Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Ashkelon Man Comes up with the Best Peace Plan Yet!

1. An idea whose time has come. Israelis need to build their own Kassams
and shoot back:

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1204546409012&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

Ashkelon man builds homemade missile
By JPOST.COM STAFF AND REBECCA ANNA STOIL

Ashkelon resident Moshe Nissimpor decided that the best way to halt rocket
fire from Gaza - in light of what he terms the government's failure to do
so - is some vigilante justice.

Rocket built by Moshe Nissimpor
Photo: Courtesy
Nissimpor developed a homemade 200-millimeter ballistic missile which he
planned to launch from Ashkelon into the Gaza Strip.
"From this day onwards, we will push back to the stone age every place
which dares shoot missiles into Israel's sovereign territory," he said
Wednesday. "It is time the world understood Israelis' lives are not
expendable."
"I'm afraid this is the only language the Palestinians understand, and
this is the language in which we'll speak to them. I have many Gazan
Palestinian friends who live as Hamas hostages. Once we bring an end to
the rocket fire, Gaza's residents will also live in peace," he said.
Nissimpor arrived at the Ashkelon Municipality building with the missile
painted black and lettered "to Hamas, from the residents of Ashkelon" in
red, and was planning to launch it.
Ashkelon residents gathered round to cheer him on and protest the
government's conduct, but at the eleventh hour, police stopped him from
firing the missile and seized it.
"I wish there were more 'crazies' like me in Israel," Nissimpor said as
the crowd was dispersed by the police.
Earlier Wdnesday, as the security cabinet met and emerged with a message
that the government will stop the rocket attacks against Israeli
communities from the Gaza Strip, three rockets struck the western Negev.
A total of 14 Kassams were fired into Israel from northern and central
Gaza, on the first day in almost a week in which nobody was wounded by the
attacks. Almost all the projectiles hit open areas.
The air-raid-style sirens installed in Ashkelon this week were tested for
the first time - causing some to duck for cover, but proving that their
whine could penetrate walls better than the calmly-pitched "Color Red"
warning.
Meanwhile, the week's second humanitarian supply convoy into the Gaza
Strip met with a glitch, as border crossing authorities detained one of
the dozens of trucks crossing entering the Strip. A truck labeled "cooking
oil" was stopped after authorities suspected that its liquid contents
might instead be materials used for producing Kassam rockets.
A truck containing "building materials" was also combed, on suspicion that
some of its contents could be used to build rockets.
Turkey's Foreign Ministry announced that the first shipment of Turkish
humanitarian aid, including four trucks full of medicine, food and
clothing, arrived in Gaza as part of Wednesday's convoy. A second Turkish
shipment is expected to be sent through the Gaza crossings soon, which
before this week had been closed to almost all shipments for more than a
month.
Around two dozen Gazans were permitted to enter Israel to receive medical
treatment.
In the morning, three rockets were fired at agricultural areas in the
western Negev, and another two hit near a kibbutz south of Ashkelon.
In the evening, an estimated nine rockets were fired from northern Gaza,
striking open areas near Sderot and Ashkelon. Islamic Jihad claimed
responsibility for the evening barrage.
During the relative lull in the Kassam rocket fire, the Defense Ministry
positioned 120 portable bomb shelters in Sderot, the final shipment of the
box-like structures to the town under current plans. The ministry also
budgeted an additional NIS 300 million to improve the state of bomb
shelters in Ashkelon.
Late Tuesday night, IAF aircraft hit a number of Kassam launchers that
were pointed at Israel.


