Israel is only responding to war. The Palestinians have not merely kidknapped a soldier, they have been relentlessly launching rockets and attempting other terrorist activities.
If Canada launched 1,000 rockets at the US, kidknapped American soldiers, suicide bombed thousands of Americans, etc., I think we can safely assume the US would see acts of war. Indeed, a declaration of war, period.
The fact is this: Those who fail to understand that Israel is a democracy like ourselves, withour system of justice, rights, government, free media and speech, sensibilities and sensitivities, and as such is as desperate for peace as would we be, and as willing to compromise as would we be, see the simple and strikingly naive narrative: The stronger nation must be in the wrong. They fail to understand, are unable to understand, that the palestinian entity is corrupt to its core, run by terrorists, has no free speech, no free media, no system of justice, and is a virtual propaganda state where the minds of people are no less subject to control than citizens of North Korea. Such a state, dedicated as it is to Israel's annihilation, will agress as long as:
* It believes it can successfully wipe Israel off the map 9as its official maps and school texts show)
* It has the the support of the Arab and Muslim world
* It has the support of the UN onside, as the majority of members states are either Islamic or want oil money or need to keep latently terrorist Islamic minorities from recruiting yet more fanatics to their terrorist cause, i.e., more 7/7's.
Moral relativism has gone mad. And the Israel/Palestinian conflcit is, perhaps, its epicentre. Cause and effect critical thinking, no matter how basic, is lost. The left which can barely find the time to express outrage over the genocide of Christians by Muslims in Sudan, the annexation of Tibet by China, the wicked harassment of christians in the Arab world, the relentless suppression of democrats in the Arab world, the thousands upon thousands of innocents rapes and murdered and tortured in Arab nations, obsesses, truly obsesses, over Israel. It's like collective mental illness.
Fortunately, the winds are beginning to change direction. Incredibly, I've actually heard fair newsreporting on the current matter on both the CBC and BBC. It won't last. But it indicates how a western world beginning to understand the madness of the Arab world is beginning to understand Israel's reality in a new context. That context is reality.