I Stand With Israel

American and European liberals are of course complaining about Israel's attempt to root out the terrorists in Gaza. The response is "disproportional", they say.

But while that implicitly acknowledges that Israel is defending itself (being in response to mortar attacks by Palestinians against civilian Israeli targets), it also presupposes that a response must be proportional. Why?

War is not about fairness. War is about defeating the enemy so thoroughly that he gives up and admits he was wrong to attack you in the first place. It's about discrediting him with a giant argumentum ad baculum, the appeal to force, because none of your valid arguments appear to work. Like all such appeals, it must be accompanied by the valid arguments or it will not prevail.

Because while the appeal to force and its direct application in the form of military attack is not a reasoned argument, it is not an invalidating one. That is, the application of force doesn't mean the side using it disproves its point; it simply doesn't prove it.

In practical terms, the use of force will fail as long as the opponent fails to internalize defeat. If reason is on his side, he will fail to be defeated, no matter how badly he's beaten on the battlefield.

The true danger therefor in the use of force is not using enough to win. And when the opponent is using it, not using force is a sign that you don't believe in your own position.

From AoSHQ:

It's been said before but it is worth repeating a thousand times: if Hamas, Hezbollah, and most of the Arab states (and Iran) laid down their weapons tomorrow and forgot about their plans to dissolve Israel, there would be peace in the Middle East. The Israelis could forget about the fences and the Palestinians might one day have something approximating a Western standard of living. On the other hand, if Israel laid down its weapons tomorrow, the country would be utterly annihilated, the Israelis killed to the last man, woman, and child.

- Gabriel Malor

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Update (20081229 0848): Dore Gold of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs does a more thorough job of defeating "proportionality":

To expect Israel to hold back in its use of decisive force against legitimate military targets in Gaza is to condemn it to a long war of attrition with Hamas.

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No, Obama Is Not The Antichrist

Of course not.

w/t Mark Steyn

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Obama on LA Times Video: Israel Has No God-Given Right to Palestine, Has Committed Genocide on Palestinians

Treacher quotes a source:

Saw a clip from the tape. Reason we can't release it is because statements Obama said to rile audience up during toast. He congratulates Khalidi for his work saying "Israel has no God-given right to occupy Palestine" plus there's been "genocide against the Palestinian people by Israelis."

It would be really controversial if it got out. That's why they will not even let a transcript get out.

Alleging genocide may go over well at going away parties for Jew-hating friends, but it doesn't play well in Tampa. Or in anywhere else in the United States.

Ya see, Mr. Obama, Americans like Israel.

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Remember Librescu

While the bullets struck his body, Liviu Librescu held closed the doors to his classrom so that the young people in his charge could escape. His was the ultimate virtue, offering his own life to save others.

w/t Jeff Emanuel

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The Cheerleaders of Hate

You want hate crime? This is a hate crime. Palestinians cheer a massacre at a Jewish school. Eight students were killed, 35 others injured. The gunman, a Muslim and supporter of Hamas, was killed by a an off-duty Israeli Army officer who lived nearby.

The jihadist hate group Hamas probably planned the attack, and certainly praised it afterward. This is their modus operandi: stir up hatred and praise terrorism, lob bombs at the Israelis, and then become outraged when they retaliate on poor widdle Hamas. It's possible that Hamas didn't actually get involved in the attack until it was clear that it was popular with the Palestinians, at which time they opportunistically and cynically claimed credit.

Like the attack at Norris Hall at Virginia Tech in 2007, there was a Jewish hero. Unlike Professor Librescu, trapped in a gun-free zone, this hero was armed and stopped the killer dead.

Now that's a cause for celebration.

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... From my Cold, Dead Fingers

That is all. Except Frank J. rules.

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Bowling for Burma Shave [Updated]

On my way to work I pass on the highway a series of roadsigns in the spirit of the old Burma Shave advertising signs. You know the kind, a little poem written on signs placed far enough apart so you can read them out loud one line at a time.

Young Thugs

Won't Dare Attack

If A Teacher

Might Shoot Back

Guns Save Life.com

The signs aren't clickable, and that's fortunate, because apparently the site given by the last one has been hijacked by Russian parasuits.
[Update: I mistyped the URL. Take a click at the site that I should have showed you the first time.]

The nice thing about the placement of these signs is that a good portion of the traffic passing them is destined for the Socialist Republic of Chicago. I'll get a picture of the signs, if I can do so without getting arrested by the Illinois Storm Troopers.

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The Noble Path

[Updated; see page source]

Monday is Memorial Day. It is a day not just to remember the heroes of the past, but to look with awe on the path they followed. As we honor the heroes who have given their lives in service of our country, each of us looks at their gift to us in a different way.

As a veteran who served in peacetime, I am humbled.

Others, who never served, must have similar feelings of gratitude, knowing the untold valor that goes with the mere act of survival in wartime, and the price paid in blood so that we could have our way of life. Even those who believe that all war is wrong are held to account for that blood. It was given as a gift, not as a bargaining chip, but that lessens not the debt we owe to the giver.

The aged can look back on a long life of freedom, knowing that had those we remember today not been willing to give up their lives to protect it, the country in which they exercised those liberties could not have stood.

