Pop Quiz - Can You Answer Correctly?

The following post was one posted by Steven Plaut on israelnn.com, to be found at http://israelnn.com/article.php3?id=6341. It stated my own beliefs so coherently that I had to share it. Author info at the bottom.

"Quick, take a fast current events quiz:1. Since the start of the Palestinian intifada, how many innocent Palestinian civilians have been intentionally murdered by Israel?

2. Since the start of the Palestinian intifada, how many innocent Israeli civilians have been intentionally murdered by the PLO, the Hamas and their affiliates?

Now, if you have been relying on the mainstream media, you will be forgiven for not knowing the correct answers to those two questions. The correct answer to the first question is: "Zero"; and the correct answer to the second question is: "All of them."

That's right. Not a single innocent Palestinian has been intentionally killed by Israel during the past two decades of intifada violence. But every single one of the hundreds of Jewish civilians killed was an intentional act of Palestinian murder.

Sure, plenty of guilty Palestinians have been killed, and these include murderers, leaders in terror organizations, rank-and-file terrorists, and people setting up rocket launchers to fire at Jewish civilians. And sure, there have also been innocent Palestinian civilians who were killed or injured when the Jews shot back. These are people who were killed in the same Israeli anti-terror operations necessitated by Palestinian terrorist aggression and atrocities.

There is a fundamental difference, however, between Palestinian civilians getting killed in anti-terror operations and reprisals by Israel, and Israeli civilians who are killed by Palestinian Islamofascists. The Palestinian dead are unintended collateral damage from operations aimed at stopping rocket attacks and other terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians.

True, Israeli anti-terror operations are not so "surgically exact" that only guilty terrorists get killed in them. I am quite sure that if and when such a precise military technology is invented, for killing only guilty terrorists when they hide among innocent civilians, Israel will be the first country on earth to adopt it. However, until then, when Palestinians intentionally target and murder Jewish civilians, innocent Palestinian civilians may suffer the consequences of Arab terror.Jewish civilians, however, are always the target of Palestinian terror.

Israeli soldiers hurt by the terrorists are generally the unintended collateral damage.Israel suffers from a fundamental strategic problem, which damages its ability to defend itself; namely, the fact that modern Hebrew does not have a linguistic equivalent to the American slang expression, "Tough!" True, it has some words for "what a shame," but they do not quite convey the same meaning. As a result, Israeli politicians generally fail to respond to whines from the world about Palestinian civilians getting hurt in counter-terror operations by saying, "Tough!"

There has never been a war in which only soldiers get killed, and there does not exist a weapons technology that allows military strikes to take place in an exact manner where no civilians near military targets ever get hurt. Such surgical precision is all the more impossible when terrorists intentionally hide within and behind civilian populations. International law recognizes the rights of countries at war to attack terrorists and even soldiers when they are hiding among civilians, even when such attacks produce civilian deaths.

International law assigns blame for those deaths to the belligerents who use the civilians as their "human shields". When Palestinian civilians are killed by an Israeli shell, then the moral responsibility for those deaths rests squarely on the shoulders of the Palestinian terrorists who necessitate Israeli return fire.

These are the same terrorists who have fired thousands of rockets and mortar shells into Israeli civilian areas, even after Israel completely withdrew from the Gaza Strip. These are the murdering Islamofascists who have turned the Negev town of Sderot, well inside Israel's pre-1967 borders, into the Israeli equivalent of Guernica, under daily bombardment. Sderot's low-income civilians live in bunkers, afraid for their lives.Don't want Palestinian civilians killed when Israel shoots back? Simple. Stop the rocket attacks on Sderot.

Don't like Israeli reprisals? Simple. Stop the terror atrocities committed by Palestinians against Jews.You want Palestinians to move about freely without being searched at checkpoints? Simple. Stop the campaign of bombings, suicide mass murders and atrocities by the Palestinians. When the Palestinians stop murdering Jews, no one will have to check their cars. When Palestinian ambulances no longer carry explosives and murderers, no one will stop them for inspection.You want the Palestinians to earn decent wages, have a comfortable life? Simple. Suppress Palestinian terrorism.

Stop Palestinian rocket aggression. Then, they can even hold day jobs in Israel if they want. They are welcome to shop in Israel and get Israeli medical treatment. But as long as the terror continues, don't expect Israel to respond by turning the other cheek and abandoning self-defense. Don't like it? Tough! Don't like civilians getting hurt in wars? Then don't start wars of terror and aggression against Israel.

The Bash-Israel lobby keeps coming up with new forms of political aggression against the Jewish state. The newest goes something like this: Until Israel is technologically capable of killing terrorists hiding in the middle of cities full of civilians without a single Palestinian civilian being injured as "collateral damage", then Israel should be coerced into adopting a policy of Quaker pacifism, under which it does not respond or retaliate at all to terror atrocities.

In other words, by demanding that Israel only implement 100% pure military tactics, which no other army on earth has ever adopted, the Bash-Israel lobby is, in effect, really insisting that Israel stop defending its own civilians altogether, that Israel should become the first nation on earth to adopt such pacifism as its military strategy. Israel must be disarmed, while terrorism must be rewarded. And if Israel dares to shoot back, then it becomes the aggressor. By the same logic, Britain and the US were the real aggressors against Germany in 1944.

Such disingenuous demands for utopian purity in military operations, even when they come from Israel's own Leftists, are little more than a demand for unconditional Israeli capitulation to terror. Indeed, the only permissible defensive strategy such people are willing to allow Israel to follow is such capitulation.Let us stop with the rhetorical pretenses and affectations. People who are "only" outraged when Palestinian civilians are unintentionally hurt by Israel, but have nothing to say against the mass rocket attacks on Sderot, are naked anti-Semites.

They consider Jewish children legitimate targets of Arab aggression and Islamofascist terror because they hate Jews. In reality, they do not care a fig about Palestinian civilian casualties. Such casualties are merely delightful propaganda tools that can be exploited to demonize the Jews.There is only one effective way to prevent Palestinian civilian casualties, and that is to stop Palestinian terrorist aggression against Israel. But that is the one solution to the problem that the modern day pogromchiki, including academic Brownshirts, will never support."

http://www.stevenplaut.blogspot.com/
http://www.zioncon.blogspot.com/