Think or Die

Ayn Rand, speaking through John Galt, the protagonist of Atlas Shrugged, once summed up the crisis facing both his fictional world and our real one in this way.

That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that which you call "free will" is your mind's freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and your character.

Given that man, the rational animal, has his mind as his tool of survival, it thus follows that choosing not to think can not only result in a diminished quality of life, it can result in a premature end to that life.

This is playing out in stark relief today in Israel and Hamastan, where the Israelis and the so-called Palestinians face extinction sooner or later if they do not start acting upon some obvious conclusions.

Consider the Hamastanis, who recently overwhelmingly reaffirmed the legacy of senseless violence Yasser Arafat bequeathed to them by overwhelmingly electing terrorists to head their government. This is a scene from the bizarro-world they choose to "live" in.

Thirty Fatah gunmen, most of them wearing masks, broke into the government compound in Gaza City on Monday, fired their rifles in the air and demanded jobs.

Minutes later, scores of police charged into the compound to root out the invaders, setting off a 25-minute gun battle that sent workers diving under their desks, shattered windows and air conditioners.

Another story describing the same event headlined that the gunmen were demanding -- and this is too absurd to make marketable satire -- security jobs. And what would these men do for their pay? Wave guns around and fire them senselessly into the air? Or act as sitting ducks for the next wave of gun-toting thugs to break in?

If, as Ayn Rand once put it, "Morality ends at the point of a gun," then civilization fails to exist when everyone needs one. There are no jobs to be had, in any lasting, meaningful sense, in such a society. So the gunmen might get a few checks for awhile, but how would a business that hired them survive? Oh. That's why they raided a government compound. The government has guns and, in a corrupt society, it is the main armed gang. And, in a basket case like Hamastan, it receives foreign aid.

The intricate web of personal and financial transactions that sustains the members of a modern, functional society simply do not exist in Hamastan any more. The Hamastani gunmen may know about "jobs" from having heard about them before, but no amount of brute force is going to make actual jobs happen. Jobs may produce money, but unlike money, jobs cannot exist as loot, and loot is no substitute for productive effort because it has a nasty way of running out. The gunmen only understand loot, and that is what they really want.

This would be part of why Hamastan is in such sad shape without nutrients flowing in through its umbilical from Israel, which foolishly relented recently, and reopened its enemy's supply lines.

Despite continuing security concerns, Israel agreed to temporarily open a passage into the Gaza Strip on Monday to allow the delivery of badly needed food and goods to reach Palestinians, sources said.

Reports over the weekend indicated the Palestinians were running out of staples, such as flour, and that bakeries would have to close down.

There are several crossings between the Gaza Strip and Israel but only the Karni crossing has been used for the passage of goods between Israel and the Gaza Strip. Karni has been closed for most of the last month amid warnings of a planned terror attack at the site.

And what was Israel's reward? Pretty much the same kind of reward an employer would get if he ignored the fact that a job applicant showed up unannounced, waving a rifle in the air and dictating the terms of his "employment".

A high alert was declared in the Jerusalem area at around 11:30am yesterday, after the domestic Shin Bet security service received a tip-off that militants in a blue van had infiltrated from the West Bank and were planning to carry out an attack in an Israeli city, Mr Rosenfeld said. Police erected roadblocks around Jerusalem, and the van was eventually spotted on the main Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway, near the suburb of Mevasseret Zion.

Police vehicles caught up with the van about 15 minutes later, about 10km past the Latrun Junction. Elite police commandos wielding automatic weapons took part in the chase, and a helicopter followed overhead.

Police ordered the ten passengers to come out of the van, made them strip to their underwear, handcuffed them and ordered them to lie face-down in a field.

Bomb experts searched the car and found a bag containing 7kg of explosives, Mr Rosenfeld said. Police removed the bomb from the car, setting off a panic among nearby motorists.

Rather than opening a route to Gaza, Israel clearly should have sealed off the West Bank as well, in lieu of the preferable option of invading both.

The Hamastanis, having already destroyed their own society, intend to destroy that of Israel as well. They clearly have no conception of living as free men who respect the rights of others and live by trading value for value. No. They are savages who live in the range of the moment, lacking any of the orientation towards the future that would make them able to see money as anything but loot.

The consequence of simply giving loot to the Hamastanis is that they never learn that money can also represent productive effort because they never have to put forth any such effort on their own in order to survive. Worse, being kept alive, they remain able to continue planning bombing raids on civilized Israel.

Stop paying tribute to pirates and they must win their loot by conquest; learn another, less dangerous and more productive way of surviving; or simply die. At best, the pirates become civilized men and potential allies, at worst, they die and no longer pose a threat.

Israel must learn and apply exactly this lesson about the Hamastanis. Israel's continued policy of senseless self-sacrifice will no more save the Hamastanis from themselves than will a government "job" make an honest man out of a gunman, and it endangers Israel itself in the bargain. For its own sake, and, accidentally, for the Hamastanis, Israel must stop insulating the Hamastanis from the consequences of their own barbarism.

To ignore the mountain of evidence to the contrary, and pretend that supporting the Hamastanis indefinitely is an option, will kill Israel, and it cannot save the Hamastanis from destroying themselves, anyway.

-- CAV