Gaza and The Morbid Song of Western Self-Destruction

Tragically ignoring Bashir Gemayel’s insights from a quarter century ago

Andrew McCarthy, the indispensable former prosecutor, most notably, of the Blind Sheikh jihadist responsible for orchestrating the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, whose brilliant new book, about this case and its lasting, if ignored implications, “Willful Blindness” will be released shortly—makes some typically cogent insights at his NRO blog, this morning, based upon combined New Duranty Times and AP reflexively biased “reportage.” 

To me the reporting Andy critiques is of a piece with the earlier European sickness unto death “reportage” (and policy) regarding Lebanon some 25 years ago—a morbid refrain, now, of our self-destruction, expressed in these moving and prophetic words by former Lebanese President Bashir Gemayel (as translated by Bat Ye’or), uttered just before his assassination in 1982, about how the last opportunity to salvage a decent Lebanon was squandered, resulting, ultimately, in present day Lebanese Hezbollahstan: 

“Europe, driven by it’s antisemitism, preferred to mutilate itself by sacrificing the ancient Lebanese Church rather than supporting Israel.” 

Andy’s full blog, is reproduced below: 

Story, which broke a few minutes ago, is in the Times. 

It is the usual, pointing out in the first sentence that a 13-month-old Palestinian girl was killed.  The Israelis, of course, are said to be shelling “civilians” — though, given that Hamas terrorists are indistinguishable from Palestinian “civilians” and launch operations from within “civilian” areas, one is left to wonder how the AP knows that. 

If you wade some 23 PARAGRAPHS DOWN in the story, you find the following:

Israel evacuated its troops and settlers from Gaza in late 2005, but militants proceeded to fire rockets from the abandoned territory. Militants raised the stakes significantly by firing Iranian-made rockets into Ashkelon, a coastal city of 120,000 people.

While Ashkelon had been targeted sporadically before, it never suffered direct hits. The assault increased the pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to protect a widening circle of people at risk.

The AP, moreover, studiously avoids any mention of the abandon with which Palestinians have attacked the border town of Sderot, less than a mile from Gaza. 

As Brett Stephens observed in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week, “Since the beginning of the intifada seven years ago, [Sderot] has borne the brunt of some 2,500 Kassam rockets fired from Gaza by Palestinian terrorists.”  (The New York Sun posted a good editorial on Sderot, here.) 

We are lectured a great deal about the importance of democratizing the Middle East as, somehow, a strategy to defeat terrorism.  I do not want to reargue this issue or make too much (again) of the fact that popular elections have thus far succeeded in empowering terrorists. 

My question for the moment is this:  Does this democratization ever entail any responsibility?  The Palestinian “civilians” were given a choice in 2006, and they chose to elect Hamas — a choice that was overwhelming in Gaza, where the terror organization — having ousted the more “moderate” terror-mongers from Fatah — now rules. 

If the civilians, eyes wide open, opt to be led by a terrorist organization whose chief calling card is its pledge to destroy Israel (a sentiment shared by a large majority of the “civilian” population), how upset are we supposed to get when the said civilians get caught in the cross-fire that is provoked by the savages they elected?