Don’t do Your Enemy’s Job for Him

If you want to read about a confusing news story, you came to the right place. I just saw a Politico article about Israeli terrorism victims who blame Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for what happened to them and their neighbors during the Hamas atrocity. They were attacked on Nahal Oz, a kibbutz near the semi-fictional nation of Gaza.

Here is an excerpt:

“He [Netanyahu] needs to say: ‘I’m sorry, I failed you. It’s because of me and my pride, you were almost murdered,’” said Cherry, a 45-year-old Belgian-Israeli health economist.

Poterman and Cherry described how they shut themselves in safe rooms on the morning of the attack, and hunkered down for 12 hours, waiting for the Israel Defense Force to come to their rescue. Over those excruciating hours, rockets flew overhead and Hamas raided homes across the kibbutz shouting “Allahu Akbar” [God is greatest] and “Massacre the Jews.”

Poterman, who until last week worked as an after-school teacher, sent what he believed would be his last Facebook post from the safe room: “Half an hour, we are locked up with terrorists at home, no one comes.”

The 40-year-old said he sent the message as he stood next to the safe room door holding an ax, while his wife Maria held their seven-month-old baby girl in one hand and a knife in the other. Neither of them expected to survive, but a latch installed on the inside of the door by a previous tenant prevented the terrorists from bursting in.

In a separate safe room, Cherry, her husband Oren and their three children barricaded the door as best they could with a cupboard and chair.

The man who sent the message boxed himself up in a laughable “safe room” or “mammad.” This is a ridiculous structure intended to protect Jews from danger. Every new building in Israel has to have a mammad on every floor. It worked for this man and his family, but mammads failed for many others because breaking into a room isn’t that hard. Getting someone to open a mammad isn’t hard when you have hostages outside.

There is a lot of hype about mammads having thick concrete walls and steel doors. Sounds great, but not a problem for a terrorist with explosives. Also, older mammads don’t always have oxygen supplies, and incredibly, they have not all been retrofitted.

Bottom line: people in mammads died during the invasion. Some from suffocation. Some by being dragged out and killed.

A mammad is better than nothing, sometimes, and they protect people from missile shrapnel, which is what they’re really designed for. Having a mammad sounds like a great idea for people anticipating missile strikes. But against armed assailants, rifles are way better.

The man quoted in the article obviously knew disarmament was a big mistake, because he made a pathetic effort to gather arms. He tried to protect his family from machine guns with a knife and an axe. Words fail me.

If you’re all for arming yourself when people come to kill you, and you have proven you are, why were you against it before they showed up? You knew they were coming eventually.

The mindset of the victims is extremely disheartening. “The government was supposed to come save us.” They are Europeans by birth, and of course, they are Jewish, so small wonder they thought the god-state was their salvation.

Here in America, we have a saying: “When seconds count, the police are just minutes away.” It’s not unnuanced flyover populist tripe. It’s indisputable wisdom. The underlying truth is that the government is not able to respond to threats sufficiently quickly to protect people. It’s not even required to, under the law. Typically, the cops show up when the party is over, like roadies cleaning up a stage after a Grateful Dead concert.

It’s nothing less than astounding that there are adult human beings who can’t figure this out. And how can such people exist, in a country where terrorist attacks and surprise wars are certain to occur?

Israelis died because they trusted their government to do things only a god could do, and because their tragic biases led them to vote for laws that made them sheep for the slaughter.

Safe rooms. Really? Even if they worked reliably, how do they help when criminals are closer to them than their victims? How well do they work for people with wheelchairs and walkers? What good is your safe room when you’re on a bus or a tractor?

What percentage of the day does a typical Israeli spend very close to the door of a safe room?

Here’s what will happen if I think criminals are on my property. First, grab a high-capacity rifle and at least two magazines. I will already have a pistol with a laser in my pocket. If I have time, I will call the police, primarily because they might arrive on time to shoot, protecting me from liability. Next, I’ll pick the best defensive location I can, and I’ll wait as long as I can before doing my best to send my guests’ guts, skull fragments, and brain tissue flying onto the walls and floor.

All but the most determined or high attackers will be cowardly and lightly armed, so the odds they’ll run off are overwhelming. If they don’t, I’ll probably be much better armed than they are, and I’ll be able to rain lead on them for quite a while. If I manage to grab additional ammo, which is likely, I’ll still have hundreds of rounds handy when they’re down to one or two.

I will not lock myself in a ludicrous room and hope the criminals don’t have time to use an angle grinder or burn me out.

Who would you rather attack? Me, or an unarmed leftist kibbutznik?

As for attacks outside the home, I can put an AK-47 and a hundred pounds of cartridges in my car if I feel like it. Not in the trunk. Not unloaded. Beside me in the passenger seat in a bag I can open with one hand. And then there’s my carry pistol. I can take it nearly everywhere. Even banks.

It is astonishing that Israeli homes and business are soft targets. Who thought that was a smart idea? Was there a meeting where a bunch of Jewish politicians trying to come up with a homeland defense plan put “gun control” on a list on a whiteboard?

The victim named Poterman says he waited 12 hours for messiah government to come save him. Think what he and his friends could have done in one hour with rifles. You can Google and find out what other armed victims managed to do. Arabs are not known for their prowess as warriors. Much the opposite. They do poorly against resistance.

Israelis should be armed, and they should carry. They should be required to carry, like off-duty policemen in America. They should also be encouraged to keep automatic rifles and lots of cartridges. The government should allot money to buying them night vision gear. They should be building pillboxes, like the Nazis who defended the French coast and the Japanese who slaughtered Allied marines.

Go on the web and watch self-defense shootings. You’ll see that successful defenders sometimes produce and fire weapons in under two seconds. It is not unusual for a person to need to shoot in an extremely short time. A person who carries a gun has the ability to respond extremely quickly to danger, and he can do it wherever he is. Think how different the music festival would have been had the paragliding baboons descended into a crowd with hundreds of pistols, with rifles in their vehicles. A lot of the attackers would have died in the air.

The government may have failed to do things it should have done in order to detect or prevent this attack. Fine. Maybe Netanyahu needs to do better. But the people also failed themselves. They need to realize the government is never going to be able to prevent every attack or respond adequately. This should be obvious.

If you want to be safe from murderers, you should do your best. Disarming yourself is not your best. When you disarm yourself, you’re doing the first thing your enemies would put on their dream list of goals.

Israelis haven’t learned from their own history. In the book of Nehemiah, the Jews were surrounded by the ancestors of people who are trying to exterminate them now. As the Jews rebuilt the temple, the people who carried materials were required to hold the materials in one hand and a weapon in the other. The ones doing the buiding had to wear swords on their hips. Open carry was the rule in the past, but today a select few get a crummy 9mm pistol and 50 rounds of weak ammunition, and the rest get nothing.

Hamas was not afraid at all of Israeli civilians, but their cowardly assassins would never dream of attacking rural Florida or Tennessee. Terrorist bodies would fill dumpsters. Shouldn’t they be more afraid of Israelis than anyone?

Leftism is a luxury delusion that comes at a very high price. I don’t know what it will take to get Israelis to let go of it. I doubt they’ll do what they have to do. I think that if sane gun policies were in Israel’s future, Zechariah 14, which is certain to happen, would look very different.