As usual, all of Israel's military actions are described in a vacuum, with little to no context as to what prompted them. That would be the ongoing war of extermination against Israel on the part of the Palestinians and the Muslim world as a whole.

For instance, Israel's justifiable military response in Gaza to the kidnapping of IDF Corporal Gilad Shalit, not to mention the years of violence and provocation that preceded it, is painted as (horror of horrors!) nothing more than an attempt to rid the world of the Hamas regime. As Margolick puts it:

When Palestinian militants from Hamas and two other groups killed two Israeli soldiers and kidnapped a third, Corporal Gilad Shalit, in late June, it seemed like a minor skirmish, at least in the context of Middle Eastern carnage. But,in a land of such deep hatreds and hair-trigger sensitivities, the strike quickly prompted an enormous Israeli assault on beleaguered Gaza, ostensibly to free the abducted soldier and stop Palestinian rocket fire, but really to cripple, if not topple, the Hamas regime altogether.

Get out the hanky and the violin because I think I feel a sob story coming on.

Indeed, it just gets worse. Here's how Margolick describes Israel's military actions in Lebanon in response to the Hezbollah-orchestrated kidnappings of two more of its soldiers:

Two weeks later, the militant Lebanese group Hezbollah staged a similar cross-border attack...It, too, prompted a colossal Israeli counterattack, one that devastated Lebanon and threatened an even wider war involving the two principal backers of the radical Islamic groups: Iran and Syria.

And here I thought Iran and Syria's backing of Hezbollah's actions were what "threatened an even wider war" not Israel's response. Silly me.

The article goes on to do the usual handwringing over the fate of the much-anticipated Palestinian state without any mention of the fact that its failure lies in the hands of its own people. The very same people who elected, as Margolick proudly puts it, "Haniyeh, one of those rare democratically elected Arab prime ministers."

He laments the rubble of Gaza, which, as he describes it, is "only moved, never cleared away." Perhaps if the Palestinians were interested in actually creating a viable society instead of simply destroying Israel, the rubble would be cleared away, much as it is in Israel immediately following one of the many terrorist attacks on its people.

But that's too much of a leap of logic for Margolick, yet another weepy western dupe to the Palestinian "cause," to make. Instead, to quote a former column of my own, he extends his misguided sympathies to tyrants and terrorists.

Suddenly, Better Homes & Gardens' glowing profile of Adolph Hitler in 1938 makes a lot of sense.

Cross-posted at CinnamonStillwell.blogspot.com.