2. Worshippers of Death
By ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ
March 3, 2008; Page A17


Zahra Maladan is an educated woman who edits a women's magazine in
Lebanon. She is also a mother, who undoubtedly loves her son. She has
ambitions for him, but they are different from those of most mothers in
the West. She wants her son to become a suicide bomber. At the recent
funeral for the assassinated Hezbollah terrorist Imad Moughnaya -- the
mass murderer responsible for killing 241 marines in 1983 and more than
100 women, children and men in Buenos Aires in 1992 and 1994 -- Ms.
Maladan was quoted in the New York Times giving the following warning to
her son: "if you're not going to follow the steps of the Islamic
resistance martyrs, then I don't want you."
Zahra Maladan represents a dramatic shift in the way we must fight to
protect our citizens against enemies who are sworn to kill them by killing
themselves. The traditional paradigm was that mothers who love their
children want them to live in peace, marry and produce grandchildren.
Women in general, and mothers in particular, were seen as a counterweight
to male belligerence. The picture of the mother weeping as her son is led
off to battle -- even a just battle -- has been a constant and powerful
image.
Now there is a new image of mothers urging their children to die, and then
celebrating the martyrdom of their suicidal sons and daughters by
distributing sweets and singing wedding songs. More and more young women
-- some married with infant children -- are strapping bombs to their
(sometimes pregnant) bellies, because they have been taught to love death
rather than life. Look at what is being preached by some influential
Islamic leaders:
"We are going to win, because they love life and we love death,"
said Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah. He has also said: "[E]ach
of us lives his days and nights hoping more than anything to be killed for
the sake of Allah." Shortly after 9/11, Osama bin Laden told a reporter:
"We love death. The U.S. loves life. That is the big difference between
us."
"The Americans love Pepsi-Cola, we love death," explained Afghani
al Qaeda operative Maulana Inyadullah. Sheik Feiz Mohammed, leader of the
Global Islamic Youth Center in Sydney, Australia, preached: "We want to
have children and offer them as soldiers defending Islam. Teach them this:
There is nothing more beloved to me than wanting to die as a mujahid."
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in a speech: "It is the zenith of honor for a
man, a young person, boy or girl, to be prepared to sacrifice his life in
order to serve the interests of his nation and his religion."
How should Western democracies fight against an enemy whose leaders preach
a preference for death?
The two basic premises of conventional warfare have long been that
soldiers and civilians prefer living to dying and can thus be deterred
from killing by the fear of being killed; and that combatants (soldiers)
can easily be distinguished from noncombatants (women, children, the
elderly, the infirm and other ordinary citizens). These premises are being
challenged by women like Zahra Maladan. Neither she nor her son -- if he
listens to his mother -- can be deterred from killing by the fear of being
killed. They must be prevented from succeeding in their ghoulish quest for
martyrdom. Prevention, however, carries a high risk of error. The woman
walking toward the group of soldiers or civilians might well be an
innocent civilian. A moment's hesitation may cost innocent lives. But a
failure to hesitate may also have a price.
Late last month, a young female bomber was shot as she approached
some shops in central Baghdad. The Iraqi soldier who drew his gun
hesitated as the bomber, hands raised, insisted that she wasn't armed. The
soldier and a shop owner finally opened fire as she dashed for the stores;
she was knocked to the ground but still managed to detonate the bomb,
killing three and wounding eight. Had the soldier and other bystanders not
called out a warning to others -- and had they not shot her before she
could enter the shops -- the death toll certainly would have been higher.
Had he not hesitated, it might have been lower.
As more women and children are recruited by their mothers and their
religious leaders to become suicide bombers, more women and children will
be shot at -- some mistakenly. That too is part of the grand plan of our
enemies. They want us to kill their civilians, who they also consider
martyrs, because when we accidentally kill a civilian, they win in the
court of public opinion. One Western diplomat called this the "harsh
arithmetic of pain," whereby civilian casualties on both sides "play in
their favor." Democracies lose, both politically and emotionally, when
they kill civilians, even inadvertently. As Golda Meir once put it: "We
can perhaps someday forgive you for killing our children, but we cannot
forgive you for making us kill your children."
Civilian casualties also increase when terrorists operate from within
civilian enclaves and hide behind human shields. This relatively new
phenomenon undercuts the second basic premise of conventional warfare:
Combatants can easily be distinguished from noncombatants. Has Zahra
Maladan become a combatant by urging her son to blow himself up? Have the
religious leaders who preach a culture of death lost their status as
noncombatants? What about "civilians" who willingly allow themselves to be
used as human shields? Or their homes as launching pads for terrorist
rockets?
The traditional sharp distinction between soldiers in uniform and
civilians in nonmilitary garb has given way to a continuum. At the more
civilian end are babies and true noncombatants; at the more military end
are the religious leaders who incite mass murder; in the middle are
ordinary citizens who facilitate, finance or encourage terrorism. There
are no hard and fast lines of demarcation, and mistakes are inevitable --
as the terrorists well understand.
We need new rules, strategies and tactics to deal effectively and
fairly with these dangerous new realities. We cannot simply wait until the
son of Zahra Maladan -- and the sons and daughters of hundreds of others
like her -- decide to follow his mother's demand. We must stop them before
they export their sick and dangerous culture of death to our shores.
Mr. Dershowitz teaches law at Harvard University and is the author of
"Finding Jefferson" (Wiley, 2007).
3. A peace plan:

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3515250,00.html






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