But it is the young who have the most to learn from Memorial Day. They can learn humility, duty, honor, courage, sacrifice, and gratitude. And they can know that as a nation we give praise to those who are willing to exercise those virtues. Perhaps by remembering the fallen of the past, those of us who will not be called upon for the ultimate sacrifice can ensure that the greater, higher and more noble path remains open for those who are inclined to take it.

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How the Jews Saved the World

Take that, jihadists.

The last bozo who tried to wipe out the Jews gave them not just a national identity, but Palestine. What will you give them, with your lust for their blood?

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Avoiding the Next School Massacre

What happens to make people shoot up a school classroom?

Eric at Classical Values asks why the Virginia Tech students, especially the adult males, didn't fight back.

There are several factors which intuition says probably contributed.

• From the time kids are babies until the end of high school, they are told that fighting is what bad kids do, and not to do it.
• Those with the urge to protect others before themselves are in Iraq and Afghanistan, not Southwest Virginia.
  
• The cops are always saying not to fight back.
• It's a gun free zone. He can't possibly have a gun.
• No one told them to fight back, that they had offensive capability and could fight back.
  

That last point bears expansion. Have ever had an object, such as a ball, thrown at you when you weren't expecting it, even in a context where you should be? It takes a lot of concentration to deal with it.

Now imagine a college textbook flying at you. You can't catch it with a gun in your hand. A hail of textbooks, pens, cell phones, backpacks, and furniture would be impossible to deal with for an attacker. A group of two or three people picking up furniture and charging the attacker with it would be able to disable him without being killed. If he happened to need a body bag after that, well, better him than the rest.

That's how kids should be trained, from kindergarten, to react to someone who threatens them or attacks their teacher. Fight back, with whatever means you have available.

A school district in Texas tried training like that, but the media controversy shut them down.

Burleson Independent School District (BISD) hired Response Options, a Dallas-based company, to provide general school safety training, which included fight-back training. The latter included encouraging students to throw objects at armed intruders, knock them off balance, make as much noise as possible, lock onto an intruder’s limbs, and try to take intruders down.

Teachers, 650 freshmen, and some elementary school students in the 8,500-student district received the training.

But after a national media buzz, on October 20 the district sent students’ parents a letter stating “BISD does not, nor will we support teaching our students to attack an intruder.”

Instead, they're trained to be helpless targets.

Why should students live with a general background fear, an implicit picture of themselves as victims in waiting? The odds of an attack are very low, after all. For a number that may as well be 100% of students, a classroom attack will never happen. Telling them that if an attack occurs, they are not just allowed but called on to repel it will do more for them than all the counseling and empowerment sessions they could attend. It's real empowerment, not feel good happy talk.

A bit of math: there are 55,000,000 K-12 students enrolled in US schools. Assuming that number holds for 10 years, then each year there will be about 4.25 million different students, or about 93,000,000 students total. Supposing that there will be 930 students involved in school attacks in the next ten years, an outrageously high number, that's 1 in 100,000 (0.001%) or approximately zero.

Compared to the number of kids who will be involved in violent crime not part of a "school shooter" scenario, it's statistical noise.

So why not teach them to fight back? Does not fighting back increase their survival chances, even for the zero percent of them who will be in that situation? Logic says no: killers who come to school have come to leave no survivors. The kids will be killed if they do nothing.

With regard to the charge that we are trained to act with cowardice in the face of a VaTech scenario, the always insightful Mark Steyn writes:

I’d prefer to say that the default position is a terrible enervating passivity. Murderous misfit loners are mercifully rare. But this awful corrosive passivity is far more pervasive, and, unlike the psycho killer, is an existential threat to a functioning society.

The lessons from VaTech are few in number. But we do know that when the targets fought back and became adversaries, more people lived. When they sat nicely or played dead, more people died.

Take your pick.

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A Tale of Two Names

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, or Virginia Tech, or VaTech, is a school which goes by many names.

As we decide how to how to remember the events of April 16, 2007 at the school, it seems to me that names will be very important.

Some names, such as that of Liviu Librescu, deserve to be remembered. Others, such as that of his killer, do not.

Librescu Teaching HallEven in his final act of heroism, Librescu taught us the value of personal courage and of sacrifice. His act, and the lives of those senselessly taken, need to be memorialized. Norris Hall, the building in which the major rampage occurred, should be central to that memorial. I call on Virginia Tech to rededicate that place Librescu Teaching Hall.

The other name, that of his killer, should be struck from our memories. If you have posted it on your web site, remove it. Never mention it again. Let us excise it from history.

This is not denial, a frightful turning away from reality, nor an attempt to hide the cold brutality of the killer. No one should receive glory, even the glory of a three line obituary, for an act such as the one committed that Monday. His acts we can remember for the evil they were. His name deserves nothing.

It's unrealistic, of course to imagine that everyone would heed my little call, or even that those who do will agree that his name should not be mentioned. I certainly hold no ill feeling for those who wish to use his name. I, however, will not.

But I will continue to hold up the name of Liviu Librescu: holocaust survivor, scientist, teacher, and sacrificial hero.

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