Saturday, March 14, 2009

14-Mar-09: While everyone's looking the other way: missiles keep being fired into Israel

Two rockets, and perhaps more than 2, landed on Israeli soil this evening. Ynet calculates that this brings the number of rockets and mortar shells fired from Gaza at Israeli civilian targets, mainly in Israel's south, since the end of Operation Cast Lead in Gaza to about 100. (In a separate calculation, the New York Times on Wednesday said the total then was 160, including mortars.)

One of tonight's rockets landed near a kibbutz. Another struck an open area south of the city of Ashkelon.

Yesterday, Friday, three additional Qassam rockets fired by Palestinian Arab terrorists with Israeli-civilian-only targets in mind, shooting from the northern part of the Gaza Strip, landed in areas known to Israelis as the Sha'ar Hanegev and Eshkol regional councils.

Yesterday's edition of the Christian Science Monitor puts the current situation in a rare perspective (see "Israeli town copes with return of near daily rockets"). Rare, that is, in the sense that mostly the mainstream media are ignoring the effects of the steady barrages directed from Gaza by Palestinian Arab terror groups against Israeli civilian communities.

And when they don't ignore it, it's in order to make disingenuous comparisons between the lopsided death toll on the Israeli side, and the number of deaths of Gazan Arabs resulting from Israeli military intervention this past December and January. Jimmy Carter's disgraceful, error-laden January opinion piece in the Washington Post is a good example.

This ongoing war in which rockets, mortars and other forms of lethal flying explosives are hurled into our towns and homes requires hard-eyed examination of the realities on the ground. The Hamas terrorist regime in control of Gaza does what it does because it receives constant encouragement and support from outside, allowing it to turn Gaza into one of the world's most miserable locales. The jihadists who stand at its head have been successful at almost nothing other than sacrificing the children and lives of the populace under their control in the name of religiously-inspired, endless war against Israel. More foreign aid has been delivered per capita to the Palestinian Arabs than to any other population in history. The outcome has been pathetic, tragic.

A meeting of select Western governments in London on Friday has evidently decided to prevent the Hamas regime from getting access to additional weaponry. Members of NATO (the US, Canada, Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands and Norway) say they will "share more intelligence information, exert more diplomatic pressure and intercept more weapons shipments coming over land and by sea to Gaza". We'll see.

The Hamas terrorists have reacted exactly as terrorists do. They say ("Hamas vows to continue smuggling weapons") the plan will fail, and they will continue to smuggle arms by whatever means into their territory. To the credit of the jihadist savages, they have never minced words. They say what they mean.

Unfortunately too many of the people and governments hearing them either confuse their own wishful thinking for serious analysis. Or, like the mullah-directed regime in Iran, they sympathize and actively collaborate.

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