I agree that both sides have got a lot of dirt and blood on their hands, but looking at how they operate, you can still see that we are dealing with different standards of warfare and living.

The hard fact remains that Israel represents Western values and individual rights, and the current leadership of the Palestinians represents the non-Western, totalitarian values of many Arab cultures.

This contrast in basic values is almost physically suppressed when the subject comes up in discussion. Leftists are particularly enthusiastic about ignoring it, for obvious reasons, since their own core philosophies do not stand up to close examination on these same terms.

Article on Palestinian values

It is interesting to note the following:

Why such seething nihilism? Consider that when the Jews came to Palestine, it was a desert. People were living in the same primitive manner as they had been since the time of Moses. The Jews brought Western knowledge and Western values to the Middle East. They turned an almost barren land into a modern, industrial civilization. They raised cities where there had been only dirt; they developed irrigated farms where there had been only dry sand; they built cars and trucks and planes where there had been mainly pack animals. They produced wealth where there had been only poverty. They brought freedom and individual rights to a land where these ideas were unknown.



And many of the Arabs hated Israel for doing so—because it was an achievement they could not, and did not want to, equal. That is why they have always wanted to destroy Israel. That is why the Palestinians continue today in that quest.

When a person sees that a different culture can produce a much better life—greater knowledge, greater mastery over nature, greater comfort and security, greater respect for the individual—than his own, he has two choices. He can adopt the new culture as a blessing, or he can seek to destroy it—and himself-because it stands as a reproach to his irrational form of existence.

The Palestinians have chosen the latter. They are guilty of what Ayn Rand called "hatred of the good for being the good." They hate the Israelis not because of their vices, but because of their virtues—their ability to better their lives by embracing reason, science, technology and individual rights. Israel (despite its own, growing crop of religious mystics) represents the triumph of secularism and freedom in the Middle East. Israel stands for the principle of . . . life.



When it comes right down to it, ignoring all hysterical Al-Quaeda rhetoric, this is the real reason the Twin Towers were attacked as well.