Like Lemmings....

Friday morning I stood at the edge of Hell. I visited Thersienstadt. I will need more time to digest the experience, much less write about it. On one level, though, Caroline Glick has saved me writing from one angle:

Column One: Israel's premeditated market failure

Caroline Glick
, THE JERUSALEM POST May. 31, 2006

...Events on the northern front and in Gaza over the past few days demonstrated that Israelis are denied a free flow of accurate information regarding their national security. On Monday, Ha'aretz reported darkly, "Iran has transferred to Lebanon rockets that reach Beersheba." The report stated that the Iranians recently provided their proxy Hizbullah with Zelzal-2 rockets capable of hitting every major city in Israel.Yet while this report is true, it is neither startling nor earth-shaking for anyone who has been closely observing developments in south Lebanon over the past few years. The recent shipment of Zelzal missiles does not constitute a departure from well-formed Iranian, Syrian or Hizbullah policy patterns.The first time that a shipment of Iranian Zelzal rockets to Hizbullah was reported was in early 2003. Just as this week it took the media one day to forget about this Zelzal shipment, in 2003, the reports received almost no attention. At the time the Israeli media and the government were busy convincing the Israeli public to support the road map which was then being written by Yossi Beilin and Tony Blair.Like the 2003 report before it, the meaning of this week's report is clear. Iran today is perched on Israel's northern border.Against the backdrop of Iran's nuclear weapons program and its ballistic missiles capabilities, Iran's presence on the northern border dramatically impacts Israel's national security posture. If before the IDF's withdrawal from southern Lebanon in May 2000 Hizbullah and its state sponsor constituted a challenging, bloody tactical threat to Israel, today they are a strategic threat. In short, this week's story about the Zelzal missile shipment reveals what a terrible mistake Israel's retreat from south Lebanon was.But the Israel media - which was the engine behind the Barak government's decision to retreat from south Lebanon six years ago - have no interest in informing the public of the magnitude of its error. So rather than provide any context for Sunday's Katyusha rocket attacks on northern Israel, our media luminaries argued among themselves about irrelevancies such as whether the Iranian puppet Islamic Jihad or the Iranian puppet Hizbullah fired the rockets on Sunday morning.If the media had any interest in serving their primary function of informing the Israeli public about its current situation, they could ask why Israel is sitting back and allowing Hizbullah to acquire the means to attack all of Israel's major cities. If we know that the missiles were delivered, why didn't we blow them up at the airport or in their silos?Since the 1950s, Israel's military doctrine has dictated that the IDF is responsible for ensuring that our enemies do not acquire the means to cause us strategic damage. This was the rationale that stood behind the Sinai Campaign in 1956, the Six Day War in 1967, the strike at the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak in 1981 and countless other operations throughout the years.But rather than receiving context or meaningful debate, the public is fed a diet of empty-headed drivel. Our media know-it-alls idiotically inform us that far more IDF soldiers were killed in Lebanon when the IDF was deployed in Lebanon than have been killed in Lebanon since the IDF withdrew from Lebanon. No one bothers to explain that in the future many more soldiers will likely be killed in Lebanon to neutralize the strategic threats that have emerged in that area because soldiers who prevented the Lebanese tactical challenge from becoming the current strategic threat were removed from the country six years ago.