Encouraging Signs in Israeli-Hezbo War

RUSH: Are you watching TV today? Have you people seen? The media was going bonkers! They were orgasmic as they were watching bombs drop in southern Lebanon, particularly on PMSNBC. I want to tell you what this illustrates, what it really illustrates here. It proves that the Israelis are showing enormous restraint. I mean, they could roll right through this entire country of Lebanon if they wanted to all the way into Damascus. I hear this talk about proportionality, and it just, well, it makes me mad. It’s not a universal voice that is demanding Israeli proportionality. I’m still encouraged. I think there are a number of elements of conventional wisdom that are under assault and in the process of changing. For example, you know, our morning update today took to task the humanitarian head honcho of the United Nations, Jan Egeland, but he accused Hezbollah yesterday.

‘The Hezbos.’ That’s my new name for them: the Hezbos. So many different pronounces for these guys, Hezbollah, Hezbullah, Hizbollah, Hizbullah, I just say ‘the Hezbos.’ It takes less time, makes more sense. This Jan Egeland was speaking with reporters at an airport in Cyprus late yesterday after a visit to Lebanon, and he accused the Hezbos of cowardly blending among Lebanese civilians and causing the deaths of hundreds during two weeks of cross-border violence with Israel. The Hezbos have built bunkers and tunnels near the Israeli border to shelter weapons and fighters and its members easily blend in among civilians, by design. Hell, they’re not letting civilians leave. In fact, the Israelis have fired on some ambulances. Oh, my God, all hell broke loose!

‘Why, how could you possibly do this! Why, that’s beyond the Geneva Conventions. That’s horrible. It’s violating the rules of war.’ Well, the Israelis found out that Hezbos are transporting themselves in ambulances from one locale to the next, so it appears that their intelligence is improving a little bit at the same time. In addition to that, CNN’s Nic Robertson has admitted that the Hezbos had control of his anti-Israel piece. This is one of the pieces I watched. Remember we were talking about the humanization of Nasrallah and how deeply involved in social surfaces they are? I don’t think it was that exact piece, but it was one like it. Robertson admitted that the Hezbos had control of his anti-Israel piece.

‘Back on July 18, Hezbollah took Robertson and his crew on a tour of a heavily damaged south Beirut neighborhood. The Hezbollah ‘press officer’ even instructed the CNN camera: ‘Just look. Shoot. Look at this building. Is it a military base? Is it a military base, or just civilians living in this building?” So it was an orchestrated story. ‘In a set-up to his interview with Robertson, Howard Kurtz played clips of NBC’s Richard Engel and CBS’s Elizabeth Palmer relating their trips into the damaged areas, with Palmer providing the sort of disclaimer that Robertson failed to include last week: ‘This morning, Hezbollah showed journalists around the ruins of its former stronghold, but Hezbollah is also determined that outsiders will only see what it wants them to see.”

CNN did not tag their report thus. There’s an interesting piece today by John Podhoretz. It’s amazing, ladies and gentlemen, how this program is show prep for the rest of the media. Podhoretz (‘JPod’ as he’s known among colleagues at National Review Online), the title of his piece today: ‘Too nice to win? Israel’s dilemma.’ Let me just read you some of the questions he asks. ‘What if liberal democracies have now evolved to a point where they can no longer wage war effectively because they have achieved a level of humanitarian concern for others that dwarfs any really cold-eyed pursuit of their own national interests?

‘What if the universalist idea of liberal democracy – the idea that all people are created equal – has sunk in so deeply that we no longer assign special value to the lives and interests of our own people as opposed to those in other countries?’ Well, I actually can’t claim credit for being first with this. Shelby Steele was first with it in his book White Guilt. Don’t be put off by that title, if you’re just hearing about this for the first time. Shelby Steele’s point is that superpowers and majorities have been made weak by guilt over their power, guilt about their power, guilt about their pasts, and guilt at the unfair advantage they have over the peons of the world.

So when the peons of the world erupt and start killing people in superpower or western democracy countries, it is, ‘Well, you know, maybe we deserve this, the way we’ve treated the world all these years,’ and we’ve got a leftist contingent throughout the world, in this country, too, that promulgates and promotes that whole concept in classrooms and so forth. Another question asked by JPod:

‘What if this triumph of universalism is demonstrated by the Left’s insistence that American and Israeli military actions marked by an extraordinary concern for preventing civilian casualties are in fact unacceptably brutal? And is also apparent in the Right’s claim that a war against a country has nothing to do with the people but only with that country’s leaders? Can any war be won when this is the nature of the discussion in the countries fighting the war? Can any war be won when one of the combatants voluntarily limits itself in this manner? Could World War II have been won by Britain and the United States if the two countries did not have it in them to firebomb Dresden and nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki?’

