RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/07/29/why-is-it-only-escalation-when-israel-retaliates/

The New York Times is breathing a sigh of relief. For while Israel has fired a few rockets at Lebanon in response to Hezbollah’s massacre of 12 Druze kids in the Golan Heights on Saturday, it has stopped short of launching all-out war on its unfriendly neighbour. For now, says the NYT, we’ve not seen a ‘major escalation’ in Israel-Lebanon hostilities. Yes we have. The slaughter of the Druze youths was a ‘major escalation’. Hezbollah’s firing of a missile that butchered 12 children was surely the very ‘surge in fighting’ that the NYT fears. Or is it only ‘escalation’ when Israel retaliates to the apocalyptic violence of the Islamist armies that surround it?

The media chatter in the wake of Saturday’s bloodbath has been incredibly – and depressingly – revealing. Hezbollah’s rocket hit a miniature football pitch in Majdal Shams in northern Israeli territory. That’s a village inhabited by the Arabic-speaking Druze people, who are spread across northern Israel, Lebanon and Syria. The rocket’s 50kg warhead detonated right where youngsters were taking a breather between games of footie. Twelve of them, all aged between 11 and 16, were killed. It was such a devastating explosion that the remains of one of the kids have not yet been found.

Hezbollah denies firing the rocket. Few are taking its denials seriously, aside from the usual Israelophobic hotheads online, who hate the Jewish State with such unhinged intensity that they hang like wide-eyed fanboys on its enemies’ every word. Israel, as Sky News reports, says the missile clearly flew the short distance ‘over the sunburnt hills’ that divide Lebanon from the Golan Heights. US intelligence officials say they have ‘no doubt’ Hezbollah fired the rocket. And yet, still, the media discussion focusses less on the horror of what Hezbollah did than on the horror of what Israel might do in response.

Everyone’s fretting over an ‘escalation’ in hostilities following the Majdal Shams massacre. ‘Diplomats [are] scrambling to prevent a surge in fighting’, says the NYT. Too late. The surge in fighting already happened. It happened on Saturday when Israel lost 12 of its children to the rocket fire of radical Islamists. There are widespread ‘fears of escalation’ after Saturday, says Reuters. That it printed these words next to a photo of a row of small white coffins containing the remains of the kids murdered by Hezbollah is extraordinary. There’s your ‘escalation’, Reuters. It has already occurred.

https://www.jns.org/en-route-to-beirut/

When 12 kids were slaughtered Saturday in the Golan Heights town of Majdal Shams by an Iranian missile supplied to Hezbollah, Israelis were horrified but not surprised. Given the incessant bombardment of northern Israel—leading to the evacuation months ago of hundreds of families from their homes—mass murder was just a matter of time.

That’s what happens with a policy of containment—a key element of the very “conceptzia” that enabled Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre. If an enemy assault fails to be as deadly as it could have been, Israel doesn’t treat it with the response it deserves. Instead, it prides itself on preventing more casualties thanks to Iron Dome defenses and public obedience to Home Front Command directives.

These include: informing us of how many seconds we have to enter a bomb shelter or safe room when an air-raid siren goes off; instructing us to exit and clear away from our cars when caught by an alarm while driving on the highway, then lie on the asphalt with our hands on our heads; warning us not to photograph interceptions, which can result in injury from falling shrapnel; admonishing us to lock our doors, turn out our lights and close our shutters at the first sign of a potential terrorist invasion; and assuring us that we’ll be the first to know if we need to stock up on supplies ahead of a greater, less temporary threat.

It’s no wonder, then, that our military is called the Israel Defense Forces. Considering the fact that we are surrounded by foes both bent on our destruction and equipped by Tehran to carry it out, one would have thought it appropriate to replace the word “defense” with “offense.”

But no. The IDF boasts of being the most moral army in the world, with a code of ethics fit for local and international kangaroo courtrooms, not soldiers risking their lives to protect the country.

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Attitudes toward Israel in today’s world can be put into three categories:

1.       It must not continue to exist.

2.       It can exist, but it must not fight.

3.       It can exist, and it can fight.

The first category comprises much of the Muslim world and just about all of the far-left world. The second category corresponds broadly—not always precisely—with official attitudes and policies toward Israel of the United Nations and most Western governments.

The third category comprises mostly conservative governments, parties, and sectors in the Western world.

Although, at the time of Hamas’s October 7 massacre against Israel, the Biden administration seemed to be staunchly in the third category, it eventually began shifting toward the second category and now hovers between the third and the second. While Israel fights on seven fronts of the Iranian ring of fire (Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Iran itself), the Biden administration’s endlessly repeated mantra is now “ceasefire”—along with all other Western governments that publicly address the issue.

Accordingly, in an effort to discourage Israel from fighting and constrain its ability to do so, since February the Biden administration has been substantially reducing arms shipments to Israel.

Imagine that, say, Belgium—a country roughly the size of Israel—had in less than ten months suffered a massacre and mass kidnapping of its citizens, as well as a constant bombardment of well over 20,000 rockets, missiles, and explosive drones from six different countries. (In Israel’s case, the six countries are Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Iran; by June 10 more than 19,000 unguided rockets alone had been launched at Israel.)

It would be strange, then, if Belgium—not any of the countries or terror organizations attacking it—were under constant, obsessive pressure for a ceasefire. It would be even stranger if Belgium—not any of those countries or terror organizations—were being charged by two international courts with “genocide” and other severe human rights abuses.

But the push to deny arms to Israel has, by now, gone well beyond the US.