MORAL EQUIVALENCE is alive and thriving in much of the media coverage regarding the current conflict between Israel and the Hezbollah terrorist organization in Lebanon. While examples abound, a July 30 column in the Washington Times by one George H. Lesser, described as a 30-year veteran of international political reporting, is a model of the major media mindset.

There is “a lot of blame to go around,” he wrote. On the one side, Israel has been “determined to push Palestinians to the wall” and “even worse” to actually build a wall. That has forced “those who have no love of Muslim extremists … into the arms of the Syrians and Hezbollah.”

But Hezbollah and Hamas are also to blame, he equiponderated, “because their success largely depends on Israeli excesses against Palestinian civilians, so they provoke Israeli excesses.”

Clearly, Lesser recognizes that Hezbollah and Hamas, which have vowed to settle for nothing less than the eradication of Israel, pursue their war of annihilation through a two-fold strategy: (1) by targeting civilians, including women and children, in suicide bombings, sniper fire and unprovoked missile attacks on residential areas, and (2) by deliberately provoking “Israeli excesses against Palestinian civilians,” which is a euphemism for such despicable actions as putting missile launchers in school yards and hospitals to assure that the Israeli Defense Force cannot take out the installations without causing civilian casualties. Hezbollah and Hamas, by Lesser’s own admission, want their own women and children dead for the propaganda value.

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But appallingly, Lesser sees such horrific acts on the part of Hezbollah and Hamas as morally equivalent to Israel constructing walls to keep out suicide bombers.

To Lesser, there is no lesser of two evils. He called on “people on both sides [to] stop the killing, stop the blaming and … recognize they are all people.” Which is all very well, except that it ignores one salient fact: Israel would gladly stop fighting and live at peace with her neighbors, were her neighbors willing to do so. But Hezbollah and Hamas, not to mention Syria and Iran, do not want to live at peace with Israel. They want Israel obliterated, and they don’t hide the fact.

Hezbollah and a substantial percentage of the population of Lebanon that support Hezbollah are so obsessed with the their determination to destroy Israel and its Jewish population that they not only rejoice every time they hear news of Jewish children getting blown to bits, but they are more than willing to see their own children die in an Israeli air strike – because the more Lebanese civilians who lose their lives in this war, the more they believe it helps their cause.

That kind of attitude is a difficult thing for the civilized mind to grasp. It is a concept so alien to our nature, so repulsive, that until confronted with incontrovertible evidence, we refuse with our whole beings to accept that anyone could actually think that way.

Yet Lesser’s sense of moral equivalence compelled him to write that “everybody is convinced those on the other side ‘aren’t like us.’ The fact is, they and we are all alike,” he claimed. But he could not be more wrong. Those who would send their children into a crowded marketplace, onto a public bus or into a teen discotheque with bombs strapped to their little bodies, or who would consider it an honor to have their children playing around a Hezbollah rocket launcher when it is taken out by an Israeli air strike, are nothing like the rest of us. They are so different from us that it strains credulity to accept that such stark differences between human beings could exist.

Naomi Ragen, an American-born novelist and playwright living in Jerusalem, is keenly aware of those differences. In a column for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, she quoted from a letter written by her son’s friend, an Israeli soldier who has been fighting Hezbollah on the ground in Lebanon. “They only win,” he wrote, “when they hide behind baby carriages.”

“Please remember this,” urged Ms. Ragen, “when you hear about the ‘atrocity’ of the Israeli bomb that killed many civilians in Kafr Qana, a place from which Hezbollah has fired hundreds of rockets at Israel.” Kafr Qana was bombed only after the civilians there were warned to leave, she wrote.

“Terrorists and their supporters have lost the right to complain about civilian casualties, since all they have is one goal” in their war against Israel, and that is “to target civilians. Every one of the more than 2,500 rockets launched into Israel [as of July 31] is launched into populated towns filled with women and children….

“So don’t cry to me about civilian casualties [in Lebanon.] Cry to those using babies and wives and mothers [as human shields]; cry to those who store weapons in mosques, ambulances, hospitals and private homes.”

What we must remember about the war between Israel and the Hamas and Hezbollah Islamofascist terrorist organizations in the Middle East is that Israel is in an existential struggle, a fight for survival. Israel wants only to be left alone; Israel’s enemies want Israel destroyed. Israel would gladly live in peace with its neighbors, but its neighbors – as they have proven over and over again – do not want peace.

