The War and the Home Front

Were there any doubt that the global war between the West and the Islamist extremist terrorist enemy rages on, the events of yesterday should put it to rest. A Palestinian Arab gunman from eastern Jerusalem shot and killed eight Jewish students — young men studying the Torah — in an exceptionally barbaric attack on an Israeli religious school. The massacre that was greeted with cheers and prayers of thanksgiving in Gaza. And two bombs in a shopping district of a predominantly Shiite neighborhood of Baghdad killed at least 53 Iraqis and wounded another 130.

The idea that this violence is going to be quelled, as the Democrats would suggest, by withdrawing American troops from Iraq is chimerical. The idea that it is going to be quelled, as the U.S. State Department appears to believe, by negotiations with the Palestine Liberation Organization leading to a Palestinian Arab state is also chimerical. The idea that it is going to be quelled by Israel's withdrawal from Gaza has also proven chimerical, as demonstrated by the more than 4,000 rockets and mortar shells that have been fired at Israel from the Gaza Strip since Israel withdrew from that land in 2005.

If there is any hope to be found amid the violence, it is the broad bipartisan determination in America to fight the war to its conclusion. Even Senator Obama, the anti-war candidate in the anti-war party, recently said, "There is a hard core of jihadist fundamentalists who we can't negotiate with. We have to hunt them down and knock them out. Incapacitate them. That's the military aspects of dealing with this phenomenon." We're thinking of having the quote printed on the back of t-shirts with the Barack Obama campaign logo on the front.

On Wednesday, before the bombs started going off, the American House of Representatives considered a resolution strongly condemning "state sponsors of terror, such as Iran and Syria, for enabling Palestinian terrorist organizations to carry out attacks against innocent Israeli civilians" and supporting "the sovereign right of the Government of Israel to defend its territory against attacks." It passed by a vote of 404 to 1, with only Ron Paul, Republican of Texas, opposing it. Until the terrorist safe havens and funding sources in Iran and Syria are uprooted, no one can expect the bombings of innocent civilians, including children and young men studying the Torah, to stop.