Sorry no posts today- I had some trouble with Blogger making a meal out of the musings I tried to post. The basic gist was that the killing of Rantissi was a good thing and that Israel is lucky to have a leader as committed and shrewd as Ariel Sharon. My feeling about Sharon's actions over a long period are that he's realistic in almost every way. He accepts the need for Israel to draw its horns in (behind a good defendable shell). He accepts that the Palestinians need to make progress towards their own state. Above all though he understands that the leadership of people like Rantissi and Yassin has chosen terrorism as a lifestyle, and that Yasser Arafat has always been able to rely on people to take the real choices off his shoulders. The BBC's Wyre Davies' comments that

'Anyone who dared hope that the killing had ended after Ariel Sharon's breakthrough meeting with President Bush in Washington last week, would have been severely disappointed.'
and
'Abdel Aziz Rantissi was a devout Muslim and hard-line political figure who firmly believed that Palestinians were justified in fighting to defeat the Israeli government in order achieve their political goals. '

betray two things. One, that the BBC refuse to understand that killing is the game that terrorists like Rantissi and Yassin were intent on playing, and death is the way the Palestinian playingfield tilts, and that what you must do is change the political geography, the lines on the playing field, so to speak. Even then enthusiasts of the first game wouldn't abandon it for another- but the hangers-on just might. They've lost two star players, which should be a reality check as to whether the spectacle is really all that wonderful after all. The BBC, however, would prefer to see those who repose confidence in Sharon as hopelessly naive. Well, whether naive or not they are certainly revenged against the architects of terror- but I wouldn't concede that Davies is right. Two, that what Rantissi was not doing was fighting the Israeli government: he, and others like him, were pursuing Jihad and blowing up children and women to satisfy religious, cultural and racial hatred.