This is why we can't have nice things

Empress Trudy

Dr. Lumish pointed out that a comment I made almost in passing garnered the ire of The Progressive Zionist, particularly of writer "volleyboy1."

I don't normally respond to this kind of hate speech. Mostly it's pointless, they have little or nothing to say in the first place, they're generally intentionally dense and absurdly literal-minded or they simply project their own hatreds. I also don't fisk such comments because, frankly, there's not much there to tease out. And once you cull the epithets, threats, curses and noise, there's little more than my own words left in that post. And if he wanted a discussion, he could have one, here. That writer has in fact posted here at IT before. But instead "volleyboy1" decided to hide in the thick of his mob and hurl bombs to his (or her – I use his, deal with it) crowd of like minded adoring fans.

But I will use it as a teachable moment to highlight the dismal failure of "Progressive Zionism," if there even is such a thing. I have to admit I never heard of the site until Dr. Lumish pointed it out. On the whole it seems pretty mainstream leftist pro Obama and repeats the standard cant as truth that emanates from the White House vis a vis Israel. It reminds me of the kind of Reform Synagogue Bumpersticker Judaism we've come to expect: “It's nice to be nice, antisemitism is bad.......but......” and then we're treated to long diatribes about the poor, poor Palestinians and the 3 trillion years of suffering they've suffered at the hands, claws and teeth of Jewish avarice. The fact that they don't call for an outright extermination of all the Jews in Israel appears to be what sets them apart from 972mag. Importantly they seem to have swallowed the whole “Jews out, Peace In” mantra. Their solution is, and let's not sugar coat it, ethnic cleansing of all Jews from Yesha and half of Jerusalem. So they're starting from a position that "they," the Arabs' lives, are in fact more precious than ours.

But let's be clear. Here is my statement:

Just fling 1 or 2 $1,000 plain artillery shells into the most densely packed areas in Gaza. In practice the odds of any one person or family being killed or injured are astonishingly low. But that's not the point. The point is FEAR. And fear is what the need to live with. They need to worry. They need to be afraid.

Here is the salient part of the response. The rest of post is mostly just name calling, noise and borderline death threats. But so be it, we ARE dealing with progressives here.

Lets be just like the murdering pieces of Human Crap in Hamas and Hizbollah and let's lob some artillery into Gaza, what's the worst thing that can happen? The IDF kills a couple of women and children or a few innocent civilians? I mean what are their lives worth anyway? They're only Arabs anyway... Right? (/snark).

Now we have to look at that in its entirety. The writer is assuming this is a call for strategic bombing like the RAF over Dresden. It clearly is not. The writer moreover assumes or patently accepts that Hamas rockets are either harmless or deservedly violent. Oh, I see phrases like "murdering pieces of Human Crap"....but I don't see a critique of what or how they do what they do. And importantly I don't see a progressive refutation of Hamas' own use of their OWN people as human shields. After all, were the IAF to bomb a rocket launching site on the top of a hospital, it's fairly likely that the people in the hospital would get killed. Which is the point of using human shields. The response I suppose, to the progressive ethos is to what – have no response at all?

At any rate the point I'm making is one of deterrence not violence. Of the 17,000 rockets Hamas flung at Israel, essentially 100% of them were terror weapons meant to demoralize the populace. What I'm suggesting is a balance of terror, a balance of fear. Just as the people who live in Sderot pressured the Israeli government to build them bomb shelters, just as the army deployed Iron Dome, I am suggesting a likewise application of fear to induce the Gazans to change their tack. Hamas is an organization like a corporation or the Mob or the Rotary Club. They function because they have low mid and high level people who operate over a span of control. They operate because the populace is cowed into permitting it. The point, putting it bluntly, is to put the fear of God into them. Progressive Zionists who oppose even the use of fear as a weapon as somehow being unfair and racist I think can be safely ignored as fools and children.

Bloodcurdling screams of butchery and such have been lobbed against strategic realists for the last 50 years. The nuclear war strategist, Herman Kahn was called every name in the book for suggesting that if a nuclear war is unavoidable, it's better to look at it as survivable, even winnable. Critics of Kahn lamented that if you dare talk about it at all, then you're making the world more dangerous because once you assert that that such a thing is survivable then someone will try. Which is a bit like taking seat belts out of cars to induce people to drive slower. The point here, is that if rockets can only be shot down, wouldn't it be better to get them to stop supporting their own fanatics in doing that?

You can't uninvent something. You can't uninvent the H-Bomb, you can't uninvent maniacal terrorism. You can plan for it. You can attempt to understand where the waterlevel of your tolerance to violence lies. Ignoring the rockets that fly into Ashkelon and hoping they go away is foolish. But so is relying on pure defense as a strategy. Iron Dome etc. works very well but what it does not do is induce the enemy to change. It merely creates a stalemate. A stalemate seemingly that progressives are happy with. Somewhere in their brains they perhaps believe that if you ignore it long enough it really will go away.

Perhaps that's what they believe. I don't know precisely. Perhaps they've embraced the low expectations of the far left as it applies to Arabs. The patent bigotry that allows them to behave like wild animals because...well....you know how THOSE people are... I don't believe that any but a small fringe actively endorse Hamas and company. But unlike them, I won't speak for them or others.

What I do recognize though is that more of the continuation of the last 90 years of western liberalism, leftism and so called progressivism – the ilk that Lenin called his "useful idiots" - is counterproductive.  Progressives inherently believe that Israel is always wrong and terrorists are always right. But it's more of a blind romantic affinity. A terrorist wouldn't be a terrorist unless he had a damn good reason. Or so the story goes. For a great read on the delusions of the left in relation to Stalin, read Martin Amis' “Koba the Dread”. And this sort of blockheaded groupthink still applies. We've replaced the CCCP with Hamas and Hezbollah and the Iranian Bomb. We've post-moderned and morally equivalenced ourselves to the point where murderers get a cookie and the cop gets demoted. A sick inversion of the very same Manichean view of the world the progressives claim to strive for. But such are the luxuries of dilettantes attend rallies and who's personal view of privation is not getting an LTE signal in order to blog about the evils of money and capitalism on the $600 iPhone mom and dad paid for.

Basically it comes down to, if you can't mechanically stop them from killing Israelis then at the very least they have to live in mortal terror of trying it. Are they afraid of 'it' as volleyboy1 exhorts us about his noble righteous terrorists? No, not yet they aren't. It hasn't been tried. What's been tried is shelling empty fields and spending a million dollars to lob a rocket through the passenger side window of a car, and, if it happens to blow up and kill the shwarma stand guy standing next to it....well that's a war crime to the progressives anyway.

As an aside, writer 'volleyboy1' starts his infantile yelling by demanding to know whether I blog at Dkos. Volleyboy1 was a frequent contributor there but was banned. He had all the Obama DNC OWS checkboxes checked, but he was thrown out for being insufficiently antisemitic and that's what burns progressive Jews most of all. Not that their fellow travellers despise them for being Jews, but for reminding them they are. After all in “The Jewish Question” Marx stated baldly that the problem of antisemitism is that the world has permitted Jews to still exist. The solution is to get rid of them all. But progressives and the far left, like ANSWER never forget you're Jews. That must be a huge disappointment to them since they've worked so hard to fit in every other way.

So I decided to respond here, not there where they can take me out of context, project and selectively censor. If volleyboy1 wants to come here to respond, I welcome it. Otherwise he can stay home and mutter and comment with his fellow PZ'rs.