[(Continued from p.8)]
There is. And it would be a radical departure from the Oslo idiocy. A move to boldly address the reality that Oslo has sucked Israel into.
When Arafat fails to deliver the goods, fails to enforce a cease-fire yet again, we can all move on. We can move on from all the talk about a Palestinian state and take the logical steps that any normal sovereign state can be expected to take when it finds itself with a terror state in the making growing within its own heart.
We have to be ready for General Zinni to fail. Ready with a plan of action. Because if we do not have a plan of action we will inevitably find ourselves playing out someone else's program.
But can't we continue with simply more of the same?
I have all the respect and admiration in the world for the Israeli security forces now operating against the Palestinian terrorists. It seems that every day we learn of yet another fantastically successful operation--capturing or killing wanted terrorists before they strike again.
But the terror swamp is still there. And until that terror swamp is drained, every terrorist we kill or capture will be replaced by others. And the situation is worse than that: each day that the swamp isn't drained, the terrorists advance on both the learning curve and in the acquisition of weapons.
It wasn't so long ago that someone saying that Judea and Samaria will be brimming with mortars and rockets ready to fire at Israeli communities would be dismissed as a crazed radical right winger. But today, a senior Israeli security official said that the Palestinian mortars and other weapons are already in place--with more to comeand the story barely got any notice.
The terror swamp has to be drained.
We have to destroy the weapons stores--Arafat won't do it. We have to "decommission" Arafat's army, leaving only a municipal level police force armed as beat cops--not paratroopers. These are forces with payrolls and offices, etc. Stop the salaries, close down the offices and related infrastructure, and the bulk of the force will vanish.
We have to do this and much more.
Will it be hard? Yes.
Impossible? Hardly.
One thing is certain. If we fail to prepare to take the initiative and take it when the time comes, we will only find ourselves having to take the very same action later--but under considerably more difficult circumstances.
The challenge is great, but we can meet the challenge. Powell may never understand this, but even in America, Powell is not the only game in town. President Bush understood the importance of a cease-fire. He surely can come around to understanding Israel's actions when Arafat makes a cease-fire unattainable.
Dr. Lerner, director of IMRA (Independent Media Review & Analysis), delivered this talk on November 22 on Israel National Radio.
Scarcely had the dust settled at the World Trade Center site--the tomb of thousands of slaughtered souls--than the voices of certain leftists in our city and nationwide were raised in support of demented policies that can only help the Al Qaeda terrorists to evade justice.
Prominent among these leftists was the Village Voice crowd, which claimed to be horrified by the September 11 attack, but then focused all its journalistic energies on undermining the nation's will to fight back. This included opposing every common sense step that might help us foil future onslaughts. For instance, in a stream of articles with headlines like "The War on the Bill of Rights," the Voice flailed out against proposed investigative tools, such as roving wiretaps, that law enforcement desperately needs to track an elusive enemy. Many responsible Americans have raised questions about one or more aspects of the new anti-terrorism laws, but the Voice clearly went over the edge, presenting the entire package as just a government plot to rob us of our civil liberties.
As smokescreen for its unwillingness to defend America, the Voice incessantly invoked the plight of Arabs and other Muslims living in New York. Article after article preached against anti-Arab racism (as if Voice readers were Klansmen in need of sensitivity classes) and against law enforcement investigation of Arab extremists in our midst (as if the U.S. was Nazi Germany). Of course no decent New Yorker wants to see innocent Muslims screamed at in supermarkets, but the Voice has focused on this issue almost to the exclusion of any sympathy for the WTC victims and their families. The one serious effort at writing about the victims, Tom Robbins' "Working-Class Heroes" (Oct. 2), which focused on trade unionists killed in the attack, was rendered grotesque by Robbins' implicit distinction between "working class" and middle-class victims--as if bond brokers are a lower order of humanity.
Among the most contemptible of Voice writers, in her response to September 11, was that paper's resident self-hater Alisa Solomon who, the week after the attack, published a brief, emotional piece entitled "The Bastards!" but soon returned to her primary mission--bashing Israel as an evil dictatorship and praising the Palestinians in spite of their nonstop murderous assaults
[(Continued on p.10)]
December 2001 - 9 - Outpost