It was inevitable.
Hamas and Fatah have signed a reconciliation agreement leading to a unity deal with elections planned for no later than September. Israeli president, Shimon Peres called it, “a fatal mistake that will ruin the chances for the establishment of the Palestinian Authority as a country." I call it a blessing in disguise. We should not interrupt our enemy while they get it wrong. This agreement sings like Pavarotti. It exposes the false facade, the teeth of this Palestinian Authority (PA) jaw trap, for the whole world to see and realize. Can you imagine signing peace with Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, only to see it annulled a short time later by the next Palestinian, Hamas-inspired ruler? Wouldn't it be easier, less risky to renounce it now, before letting it grow and solidify, before consenting to the rule of terrorists over Judea and Samaria? It's no secret. Hamas enjoys wide support among the Palestinian population in Gaza and in the West Bank. Hamas represents a critical share of the Palestinian population in these areas. Had real democracy been put into action in these territories Hamas could have gained a significant share or even a majority of the votes, the same as they had in 2006. The latest Hamas-Fatah agreement can only elucidate and bring to the fore what was not apparent to those peace-seeking naïve leaders of the West. Let's not bury our heads in the sand. Hamas is as Palestinian as an orange is to orange juice. And one can't form a representative Palestinian government without sharing power with these blood-thirsty terrorists who keep calling for Jihad against all Jews. Signing a peace agreement with Mahmoud Abbas, with a person pretending to be in charge, with a government that does not represent, or does not even rule over half of its people is not worth the paper the agreement is signed on. This type of an agreement is exceedingly unstable. It's a ruse. Fatah activist Kifah Radaydeh, who was interviewed on PA TV, could not have said it clearer. "...we perceive peace as one of the strategies," he said. "…It has been said that we are negotiating for peace, but our goal has never been peace. Peace is a means; the goal is Palestine (i.e., the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea)." When it comes to their intentions vis-à-vis Israel, Kifah Radaydeh has been candid; Hamas has been forthright; the PA and its president have been deceptive. They fooled the Israeli left, they fooled the world; they gained sympathy and support for their fake cause. Not anymore. Should the Hamas-Fatah reunion take place the rest of the world will confront a new PA. The world will face up to an uncompromising Islamic regime that does not take cover behind a fake façade. Had unambiguous logic dominated the thinking of existing world powers, the Hamas-Fatah reunion would have helped the US and the EU put down that crack pipe and get a grip on reality. They would realize that blaming the Jewish state for lack of progress in the peace process with the Palestinians is like accusing Poland for instigating World War II, or holding the US responsible for setting off a war with al Qaeda on 9/11. They would realize that a majority of Palestinians are the ones who give Palestinians their bad name. They would recognize that peace in the Middle East will come when we all speak Esperanto, that agreements with unstable Islamic regimes are as dead as Latin. The Hamas-Fatah reunion should serve as a revelation. It should help the Israeli government and the rest of the world realize that even if this reunion does not materialize at this instant it is a semi-dormant volcano ready to erupt at any moment in the very near future. You can't be safe living next to an active volcano unless you dismiss the Pompeii experience. You can't make peace with a PA that changes its colors every other season unless you don't mind paving the road to an all out deadly war. BIO Dr. Avi Perry, a talk show host at Paltalk News Network (PNN), is the author of "Fundamentals of Voice Quality Engineering in Wireless Networks," and more recently, "72 Virgins," a thriller about the covert war on Islamic terror. He was a VP at NMS Communications, a Bell Laboratories - distinguished staff member and manager, a delegate of the US and Lucent Technologies to the ITU—the UN International Standards body in Geneva, a professor at Northwestern University and Intelligence expert for the Israeli Government.
0 Comments
Modern laws of war, such as the 1949 Geneva Conventions, were defined in the aftermath of World War II. They were based on paradigms established throughout previous world military conflicts, where wars were fought between regular armies, and where death and suffering of non-combatant civilians reached a point of incredibility.
