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| Terrorists, and Hamas are the leading example, neither respect nor protect civilians; not their own, not the enemy's |
No one, and there are no exceptions to this statement, sees anything but hot air in a condemnation of the jihadist Hamas regime. Hamas, like other terrorists, has never concealed its intentions to use terrorism and every other tactic in pursuit of the messianic goals defined in its blood-curdling Hamas Charter. They are not misfiring or miscalculating. The innocent victims are the target and always were.
What does bother us, a lot, is the attention she and it (the statement) pay to Israel's defensive measures.
"I also deplore the loss of civilian life in Gaza and call on Israel to show restraint. The lives of civilians must be spared everywhere and in all circumstances. Only an immediate cessation of all violence can bring back the calm necessary to allow for a lasting truce in the Gaza strip."Restraint.
Nauseatingly, she and her Brussels comrades place Israel and the terrorists on an equal footing. The effect is they negate the essence of the terrorist playbook that characterizes everything the Hamas regime does to Israel and its inhabitants. And so on that basis, the carefully calibrated and executed steps Israel takes in pinpointing Hamas terrorists on the ground, and eliminating them and their tunnels and weapons caches as surgically as warfare ever allows, are not enough to meet the 'restraint' test. Otherwise why call for more of it?
Her British compatriot, Col. Richard Kemp, previously commander of Her Majesty's forces in Afghanistan, knows infinitely more than Ms Ashton about how war is done. Regarding Israel's much-condemned military measures during the 2009 Operation Cast Lead, he said to the UN Human Rights Council (video here) that the Israeli Defence Forces "did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare". Does that count as restraint? Does it count for anything?
Wouldn't it be refreshing to hear Baroness Ashton, or indeed any political leader, acknowledge publicly that the fight against terrorists - dressed in civilian clothing, embedded within civilian settlements, using sophisticated explosive weapons against unprotected school buses and restaurants and other deliberately chosen civilian targets - needs to be fought to win?
And if she has a view on this, we would be interested to know the Baroness' assessment of the appropriate degree of restraint when it's your family that is under attack by the highly-equipped, religiously-inspired thugs?
3 comments:
Argh - she is maddening old bad who must be ignored for our survival.
There are two legs to your comment, Mr Gerson. Yes, she and those who stand with her must be ignored at the tactical level. No responsible government, let alone responsible parents or responsible citizens, can exercise some remote stranger's notion of 'restraint' if this conflicts with the imperative of saving our lives and those of our children.
That's the easy part.
That she and her actions are maddening is a subjective assessment that could apply no less to a long list of other politicians, and not only European. But it goes beyond maddening when they not only 'call' or recommend or advise as she did today, but also vote in high places for sanctions and laws. When they do that, it's post-maddening. It's threatening, existentially.
You probably have also noticed that the more that statements like Baroness Ashton's are heard in public discourse, the more you hear voices from within Jewish and Israeli ranks, sounding like they hate being on the outside and wanting to be loved and liked and understood.
That cacophony is maddening, threatening and deeply painful because it is so self-defeating and ultimately so selfish and so cowardly.
What an embarrassment to my country this woman Ashton is. And it terrifies me that an organisation as corrupt and as undemocratic as the EU has a 'Foreign Minister'.
Her statement reeks of the fashionable 'both sides are as bad as each other' laziness that sounds a bit like serious thought but is of course much easier. The easily impressed hear it and think that you are nuanced, whereas really you simply don't know jack about the subject on which you're pontificating.
The pictures on her Wiki page tell me a lot: especially the photo featuring Ashton and the US Secretary of State: as she poses next to Ashton, Hilary Clinton smiles as though experiencing for the first time how it feels to be the most beautiful woman in the room.
Michael
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