From Condi Rice, among others, regarding “innocent” Paleosimian civilians — a long-festering boil of sophistry, lanced by Andy McCarthy:

On the political front, it is high time to acknowledge the failure of the fantasy that the Palestinians are legitimate actors worthy of statehood and its privileges. Contrary to the prevailing elite view, legitimacy is not conferred by such facile exercises as the holding of popular elections — though such exercises are not without consequences, which we will come to momentarily. There are certain minimal requirements for statehood, not least of which is accepting the right of one’s sovereign neighbor to exist.

At present, no representative of the Palestinian people concedes this right to Israel…

When we appraise hostile countries, it has become de rigueur in our foreign policy circles to distinguish the “people” (always good) from their nasty governments. So it is with the noble Palestinians. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice insisted in a 2006 interview, for instance, that the “great majority” of them — i.e., upwards of “70 percent” — are “perfectly ready to live side by side with Israel because they just want to live in peace.”

This is preposterous. Palestinians are weaned on Jew-hatred through schools and media controlled by the competing factions and other jihadists. Their national heroes are those dedicated to killing Jews, most especially the “martyrs” (or shaheed) who self-implode in suicide attacks. It is to be expected, then, that when the public is polled in the actual Palestinian territories, rather than in Condi-world, a very different reality is reflected: About three in four Palestinians deny Israel’s right to exist, a figure that soars to over nine in ten when only the fighting-age demographic (between 18 and 25) is considered.

It is, moreover, only natural that Palestinians would choose Hamas in a free election, as they did in 2006. Of course, no shortage of delusional gibberish has been spouted about this outcome by democracy devotees — who typically twaddle about elections having consequences right up until the moment when the election happens and they don’t like the consequences. So, to maintain the fiction that we are dealing with decent, peace-loving people, we are urged to blinker the Palestinians’ choice to be led by unabashed mass-murderers.

It’s high time we wiped all that liberal-flung sand out of our eyes and got on with the business of defeating our enemies, and aiding our allies in that fight in whatever ways we can. Read it all, natch.

Update! If you don’t read any of the rest of it, read and understand this, on the noxious Protocol I additions to the Geneva Conventions — which, mercifully, neither we nor Israel have signed onto:

For very sound reasons, this is not our law. Nor is it Israel’s. Governments with real security responsibilities cannot protect lives this way. If they try to do so, they are effectively elevating the lives of their enemies above their own populations. That would be inappropriate in any event, but it is especially inane when the enemy is the Palestinians. They have willingly chosen to be led by a terrorist group whose sworn mission is to obliterate a neighboring country. Of all the civilians on earth, they are the least deserving of such indulgence.

With each day’s perusal of news accounts comes new accusations of Israeli international law violations and war crimes. In response, we shouldn’t cower behind the usual diplomatic niceties. We should be clear: there are no international law obligations in warfare absent consent. We can’t stop transnational progressives from designing suicidal compacts, and we can’t stop Europeans from adopting them. But we are not obliged to engage the fiction that these arrangements constitute law in our own country, in Israel, or in any nation sober enough to reject them.

Fighting a defensive war for survival is not a war crime. It is an obligation. It is primarily what governments are created for. To claim otherwise is make a perverse mockery of international law. We must defend Israel full-throatedly on this point. In doing so, we are defending ourselves.

No more to add. Damned excellent piece, start to finish — cogently argued, engagingly presented, convincingly reasoned, and morally incisive and precise.