Obsession

One of the best polemical political documentaries you will ever see or, at least, the most timely. Obsession. It’s long, but worth viewing. Be warned that there are scenes of graphic violence.

I vaguely knew about the parallels between Naziism and Islamofacism, but had no idea how joined at the hip they are. Some of the WWII footage was an eye-opener. (Did you know that the Mufti of Jerusalem organized his own Bosnian Muslim SS troops?)

The film has its own web site where you can order a copy on DVD.

When worse is better

Rich Lowry hits a homer.

It is for Qanas that Hezbollah conducts its operations among civilians in the first place. It hopes that Israeli attacks will cause civilian casualties so that the Jewish state’s offensive will be delegitimized. It thus depends on a perverse logic whereby a civilized military force attempting to avoid civilian casualties at the cost of the effectiveness of its own operations is considered barbaric and is pressured to end its campaign — and the world perversely reasons right along with it.

This is one of the greatest asymmetries of asymmetric warfare. For a guerrilla force, worse is always better, even though the worse comes at its instigation. It seeks a widening gyre of death and destruction. “Promoting disorder is a legitimate objective for the insurgent,” David Galula writes in his classic study of insurgency warfare. “Moreover, disorder — the normal state of nature — is cheap to create and very costly to prevent.”