One of my absolute favorite writers, Steven Plaut, has written a piece that reflects what I posted Wednesday. In his article, Tough!, Plaut emphasizes the clear moral differences between Arab aggression and Israeli retaliation.

Unfortunately, far too many people in the world understand enough of the situation to fully recognize the folly of moral equivalency. It's very easy for an outsider to fall for the propaganda that emanates from leftist circles. Especially when much of it comes from Israeli leftists and Arab sympathizers.

To quote Plaut:

Not a single innocent Palestinian has been intentionally killed by Israel during the past two decades of intifada violence. But every single one of the hundreds of Jewish civilians killed was an intentional act of Palestinian murder.

Sure, plenty of guilty Palestinians have been killed, and these include murderers, leaders in terror organizations, rank-and-file terrorists, and people setting up rocket launchers to fire at Jewish civilians. And sure, there have also been innocent Palestinian civilians who were killed or injured when the Jews shot back. These are people who were killed in the same Israeli anti-terror operations necessitated by Palestinian terrorist aggression and atrocities.

This, of course, has been proven to be true. The only ones who argue this are the same people who refuse to believe that the Jenin massacre was a myth

There is a fundamental difference, however, between Palestinian civilians getting killed in anti-terror operations and reprisals by Israel, and Israeli civilians who are killed by Palestinian Islamofascists. The Palestinian dead are unintended collateral damage from operations aimed at stopping rocket attacks and other terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians. True, Israeli anti-terror operations are not so "surgically exact" that only guilty terrorists get killed in them. I am quite sure that if and when such a precise military technology is invented, for killing only guilty terrorists when they hide among innocent civilians, Israel will be the first country on earth to adopt it. However, until then, when Palestinians intentionally target and murder Jewish civilians, innocent Palestinian civilians may suffer the consequences of Arab terror.

Jewish civilians, however, are always the target of Palestinian terror. Israeli soldiers hurt by the terrorists are generally the unintended collateral damage.

That last line says it all. In fact the whole article does. But what Mr. Plaut leads to is simple:

Israel suffers from a fundamental strategic problem, which damages its ability to defend itself; namely, the fact that modern Hebrew does not have a linguistic equivalent to the American slang expression, "Tough!" True, it has some words for "what a shame," but they do not quite convey the same meaning. As a result, Israeli politicians generally fail to respond to whines from the world about Palestinian civilians getting hurt in counter-terror operations by saying, "Tough!"

When I was a kid, whenever something seemed unfair to me, I was always told "tough", or "too bad", or even the occasional "get over it". While it didn't make me feel all that much better at the time, I later grew up and realized that just because something doesn't go the way YOU want it to, that doesn't mean it's unfair, or even wrong.

Continues Plaut:

When Palestinian civilians are killed by an Israeli shell, then the moral responsibility for those deaths rests squarely on the shoulders of the Palestinian terrorists who necessitate Israeli return fire. These are the same terrorists who have fired thousands of rockets and mortar shells into Israeli civilian areas, even after Israel completely withdrew from the Gaza Strip. These are the murdering Islamofascists who have turned the Negev town of Sderot, well inside Israel's pre-1967 borders, into the Israeli equivalent of Guernica, under daily bombardment. Sderot's low-income civilians live in bunkers, afraid for their lives.

Why don't some people get this???

Plaut gets to the point he's trying to make:

Don't want Palestinian civilians killed when Israel shoots back? Simple. Stop the rocket attacks on Sderot. Don't like Israeli reprisals? Simple. Stop the terror atrocities committed by Palestinians against Jews.

You want Palestinians to move about freely without being searched at checkpoints? Simple. Stop the campaign of bombings, suicide mass murders and atrocities by the Palestinians. When the Palestinians stop murdering Jews, no one will have to check their cars. When Palestinian ambulances no longer carry explosives and murderers, no one will stop them for inspection.

You want the Palestinians to earn decent wages, have a comfortable life? Simple. Suppress Palestinian terrorism. Stop Palestinian rocket aggression. Then, they can even hold day jobs in Israel if they want. They are welcome to shop in Israel and get Israeli medical treatment.

But as long as the terror continues, don't expect Israel to respond by turning the other cheek and abandoning self-defense. Don't like it? Tough!

As Plaut says, and I really agree, there is only one effective way to prevent Palestinian civilian casualties, and that is to stop Palestinian terrorist aggression against Israel. There is no "cycle" of violence - that's just another propaganda tool employed by leftist and other Arab sympathizers. Anyone who knows anything at all about the conflict understands that. However, far too many simply follow the soundbites emanating from the bowels of the mainstream media - and therefore the "intelligentsia" of the liberal mindset.

Until 1967, Israel was the darling of the left. A socialist-driven society succeeding against all odds to survive. But once Israel became strong enough to protect her own, she became the target of those very same leftists. It didn't matter that Israel became strong out of necessity in order to simply exist. No, it just mattered that they were no longer the "victim".

And as we all know, liberalism is all about victimization. The left has never met a victim they couldn't protect, even if the victim deserved their own fate. Should a "victim" attempt to free themselves of their victimhood and no longer need the liberal who "freed" them, they are labeled an Uncle Tom,or an embarrassment.

If you truly want to know my problem with liberalism and Islamofacism, there it is in a nutshell. Kudos to Steven Plaut for eloquence.