TOUGH!

by Steven Plaut
(Arutz Sheva - IsraelNationalNews.com)
June 29, 2006
Link To Article

Quick, take a fast current events quiz:

1. Since the start of the Palestinian intifada, how many innocent Palestinian civilians have been intentionally murdered by Israel?

2. Since the start of the Palestinian intifada, how many innocent Israeli civilians have been intentionally murdered by the PLO, the Hamas and their affiliates?

Now, if you have been relying on the mainstream media, you will be forgiven for not knowing the correct answers to those two questions. The correct answer to the first question is: "Zero"; and the correct answer to the second question is: "All of them."

That's right. Not a single innocent Palestinian has been intentionally killed by Israel during the past two decades of intifada violence. But every single one of the hundreds of Jewish civilians killed was an intentional act of Palestinian murder. Sure, plenty of guilty Palestinians have been killed, and these include murderers, leaders in terror organizations, rank-and-file terrorists, and people setting up rocket launchers to fire at Jewish civilians. And sure, there have also been innocent Palestinian civilians who were killed or injured when the Jews shot back. These are people who were killed in the same Israeli anti-terror operations necessitated by Palestinian terrorist aggression and atrocities.

There is a fundamental difference, however, between Palestinian civilians getting killed in anti-terror operations and reprisals by Israel, and Israeli civilians who are killed by Palestinian Islamofascists. The Palestinian dead are unintended collateral damage from operations aimed at stopping rocket attacks and other terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians. True, Israeli anti-terror operations are not so "surgically exact" that only guilty terrorists get killed in them. I am quite sure that if and when such a precise military technology is invented, for killing only guilty terrorists when they hide among innocent civilians, Israel will be the first country on earth to adopt it. However, until then, when Palestinians intentionally target and murder Jewish civilians, innocent Palestinian civilians may suffer the consequences of Arab terror.

Jewish civilians, however, are always the target of Palestinian terror. Israeli soldiers hurt by the terrorists are generally the unintended collateral damage.Israel suffers from a fundamental strategic problem, which damages its ability to defend itself; namely, the fact that modern Hebrew does not have a linguistic equivalent to the American slang expression, "Tough!" True, it has some words for "what a shame," but they do not quite convey the same meaning. As a result, Israeli politicians generally fail to respond to whines from the world about Palestinian civilians getting hurt in counter-terror operations by saying, "Tough!"

There has never been a war in which only soldiers get killed, and there does not exist a weapons technology that allows military strikes to take place in an exact manner where no civilians near military targets ever get hurt. Such surgical precision is all the more impossible when terrorists intentionally hide within and behind civilian populations. International law recognizes the rights of countries at war to attack terrorists and even soldiers when they are hiding among civilians, even when such attacks produce civilian deaths. International law assigns blame for those deaths to the belligerents who use the civilians as their "human shields". When Palestinian civilians are killed by an Israeli shell, then the moral responsibility for those deaths rests squarely on the shoulders of the Palestinian terrorists who necessitate Israeli return fire. These are the same terrorists who have fired thousands of rockets and mortar shells into Israeli civilian areas, even after Israel completely withdrew from the Gaza Strip. These are the murdering Islamofascists who have turned the Negev town of Sderot, well inside Israel's pre-1967 borders, into the Israeli equivalent of Guernica, under daily bombardment. Sderot's low-income civilians live in bunkers, afraid for their lives.

Don't want Palestinian civilians killed when Israel shoots back? Simple. Stop the rocket attacks on Sderot.

Don't like Israeli reprisals? Simple. Stop the terror atrocities committed by Palestinians against Jews.

You want Palestinians to move about freely without being searched at checkpoints? Simple. Stop the campaign of bombings, suicide mass murders and atrocities by the Palestinians. When the Palestinians stop murdering Jews, no one will have to check their cars. When Palestinian ambulances no longer carry explosives and murderers, no one will stop them for inspection.

