Where’s my barf bag? No bother, this copy of The New York Times will do just fine:

A Sudden, Violent End for a Promising Youth.

The “promising youth” was a suicide bomber; his “sudden, violent death” was mass murder. (One could imagine the NYT description of Jeffery Dahmer: An attractive young man, doomed by his odd obsessions.)

This particular suicide bomber gave his explanation of why he strapped a bomb to his chest and killed 17 people. It is very illustrative of the Palestinians and their “cause:”

"There is no alternative to resistance and no exchange for our full homeland, without divisions or separations. We won't give up our smallest right, whatever the price is, whatever the sacrifice. Our steadfast Palestinian people, you are great, your jihad is great. You are standing like men, providing heroes in the battlefield."

I fear these are words from a people about to be annihilated. Sometimes whole societies chose war, even when it is clearly not in their interest to do so (polls show that 80% of Palestinians do not feel that Israel has a right to exist).

A Confederate Rebel rousing his comrades to fight the yankees, a Bosian Serb urging his friends to kill Muslims, or a Japanese admiral launching the attack on Pearl Harbor could have spoken these words (with substitutions made for “Palestinians” and “jihad”).

The Israelis have long had the power to kill all the Palestinians, but they have restrained themselves. The Palestinians have long had the desire to kill all the Jews, but they lack the power. It is not a "cycle of violence;" It is a series of provocations and responses.

The Palestinians – as stubborn and stupid a people as there ever was - interpret Israeli restraint as a sign of weakness. Feeling Israel must be frightened by Arab ferocity, they shelter the most ferocious Arabs of them all: the vicious terrorists of Hamas and Hezbollah. The Palestinians are seduced by these murderers and their bloody rants.

Israeli restraint is again being tested. And someday, it will snap. The trigger could be anything: one suicide bombing too many, the use of WMD, the destruction of the government in Tel Aviv.

When it happens, Israel will lash out in desperate fury: it will flatten Palestinian towns and the Holy Land will be strewn with the mangled bodies of Palestinian women and children. Israel will build huge walls around its society and it will ignore the world's criticism.

America will be shocked (shocked!), but only because we are ignorant of our own history: we, after all, are the only nation that has incinerated 140,000 people in nuclear fire. And as barbaric as that act was, I think it was justified. It turned the most vicious racists in Asia into a docile and curious people, and they transformed the region through their economic, not military, power.

The world must remember that Israel is also at war with vicious racists. It is a war for its survival, and Israel is growing furious and desperate.

The Palestinians will likely be the last ones to learn this. Unfortunately, the lesson will be bloody.

But then the Palestinians have always been slow learners.


- posted by total @ 6/17/2003 06:03:00 AM .