Showing Both Sides

Victor Davis Hanson answers a question today in the Angry Reader section. I can't help but present it in full:

Have you ever written, Mr. Hanson, anything critical of Israel. Come on, show both sides.

Hanson: Israel, like the U.S., is a democratic republic, so it is an honest reflection of human nature and argumentation, and of course subject to mistakes as is any liberal state. But we are talking of disagreements within definite parameters of lawfulness and transparency. Hamas, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt simply have no liberal institutions. State-run megaphones puppet the party-line. Anti-Semitism is a national creed. There are no human rights as we know them. So it hard to insist on moral equivalence, when in one state Arabs vote and enjoy legal protection, and in another Jews would be hounded and killed or ethnically cleansed. After all, the entire matter is Orwellian: there are no illegal Arab aliens in Syria, for example, but plenty in Israel. So they must know something you do not.

If the Palestinians were to forget about a disputed 10% of land on the West Bank for 10 years, use petromoney from their friends, reform and open the economy and insist on the rule of law, they could craft a humane society that could very easily come to an agreement with Israel. But then, that would require growing up, rejecting easy handouts to militias, renouncing the mystique of terror, questioning patriarchy, gender apartheid, fundamentalism, and autocracy — and being more like Israel than like Syria or Iran. And that apparently is just too much.

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Comments

[Empires Fall]

Hey man,

It's hard to muster up much sympathy for you since you've thrown in your lot with rabidly anti-immigrant and xenophobic factions in the United States and Canada.

You've also polluted your own well to the extent that you're now afraid to return to your home country for fear that you'll be stoned to death.

The only people who would be likely to come to your defense are the liberals. But you've written so many articles in favor of US-sponsored deathsquad dictatorships that it's probably a good thing for you to return to a US-sponsored deathsquad dictatorship.

You made your bed, now lie in it.