Take Away Hezbollah's Collaborators, Human Shields, And Useful Idiots. Disband UNIFIL Now.
The IDC's GLORIA center held a joint video conference with the State Department on the domestic and international situation in Lebanon, bringing together Israeli, American, and Lebanese experts. It is extremely long but if you haven't been keeping close tabs on what's going on in Southern Lebanon - aka "the place where a war will probably be fought soon" - this is your opportunity to get caught up. Here's a teaser about one of the parts we're not including: "many jihadists and terrorists have been infiltrating Lebanon... with the supposed support of NGOs and money from the Gulf."
But we do want to make sure you catch this part:
And it's not just that UNIFIL provides Hezbollah and Syria with thousands of human shields. UN peacekeepers are also basically helpless hostages. After bragging about how they were going to the Middle East to sort things out, the Europeans have gone from pretending to monitor Hezbollah's attacks on Israel to trying to stop Hezbollah from attacking UNIFIL itself. Hezbollah and Syria use the vulnerability of European peacekeepers to extract European diplomatic concessions in unrelated areas. Instead of being sacrificed for demonstrably misplaced European self-interest, Israeli security is now being sacrificed for transparently facile European self-delusion.
The Europeans have this image of themselves as tough soldiers who have come into Lebanon to finally put an end to all this Zionist warmongering nonsense. It's very important for them to hold on to the idea - crucially, ultimately important - that they are putting the Israelis in their place.
But in reality the mostly French soldiers in UNIFIL are pathetically bad soldiers. They like to play-act at being tough military men in a brutal warzone, but they're so poorly trained that they don't even know what good training looks like. Since they can't admit their pathetic helplessness, they hysterically accuse Israel of lying when Israel provides evidence that Hezbollah is using UN facilities to attack Israeli civilians - mostly because UNIFIL can't do anything to stop them. They can't even stop their bases from getting overrun by Lebanese funeral processions. Or by little Lebanese kids.
So on one hand, UNIFIL's seeming collaboration with terrorists is a result of being terrified incompetents who are in way over their heads as a result of historical arrogance and anti-Israel antipathy. But after the jump, reasons why UNIFIL's seeming collaboration with terrorists is sometimes a result of their actual collaboration with terrorists. And why it wouldn't matter if it wasn't.
In the pre-Lebanon-II years, UNIIFL wasn't expected to do anything except publish reports that (lyingly) bragged that Hezbollah wasn't building an army in south Lebanon. But even then they were slipping from being embaressingly friendly with Hezbollah to literally cleaning up the scene of the crime after Hezbollah attacked Israel and kidnapped soldiers in 2000.
This should not be a surprise. UNIFIL come from countries where a plurality of the population routinely ranks Israel as the greatest threat to world peace. These countries are pathological when it comes to their hatred of the Jewish State. From banal anti-Semitism to seething anger to the occasional explosion of violent hatred, these are places where viciously attacking Israel is part of people's core identity. But the international left expects people to believe that 20-somethings from France, Italy, and Spain will suddenly become neutral model soldiers when they put on a blue helmet.
So in 2000 two or three UNIFIL soldiers accidentally left their van open for the night and Hezbollah soldiers somehow were there to grab the van's license plate and that license plate coincidentally ended up being used to lure in and kidnap Israeli soldiers. Except it turns out that the UNIFIL soldier in charge of keeping the van under lock and key thinks of Lebanon as a "second homeland" that he must protect from the Israelis.
Post-Lebanon II, UNIFIL has - either through negligence or willful collaboration - allowed Hezbollah to fully rebuild its stockpile while restricting Israeli movements. Hezbollah has been allowed - either through negligence or willful collaboration - to plant bombs on the Israeli border. And in an incident that perfectly illustrates the combination of European arrogance and incompetence that's going to get Israeli and Lebanese civilians killed, the UNIFIL commander condescendingly told the Israelis to calm down because UNIFIL had everything under control:
Two days later after Katyushas fell on Israel from southern Lebanon. UNIFIL responded by condescendingly telling their Israelis their anger was unreasonable because "100,000 peacekeepers [are] not capable of preventing a couple of people from firing a crude rocket.". It's always the Israelis who are overreacting because they don't understand military affairs. UNIFIL, on the other hand, is apparently staffed top to bottom by the most competent of experts. Obviously.
