Soccer Dad

When scrappleface imitates thomas friedman

Reid: Bush Must Halt Slaying of Terrorist Leaders - scrappleface.com (satire)

“It’s a known fact that every time a terror leader is killed, another rises to take his place,” said Sen. Reid. “Therefore, the only way to stop the spawning of new terror leaders is to halt the slaying of the current ones.”

The Reality Principle by Thomas Friedman (not satire) or here

Have you noticed how often Israel kills a Hamas activist and the victim is described by Israelis as "a senior Hamas official" or a "key operative"? This has led me to wonder: How many senior Hamas officials could there be?

We're not talking about IBM here. We're talking about a ragtag terrorist group. Israel should have killed off the entire Hamas leadership twice by now. Unless what is happening is something else, something I call Palestinian math: Israel kills one Hamas operative, and three others volunteer to take his place, in which case what Israel is doing is actually self-destructive.

When it suited him, Thomas Friedman would dismiss the capacity of Hamas to inflict damage on Israel. Hamas may not IBM but it does have a structure. As Elder of Ziyon recently pointed out

In the three years prior to Yassin's death, approximately 800 Israelis were killed in terror actions. In the three years since, that number has plummeted to about 110.

Yassin and Rantisi had organizational skills. Killing them reduced the capacity of Hamas to continue its terror war against Israel. They may have successors, but those successors are nowhere nearly as successful as they were in sowing terror.

Daniel Pipes noted that

Every inquiry into Palestinian suicide attacks, and especially Nasra Hassan's remarkable report in a recent issue of The New Yorker, finds that these do not just happen spontaneously but result from a large and sophisticated infrastructure.

This infrastructure exists for one reason: to make normal men want to die. Because Islamic law prohibits suicide, a suicidal person cannot be recruited to go on a mission. Rather, it is (perversely) necessary to dispatch only those who are not suicidal.

Islamic Jihad, which along with Hamas trains the suicide killers, explains: "We do not take depressed people. If there were a one-in-a-thousand chance that a person was suicidal, we would not allow him to martyr himself. In order to be a martyr bomber, you have to want to live." The same strange logic applies for Hamas, which rejects anyone "who commits suicide because he hates the world."

Convincing healthy individuals to blow themselves up is obviously not easy, but requires ideas and institutions. The process begins with the Palestinian Authority (PA) inculcating two things into its population, starting with the children: a hatred of Jews and a love of death. School curricula, camp activities, TV programming and religious indoctrination all portray Israelis in a Nazi-style way, as sub-human being worthy of killing; and then deprecate the instinct for self-preservation, telling impressionable young people that sacrificing their lives is the most noble of all goals.

Friedman, like his colleagues at the Times, pretends that he believes that Israel has a right to defend itself. Friedman though argues that it is counterproductive for Israel to defend itself therefrom it shouldn't.

The evidence shows, though, that while Israel may not be able to wipe every last Hamas terrorist, Israel can degrade the organizaiton's capabilities by killing its key personnel. It's not even arguable that killing Yassin and Rantisi did more to secure Israel than the withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 or from Gaza in 2005. The first action dealt an operational blow to Israel's terrorist enemies; the latter ones strengthened them.

It would be nice to dismiss Friedman's 2003 comments about the "ragtag" Hamas as satire. But I can't. It's simply his implicit way of saying that Israel ought not defend itself.

Thomas Friedman, ,Israel, Anti-terror Tactics.