What They Are Saying

Columnist Jeff Jacoby writes in The Boston Globe (www.boston.com) on July 30, that Israel's war with Hezbollah is America's war too:

Jeff Jacoby

"According to a pair of Gallup polls last week, 83 percent of Americans say Israel is justified in taking military action against Hezbollah, while 76 percent disapprove of Hezbollah's attacks on Israel. Yet when asked which side the United States should take in the conflict, 65 percent answer: neither side. ...

"Gallup's numbers suggest two things. First, that most Americans, sizing up the warfare in Northern Israel and Southern Lebanon, recognize that Hezbollah is the aggressor and that Israel is fighting in self-defense. And second, that most Americans believe this fight has nothing to do with the United States.

"Welcome to Sept. 10. ...

"Most Americans paid no attention to Al Qaeda and its threats -- until 3,000 people lost their lives on Sept. 11, 2001.

"Has nothing been learned?

"Hezbollah's barbaric assault on Israel -- kidnapping and murdering soldiers who weren't engaged in hostilities, firing waves of missiles into cities and towns, packing rockets with ball bearings meant to maximize suffering by shredding human flesh -- is part and parcel of the radical Islamist jihad against the free world. Nothing to do with the United States? It has everything to do with us. Hezbollah hates Americans at least as implacably as Al Qaeda does, and rarely misses an opportunity to say so.

" 'We consider [America] to be an enemy,' railed Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, at an enormous rally in February 2005. 'Our motto, which we are not afraid to repeat year after year, is: 'Death to America!' And from tens of thousands of Hezbollah supporters came the answering cry: 'Death to America!'

"These are anything but empty threats. Prior to Sept. 11, Hezbollah was responsible for more American casualties than any other terrorist organization in the world. Among its victims was Army officer William Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut who was abducted by Hezbollah in March 1984 and who died after 15 months in captivity of torture and illness.

"And the young Navy diver Robert Stethem, singled out during the 1985 Hezbollah hijacking of TWA Flight 847 and brutally beaten before being shot to death.

"And William Higgins, a colonel in the Marine Corps and commander of the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Lebanon, who was seized by Hezbollah in February 1988, tortured, and eventually hanged. ...

"And the 241 U.S. servicemen murdered by Hezbollah on Oct. 23, 1983, when a suicide bomber drove a truck rigged with TNT into their barracks at the Beirut airport.

"And the 19 U.S. servicemen killed in the 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia.

"For more than two decades, Hezbollah's Shi'ite fanatics, backed by Iran and sheltered by Syria, have made it their business to murder, maim, hijack and kidnap Americans with the same hostility they harbor for Israel. ...

"Sept. 11, it was said time and time again, 'changed everything.' No longer would Americans walk around with eyes wide shut, oblivious to the threat from the Islamofascists. Not our war? Listen again to the Hezbollah hordes: 'Death to America! Death to America!'

"They're serious about it, deadly serious. Why aren't we?"

Survival Gets Noisy, and Israel's Fighting for Its Life

Columnist Wesley Pruden writes in The Washington Times (www.washingtontimes.com) on Aug. 1 that those outraged by Israel's defending itself are hypocrites:

Wesley Pruden

"If the Jews would just die without making a lot of noise, the Nice People could get on with the really important things in life, stuffing their faces with salmon and bean sprouts, watching the Rev. Billy Don Moyers pontificate on PBS, and making more Nice People.

"The Nice People, manipulated by the coverage of Lebanon, are getting fed up with the Israelis, who are acting as if they have the right to survive in peace. But the Jews insist on 'disproportionality,' on firing back when fired on by the Hezbollah 'guerrillas,' as newspaper and TV correspondents call 'terrorists.' ...

"The photographs of Kana's dead children would break the hearts of anyone but an Islamist terrorist, but the photographs of Hezbollah artillery and missile batteries, planted among women and children precisely to draw Israeli fire, were smuggled out of Lebanon by an Australian journalist and published yesterday in Melbourne's Herald Sun. The photographs are proof of terrorists hiding behind the chadors of their women and cowering with children.

" 'It's important to remember this crisis began with Hezbollah's unprovoked attacks against Israel,' [the president] said. 'Israel is exercising its right to defend itself.' And so it is. Survival is often noisy, and the rest of the world will just have to put up with it -- and thank the Jews."

Just Wars Can Lead to Tragedies, But That Doesn't Make Them Less Just

Literary editor Leon Wieseltier writes in The New Republic (www .tnr.com) on Aug. 4 about the justness of just wars:

Leon Wieseltier

"The killing of children, any children, is an evil. Those who are responsible for these deaths in war are responsible for an evil. To think otherwise is surely a depravity. ...

"The question of the killing of children in a just war is not the same as the question of the killing of children in an unjust war. It is easy to arrive at moral clarity about the evil done in a wrong cause. ...

"I am thinking of the children killed in Kana. Since I support the Israeli war against Hezbollah, I have a duty to admit that I support a war in which such catastrophes happen. This is difficult; but the brutal truth is that it is not impossible. For Kana is not all I need to know about the war. Conscience is not the enemy of intelligence, and there is more about this conflict that is pertinent to moral analysis. The exterminationist objective of Israel's adversary and of its adversary's patron, the rain of rockets launched precisely to kill non-combatants, the deployment of its arsenal in the thick of its own population: These, too, are facts of moral significance.

"For Hezbollah, the murder of innocents is its strategy. So I am not embarrassed by Israeli power, or by its use now. I notice also that some people who denounce the loss of life on the Lebanese side are reticent about the loss of life on the Israeli side. Perhaps more Israeli deaths would restore a perverse kind of moral parity ...

"I do not see that one can fairly oppose the Israeli campaign against Hezbollah without asking a state to acquiesce in a mortal danger to itself, and a region to acquiesce to jihadism. The weakening of Hezbollah would amount to the strengthening of Israel and Lebanon, and the weakening of Iran. This seems like a fine strategic and moral result. It might even permit us to talk again of peace."