Hope Amid Despair?: A reluctant world begins to confront reality.

[ksen]

Hope Amid Despair?: A reluctant world begins to confront reality.

by Victor Davis Hanson
(from National Review Online)

Pessimism is now the conventional wisdom about the wars in the Middle East, and, indeed, it is hard to find any good news in the recent ceasefire.

Syria and Iran stage celebrations as news emerges from the ruins of southern Lebanon revealing just how well-armed Hezbollah was — and how impotent the Lebanese “government” really is. The only suspense remaining is whether the United Nations peacekeeping force or the Lebanese army will prove the most craven in giving Hezbollah a green light to rearm and terrorize.

The old Arab agenda of recapturing “stolen” land has been superseded by a new Islamist jihad that is as fanatical as it is inhuman. The Islamists care not a whit for ground, but only for the abject destruction of the Jewish state and to finish the Holocaust that they claim did not take place. Few of the pundits now clamoring for “engagement” care to recall that Syria probably murdered Rafik Hariri, or that Iran promises to wipe Israel off the map.

The near criminal indifference of the international community is cause for greater depression still. No one says a thing about horrific Arab racism and anti-Semitism that brazenly offer the world pictures of our secretary of State as a primate and constant hate speech of Jews as apes and pigs. And here at home, a celebrity actor, the staff of a failed congresswoman in Georgia, and a crazed Muslim with a gun in Seattle all shout about the evils of the “Jews” — a good cross-section of just how insidious is the growing anti-Semitism.

The globalized media is absolutely discredited after the coverage of Lebanon. Reuters has destroyed its reputation, gained from 150 years of world reporting, by releasing doctored pictures and tolerating staged photo-ops. Almost all the Western media outlets failed to distinguish Lebanese civilian from military casualties — as if the Hezbollah terrorists they never filmed and never interviewed never died.

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Link: http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MWE4NDBjNzNjNjE4Yzk1NTU2YWQ0ZjE3N2I5ZWE5NWY=

 

[nightflight]

Good article!

 

[Voegelin]

Victor Davis Hanson writes, "No one says a thing about horrific Arab racism and anti-Semitism "

Oh yes they do. All the time. Not only to describe Arabs but to describe everyone else. And therein lies the problem. When a Christian makes a movie about the Passion and it is described as "antisemitic", when Trent Lott or another politician makes an off the cuff well- meaning comment and is accussed of racism, when we hear these words used day in and day out as political weapons over the most silly things, is it any surprise that when real racists and real antisemites act on their hate that many people turn away? Hilaire Belloc made a prophetic charge in 1921. He warned that if antisemitism was used to deflect all criticism, if dialogue was shut down by labeling those with questions as haters and antisemites, the nation of Israel would face tragedy. And it did. The way to make allies is not to make everyone live in fear of being called a name but to stand up and make your case honestly; to attack only those who do pose a threat. Israel did that in the 1960s. It can do it again and it should.

 

[burrow_owl]

Hanson is such a loser. He's just dumb. Like, no one but wicked dorky bloggers eating cheetos in their parents' basement cares about the reuters stuff.