Palestinian paternalism gives their barbarity a pass

Steve Huntley:

The 40th anniversary of Israel's lightning victory achieved in six days of war finds the Jewish state struggling through the seventh year of a terrorist war unleashed by Yasser Arafat in 2000. A quick victory as in 1967 has eluded Israel for the simple reason that then the Arab world hurled armies at Israel, while now the Palestinian terrorists' weapon of choice has been the civilian, most gruesomely in the men, women and teenagers recruited to be suicide bombers.

Most of the time civilians are employed as cannon fodder, human shields behind which the terrorists of Hamas, the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, Islamic Jihad and other criminal gangs plot murder, dispatch "militants" to kill seniors, women and children, launch rockets at Israeli villages, then fade into the crowd to escape reprisals.

The rocket attacks are what preoccupies the Israelis these days. In only two weeks, Palestinian terrorists have fired more than 250 primitive Qassam rockets from the Gaza Strip into Israel, aiming principally for the town of Sderot. Two people have been killed. Others have been wounded, many temporarily evacuated and probably all of them traumatized by the terror of any moment being shattered by an incoming rocket.

Israel is constantly warned by the likes of the European Parliament not to react "disproportionately" to Palestinian violence, without anyone ever quite defining what would be proportionate.

It seems logical that in the current crisis that a proportionate response would be for the Israelis to return the fire in the same manner they are suffering it, i.e., launch rockets toward the Gaza Strip. But the Israelis won't resort with this form of retaliation because their society won't tolerate the deliberate targeting of civilians.

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On Wednesday Britain's largest academic trade union voted to endorse a boycott of universities in Israel because of the "Israeli academe's cooperation with the occupation." Of all the despotic regimes in the Middle East and in the face of continuing Palestinian targeting of civilians, the Palestinian kidnapping of a British journalist and the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, the British academics single out Israel -- it sounds like something out of the satirical Onion newspaper.

While some of the Brits fretted that their deliberations might seem anti-Semitic, no one apparently questioned their attitude toward the Palestinians. Not holding them to the same civilized code that the Israelis are reeks of paternalism, evoking the racially tinged attitude of empire that the denizens of the colonies just couldn't be expected to attain the high example of Europeans.

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Academic trade unions are suspect to begin with, this action proves they are irrational. They should be condemning the inhumane conduct of the Palestinians that has kept them in a situation where they cam blame their incompetence on an "occupation" that does not exist in Gaza from where the rockets are launched. The bankruptcy of reason on this issue explains in part the failure of the British education system. These guys are not very smart, but then neither are the Palestinians.