Politic?

This is a blog dedicated to a personal interpretation of political news of the day. I attempt to be as knowledgeable as possible before commenting and committing my thoughts to a day's communication.

Thursday, July 10, 2014

The Point Of No Return

"The army is ready for all possibilities. Hamas will pay a heavy price for firing toward Israeli citizens. The security of Israel's citizens comes first. The operation will expand and continue until the fire toward our towns stops and quiet returns."
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
Israeli soldiers walk past mobile artillery units near the border with the Gaza Strip July 9, 2014. (REUTERS/Amir Cohen)
"There is no mediation, in the common sense of the word. Egyptian diplomatic efforts are aimed at immediately stopping Israeli aggression and ending all mutual violence."
"Contacts have not yet achieved a result."
Egyptian Foreign Ministry spokesman Badr Abdelatty

"They have more [rockets and missiles], but more important, the majority of what they have is from the longer-range side."
 "They understand where Israel’s weak point is…. Tel Aviv or Jerusalem are much more attractive than Sderot."
former national security adviser Maj. Gen. Yaakov Amidror (res.)

Rocket fire from Hamas appears unending. The rockets had been sent over the border into Israel for weeks, an increase from what normally prevails with border towns like Sderot constantly on alert, and at the present time unable to relax their state of alertness, to head straight for bomb shelters at the sound of the sirens warning of seconds to act. Children cling to their parents for reassurance, but there is none.

Hamas is studiedly recalcitrant; they will not halt the firing, their enemy must make the first step. Their enemy has decided to take that giant step of aerial bombardment because Hamas took that indefensible first step to begin with, and then added the kind of atrocious assault they would know that Israel could not set aside, with the abduction and murder of three boys; a departure from their usual target of Israeli soldiers.

Hamas had two years to establish a cache of tens of thousands of rockets. In the first year, following the Egyptian-brokered 2012 ceasefire after the 8-day IDF invasion of Gaza to stop yet an earlier unceasing barrage of rockets, the Muslim Brotherhood-led government was complicit in permitting rockets to be smuggled through tunnels at the Sinai Gaza/Egypt border. Egypt's new government views Hamas as only somewhat less repugnant than its older-brother Islamist organization.

In stepped Qatar with billions to aid Hamas when its financial support was cut off from Iran and Egypt; Egypt because it wants no truck with Hamas whose militias are almost as much a danger to them in the Sinai as they are to Israel and Iran in return for Hamas refusing to support the Syrian regime against the Sunni Syrian rebels. Qatar's billions, however, helped Hamas to secure the purchase of more advanced rockets from Iran and from Syria.

Foreign reporters have written of their surprise to see rockets whiz close by them, from the close precincts of Gaza hotels they stay at, never suspecting that such caches were launched nearby. But those rockets are launched, as they always have been, from close quarters to mosques, community centres, schools, hospitals and other public civil centres where Palestinians are wont to gather.

So that when the IDF responds, targeting the launch pad, civilian Gazan casualties make good public relations fodder, earning enmity worldwide censuring Israel.

The greater the number of Palestinian civilians who fall victim to their plight as human shields for Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the more pressure the international diplomatic community presses upon Israel to cease and desist its "disproportional" response to the constant threat posed to its population by an irredentist threat that means to destroy the Jewish state.

The European Union predictably condemns "indiscriminate" rocket fire from the Gaza Strip while it deplores "the growing number of civilian casualties caused by Israeli retaliatory fire."

Is there any country within the European Union that would withhold its fire in the face of constant barrages  coming over its border to threaten the lives of its civilians? One of those retaliatory strikes was a rocket targeting the home of a known Islamic Jihad terrorist. He was killed alongside five of his family members. It is well enough known that Israel targets such threats to its existence.

For some the appeal to martyrdom is irresistible; for others, martyrdom is fine for the underlings.

Rockets targeting Haifa, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Dimona, the location of Israel's largest nuclear plant guarantee that the response from Israel will be stepped up.

Hamas gloats that it loves death, and its glorification of martyrdom, infusing enthusiasts with the will to sacrifice themselves for the cause of "resistance" against an oppressor that would just as well live in peace with its scurrilous neighbours, exemplifies the collective lunacy of a violence-embracing victimhood psychosis.

Interactive by CHRISTOPHER MANZA and MICHAEL SNIDER, Graphic by TRISH McALASTER / THE GLOBE AND MAIL

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