OJ - agree but how realistic is that (Israel hitting Syria)? Israel is being roundly condemned for going after terrorists who have shot over 3,000 rockets into Israel, killing civilians - no way the international community would tolerate Israel hitting Syria.

Yes, they risk being re-condemned.

OJ, I can appreciate your concern for the long-ill-treated Shia.

But your love affair for Hezboallah is absolutely beyond me. They are coldblooded killers at the use of a fanatic who wants to see Israel and the west totally destroyed. But I really don't see much condemnation of them coming from you.

Your Catholic love of those who have saints and a lot of ritual is blinding you on this one, I think.

The Hezbos south of Litani are about to be crushed. If Syria and/or Iran so much as twitch in the direction of saving them, we're into Phase II. With direct French involvement. It's all good.

true:

Ill-treated people often end up with dubious representation--fanatic enough to withstand the dangers. Hezbollah's cause--winning political power for the Shi'a plurality in Lebanon-- is just, even if some of their methods and rhetoric are extreme.

ghost:

There you go--retreat and yell, charge!

Yeah, I'd say demands that Israel be destroyed, all Jews be killed and then every Lebanese who failed to support Hezb'allah is "extreme".

You've lost perspective and my respect.

And, I am truly astonished that you take Hezb'allah at face value as being primarily concerned with political power for Lebanese Shia. If that was true once - a rather questionable thesis - it most certainly is true no longer.

Hezbollah is little different than Hamas and will likewise be moderated by the realities of political responsibility. Their rhetoric is just as silly as that of the Israeli Right.

The trick, oj, is to take their weapons and give them their rights. Need to do both. Tough job, but somebody's gotta do it.

ghost:

Ask Lou, one of the rights is to be armed. The insistence that they have lesser rights than we is a manifestation of how we dehumanize them.

Ask Lou, criminals don't have the right to bear arms, only law-abiding citizens.

The second right is to make their own laws.

Bearing arms has nothing to do with Katyushas, RPGs, .50 calibers, and 30-mile rockets. If they want those weapons, they will lose their lives.

AKs - they can have tens of thousands. But nothing heavier (unless they successfully secede from Lebanon).

rat:

Then by what right do we keep our army?

(1) HB has little to do with political representation for Lebanese Shia. HB could care less. They're dancing on strings held in Damascus and Tehran. Easier for Israel to sever those strings a few kilometers away in s. Lebanon, than to go into Damscus and Tehran.

(2) one of your points OJ, with regard to both s. Lebanon and the West Bank/Gaza is that by giving these folks their own state, and responsibility, Israel then has greater justification in hitting them back if they persist in fighting a war with Israel, no?

Well, the Israeli's withdrew from s. Lebanon and HB set up a defacto state there. Whatever their quibbles with the parliament in Beirut, the fact remains that HB has operated their own state with virtually no interference from Beirut. And yet they persisted in attacking Israel. Now its payback time. They wanted their state, they got it, and now they have to take responsibility for their actions.

Neither the Shia in the south, nor the Christians in the north will be free until the Syrians and Iranians are out of Lebanon.

Btw: it's funny that you accuse others of dehumanizing them, when you, by asking Israel to ignore their provocations are treating them like children, you're infantilizing them. They, the HB, deserve to be treated as responsible adults, not as babies, and as adults their provocations deserve a serious response from Israel.

Jim:

Exactly. I have no problem as a moral or legal matter with Israel retaliating for attacks by Hezbollah. It was just stupid, which is why it didn't work. In particular, it is stupid if you don't want Southern Lebanon to become an independent Shi'a state--which the Israelis presumably don't. I do think they should become a state so think this tussle worked out rather well, though I'm sorry it was at Israel's expense. There was a better war for them to fight but they biffed it.

The only people who want southern (lower case!) Lebanon to be Hezbostan are the Hezbos, Iran and Syria. And Syria, with its genitals in a French vise, is reconsidering. (Assassinating Harari was really stoopid.)

Oj, please don't play games with the RKBA. Hezbollah are not the militia. They are a criminal organization, the way the SS were a criminal organization.

Hezbollah's characteristic crime is pervasive violation of the LoW. They fight dressed as civilians, against civilians from behind civilians. Every breath they are suffered to take is the fruit of our and our ally's forbearance.

Excuse us if our sympathy for these criminals has been exhausted. Bad Indians don't get to keep their firesticks.

No, they're the legitimate representatives of the people of Southern Lebanon. They fight like we did.

But, to the broader point, if ghost gets his wish and they get a nation there is no basis in any law or moral scheme for requiring that state not to be armed and able to defend itself. The Indians didn't get to keep their arms because we subjugated them. Israel can't do the same to the Shi'a.

