Who Will Act for Civilization?

(Michael Kamber, NYT)

A Hezbollah rocket killed 12 IDF reservists yesterday in a parking lot on Kfar Giladi, a kibbutz in the Upper Galilee. It was the deadliest attack by Hezbollah since it began its war against Israel three weeks ago.

How does a single rocket cause this?  The answer is in the story in today’s New York Times:

The most destructive [attack Sunday] was a single rocket packed with ball bearings that slammed into a parking lot at Kfar Giladi, a kibbutz in the northeastern panhandle, scoring a direct hit on Israeli reservists who were staying there.  The rocket sprayed the bearings in a deadly cloud up to 60 yards in diameter, leaving a scene that witnesses, including a war-weary ambulance driver, described as the most horrific carnage they had ever seen.

Sixty yards -- more than half a football field. 

When we visited Haifa last week, and viewed an apartment complex nearly demolished by a Hezbollah rocket, we noted that the more stunning damage was actually to the buildings across the street and down the road, 15 to 30 yards away.  Those buildings still stood -- but with walls pock-marked with hundreds of holes:

To get a sense of how significant each hole is (and the force necessary to have created all of them), you have to put a finger in the hole and see how far it goes, and how much bigger it is than a finger: 

The victims at Kfar Giladi yesterday were military reservists, but since the target of the rockets was a kibbutz, the intended victims were probably civilians.

Israel is fighting an enemy that crossed an international border in an unprovoked act of war, with no legitimate border or other territorial claims, that amassed more than 12,000 rockets and still retains thousands of them, that is supplied by countries dedicated to the destruction of Israel, and that intentionally fires rockets indiscriminately against civilian targets loaded with ball bearings calculated to maximize civilian casualties -- and whose publicly-declared objective is the genocidal destruction of a U.N. member. 

If the U.N. and the West cannot stand up to this, they cannot stand up to anything.

The Israelis killed yesterday at Kfar Giladi were: Eliyahu Elkariaf, 34; Yosef Karkash, 41; Shlomo Buchris, 36; Yehuda Greenfeld, 27; Ziv Balali, 28; Daniel Ben David, 38; Marion Berkovitch, 31; Ro'I Yaish, 27; Shaul Shai Michlovitch, 21; and Shmuel Halfon, 41.  Reservists (civilians until three weeks ago), aged 21 to 41.

Comments

[RR]

From yesterday’s “Journal Editorial Report” with Paul Gigot, Rob Pollock and Daniel Henninger: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/08/israels_war_and_ours.html

Gigot: Rob, I want to read you a quote from Mark Malloch Brown, who is Kofi Annan's right-hand man. He's a British citizen, Kofi Annan's right-hand man at the U.N. And he said this, quote, "It's not helpful to couch this war in the language of international terrorism. Hezbollah employs terrorist tactics, but it is an organization that draws on a strong political well of support in southern Lebanon, and after the events of the last few weeks, more deeply," end quote.

What do you think of that argument that this is not really about terrorism, this is really about a local conflict between Lebanon and Israel?

Pollock: Yes, and maybe it's not helpful if you're a proponent of outrageous moral equivalence. But look, what is Hezbollah doing? Hezbollah is firing -- is deliberately targeting civilians with rockets filled with shrapnel to cut holes into people. It hides among civilians. It fights out of uniform. These are all classic terrorist tactics. They're the exact same kind of tactics that characterize an organization like al Qaeda or the insurgency in Iraq. It's all part of the same fight that the civilized world is having with unlawful combatants.

Gigot: So this is our fight?

Henninger: Absolutely. And the terms of the fight are very important. I'd like to pick up on this Malloch Brown point about the United Nations. You know, one of things going on here in this event is that the United Nations is standing discredited.

[N.B. Goldstein]

It truly is a War on Evil. The world is facing an enemy who has no regard for human life - and as such, they should be removed from existence. Civilization will be much better off.

Great post!