Thursday, March 08, 2012

Books and homicidal sympathies

I have a bad habit. When I start reading a (non-fiction) book, I feel obligated to finish it no matter how bad and how unoriginal it is.  That is my story with Daniel Byman's A High Price:The Tirumphs and Failures of Israeli Counterterrorism".  And what do you say about an author who believes that Fath is the acronym for "The Liberation Movement for the Palestinian Nation"? (p. 3); a man who justifies the killing the innocent Arabs in Palestine before the establishment of the state of Israel under this pretext:"seeking out the enemy and killing him before he could attack.  Even when the enemy could not be killed, the hope was to scare him into passivity." (p. 14)