Home » Politics & Society » Middle East Politics » Hide the Women and Children

Hide the Women and Children

© lawhawk

Throughout the Intifada and the current terrorist campaign by Palestinians against the Israelis, we in the West have seen a very disturbing trend. Palestinians who are often killed or injured by confrontations with the Israelis are young men or children.

While those in the West would take Israel to task for the deaths of those individuals, Israel would remind the world that these individuals were engaged in combat with Israeli forces. The teenagers who would throw rocks and molotov cocktails against Israeli soldiers, or even become suicide bombers who target Israelis at work and play are not innocents who deserve the world's pity.

These are individuals who are being used by the Palestinian leadership - whether from the Palestinian Authority or the Hamas, Islamic Jihad, or Hizbullah mullahs who order armed insurrection against Israeli civilians for no other reason than they are simply Israelis. This is not a question of whether the terrorists are attacking legitimate targets. They are not.

Even the IRA in Northern Ireland has ground rules for dealing with the British Army. They would place bombs in certain locations and call ahead to say that those bombs would be detonated. The IRA would attack army and other military targets, not civilians eating lunch or making purchases at shops. The terrorists attacking Israel have no such code of conduct other than to try and kill as many Israeli women and children as possible. Taking out as many Israelis is the goal.

And until this past weekend, it was a goal experienced solely by young men. For the first time, a Palestinian woman blew herself up, killing herself, one Israeli and wounded over 100 (including a survivor from the September 11, 2001 attack in New York). One could say that this marks a milestone in Palestinian politics as they have achieved equal rights status between men and women.

Now both can go out and kill Israelis without the slightest hestitation. While Israelis, Europeans, and the US hold women and children to be sacred and try to protect them at all costs, no such ethos exists within the extremist camp.

While the Israelis are continually singled out for its attacks against known terrorist groups and occassionally inflict collateral damage against uninvolved individuals, the Israelis continually attempt to limit the collateral damage. The terrorists thrive on the collateral damage. The more the better.

The same thing is happening to the US. US airstrikes that injure innocent civilians in Afghanistan are treated as the US acting unjustly, even though the number killed or injured is exceedingly small. The US policy of striking at terrorist cells in Afghanistan is to target terrorist groups in a manner that purposely limits collateral damage and instead puts the lives of American soldiers at risk. All to protect the lives of women and children.

The copyright of the article Hide the Women and Children in Middle East Politics is owned by . Permission to republish Hide the Women and Children in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.