Beware of irrational exuberance

Sent to the Boston Globe November 28, 2024:

Dear Editor:

Any exuberance over the ceasefire deal arranged between the Hezbollah terrorists and Israel would be irrational.

Hezbollah violated the ceasefire within minutes of its taking effect and has continued to violate it many times in just the first day. One certainly cannot expect the Lebanese army, which is effectively controlled by Hezbollah, to enforce the ceasefire conditions; the same goes for UNIFIL, which has been an abject failure since it was supposedly strengthened 18 years ago and has done nothing as, time after time, Hezbollah attacked Israel from positions within a football field's length of UNIFIL forces.

Nor can we expect either to destroy the Hezbollah's tunnels and rockets in southern Lebanon which have not yet been destroyed by Israel, not to mention enforce compliance with UN Security Council Resolution 1559, which mandates the disarming of all militias in Lebanon. Until that is done and the power Iran has over Lebanon through its Hezbollah proxy is removed, Lebanon will remain a failed state and peace will be more of a hallucination than a realistic dream.

Sincerely,

Alan Stein

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hamas disarming? Get real.

Dear Editor: One can only laugh at the report that Khalil al-Hayya, referred to as a top official of the barbaric Hamas terror group, said Hamas would disarm "if an independent Palestinian state is established along pre-1967 borders." That would be about as likely as it bringing back to life the babies it decapitated and incinerated on October 7. And don't the Palestinian Arabs claim there already exists an independent Palestinian state? Mahmoud Abbas calls himself the president of the "State of Palestine" and is recognized as such by most of the members of the United Nations, as well as the UN General Assembly. Would Hamas disarming even make a difference? Would Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Fatah or any of the dozens of other Palestinian terror groups also disarm? Would Hezbollah send its 150,000 rockets back to Iran? Would the Houthis stop launching missiles at Israel? Would the Iranian mullahs stop leading chants of "Death to Israel" and "Death t...
Read more

Reporting on the wrong story in the wrong way

 May 14 marked the seventy-sixth anniversary of one of the most inspiring events in human history. An ancient people mostly dispersed from their homeland nearly 2,000 years before by foreign invaders reestablished their sovereignty and withstood an invasion by five foreign armies. Today, those same people are still valiantly facing enemies bent on the destruction of their sovereign state. Yet rather than producing a program about that modern day miracle, WBUR chose to produce the Here & Now episode "Millions of Palestinians across the world commemorate 'Al Nakba,'" an interview pandering to a descendant of those who tried to prevent that miracle and not just air his lies and distortions but reinforce them. Nowhere did the interviewer correct Beshara Doumani lies and distortions and point out, for example, the Jewish people are the indigenous people of the land the Roman conquerors renamed Syria Palaestina (living there for thousands of years before the first Arabs...
Read more

Give Israel the credit it deserves

Sent to the Boston Globe February 12: To the editor: While getting tremendous pressure, even from its friends, to refrain from going into Rafah because of the dense population, Israel provided graphic evidence of the obvious need to root Hamas from Rafah and its ability to continue to minimize civilian casualties, already evident from the fact that the ratio of civilian to combatant deaths in Gaza has been less than a quarter of that expected by the UN in urban combat. First, Israel revealed the way not only was UNRWA's main headquarters in Gaza City directly above a terror tunnel containing a major Hamas command and data processing center, but provided power for Hamas' facility and Hamas terrorists actually worked out of offices in UNRWA's headquarters! Second, Israel conducted an amazing operation in the heart of Rafah, rescuing two hostages there, killing a number of terrorists and doing it without a single civilian casualty! Without Israel rooting Hamas out of Rafah, Ha...
Read more