Actually, no. Not exactly, anyway. Not quite.
How Israel Helped to Spawn Hamas
Surveying the wreckage of a neighbor’s bungalow hit by a Palestinian rocket, retired Israeli official Avner Cohen traces the missile’s trajectory back to an “enormous, stupid mistake” made 30 years ago.“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” says Mr. Cohen, a Tunisian-born Jew who worked in Gaza for more than two decades. Responsible for religious affairs in the region until 1994, Mr. Cohen watched the Islamist movement take shape, muscle aside secular Palestinian rivals and then morph into what is today Hamas, a militant group that is sworn to Israel’s destruction.
Instead of trying to curb Gaza’s Islamists from the outset, says Mr. Cohen, Israel for years tolerated and, in some cases, encouraged them as a counterweight to the secular nationalists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat’s Fatah. Israel cooperated with a crippled, half-blind cleric named Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, even as he was laying the foundations for what would become Hamas. Sheikh Yassin continues to inspire militants today; during the recent war in Gaza, Hamas fighters confronted Israeli troops with “Yassins,” primitive rocket-propelled grenades named in honor of the cleric.
Bold mine, and dispositive. Once again, as we have so many times in so many variant contexts, we see the triumph of forlorn, vain hope over common good sense and experience: Israeli leadership took the option of supporting the ostensibly-more-moderate devil they thought they knew over the seemingly more radical/extremist one. Or so it seemed at the time, anyway. That worked out for them precisely as it always has in all times and places: Not. Too. Good.
So in effect, the ultimate lesson is being taught yet again: Kill. Them. ALL. Mooselimb jihadists come in but one flavor, and one flavor only, which has nothing whatever to do with Baskin-Robbins: Bloodthirsty Genocidal Maniac©. Alas for us all, that really is all there is to this; no amount of “hope” will ever alter the ugly reality one whit. After more than 1500 years, the Western world fails to learn at its own direst peril.
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A radical Muslim wants to kill you.
A moderate Muslim wants the radical Muslim to kill you, and will dance, applaud, and pass out candy when he does.
This concludes your familiarization briefing on Islam.
Nothing should be left alive in gaza. Kill everything in it and everything that try’s to go back in for the next 10 years. Leave it barren and empty.
Levelling Gaza seems to be exactly what the IDF is doing, Carthage-style.
I don’t have enough popcorn to watch this show.