A friend of mine just wrote me how mad he is at the Los Angeles Times for putting on page 11, instead of page 1, the important statement by Richard Perl who now believes we should not have invaded Iraq.
I answered him the following:

I wonder why you are so mad at the Los Angeles Times. May be you want to direct your anger at the Bush team. However, it is also a mistake to blame that Bush team, and I am no supporter of them, for the unforeseen developments in Iraq, especially the endless atrocities against civilians. We, and I mean almost every one, did not grasp the lack of respect for human lives of these people: the terrorists, and many Iraqis themselves, who propagate these atrocities, both Shiites and Sunnis.

We need to stop focusing our anger at ourselves, but direct it at them- the murderers!
This does not mean supporting Bush, but anger? Direct it towards the Arab world that tolerates these atrocities and also support the terrorists.

Similarly in Israel. Most Israelis direct their anger at their government, instead of the Palestinians and Hezbollah who commit the atrocities and rocket firing.
See below what a Palestinian leader says about their Violent Society.

Americans, and I believe especially Jews, are so eager to despise, and fight with our brothers instead of focusing our anger on the real source of the agony. We can disagree as much as we wish among ourselves, but the anger should be directed towards those in the outside world who cause the murders and agonies.

Matania
11/4/06

PA Spokesman: Are the Palestinians a Violent Society?
Palestinian government spokesman Dr. Ghazi Hamad wrote in Al-Ayyam on October 17, 2006: "Are we really a violent society?...It has become the master that we obey everywhere - in the home, in the neighborhood, in the family....Our celebrations have no point or meaning, unless during them we fire a volley of bullets that echoes alongside the women's ululations of joy. Under sad circumstances and at funerals, our heroes volunteer to 'puncture' the air with hundreds of shots from their rifles. It is inconceivable for our marches - whatever their goals and political color - not to have dozens of rifles and armed gangs climbing on cars and aiming rifles, and youths leaning out of car windows waving the barrels of the Kalashnikovs and roaring with joy."
"When we are angry at the electric company, we have no solution but to shatter its [equipment] and break its furniture. When we are angry at the municipality or at the governor, we call in a group of masked gunmen - the heroes of our age - to climb on the rooftop and draw their weapons in front of the satellite TV [reporters]." (MEMRI)

Tags:

Middle East

I hate war with a passion, but feelings should not determine national policy, nevertheless, let me tell you about some lessons I have learned about war.
My exposure to wars was amplified lately by listening to a private recording of one of our young soldiers in Iraq and seeing a number of documentaries on WWII. I especially like you to pay attention to the atrocities against civilians committed by all sides in the USSR-- all sides were Christians.
All of this sad material impacted me considerably.

1. A few months ago I listened to a recording of a 19 year old US soldier while under a sudden attack in Iraq. He was full of powerful, raw emotions. No one will use this recording in a recruiting event. He was fearful, excited, abnormally high, confused, courageous, almost all of these emotions and more at nearly the same time. He survived that unexpected attack. War is hell and no one who did not experience it first hand can grasp its impact during the battle and the remaining emotions later on.

2. Let us go now to WWII. First the War against Japan. I saw several documentaries about it in the last few months which were narrated by both American and Japanese military historians with maps, battle plans and historical videos. Some documentaries were about the war at sea, some about the war on the ground. I will mention here only the war on the island of Okinawa since it reminds me so much of Israel’s recent war against Hezbollah. For several years Japan fortified Okinawa in anticipation of an attack by the increasingly powerful US military machine. Several hundred thousands Japanese dug many caves, tunnels and fortifications into the hills and every possible strategic position. Due to misleading propaganda their civilians were so frighten of the US soldiers that they preferred to die rather than surrender to our forces.

The battles were fierce. The US had a half million military personnel involved, two hundred thousands who landed on Okinawa, the rest on the 1300 ships supporting the attack. We used every arsenal we had against the Japanese, from handheld to motorized flame throwers that incinerated Japanese soldiers and civilians to aircraft attacks from our vast fleet of aircraft carriers; we had all the immense power of the formidable US military. The magnitude of the effort was about half of the D-Day invasion of Europe! The number of aircraft and ships, soldiers and Marines we had is staggering to grasp-- 1300 ships! But all of this immense power did not lead to an easy or quick conquest of Okinawa. It took 3 months of fighting from ridge to ridge, from one fortified battlefield to another. The Japanese fought with great courage, and good planning and execution too. They were very brave soldiers and their commanders dedicated and well trained. The US suffered 12 thousand dead, and 38 thousand wounded or missing and hundreds of lost aircraft, about half of the US casualties of the invasion of Europe. The Japanese lost over 100 thousand soldiers, half of the German deaths caused by the D- Day invasion. Japan also lost untold thousands of civilians, and hundreds of aircrafts. A thousand of our soldiers are still missing on Okinawa.

The point? It is extremely difficult to defeat a well entrenched, well prepared army; the fighting causes a high level of casualties and demands a considerable time despite the immense power a country may have.

