Jonathan Rosenblum offers some common sense in the Jerusalem Post:
European criticism of Israeli military responses to attacks upon Israel and its citizens has become so formulaic that the various EU officials and foreign ministers can probably recite it in their sleep.First comes a ritualistic acknowledgment of Israel's right to defend itself, followed inevitably by the accusation that the particular Israeli response was disproportionate. So automatic is the second statement that it completely vitiates the first.
The Europeans never bother to explain what response they would consider proportionate, or how those actions would obviate the threats to Israel's civilian population. After the Sbarro bombing, for instance, would the proportionate response have been to send an Israeli suicide bomber into a Ramallah pizzeria?
How do the Europeans know that Israel's actions are disproportionate? The "asymmetry in the reported death tolls," explains The New York Times's Steven Erlanger, in a July 19 news story. In short, there are too few dead Jews.
THE RELIANCE on death tolls to determine the propriety of Israeli military action is more than a little problematic. First, it turns warfare into a weird kind of boxing match in which you can only hit your adversary as hard as he hit you. That is not how either boxers or nations fight.
American UN ambassador John Bolton rightly ridiculed the European view of proportionality earlier this week. If Hizbullah kidnaps two Israeli soldiers, he asked, does that mean Israel can do nothing more in response than capture two Hizbullah operatives?
Something close to that view does, in fact, prevail among critics of Israeli military action. News stories denigrate the destructive capabilities of Palestinian weapons, for instance, and downplay the impact of those weapons on Jews living under their threat. Thus the Times's Erlanger quotes a Gaza resident who characterizes Kassams as nothing more than "needle pricks," even as he insists on the Palestinians' inalienable right to continue delivering those needle pricks.
To limit Israel's response to such "needle pricks" - actually it is usually far less, since Israel would never fire Kassams into Beit Hanun - constitutes an open invitation to aggressors, since they know in advance that they will never pay a higher price than the damage they inflict.
A MERE count of body bags further ignores the fact that those bags have a provenance. Many other questions have to be asked - for example, are the bodies those of combatants or civilians? If they are of civilians, were they killed because the enemy embedded military targets among the civilian population?
It is also relevant to know who started the fighting. How many Lebanese would have been killed by Israel in the past two weeks if Hizbullah had not attacked Israel within its internationally recognized border?
Read it all.
"First, it turns warfare into a weird kind of boxing match in which you can only hit your adversary as hard as he hit you. That is not how either boxers or nations fight." Especially when you are outnumbered 100 to one.
Now, let's take a logical look at what "proportionate casualties" means mathematically.
According to wikipedia - admittedly not the best source, but good enough in this case, I think - there are about 1.3 billion Muslims in the world and about 14 million Jews.
So, to maintain a proportionate casualty ratio, the Jews need to kill about 100 Muslims for every Jew that dies.
I've just returned from visiting my parents (many miles away), which gave me a rare chance to speak to my brother, who is a decent sort but not very quick on the uptake. Needless to say, he regards Israel's response as too strong and, again needless to say, he was completely dumbfounded when I asked him what sort of response he would consider to be appropriate.
Speaking with him was a most depressing experience. He almost choked on his cup of tea when I stated that the ideology of Islam itself is the problem we face and the enemy that we must overcome. In fact, he sneered at the very idea that we actually have an 'enemy' to deal with. He pins his hopes on the belief (although he had no evidence to support it) that young muslims in Europe will not stand for religious indoctrination and will demand the freedom to live like Westerners. It was almost as if the past few years had somehow passed him by.
I wonder how many more are like him?
It is clear now as it has long been clear that the EU's influence in world affairs in harmful to that very civilization that they claim to stand for. Here we have politicians who exemplify that same herd or crowd mentality that reasonable people shun. The response of most EU leaders to the war between Israel and hizbullah is a demonstration of EU incapacity to reason, to be just, etc. Chirac is shameful. Yet France is the land of Descartes, Montaigne, and Montesquieu. How the mighty are fallen...
The UN too does its usual thing, which is undermining peace and civilization.
EnemyofIslam: Sadly, there are many more like your brother. MY brother for a start, and mother too. And,depressingly, most people I know. They only see what they believe and what they believe is the information they receive day in and day out. Like so many others they are brainwashed by the MSM....in their case the BBC. So many are in denial...they do not want to or cannot believe that a war has been declared against them.
