Peter Preston cheers suicide bombers in this essay for the Guardian, titled Palestinians have found a weapon Israel can’t counter. There are so many offensive statements in this piece (of crap) that I will try to focus on the most odious:
The Israelis use their heavy-duty kit to blast the remnants of PLO authority. The Palestinians wrap teenage girls in Semtex and send them, smiling sweetly, to devastate supermarkets and cafes.
Ahh. Moral Relevance and equivocation, the preferred side-arm of every nitwit.
Are they – the inexhaustible legions of Hamas and Hizbullah – to be condemned for that?
In a word, YES, you silly limey bastard.
It is easy to feel revulsion at so many young lives lost in a cause we can’t fully understand; and over so many Israeli civilian lives, innocent lives, brutally shattered.
Apparently not easy enough, as it appears to have utterly escaped you in this ode to suicide bombers.
Yet there is also another reality. The IDF has its jets and tanks, weapons of conventional war built and used to kill. The Palestinians possess no such weaponry; they are completely outgunned and outclassed. No one – apart from Arabs bearing wan words – comes to their aid. But they have, nevertheless, found a weapon at last that the Israelis cannot counter.
That is almost right. No one does come to their aid. Not even the ARAB nations, who have done nothing but exacerbate this problem.
Suicide is their chosen tool, their howitzer of ultimate resort, clinically chosen. We may think of suicide as an act of emotion – but, as Primo Levi once said, that overlooks its careful sentience. “Animals don’t commit suicide.”
Groan. Animals do strap explosives to themselves and blow up seders and 22 innocent victims.
And we need to be clear: it’s a winner. It has humiliated one of the world’s toughest conventional armies. They move in, flattening all before them and, far away, another burger bar or shopping centre is blasted to smithereens. There are some wars conventional soldiers can’t win.
Cue the triumphant music. The Palestinians are about to suicide bomb themselves into oblivion, because the rest of the world is about to break out a big stick- and we are not going to beat Israel with it.
Go read the rest of this disgusting babble. I am tired.