The Geneva Conventions laws of war were designed to protect non-combatants, including former but ineffectual ones such as POWs, or other enemy soldiers who could no longer pose a danger or a threat to the opposing side. The laws ruled out attacks on civilians, on doctors, ambulances or hospital ships displaying a Red Cross, a Star of David, or a Red Crescent. They prohibited the firing on a person or a vehicle bearing a white flag, since that indicated intent to surrender or a desire to communicate. Laws of war can work as long as both sides to a military conflict respect them, and as long as the initiator of the war does not include genocide, ethnic cleansing, as his war objective or as his key agenda item. They can work providing that no side to the conflict uses the laws to their military advantage, advancing their aggressive warlike acts by using ambulances to transport troops and weapons, shooting behind human shields, behind protected symbols like a white flag, from inside a mosque, from a hospital, next to a UN post, or from a school. Laws of war place a great deal of emphasis on intentions. They take into account the fact that even when no side to a military conflict has any intentions of violating the law, civilian deaths and suffering are inevitable. Collateral damage and deadly mistakes do play a remarkable part in the hail of fire. But, as long as care is taken and intentions are aimed at avoiding or minimizing such unfortunate casualties, errors and accidental collateral damage are not classified as war crimes. In general, the wise people who defined the nature of war crimes, understood that wars are natural means to resolving conflicts when talking and diplomacy have been exhausted and have come home empty-handed. These judicious folks understood that wars are temporary states of affair; peace would be following the fighting, and life will go on in the war's aftermath. Consequently, they classified long-term and severe damage to the natural environment, in excess of the concrete and direct overall military advantage, as war crime too. Unfortunately, the Geneva Conventions failed to provide guidelines for what constitutes a proper defense in the special case where an aggressor's ideology revolves around the realization of the most prevalent of war crimes, a genocidal holocaust of an entire nation, where the aggressor's tactics draw on all of the Geneva Conventions, only in reverse. How do you respond to the Hamas terrorist regime whose aspirations call for the killing of your women, children, or any other breathing Jew? Responding in kind violates the Geneva Conventions. How do you respond to a terrorist regime that hides behind human shields, fires rockets, mortar, missiles into civilian targets from civilian structures, from mosques, or from other sanctuaries protected by the Geneva Conventions? Shooting back in self-defense violates the Geneva Conventions. How do you defend yourself when the threat over your head is existential, when you know that losing a single war amounts to a permanent death for your entire nation with no possibility of a comeback? Could you ignore some of the Geneva Conventions when defending yourself? Could you have more leeway in interpreting the rules without being subject to criminal prosecutions? Could you be forgiven if the alternative you face is unending criminal assaults on your civilian population? How do you defend against an enemy whose soldiers dress in civilian clothes, pretending to be innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire? Should you be prohibited from targeting them? The Geneva laws of war must be amended. These laws should recognize that self-defense against the worse kind of war criminals requires more leeway in interpreting how the object of the criminal assault may act upon, and what is a proper self-defense under these conditions. Hamas and Hezbollah employ the Geneva Convention laws of war as a weapon against Israel, knowing that not only can they violate the rules or disregard them, but rather utilize them in gaining military advantage. Their criminal strategy merely gains momentum since Israel's self-defense response is subdued by the same rules. Tolerating the utilization of human shield as an effective weapon encourages the use of human shield. Tolerating exploitation of privileged places (like mosques, hospitals, schools, and similar buildings as base for launching rockets and mortar) encourages the use of these tactics. Using ambulances for the safe movement of troops and war material rewards this action. Taking part in active battle while pretending to be civilians, knowing that Israel will hesitate targeting the violators, all encourage the use of these war crimes. If Hamas and Hezbollah opt for war crime tactics, responsibility for their own civilian casualties must rest with them and only with them, especially in the case where Israeli response in self-defense inflicts unintentional civilian casualties in Gaza, Lebanon, or any other war-criminal state. The enemy must realize that using the Geneva conventions laws of war will not protect those who use them as a weapon in an aggressive war they initiate. The Geneva Conventions laws of war must be amended. They should make certain that terrorist states who exploit and abuse these conventions by utilizing them to advance their illegal aggression, will not be able to do so. They should realize that a law-abiding state like Israel—a state whose fight against an enemy that violates every rule on the books, is a self-defense struggle for survival—should not be held responsible for unintentional civilian casualties assumed by the aggressive violator. Left-leaning ideology is an ideology obsessed with rooting for the underdog, the poor, the deprived, the loser. As a rule, the flag bearers of this standpoint are quite aggressive—even to the point of turning violent—in their quest for saving the world from its villains. They represent David against Goliath, Don Quixote against the windmills, "Good" against "Evil"—or so they believe.
