Pity the poor Gaza Palestinians who are worth more dead than alive to their leaders -- terrorists who have turned that tiny sliver of land into hell on Earth.

In the twisted and coldly calculating view of Hamas, dead and injured Palestinian civilians -- and the more the better -- make great ammunition in the PR war for the world's sympathy.

Israel takes great pains to minimize civilian casualties in its ongoing war against terrorists. It phones ordinary Palestinians to warn them to take cover as it targets Hamas militants, arms-smuggling tunnels, weapons-storage depots and other terrorist infrastructure. Israel also treats injured Palestinian civilians in its top-notch medical facilities.

When was the last time a Palestinian suicide bomber warned away civilians before blowing up a building in Israel? Oh, right. That would defeat the purpose.

While Israel bends over backwards to avoid civilian deaths, Muslim extremists deliberately try to kill as many civilians as possible.

For the Muslim terrorists, it's a win-win situation. No matter how few civilians are accidentally killed by Israel, it's always a "massacre."

And using civilians as human shields and storing weapons in mosques and other buildings frequented by civilians are other tactics to ensure innocent Palestinians die to make Israel look bad.

Similarly, the more Israeli civilians are slaughtered to "free Gaza" (even though Israel actually left Gaza in 2005), the more victorious Hamas appears.

MEASURED IN BLOOD

Victory to Hamas and other Muslim extremists is not measured in the kinds of successes you might expect -- state-building, law and order, industry and job creation.

It is measured in blood alone. Victory is measured in a hatred so deep that Hamas has no interest in building a functioning Palestinian state and living in peace alongside Israel.

The Hamas dream is no secret. These terrorists and their sympathizers want all of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza under Muslim rule. You can't negotiate with an entity that seeks your destruction.

All you can do, as Israeli President Shimon Peres said this week, is to teach Hamas a lesson. The alternative is for hundreds of thousands of Israelis to put up with perpetual rockets crashing into their homes, schools and playgrounds. Where are all the international protests over that?

More than 6,000 Hamas rockets and mortars have been fired into Israel since the Jewish state withdrew from Gaza three years ago. What other country would sit back and do nothing in the face of repeated terrorist attacks?

Perhaps the only country in the world that supports Hamas is Iran, the pariah state run by a sociopath who dreams of nuking Israel.

There are about 5,000 centrifuges in Iran to enrich uranium which is used to make nuclear bombs. Nuking Israel would kill scores of Muslims as well as Jews. But Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, like other Muslim extremists, is far more concerned with threatening to annihilate Jews than improving the lives of Muslims.

As for the tens of thousands of demonstrators around the world who have condemned Israel, with their hyperbole about genocide and war crimes, they need a history lesson and some common sense.

Genocide is what's going on in Darfur, where militias backed by the Arab-dominated Sudanese government have murdered more than 300,000 people, mostly from minority ethnic groups.

Terrorism is a world menace. Israel, at least, has the guts to strike back.
 

(  Terrorism as an excuse for war crimes  )