You want the Palestinians to earn decent wages, have a comfortable life? Simple. Suppress Palestinian terrorism. Stop Palestinian rocket aggression. Then, they can even hold day jobs in Israel if they want. They are welcome to shop in Israel and get Israeli medical treatment. But as long as the terror continues, don't expect Israel to respond by turning the other cheek and abandoning self-defense. Don't like it? Tough!

Don't like civilians getting hurt in wars? Then don't start wars of terror and aggression against Israel.The Bash-Israel lobby keeps coming up with new forms of political aggression against the Jewish state. The newest goes something like this: Until Israel is technologically capable of killing terrorists hiding in the middle of cities full of civilians without a single Palestinian civilian being injured as "collateral damage", then Israel should be coerced into adopting a policy of Quaker pacifism, under which it does not respond or retaliate at all to terror atrocities.

In other words, by demanding that Israel only implement 100% pure military tactics, which no other army on earth has ever adopted, the Bash-Israel lobby is, in effect, really insisting that Israel stop defending its own civilians altogether, that Israel should become the first nation on earth to adopt such pacifism as its military strategy. Israel must be disarmed, while terrorism must be rewarded. And if Israel dares to shoot back, then it becomes the aggressor. By the same logic, Britain and the US were the real aggressors against Germany in 1944.

Such disingenuous demands for utopian purity in military operations, even when they come from Israel's own Leftists, are little more than a demand for unconditional Israeli capitulation to terror. Indeed, the only permissible defensive strategy such people are willing to allow Israel to follow is such capitulation.Let us stop with the rhetorical pretenses and affectations. People who are "only" outraged when Palestinian civilians are unintentionally hurt by Israel, but have nothing to say against the mass rocket attacks on Sderot, are naked anti-Semites. They consider Jewish children legitimate targets of Arab aggression and Islamofascist terror because they hate Jews. In reality, they do not care a fig about Palestinian civilian casualties. Such casualties are merely delightful propaganda tools that can be exploited to demonize the Jews.

There is only one effective way to prevent Palestinian civilian casualties, and that is to stop Palestinian terrorist aggression against Israel. But that is the one solution to the problem that the modern day pogromchiki, including academic Brownshirts, will never support.

Admissions

I have to admit a few things:

1. I've been working very hard the last few weeks. A lot of hours. It will likely continue throughout the summer. However, I admit, I have found time each and every day to sit back and thank god that I am not one of the 11,000 poor souls studying for the NY bar exam this summer. I think back to last summer with terror and relief that I am now past that stage in my life. I try to think of one person I know who will be sitting for the bar this year and chuckle to myself over the hell they must be going through in the bar review courses and hours and hours of personal studying. Occassionally, I will even pick up the phone and call one of these people just to hear their suffering first-hand. It's sick really, but makes me feel better.

2. I have started to use the A&D cream that you put on a baby's ass when they have a bad diaper rash. Nothing crazy here. You know how sometimes you play ball in extreme heat, or even spend a day walking around for an extended time in hot sticky weather. Your thighs start to stick together and rub. Then they get all raw and uncomfortable. You've all had this, most of you would be embarrassed to admit it. I'm not. I hate that feeling. It makes it so uncomfortable to walk, that you actually feel less like an idiot waddling like you are constipated in order to avoid touching thighs. Alpha males are reduced to whimpering faygeles in the shower when the hot water hits the reddened areas. Anyway, this happened to me last week and as I left the shower, I noticed the A&D tube that we will often use for my kid when they have a diaper rash. I thought to myself how amazing it is that the second that cream goes on, the kid stops complaining and crying about the diaper rash. So i gave it a shot. Within 10 seconds I felt great and within an hour or so I no longer felt any effects of the redness. It was amazing. This product is clearly not just for babies. Anyway, people laughed at me last night when I was playing ball and I announced that I had found a new use for the A&D cream, so I figured I'd simply explain its use and affect.

3. I like David Ortiz. Not like I like Derek Jeter, but I respect him as a player. I love the fact that he always looks like he's having a great time out there. Obviously, his ability to hit in the clutch at a ridiculous rate makes him easy to respect, but there are plenty of guys throughout history who have done that while being complete a-holes. Ortiz is not one of them.

