|
The Mideast conflict according to Buchanan
According to Patrick Buchanan writing at WorldNetDaily, “Olmert seized upon Hezbollah’s capture of two Israeli soldiers to unleash the IDF in a pre-planned attack” against Lebanon. [italics added] According to Buchanan, “To punish [the Palestinians] for the crime of electing Hamas, Olmert imposed an economic blockade of Gaza and the West Bank.” In other words, anything done by popular election must be good and acceptable. Buchanan, the one-time Catholic traditionalist conservative who doubted the efficacy of democracy, is now more of a democratist than President Bush! Unlike Bush, who made an unprincipled exception from his democratism after Hamas was elected, Buchanan is an absolutely consistent democratist, making democracy the absolute standard … as long as it can be used against Israel. According to Buchanan, “Then, Israel instructed the United States to terminate all aid to the Palestinian Authority, though Bush himself had called for the elections and for the participation of Hamas. Our Crawford cowboy meekly complied.” There are those Israelis again, controlling America. It doesn’t occur to Buchanan that America had its own reasons to cut off aid to a people who had just elected an all-out terrorist party. Then, according to Buchanan, “The predictable result: Fatah and Hamas fell to fratricidal fighting, and Hamas militants began launching Qassam rockets over the fence from Gaza into Israel. Hamas then tunneled into Israel, killed two soldiers, captured one, took him back into Gaza and demanded a prisoner exchange.” Got that? The Palestinians’s tunneling into Israel and terrorist attack against Israelis and kidnapping of an Israeli soldier were the result of Israel’s cutting off financial aid. It was Israel’s own cruelty—not Israel’s appeasement—that spurred the Palestinians to dig the tunnel and kill Israelis, Then, having blamed the Palestinian attack on Israel on Israel, Buchanan, evidently realizing how far out on a limb he’s gotten, turns around and says: “Let it be said: Israel has a right to defend herself, a right to counter-attack against Hezbollah and Hamas, a right to clean out bases from which Katyusha or Qassam rockets are being fired and a right to occupy land from which attacks are mounted on her people.” He then proceeds to blame Israel for “imposing deliberate suffering on civilians, collective punishment on innocent people, to force them to do something they are powerless to do: disarm the gunmen among them.” What Israel’s reasoning is in making these seemingly punitive attacks on Lebanon I don’t know; the Israelis may think that they must make the Lebanese feel the cost of harboring anti-Israel terrorists. I think it’s a legitimate question whether Israel’s reprisals are going too far. But Buchanan, having set up the entire situation as Israel’s fault, having portrayed Israel as provoking the Palestinians to dig a tunnel into Israel to kill Israelis, having portrayed the Hezbollah attack on Israel as a mere pretext that Israel seized upon to carry out a pre-planned attack on Lebanon (rather than as an act of war by a party that is an elected member of the Lebanese government), and, of course, having totally ignored the Israeli policy of appeasement that led to all this (since that would spoil the picture of Israel as a heartless aggressor), Buchanan has zero credibility to make the case that the Israeli offense is excessive in execution, though technically justified, since the whole point of the first half of his column is that it is not justified.
Email entry |