Your sympathy is immaterial. They're as reality you'll learn to live with.

Olmert has sowed the seeds of Israel's demise with his Clintonite cowardice. He is a traitor.

OJ is, of course, wrong about political responsibilities maturing terrorists into humdrum public servants. That he will never, ever cede his sophisticated view of this matter need not serve as red meat for the rest of you. The Hezbohs could be lobbing thousands of sarin-tipped rockets into Tel Aviv every day and OJ would continue to find any response "silly."

However, OJ is right about at least Damascus needing to be addressed. If Israel had a man with the stones of our Gen'l Sherman, or a Menachem Begin, I think they'd shove the Shia into N. Leb and just take S. Leb as the fruits of a just war. Put people who want to murder your people, and passively or actively contribute to the murdering of your people, on a reservation, call it "the greater Beirut refugee camp" and give it a seat at the UN to vote against Israel.

In addition, Israel would be equally justified in taking the lower and eastern 2/3 of Syria. Forever. OJ makes the point that all they risk by doing the right thing is being "re-condemned." That's exactly right. International favor will never be their's. There's a freedom in that: the freedom of a zionist manifest destiny to democratize another large piece of the Middle East the way we democratized northern Mexico. What's Hebrew for "git-r-done"?

Begin and Sharon didn't do any better than Olmert. It's not a war Israel can win.

ghost:

Yes, that's the overwhelming majority of the people of Southern Lebanon. They'll get their wish because they think of themselves as a nation. That's the lesson that history since WWI teaches, as witness Israel.

OJ, they either have the stomach for it, or very soon they don't exist; is there nobody in Israel who wants to kill bad guys? They can win: by conquering. Conquer, expand, repeat. The Arabs lucky enough to be absorbed will join the richest and freest Arab middle-class in the world, as Israelis.

The Hezbohs have responsibility for S. Leb, they sucker-punched Israel with rockets for 18 months; now most of Lebanon's infrastructure is badly damaged and there are shortages of everything vital to daily subsistence. The political consequence for this civil servanthood is that Hezbollah is wildly popular. Neither have Iran and N. Korea softened and civilized with nationhood responsibilities. Yours is a pipe dream in this matter.

To the contrary, the reality is that there is no external existential threat but a fatal internal one. Their secularism spells their demographic doom. Sharon just gave Palestine back as a holding action. It's Judaism they lack the stomach for.

Fortunately, by the time the state is dying off its neighbors will be rather normal democratic states.

You make a good point about their inevitable death by secularism. Maybe we ought to encourage a Muslim evangelization of Israel; a mass conversion would both save the Jews and produce yet another Muslim democracy.

There won't be a conversion--they'll just outnumber them one day and outvote them. All Sharon was doing is trying to draw Israel's new borders narrowly enough to delay that day for awhile.

www.brothersjudd.com/blog/archives/2005/08/zionism_without_zionists.html

OJ, thanks for the insight; for all your wrongness, which I attribute to New England inbreeding, you are sometimes spot-on; but doesn't this brink-of-extinction viewpoint make worrying about the Hezbohs or any other Jew hater/attacker rather "silly"?

No. We need to help Reform Islam, which will endure along with us, and an important part of that is not hating Jews, whose religion is perfectly compatible with both of ours. We had trouble learning that ourselves if you recall.

Yes, Judaism is indisputably great. But's it's sort of played-out if Jews don't want more Jews, no? If Jews are deciding to ship traincars full of potential kids to virtual crematoriums in the form of childlessness, is not their endstate that of the Hezbohs?

The Orthodox haven't given up and still reproduce at decent rates. There just won't be enough of them for there to be a Jewish state eventually.

Caroline Glick is as hysterical as the American hawks who think Israel should have wiped out everything in Lebanon. And then Syria.

No need. Iran, maybe.

palm, I thought that Arab Israelis were happy with their lot, but I read that they were also demonstrating for Hezbollah. I hate citing something I read in the media, but if this is true, it's very disturbing.

ERP: yes, that behavior in a time of war fully justifies detention camps, or permanent reservations; but, as OJ points out, Israel is plunging toward demographic nullity, so it's all just noise on the ride down

we can airlift the Orthodox breeders as the Hezbohs ride into Tel Aviv gleefully shooting off their rifles and waving the crushed skulls of the Jewish children they tortured and killed along the way; the Hezbohs will win, Olmert has really sped up the timetable for their victory, but they're still savages

palm, are you being sarcastic? It's difficult to know what's really happening when the media are so unreliable.

I don't think the Hezbos will win and still hold out hope that Bush pulls out another plum.

ERP: it's all over but the dyin': Hesbo savages win, and they ain't gonna wait for the demographic collapse of the Jewish democracy