But we must also be aware that the current conflict in the Middle East is much more than just a localized spat between Israel and Hezbollah. It is a crucial battle in a global war, and the Islamist radicals, who are the aggressors in this war, are not interested merely in terminating the state of Israel and its inhabitants. That is but one step in their game plan. The ultimate objective is world domination and the establishment of a global caliphate under which life in every nation will be no different than it is now in Iran under the Iranian Mullahs or than it was until four years ago under the Taliban in Afghanistan. And to achieve that, they must defeat the United States. Not just drive us out of the Middle East but conquer us on our home turf.

Hezbollah and Hamas are instruments of the Iranian Islamic Republic. Iran’s ruling mullahs and its belligerent President Mahmound Ahmadinejad have repeatedly voiced their intention, as Newt Gingrich has pointed out, “to destroy the United States, Israel and any country allied with them.”

Delusions of grandeur, you say. Megalomania. Iran might be able to harass Israel, and they might be making it tough for us in Iraq by supporting the insurgency. But they can’t hurt us over here. After all, we’re the world’s “only remaining superpower.” We’ve got enough firepower to blow Iran off the map if they messed with us.

A lot of hot air, you say. Mere bluster. Iran is no real threat to us, and if we would just quit sticking up for Israel, quit trying to force democracy on Iraq, quit fretting over their nuclear ambitions, tone down the “axis of evil” rhetoric and clear out of the Middle East, then Iran will be no threat to us at all.

They would like us to believe that. But the fact is that if we did all of those things, the Iranian radicals would only be strengthened and emboldened.

The Islamofascist threat, with Iran at its axis, is the most dangerous and serious threat to the United States and to the future of democracy and the free world that we currently face. It is at least as serious a threat to us as Naziism was under Adolph Hitler, at least as grave a threat to us as Communism was under Joseph Stalin. And a strong case can be made that Islamfascism poses an even greater threat to the free world than Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union ever did.

But how can that be? The Middle Eastern countries that host and support terrorists are small, backward countries with puny military capability compared to the United States. (It is amusing – to put it kindly – many of the same people who hold that view are the same people who talk about the U.S. military already being stretched too thin. They think they can have it both ways.)

But Iran’s current population is roughly the same as the population of Japan at the start of World War II , and Japan managed to conquer nearly all of Asia and the Pacific before American and Allied forces finally turned the tide. It is roughly the same as the population of Germany at the start of World War II, and Germany managed to conquer most of Europe before U.S. and allied forces were able to bring an end to the aggression – and only then at a staggering cost in terms of lives.

No, the fact that we’re bigger than they are should give us little comfort.

Furthermore, although the Islamic Republic of Iran is the umbilicus of the global Islamofascist threat, its radical objectives are shared by several other rogue nations in the Middle Easter (such as Syria) and by numerous Islamist terrorist organizations (such as Hezbollah, Hamas, Al Qaeda and Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood).

There are more Muslims in the Middle East than the entire population of the United States. Moreover, there are roughly 1.3 Muslims in the world, more than four times the entire U.S. population. Certainly not all Muslims are Islamofascists, but it is anybody’s guess how many of those 1.3 million Muslims are Islamofascist supporters or sympathizers. We are forced to guess, because so few of them are telling us otherwise. Most of the world’s Muslims over at least the last two generations have been raised on a constant diet of murderous hatred for Jews and Americans and have been taught from the cradle that helping to destroying “the Great Satan” (America) and “the Little Satan” (Israel) is their religious duty. With so few Muslim clerics around the world openly refuting that notion, it would be naïve to think that a majority of Muslims have rejected the Islamist propaganda on their own initiative.

It is, in fact, the fanatical religious ideology of radical Islam that makes the Islamofascist threat at least as dangerous as Nazism or Communism, if not more so. Whether or not their leaders really believe what they are telling people, or are just using the religion as a bloody path to power, there is little doubt that most Islamist terrorists are possessed of a fanatical conviction that Allah wants them to kill the infidels and that a bawdy paradise awaits those who die doing so. Certainly the Marxist ideology, which was rooted in atheism, could offer no such promise of post-mortal pleasures to those who sacrificed their lives for the cause.

It is fortunate that there are many people in the United States who recognize, at least to some degree, the threat America faces from Islamofascists in general and from the Islamic Republic of Iran in particular. I think few really grasp just how serious that threat is, however. But fortunately, the Bush Administration seems to recognize the danger. Yet many Americans do not, and unfortunately President Bush is to a large degree constrained in his options by the fact that many of his political opponents and even a large number of people within his own party seem to believe that diplomacy and appeasement are the best way to deal with the Iranian threat – if, indeed, they acknowledge that such a threat even exists.

A debate rages among U.S. conservatives between two starkly divergent views of what constitutes “true” Islam. The one side sees radical Islamists as having hijacked a great and basically good religion for a nefarious purpose; the other side sees Islam itself as fundamentally radical and nefarious. Scholars on both sides make their case from the Koran and from history.

