Friday Linkage

Mena Trott has a hilarious view of what it would be like if bloggers had been around throughout history. Although the history nerd in my says that Samuel Pepys was really the first blogger…

Listening To Radical Islam

Victor Davis Hanson has another brilliant column in which he reminds us of what radical Islamists really want. The left keeps trying to project their pet beliefs onto radical Islamists, but the truth is that their radical Salafist agenda won’t be satiated by merely withdrawing from the Middle East and allowing it to be taken over by dozens of Taliban-like governments – the demands of radical Islam is to subjugate all the world under shari’a.

We want “peace”? Stop educating women, kill Jews and homosexuals, and submit to life as a dhimmi. Elsewise the only true peace will be when this radical ideology joins Communism and fascism on the ash-heap of history.

Brother Against Brother

Slate has a heartbreaking piece on the Gaza withdrawal by Israel:

Earlier this month, army psychologists and brigade commanders coaxed soldiers into confronting their worst fears for disengagement. “What would make you freeze?” asked an officer at one session. The young soldiers eyed each other nervously before responding. The most common answers weren’t the stuff of typical battlefield nightmares: A familiar face. A wheelchair-bound grandmother. One nervous woman stood and spoke softly. “I worry about a crying child,” she said hesitantly, playing with the hair at the back of her neck. To carry off obstructing settlers, the unit has been broken into teams of four, by gender and size; female soldiers have been instructed to handle resisting children if their parents won’t. “I don’t want to separate a mother from her child. I don’t know how I would handle that. I don’t want to think about that.”

The Israelis are doing something that is virtually unprecedented in history. The Gaza withdrawal is a bold and dangerous move for Sharon. It puts the Likud hawk against a good segment of Israeli society including a good portion of his own party, and threatens to tear Israel apart. Yet he is doing it because it is the only way to make Israel more defensible. Sharon, who has a deserved reputation as a course and tactless man has shown far more strength and wisdom than the erudite and intelligent Binyamin Netanyahu who used this difficult moment to engage in some decidedly unhelpful political grandstanding. The choices Sharon’s being forced to make are truly wrenching.

Would any Arab country do the same were those roles reversed? Despite Israel’s efforts to disengaged itself from Gaza, the same old anti-Semitic slurs will still echo from the left. Israel is damned if it does, and damned if it doesn’t, and all they can do is to try to protect themselves as best they can.

I feel for the settlers in Gaza who are now being forced to abandon their homes for an uncertain future – but I feel worse for the IDF troops forced to rip them away from their land.

As for the Palestinians, if I thought they’d turn Gaza into something more than the slum it currently is, it would be some comfort. Knowing that it will probably get worse makes me wonder if Israel’s pullout really was the right thing to do.