Without Justice, There can Be No Peace

Reader S. T. has some interesting things to say and wanted a place to say it.

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It sounds reasonable. Justice is a pillar of civilization. When there is justice, people have confidence in authority and when there is no justice, they don't.

But not everybody who says this, or something like it, is saying something reasonable. When the subject is Israel, this phrase can often be more correctly interpreted as a direct threat. In the language of terrorists and their abettors, "justice" means the eradication of Israel, and "peace" means the successful conclusion of jihad. So the statement really means, "until Israel is destroyed, there will be no end of Jihad".

Here's a fairly typical example:


"A just peace or no peace"

"The problem is not with any particular Palestinian group but with the denial of our basic rights by Israel. We in Hamas are for peace and want to put an end to bloodshed."

.. yada
yada yada

For perspective, let's look at how Hamasnicks speak when they're speaking plainly:

"Zahar: Israel must change its flag"

Note the difference between the message above and the message given to the outside world:

"Hamas: No peace until Israel pulls out"

So there's a lot of double talk and flat out lying, but you probably already knew that. The double talk can be fairly simple, such as the example above, but it can also be subtle. Terrorist Abettors, as I like to call them, can be more transparent (eg- ISM), and
sometimes less so.

Here's an example of the less transparent sort:

"Lessons from history". Nevertheless, statements like:

"It is Israel’s barbarous behavior that turns the Jews – unjustly, but unsurprisingly - into targets of wrath, even in places with no significant history of anti-semitism."

certainly do get ones attention.

Of course there's nothing you can do to counter this argument because to
do so you would have to prove a negative, that some Pakistani or Malaysian who has never met a Jew in his life would hate the lot of them less if they were just a little more understanding about this whole suicide bomber thing.

As the reader, you're supposed to come away with the impression that the Jews could have peace if they could only be more peaceful themselves, notwithstanding what you already know about their enemies.

But if you give the statement a moment or two to settle in, then the real horror of it becomes apparent. It's a vicious accusation, almost worthy of the Jew hater tradition of blood libel, though done up here in pastels instead of the usual harsher tones, while the author expects to be applauded for his wisdom and peace loving nature.

Was it innocent and sincere; or could it possibly have been sinister? Do peaceniks really fail so completely to understand the dangers the Jewish state faces, or is there something else going on?

The answer is often "both". It is true both that peaceniks are too preoccupied with their image of themselves (as peace makers deserving of praise, sometimes even awards!!) to give as much thought as they should to the hard questions of war and peace, and, that the gap in their knowledge is readily filled by a script provided by people who, themselves, do indeed have a sinister agenda.

Let's just summarize that last point. The world is filled with people who will readily sacrifice Israel's safety on the alter of their own self image. They come from all classes, races, and social circumstances. They follow a script.

While they can be more or less transparent, in the more transparent cases you can see easily that the script is a sort of burned out pseudo Marxist screed where the Jew hatred is barely disguised (Jews are barbarous baby killers. Zionism is Racism. etc). But the essence of the script is always the same, and in this sense they are always transparent; it aims to de-legitimize any effort the state of Israel makes to defend its people.

There's a scene in La Femme Nikita where the character Victor, played by Jean Reno, is coming out of a building after having finished a kill that Nikita herself could not manage to finish. The police have already been called to the building, so as Victor comes down the stairs in front of the hotel lobby, three policemen approach with their guns drawn. He has one hand on his gun, but it's concealed. With the other hand, he signals to the police to stop, stay calm, stay quiet. Everything is under control, his gesture implies. This buys him a moment in which the policemen are off guard, and in that moment he shoots all three of them dead.

Something similar happened for real on 9/11. (9/11 recordings)

"Nobody move. Everything will be OK. If you try to make any moves, you'll endanger yourself and the airplane. Just stay quiet."

And on three of those four planes that day, that's what people did.

I actually started writing this article, or one similar to it, a few months after 9/11. Then my personal life got very busy and I never finished it or any of the others I was working on. In the years since then, I've been happy to learn that lessons such as this one have been absorbed by a great deal of the American public. More than that, I've discovered that rhetoric that at that time was exclusively being used by the Abettors has since been co-opted and is being used in turn by supporters of Israel. No Peace without Power.

Things have really changed. This Lebanon war has been full of surprises for the enemy. I'm discovering, to my delight, that the Jihadi had better get used to surprises.