From the Assistant Editor
Jonathan Friedman
Two weeks ago, Hezbollah terrorists crossed the Israeli border from Lebanon and killed eight Israeli soldiers and kidnapped two. Israel has responded with an aggressive attack on the Hezbollah strongholds in Southern Lebanon. Many Lebanese civilians have died. This is because Hezbollah, like most terrorist groups, hides among the people. Civilian casualties are inevitable.
Hezbollah, which practically runs Southern Lebanon as a state within a state, has retaliated with rocket attacks on Northern Israel. Civilians have died in Israel too. Hezbollah leaders claim they are aiming only for Israeli military targets. Even if that is true, which I doubt it is, its rockets have terrible aim and it is impossible to say they are headed for a specific target.
As the war continues, many members of the mainstream media continue to ask the same ridiculous question: Is Israel’s attack on Lebanon disproportionate to what the Hezbollah terrorists did to trigger the conflict? The answer, of course, is yes. But this is because Israel is trying to severely diminish the strength of a terrorist group that has killed more than 800 people around the world in its two-decade history, an organization the Lebanese government is either unable or unwilling to control.
Israel is responding to a terrorist group’s actions within its borders the same way the United States acted following the Sept. 11 attacks. The U.S. responded to the incident on its soil by destroying Al Qaeda strongholds in Afghanistan and toppling the government that protected the terrorist group. Obviously, Al Qaeda was not completely annihilated, but much of its infrastructure was, and now its members are scattered throughout the world, less of a threat than they were prior to Sept. 11.
Few people, even those who dislike the current American government, said the U.S. was wrong to attack Afghanistan. So why are so many people not giving that same support to Israel? The Jewish state might not be able to completely eliminate Hezbollah, but with its current operation, Israel can severely weaken it.
There are those who say Israel should immediately stop its military operation and begin talking with the enemy. Talk with whom exactly? Hezbollah, which was created to kick Israeli soldiers out of southern Lebanon but still attacked Israel after it withdrew from Lebanon six years ago? The Lebanese government that has no control over Hezbollah? Or the governments of Syria and Iran, which supply Hezbollah with its weapons so it can do their dirty work?
One last thing to mention is regarding the civilian casualties in Lebanon. When the media give the estimates on the number of Lebanese killed, only sometimes do they mention those numbers are coming from the Lebanese government. How do we know those numbers are accurate? I am not suggesting the Lebanese government is working in coordination with Hezbollah, but the Lebanese government has been trying to portray Israel as an aggressor destroying its country, and therefore has a motive for overestimating civilian deaths.
Also, it is never reported how many of the dead are actually innocent civilians and how many are Hezbollah terrorists. Knowing those numbers is important since the killing of civilians is tragic and the killing of terrorists is one of the goals of the operation.