With this Posting, GraniteGrok is happy to welcome Bob M! We have enjoyed his Letters to the Editor in the local papers for a while now as they have been factually based and logically written. He will be seen here, hopefully, more than occasionally.
Thanks Bob! -Skip
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Concerning the response by Israel to the terrorist attacks by Hezbollah, there is much talk about “proportionality”. By definition, proportionality means that the relationship of one thing to another will remain the same, even as things change. In current terms, some are asking that the capabilities of Hezbollah be the same after this war, as they were before they kidnapped Israeli soldiers and indiscriminately fired literally thousands of rockets into Israeli cities. Pure pooh!
Since its rebirth in 1947, the people of Israel have had to fight against people who have continually initiated and waged war against them.
Their neighbors have repeatedly tried to deny their existence. When their all out war attempts failed, Israel’s foes turned to terrorism. Now, powerful nations, Iran and Syria in this case, have turned over thousands of sophisticated weapons to radical Muslim terrorists in the hope that they can hasten the “end times”; armageddon. Israel is responding in an effort to save its national, religious, and personal existence, and people calling for proportionality are asking that they not go so far as to destroy the ability of Hezbollah to wage war against them. Again, pure pooh!
Let’s look as proportionality. First, size. Using 2003 census data, the nation of Israel occupies slightly over twenty thousand square kilometers, it’s very similar in size to the State of New Hampshire. By comparison, Israel’s neighbor, Jordan, occupies almost five times the space, Iran eighty times as much, Egypt, fifty times, and so on. If we look at the land mass of eight of Israel’s closest neighbors, we find that those states have over six and a half million square kilometers of space, three hundred and twenty five times as much as Israel. It must be noted, that those nations do not want proportionality, they want Israel to be eliminated. True enough, the small space Israel occupies has enormous historical and religious significance, but Israel been a good shepherd of the land and its treasures.
Next, people. There are over two billion, one hundred million Christians in the world, over one billion three hundred million Muslims, and nine hundred million Hindus. How many Jews in the world? The best estimates range between fourteen and seventeen million. Proportionality would dictate that those ratios remain essentially the same but the Iranian/Syrian backed Hezbollah want to make the Jewish population zero. Is that proportionality? More like David vs. Goliath and the hand wringers are asking David not to hurt poor Goliath.
As noted above, there are between fourteen and seventeen million Jews in the world; four to six million of them are in Israel. The estimated number of Jews in the world prior to World War II was about sixteen and a half million; about what the high estimate of the world wide Jewish population is today. At the end of the great war, the estimate was fourteen million. Birth rates are determined by women, more so than men, and the murder of young Jewish women during the holocaust has contributed significantly to the low population growth. By comparison, the nation of Ireland has just under four million people. However, people in the United States claiming to be of Irish descent number over thirty million. Of course, and thankfully, the Irish weren’t exterminated during WW II.
The issue needs to be restated. It is not proportionality, it is irrationality. It is not rational for over a billion people to feel that fourteen to seventeen million people should be denied their right to life and their right to live in peace. It is not rational for nation states to simply shrug their shoulders to the “Jewish problem”, particularly when many of those nations owe their very existence to others who came to their aid in the past. To be sure, those nations did not utter the word “proportionality” in an effort to hold back the destructive capabilities of the Allies against the Axis. It is not rational for those occupying millions of square kilometers of land to want to deny Jews a paltry twenty thousand square kilometers of their land. It is not rational to carry a hatred for thousands of years. Who can tell the original reason for such hatred? It is not rational to expect that any country should have to fight for their survival on every day of their existence. It is not rational to expect children to be at risk in school or at play.
Proportionality? Pooh! Let’s have some rationality
