OK, I Know Nothing But...

Right now, there's a bit of a war of sorts between Israel, Hizbollah (or Hezbollah), and Hamas. Or that is what many enlightened individuals would like to think the war is just between. France is mad at Israel for hitting back and so is just about everyone else in the modern world. But really, everyone in the modern world is always mad at Israel. Anyway, here are a few interesting tidbits that I've come across that actually, if they are accurate tidbits, clearly point the direction this war is moving in unless diplomacy is able to end it now. The war is moving on to Syria and then perhaps Iran because Lebanon seems to be a somewhat of an innocent player caught in the crossfire because their greatest crime seems to be that they have been a strong terrorist stronghold :

First, from Right Truth :

Columnist Mark Steyn, a personal favorite of mine, was on the Hugh Hewitt Show yesterday and had the following to say about people that refuse to consider the Israeli/Palestinian situation a conflict of radical Islam.

MS: I think it is one war. You know, I think we forget how much of the present depravity derives from the Palestinian situation. Going back to 1971, the Palestinians assassinated this guy in an Egyptian hotel. They shoot him dead in the lobby, and as he falls to the parquet, the guys who killed him rushed forward and start drinking his blood. You know, a lot of the death cults started in this...with this particular situation, and it is metastasized, and I think it is one war. And that's the difficulty that Christopher Hitchens and Tony Blair and people like that have, that they can't...they're on the right side...you can't be on the right said [sic] against Islamism everywhere but Gaza and the West Bank.

HH: But they never wanted to believe, and I sense that in the Hitchens interview yesterday. He does not want to believe it is Islamism, because if it is, then the die is cast. It's more about oh, the poor Palestinians and the two state solution. But the two state solution, Israel would gladly accept, it's the Islamists don't want it.

Now from Tim Blair :

“Why is this Arab-Israeli war different from all other Arab-Israeli wars?” asks William Kristol. “Because it’s not an Arab-Israeli war.” More:

Most of Israel’s traditional Arab enemies have checked out of the current conflict. The governments of Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia are, to say the least, indifferent to the fate of Hamas and Hezbollah. The Palestine Liberation Organization (Fatah) isn’t a player. The prime mover behind the terrorist groups who have started this war is a non-Arab state, Iran, which wasn’t involved in any of Israel’s previous wars.

What’s happening in the Middle East, then, isn’t just another chapter in the Arab-Israeli conflict. What’s happening is an Islamist-Israeli war.

Now from Right Truth :

India made the nation's strongest accusatory statement this morning since the train bombings in Mumbai when it accused "elements accross the border [ed. Pakistan]" of the attack.

"We are also certain that these terrorist modules are instigated, inspired and supported by elements across the border without which they cannot act with such devastating effect," he said.

"Pakistan in 2004 had solemnly given an assurance that Pakistani territory will not be used to promote, encourage, train and abet terrorist elements directed against India," said Singh. "That assurance has to be fulfilled before the peace process or other processes can make progress."

Now from Daniel Pipes :

"Enough now with this turning the other cheek! It's our duty to protect ourselves." Thus spoke Monsignor Velasio De Paolis, secretary of the Vatican's supreme court, referring to Muslims. Explaining his apparent rejection of Jesus' admonition to his followers to "turn the other cheek," De Paolis noted that "The West has had relations with the Arab countries for half a century … and has not been able to get the slightest concession on human rights."

De Paolis is hardly alone in his thinking; indeed, the Catholic Church is undergoing a dramatic shift from a decades-old policy to protect Catholics living under Muslim rule. The old methods of quiet diplomacy and muted appeasement have clearly failed. The estimated 40 million Christians in Dar al-Islam, notes the Barnabas Fund's Patrick Sookhdeo, increasingly find themselves an embattled minority facing economic decline, dwindling rights, and physical jeopardy. Most of them, he goes on, are despised and distrusted second-class citizens, facing discrimination in education, jobs, and the courts.

These harsh circumstances are causing Christians to flee their ancestral lands for the West's more hospitable environment. Consequently, Christian populations of the Muslim world are in a free-fall. Two small but evocative instances of this pattern: for the first time in nearly two millennia, Nazareth and Bethlehem no longer have Christian majorities.

This reality of oppression and decline stands in dramatic contrast to the surging Muslim minority of the West. Although numbering fewer than 20 million and made up mostly of immigrants and their offspring, it is an increasingly established and vocal minority, granted extensive rights and protections even as it wins new legal, cultural, and political prerogatives.

