Given an opportunity to prosper, Palestinians chose wrong and now pay
If you make something expensive, you get less of it. Liberals understand this when they advocate, for instance, carbon taxes for their misguided fight against global warming. They are mystified, conveniently, when raising taxes (a cost of income) drops productivity (what makes income).
Israel is currently making terrorism expensive for the Palestinians:
Israel obliterated symbols of Hamas power on the third day of what the defense minister described Monday as a "war to the bitter end," striking next to the Hamas premier’s home, and devastating a security compound and a university building.
And they will find that they will get less terrorism.
Apparently only when Palestinians decide that fooling around with terrorism is too expensive will they chuck Hamas and Hezbollah and join the ranks of the civilized and prosperous.
Those who advocate the “peace” process, which really rewards Palestinian terror, only keep the war going, causing long term misery and taking the long term risk that the terrorists will get serious weapons that cause a devastating nuclear response.
The key to saving Muslim lives is to end terrorism by crushing it as a viable tactic and ensuring that terrorists do not have access to state sponsored weaponry.
Israel’s current attacks focus on Hamas specific targets. If they really want to help the Gaza residents they will broaden the focus to infrastructure – electric, water, transportation. They will make it so uncomfortable to live with Hamas in charge that Gaza residents will chuck Hamas to the ashbin of history.
More people will die in the short run – mostly Gaza civilians. But they had a choice didn’t they? They could not support and vote for terrorists that randomly shoot hundreds of missiles onto civilians in neighboring lands.
Being nice to terrorists only makes more of them. Send missiles not food.
December 29th, 2008 at 3:08 pm
That’s the direction we had been going, but never to this degree, unfortunately. Now we will go in reverse, and do much talking and be engaged in a process, rather than beating down the enemy. We will be seen as weak again, as we were under the Clintons.
December 29th, 2008 at 9:20 pm
Scorch the earth in Gaza like Sherman did in the south. Create a completely sterile zone all the way to Egypt. Move, i.e. ship, all the ragheads to the desert, say to Tayma in Saudi Arabia, and let the U.N. deal with them. Harsh? You bet, and it’s what they all deserve.
December 29th, 2008 at 9:58 pm
Yadda, yadda, yadda; such talk has been going on for sixty years, ever since Israel was invented. It assumes a Western economic mentality, which is apparently totally alien to the Middle East have-nots. If you have some good ideas that have not already been thought of, speak up for the benefit of the people who deal with the Middle East for a living. At the moment we have two active laboratories for dealing with Middle East problems – Iraq and Afghanistan. How do you rate our long-term prospects for an acceptable permanent solution in those two places? Do you think our Western military approach is well suited to the problem? Or do you think that Muslim have-nots see life entirely differently?
December 29th, 2008 at 10:46 pm
An Islamic run state will ruin itself. What we are discussing is a Jewish one that permits safe Islamic citizens. That has been tried and succeeded – Israel before 1982.
Iraq is a useful non-floating base against Iran. Any Democracy experiment is a side-show. Interesting, great if it works, but not a requirement.
Afghanistan need only not permit aggregations of exportable terrorists. Mission accomplished.
December 30th, 2008 at 8:16 am
They’re all savages in Gaza, none of them noble.
http://atheism.about.com/od/islamicextremism/a/daralharb.htm