Sunday, August 21, 2011
More RRH
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THE ROCKET BLITZ
By: Steven Plaut
Date: Wednesday, December 06 2006
A fascinating question of history is what might have happened
had Neville Chamberlain not resigned in May 1940 but continued on as
British prime minister, with Winston Churchill never taking command.
What would have happened during the blitz as bombs and rockets
exploded all over London, killing and maiming men, women and children?
After careful consideration, the following is a virtual history
of the London blitz without Churchill:
As the rockets begin to land and explode around London,
Chamberlain announces that he recognizes the German Reich and the
right of Germany to set up its own state in areas released from Czech
and Polish occupation. Britain appeals to Hitler to arrest those
enemies of peace who are launching rockets at London. Chamberlain
appeals to the political leaders of the Reich to denounce the rocket
terror and begin negotiations to end the attacks.
Hitler insists he is trying his best to stop the violence but is
having trouble controlled the radicals who have taken over the German
parliament. The British foreign minister agrees. To help calm the
situation, the British government agrees to send food and medicine to
Germany. The RAF targets and assassinates some Luftwaffe pilots and
base personnel, but several German civilians are killed; Britain is
denounced for this by the international community and by the British
Labor Party.
Hitler speaks at a large rally in Nuremberg and exhorts the
masses to remember the martyred German pilots who were killed while
dropping bombs on London, and to strive to continue their mission.
Chamberlain praises Hitler's speech for exhibiting moderation and
restraint. He begins sending small arms to the Germans to help control
the anti-peace German underground opposition groups.
During a lull in the bombings, Chamberlain makes a speech in
which he says he is more concerned about the invasion of Britain by
Hollywood movies than he is by buzz bombs (to be echoed decades later
in an Oslo-era speech by Shimon Peres, in which Peres would say he is
far more worried about the infiltration into Israel of cable
television than the infiltration of terrorists).
When more bombs explode, the calls increase inside Britain to
strike back at Germany. The British Union for German Human rights
denounces this as racism and bigotry.
Chamberlain points out that massive retaliation would be the very
worst option possible. Britain must endeavor to make peace with its
German peace partners, not feed the fires of hatred. This is the only
way to achieve a New Middle Europe, he insists. And besides, if Hitler
is not supported and strengthened, an even more radical and violent
leader will emerge in Germany.
As more rockets fall, Chamberlain points out that the dead are
simply martyrs for peace and Britain must carry on with its peace
process, since there is no alternative. A pro-German member of the
British parliament travels to Berlin and calls for Britain's
annihilation. Chamberlain allows Oswald Mosley's fascist party to run
in the election. Mosley's people exercise hegemony over the British
universities and the media.
After more rockets explode, Chamberlain loses his temper and
decides to take action at last. He assigns extra police to guard the
Underground stations in London. He orders British critics of his peace
process to be arrested for criminal incitement against the government,
accusing the critics of undermining peace efforts and endangering
security. Chamberlain meets with British antiwar poets and writers and
they issue an appeal to the British public to remain firm in the face
of adversity and continue to strive for peace. Stiff British upper lip
and all that.
Chamberlain again appeals to President Hitler, as the legitimate
leader of the Teutonic peoples, to arrest those responsible for the
rocket aggressions. But he reminds British citizens that the
unbearable alternative to negotiations with the Reich would be to send
British soldiers back into the territories of Central Europe. Teams of
pro-German professors from British universities tour the world
demanding a boycott of all commerce and trade with Britain.
More rockets land. Chamberlain proposes speeding up the peace
process and disarming the Royal Navy as a show of good will. The
representatives of Vichy France come for a state visit, congratulating
Chamberlain and the British and German peoples for their devotion to
peace in the face of provocation.
Some more rockets land. Chamberlain proposes, as a retaliatory
measure, arresting some ethnic German pro-Nazi spies inside Britain,
but British civil rights lawyers appeal to the Court of Appeals and
the ruling is overturned. The government considers proposals to turn
Stonehenge over to the Germans as a goodwill gesture, since it is a
holy shrine for all pagans.
Even more rockets land. The British Peace Now movement notes
that there would be no violence at all if the British would just
disarm altogether and stop making Hitler feel insecure. Besides, they
say, the British should not be occupying Scotland and Wales at all,
lands in which they don't belong. Chamberlain opens secret
negotiations with Germany to transfer London's East End, Greenwich and
Docklands areas to German sovereignty.
Many more rockets land. That's it, yells Chamberlain. The
proverbial camel's back is broken. It is time to fight German terror
with all means at our disposal. This is the Moral Equivalent Of War,
he yells - MEOW, for short. There is no alternative.
We must, he declares, initiate talks with Germany at once so that
we can conduct unilateral withdrawal as quickly as possible from Devon
and the Midlands.
