Retaliate

This is why we invented the term "no-brainer."

I’m getting lazy in my old age and have started using shortcuts to figure out what’s actually going on. One of the best shortcuts is watching the language your opponent is using. A good example is criminal justice “reform.” When you hear “restorative justice” or “harm reduction,” you can cut to the chase: Whomever you’re talking to wants to let hoodlums out of jail earlier or not put them there to start with. They can dress it up, and they will, but it’s always the same deal.

Ditto with college admissions. “Inclusivity,” which I guess is intended to sound welcoming or something, actually means, “Get those Jews and Asians outta here and give the spots to underperforming blacks.” It’s typically trotted out with a good deal of moralizing about slavery or Jim Crow or something else no college applicant in existence had anything to do with, and would have opposed anyway, but is close enough if you just remember blacks are a more reliable voting bloc for the Democratic Party. Still, the moralizing is done with a wicked belligerence designed to silence you as a racist, hence to fortify the Left’s version of another of their favorite cudgels, free speech — which, in condensed form, means “Shut up.”

And then there’s “threat to democracy.” That means you, if you’d consider voting for Trump over the fellow who’s halfway to assisted living. And you’re especially a threat to democracy if, audaciously, you want to see more than one candidate on the ballot, rather than accede to a reading of the Fourteenth Amendment so bizarre and biased and truncated that it got zero votes in the Supreme Court, including from some of the most liberal justices ever to have served. (If anyone has seen the academic hacks who hatched that theory show any second thoughts in light of their getting skunked, please let me know).

This brings me to today’s topic, the latest attack on Israel by Iran and the jihadists in league with it. The question — at least it’s being called a question — is whether Israel should retaliate. As soon as the attack began, I started listening for the tip-off vocabulary of the anti-Semitic Left (that being most of it): de-escalation, restraint (restraint on Israel, that is), “diplomatic solution,” anything about Gaza, particularly if jammed in the same sentence as “humanitarian crisis,” and the old stand-by, Palestinian oppression.

But I was slow this time. I missed the term that’s jumped to the head of the line — “wider war.” We have to avoid a “wider war.” This pretends that, if you’re a Jew in that part of the world and behave with suitable (to wit infinite) submissiveness, you can magically avoid the “wider war”that’s been going on against you since forever. As Matti Friedman explains:

Th[e] largely fictional narrative [about the October 7 massacre and its aftermath] is a continuation of many years of press coverage insisting that the story here is an “Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” a framing that sets up the region’s six million Jews as a powerful majority and the region’s hundreds of millions of Arabs and Muslims, the vast majority of whom are not Palestinian, as a beleaguered minority.

The truth is that there isn’t an “Israeli-Palestinian” conflict that exists in isolation. There’s an Arab-Muslim war with Jews that’s about a century old, in which most of the combatants on the Arab side have not been Palestinian and some of the Jewish victims haven’t been Israeli (like the Argentinians killed by Iranian terrorists at a Jewish community center in 1994, for example, or the masses of Jews forced from their homes in the Islamic world after Israel’s founding). These days, the relevant conflict is between the alliance led by the Shia clerics of Iran’s Islamic Republic against states in the American orbit, most of them Sunni, like Jordan and Saudi Arabia, and one of them Jewish. 

Last night should make clear, for those still in doubt, that Gaza is just one part of the broader story of Iran’s growing power and its tightening encirclement of Israel. When understood in this context, the behavior of Israel and its opponents becomes easier to understand. 

I briefly heard Alan Dershowitz sum up the “question” about retaliation with a pithiness we could use to keep in mind. Why should Iran stop its behavior when it’s never been given a reason to stop?

For 45 years, our country, the world, and Israel in particular, have seen the rewards of the Democratic Party’s grotesque incompetence, to use a polite word. In 1979, Carter handed Iran, formerly an ally of the United States, to the mullahs and their endless chants of death to America. He furrowed his brow while our hostages were paraded. Still, with him, it was probably cowardice more than affirmative anti-Americanism. Things changed by the time Obama became President — the pallets of cash while Iran continued to sponsor Islamic terror (which you still can’t call by its name lest you be labeled an “Islamophobe”). How much of that cash was and is being used to build The Bomb and, for one other example, fund murderous expeditions like October 7, remains a subject about which the MSM’s “investigative journalism” continues to be conspicuously incurious. Now it’s Biden, in the 190th day of his own hostage crisis — which of course is seldom referred to as a crisis, or referred to at all now that I think of it, the better to divert our attention to — well, to whatever, last week the Perils of Being a Gazan and today the need to avoid a “wider war.” Next week it will be something else, the one constant being that Jews will be at fault.

To be honest, I doubt there is much we can do while Biden occupies the Oval Office and increasingly blunt anti-Semitism occupies so much of his party, academia, and the press. Still, it’s worth taking note of Mitch McConnell’s statement out today:

President Biden has insisted that America’s commitment to Israel’s security is ‘ironclad’. It is time for his Administration to match words with actions. President Biden must lead an international effort to impose sufficient costs on Tehran to compel an end to its aggression and terror, both on Israeli soil and — as demonstrated with today’s IRGC assault on a commercial shipping vessel — around the region. Iran’s leaders must know the things they value most are at risk. 

“The President must also give Israel the time, space, and support it deserves to finish the job against Hamas. Tehran and its proxies are emboldened when they see divisions between the US and Israel.

But even if McConnell’s words were heeded, which isn’t going to happen, at some point we need to address what no one wants to talk about: Even relatively strong measures against Iran, while useful and needed in the short run, aren’t going to work in the long run. Iran needs to be de-commissioned entirely as a military threat. This needs to happen before it gets the atomic bomb. Our next President needs to explain this to the nation and prepare it for what it needs to do. Tragically, no one currently seeking the Office has either the seriousness of purpose or the stature or the gravitas to do it.

(Note to readers: I’ve been absent with a bug for the last two weeks but am making progress. And for those who are wondering, I’m not Jewish. I guess nominally I’m Episcopalian, although not much of anything, really).