4. I like a Dixie Chicks song. Just one song. Forget it. I'm joking. I didn't really mean that. They're gay.

John Sterling - How the Mighty Fall

"It is high... it is farrrrr... it issssss........ CAUGHT in shallow left field. Now Susan, from where we are sitting that ball looked like it was gone."

"Yes, John. The wind must have kept that one in the park."

Growing up on Long Island, I was one of the few kids my age without cable television. This meant that from early April through September, and as I got to my teenage years October, I spent a good deal of my evenings with John Sterling and Michael Kay. These two, of course, were the radio play-by-play announcers for the Yankees during the part of my childhood that I remember. Yes, that puts me in my mid-20's and no, I will not be comparing them to the great Mel Allen.

I remember running back and forth from my room to my parents' room after a home run call or a great play in the field to re-live it with my Dad and brother (who usually had the same agenda as me). Whether it was Sterling's drawn out excitement, Kay's "see ya!" or either of the two of them making up a word ("Jeterian"), I felt like they really brought the game to me at home.

As I grew up, got married and - more importantly - got cable, I started to watch and follow a lot more baseball than just the Yankees. I learned of people such as Mel Allen, Jack Buck, Ernie Harwell and Vin Scully and phrases such as, "shot heard round the world," "I don't believe what I just saw," and "The Giants win the pennant," and began to realize that Sterling and Kay were far from the greatest of all time. However, they were the baseball voices of my youth and therefore will always rank up there with anyone else. There is something special about the guys who bring you baseball when you are a kid. It was always there, almost every night for 6 months - excitement, entertainment and most importantly a rooting interest. Sterling and Kay provided this to me for most of the years I lived in my parents' home.

Along came the creation of the YES network and Michael Kay bolts for TV. Probably a good move. The two personalities couldn't BOTH be the "voice of the Yankees." Now, in a way, with one on TV and one on Radio, they could be. Kay surrounded himself with great people - Singleton, Mercer, O'Neil - and has looked great because of it. Sterling, on the other hand, got stuck with Charlie Steiner and Suzyn Waldman. Sterling and Steiner had no chemistry and listening to them was not a good experience. Waldman, annoying as she is, at least seems to flow well with Sterling. Except there is a more important issue which I have eluded to with my two quotes to begin this post - Sterling is losing it and fast.

John Sterling still has the voice and the enthusiasm. It is still as exciting as ever to hear him call a home run or big play, BUT, he gets it wrong way too often. He can no longer read the field and see the play develop. There are noticeable delays after the crack of the bat as he tries to figure out where the ball will end up and the few times he is on time, he misjudges badly. He repeats himself way too often - "Now I challenge anyone to figure out baseball" is a phrase that surfaces at least once a night, if not more. It's like he's given up. It's the same shtick every game.

While I watch most games on TV these days, i will often get caught leaving work late and will listen to the radio play-by-play during my one hour plus commute home. I used to enjoy these broadcasts and actually experience the game through them. No more. I now feel like I tune in as I would to the internet game casts, just to see what's happening. It is sad really. Maybe it's time for some new blood and a new era in Yankee radio. The Yankees as a team have finally begun to bring in some youth and re-invent their personality as a team, maybe it's time for the same on the radio.

Then again, every once in a while I'll be driving over the Throgsneck Bridge on my way home from work and I'll hear a perfectly timed Sterling home run call - "Giambi has worked the count full. Schilling looks in. Schilling sets. It'll be a 3-2 to Giambi... CRACK! ... There it goes deeeeep to right. That ball is high, it is farrrrr, it issss GONNNE! [Roar of the Crowd]..... Upper Deck! .....[Stadium music kicks in].... And the Yankees take a 2 run lead on a 3 run Jason Giambi blast to right. The Giambino!"

I grab my cell phone from next to me and dial up my Dad too see if he heard the call.