If we are to win the war on terror, which is in truth a war against radical Islamfascists fanatically obsessed with our destruction and global domination, it would seem at first blush that knowing which interpretation of the true nature of Islam is correct would be critical in defining, identifying and defeating our avowed enemy.

In actuality, it is irrelevant which view of Islam we think is correct. What matters is what Muslims themselves believe to be the correct interpretation of Islam.

There are, as heretofore mentioned, Muslims (or at least people who identify themselves as Muslims) who believe it is their religious duty to kill “infidels” (us) at every opportunity and to defeat and destroy “the Great Satan” (us), and who will willingly take their own lives in the execution of that (as they see it) sacred charge. They are our sworn enemy, and they have declared – and are waging – a war against us. And they are far more numerous and more widespread than we ever imagined. They number at least in the millions, and perhaps in the hundreds of millions.

The leaders of these bloodthirsty radicals claim to represent all of Islam, and they openly call upon all Muslims to join in their murderous jihad.

How many of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims believe that message? Although most would probably not, themselves, be inclined to carry out a suicide mass slaughter of women and children, how many feel admiration for those who do. One would hope that many Muslims are horrified that such barbarous acts are being carried out in the name of Islam, thus defaming the religion they love? How many Muslims around the world do feel that way, it is impossible to know. However, the dearth of Muslim clerics and ordinary Muslims speaking out openly against terrorism, particularly where that terrorism is directed at Jewish children in Israel, suggest that either there are few in that category or, perhaps, that there are many who are terrified to speak out, fearing for their own lives or the lives of those they love.

But even that raises an interesting question: If radical Islamic terrorists are so willing to take their own lives in the act of killing infidels, or to send their own children off to do so, or put their wives, mothers, sisters and daughters in the path of an Israeli air strike as fodder for a propaganda photo op, why is it that so many “moderate” Muslims, if they really don’t believe that terrorism is Allah’s way, would be afraid to speak out against such barbaric acts? Why would they fear death for speaking out if they believe that the terrorists have hijacked their beautiful “religion of peace?” Don’t they think that Allah would reward them for at least verbally defending the true faith against those who have corrupted it for the sake of power?

As the radical Islamist’s war for global domination ramps up – and it will – Muslims around the world will be faced with a choice. They will need to decide where they stand.

So, too, must the rest of the world make a similar choice. If that choice is to appease, then the free world is doomed. And that seems to be the choice that most of Europe has already made. It is also the choice that most of the mainstream media in the United States is advocating.

One of the factors that makes Islamofascism such a serious threat is the amount of financial resources available to terrorists and terrorist states. At current oil prices, Iran alone has gross revenues, from some 3.9 million barrels of oil a day, of about $110 billion a year. Most of that money is going into weapons programs, and most particularly uranium and plutonium enrichment.

Today’s record crude oil prices are also filling the purses of other oil-producing Muslim nations with billions in windfall profits. Some of these countries are nominally our allies, but many individuals who have become wealthy beyond comprehension, including some Wahabis in Saudi Arabia, are ling-time financiers of Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups and the driving force behind the Wahabi Madrassas school system that indoctrinates young Muslims with a murderous hatred of all non-Muslims.

Islamofascism is a serious threat in large measure because the Islamofascists have mastered the techniques of asymmetric warfare. The Iranians and their terrorist allies have no illusions about being able to defeat us on the battlefield. But bent on world domination, they are pursing many strategies in addition to terrorism that they believe will ultimately bring about the defeat and destruction of the United States and other western democracies.

Our enemies well understand the crippling power of propaganda. They have seen the mighty United States defeated in Vietnam not on the battlefield but on the home front by anti-war, anti-American propaganda in the mainstream press, depicting the United States as an empirical power and American troops as baby killers. They are convinced that can happen again. The U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam convinced all of America’s enemies throughout the world, including the Iranian Mullahs, that formidable military technology notwithstanding, America is weak. We are spineless, we are gullible, we are fickle, we have a short attention span, and we are much too squeamish to sustain – or to inflict – the casualties necessary to achieve victory. Therefore, we can be easily defeated by a smaller but more determined, more persistent, and more ruthless enemy.

The Iranians believe that it is only a matter of time before the United States will pull out of Iraq and let the pro-Iranian Shiite militias of Moqtada al-Sadr duke it out with al-Qaeda and the remnants of the Baathist party for control of Iraq. No matter who won such a civil war, if democracy does not prevail, it will not be good for the United States. If al-Qaeda wins, Osama bin Laden can resume in Iraq what he started in Afghanistan. If the pro-Iranian Shiites win, Iran will have greatly expanded its sphere of influence in the Middle East and be a big step further toward its goal of establishing a global Caliphate. If the Baathists win, we’re back to square one.

