David Horovitz argues that, instead of condemning Israel’s highly effective counter-terrorism strategies—as Europe and the U.S. have done for decades—it would make more sense to emulate them.
As bombers and gunmen targeted our buses and our shopping malls and our hotels and our colleges and our restaurants, we did two things that France, the U.S., and the rest of the free world will have to do if they want to defeat this latest, particularly despicable Islamist terror iteration: we learned how to reduce our vulnerability to terrorism, and we tackled the killers in their centers of operation. Shortsightedly, hypocritically, and abidingly, the international community, including most of the Western world, barely understood the need for the former strategy, and castigated us for the latter.
We made it harder for terrorists to kill us by doing what those CNN experts are saying is impossible: yes, protecting all of our cafes, and restaurants, and shopping malls, and hotel entrances, and buses, and every other public place where our citizens gather, with barriers and metal detectors and security guards. . . . And to the ongoing fury of misguided critics everywhere, we built a security barrier—a mix of fences and sections of wall—so that Palestinian suicide bombers could not just drive into Israel and blow us up. We became a nation of domestic-security analysts, gauging where to shop and whether or not to take the bus as we sought to minimize our exposure to the killers. And we toughed it out.
We also took the offensive, notably after that black March 2002 when we launched a major military operation to destroy the “infrastructure” of terrorism in the West Bank—the bomb-making factories and the bomber-indoctrinating production lines. Much of the international community, ill-served by some particularly pitiful journalism, misrepresented the operation, echoed false Palestinian claims about the death toll, and . . . insisted that we stop and get out. But we didn’t.
Read more on Times of Israel: http://www.timesofisrael.com/will-the-west-now-adopt-israels-anti-terror-strategies/