The war against the Jews (7)
A window into the gruesome actuality by contrast is provided on WorldNet Daily, where Aaron Klein produces more evidence of the way in which Hamas is deliberately using its civilians as air-strike fodder to bring about as many civilian deaths as possible:
Amid Israel's ongoing ground operation in the Gaza Strip, the Hamas terrorist group has been drawing Israeli forces into populated civilian areas, shooting at Jewish fighters from occupied civilian homes while women and children were inside, an Israel Defense Forces commander fighting in Gaza told WND.This strategy —which, as I have previously observed, relies on the western media to act as willing dupes for such diabolical manipulation —clearly places the Israelis in a hellish dilemma. If the strategy is to lure them back into Gaza, they must not be thus lured; but the attacks on Ashkelon in particular would seem to leave them no alternative but to wage proper war inside Gaza; but as we can see, if they do so Hamas will place as many civilians as possible in harm’s way in order to maximise the actual (and falsified) casualty rate, further inflame the Muslim world, provide a pretext for further attack and ensure that the so-called civilised world sits on its hands while Israel goes under.‘Hamas terror operatives shooting at us took up positions inside civilian homes while the civilians were still inside,’ said the commander, who was speaking from the outskirts of an IDF operation in Jabaliya in the northern Gaza Strip. ‘The aim is to draw us into killing civilians to bring about international pressure to end our operation,’ the commander said, speaking on condition his name be withheld due to Israeli military restrictions on media interviews by fighting forces. The commander said in one case today, four Hamas snipers shot at Israeli forces about from the open window of a home where women can be clearly seen in the background.
For what the myopic or bigoted west fails to grasp is that the new reality of asymmetric warfare reverses the usual calibration of a country’s military strength. This is because the asymmetry is not confined merely to military hardware. It is because it also relates to the moral calculus of that country. The bitter irony of the western liberals’ grotesque claim that Israel is involved in ‘disproportionate’ violence in Gaza is that, on the contrary, Israel is totally constrained by its own ethical code from fighting on the same basis as the Arabs. So while Israel is earnestly consulting its Supreme Court on the legal criteria of proportionality and human rights that must govern its military strikes, the Arabs not only deliberately target Israeli innocents for mass murder but offer up their own people as bomb fodder. That is what they mean when they gloat that they will win because ‘we love death while you love life’. A contest between those for whom life is sacred and those for whom their own and others’ lives are utterly without value and wholly dispensable on the way to the next world is no contest.
This reality of asymmetric warfare and the way in which it all but negates conventional calibrations of military strength is well explored in this article in the Middle East Quarterly:
The Israeli military faces a serious dilemma because it adheres to a specific moral code. Despite Arab propaganda to the contrary, Israeli military planners respect human life.[6] Tel Aviv University philosophy professor Asa Kasher and current Israel Defense Forces (IDF) intelligence chief Amos Yadlin write that, even when dealing with terrorists, Israeli soldiers conduct operations ‘in a manner that strictly protects human life and dignity by minimizing all collateral damage to individuals not directly involved in acts or activities of terror ’[7] When trying to oust terrorists from Jenin in April 2002, for example, Israeli commanders decided to pursue a house-to-house ground strategy rather than employ the kind of airpower that would keep Israeli soldiers out of danger but would heighten the risk of collateral civilian casualties.[8] This decision cost the lives, in one incident, of thirteen IDF soldiers in an ambush in the Hawashin district on April 9…
The result is an asymmetry in which Israel restricts itself in accordance with international law from indiscriminate attacks on civilian targets while groups such as Fatah, Hamas, and Hezbollah intentionally target Israeli civilians and employ their own civilians as human shields to deter an Israeli response. Avi Dichter, Israel's public security minister, spoke to this predicament in the context of the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war: ‘You can [conduct military operations] in a short time; you can flood southern Lebanon with ground troops, and you can bomb villages without warning anyone, and it will be faster. But you'll kill a lot more innocent people and suffer a lot more casualties, and we don't intend to do either.’[15] Maj.-Gen. Giora Eiland, Israel's national security advisor from 2005 to 2006, explained the Israeli decision-making process: ‘We are forced to kill someone only when four conditions are met: Number one, there is no way to arrest someone. Number two, the target is important enough. Number three, we do it when we believe that we can guarantee very few civilian casualties. And number four, we do it when we believe that there is no way that we can delay or postpone this operation, something that we consider as a ticking bomb.’
Lebanese researcher Anis Al-Naqash said in a lecture that talk of a new Middle East without Israel indicated a fact that will come true, and that the next victory will be soon and will include the destruction of the Israeli army.
So what to do to escape this nightmare? It seems to me that, in a situation where there are no good options only less terrible ones, there needs to be a conceptual leap. Asymmetric warfare paralyses the good and delivers victory to the bad; conventional warfare enables a just war to be fought by the good which can defeat the bad. I have said before that all roads lead back to