THE ‘BIONIC JEW’ THEORY OF THE UNIVERSE:

But it’s more difficult than you might think to talk sense into such folks because they believe strongly in the Bionic Jew theory of the universe. This goes beyond space lasers or even weather control: It’s a belief in the existence of the super-sabra. In this fantasy, Israel is a place where Jews go to have their software updated, not to learn to use weapons but to become weapons.

After all, if Israel can genetically engineer Egyptian attack sharks and radiation-sniffing Iranian lizards, imagine what can be done with human potential.

There is another, less amusing thought process at work here, however. And that is that the morality of Israel’s operations is inversely correlated with their level of success.

Israel’s critics insist the Jewish state carry out individually targeted attacks. Blowing up a terrorist’s personal pager, maiming him and him alone, is obviously in compliance with this demand. But what if Israel does exactly that to thousands of individual terrorists simultaneously? That’s no good, for reasons that are difficult to explain but which feel obvious to the public intellectuals keeping score.

You can see how this approach has been applied to Gaza for the duration of the ongoing war. If Israeli soldiers encounter an empty house rigged with explosives but which has an entrance to a subterranean tunnel system used only by the terrorist army and the hostages the IDF is trying to rescue, what can it do? The obvious answer is: it can detonate the explosives from a safe distance and then enter the tunnels. After all, the war crime here is Hamas’s, and such an approach allows the IDF to neutralize the threat without harming civilians.

But what if Hamas illegally rigs a house again? And again? “An aerial photo recovered by the Israeli military from a Hamas commander’s post shows three dozen hidden tunnel entrances marked with color-coded dots and arrows in one crowded neighborhood,” reports the New York Times. The underlying facts haven’t changed: Hamas has committed the crime, Israel is pursuing the approach most closely aligned with humanitarian concerns. But because Hamas has replicated its crime many times over, Israel will knock down many houses. Suddenly, the public criticism is of Israel’s conduct, its supposed “domicide,” its appetite for destruction.

In this upside-down world, the more war crimes Hamas carries out, the less Israel is morally permitted to do in self-defense. Hence, the problem in Lebanon is not that there are thousands of Iranian terrorists there but that Israel wants to take out all of them.

Read the whole thing.

Related: More on “Operation Grim Beeper.” “By the way, for an ideology that is rooted in a desire to return to the 8th century, hasn’t Israel helped them take one big step there by causing Hezbollah to abandon electronics?”