Seth Mandel "Amid all the metrics commentators propose to determine “who won” Operation Protective Edge, one is staring everyone in the face: the international community’s attitude toward a postwar (if and when the war is over) Gaza. And on that score, Israel seems to have won a convincing victory. The Gaza war has changed the way the world is talking about Hamas and the Gaza Strip–and, despite all their tut-tutting at Jerusalem, they sound quite a bit like Benjamin Netanyahu.
"... This time Hamas seems to have overplayed its hand.
"It’s possible that this is Hamas being a victim of its own morbid “success” with regard to the propaganda war. ... And no matter how often they try to blame Israel, they seem to understand that there’s only one way to prevent future bloodshed: demilitarize, at least to a significant degree, the Gaza Strip.
JACK LEVEY responds to the idea discussed above of the UN monitoring any cease-fires in this region:
- Would that be the same UN that refused to enforce access to the Suez Canal for ships to and from Israel?
- The UN that withdrew its peace keepers from the Sinai in 1967 at Egypt’s demand?
- The UN whose forces in Lebanon blocked Israel’s attempt to rescue kidnapped soldiers, failed to block terrorist attacks on Israel, and obstructs Israel’s attempts to respond to attack? Who allowed Lebanese terrorist to rearm, falsely accused Israel of targetting UN forces, and then came pleading to Israel for help when the terrorists attacked them?
- The UN whose schools in the disputed territories go beyond anti-Zionism to teach out-and-out Jew-hating?
- The UN that let Hamas divert millions of dollars of cement and rebar to constructing terror tunnels, after promising Israel to make sure that the supplies would be used only for rebuilding civilian infrastructure?
- The UN who falsely accused Israel of targetting UN schools, and who blamed Israel for deaths caused by Hamas shells and rockets? Who blatanly publishes false statistics about Gazans killed in the recent conflict, and who blasted Israel in the trumped up Goldstone Report after the last one? (I think I’ve read about those events at Contentions, as recently as today.)
- Who let Hamas build tunnels under UN schools and clinics (one of them with 12 barrels embedded in the walls, each barrel containing 170 lbs of high explosives — well, the UN guys must have been out for coffee), and handed rockets over to Hamas after finding them stored in UN schools?
- The UN that routinely condemns Israel as a human rights violator, while finding nothing wrong with such bastions of freedom as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, and Sudan? Who allowed genocide to occur under the noses of its troops in Rwanda? Whose envoy endorsed the fraudulent claims of a massacre in Jenin?
- The UN whose court ruled that Israel had no right to build a fence to keep terrorists out because the terrorists were not a sovereign nation and accordingly Israel had no right of self defense against them?
- Am I the only one who thinks this might not be the best idea? Why would Israel agree to such an agreement, and how could it possibly rely on the UN to monitor Hamas instead of aiding and abetting them?
- ...
However, leftist -oops, "progressive"- cartoonist Pat Oliphant shows us that liberals cannot learn, cannot be made to learn, from the obvious:
