MR Calls Bullshit On "Israel Losing Support in the Arab World" Meme
From Arianna herself:
Israel needs to take a deep breath, take a close look at the battlefield (focusing not just on the body count but on the hearts and minds being lost), and learn from the disastrous example of Iraq what blindly and stubbornly staying a self-defeating course will bring. Israel's current strategy of trying to bomb its way to security is actually having the counterproductive effect of making its people less safe.
This argument is very, very bad:
(1) Israel is not losing support in the Arab and Muslim world - they never had any to begin with (link is to one of our favorite polls, a Pew poll that concludes among other things that fully 100% of Jordanians are anti-Semitic). Yet again we point out that Hamas won the Palestinian election, while the Hezbollah political alliance won 24 out of 24 southern seats in the last Lebanese election.
(2) If Israel ever did have any Arab or Muslim support to lose, it certainly wasn't doing them any good. Arab and Muslim hearts and minds didn't stop a single missile from falling on a single Israeli home or school. So if destroying those missiles from a F-16 causes those fickle Arabs and Muslims to stop lending Israel their totally worthless support - well, that seems like a reasonable price to pay.
PS - this is also stupid:
Meanwhile, the conflict has dramatically weakened the democratic government of Lebanon and greatly emboldened the radicals in Iran, whose president today said the "main solution" to the Middle East crisis was the "elimination" of Israel.
As if the radicals in Iran weren't "greatly emboldened" before, when they were, you know, threatening the elimination of Israel. There may be lots of reasons for Israel to de-escalation in Lebanon, but the idea that it's enabling Ahmadinejad to openly call for the destruction of Israel can't be one of them... because he was already doing that. And making Muslims and Arabs hate Israel can't be one of them either... because they already did.
Michelle Malkin did a pretty good job mocking the suggestion that Muslims throughout the world are bereft of reasons to riot (links in the original):
If it's not Qana, it's Gitmo. Or cartoons or pop singers. Or filmmakers. Or books. Or more books. Or beauty pageants and bikinis. Or American fast-food joints. Or Valentine's Day. Or playing cards. Or Piglet. Or soccer. Or South Park.
One of two things about the liberal opponents of Israeli self-defense must be true: either they are dishonestly arguing that Israel should cease causing things that they know quite well were already happening, or they know absolutely nothing about the Middle East. Either way, they ought to be more cautious about telling Israel not to retaliate to brutal acts of war, since both mendacity and ignorance are in their own ways unseemly.
Israel needs to take a deep breath, take a close look at the battlefield (focusing not just on the body count but on the hearts and minds being lost), and learn from the disastrous example of Iraq what blindly and stubbornly staying a self-defeating course will bring. Israel's current strategy of trying to bomb its way to security is actually having the counterproductive effect of making its people less safe.
This argument is very, very bad:
(1) Israel is not losing support in the Arab and Muslim world - they never had any to begin with (link is to one of our favorite polls, a Pew poll that concludes among other things that fully 100% of Jordanians are anti-Semitic). Yet again we point out that Hamas won the Palestinian election, while the Hezbollah political alliance won 24 out of 24 southern seats in the last Lebanese election.
(2) If Israel ever did have any Arab or Muslim support to lose, it certainly wasn't doing them any good. Arab and Muslim hearts and minds didn't stop a single missile from falling on a single Israeli home or school. So if destroying those missiles from a F-16 causes those fickle Arabs and Muslims to stop lending Israel their totally worthless support - well, that seems like a reasonable price to pay.
PS - this is also stupid:
Meanwhile, the conflict has dramatically weakened the democratic government of Lebanon and greatly emboldened the radicals in Iran, whose president today said the "main solution" to the Middle East crisis was the "elimination" of Israel.
As if the radicals in Iran weren't "greatly emboldened" before, when they were, you know, threatening the elimination of Israel. There may be lots of reasons for Israel to de-escalation in Lebanon, but the idea that it's enabling Ahmadinejad to openly call for the destruction of Israel can't be one of them... because he was already doing that. And making Muslims and Arabs hate Israel can't be one of them either... because they already did.
Michelle Malkin did a pretty good job mocking the suggestion that Muslims throughout the world are bereft of reasons to riot (links in the original):
If it's not Qana, it's Gitmo. Or cartoons or pop singers. Or filmmakers. Or books. Or more books. Or beauty pageants and bikinis. Or American fast-food joints. Or Valentine's Day. Or playing cards. Or Piglet. Or soccer. Or South Park.
One of two things about the liberal opponents of Israeli self-defense must be true: either they are dishonestly arguing that Israel should cease causing things that they know quite well were already happening, or they know absolutely nothing about the Middle East. Either way, they ought to be more cautious about telling Israel not to retaliate to brutal acts of war, since both mendacity and ignorance are in their own ways unseemly.