The post-Lebanon II UNIFIL force took shape in the following way: Europe haughtily assured Israel that it was OK to withdraw from Lebanon because they would send in more troops to implement the ceasefire. Under enormous pressure, Israel agreed to a larger UNIFIL force so long as it was made up only of soldiers coming from countries that recognized Israel. Because it strains even the bounds of leftist sophistication to pretend that soldiers from places like Saudi Arabia or Indonesia can be objective in a conflict involving Israel. Then the Europeans realized that their bragging actually required them to put troops in harms way, so they quickly backed off and witheringly attacked Israel for being reluctant to accept Indonesian troops. As if that had been the deal the whole time. Final result? Israel had to accept Indonesian troops. And we have no doubt that they've been serving with all of the dignity, honor, and commitment that we've come to expect from UNIFIL.
Even if UNIFIL was staffed by the best-trained most well-intentioned troops on the planet - which, we suggest to you, they're not - they couldn't do anything but sit there as a de facto shield for Hezbollah to hide behind while bombing Israeli civilians. Hezbollah has figured out a sure-fire way to make sure that UNIFIL doesn't interfere with their preparations for the next war - they took the dramatic step of moving ever so slightly north, outside of the area UNIFIL patrols and into the middle of Palestinian refugee camps.
References:
* THE FUTURE OF LEBANON [MERIA]
* Italian Ambassador Comments II: Italian Peacekeepers Don't Seem To Understand Their Job [MR]
* Sarkozy: Let's Engage Syria! Barry Rubin: Let's Not! [MR]
* The French Will Fire On WHO? They're Going To Do WHAT? [MR]
* French Proud Of Not Having Worst Soldiers Ever, Threatens To Fire On Israeli Jets [MR]
* Again With the Idiotic French Self-Congratulation On How Their Soldiers Haven't Disobeyed Basic Instructions [MR]
* UN Peacekeepers Begged Hezbollah to Stop Using Them As Human Shields. UN, LA Times Blame Israel Anyway. [MR]
* Ways That the UN Has No Credibility [MR]
* UN Lebanon Force Now Getting Beaten Up By Little Kids [MR]
* UN Building Hit in Lebanon. UN, AP blame Israel. Yawn. [MR]
* The UN Should Stay the Hell Out of Israel's Way [MR]
* UNIFIL Involvement in 2000 Kidnapping Not News. Involvement of UNIFIL Soldier Who Thought of Lebanon as "Second Homeland", However, Is. [MR]
* The Inbar Report On Lebanon II's Failures [MR]
* UNIFIL: We Suck. We Totally, Totally Suck. [MR]
* Outrage Of The Day: UNIFIL Allowed Hezbollah To Plant Bombs [MR]
* Katyushas Hit Israel Two Days After UNIFIL Commander Promises Peace [MR]
* UNIFIL: We Suck. We Totally, Totally Suck. [MR]
* Israel Sets Standards for Peacekeeping: Only Countries that Can Hide All or Some of Their Anti-Semitism Can Be Trusted to Protect the Jewish State [MR]
* Weekend News Roundup - 2006-09-02 [MR]
* This Summer's War With Syria - Syria Aims Chemical And Biological Weapons At Israeli Cities, Complains That Israel Might Attack It To Prevent It From Launching Chemical And Biological Weapons [MR]
* Anyone Know Where Hezbollah's New Bunkers Are? What's That? Super-Dense Refugee Camps? [MR]
Previously:
* UN: Murder of Jews Not Really Our Problem
* Boston Globe Notices UN Is Not Entirely Fair To Israel (Plus: Lebanese Muslims Pissed That Even Israel Is More Humane Than Syria) [Video]
* The UN Has Been Screwing Israel For Decades
Cross-posted to:
* The Astute Bloggers
* Israpundit
