Home
In this issue
Nov. 6, 2009
Rabbi Berel Wein: Choosing to hear
JWisdom.com Zero to 1/60th: How to Empower An Hour with Gavriel Aryeh Sande (7 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick The mullahs' big week
Suzanne Fields A Fallen Wall for Fallen Man
Nov. 5, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet: Three scrumptious -- but simple -- butternut squash dishes
JWisdom.com Hidden Hints: Unlocking Faith & Prayer with Rabbi Jay Yaacov Schwartz (10 minutes)
Nov. 4, 2009
Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger: Should prayers be covered?
JWisdom.com When God played peacemaker With Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Nov. 3, 2009
Martin Peretz: Beware, Barack. Beware, Rahm. Beware, Axelrod
JWisdom.com Are you are closet idolater? With Sara Yoheved Rigler (10 minutes)
Nov. 2, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The Holocaust is now on Facebook
JWisdom.com Abraham's Strange Change With Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer (5 minutes)
Oct. 30, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: Secret to Immortality
Caroline B. Glick Silencing dissent in America
Oct. 29, 2009
Lini S. Kadaba: Do tactics avert flu or reduce humanity?
JWisdom.com We Must Revamp our Religious Vocabulary With Gavriel Aryeh Sanders ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 28, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: Atheists in Bubbleland
JWisdom.com Why what we wear impacts who we are With Rabbis Mordechai Becher, Menachem Golberger and Aliza Bulow ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 27, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The United Nations Is Outraged Again, Or: Department of Mideast Static
JWisdom.com The Science of Love With Rabbi Jonathan Rietti ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 26, 2009
The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Damaging disclosures with a twist
JWisdom.com Wisdom and Wonks With Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 23, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: Are you ready for the ultimate pleasure?
JWisdom.com Watermark and oneness with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 4 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick Stop using limited powers in a way that expands our enemies' advantages over us
Oct. 22, 2009
Steven Emerson: Terror Cases Share Desire to Kill Americans
JWisdom.com No More More Family Fights --- Really? By Sarah Chana Radcliffe ( 5 minutes)
Oct. 21, 2009
Tonya Alanez: Holocaust denier sues survivor, calling Auschwitz memoir 'vicious lies'
JWisdom.com Meditating Jewishly: A Panacea for Success by Sarah Yoheved Rigler ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 20, 2009
Dennis Prager: Obama and Dalai Lama: Why Israel Worries about U.S. President
JWisdom.com Abraham was not religious By Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer ( 6 minutes)
Oct. 19, 2009
JWisdom.comWhy Good People Do Bad Things By Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 16, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: The Perfect Number
JWisdom.com Hearing Voices By Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 5 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick How Turkey was lost
Oct. 15, 2009
Jeff Jacoby: Peace vs. the 'peace process'
JWisdom.com: Former MTV producer and stand-up comedian Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff: Taming a Control Freak (A VERY fast 15 minutes)
Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review August 1, 2006 / 7 Menachem-Av, 5766

Sometimes survival gets a bit noisy

By Wesley Pruden



Printer Friendly Version

Email this article



http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | If the Jews would just die without making a lot of noise, the Nice People could get on with the really important things in life, stuffing their faces with salmon and bean sprouts, watching the Rev. Billy Don Moyers pontificate on PBS, and making more Nice People.


The Nice People, manipulated by the coverage of the fighting in Lebanon, are getting fed up with the Israelis, who are acting as if they have the right to survive in peace to live lives of quiet exasperation. But the Jews insist on "disproportionality," on firing back when fired on by the Hezbollah "guerrillas," as the newspaper and television correspondents insist on calling "terrorists."


Louise Arbour, the high commissioner of human rights at the United Nations, is typical of the Nice People of the West who are losing patience with the Jews. She's against killing, and not only that, she "strongly condemns" it. Or some of it. She demands an investigation, but only of the Israelis, and not just an investigation by anybody. She wants "international expertise."


"In order to establish facts and conduct an impartial legal analysis," her "office" says, employing the magisterial third person, "the high commissioner reiterated the need for independent investigations." To this end, she advocates "the active involvement of international expertise."


It's important to be fair, even to be fairer to some than to others, so we can guess who these paragons of "international expertise" might be, recruited from the crowded ranks of the compassionate of Zimbabwe, Sudan, Iran, maybe even North Korea, all, naturally, determined to protect and preserve human rights.


The Israelis, once efficient and savvy, now seem to be as confused as everyone else in the West, so fearful of giving public-relations offense that they can't speak for themselves. There's plenty to show and tell, but they're allowing the world media to get away with the usual evasions, distortions and prevarications, to draw the outlines of the fighting with the moral equivalence so prized in the salons of the West. The photographs of the dead children of Qana would break the hearts of anyone but an Islamist terrorist, but the photographs of the Hezbollah artillery and missile batteries, planted among the women and children precisely to draw Israeli fire, were smuggled out of Lebanon by an Australian journalist and published yesterday in the Herald Sun of Melbourne. The photographs are proof of Hezbollah courage, of terrorists hiding behind the chadors of their women and cowering with the children.


"Israel is losing this war because it is not fighting it in a manner calculated to win it decisively," observes Jed Babbin of the American Spectator. "It is fighting only Hezbollah, a proxy of its real enemies. If Israel accepts a cease-fire without breaking Hezbollah's hold on southern Lebanon, all of Lebanon will become a colony of terrorist Iran. And Israel will have suffered a strategic defeat. On the ground and on the airwaves, the war must be fought ... to win decisively, or lose inevitably."


But enabling Hezbollah will be more than a defeat for Israel. George W. Bush understands this. The restraint so admired in the West is regarded as the weakness of poltroons in the land of Allah, and grand talk of diplomacy and compromise is merely the funk and fear of frightened old women. The extraordinary ordinary American gets it, as he nearly always does, even when others don't. Everyone is "tired of war," a barber in Des Moines tells an inquiring reporter for The Washington Times. "The consensus here is that if Israel laid down their arms, there would still be fighting. But if Hezbollah laid down its arms, there would not be."


The president laid down "clear objectives" yesterday, and for the sake of Lebanon as well as for Israel and the United States, he must stick to them. This means that Syria and Iran must for once behave themselves.


"It's important to remember this crisis began with Hezbollah's unprovoked attacks against Israel," he said. "Israel is exercising its right to defend itself." And so it is. Survival is often noisy, and the rest of the world will just have to put up with it — and thank the Jews.

Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in Washington and in the media consider "must reading." Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.

JWR contributor Wesley Pruden is editor in chief of The Washington Times. Comment by clicking here.


Wesley Pruden Archives



© 2006, Wes Pruden