But perhaps the most likely scenario is that the country will split into regions controlled by the various factions, giving each of them a base of operations in Iraq. It is not a pretty prospect.

The Iranians also believe that it is only a matter of time before Israel is annihilated and replaced with an Iranian client state. Hamas and Hezbollah can then turn their attention to other targets further afield such as Europe and the United States.

And speaking of Europe, the Islamist takeover of Europe is progressing very well, thank you. The Europeans, who have made nice to the Muslim world in response to every threat, and who have opened their doors to Muslim immigration, generously supported a mostly idle Muslim population with what the Europeans view as welfare entitlements but the Muslims themselves recognize as dhimmi tax (a tribute Muslims have historically demanded of non-Muslims in occupied lands as the price of not being put to the sword), and have given into countless demands that are, in effect, moving Europe in the direction of Sharia [Koranic] law. As the birthrate of native Europeans is far outstripped by the high birthrate and continued immigration Muslims, and as the Muslim population refuses to assimilate or to consider themselves Europeans or even to accept the notion that Muslims are bound by the laws of their host countries, all of Western Europe is now very close to losing its sovereignty and its identity and appears willing to let it happen without a fight.

The attitude is typified by a recent comment by Sweden’s minister of democracy, Jens Orback, as quoted recently in a National Review article by Mark Styne. Said Orback: “We must be open and tolerant towards Islam and Muslims because when we become a minority, they will be so toward us.”

This is a situation of which few Americans are aware. In Styne’s words, “the defeatism of the Jens Orback generation … accepts civilizational suicide – as a given, can’t be reversed, no choice but to embrace our fate.”

Orback’s expectation that a Muslim-dominated Europe will be “open and tolerant” to native Europeans is nescient at best. Unless moderate Muslims in Europe decide that they want to resist Islamism and embrace western democracy – and there are no signs yet that many do – their leaders will impose Sharia law on all of Europe, and the freedoms that Europeans have been so accustomed to enjoying, and have been so taken for granted even as they have been slipping away, will be gone forever.

It is less likely that the Islamists will be able to defeat the United States by the same non-military strategy – unless, of course, a majority of Americans fall into the same depth of defeatism and ennui as have the Europeans. But with Israel gone and Europe having surrendered without a struggle, we won’t be left with many allies in the world. And by that time, the capability of Islamic terrorists to inflict massive casualties on us will have multiplied exponentially. No matter if Iran has successfully built its own nuclear weapons; by then, it will have access to the French nuclear arsenal.

In the days following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, in full recognition that radical Islamic terrorists were waging war against the United States, President George W. Bush declared war on international terrorism. In a joint session of Congress on September 20, he said, “Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists, and every government that supports them. Our war on terror begins with al-Qaida, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.”

That statement is far more than a threat or a pledge, it was a simple statement of fact, because until that mission is accomplished, and no matter to what extent we may cower, appease or retreat, any radical Islamic terrorist groups we have not yet found, stopped and defeated will continue to wage war against us.

President Bush promised: “We will direct every resource at our command -- every means of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence, every instrument of law enforcement, every financial influence, and every necessary weapon of war -- to the disruption and defeat of the global terror network.”

Although the President’s critics say constantly that he misled the American people by promising a swift and easy victory, the truth is quite to the contrary. “Our response,” he said, “involves far more than instant retaliation and isolated strikes. Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have seen. It may include dramatic strikes, visible on television, and covert operations, secret even in success. We will starve terrorists of funding, turn them one against another, drive them from place to place, until there is no refuge or rest.”

Furthermore, he said, “we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.”

The President was roundly criticized for that statement. Yet was the right thing to say and the right thing to do. It demonstrated a clear understanding of the nature of Islamic terrorism and what it would take to defeat it. America should never have lost sight of that commitment, should never have wavered, should never have weakened its resolve.

Not just nations but individuals were faced with a decision at that moment, and regrettably many Americans, particularly in the liberal media, among the liberal elites in Hollywood and academia, and in the Democratic Party leadership (but also a few among the radical Right) chose to stand with America’s enemies.

As the ensuing years confirmed President Bush’s acknowledgement that the war to defeat the Islamic radicals who were out to destroy us and our way of life would be neither quick nor easy, it seems that more and more Americans have abandoned their support for the cause. Apparently, some have decided that the cost of defeating the enemy, in terms of blood and treasure, greater than it is worth. They do not realize how great will be the cause of not defeating this patient, determined and fanatically ruthless enemy. Others seem simply to have grown war weary. The duration of the struggle, which whether we like it or not is still in its early stages, has exceeded their attention span. To a large extent we suffer from a national malaise that could well be described as Societal Attention Deficit Disorder.

