The Ceasefire Nonsense

How can Israel stop her defensive action in Gaza? Rockets are still raining down on Israel. Hamas says they will not implement any ceasefire unless Israel agrees to conditions that are tantamount to suicide, as Hamas demands open borders for Gaza that would enable them to build up a virtually limitless supply of weapons. Israel has accepted temporary ceasefires several times during the current conflict, only to watch Hamas violate each truce. Hamas started the conflict and is determined to continue attacking Jews. Nothing Israel does short of an IDF victory will change that. Kerry is twisting Israel's proverbial arm quite a bit, when what he should be doing is shaking Netanyahu's hand for being an ally in the war against Islamist aggression.

Scales of Injustice

Israel is not held to a double standard. The Jewish State is held to an impossible standard wherein international leaders give lip service to Israel's "right of self-defense", but then urge "restraint" on Israel's part and ultimately condemn the Jewish State for casualties among Gazans that actions by Hamas, not Israel, have made inevitable. Hamas should be called to account for exploiting Palestinian women and children as human shields. The mainstream media has lambasted Israel while immunizing Hamas, an organization that is causing all the bloodshed. Millions of innocent Japanese and German women and children were killed by the Allies in World War II, but did that make the Allies the culprits or take the blame away from the Axis as the Axis started that war of aggression? War is an inherently unsavory undertaking, even when carried forward for a moral cause. The innocent are killed alongside the guilty. War is tragic but when a group or country is bent on the destruction of another people, they must be stopped by any means necessary, even though non-combatants, even babies die because they are hostages to a genocidal enterprise, whether that be Nazism in the 1940s or jihad today.

Fighting Without Honor

The brave warriors of Hamas break every law of war in their current campaign. First, their rocket and mortar barrage is intended to cause indiscriminate slaughter. They are simply lobbing bombs at populated areas where any IDF combatant killed or wounded would be purely incidental. Hamas bases mortar and missile-launching crews and hides their arsenal in and around schools, hospitals, and mosques in a deliberate effort to spark return fire from Israel which will damage or destroy those institutions. Hamas terrorists use ambulances to transport themselves and their weaponry. Hamas gunmen are now routinely deployed in IDF uniforms, and when they are captured in Israeli garb, they should be summarily executed. Israel has instructed Gazans exactly where the IDF is about to strike and warned them to leave. Hamas has ordered Palestinian civilians to remain in the line of fire after IDF warnings. In short, Israel does all it is humanly possible to do to protect non-combatants on both sides, while Hamas does all it can to create maximum carnage among civilians, even among Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Yet, few condemn Hamas and commend Israel on her effort to defeat terror. Too many, including the State Department and Secretary Kerry himself, and the UN and Ban Ki-moon castigate Israel as it is waging as careful a war as can be waged to eradicate the genocidal fanatics of Hamas.

Dream Act Nightmare

Barack Hussein Obama has wanted to have it both ways when it comes to illegal immigration, so that very little concrete action is taken to stem the flow of criminal border breakers. When Arizona passed local laws to discourage illegal alien entry, Obama's Justice Department and Attorney General Eric Holder sued that state saying that immigration was a solely Federal purview, but when it serves the purposes of the administration to wash their hands of the border crisis that their lax enforcement of immigration law has engendered, the White House says that thousands of unaccompanied minors sneaking over is a "local problem" as is evinced in a Washington Post report Saturday by David Nakamura, Jerry Markon, and Manuel Roig-Franzia. Obama really should not be able to have it both ways, wherein the Federal government does not protect the US Southern border and blocks Arizona from protecting itself but then, places the responsibility for a surge of young foreigners trying to take advantage of special status under the "Dream Act" on the border states themselves. Obama is only able to engage in this blatant dereliction because of a handmaiden media that refuses to hold him and his administration to account.

Thwarting the Tunnelers

Many years ago, my mother suggested the solution to Chernobyl before the disaster was addressed in exactly that way. Now, she has suggested that the infiltration tunnels from Gaza into Israel can be severed by digging a forty meter deep trench, wide enough to monitor and block any attempt to dig through from the Strip. This would seem to be a technically feasible and relatively cost efficient way to make it harder for jihadists to terrorize Israelis. A trench or even that trench being filled with water and turned into a modern moat would make Hamas' effort at digging tunnels a much more difficult undertaking without more risk to innocent life. As it is now, street to street and even house to house fighting extract a terrible toll on both sides. No one could argue a trench or moat is aggression. Israel can perform a purely defensive measure that ultimately will save lives not only in Israel but in Gaza as well by digging what amounts to a deep ditch.

Idea for Peace

Could a peace agreement be reached in the Ukraine? Could the restive area that has more loyalty to Moscow than Kiev be given a semi-autonomous status? Could Kiev and Moscow agree that the area be demilitarized with police there being drawn with proportional representation of ethnic Ukrainians and ethnic Russians and their focus be on policing only in their own ethnic communities? Would declaring an amnesty for past crimes, even the Malaysia jet massacre, secure a peace if the aforementioned circumstances are met? I know it bridles any sense of justice to let nearly three hundred murders go unpunished, but if doing so brought lasting peace and ultimately saved thousands of lives, it could not be said that the airline passengers died in vain. Swiss, despite having Italian, French, and German ethnic groups, have lived peacefully for generations despite differences in language and ethnicity through a cantonment system that respects the rights of all three collective groups. Perhaps, the two groups in the Ukraine will see this great human tragedy as a reason to cease fire and use the Swiss example to settle differences with no more blood being shed.

No Restraint Displayed

A deliberate action brought down the Malaysia Air passenger jet and killed almost three hundred people. The government of the Ukraine had nothing to gain, and no logical reason to bring down the plane. The government of Russia had no motive to fire a missile at a commercial jet. Only Russian separatists in the breakaway portion of the Ukraine had reason to attack an aircraft where the jet went down. I suspect that those who fired the ground to air missile were pro-Russian rebels who thought they were firing at a Ukrainian military aircraft. They were, of course, absolutely wrong and the jet was not a legitimate target for anyone. Those who knocked the jet down were undisciplined thugs who have transformed themselves into murderers by an act so careless that it became callous to the extreme. The missile attack was not a military action, but an act of such thoughtless negligence that it must be called "terrorism".