At MSNBC the Associated Press reported today's news of the ongoing war between Israel and the initiator of this war - Gaza.
"Israel launched the offensive on Dec. 27 in response to intensifying rocket fire by Hamas militants in Gaza. The operation has killed more than 430 Palestinians, including dozens of civilians, according to Palestinian and U.N. counts. Four Israelis have also been killed, and rocket attacks on southern Israel persist."
"Israel denies there is a humanitarian crisis in Gaza and has increased its shipments of goods into Gaza. It says it has confined its attacks to militants while trying to prevent civilian casualties."
At MSNBC world blog Martin Fletcher summarizes this war.
"Essentially, Israel wants to destroy as much as possible of Hamas military infrastructure, teach Hamas the same lesson, and reach a cease-fire that will last."
"But Hamas still has an arsenal of weapons, including thousands of rockets, suicide bombers ready to attack, and the support of its people in Gaza. Israel will overwhelm Hamas, but could yet suffer some nasty surprises.
"The only other way the fighting could end soon is the way it has in the past: An Israeli rocket hits a school or an apartment building, killing a hundred people. Then Israel will not be able to withstand international pressure to call off the attack." (Read)
This writer implies in this last paragraph that Israel better not hit a school or an apartment building! But it's OK for Hamas to launch rockets at an Israeli city killing civilians for months on end with no outcry by the rest of the world? No one will support Israel at least morally except the United States and that is very tepid support indeed. Why doesn't Israel have a right to vanquish it's enemies once and for all. Why is it hostage to world opinion when most countries have nothing but hatred for Israel. There's only one way to completely route the enemy and that is by discovering selfishness and rejecting the "sanction of the victim" mentality (see previous post). Rational selfishness advocates the values required for man's survival qua man:
"...not values produced by the desires, the emotions, the "aspirations," the feelings, the whims or the needs of irrational brutes, who have never outgrown the primordial practice of human sacrifices, have never discovered an industrial society and can conceive of no self-interest but that of grabbing the loot of the moment." (The Objectivist Ethics).
There is a fundamental moral difference between a man who sees his self-interest in production and a man who sees it in robbery. The evil of a robber does not lie in the fact that he pursues his own interests, but in what he regards as to his own interest; not in the fact that he pursues his values, but in what he chose to value; not in the fact that he wants to live, but in the fact that he wants to live on a subhuman level. (The Virtue of Selfishness).
The title of Mr. Martin's article is What is Israel's End Game in Gaza? Indeed! It should be nothing more or less than winning and destroying the enemy and those who give them comfort and support. If Israeli's lob a bomb at a hospital or a school any deaths are on Hamas, a most vile group of killers and religious thugs and the people of Gaza for allowing these creeps to live among them and to wage this most unnecessary of wars. Israel lives surrounded by nations whose hostility cannot be understood or rationalized. In the Middle East, on the one hand you have a tiny country that produces and invents all sort of goods and services on the other hand you have several countries who produce for the most part nothing but live to kill Jews.
But to win, Jews must cure themselves of their split personality: They cannot fight Hamas and save "civilians". They cannot win against their enemies without incurring collateral damage. They will understand this when they eschew the philosophy of sacrifice and become like the ancient biblical warriors, sure of their righteousness NOT because of God but because they deserve to live free from terror and the threat of death. Their enemies are very small but they cannot be beaten in the long run without Israel's total and guiltless commitment to their right to live on this earth.
4 comments:
You are a moron. You use the atheist philosophy of Rand to both attack the "religious thugs" of Hamas & defend the "righteous biblical warriors" of Israel.
Where do you think the mantra "Israel's right to exist" originates from? From the Bible. The "chosen people", the "chosen land"...the lie of the "land without people for the people without land".
Your commitment to killing is obscene. You defend one people's "right to exist" whilst calling for the destruction of another...and you talk about "split personality".
You clearly no nothing about Israel. Few Americans do. You wonder why Israel doesn't just "get it over with" & kill all Palestinians, whilst many Israeli's ( you are not Israeli, btw, much as many Americans would like dual citizenship ) actively oppose the occupation. These Israeli's are silenced & labelled "traitors"...yet they are Israeli's.
Hamas is the democratically elected government of Palestine. I don't know how many times this needs to be said, but clearly the message is not getting through. You can bandy words like "terrorist" & "illegal" around all day long, but coming from a citizen of a country that has been responsible for more deaths of innocent civilians than Hamas could ever claim in a thousand lifetimes, I'm afraid it's little more than hollow rhetoric.
Your stated aims in life appear to be as selfish & as determined to destroy any group or philosophy that doesn't suit Ayn Rand. It's just a pity for you that the majority of the World does not share your nightmare vision of global nihilism...not even the dreaded "mussies".
@dom,
Your post is filled with a bunch of strawman arguments - nowhere does the poster say anything about exterminating all Palestinians, and that's not the same thing as collateral damage from military targets.
And sorry, but the holy pee of democracy doesn't transform Hamas into a legitimate government. They acted unconstitutionally to depose the Fatah Palestinian police forces from Gaza violently anyway, and they are a bunch of thugs devoted to the destruction of the Israeli government. The basis for their existence is the taking away of the land from someone else.
If Israel doesn't have a right to exist, what nations do have a legitimate right to exist? Just because there is a biblical statement about the land doesn't mean we ought to have prejudice against them if we're atheists, because the people there have as much right to have a nation as any other people do.
I won't speak to the original poster's motivations, but as far as the philosophy of Ayn Rand is concerned, it supports opposing your enemies, with violence if it makes sense. You say that this is nihilism. I think it's quite clear that actually the opposite of this philosophy is nihilism: if you let your enemies run all over you, you don't care about your life, and you're a nihilist because you're embracing a philosophy of non-existence. Would you also advocate that Jews and Nazis should have tried to reach a peace agreement during World War II?
I wanted to clarify my statement of "As far as the philosophy of Ayn Rand is concerned, it supports opposing your enemies, with violence if it makes sense." I think it could be misconstrued as a general ambivalence towards the use of force, and I don't believe that. But my own personal view and I believe most Objectivists would agree that it's always preferable to resolve disputes without violence. However, if the other party is committed to using force and has abandoned reason, as Hamas clearly has, all bets are off and the use of force is permissible.
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