A must-read column from Caroline Glick in the Jerusalem Post (thanks to Ruth King): "Column One: The end of mythology":
The deportation of the Jews from the Gaza Strip and northern Samaria over the past week and a half and surrounding events have put paid to two of the foundational myths of the narrative that has been propounded for the past 30 years by the Israeli and international Left. In attempting to analyze these traumatic events in a manner that will – at least to a degree – mitigate the dangers to Israeli security that the expulsions have engendered, it is important to identify these myths and dispel them now. For if we do not do so, we will find ourselves, again, waging an uphill battle to dispel these lies after the next die has been cast in favor of still more Israeli retreats and expulsions – this time from Judea and Samaria.And so, even as our souls cry out in pain as we stare wild-eyed at the sight of 8,000 Jewish patriots, transformed in a moment into homeless, wandering Jews in the Land of Israel, our duty is to soldier on and work to preempt further destruction.
The foundational myth of the Left is that Jewish extremism, not Palestinian terrorism, is the cause of Israel's present security woes and the source of the constant wars that have plagued us since the dawn of modern Zionism. What we saw this week was that these people – whom one British reporter standing outside the synagogue in the now-ruined Neveh Dekalim so eloquently referred to last Thursday as "the hardest of the hard-line settlers" – are anything but extreme.
The expelled residents of Gush Katif – from the farmers of Atzmona, Katif, Netzarim, Netzer Hazani and Kfar Darom, the surfers and fishermen of Shirat Hayam, the Torah scholars of Neveh Dekalim and the mothers of Gadid – are not "hard-line" or "extremists." They are the finest sons and daughters of Israel. They are the bravest soldiers in the IDF and the most patriotic citizens that Israel has produced.
Read it all. Please.
and after you've read it all, you may want to read this recent frontpagemag.com interview with Brigette Gabriel about the "civil war" in Lebanon and its subsequent Islamification.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=19016
She's right on the money. Why should they stop now, on the edge of victory? Defeating apes and pigs has been a goal of Islam since Mohammad decided he no longer liked them.
Did anyone really think these armed and unstable people, were going to abide by any agreements made with Jews?? According to Allah, true believers renounce agreements with Jews. The leaders of the rabble have made their intentions clear. Israel should not have given away Gaza, to give anything else away might be fatal.
I disagree with Naomi Ragen. She completely fails to see the larger picture.
Victor Davis Hanson had it right in this article:
________
Sharon has right strategy with Gaza
Victor Davis Hanson
Chicago Tribune
August 26, 2005
"Brilliant tactician, lousy strategist." So goes the conventional wisdom about the old bulldozer Ariel Sharon.
But that assessment is exactly backward.
Sharon's strategic insight has always proved more impressive than his messy tactical operations. For now, keep that in mind, as we seem to watch divided Israelis yell at each other while united Palestinians gloat about expelling the Zionists.
Gen. Sharon's counterattack across the Suez Canal in October 1973 during the Yom Kippur War also was seen as reckless, in its disregard for logistics and lines of communication. His 1982 army that invaded Lebanon proved tactically lax in allowing allied Christian militias to commit atrocities.
But Sharon's long-term thinking? That's another story altogether. Trapping the Egyptian 3rd Army in the Sinai, and then showing the world that Cairo itself was defenseless in the path of an Israeli armored division, was a strategic masterpiece aimed at ending the 1973 war outright to Israel's advantage.
The march into Lebanon forced Yasser Arafat out of the Middle East for a decade.
So Sharon was always a strategic thinker, and we are seeing his accustomed foresight working in the controversial exodus from Gaza.
The Israeli military is crafting defensible borders, not unlike the old Roman decision to stay on its own side of the Rhine and Danube Rivers. In Sharon's thinking, it no longer made any sense to periodically send thousands of soldiers into Gaza to protect fewer than 10,000 Israeli civilians abroad, when a demographic time bomb of too few Jews was ticking inside Israel proper.