2. The return of RRH
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ISRAEL'S RRH DOCTRINE REVISITED
By: Steven Plaut
Date: Wednesday, March 05 2008
Back in the fall of 2005 I wrote, in an Internet article responding
to one of the early rounds of rocket attacks on Sderot from Gaza
following Israel's "disengagement" from the area:
"The PLO and its affiliates now have all the freedom they need to
upgrade their rockets. The new, improved Kassam rockets will be able
to hit Ashkelon from Gaza. Sharon's Gaza capitulation will turn the
Negev town of Sderot into Israel's Stalingrad."
This past week that prediction became fact. Ashkelon became the next
victim of the Sharon-Olmert strategy of defeating the terrorists by
waiting for them to run out of ammunition. The Olmert government is
suddenly upset that Ashkelon was hit by Hamas GRUD rockets and is
meowing that this really is intolerable and crosses all the red lines.
Translation: firing thousands of rockets into Sderot and turning it
into the Israeli Guernica is tolerable and was never crossing red
lines because who cares about those backward, religious Moroccan
blue-collar workers in Sderot?
Olmert's people are saying that if the blitz on Ashkelon does not
end, Israel will hit back really, really hard. Of course Israel has
been making empty threats to hit back really, really, hard for more
than two decades. It did send some troops into Gaza in response to the
latest atrocities, but it was much too little, much too late. Only a
comedian would consider it to be hitting back really, really hard.
I've long suspected that it is the Israeli grand strategy to defeat
the Palestinians by forcing them to laugh themselves to death. That
seems to be the only possible way to understand the latest
resuscitation of the RRH Doctrine, which has dominated Israeli policy
toward the Palestinians and the Arab states since the early 1990's.
The RRH Doctrine was invented in the early days of Oslo. Israeli
governments would make deals to hand over most of the West Bank and
Gaza Strip to the PLO, while reassuring Israelis that there was no
reason for worry - if the Palestinians misbehaved, Israel would hit
back at them. Really, Really Hard.
The Boy Who Cried Wolf was a far more credible strategist.
Even if, perchance, anyone ever took the RRH threats seriously, by
the mid-1990's RRH was little more than a long-running standup shtick.
Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres had threatened it during the early days
of Oslo. Later, after each successive act of terrorism, Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu would loudly invoke RRH, but did little, if
anything, to retaliate.
After Netanyahu came Ehud Barak, who also threatened RRH regularly.
But his only implementation of it consisted of chopper attacks on
empty Palestinian buildings - and only after the PLO was given advance
notification so that all humans and terrorists could be evacuated.
RRH was also used by a series of Israeli prime ministers to threaten
Hizbullah in Lebanon and their Syrian puppet masters. After each
Hizbullah attack on Israeli towns or forces, Israel threatened the
most serious RRH. But in the end, the only action taken was a
panicked, unilateral withdrawal from southern Lebanon, which left
Hizbullah sitting smack on Israel's border with thousands of its
rockets aimed at northern Israel.
Almost as old as the RRH Doctrine is the
Who-Could-Have-Ever-Predicted-THAT Syndrome. Since Oslo, every new
Israeli concession has resulted in escalated Palestinian violence. And
each time the Israeli chattering classes would sigh and ask, "Who
could have possibly foreseen this?"
Israel's media and intellectual elite could not foresee any failures
stemming from the Oslo capitulations and appeasements because the
media and universities are by and large occupied territories of
Israel's radical left. The answer to the rhetorical question "Who
could have foreseen the failures of Oslo?" is "Anyone not blinded by
ideology."
Predicting that cowardice in the face of rocket attacks on Sderot
would lead to similar attacks on Ashkelon hardly required the
prophetic skills of a Jeremiah.
A few weeks after the handshake on the White House lawn in 1993, I
wrote my first article predicting the complete failure of the
Rabin-Peres Oslo initiative. I said the PLO would simply use any
territory turned over to it by Israel to build a terror infrastructure
and launch attacks on Israel. I wrote of future rocket attacks and
sniper fire against Israeli towns from the Palestinian-controlled
areas years before they actually began in earnest. And I was hardly
alone in 20/20 foresight.
Let's give the Arabs some credit. Israel has made so many threats of
RRH since the Oslo "peace process" began that a Palestinian leader
would have to be learning disabled to take any of them seriously. If I
consider them a joke, why should Abu Mazen and the Hamas leaders take
any of them seriously?
The fast incursion that killed a few dozen terrorists in Gaza this
week will hardly make a difference.
The Palestinians know what we all know: Olmert is afraid to take the
only action that, in the end, can end the shooting of Kassam rockets
into Israeli homes: R&D - Reoccupation and Denazification.
