Farah on Israel

Joseph Farah writes about Israel, her enemies, and her illusions about her enemies. Every thought and sentiment in this column is identical to my own. (See this and this.)

Michael Jose writes:

Your posting on Joseph Farah reminded me of a problem that I have with his writings on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.

Basically, Farah’s writings are mostly worthless because while he whines on and on about how Israel is not doing enough to defend itself, he shies away from actually advocating that Israel do anything.

In the article you cite, he says:

“What does Israel need to do now? It needs to do what I have been advocating from the beginning—defeat the bad guys, destroy them, kill them all.”

Okay, so how does he propose that? Re-occupy Lebanon? Imprison all of the Palestinians and interrogate them to find out who belongs to Hezbollah and who doesn’t? Kill everyone and let God sort them out? Or does he believe that a more pin-prick accuracy campaign (like targeted assassinations) is feasible? Farah doesn’t actually recommend any tangible action by Israel.

If you look through his previous columns, you’ll see that he continuously implies that the Palestinians don’t really belong west of the Jordan and that it would be nice for them to move somewhere else—once he even gave the impression that Iraq should open its doors to Palestinian refugees. But he never explicitly advocates transfer and on at least one occasion, denied that he advocated transfer.

I posted about this on my blog.

Whether I agree with you or not, I respect that you have the guts to say what you mean. Farah, for some reason, doesn’t.

LA replies:

I shouldn’t have said that I agree with every idea and sentiment in his article. The business about “kill them all” is, as you say, self-indulgent and lacking any specific content. I repeat that the only way Israel has a realistic chance of a long-term future is by removing the Arabs from west of the Jordan. Israel cannot “kill them all,” any more than America can democratize the world of Islam. The aim of the West cannot be to defeat Islam in some final sense, since that is impossible, but to drive the Muslims back and render them unable to harm us.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 16, 2006 08:58 AM | Send