George Handlery about the week that was. Radicalizing majorities. If criminality is a life style, is enforcing the laws racism? The right to total war and the obligation of a limited response. Needed: The courage to win. Terrorism is about ultimate subjugation not about compromise settlements. Back to the oven?
 
1. One reads, “Israel has lost the propaganda war” over Gaza, “sequel ‚X’”. True. However, the judgment has little to do with Israel’s responsibility and the quality of her crisis management. This defeat had been pre-programmed. That has everything to do with the proper response to the violence engaged in by a PC-protected group. (N.B. As this was written, an e-mail called attention to a poll conducted by a newscaster. On the site, one could click on the Israeli or the Palestinian flag to register their support. The score, when checked, was about 50:50.)
 
2. There are instances when a minority develops the notion that, in order to assert and maintain its identity, it needs to resort to extreme measures. In some cases this leads to demonstratively insulting the majority’s way of life. Furthermore, its customs that regulate beyond formal laws social relations and the public order are systematically violated. If this pattern enters into the consciousness of the majority, the consequence is its radicalization. A symptom of that is that those unwritten laws and inhibiting conventions that have protected all are cast aside. With this collapse of public life’s good manner code, the role of violence will be enhanced as a regulator of inter group relationships.
 
3. Criminality is, to its apologists, part of a “life-style”. Do we not have the fundamental human right to live our lives in our own way and as we please? By this standard, we arrive to a position favored by some. If the foregoing is taken seriously then, it becomes easy to claim that moving repressively against criminality amounts to “racism”. In this instance, a racist is whoever refuses to accept the right of others to act, not according to laws and customs, but according to personally defined norms. All that is needed is to claim that the disruptive comportment is a derivate of “culture”.
 
4. Hamas has revealed that it sees itself as waging total war. Accordingly, this organization that exercises total power in a portion of what would be the Palestinian state, does not believe in a negotiated settlement. So much is logical because of the hardly concealed aims of the outfit. Hamas’ goals are not negotiable and so they can only be imposed. This is also to be considered when Hamas’ complaints about Israeli counter measures are evaluated. The articulated position transcribes into two contradictory claims. It is their concurrent application that violates logic. However, this trifle will be unlikely to bother Hamas foreign supporters, or, to put it differently, those who are instinctively inclined to blame Israel. What Hamas insist upon is its moral right to wage total war when it dishes out blows. On humanitarian grounds, it demands a limited war when the foe strikes back. Only a fool would accept such rules for the game that is being played.
 
5. A critical question that Israel’s government faces in Gaza – and the US’s in Iraq/Afghanistan – is: “Do we have the courage to win if it has to be”?
 
6. The Mumbai terror chat. Some newspapers have presented the edifying transcript of the phone conversations the terrorists had with their guides. The recorded directions went to the point of ordering the (cheered) murder of hostages from abroad. The questions raised by, and the instructions given to the Jihadists, are in many ways enlightening. The interpretations, to which the content leads us, are revealing regarding the mentality and the purposes of Islamist terror. The same goes for the PC thesis that concessions, financial support, and psychosocial measures will placate terrorists. The released material makes it clear that, terrorists do not strike in the pursuit of politically realizable and therefore, by some standard, “reasonable” goals. From what one read, it appears that, terrorism is not a reluctant “continuation of politics by other means”. Those resorting to terror were in this case not people who see no chance to achieve reasonable ends by conventional, that is political means against an unbending foe. What the conversations disclose is that, departing from the line of press releases, the purpose of terrorist action is simple and straightforward. That purpose is to be accomplished by killings. The more the better. The rationale of these murders is to induce fear. The goal of this fear is to force total surrender.
 
7. Ideologically motivated extremist have, as pleaded above, no real political goal. The rationality of their position derives from an insight into the subconscious. Such militants realize something basic. It is that political solutions are only possible when they contain a quid pro quo for all parties concerned. Ideologies do more than to confirm that its insiders are totally right. They also reassure True Believers that outsiders are totally wrong and that this makes them totally evil. In the interest of a pure world, this element must be eliminated. Accordingly, the purpose of the struggle is not to force the opponent to negotiate a settlement. What is wanted is total defeat and total submission. It is part of this mind set – it had mainly secular forms in the 20th century – that the struggle does not end when, cowed, the defeated accept their subjugation. The real mayhem begins after the end of formal hostilities between organized forces. (A concrete example is the case of People’s Kampuchea.) The enemy in this continuing, but in the end more bloody struggle than that of the first phase of confrontation, are the remnants of the pre-capitulation era’s order.
 
8. In last weeks Duly Noted, I opined that the events in Gaza would hardly suffice to radicalize Islamists beyond the point they are already agitated. A reader responded that, while the foregoing might be true, there would be radicalization. Jimmy Carter – and those he represents – will certainly be inspired to become agitated. The letter-writer is right. In the West, the Jimmy Carter types have certainly been encouraged to mobilize. In doing so they have the full support of that segment of the immigrant population whose focus of life continues to be in the Near East.
 
9. “When we put an Israeli-made product into the shopping cart we should conjure up the picture of the mass of murdered Palestinian children. Having done so, we should put the item back on the shelf”. Ever so slowly, the call for a boycott of Israeli goods will be muting into an appeal to avoid Jewish businesses. The next stage will be a call for damage to be done to anything owned, operated or popularly associated with Jews. Meanwhile, anyone who, after a new 9/11, might think of doing the same with Moslem countries, products or businesses, would be labeled a racist. As such, he would be considered to be in violation of diverse laws.
 
10. A woman in a demo in Miami advised “the Jews” to go back to the “oven”. What she meant was the gas chamber. Do you have an inkling for whom she and her supporters – if already US citizens – might have voted? Once at it, guess whom the few – mainly Jewish – counter demonstrators have supported. It is likely that it was the same bundle of candidates. The writer discovers a further oddity in problem regarding the “oven” bit. It is that in a different context, the lady advocating this solution would be likely to insist that, the Holocaust is a Zionist invention. Therefore, the suggestion to return to the ovens implicitly confirms a “Jewish lie”. Alternatively, the call for incineration suggests a course of action that refers to an alleged myth. It is unlikely to do much good because, in the eyes of some, too many survived the “final solution” that, anyhow, “did not happen”.
 
11. On January 8, the Hizbollah rocketed Israel. Resolute as ever, the UN reacted by sending a few more troops to the border. There must be some confusion here. The missiles are not fired horizontally through the border along a trajectory that is six feet high. Missiles are made to fly over the border. Putting people on the line of separation will not put them into harm’s way. Nor will the presence of peace keepers help to keep the non-existing peace.