And all of this is to our enemy’s benefit. But it is no accident. It has come about largely as a result of the massive propaganda campaign being waged jointly by the radical Islamists themselves and their willing accomplices among the American liberal elite, from Hollywood to the Hill and from UC Berkeley to NBC.

Perspicacity Press has stated repeatedly, and will continue to reiterate that the ongoing difficulties in dealing with the insurgency in Iraq are largely due to the conviction on the part of the insurgents, and their supporters in Iran and elsewhere, that all they need to do to defeat the mighty United States is keep to hang in there until the next U.S. election. They believe this because the leaders of the Democratic party have promised it, and the Liberal Press is doing its part to bring it about by incessantly portraying the United States as an evil aggressor nation and our troops as war criminals.

The war in Iraq, the Bush Bashers contend, is not part of the war on terrorism but a distraction from it, though evidence continues to mount that Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime was even more deeply involvement with al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations than anyone realized.

The mantra, “Bush lied, people died,” is a falsehood that has been repeated so many millions of times that it has become widely believed, and it seems no amount of evidence can convince those who have bought into it that President Bush did not lie about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Captured documents furnish proof positive that whatever Saddam might have done with his existing WMD to keep American troops from finding them, he retained means, the ability and the intent to quickly reconstitute his weapons programs once U.N. sanctions were lifted (something he had good reason to believe was only months away). Evidence abounds that caravans laden with WMD were moved north into Syria on the eve of the war. And actual caches of chemical weapons, including sarin gas, have been uncovered in Iraq – all of which is conveniently ignored or trivialized by the liberal press.

President Bush has been intensely criticized for “misunderestimating” how stubborn the insurgency would be in Iraq. But if he misunderestimated anything, it was how viciously partisan his political opponents in the United States would be and how willingly they would support America’s avowed enemies and work for their own country’s defeat in the effort to discredit and destroy a political opponent. (Some of them have other reasons than mere partisanship for wanting America to lose the war – as Perspicacity Press has written about before – but I won’t get into that now.)

It is unfortunate – no, it is contemptible – that President Bush’s political enemies have so well succeeded in bringing about the “quagmire” in Iraq that they so desperately wanted, because not only has the war in Iraq bogged down, but with it the war on terror.

When President Bush identified Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an “axis of evil,” he rightly identified three of the most dangerous rogue regimes in the world. One of those regimes is gone, although if the radical leftists in the United states have their way it will either return or be replaced (to their giddy delight) with something worse. The other two are becoming ever more dangerous, but because of the failure of the American people to remain united in the war on terror, our ability to deal with those threats has been severely compromised.

What many of President Bush’s political enemies seem to not to care about and what many Americans seem not to realize is that the radical Islamofascist terrorist organizations, and the rogue regimes that support them such as the Islamic Republic of Iran, are not going to end their war against us if we appease them, or if we withdraw from the Middle East, not even if we look the other way while they develop nuclear weapons to use against us, or even if we abandon our support to Israel and give them a free hand to wipe Israel off the map, which they openly say they intend to do.

These people – I cannot reiterate often enough – are determined to destroy Israel and they are determined to destroy the United States. No truce, no withdrawal, no bribe, no change of administration and no change of U.S. foreign policy will deter them. They will continue to seek ways to kill us at every opportunity, will continue to pursue their ultimate objective of destroying democracy, conquering the world, and (as President Bush said in his Sept. 20, 2001, address to Congress) “imposing [their] radical beliefs on people everywhere.”

Can they make good on such a threat? Can they achieve that diabolical goal? That depends entirely on how we respond. If we resist with the same strength of will that they aggress, they cannot ultimately prevail. But if fail to take their threats seriously, or if we cower under their threats, and by so doing give them room and time to increase their WMD arsenals and to train and deploy their terrorist cells, then by the time we realize that we are in an all-out fight for survival, the cost in lives could well number in the millions. We are dealing with enemies that will not hesitate to wipe out entire cities once they have the capability – and they will not be deterred by a countervailing threat of heavy casualties on their side.

Nothing will deter the Islamofascists in their murderous pursuit short of their defeat, and they will never be defeated until we are committed to a course not of appeasement, nor of containment, but of clear-cut victory. Once again, as President Bush said, the war against radical Islamic terrorists “will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.” It will not end until then for the simple reason that they will not quit until they have been forced to quit, until all would-be terrorists have been shown that terrorism will never succeed as a means of achieving their goals, until the civilized world (starting with us) has made it clear that a goal of tyrannical domination will not be tolerated no matter what means may be employed in its pursuit.

