Orwell got it backwards

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Recently someone in Iran or Turkey had an insight: Just as war is too important to be left to the generals, peace activism is too important to be left to the pacifists.

As a result, Islamists around the Middle East are getting in touch with their inner peace activist.

They’re sponsoring “peace ships,” replete with jihadists masquerading as pacifists on board, to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza. Real “peace activists” are brought along for window dressing.

This became obvious when Israeli commandos attempted to board the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara last month. Along with several hundred peace pilgrims and 1,100 tons of styptic pencils and Band-Aids bound for Gaza, it also carried 50 or 60 Turkish Islamist toughs, each of whom had been paid $10,000 cash to seek peace.

It turned out the Turkish “peace activists” had issues with the peace part of the concept. When Israeli commandos rappelled onto the latter-day Love Boat, instead of going limp, Turkey’s excitable peaceniks lit into the boarders with steel rods and knives.

That in turn prompted the rest of the boarding party to draw pistols and make peace with extreme prejudice. When the smoke cleared, nine peace seekers had found it, and a couple dozen more had had near-peace experiences.

It subsequently emerged that funding for the flotilla had not come from bake sales at the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center, but from a Turkish Islamic charity with ties to terror groups called IHH. It also emerged that IHH was acting as a cutout for the Turkish government.

The incident, and the world’s reaction to it, provided a moment of clarity — for Israel at any rate. It became blindingly clear that most governments can’t tell the difference between a peace activist and a jihadist or choose to ignore it, at least insofar as Israel is concerned. It also became clear that much of the world wouldn’t be overly troubled if Israel were to drop dead.

But the real moment of clarity came when the Iranian and Turkish governments and Hezbollah announced they intended to send further “peace ships” to Gaza.

Israel will have no choice but to stop those ships. To do otherwise would let Gaza turn into an Iranian port and missile base.

However, intercepting the ships will provide Iran and its allies with a pretext to launch the war of extermination against Israel that Ahmadinejad has been plotting.

Ahmadinejad has never made a secret of his desire to destroy Israel, and he has spent the past five years acquiring the weapons, installing the
logistical infrastructure, training the troops, building the alliances
and creating the ideological climate to do so. These preparations are
well along, and the strategy they represent has a real chance of
working.

How can
this be? Ahmadinejad’s not so secret weapon is the ballistic missile.
Iran and Syria, which both now produce ballistic missiles indigenously,
have piled up 1,000 to 3,000 of them in Syria and Lebanon. These
missiles, not the Iranian nuclear program, are the primary existential
threat to Israel and will continue to be for some time to come.

A
lot of people tend to think of ballistic missiles as a relatively minor
threat (provided they aren’t armed with nukes) because they aren’t very
accurate. Their information is out of date.

In 1991, a Scud-type missile had a 50 percent chance of landing within a mile of its target.

Today it’s more like 600 feet and maybe even less.

Moreover,
today’s ballistic missiles have conventional warheads that can spread
destruction over a much larger area than their Gulf War predecessors.

These missiles are intended to be fired in salvos at its air bases, command and control bunkers, tank parks, power plants, ammunition depots and so on.

If
the Israeli air force is grounded, even temporarily, and its reserve
army’s ability to mobilize quickly is degraded, then the attackers have
a real chance of success — provided they have a sufficient ground force
of their own.

The
Syrian army and Hezbollah militia are probably not sufficient. But if
Iran could get its Revolutionary Guard Corps into the fight, that might
be another matter.

And
thanks to Erdogan throwing in with Ahmadinejad’s Axis of Evil 2.0,
Iranian divisions could very well be granted road passage through
Turkey to Syria and on to the fray.

If
some of the foregoing seems a little improbable, consider that last
week Iran announced it was moving Revolutionary Guards Corps divisions
north into Iran’s Azerbaijan region — ostensibly to prevent an
American/ Israeli attack from the neighboring country of Azerbaijan.
However, the region also shares a common border with Turkey, and good
roads through Turkey connect it to Syria.

So they could move swiftly if a few boatloads of “peace activists” were to, Allah willing, pick a fight off Gaza.

Orwell got it backwards. Nowadays, peace is war.