3. The battle between Germany and the USSR.
I will mention just a few facts to give you a feel of the immensity and cruelty of war, so you may realize, I hope, how “sanitized”, and limited are the wars of recent times, and thank God for that.
The Germans invaded the USSR with 500 tanks, a huge number then. [The 1973 war between Israel Egypt and Syria involved considerably more tanks than that.] The Germans advanced rapidly into “Mother Russia” and inflicted untold casualties on the USSR Army and local civilians. All told the USSR suffered a third of the total losses of WWII - - eleven million soldiers and twelve million civilians, including one million murdered Jews. USSR losses were the largest of any nation: three times the losses of Germany, sixty times ours. Part of this huge Russian loss, however, was due to Stalin’s own cruelty against his own people and his initial interference in the execution of the war.
I want to call to your attention a usually hidden fact about that war, the murder of vast numbers of civilians by the four military groups: the German Army, the Russian army, the Russian partisans and the Ukrainian partisans. All of these Christians groups excelled in murdering vast number of Russian civilians, and did that without any regret. The Germans fought the other three groups; the Russian Army and the Russian partisans cooperated much of the time, and all of them killed Ukrainian partisans and civilians alike. Confiscating all available food, rapes, murders, and burning of villages were common occurrences.
THE CURRENT BLOODY INTERNAL WAR BETWEEN THE IRAQIS IS INSIGNIFICANT COMPARED TO THE BRUTALITY AND THE NUMBER OF CIVILIANS KILLED BY THE RUSSIANS THEMSELVES DURING THAT PERIOD

It took the Russians several years to drive the immensely powerful German Army back to Berlin. Several years ago I saw an unvarnished, heart wrenching, documentary about the real war in Stalingrad, not the Russian propaganda of immense heroism. This documentary, with actual footage of people falling dead on the streets from starvation. I also saw recently a documentary about the USSR counter attack there. It was more like shear madness. Maybe it was a necessary madness to finally stop Hitler from causing even more damage and deaths in the USSR, but the battle of and liberation of Stalingrad was closer to madness than a military campaign... The Germans wanted to conquer Stalingrad, a city that stood between them and their target- the Volga River. Stalin decided that they must resist that by any mean possible. Stalin poured over one million additional soldiers into that battle, the great majority of them died before they reached the surrounded city. One million USSR soldiers and one million Germans soldiers died; also a hundred and ten thousands Germans were captured at Stalingrad. The number of Russian civilian deaths, from attacks and from starvation was possibly over a hundred thousands.
Ninety five percent of the one hundred and ten thousands captured German soldiers died in Russian captivity because of mistreatment and starvation.
The German captured two million Russians and used them as slave labor and prostitutes. The Russian army upon arrival in Germany considered their own liberated Russians as traitors and send most of them to the gulag, Siberia mostly, many of them died.
Think about these numbers and realize the difference of today’s wars.

These war documentaries interviewed several German and several Russian officers and soldiers. Both sides considered the other one as barbarians and inflicted many atrocities against them. Even after fifty years both the German and Russian interviewed were somewhat elated by their victories and personally committed atrocities against the other side. They did not show remorse, saying you have to understand that was war time.

What is the meaning of that to our time?
This is a huge subject, each one sees it differently, draw your own conclusion, but let me make several observations for your consideration:

No question in my mind that war is hell and the civilized world must do all it can to stop them in infancy, before they mushroom. We are very weak in the task. We waited long in Yugoslavia ten years ago, but under US leadership finally the ethnic cleansing was stopped. To accomplish that, and prevent our own casualties, we bombed their cities, civilian installations for months destroying much of their infrastructure. No one in the West said a word against the bombing of civilians then. Why was it treated so differently from Israel’s attempt to protect itself from rocket attacks by Hezbollah?
Consider the Rwandan genocide when the Hutu initiated a terrifying campaign of genocide massacring three quarter of a million of minority Tutsis while the rest of the world did nothing!
The twenty years long massacre by the Sudanese government of Christians and natives of Darfur and others in the Sudan is continuing. To date the world only talks about it.
Over decades Saddam murdered two million of his own people and caused the death of one million Iranians, invaded Kuwait, and little was done about that until the US and Brittan invaded Iraq. The mistakes and immense problems after the invasion not withstanding.

Israel lost six thousands people, one percent of its population, in the war of independence and similar numbers in the 67 and 73 wars imposed on her by the Arabs, and only the US came to its aid providing important supplies and political support.

I hate the killing and agony that wars bring to all sides. I believe that Israel gets too much criticism for defending itself from wars imposed on her.

It tore my innards to watch those documentaries and write the above so I went to watch serene slides of beautiful Israel, and cried to clean my hurt soul from all of those insanities. Tens of million of innocent people were murdered because of the madness of leaders such as Hitler, Stalin, Saddam, Arafat, Nasrallah of Hezbollah, Ahmadinejad of Iran, the Bin Laden group, and similar maniacs.

Matania
11-06

Tags:

Middle East,
Israel news