It is going to be a tough job, a long struggle. It will require, as President Bush, has said, a “generational commitment.” But if we shrink from the fight, the ultimate cost will be far greater, the road to victory far more difficult.

So what has all of this to do with Hezbollah and its beef with Israel? Very simply, Hezbollah, which is very much a creation of and a surrogate of Iran, is itself a terrorist organization of global reach, having conducted terrorist attacks in locations from Spain to Argentina.

According to former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage (as quoted in a CBS report in April 2003), “Hezbollah may be the ‘A-Team of Terrorrists’ and maybe al-Qaeda is actually the ‘B’ team.”

While Hezbollah’s number one objective is to do away with the state of Israel, the United States is next on its list. Already, Hezbollah has been responsible for carrying out numerous terrorist attacks against the United States. We are indebted to CAMERA.org for publishing a timeline of Hezbollah that includes the following examples.

The first major attack by Hezbollah occurred shortly after it was formed in Lebanon 1982 with the assistance of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. In April 1983, Hezbollah attacked the U.S. embassy in Beirut, killed 63 people. Six months later, a Hezbollah attack on the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut killed 241 American military personnel. In April 1984, a Hezbollah bomb killed eighteen U.S. servicemen and injured 83 people in Torrejon, Spain. Five months later, Hezbollah attacked the U.S. embassy annex in Beirut, killing 24 people. Since then, American civilians and military personnel have frequently been the victims of Hezbollah hijackings, kidnappings and murders.

Hezbollah is known to have terrorist sleeper cells in the United States and to be conducting fundraising activities in the United States. Furthermore, there are thousands of outspoken supporters in the United States who show up at pro-Hezbollah rallies shouting the same “Death to Israel” slogans you hear in the Arab street.

Hezbollah declared a war of extermination against Israel in February 1995 in a manifesto that declared it would never accept any cease-fire or peace treaty and would not relent until Israel was destroyed. Since then it has conducted numerous terrorist attacks against Israel including a deadly bombing of the Israel embassy in Buenos Aires in March 1992 and bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in July 1995 that killed 86 people, in addition to firing dozens of Katyusha rockets into northern Israeli towns on frequent occasions over the last decade.

Israel, which had occupied Southern Lebanon some 18 years earlier to establish a “security zone” to prevent attacks on northern Israel first by the Palestinian Liberation Organization and later by Hezbollah, unilaterally withdrew from Lebanon May 2000 on promise from United Nations Secretary General Kofi Anan that U.N. peacekeepers would keep Hezbollah away from the border. But Hezbollah attacks have continued against Israel on an almost daily basis.

A U.N. Security Council resolution in September 2004 called for “the disbanding and disarmament” of Hezbollah, but neither the U.N peacekeepers nor the Lebanese government have taken any steps to bring about that disarmament, and meanwhile Hezbollah’s terrorist activities continued. Moreover, with assistance from Iran and Syria, Hezbollah expanded its militia with the recruitment and training of thousands of additional fighters and stockpiled tens of thousands of Katyusha rockets as well as hundreds of longer-range, more sophisticated rockets and other armaments from Syria and Iran.

It has been widely reported that on July 12, 2006, with no provocation, Hezbollah forces crossed into Israel and kidnapped two Israeli soldiers. What goes unmentioned in most news accounts is that Hezbollah also killed three soldiers in the process, then killed four more who were pursuing the kidnappers in a tank, and then shot another while he was attempting to recover the bodies of his fallen comrades. Also generally unreported is the fact that Hezbollah on the same morning sent salvos of rockets into Israel aimed at residential neighborhoods. The warheads on these rockets were filled with ball bearings and explosives, an innovative terrorist weapon designed to inflict casualties on as many people as possible over a wide area.

By mentioning only the kidnappings and ignoring the eight soldiers killed in the process and the rocket nearly simultaneous rocket attacks targeting civilians, the news media has attempted to minimize the gravity of Hezbollah’s deliberate acts of war, as a preface to blaming Israel for a “disproportionate” response.

Hezbollah was undoubtedly caught off guard by the fury of Israel’s response, as was much of the rest of the world, expecting that Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert would be much more inclined to appease and much less inclined to retaliate than his predecessor, Ariel Sharon.

To his credit, Olmert recognized that Hezbollah’s objective is not just to extract concessions from Israel but to destroy Israel and that any concessions would be counterproductive. That is really not a hard conclusion to draw, considering that Hezbollah Leader Hassan Nasrallah has said, “I do not recognize the state of Israel, and I want to set out from South Lebanon to liberate Palestine in its entirety.’” This is consistent with Hezbollah’s manifesto which states, “Our struggle will end only when this entity [the state of Israel] is obliterated.”

