One of the mantras heard in the condemnation of Israel in the current struggle to end the rocket bombardment and destroy the infiltration tunnel networks of the Hamas terrorist forces is that while there are hundreds of casualties being suffered within Gaza there are relatively little damage and a near unbelievable lack of noticeable casualties amongst the Israeli populations and cities. This lack of such disaster spread throughout Israel is due to two basic facts, first, the Hamas rockets are unguided and inaccurate with the majority landing in open areas thus doing little other than difficult to measure psychological damage simply from the repeated sirens and the having to hurriedly head for shelters and spend anxious minutes or longer in tense anxiety and second, the next to impossible success of the Iron Dome interceptor batteries which have downed approaching perfect interception percentage which has spared Israel the damage and casualties which previously would reached frightful levels. Take away either of these two factors and Israel would be showing similar levels of damage and significantly higher casualties than are being witnessed in Gaza despite the facts that Hamas places their civilians in the path of dangers and risks their lives in order to attempt to prevent attacks on something they value more than their people’s lives, their rockets to launch in the hope of murdering as many Israelis as possible while Israel invests whatever is necessary to prevent any harm from coming to her civilians. For those hanging on every new broadcast hoping for news of a highly successful attack which brings devastation to those Israelis, it will only take one failure of the Iron Dome batteries which are tasked with protecting Tel Aviv for your dreams to be unfortunately realized. In central Tel Aviv are tall office buildings with ten having forty or more floors and one that clears fifty which could be struck by a Hamas rocket and some of their largest are capable of doing sufficient damage to collapse one such skyscraper making such a strike the worst terrorist strike in Israeli history with a potential of thousands of murdered Israelis as a result of that one rocket which might get through. Those who hold the disparate death tolls and damages as their reason for despising Israel and throwing their sympathies to Hamas in empathy for their greater losses are damning Israel because of her success at protecting her population.
If instead of measuring by damage taken one were to measure the presumed disparity by number of explosive bombs and warheads launched or dropped and number of attempted ground mission and took the period of time leading up to the Israeli ground assault beginning you might be surprised. This comparison does not include the over a thousand rockets launched by Hamas into Israel before Israel launched her first bombing mission and only those rockets and attempted infiltrations by Hamas measured against the number of Israeli bombs and commando raids. The explosive comparison had slightly over a thousand-five-hundred Hamas rockets while the Israelis retaliated with slightly over two-thousand bombs with Hamas having attempted around a half-dozen infiltrations against a single naval commando mission by Israel. When one looks at the attacks and attempts to impart damage, destruction and casualties on the other side the conflict between Israel and Hamas becomes far more even contest with the measurable difference being in the preparation and success in defending and protecting ones people from those attacks.
This holding Israel at fault because of her being the stronger and more technologically advanced also ignores one of the most vital and important facts, Israel did not initiate this war and Israel removed every last Israeli and removed every IDF troop and base from all of Gaza in August of 2005. When people point to the blockade it needs to be pointed out that when Israel removed their presence they tuned the greenhouses and working businesses worth millions of dollars behind for the Gazans to utilize giving them functioning and profitable operations and did not impose any blockade on Gaza until after Hamas took control of Gaza in a bloody and violent coup defeating the forces of the Palestinian Authority headed by Mahmoud Abbas. As long as the Palestinian Authority was governing Gaza the Israelis felt little need to clamp strict control over the ports in Gaza but this sense of security dissipated when Hamas which is sworn to the destruction of Israel and the eradication of Jews worldwide stipulated in the clearest possible language in the Hamas Charter and is a unifying theme taught in their schools and portrayed throughout their media.
Anybody who has attended one of the liberal arts colleges or universities and received lectures from professors holding the typical anti-capitalist and anti-American views such as often lectured by such as Noam Chomsky you would be familiar with their anti-American programs. They claim that American culture is polluting the world and tainting the natural culture and altering societies claiming that this societal culture creep that is Americanizing many of the cultures in the third world presumably destroying these primitive cultures which they claim are superior to the crass American culture as the more primitive cultures presumably live in harmony with nature. They also claim that the United States is the worst polluter of nature in the world, something far from borne out by actual unmassaged statistics. Was the United States a large pollution engine a number of decades ago? Yes, though not necessarily the worst. The truth is that since the 1970s the United States has been the only nation that has actually met and surpassed the stringent requirements set by the Kyoto Protocols despite the fact that the United States never signed on to these standards. Another canard is that the United States economic wealth has stolen from the less developed world their share of wealth because since the available wealth is presumably constant, their claim, not mine, then by obvious measurement, by the United States having so much wealth they have to have made it unfairly by robbing the poorer nations. What they are intentionally suppressing is that wealth is not a constant and the United States historically has been the greatest creator of wealth.
What, you need some proof that wealth is constantly being created? To use the most obvious proof that wealth grows over time and directly proportionally to technological advancement one need look no further than ancient human history, real ancient human history. Original ancient man, as in Homo erectus, our ancient ancestors hunted with spears and possibly bow and arrows and the keeper of the fire would be put to death if he permitted the fire to be extinguished and was responsible for transporting the embers to spark the fire when the tribe migrated. We could now trend the advances and thus creations of wealth through the ages with the Greeks and Romans who used plumbing, aqueducts and relatively complex weaponry compared to spears but quite primitive and useless against modern weaponry. Then we see what we have today with buildings covering large swaths of Europe and the United States, automobiles and other items which not long ago were considered luxuries or were not yet invented. All of these are indication of increased available wealth and by claiming that American culture and production methods are ruinous to less advanced nations is actually a form of elitism which is using false arguments to keep the third world less advanced and inferior to the technologically modern world by claiming that their lack of modernity is a state of existence that needs to be preserved. Where this is actually more destructive ecologically can also be described by researching the production of a simple product which has been in existence for numerous centuries, the production of charcoal. Modern charcoal is produced using electrical heating elements with the wood chips placed in a chamber which is filled with CO2 which minimizes escaping pollution while the tried and true old school method is to make large piles of wood chips and allow them to smolder such that the ones buried in the center are oxygen starved and are made into charcoal but produce heavy amounts of smoke and if a large area is used to mass produce charcoal with numerous large mounds smoldering away the area can become absolutely toxic. Which way would any intelligent ecological activist desire to have people worldwide produce charcoal, with modern equipment or the good old fashioned way which is still used in much of today’s world? Criticizing the United States for having a worldwide cultural influence and a greater proportion of the world’s per capita wealth is a form of primitivism and a rejection of advanced technology. This is found in a number of other elitist fads such as rejection of most technological advancements in agricultural preferring “natural” products. The same crippling anti-success jealousy which has infected much of social academia is behind much of the anti-Americanism as it is also behind much of the anti-Israel hatreds. This is most evident in the condemnation of Israel for protecting her people while sympathizing with Hamas because they appear disadvantaged by the resulting casualty numbers and destruction of infrastructure despite the actual number and size of explosives launched by each side being relatively equal, and actually favoring Hamas if one includes the three week buildup of rockets fired into Israel before the initial Israeli response to those attacks. But it is so much more noble to favor the underdog and it gives one a sense of superiority but cannot be assumed to grant them any moral advantage, that takes a more reasoned, systematic and unemotional examination of facts and actual numbers and not kneejerk emotional spontaneous reactions.
Beyond the Cusp 