Howard Linett
Maintain Your Perspective
January 3, 2009
 

Northern Mexico along the Arizona and California border is taken over by a drug cartel. The Mexican government is powerless and does not interfere, virtually ceding its sovereignty to the drug lords. The cartel orders the American government to stop interfering with its drug curriers’ deliveries across the border into the United States. A US Border Patrol and Customs Enforcement operation results in a gun battle with a trio of drug runners transporting 300 pounds of cocaine, caught crossing into southern California. The 3 smugglers are killed.

During the following 24 hours, from within the heart of Tijuana’s heaviest populated civilian neighborhoods, the cartel fires a total of 60 missiles with high explosive warheads into the United States, targeting every town and city between the border and San Diego, where one missile hits an empty kindergarten playground at 10:30 pm. Most of the missiles fall into wasteland, but a dozen strike civilian targets, factories and homes. Nine people are killed. Eighty-six are wounded, twenty with life-threatening injuries. Property damage is extensive. The entire population of southern California is panicked and hysterical. How do you think the US Government would react? Keep my hypothetical in mind as I describe reality.

The terrorists in Gaza have been under siege for less than a week. Yet the world has already united against Israel for its barbaric and criminal attack upon the defenseless and innocent population of the Gaza Strip. Photographs and video, the more graphic the better, of dead women and children and of the destruction caused by the continuing Israeli air attack clog the Internet, European TV broadcasts and newspaper front pages. Reporting that Israel is responding to terrorists in Gaza firing barrages of missiles and mortar bombs into Israeli civilian towns and cities is at best a footnote. Israeli is damned. The terrorists are saved. Now you understand why Israelis have a Masada Complex.

I will not review how Hamas, designated a terrorist organization by the US State Department, by force of arms hijacked sovereignty over the Gaza Strip. Suffice to say Israel honored a Hamas “cease-fire,” actually a strategic lull in hostilities to allow the terrorist gang to better prepare for the next round of warfare. Hamas and its clone Gaza based terrorist groups never stopped firing deadly Iranian 120mm mortar rounds and a variety of missiles into Israel. The terrorists merely reduced the number attacks and the munitions they fired. If memory serves me towards the end of the “lull,” in a single day 30 rockets and mortar bombs were fired into Israel. Israel did not respond. Hamas was emboldened by Israeli’s fear and turning the other cheek.

The cease-fire’s term ended. Hamas did not extend or renew it. A few nights later IDF forces caught a pack of terrorists trying to plant a roadside bomb along the border separating Israel from the Gaza Strip. The IDF stopped the terrorists’ operation, killing three. Over the following 24 hours 60 rockets were fired into Israel, as always targeting civilian population centers. All terrorist groups participated. Even the Palestinian Authority Fatah, you know the “good terrorists” America has for years been training and arming, claimed responsibility for firing 4 of the missiles. Three days later Israel attacked Hamas facilities in the Gaza Strip. Finally the Israeli government said, “Enough.”

Israel caught the cocky Hamas with its collective pants down. There are reports that Egypt helped by assuring Hamas that Israeli would never attack on the Jewish Sabbath, which is exactly what Israel did at 11:30 am. Among the first targets hit by the Israeli fighter planes and attack helicopters was the graduation ceremony for the Hamas Officers’ Course. Since then everything Hamas has been targeted, especially the hundreds of tunnels used to smuggle the arms, ammunition, mortar rounds and rockets into the Gaza Strip, in violation of every agreement ever made with Israel by a representative of the Palestinians.

For the last 8 years from within the Gaza Strip terrorists have been firing rockets and mortars at the northern Negev town of Sderot, a totally civilian target, mostly a college community. The terrorists’ actions constitute genuine war crimes, crimes against humanity that no foreign government has ever attempted to pursue. My daughter, when not confined to her home’s or some other bomb shelter, attends Sderot's Sapir College. Attacking the terrorists in order to stop their missile and mortar attacks on Israeli civilian targets is 8 years over due!

Israel has and continues to target the buildings and locations where Hamas has stored and hidden weapons, missiles and its explosives R&D programs, terrorist armories, ammunition bunkers, fortifications, weapons manufacturing facilities, rocket launching sights, mortar pits and terrorists firing and transporting those missile, rockets and mortars. Also destroyed have been the building containing the terrorist organizational infrastructure, offices, communications, broadcast and command and control centers. Doing so Israel knows it is under the microscope of the UN, EU, every world power and wannabe world power. Israel does not target Gaza’s civilian population. That does not mean there are no civilian casualties. There are.

Hamas has methodically, deliberately and premeditatedly located its attack and storage centers among the most densely populated sections of the Gaza Strip’s civilian neighborhoods. Did I hear you say, “Hey isn’t that a war crime?” Hamas wants civilian casualties. It invites them. It causes them. Bodies must be paraded in front of the cameras of the video and still photographers. Those images must be on every computer monitor, TV screen and front page of every newspaper, every day, day after day if the terrorists are to conceal their acts of unending terrorism and create the illusion that it is the terrorist who is the victim.

After the Photo-Op Hamas victims have been known to get up and walk away. The real bodies, those of individuals who died long ago and not in an Israeli attack, are then return to the location where they have been collected and stored for months or longer, to be hauled out and used as props to create the illusion of a deadly Israeli attack on civilians. If you don’t think such a horrible thing could be done, you haven’t been watching the numerous investigative broadcasts showing the fakery.