PrintJanuary 24, 2009
Gaza's Perverse Mindset
If all the wailing and whining by the Gazans and their friends at the New York Times and various leftist NGOs about the economic "oppression" being suffered, you'd think that maybe -- just maybe -- during the lull of a ceasefire, they'd pour what efforts and resouces are available into rebuilding infrastructure such as hospitals, schools, and housing.
Not the Gazans, whose perverse mindset values destroying Israel even above preserving and improving their own lives. And they don't seem to care who knows it. The network of tunnels constructed beneath the Gazan border with Egypt serves primarily as the single smuggling route for all of the armaments that supply the terrorists and provide large quantities of rockets, missiles, and mortar shells to be fired across the border at Israeli civilians.
There is no functioning airport; land crossings along the Israeli border are unuseable for arms smuggling; sea approaches are interdicted by the Israeli navy, so tunnels it is -- which is why Israel took so much trouble to destroy as many as it could during its assault.
But the moment the fighting stopped, ther Gazans turned every effort to repair and rebuilding the tunnel network in the hopes of smuggling in more arms to be used against Israel -- which, in turn will naturally lead to more military force being applied by the IDF, and the unavoidable "collateral" damage and deaths that will surely occur.
So perverse and singleminded is the Gazan fanaticism which places killing Jews above the welfare of its own families and friends, that they make no secret at all of their haste to take advantage of the Israeli ceasefire to work at regrouping and rearming their murderous force. Witness the Gazan admission of NY Times photographers to portray the actual tunnel work going on:
Even the Times was shocked:
"Everybody's busy rebuilding now," said a manager of one digging team. "In a month, it will be back to normal."
The defiant pose seemed surprisingly brazen in light of recent events: Israel said smuggling tunnels were a prime concern, after Hamas rockets, in attacking Gaza, and it hit dozens of them in airstrikes during the war.
What is to be done? Have the Israelis not yet learned the lesson of the last Lebanon war? Do they not understand the reasons for the World War II demand of Roosevelt and Churchill for a complete and unconditional victory?
There is no reasoning with insane ideologues; there is no appeasement; there is no negotiation, nor conventional agreements. Like a pit bull turned vicious, the only answer is destruction -- complete and utter -- or the total removal of the capacity to do harm.
Providing a respite for the rebuilding of tunnels, and quitting an assault before their total destruction may prove to be a military and political blunder that Israel will live to sorely regret.