Well, I don’t mean to be cutting of J. Pod, but we discussed all this on this program last week and even the week before, and discussed it in many ways. I asked it, ‘What is the will of the American people where this where all this is concerned?’ Fascinating interview yesterday, by the way, with Ralph Peters, which will be in the next issue of the Limbaugh Letter, and I’m going to probably cut it up and tempt you, tease you with some audio excerpts of this interview because he’s a brilliant man and he’s a great writer. He also echoed many of the sentiments I had. He just went on and on and on about the greatness of the American people, and when finally pushed to the limit, you can always count on them. You can count on Main Street, small town, middle America, to always do the right thing.

He doesn’t believe that has changed. He thinks that represents a majority of the country’s thinking. He, of course, had effusive praise for the men and women of the armed forces of which he was a former member. But still, there are new constraints on countries like the United States and Israel when it comes to waging war even after you’ve been attacked. And everybody is asking the question and has been in the case of Israel, do they really have the guts to be the old Israelis of the past? And look at those tanks moving now. It looks like the Israelis haven’t changed at all. This is heartwarming news, because Israel is fighting this war for us; they’re doing this for our sake as well as for theirs.

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RUSH: The editor-publisher of the largest newspaper in Germany has called the Europeans a bunch of cowards. He’s called them a bunch of cowards, and what reminded me of it was some little crawl on TV: Europeans require ceasefire before sending in any members of some peacekeeping force. The Germans — get this, the Germans — said we will only go in if Hezbos promise not to shoot at us. The Germans said this after the editor of their largest newspaper, and I can’t even remember the name of the newspaper, basically called the Europeans a bunch of cowards. Here’s another interesting piece on this. This is from Greg Richards at one of our favorite blogs, as you know, the American Thinker: ‘Israel is being set up in the world’s media to meet an impossible standard. To its critics, if Israel does not instantly destroy all of the Hezbos and its fixed installations — and that instant has now already passed — and do it without taking any casualties itself or inflicting any collateral damage on the other side, then it has failed.

‘By this peculiar standard any country that has ever fought a war has lost it after the first week, but it should surprise no one that this standard is only applied to Israeli and the United States. It’s an absurd standard and a defeatist one. Having set the rules of the game so as to ensure failure, critics then commence laying blame on the country, which is presumed guilty merely by being who and what it is. The victim of unprovoked attacks is thus guilty of a disproportionate response, eliminating military installations hidden among civilians such as hiding being a war crime itself, by the way, becomes an attack on civilians.

‘Such guilt-mongering is not simply wrong, it’s also camouflage designed to divert attention away from the party which bears far greater responsibility, and there is a person that is responsible for the devastation both in Israel and Lebanon, and that person is the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan. This is Kofi’s war,’ writes Mr. Richards. ‘Israel withdrew from Lebanon in 2000, under the guarantee of a UN resolution that the border area would not be remilitarized. The responsible agent of that guarantee is Kofi Annan.’ You know, I love all these guys because they contribute to our broad base knowledge and intellect, but I must say this is tough. It’s tough to see so much of what has already been said on this program in past weeks pop up days and even weeks later.

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RUSH: Here, by the way, is a piece that I didn’t print out. It’s by Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of Axel Springer AG. He’s chief executive of the German publisher Axel Springer, and he wrote a blistering attack in Die Welt, Germany’s largest daily paper, ‘Against a timid reaction of Europe in the face of the Islamic threat. Must read,’ it says here. ‘A few days ago Henry Broder wrote in Welt on Sonntag, ‘Europe, Your Family Name is Appeasement.’ It’s a phrase you can’t get out of your head because it’s so terribly true,’ but his point is: Europe, thy name is cowardice, and this is the CEO of the largest publishing unit in Germany. Williamstown, Kentucky, we’ll start with you on the phones today, Ned. Welcome. Nice to have you with us, sir.

CALLER: Thanks for talking to me, Rush, I appreciate it.

RUSH: You bet.

