According to the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson, the “unrestrained Israeli response threatens to make an iconic hero of Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah.” Maybe Nasrallah’s threatening to become a hero in some people’s eyes, but he’s still a terrorist in mine–and it’s absurd to suggest that we shouldn’t go after terrorists because that might make them more popular in some quarters.
What seems to be more important to Robinson are the pictures of weeping grandmothers and the tourist industry. While it’s understandable that tourism might be on Robinson’s mind (he’s just returned from vacation, we learn), there seem to be more substantative things to worry about in the region–like, say, stopping Hezbollah from firing rockets into Israel.
Does Robinson think America would allow its neighbors to fire rockets across the border with abandon? Or, to ask a question that may hit closer to home, does Robinson think that America would have a booming tourist industry if the major U.S. cities were commonly hit with random RPGs? Robinson talks of “proportionate” military response without describing what that might look like.
It’s easy to talk of peacful responses and cease-fires–this is the conventional liberal response to any conflict–but this worldview doesn’t work when dealing with an organization or group of people whose sole purpose is to destroy every Jew–man, woman, and child.