Groundhog Day

In the 1993 movie, Groundhog Day, the main character wakes up every morning and relives the same day, making small changes to events in an effort to reshape the outcome. The movie is a comedy, and events remain predictably the same, regardless of the protagonist's moves.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has all of the elements of a tragic version of Groundhog Day -- predictable events, predictable reactions, and a predictable outcomes. In every case, the events are the same:

1. The Palestinians are promised significant benefits by Western Nations immediately after they precipitate yet another Israeli defensive action. Vast sums of Western money ("Humanitarian aid") flow into their corrupt pseudo-government, but conditions on the ground never change
2. They promise to abide by conditions—e.g., no importation of offensive weapons, no terror attacks, blah, blah blah ...
3. They proceed to violate every promise, but are defended by Western Leftists because they are "oppressed."
4. They wait for a few years until they have illegally acquired (smuggled) sufficient weapons (most recently rockets) and then launch on Israeli civilian population centers.
5. Rockets are launched from schools, hospitals, and mosques in an effort to use unwilling human shields and maximize collateral damage when Israel responds.
   
6. The main stream media largely ignores all of this.
7. Israeli civilians are under fire, and Israel's air force responds in an effort to take out the rocket launching sites.
8. Western leaders make a show of being evenhanded by stating that Israel has every right to defend its citizens from attack.
9. Within hours, Western leaders begin to state that Israel's response should be "proportional."
10. The Left leaning main stream media waits about 48 hours and then begins to report on Palestinian "civilian" casualties, never validating casualty claims, never considering that many of the casualties were de facto Hamas fighters or unwilling human shields, and absolutely never noting that Hamas' action put their own civilians in harm's way.
11. Within the next 24 hours, useful idiots like CNN's Anderson Cooper are embedded in Gaza, lamenting all of the death and destruction (the amusing thing about this is that Hamas would cut the throats of every Left-leaning "journalist" were these intrepid reporters not shilling for Hamas on an international stage).
12. Israel escalates its defensive attacks and begins to take offensive action against Hamas targets, control centers, communication facilities, etc.
    
13. Immediately, Western leaders begin to pressure Israel to stop these actions.
14. Hamas knows that they're protected by the Western media, many Western politicians, and a vast majority of those on the Left, who over the last few decades have cultivated a virulent antipathy toward Israel.
15. A "cease fire" is brokered with significant bribes for the Palestinians and empty promises for the Israelis.
16. Hamas thumps its chest, declaring that it has "defeated" the IDF.
17. Ground Hog day restarts at step 1

In my view, this process will never end, until Israel is pushed to finish Hamas once and for all. There is no settlement that can be reached with a group of elected terrorist thugs and the populace that supports. There is no negotiation that can succeed when one side breaks every promise and is perfectly willing to follow the Islamist dictate of Tacqqia—approved lies to infidels. There is no good outcome ... none. And with that in mind, Israel must be wary of "friends" like Barack Obama—a man who clearly sympathizes with the anti-Israel attitudes of his leftist brethren worldwide. Update: ------------- And so it begins. This from Rachel Maddow, queen of the leftist crew at MSNBC:

MADDOW (after referring to President Obama's visit to Cambodia, Thailand and Myanmar): And of course the whole trip to Asia comes in the midst of a very scary flareup between Israel and Gaza. Now, we do not know exactly what started this most recent round of fighting, but we do know that an Israeli air strike killed the top commander of Hamas in Gaza on Wednesday. And we know then that that was followed by rocket attacks aimed at southern Israel and then Tel Aviv and then today, Jerusalem. Israel has been pounding Gaza with air strikes. The attacks appeared today to be rapidly escalating, including signs that Israel is preparing for a ground incursion into Gaza. The New York Times tonight citing reports of Israeli tanks massing on the border with Gaza.

Newsbusters vets Maddow and shows the virulent lies that pass for Leftist media commentary on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

Gee, if only Israel hadn't inexplicably killed that poor misunderstood Hamas commander. Conspicuously absent from Maddow's narrative is any mention of Israel's rationale for the attack -- Hamas targeting Israel with hundreds of rocket attacks from Gaza, as they've been doing every year for the last decade. Indiscriminate savagery that does not distinguish between military and civilian targets, in marked contrast to Israel's response, which was to kill one of Hamas's leading terrorists. Maddow rearranges the chronology more to her liking, claiming that Israel killed Hamas's top commander, "followed" by Hamas rocket attacks on Israel, instead of the actual sequence which was the other way around. Seeing how this elephant-in-the-room omission about Hamas bellicosity isn't a problem for Maddow, it is too much to expect she'll ever mention another inconvenient fact -- Hamas targeting Israeli civilians with rockets from the same territory Israel reliquished to Palestinian control in 2005. Land for peace, indeed.