Olmert was right, therefore, in concluding that Israel’s response must not be “proportional” but a decisive victory over Hezbollah. While Israel has no desire to occupy Lebanese territory, he said, Hezbollah, must be disarmed and dismantled.

Israel’s offensive was specifically – and precisely – targeted at Hezbollah, not at Lebanon. In fact, Olmert called upon the Lebanese government to assist in reigning in and disarming the Hezbollah terrorist organization.

Regrettably but not surprisingly, Lebanon’s pro-Syrian President, Emile Lahoud – although a Maronite Christian, not a Muslim – quickly sided with Hezbollah, clearly positioning Lebanon as a state sponsor of terrorism. An Associated Press story appearing in the Jerusalem Post on July 16 reported that Lahoud “said … that Israel’s bloody assault could push desperate Lebanese citizens to sacrifice their lives to defend their country and even commit acts of terrorism.” (Italics added.) The article quoted Lahoud as vowing that “the Lebanese will not surrender.” Prior to Lahoud’s making that statement, Lebanon was not under attack; only Hezbollah, which the Lebanese government (along with the U.N.) was supposed to be responsible for disarming.

Lebanon’s Prime Minister Fuad Siniora, a Sunni Muslim and successor to Prime Minister Rifak Hariri who was assassinated by the Syrians in 2005, was initially quoted in a Milan newspaper, the Corriere della Sera, as having called for the disarmament of Hezbollah. But according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Siniora’s office denied the report the following day, criticized Israel for its heavy-handedness, and said he would “seek compensation from Israel for the ‘unimaginable losses’ to the nation’s infrastructure.’”

The response of Israel’s Vice Premier Shimon Peres was to the point: “Why doesn’t [Siniora] stop the Hezbollah? Israel didn’t start the war.”

By siding with and expressing support for the Hezbollah terrorist organization, the Lebanese government has forfeited any right to criticize Israel for expanding its offensive beyond Hezbollah-specific strategic targets. While at the outset the Hezbollah forces may have been considered an illegal non-state militia, the pro-Hezbollah position of the Lebanese government has transformed Hezbollah into a state actor.

Iran, meanwhile, has made its position clear. On Monday, July 17, the Tehran Times quoted Iran’s ruling Ayatollah Khamenei as saying, “Israel’s dream to dominate Lebanon will never be realized.” Khamenei “also pointed out that Muslim nations are proud of Hezbollah’s brave response toward the Zionist assaults.” He also “said that Hezbollah will never be disarmed,” according to the Tehran Times article.

Pro-Iranian and pro-Hezbollah (as well as anti-Israeli) propaganda are certain to be expected from the Tehran Times. But things don’t get much better in the U.S. mainstream press. In article in the July 25 LA Times, Reza Aslan, an Iranian-born research associate at USC’s Center for Public Diplomacy, wrote, undertook to make the point that Hezbollah is not in any way a puppet of Syria or Iran but is acting on its own for no purpose but to defend Lebanon against Israeli aggression. “The truth is that Hezbollah has never advocated a pan-nationalist ideology,” according to Aslan. “Though created by Shiite Iran and sustained by Arab Syria, it has eschewed any pan-Arabist, pan-Islamist or even pan-Shiite ties,” and it is “irresponsible” for the West to claim otherwise, he wrote.

But Hezbollah’s own manifesto refutes the notion that Hezbollah’s only interest is in defending Lebanon; it exists expressly to destroy Israel. Furthermore, in the words of Nazrallah himself (as reported on July 16 by CBS News), “Hezbollah is not fighting a battle for Hezbollah or even for Lebanon but for the Islamic nation.” Sounds suspiciously pan-Islamist to me.

Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz and his student Mike Webber, in a guest essay for the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, responded on July 23 to an earlier Democrat and Chronicle editorial that “denounced Israel for an ‘overwrought military response’ – but failed to criticize Palestinian terrorists for the bombings, shootings and kidnappings of Israelis that precipitate the confrontation.

“Some context is in order,” they wrote. “In 2000, Israel unilaterally withdrew from territory along its northern border, relying on United Nations assurances that it would protect Israel from further Hezbollah attacks. (It has not.) In 2005, Israel again unilaterally withdrew, this time from the Gaza Strip. However, instead of leaving Israel alone after getting what they purportedly wanted, the terrorist factions running Gaza and southern Lebanon were emboldened to fight on to destroy the Jewish state.”

Dershowitz and Webber pose a profound question: “How, then, should Israel behave when the Palestinian government fires rockets into Israeli population centers?”