CALLER: My comment was: I’m in the Army, and I see on TV, reading the paper, whatever, how the Israeli-Lebanese conflict with Hezbollah, whatever, you know, the international community, I don’t know, makes us look like the bad people when we have to attack a civilian area where the enemy stored weapons, soldiers, stuff like that, and how they demonize the Israeli army for destroying these sites when they’re being shot at, they’re obviously caches for enemy weapons, but they don’t demonize them for doing so, you know, putting anti-aircraft on top of hospitals and stuff, which is against the law of land warfare. Why doesn’t the international community say, “Hey, you know, in this war: they are the reason for the deaths.”
RUSH: More and more of them are. Those who aren’t are doing so simply because of two things, two basic things. There’s just a general hatred for western democracies among much the world and Israel gets added into that, also because they’re Jewish and there’s anti-Semitism. The United Nations is the breeding ground and the modern day repository for anti-Semitism, as is much of Europe. France? You wouldn’t believe the level of anti-Semitism there. So there’s no question that that’s part of it, but you’ve got more and more people now that are starting to see this another way. It’s not as universal as it used to be even to the extent that the Arab nations in that region have condemned Hezbollah as well.
In fact, Israel is an interesting study. You know, Israel is a very, very liberal bunch of people. Israel is a very socially liberal country. In this instance, however, it’s fascinating, a couple of the biggest liberal, social, political leaders, not elected, but just commentators and so forth in that country are 100% behind this action. Public opinion polls in Israel show that 90% of Israelis are all for what the Israelis are doing. I go back to what I said last week. There’s a whole bunch of positive stuff in this, and I don’t want to spend the whole day here recounting it, but among some of the things that are positive, terrorist techniques are now being learned and discovered and they’re not being supported. There’s a call from the United Nations, “We gotta stop this humanitarian blasting, this is blasting of innocent civilians.”
The world is saying, “Wait a minute. They’re driving around in ambulances. They’re launching missiles out of homes.” Terrorist tactics are being widely disseminated here and widely seen for what they are. One of the rules of war you mentioned, Ned, hiding is illegal. You’re not allowed to hide amongst civilians and this sort of thing, and they’re doing it and they’re being called on it, and the Israelis are being the Israelis that we’ve always known they are. When they find out where these people are they’re going and getting them and they’ll deal with the PR fallout that they’re killing innocent civilians because they know what they’re doing, and they know who they’re targeting and they know who they’re killing and it’s by design.

So this is a huge positive that’s happening here, and people who said yesterday, ‘Wait a minute, give them a week? They’ve gotta get this done in a week or it’s a failure?’ If Hezbollah survives, even with just a shell of its foreman self, if Israel doesn’t totally wipe them out, why, it’s considered a defeat for Israel. There have been people who move the goalposts that way, and it is seductive. In fact, it even drew me in, and I’ll tell you why I fell for it, and I’m embarrassed to admit that I did, but I fell for it on the basis that it’s all PR. But the reality on the ground is how wars are won and lost. A lot of people are very concerned about the PR.

‘Well, Hezbollah can say they won when they lost,’ just like the Democrats say it’s a moral victory when they lose by four points in a Republican district. They run around saying, ‘Ah, the Republicans ought to be worried about this,’ but they’re still losing elections. Well, the point here is: Israel is still winning this battle. The PR can say one thing, but this is an indication of just how much people get wrapped up in imagery and spin and PR and ignore the reality of things. I can cite countless examples of this throughout our culture, throughout our business world, throughout the media world. I’m not going to name ’em, but I can’t tell you the number of television and radio shows that in reality have no audience worth speaking of, but if you read certain media you’d think they’re the biggest things going, for a host of reasons.

They survive on the buzz. They survive on buzz, but they’re not really winning anything and they’re not really earning a whole lot of money which is the definition of going into business, is one of the reasons you do it, but the spin, nevertheless, makes it look like they’re hot, makes it look like they’re huge, and this is what the terrorists have learned, be it Al-Qaeda or the Hezbos or whoever have learned about our media. They are caught up in spin; they have their own agendas; they do have an interest in the outcome of events; and if they can spin the outcome of an event into an alternative reality, they’ll do so, such as they try it constantly with the US economy, talking about how rotten it is, soup line America. They’re hell-bent on creating crisis after crisis after crisis.

They want people in the throes of doom and gloom. They want people thinking pessimistically. Because when you’re thinking pessimistically, you’ll vote for change. And that’s what this is all about. When you factor in Israel and the Hezbos, you factor in that there is a natural born hatred for Israel at the United Nations in much of the American left, by the way, and certainly in lots of western and eastern Europe. The Israelis don’t play the PR game and a lot of people get frustrated by that. A lot of people get frustrated when a lot of their allies, friends, associates, don’t respond to the PR game, and it boils down to what world do you want to live in. Do you want to live in the real world?

When you win the war, you’ve won it. You’ve beat back the bad guys. You’ve limited their ability or destroyed their ability to wage war on you, or do you want to win the PR war, where you don’t really accomplish anything but the world loves you, and in this case for Israel, what it would require for the world to love them is to actually be marched into the Mediterranean Sea, which they know, but they’re not going to fall for it. But a lot of people throughout our society in all levels of business, everywhere you go get sucked in by the notion of winning the spin, winning the PR battle. And in this case, the Israelis are eschewing that for substantive victory and substantive reality — and thank God for it. I think the people in life that you can trust and the people in life that you can count on, are the people who have both feet firmly planted in reality because all the rest are a bunch of phony baloney, plastic banana, good-time rock ‘n’ rollers who can’t stand the light of reality shining on them.

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