Handcuffed by our Western values?

We need to think very carefully about what this means for the United States and the Western World and where we go from here.

The terrorists are: using liquid explosives carried aboard in hand luggage in their planning to destroy hundreds of passengers in airliners - this since 1995, and it continues; using aircraft as weapons (9-11) and bombing trains and buses (Britain’s 7-7 and Madrid); and using Katyusha rockets to bombard Haifa and other targets in Israel. These unguided rockets are intentionally and indiscriminately killing innocent civilians. About 4,000 of these have been used to date, with 250 fired into Israel on Sunday within 24 hours of a UN “cease fire”.

To put this in a nutshell, Israel, used a conventional military force bound by restrictions on the indiscriminate killing of civilians, to find and kill people lobbing unguided rockets into their civilian population with no restrictions on their use of indiscriminate killing: a kind of asymmetric warfare of the most heinous sort.

The UN and the media view the opposing forces through one single prism of values: both are brother nations of the world. In fact, there seems to be a media bias towards Hezbollah (not a nation at all). And Kofi Annan wasted no time in saying Israel “intentionally” killed UN observers during the conflict.

The terrorists, media and the UN tend to handcuff the West within its own values even more, while the other side feels empowered. Reuters news service participated in the chicanery last week by publishing doctored photos detrimental to Israel.

And the screaming rhetoric of Aljazeera reminds us that the other side doesn’t play by the same rules as the west - freedom of the press without checks and balances.

In a story in the Los Angeles Times by Ashraf Khalil on August 1, Khalil detailed how the Israelis are also phoning innocent civilians on the civilians’ mobile phones to warn them of impending danger due to military action. Israel also used a radio station to warn civilians in Lebanon of impending danger: in Arabic. Israel dropped leaflets to warn civilians.

Israel moved humanitarian care and caution in war to a new level.

No nation, in the history of man, ever went to such great lengths in war to warn innocent civilians. And this in the face of an enemy, Hezbollah, who elected to hide behind those very civilians.

On August 10, former Israeli Prime Minister Mr. Benjamin Netanyahu told reporters that Iran’s President Ahmadinejad is working on nuclear weapons and “eventually after crying wolf, you face the wolf, and this wolf has nuclear teeth, and it will bite, of that I’m sure”.

This is the same President Ahmadinejad that appeared on 60 Minutes on August 13, claiming that the UN was only serving US needs; who said last autumn that the Jewish state had to be wiped off the face of the earth; and who is defying the United Nations while he does nuclear research that most experts believe is intended to make a nuclear bomb. This is the same President Ahmadinejad that is arming Hezbollah and developing his own long range ballistic missiles.

A few days ago, Mr Bernard Lewis, professor emeritus at Princeton, wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “During the Cold War, both sides possessed weapons of mass destruction, but neither side used them, deterred by what was known as MAD, mutual assured destruction. Similar constraints have no doubt prevented their use in the confrontation between India and Pakistan.”