August 7, 2010. (AP) Jerusalem. Israel fired three nuclear missles into Damascus early this morning, killing an estimated 4.5 million inhabitants of Syria's capital city. This attack follows a series of warnings issued by Israel to Syria demanding the return of an Israeli Defense Force guarddog, affectionately known Baruch, which had been abducted two weeks ago in the Golan Heights by a Syrian-sponsored militia known as the Hajibi. It is not known whether the leadership of this extremist group, which aims to "liberate all of God's creatures from the Zionist state" according to the group's Web site, survived the attack.
A swift round of international condemnation immediately followed, with violent demonstrations erupting in cities all over the globe. The United States was the only nation to publicly express support for Israel's actions. "The United States supports Israel's right to defend herself," President Hillary Rodham Clinton stated during a televised address to the nation. "Syria was warned time and time again to stop harboring terrorist groups bent on the annihilation of Israel. Had Syria reined in these terrorist groups, millions of Syrian civilians would be alive today," she insisted. Calling the the abduction of "an innocent cuddly pomeranian" an "unacceptable provocation", President Clinton echoed the arguments made by hawkish Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has met every provocation by an Arab neighbor with a resounding retaliatory strike, none more devastating than this one.
American intellectuals leaped to Israel's defense. "Any talk of 'proportional force' would be tantamount to Vichyism," wrote Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post. Martin Peretz, in a vituperative editorial published on the The New Republic web site, argued that "the ultramontane Arabs in Syria, by acceding to perfervid pan-Arab fantasies of a second Holocaust, deserved no less." Peretz added that the attack was justified because the "Arabs have an inferior culture, one with no sense of humor." Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz argues that millions of Syrian killed in the attack should not be considered civillians under international law but "collaborators complicit in Syria's support of terrorism." And discredited neoconservative William Kristol, in his four hundredth sixty-eighth call for a wider Middle East war, praised "our nuking of the terrorists." "America's enemies are now on notice to attack us at your peril," Kristrol exhorts in an odd, bellicose editorial that appears to conflate the United States with Israel. The aforementioned commentators also accused anyone who didn't support Israel's nuclear attack of being anti-Semites and "terrorist sympathizers."
Other American analysts, sensitive to accusations of anti-Semitism even though many are themselves Jewish, fear that Israel's massive attack will backfire on Israel and the United States by creating more terrorists and a destabilization of pro-American regimes in Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. These analysts point to the massive anti-American and anti-Israeli demonstrations raging across Arab and European cities immediately following the attack as a warning sign.
