Crusader War College

This is a slightly edited version of the comment I made at Rantburg at the link. Warning, Aris Katsaris hijacked it with his typical looniness.

Time for an "in-your-face" observation, it appears.

The biblical promise to Abraham has been that those who would curse his descendants would be cursed, and those who would bless his descendants would be blessed. Consider the rapid rise and persistence of American power, both military and economic, since the recognition of Israel by Truman in 1948, and continued support until this day, compared to the decline of Europe and the persistent vegetative state of the entire Arabic world whose hatred for Jews (now proxied by hatred for "zionism", which is merely Jews in their country defending themselves, rather than trusting those who consider Jews to be commodities only good for political barter). At the same time, one wonders if the 60s was divine blowback for shafting the Israelis when we sided with Nasser in the 1956 War.

I would say QED, but the proof is only good to those who hold to a judaeo-christian belief of how the world works. Thus, I shall try a different tack.

The decision to be made is whether to support the Israeli Jews in the creation of an explicit Jewish State, or to support the palestinians in creating a temporarily secular state that will inevitably morph into a Muslim State. The odds of it turning out to be more like Turkey than, say, Pakistan, are not good. In fact, they're abysmal: the demonstrated incompetence of Fatah/Hamas as functional governments "serving the people" is a case in point. An analysis of casualty populations refutes the "both sides are morally equvalent" argument: The casualties of Palestinian attacks are mostly women and children, while the casualties of the IDF are young males of fighting age. One would not call the IDF immoral for the occasional death of a civilian any more than one would call Palestinian terrorists moral for the occasional death of an Israeli soldier. The perponderance of the evidence points to a serious Israeli attempt to adhere to Geneva Conventions requirements, as well as a serious flouting of those same conventions on the part of the Palestinians. The patent excuse that the Israeli draft makes the children into "potential soldiers" makes a mockery of what it means to make ethical choices. It also violates the geneva conventions, whose intent is to protect people who are CURRENTLY civilians, and which makes explicit distinctions between legal insurgents and the supportive population within which they operate.

More pertinently, nobody has any authority to issue indulgences for GC violations, since no indulgences are allowed by the conventions. The silence of the conventions in the event of violation is often used as an argument for continued adherence despite violations, but a suicide pact is not a moral document. And if one is inclined to be worried about the rule of law, one should equally worry about the criminals who violate the law than the good citizens who keep it most of the time.

The only GOOD reason for supporting the Palestinians is that it garners Arab support, which means that the oil keeps flowing.

The GOOD reasons for supporting the Israelis is that they are a modern Western nation-state, with a functional judiciary system which has demonstratably shown an ability to override military/government considerations with regard to the Security Wall. I do not think those overridings to be particularly intelligent, but the fact that the Israeli Judiciary has more power over its government in its little finger than every Arab/Muslim Judiciary in the entire world says volumes. Moreover, this is a free people whose technological prowess, on a per capita basis, is far and away the highest in the world.

Thus, the motivation behind the choice of favoring the Palestinians is, based on a physical natural resource. In short, it IS "all about the oil".

The motivation behind the choice of favoring the Israelis is based on qualities of harmony and compatibility between us and them in the fields of the mind (technology and science) and spirit (governance, religion, culture).

To paraphrase a certain sage: Those who love the things of the flesh will support those who give them things of the flesh, while those who love the things of the spirit will support those to give them things of the spirit.

So who, REALLY, is the spiritual people, and who are the materialists, as revealed by their CHOICES, and not their RHETORIC?