Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: More Like This Please

More Like This Please
Michael J. Totten - 02.23.2010 - 8:47 AM
I can understand why Dubai authorities aren’t happy about the killing of
Hamas senior military commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, presumably by
Israeli Mossad agents, in one of the city-state’s hotel rooms last
month. More than most countries in the Middle East, the United Arab
Emirates has stayed out of the Arab-Israeli conflict and would rather it
not wash up on the beach.
Even as European Union officials perfunctorily squawk about the use of
forged passports by the assassins, few others have grounds to complain.
Al-Mabhouh was a terrorist commander on a mission to acquire Iranian
weapons for use against civilians. He was a combatant. Unlike his
victims, he was fair game. He would have been fair game for even an air
strike if he were in Gaza. As he was, instead, in Dubai, he was taken
out quietly without even alerting, let alone harming, any of the
civilians around him.
If only Israel could fight all its battles this way. It would be the
cleanest and least-deadly war in the history of warfare. Even some of
Israel’s harshest critics should understand that.
“The Goldstone Report,” Alan Dershowitz wrote in the Jerusalem Post,
“suggests that Israel cannot lawfully fight Hamas rockets by wholesale
air attacks. Richard Goldstone, in his interviews, has suggested that
Israel should protect itself from these unlawful attacks by more
proportionate measures, such as commando raids and targeted killing of
terrorists engaged in the firing of rockets. Well, there could be no
better example of a proportionate and focused attack on a combatant
deeply involved in the rocket attacks on Israel than the killing of
Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.”
Hamas and Hezbollah use civilians as human shields. Hezbollah uses an
entire country as a vast human shield. Some critics, for various
reasons, are more interested in lambasting Israel than the terrorist
organizations it’s fighting. That’s easy when you live in New York or
Brussels. People in the Middle East have to live with (or die because
of) what happens. How Middle Easterners fight wars isn’t political or
academic to me. I’ve never been inside Gaza, but I once lived in
Lebanon, I travel there regularly, and there’s a real chance I’ll be
there when the next war pops off. I’d rather not be used as a human
shield if that’s OK with those who give Hamas and Hezbollah a pass. And
I’d much rather read about Hezbollah leaders getting whacked by
mysterious assassins with forged passports than dive into a Beirut bomb
shelter during Israeli air raids.
But I’m not particularly concerned about my own skin here. Nobody forces
me to travel to war zones. I don’t have to visit the Middle East ever
again if I don’t want to. Every trip I’ve ever taken has been voluntary,
and I can leave whenever I’ve had enough.
A lot of people I care about live in Lebanon, and some of them can’t
leave. They never volunteered to be used as human shields by Hezbollah,
and in fact had their neighborhood — my old neighborhood — shot up and
blown up by Hezbollah gunmen recently. Hezbollah Secretary-General
Hassan Nasrallah doesn’t consult them or their elected officials on his
foreign policy and would sooner shoot them than be relieved of his
ability to declare war unilaterally or on the orders of Tehran.
It’s unlikely that Israel can avert the next war by assassinating its
enemy’s leadership, but it’s always better to take out a high-level
target in person whenever possible than with a blockbuster bomb from a
distance. I can’t help but wonder if those griping about the recent hit
in Dubai — assuming the Mossad actually did it — care less about the
lives of real human beings than the latest excuse to bash Israel. If the
Arab-Israeli conflict will continue — and it will continue — civilians
on both sides should prefer combatants be taken off the board quietly
while everyone else goes about their daily business in peace.
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/totten/243196

 More Like This Please
più cose che aumentano esponenzialmente il pericolo per gli ebrei,
visto che un trafficante d'armi si sostituisce sempre, mentre i morti
di un attentato no?