The same question should be asked regarding Hezbollah in Lebanon as well as Hamas in Gaza. Both seek Israel’s destruction. Both make unprovoked attacks on Israel, even after Israel has voluntarily and unilaterally withdrawn from territory that it initially occupied only for defensive reasons. Yet after the withdrawal, supposedly what the terrorists wanted, they only intensify their unprovoked attacks on Israeli civilians.

Hamas has fired some 800 rockets into towns in southern Israel in the last year, and Hezbollah has fired thousands of rockets at residential areas in Israel in just the last few weeks, all of them intended to kill civilians.

“Israel would never stoop to the level of its enemies,” wrote Dershowitz and Webber. “Israel has never acted with even proportional harshness, let alone excessive force, toward Palestinian terrorists or their military backers in Damascus and Tehran.”

So why have more civilians died in Lebanon than in Israel? Because Israel has so long been the target of terrorist attacks that the country has built numerous bomb shelters as a protection, while in Lebanon, the heartless Hezbollah terrorists invite civilian casualties – again for purposes of propaganda – by launching their attacks from schoolyards, hospitals, mosques, and residential neighborhoods – and even from a position adjacent to a United Nations observers post. Even though the Israeli Defense Forces drop leaflets warning civilians to flee in advance of an air raid, many do not heed the warning. Either they are not allowed to leave or they choose not to do so, gladly offering their lives in the cause of the Islamists’ propaganda war. In either case, it is Hezbollah (and its supporters) and not the Israelis who are responsible for the civilian deaths in Lebanon.

As Naomi Ragen put it, “If you hide behind your baby to shoot at my baby, you are responsible for getting children killed. You and you alone.”

You do not ever see the Israelis, incidentally, using women, children and infants as human shields in this fashion. The Israelis value life. Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists do not.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir said many years ago, and it remains true to this day, that there will be peace between the Arabs and the Israelis when the Arabs “love their own children more than they hate us.”

The United States is right to not insist on an immediate cease-fire in the Middle East, such much of the rest of the world is calling for. But the United States should take an even stronger stance by insisting on the complete disarmament and dismantling of Hezbollah, as called for in U.N. Security Council Resolution 1559. The United States should insist that the United Nations and the Lebanese government take action to bring that about, and if they fail to do so (and it is abundantly clear that they will fail to do so), then the United States should assist Israel in whatever way it can to bring it about. If the Lebanese government insists on backing Hezbollah, the avowed enemy of Israel and the United States, then it has declared itself to be a party to the war. It would be wise to back off from that position.

The United States, which is constantly barraged with belligerent and threatening language from Iran and Syria, should make it clear to those countries that any assistance to Hezbollah will not be tolerated. If either of those rogue regimes choose to ignore such warnings, we need to be prepared to back up the talk with enforcement.

The reality is that at some point and in some place, we are going to have to deal in some fashion with Syria and Iran. Diplomatic pressure may or may not be sufficient in Syria. It is unlikely to be sufficient in Iran, so long as its present radical Islamist leadership controls the country, because – once again – Iran’s president and its ruling Mullahs are obsessed with destroying us and dominating the world. The longer we wait to deal with them, the bloodier the conflict will be, particularly if we procrastinate until they have nuclear weapons in hand.

For the sake of our national survival, we must realize that Islamofascists, in Iran and elsewhere, do not seek nuclear weapons and other WMD as a deterrent, because they are not interested in peaceful coexistence – not with Israel and not with us. We cannot allow terrorists or rogue states, and Iran in particular, to acquire nuclear weapons!

And we must not allow Iraq to continue to support terrorists and insurgents in Iraq. The insurgency in Iraq will never be brought under control until we have dealt with Iran.

Nor can we allow Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, Iran, the United Nations, the American press and the many other enemies of Israel to bring about Israel’s demise. It is not just Israel’s future but the future of the free world that is on the line.

Again, as President Bush recognized five years ago, the war against Islamofascist terrorism “will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.” He warned that “any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.” This applies to Hezbollah. It applies to Hamas. It applies to Syria and to Iran under existing regimes.

Richard Armitage said three years ago, “We’re gong to go after [Hezbollah and other terrorist groups in addition to al Qaeda] just like a high school wrestler goes after a match. We’re gong to take them down one at a time.”

The question facing the United States today is whether we are going to stay tough and do what we promised – what needs to be done – or whether we are going to go soft, equivocate, procrastinate, hum-haw around, and allow Islamofascists to continue building their weapons of mass destruction. If we wait too long, when the battle does come it will be bloody and brutal beyond anything the world has yet seen!

Source: www.PerspicacityPress.com. Copyright © 2006 Rand Green Communications.
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