Editorials

Cautious Optimism: More signs of Israeli success now than against Hezbollah, 2006

Wednesday, 31 December 2008 12:22 IJN Editorial Staff

There’s something not quite right about all the predictable responses to Israel’s long overdue, ferocious attack on Hamas terrorists in the Gaza Strip.

We hear that Israel is using disproportionate force; we hear that Israel is losing the media war; we hear that “the world” is against Israel; we hear that Israel is relying too heavily on air power (the mistake it made in its attack on Hezbollah in 2006). Somehow, all this doesn’t ring right. Something’s changed — we are cautiously optimistic.

Take the media war. The Winograd Report, which excoriated Israel for its poor media coordination during the Second Lebanon War in 2006, said to establish a centralized media spokesman for Israel during war. Israel did so. She established the National Information Directorate. Preliminary results show that Israel is getting more air time, and better air time, than usual.

A lesson Israel could learn from Hamas

Thursday, 25 December 2008 09:08 IJN Editorial Staff

On December 19 Hamas announced that it was cancelling it adherence to the ceasefire with Israel.

Hamas did not wince, nor worry what the “nations of the world” would say.

Hamas did not care what Israel thought.

Hamas did not engage in tortuous introspection about the losses it might take from Israeli hits, or the losses it might take at the UN or other diplomatic forums.

There is precious little that Israel can learn from Hamas; in fact, absolutely nothing, except this: One’s own interests, not what someone else thinks of one’s own interests, should determine behavior.

A most welcome approach: genocide prevention

Thursday, 25 December 2008 09:07 IJN Editorial Staff

A most welcome development in Washington is a new approach to genocide prevention — a task force that recommends a way to predict or halt genocides before they start, or seriously to retard a genocide that has begun.

This is radically unlike all previous approaches, which share this lugubrious quality: they are all after the fact. After the Holocaust Americans woke up to the fact that Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt could have done a lot, with a minimal expenditure of time, money and military resources, to save hundreds of thousands or perhaps even millions of Jews by bombing the rail lines to Auschwitz. After the Rwandan genocide in 1994, it was pointed out to Pres. Bill Clinton that he could have sent troops or, as the Economist pointed out, at least jammed the radio broadcasts that told the killers where to go and whom to kill. (Clinton “could have known, if he had wanted to know,” Samantha Powers retorted when Clinton claimed, again, after the fact, that he had not known enough what was going on in Rwanda). After the killing fields of Cambodia in the early 1970s, Sec. of State Kissinger and Pres. Nixon realized that they had not calculated the effect of their invasion of Cambodia on its genocidal killers. After the Armenian genocide of WW I — well, even 90 years afterward, the Turks are still shamelessly and shamefully denying it. Astoundingly, the worst human crime has received the least effective human response.

A Chanukah miracle, 5769

Thursday, 25 December 2008 09:04 IJN Editorial Staff

People in search of a Chanukah miracle this season need look no further than their own backyard –– or DIA’s,to be exact. Last Saturday night (the night before Chanukah), a Continental Airlines jet bound for Houston struck a berm, lifted off slightly, hit the ground, veered 2,000 feet off the runway and skidded sharply into a shallow, snowy ravine. A fire raged inside and outside the plane.

In subsequent photos, the Boeing 737-500 lies broken and lifeless, an enormous whale beached in frozen earth. Although the investigation is just beginning and no one can say exactly what caused the accident, officials and passengers alike agree it was a miracle that no one died. Somehow, as flames and fear spread through the plane, 115 passengers and crew managed to crawl to safety through the emergency exits. Thirty-eight people were injured, one seriously, but no one perished. That’s pretty miraculous.