But Gaza itself is only a tessera in a far larger strategic mosaic. The Israelis also press on with the border fence that will in large part end suicide bombings. The barrier will grant the Palestinians what they clamor for, but perhaps also fear: their own isolated state that they must now govern or let the world watch devolve into something like the Afghanistan of the Taliban.
Once Israel is out of Gaza and has fenced off slivers of the West Bank near Jerusalem deemed vital for its security, Sharon can bide his time until a responsible Palestinian government emerges as a serious interlocutor.
Then any lingering disagreements over disputed land can be relegated to the status of a Tibet, northern Cyprus, Kashmir or the Sakhalin and Kurile Islands--all postbellum "contested" territories that do not prompt commensurate attention from the Muslim world, Europe or the United Nations.
Palestine as a sovereign state rather than a perpetually "occupied" territory also inherits the responsibility of all mature nations to police its own. So when Hamas and Co. press on with their killing--most likely through rocket attacks over the fence--they do so as representatives of a new Palestinian nation.
In response, Israel can strike back at an aggressor without worry about the blowback on isolated vulnerable Israeli settlements.
Sharon's withdrawal policy from Gaza is thus a critical first step of turning the struggle from an asymmetrical war of terror back into a conventional standoff between delineated sovereign states. And that can only help a militarily superior Israel.
Politically, Gaza plays well. If the once right-wing Sharon can harness his own zealots, the world wonders why Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas cannot muzzle Hamas and Hezbollah?
From their creepy rhetoric so far, Palestinian militias have proclaimed that Gaza is the first step toward the eventual destruction of Israel proper. But once again that only plays into Israel's complaint that withdrawal is seen by Palestinians as something to be manipulated rather than as an opportunity upon which to build a just society.
While there probably won't be a single Jew in the new Palestinian nation, there are more than 1 million Arabs inside Israel. Even more bizarrely, more than 100,000 illegal immigrants have left Arab lands to reside in the "Zionist entity." Politically correct Arabs will not even employ the word "Israel" in their lexicon, but tens of thousands of Arabs seem to want into it nonetheless.
In a reciprocal world, why couldn't the Jewish settlers stay on in Gaza as resident immigrants, adjudicating their property claims with the new government and freely abiding by Palestinian law and protocol? Sharon is reminding us that, unlike the Arabs inside Israel, they would be ethnically cleansed in hours in the same manner that nearly a million Jews were run out of Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus and Tripoli in the decades following 1947.
The pullout from Gaza is bringing long-needed moral clarity to a fuzzy crisis. Heretofore the Palestinians have counted on foreign support through fear of terrorism, influence with oil producers, unspoken anti-Semitism and carefully crafted victim status accorded savvy anti-Western zealots. But now they are increasingly on their own, and what transpires may soon end their romance of the perpetually oppressed.
So Ariel Sharon leaves, with an "Hasta la vista, Gaza--and be careful what you wish for."
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-0508260327aug26,0,1119635.story?coll=chi-newsopinioncommentary-hed
Yes Paul, I was hoping Sharon would have an ace up his sleeve. Unfortunatly his rational is insane. This is because the whole subject is insane, perpetrated and sustained by insane people, so any solution is also insane. The insanity is not going to go away soon. In fact, it's getting stronger. Giant spiders from Allah attacking New York City, to Cindy Sheehan from Vacaville, attacking Crawford, Texas, are symtoms of encroaching meatballism. Meatballism is a device employed by Islam and leftists, to justify themselves and push their insanity, by any means possible. Then if you add in the 'predestination' factor, everything gets really crazy. Allah is supposed to know best, but sometimes I wonder...
HEY !! - "Giant spiders from Allah attacking New York City" - thanks for the news update, 'duh_swami' - I must have missed that.
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BTW - I am interested in making a purchase and need someone with the know how / where abouts to contact me - is there not a bridge for sale in Good old US of A ? !!
(Aussie) DOG !!
p.s. - I'm STILL over the moon that our Government is making ... hmm ... less than PC statements in our fight against ... hmm ... (whisper whisper) ISLAMIC extremism.
p.p.s. GREAT to be with you guys and other FREEDOM LOVING, democratic nations in the war against world domination by Islam.