This widening disparity has caught the attention of the Church, which for the first time is pointing to radical Islam, rather than the actions of Israel, as the central problem facing Christians living with Muslims.

Here, from Catholic World News via The Gates of Vienna blog :

The Holy See has protested Israel's air raids on Lebanon, condemning both terrorist acts and reprisals that violate national sovereignty and strike at innocent civilians...

...Cardinal Sodano said that the Holy Father was carefully following news of the latest developments in the Middle East, "which risk degenerating into a conflict with international repercussions."

"As in the past, the Holy See also condemns both the terrorist attacks on the one side and the military reprisals on the other," he continued." He argued that Israel's right to self-defense "does not exempt it from respecting the norms of international law, especially as regards the protection of civilian populations."

"In particular," the statement continued, "the Holy See deplores the attack on Lebanon, a free and sovereign nation."

Now from Egyptian blogger who helped bring to light the falsehoods behind the Danish Cartoon insults, Rantings of A Sandmonkey via Right Truth :

Me, personally? I am not sure who to root for, because even though I hate Hezbollah I think Israel is full of shit for not attacking Syria instead. They know that this is where the orders and the supplies come from. It's why they hit the lebanese-syrian Highway: to prevent the supplies from coming in.

Now, from The Gates of Vienna :

Ambassabor John Bolton at the UN : ...We have repeatedly made clear to Lebanon and Syria our serious concern about the presence of terrorist groups on their soil and the periodic attacks against Israel from groups and individuals in southern Lebanon.

All militias in Lebanon, including Hizballah, must disarm and disband immediately and the Lebanese government must extend and exercise its sole and exclusive control over all Lebanese territory.

President Bush has made clear that Syria and Iran must be held to account for supporting regional terrorism and their role in the current crisis. Syria provides safe haven to the militant wing of Hamas and provides material support to Hizballah, which also maintains an active presence in Syria. Iran’s extensive sponsorship and financial and other support of Hizballah is well known and has been ongoing for decades. No reckoning with Hizballah will be adequate without a reckoning with its principal state sponsors of terror.

We call on Syria and Iran to cease their sponsorship and support of terrorist groups, in particular Hizballah and Hamas. For the third time in two weeks, we again call on Syria to arrest Hamas leader Khaled Meshal, who cWe calurrently lives in Damascus. There is no excuse for a member state of the United Nations to continue to knowingly harbor a recognized terrorist...

Now, one more time from Right Truth :

BREAKING: According to Fox News, reported by the Jerusalem Post, Syria has said they will come to the aid of the Lebanese people. It is unclear if this is military aid or not. Is this the prelude to an all-out war?

Action:

The US warned Damascus and Tehran [That would be John Bolton's statement at the UN security counsel this morning] that they would be held accountable for their role in the crisis and insisted that Israel had the right to defend itself. But it called on Israel to minimise civilian casualties. Five more people were killed in Lebanon, bringing the toll since Wednesday to 60.

Reaction:

"The Syrian people are ready to extend full support to the Lebanese people and their heroic resistance to remain steadfast and confront the barbaric Israeli aggression and its crimes," said a communique from the party's national command issued after a meeting.

Mrs. P

Comments

[James G. Poulos]

Where does one begin? The gears of the world are grinding. Important rules instead are impotent to coerce or constrain the conduct of nations. Lebanon is a failed state. Syria is the bonnie king of failed states, a fraud in every manner but in meeting the minimum requirements of sovereign function. And Vladimir Putin is occasionally correct.

We are stepping through the looking glass; the answers we seek inhere in an international order which has been putzed right out of serviceability since the one-two punch of Suez and Hungary. Now no longer is it unserviceable, it is illegitimate, too.

The marks are everywhere. Russia might belong in a group of nations that numbers eight but only by a stretch of official silliness does it belong in the G8. This is awkward because Russia is the most important nation, to the West, on planet Earth. Israel is to be supported in its defenses and not in its offenses. For whom has that ever not been true? The Arab world is in a state of cultural and political apoplexy. Only selling oil works. The Chinese moan at that fossilized and eternally poisonous porcupine quill stuck in the toe. Everywhere is unintended compromise and untoward frustration.

What is to be made of the Open War in this wretched soured light? My groping and reaching through the dusk puts the fingers to an awful but decreasingly negotiable conclusion: Syria is doomed. Syria is Italy 1938. Syria is rotten. Syria is complicit, in a manner, yes, that even Iran is not. Syria is, really, despicable and false in a way Iran is not. Syria peels back the mask on the bankruptcy of the international order in a way even venerable, distressed, ambitious, ignoble, fevered, brilliant, bunkered, brutal Iran does not and cannot.

