Israel became a state within a week of my twenty-first birthday. I was a full-time student at NYU and worked part-time to pay for tuition. Too busy to closely follow world events in detail at that time, I was aware only of historic highlights. These included the jubilation of Palestinian Jews, and the attack on Israel by Palestinian Arabs on the same day that Israel was recognized as a state by the United Nations.
Listening to the radio just after the war began, I remember an ominous statement from a Palestinian top official who stated (I believe at the UN) that the Palestinians would never accept the UN resolution recognizing Israel as a state. So far, his warning has proved to be true.
Israel functions as a secular parliamentary democracy–notwithstanding scholarly arguments that it is a theocracy. Its neighbors are an assortment of oligarchies, theocracies, and dictatorships, the antitheses of democracies. In tacit complicity with terrorist organizations, the official rulers of those countries help terrorists wage war against Western Civilization.
It is striking to note on the net that there is ‘no Internet consensus for the definition of terrorism.’ That’s one way to legitimize, even condone, terrorism. Only a political partisan would find it ‘impossible’ to define terrorism! Apparently, political partisans in the United States make no distinction between ‘terrorists’ and ‘freedom fighters’ or the difference between a battlefield and ground zero of the former World Trade Center or a marketplace frequented by civilians. Somehow, vociferous partisans, often exquisitely fluent in English, can find no words to define terrorism. At best, some of them are naive. Most are misguided by their partisanship.
Although oil factors heavily as the geopolitical source of conflict, Middle East turmoil is profoundly ideological. Theocratic Iran has a leader who claims the holocost is a hoax. Terrorist groups are being elevated to legitimacy as political parties within governing bodies of sovereign states. The United States is ‘the Great Satan, and Israel its whore.’ The militant cry is ‘kill all Jews and Americans.’ The leader of Iran openly states that Jihad’s principal intention is to wipe Israel off the face of the earth and establish Sharia Law globally. Echoes of Mein Kampf reverberate loud and clear on radio, television, and the Internet. There are disagreements and rivalries among Middle Eastern states, their tribal constituents, and terrorist organizations, but they are all one in their hatred against Western Civilization.
Although Americans have been attacked at home and abroad by terrorists, they are not faced with the constant threat of annihilation. Israel is lethally vulnerable to defense breaches because of its geography. Ideological sophisms and niceties have no place in the realities of the landscape of Israel. Relinquishing the West Bank and the Gaza strip is ‘national suicide,’ as Netanyahu puts it.
Given the circumstances, Pakistan’s indignant protests against taking out Bin Laden without deference to Pakistan’s sovereignty may have been necessary to avoid internal reprisals. Be that as it may, it is certain that if the Pakistani government had been informed of our intent, Bin Laden would have been moved out of the compound long before the arrival of a SEAL force.
There are those who argue that the Prince of Terrorism should have been captured rather than killed. Armchair strategy is okay for sports events, but it is unseemly when it is related to on the spot, real life or death situations. Besides, it takes an inordinately dull imagination not to have some sense of what a clandestine military operation is like.
At the official level, the United States violated international law. Israel also violated international law when it took out a nuclear facility in Iraq in little over one minute. Israel will soon take out another nuclear facility, this time in Iran. In the face of genocide, international law must be suspended, especially in the heat of a simmering third world war that threatens Western Civilization.
Reflections and commentaries by the other Mario Martone 