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| Israel-Palestine-Jordan |
| States of Terror |
| 2006-07-14 |
| Wall Street Journal house editorial Israel's military invasion and naval blockade of Lebanon is being denounced in European capitals and at the United Nations as a "disproportionate" response to the kidnapping this week of two of its soldiers by Hezbollah. Israel's decision late last month to invade Gaza in retaliation for the kidnapping of another soldier by Hamas was also condemned as lacking in proportion. So here's a question for our global solons: Since hostage-taking is universally regarded as an act of war, what "proportionate" action do they propose for Israel? In the case of Hamas, perhaps Israel could rain indiscriminate artillery fire on Gaza City, surely a proportionate response to the 800 rockets Hamas has fired at Israeli towns in the last year alone. In the case of Hezbollah, it might mean carpet bombing a section of south Beirut, another equally proportionate response to Hezbollah's attacks on civilian Jewish and Israeli targets in Buenos Aires in the early 1990s. We aren't being serious, but neither is a feckless international community that refuses to proportionately denounce the outrages to which Israel is being subjected. That goes also for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who says "all sides must act with restraint." But Israel's current problems result in part from an excess of restraint in responding to previous Hamas and Hezbollah provocations. . . . |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #6 Very good TW. "Go talk to the wall" as best as I can determine. Like so many phrases, they are often rich in meaning and have several similar meanings. Yiddish and Hebrew gives rise to some funny stories. An aunt on my wife's side was talking in Hebrew about a nephew "complaining too much." What came out was "Why does Charley play with himself so much?" Apparently the phrases are very similar. |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2006-07-14 12:00 |
| #5 Lots of that going around, JohnQC; I'm the Old Testamenter, and my grandmother's memoir is archived in the Holocaust Museum in DC, among other places. Only my parents never spoke in Yiddish, so I took a course at Hebrew School one quarter -- at the same time as I was studying Hebrew and German, so it didn't stick. "Go right through the wall"? |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2006-07-14 11:54 |
| #4 TW. Have a mixed marriage--old testament and new testament. Wife has relatives in Tel Aviv. The wife's parents are holocaust survivors--despite that some don't believe it ever happened. Some Yiddish picked up through my wife and the in-laws--enough to appreciate some of the humor of Yiddish. |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2006-07-14 08:19 |
| #3 "Disproportionate" response strikes me as the best way to minimize the total (long-term) cost of a war - at least if it is clear which side should win militarily. It establishes that those who have the means to achieve victory also have the will to do so - at that point only the insane or suicidal would continue to fight (of course that makes this whole discussion moot in regards to the Islamist war.) |
| Posted by: Glenmore 2006-07-14 08:12 |
| #2 Yiddish, John QC? |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2006-07-14 07:41 |
| #1 Israel's current problems result in part from an excess of restraint in responding to previous Hamas and Hezbollah provocations Time to tell the Euros to "Gay red tsu der vant." |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2006-07-14 07:28 |