From the headlines

Israel being held to impossible standards
By Charles Krauthammer
Washington: What other country, when attacked in an unprovoked aggression acorss a recognized international frontier is then put on a countdown clock by the world, given a limited time window in which to fight back, regardless of whether it has restored its own security?
What other country sustains 1500 indiscriminate rocket attacks into its cities- every one designed to kill, maim, and terrorize civilians- and is then villified by the world when it tries to destroy the enemy's infrastructure and strongholds with precision-guided munitions that sometimes have the unintended byt unavoidable consequences of collateral civilian death and suffering?
Hearing the world pass judgment on the Israel-Hezbollah war as it unfolds is to live in an Orwellian moral universe. With a few significant expections (US, UK, Australia, Canada and a very few others) the world- governments, media, UN bureaucrats- has completely lost its moral bearings.
The world that obviates all thinking and magically inverts victim into aggressor is "disproportionate" as in the universally decried "disproportionate Israeli response."
When the US was attacked at Pearl Harbour, it did not respond with a parallel "proportionate" attack on a Japanese naval base.
It launched a 4 yr campaign that killed millions of Japanese, reduced Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki to cinder, and turned the Japanese home island into rubble and ruin. Disproportionate? No. When one is wantonly attacked by an aggressor, one has every right- legal and moral- to carry the fight until the aggressor is disarmed and so disabled tat it cannot threaten one's security again. That's what it took with Japan.
Britain was never invaded by Germany in the 2nd World War. Did it respond to the blitz and V-1 and V-2 rockets with "proportionate" aerial bombardment of Germany? Of course not, Churchill orchestrated the greatest land invasion in history, which flattened and utterly destroyed Germany, killing untold innocent German women and children in the process.
The perversity of today's international outcry lies in the fact that there is indeed a disproportion in this war, a radical moral assymetry between Hezbollah and Israel: Hezbollah is deliberately trying to create civilian casualities on both sides while Israel is deliberately trying to minimize civilian casualities, also on both sides.
In perhaps the most blatant terror campaign from th eair since the London blitz, Hezbollah is raining rockets on Israeli citities and villages.
These rockets are packed wih ball bearings that can penetrate automobiles and shred human flesh. The are meant to kill and maim. And they do.
But it is a dual campaign. Israeli innocents must die in order to Israel to be terrorized. But Lebanese innocents must also die in order for Israel to be demonized, which is why Hezbollah hides its fighters, its rockets, its launchers- its entire infrastructure- among civilians. Creating human shields is a war crime. It is also a Hezbollah specialty....
Israel's response to Hezbollah has been to use the most precise weaponry and targeting it can. It has not interest, no desire to kill Lebanese civilians. Does anyone imagine that it could not have levelled southern Lebanon, to say nothing of Beirut? Instead, in the bitter fight against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, it has repeatedly dropped leaflets and sent messages by radio and even phone text to Lebanese villagers telling them to evacuate so teh would not be harmed.
Israel knows these leaflets and warnings give the Hezbollah fighters time to escape and regroup. The advance notification as to where the next attack is coming has allowed Hezbollah to set up elaborate ambushes. The result: Unexpectedly high Israeli infantry casaulties. Moral scrupulousness paid in blood. Israeli soldiers die so Lebanese civilans will not. And who does the international community condemn for disregarding civilian life?