History as an example

The situation in Israel and Lebanon is grave, and the suffering is shared by both Israeli and Lebanese civilians, but this is as far as the "similarity" goes.

The thousands of Katyusha rockets launched at Israeli towns by Hezbollah from Lebanon (six years after Israel withdrew from Lebanon) are specifically aimed at women and children. Close to a million Israeli citizens have been forced to live in bomb shelters for nearly a month now, or were displaced. Israel, on the other hand, attempts to minimize civilian casualties by warning the Lebanese to stay away from Hezbollah structures prior to bombing those buildings. England didn't take the trouble to do it during World War II when it carpet-bombed Dresden. The U.S. didn't warn the Japanese at Hiroshima, neither did the Russians in Chechnya. In fact, no country (except Israel) ever has. Yet, the only one condemned is Israel. The U.S. is not a proxy for Israel, nor is Israel for the U.S., but the two countries do share the principle that it is the duty and obligation of a democratic government to ensure the safety of its citizens, and to protect them from harm. If there are any "proxies" in the region, it is Hezbollah as a proxy for Iran, part of the Lebanese government as a proxy for Syria.

In its nearly 60 years of independence, with a population that only now reaches almost 6 million and a space about the size of New Jersey, Israel has achieved, created, invented and innovated more than the entire Arab population has done in the past millennium. Imagine how much the Islamic world, with all its natural (oil) and human resources could have achieved had it directed its energy toward building and creating, and had the Muslim replaced their obsession with the microscopic Jewish state with the desire to learn from Israel and follow in its footsteps.

Had Syria, Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas decided to lay down their arms and accept the elementary right of the Jewish people to their own state in their own homeland of 3,000 years, there would be peace tomorrow. Avi Kaufman Agoura Hills