There is a problem, though, with the left-leaning approach. Equating "Good" with the underdogs and the losers, "Evil" with the successful and the winners, is not always proper. Losers, in most cases, have brought the misery upon themselves through their own actions, and the successful, more often than not, have worked hard and legitimately before attaining their status. Of course, there are cases to the contrary, nevertheless, profiling by picking "good" and "evil" based on "poor" and "successful" respectively, is ironic, wrong and improper. What's more, as soon as the left-leaning ideologue realizes his dream—David has defeated Goliath and is no longer the underdog—the zealous advocate for human justice no longer supports his former hero. David has now become Goliath—a subject of abhorrence, a target for hate speech and action. Angel Gabriel has become the devil, only because he is no longer the underdog. It is true that the state of Israel used to be a favorite among many left leaning personalities up until she won the Six-Day War in 1967. That war changed the geography of the Middle East. Israel's, unexpected, but magnificent triumph, over several, better-equipped Arab enemies, transformed her image from the underdog to the occupier. All of a sudden, the nation of Palestine, which had not existed before 1967, the smallest community of the huge Arab nation, became its own nation. A splinter set of Goliath's teeth, a former aggressor turned loser became a favorite of the left, while the winner, the former underdog, the David, became the villain—It had won and therefore it was no longer the smaller fry. And this is one bad reason why the "poor" Palestinians and the Hamas war criminals are admired by the misguided left. These leftists sympathize with the weak, the poor, and the "oppressed". They feel for the ones who have been violating international law. They see eye to eye with those attacking Israeli civilians with rockets and mortar, shooting at school buses, shooting behind human shields, behind protected symbols like a white flag, from inside a mosque, from a hospital, from cemeteries, next to a UN post, or from a school. After all, The Geneva Conventions laws of war were designed by the powerful against the weak. Consequently, it's time for the weak to show its resolve, to reject the will of the powerful, to ignore the rules while insisting on having the "powerful" comply with the slightest comma. The same is true with Islam in Europe and in the US. The "religion of hate and hubris" is referred to as the "religion of peace" by those leftists who view it as the little, innocent deer who try to survive in a jungle ruled by the Judeo-Christian carnivores (It's actually just Christian, but the title of Judeo-Christian makes it for a more appetizing target of hate). When politically incorrect statements spill the beans, tell the true objective of where Islam is headed—world domination, Sharia Law, Dhimmi status imposition on all infidels, religious intolerance, subjugation of women, to name a few great qualities—the left ideologues cry foul. "You can't insult Islam," they say, "even when you tell the truth." Islam is the underdog now. Islam treats the left as its vehicle of useful idiots; the left is being manipulated as an instrument for achieving Islam's final objective. The left leaning ideology is the Achilles heel of the Western democracies. The rest of us must wake up and understand that this virus can become deadly, just as it did in Hitler's Germany and in Lenin's Russia. We must develop early resistance, a vaccine, not a politically correct one. We must undermine the leftists' credibility by proving that the underdog may deserve its feat; the underdog may not always have the truth on his side; the underdog may be evil just like Islam, like llamas, like Hezbollah, like al Qaeda, just like the rest of the world's innocent death seeking martyrs. |
Categories
All
|