I have just witnessed a 30 minute discussion on BBC World concerning the 'Middle East Crisis'involving various journalists (Jewish,Arab and Gentile) and not once were the words 'Islam', 'Muslim' or'Jihad' used.
First rule of boxing: protect yourself.
One can’t fight while bleeding profusely from the face, vision is impaired, and body blows weaken the legs, no stamina.
Keep your gloves up, one punch can end a fight.
"Sadly, there are many more like your brother. MY brother for a start, and mother too. And,depressingly, most people I know. They only see what they believe and what they believe is the information they receive day in and day out. Like so many others they are brainwashed by the MSM....in their case the BBC. So many are in denial...they do not want to or cannot believe that a war has been declared against them."
-- from a posting above
Give them books: Ibn Warraq, Spencer (start with "The Myth of Islamic Tolerance"), Bat Ye'or, and "While Europe Slept." Give them websites to look at. Give them printouts. Keep after them, sweetly (I don't how that might work, being incapable of it myself) but determinedly. Tell them Islam is a religio-political Total System, it has canonical texts that are immutable, it has a Perfect Man, Muhammad, it has hundreds of Jihad-verses and Hadith stories, and it has a history, lasting 1350 years, from Spain to East Asia, that shows remarkable similarities in the ways that non-Muslims have always been treated under Islamic rule. Islam divides the world uncompromisingly between Believer and Infidel, Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb. Let them come to understand this. Let them come to understand that Muslims present a problem, in every single Infidel country in which they are now present, unlike that presented by any other immigrant group -- Andean Indians, black Africans, Hindus, Buddhists from Vietnam, Chinese, anyone at all. The problem is not hard to find: it is their belief-system, and the attitudes that even non-mosque-gooing Muslims pick up and adopt. This problem has no solution based on the dream of "integration." Nowhere in the world did Muslims modify their views; everywhee they outbred those whose lands they conquered, or conducted Da'wa, or forced Islam by imposing conditions so onerous, so humiliating and degrading and physically dangerous, that many converted ("reverted") to Islam.
You are trying to alert as many people as you can, and it makes sense to start with those you know best.
German and Japanese cities were fire-bombed and nuclear bombs were dropped not to save Americans as the PC myth goes, but to break the will of our adversaries by killing them in great numbers and horrific ways. The fanatics we fight are not like the weeds invading my flower beds or the rabbits attacking my vegetables. I can (and do) kill them all summer long, and they keep coming. Humans are different,and the lesson of war is simple. Killing enough of your adversary breaks his will and changes his behavior, even behavior tied to strongly-held belief systems.
"Islam is a religio-political Total System"
Because there is a religious element in this, it makes it harder for a Western secular person to understand the threat. Western world, Europe in particular, has been so thoroughly secularized and the position of Christianity so severely eroded that people are becoming more and more ignorant of religious beliefs.
There is also a tendency, especially among secular atheists, to lump all the religions together and say that they are all equally bad without giving much thought on what the doctrines of various religions actually state.
People who generally hold all religions in contempt also mention the numerous atrocities committed in the name of Christianity including the Crusades, Spanish Inquisition etc. to prove that Christianity is equally bad or even worse than other religions. When you ask, what is the Christian theological basis for these atrocities, they usually cannot provide a straight answer but quote some verses from the Old Testament to prove that there is violence in Christianity as well.
In the West religion has increasingly withdrawn from public sphere and is seen mainly as private worship. It is easy for someone ignorant of religions to regard islam as just another faith without considering the totalitarian nature of the belief system.
A common misconception is that muslims are "just like us" and "want the same things as everyone else". When this illusion is broken by another muslim atrocity, the explanation is 'oppression', 'lack of opportunities', 'racism' or something like that.
There are several self-created layers of deception that make seéing the truth very difficult and for some totally impossible (the hardcore leftists).
For me the Danish cartoon riots were the turning point when I actually started educating myself about islam. Before the cartoon craziness I was a firm believer of the "Tiny Minority of Extremists" theory.
Thus the Times's Erlanger quotes a Gaza resident who characterizes Kassams as nothing more than "needle pricks," even as he insists on the Palestinians' inalienable right to continue delivering those needle pricks.
The terrible thing is that Erlanger, who is based in Jerusalem, has seen the results of the needlepricks and knows what damage they do.