Malcolm Smart, director of Amnesty International's Middle East and North Africa Programme, said: “We condemn all attacks on civilians, but unlawful attacks by one side cannot justify violations by the other. Israel's attacks this week display a degree of disproportion and recklessness which has so often characterised Israeli military attacks in the Occupied Palestinian Territories in recent years." Malcolm Smart disgusts. Nowhere in his nauseating display of moral idiocy does he recognize, or even hint at recognizing, that the Israelis left Gaza entirely. They uprooted whole villages, though Gaza, like the "West Bank," is an area that according to the League of Nations' Mandate for Palestine was to be part of the territory set aside for a Jewish state. And it is less than 1/1,00th of the vast areas that the Arabs inherited.
And in those areas where the Arabs rule, in those lands that we too easily call "the Arab world" (it's a phrase from ARAMCO propaganda of the 1940s and 1950s), in the nearly two dozen lands they now rule, every non-Arab (see the blacks of the Sudan, see the Kurds of Iraq, see the Berbers of North Africa) and non-Muslim (see the Copts of Egypt, see the Maronites of Lebanon, see the Assyrians and Chaldeans of Iraq) group must constantly fight for its continued existence. Every such group is forced to endure the steady pressure of Islam and of "Uruba" or Arabness, in a never-ending attempt to make these non-Arabs or non-Muslims forget their own history, through cultural and linguistic imperialism, or -- as with the black Africans in the Sudan, both the non-Muslims of the south, and the non-Arab Muslims of Darfur -- to simply be wiped out, or at least sufficiently reduced in numbers, so that the Arabs can inherit the land, and, what's more, the oil known to be in the south, and suspected to be in Darfur. In 1900 the population of the Sudan was almost entirely black African, with only a small Arab sliver in the north. That has changed.
Malcolm Smart, in his false equivalences, lets one side kick the beam. He knows that Israel wants only to stop the rockets from raining down on Sderot, and now on Ashkelon. He knows, he must know, what the Western allies did when rockets rained down on London. He must know how any country, and one not as tiny or as permanently under siege as Israel, would react if, from territory adjacent, people who wolfishly howled with glee at the prospect of destroying neighbors simply shot rocket after rocket into cities. And these rockets are not aimed at military targets and sometimes, inadvertently, misfire. They are not aimed at all. They are simply shot into cities. What would the French, the British, the Italians, the Americans, the Canadians do in such a situation?
There is no country on earth that gives evidence of being more scrupulous, taking more care, than the Israelis in their response. Where they fail, it is in not making absolutely clear to the malcolm-smarts of this world that they are ignoring the problem, the problem of the permanent opposition of the Arabs of Gaza, the Fast Jihadists of Hamas, and the Arabs of the "West Bank," the Slow Jihadists (who want that Jizyah from Western donors to resume, and to flow into the pockets of their eager warlords, with some of it no doubt to be shared with the general populace) of Fatah.
What does Malcolm Smart, or all the moral preeners in NGOs -- or in foreign offices -- expect Israel to do? What would they do, if it were their country having that steady rain -- not the gentle rain of heaven upon the place beneath, but a rain of death and potential death, that keeps coming and coming?
There is only one way, and in such circumstances there has never been any way but that one way. And that is to punish those who rain those rockets, and make them suffer, until they stop. No appeals to decency or common sense will do.
If Malcolm Smart has a plan, let's hear it. And perhaps he will also care to tell us what entitles him to be heard -- is it that he has slithered his way to the position he now holds? Is that what gives him moral authority, that he is now that grand thing, the director of Amnesty International's Middle East and North Africa Programme? Is that it?
Is that the reason we are to listen to Malcolm Smart, and are asked, for one second, to regard his viciousness and idiocy as morality? Is he in a position to tutor anyone in such matters? Why? On what theory?.
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