With Iran, we reap something not of our world. This demands a certain respect (yes) and indeed it has received that respect. With Syria, we reap the ruin and filth of the worst of the West, grown brittle and cliqued in the dead soil of Damascus. We reap phony borders and bogus statehood. Syria is entombed in the same rancid amber containing the zombie state of North Korea. And this is the hungover morning of the dead.

[Mrs. Peperium]

Reality is our friend and Mr. Poulos, you are aquainted with much more reality than I am with these affairs. I can't help but think there is a tipping point going on here. I don't think Hezbollah wanted war, I think they just wanted to mess with Israel. Unfortunately for them and their allies, like Syria and Iran, Israel was not as weak as they perceived it to be after Sharon's stroke and et al. Now, they've committed themselves and they've got their crazy mullahs and their illiterate goons swearing to fight to the death in return for their 72 perpetual virgins naturally, and Hezbollah can't just simply say oopsie- we'll return those soldiers with their uniforms nicley pressed... or the cries of infidels will go up from their followers and it's orange jumpsuit and sharpened sabar time for the leaders. Just look at what Judas did to Jesus when Jesus did not turn out to be the zealot Judas perceived him to be. So Hezbollah must fight on eventhough they are horriby outgunned and outmanned. They are a suicide death cult operation taking on a highly competent, women soldiers and all army with nuclear-tipped missiles. This is sheer tactical madness! If a Hezbollah strike hit Israeli death paydirt, all bets are off and Hezbollah's allies must join in. Then I think we might even have to pony up to the bar along with England, Australia and whoever else. England had better pony up becuase isn't this mess their fault since they the ones who drew these false boundry lines in the sand back before 1920 or so?
As for how we individually are supposed to respond during all of this, prayers are good and we should also take a bit of advice from those in the region; http://www.sandmonkey.org/2006/07/16/in-praise-of-the-human-spirit/ - keep scrolling down.

[Mrs. Peperium]

BTW, did you see Father Neuhaus' piece on Phillip Rieff ;
http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=300

Mulligatawny is one of my most favorite soups. Let me know if you need a recipe.

[James G. Poulos]

Yes. This, I think, is the nut: “You believe because you think it’s good for you, not because of anything inherent in the belief. I think that the orthodox are in the miserable situation of being orthodox for therapeutic reasons.” I would propose this is both true and necessarily so. Religion -- in its controlling as well as remissive modes -- has always had therapeutic value, and in good faith, too, has religion found compelling and often dangerous vibrance. But how today, in the most self-selfconscious time on Earth, can anyone fend off awareness of the practical value of one's own pose? We have raised awareness to the absurd height -- the point of awareness awareness. And what honest churchgoer, after all, especially after the cruel lessons of religiosity past, wants to selfconsciously do something knowingly bad for him or for her?

The trick I think is that the prevailing notion of "bad" itself is in error -- in a way that leaps beyond Nietzsche's own beyond of superable goods and evils. Even Nietzsche would say our mere bads outnumber our goods. Shame was to be eliminated as an impediment to greatness, not low-rent license. Among our mistaken notions of health, the worst may be that reticences and deprivations are illnesses -- that repression of self is unjust, cruel, rudely unnecessary. In fact -- and this is something some churches still do well -- one example of the health of reticence is the vital community training of ritually manipulated and maintained distance between individuals. Geographically local social order is necessary to the grooming of the civilized, who learn together when and when not to approach, interact, draw near. The formal structure of reticent intimacies is something that churchgoing, I should say, can help teach expertly.

But, of course, to have churchliness in the new style this would all go out the window, both physically and emotionally. One of the costs of selfconscious therapy is that the therapeutic is mounted in bad faith; we know what is happening as it happens, we cannot get far enough outside ourselves to inhabit ourselves in peace. Therapy with a bad conscience is selfishness put on as a group grope stage show. The ritual formality of distance is destroyed on the cheap. That this loss wounds is not so for the selfish reasons of therapeutic well-being, but for those of well social order itself.

Now about that recipe: my own darling might be persuaded to whip up some mulligatawny, to be served, I'd bet, appropriately near a glass of Amontillado.

[Mrs. Peperium]

Again Mr. Poulos you've got the gears in my brain going around. I'll be back later on this as I give it some serious - well as serious as I can give- thought to it. You have, probably knowingly, hit on something very large.

As for the Mulligatawny - since you live in an area with excellent I'll also post the recipe with the all of the trimmings like tamarind extract and coconut milk. Like Father Neuhaus said; great fun.