While I do often have disagreements with Mr. Sobran I am rarely moved even to email him. But in this opinion piece he appears to have turned his back on his previous understanding of the Middle East.

Nearly everyone but a few hard-line Zionists, many of them Christian, seems to agree that the harsh Israeli response to Hezbollah rocket attack from Lebanon has been "disproportionate," an "overreaction." Well, maybe. It's certainly been bloody and frightening.

To review the time sequence of events

1. Hezbollah attacked an Israeli patrol, three killed and two captured -- captured not kidnapped. Israeli and western reports say it occurred in Israel. Reports from the rest of the world say it occurred in Lebanon. Israel knows to much about where they attackers came from for it to have happened in Israel.
2. Israel sent a tank over the border to retrieve the two captured soldiers. It was destroyed by a mine killing four more Israelis.
3. Israel began a military attack on Lebanon starting with the Beirut airport.
4. Hezbollah started firing rockets into Israel.

Pardon me but the question is whether or not Hezbollah's response to the Israeli bombing has been proportionate. The answer is obvious. While the organization is likely doing the best it can in response to the bombing it is far, far less than proportionate.

But given the premises of the nation-state, just what were the Israelis supposed to do? How do you calculate "proportion" in cases like this? If a state is supposed to protect its own subjects, precision in such a situation is nearly impossible to specify or achieve, and Hezbollah (the Army of Allah) was obviously counting on this. When it fired its rockets, it was dealing death as surely -- and as cruelly -- to innocent Muslims in Lebanon as to Jews in Israel.

The usual, reasonable and customary response to the capture of troops in combat is to work out a prisoner exchange. That is the proper and proportionate response. You are assuming the rockets preceded Israel's attack on Lebanon but it did not. Israel escalated it beyond border incursion and it is not clear who made the incursion.

Even those of us who have been skeptical and suspicious toward Israel, as I have, can only be revolted by such merciless enemies. They can neither be reasoned with nor threatened, and killing them seems only to make them multiply. The simplest tactics of terrorism can put its targets into impossible positions.

I have no brief for Israel's enemies nor do I have a brief for Israel. But any impartial review of the evidence without a consideration for bible stories makes Zionists the murderers and thieves from day one. Zionists are irrational, ideological fanatics.

Zionists chose to live in the most dangerous place in the world for them to live and then they whine about the continuing resistance they knew would be their lot in life in Israel. Those who were born in Israel can curse their parents. Most European countries allow grandchildren of emigrants to return no questions asked.

Zionists stole the private property of over a million individuals. The rightful owners want it back. That is all there is to the Israeli question. There is nothing more you need to know.

All thieves can justify their actions. The use of deadly force to gain the return of property is moral when there is no other recourse. Holders of stolen property are as guilty as the original thieves.

Not only Israel but the Western world is dealing with something new to us: the murderous martyr, the man who is willing to die in order to kill for his cause. Such a man is a human conundrum. How on earth do you deal with him?

I am confident if those "martyrs" were given tanks, F-16s, and smart bombs they would choose to use them rather than explosive belts. Lets try it and find out. Hezbollah appears to be very willing to use rockets and AK-47s so we can test arming the Palestinians quite cheaply to see if they will give up using suicide bombers.

Think of the man who kills his wife and children, then shoots himself. His neighbors wonder if it could have been prevented, but can only wring their hands helplessly afterward and ask how it ever came to this point. What unfathomable hatred makes people do such things?

As that describes the folks at Masada perhaps they should all be designated heroes and get on with life. Masada is a point of pride of modern Israel. Its army admires the murdering, thieving defenders of Masada and praises their murder of their wives and children before suiciding. You may not understand it but Israelis idolize such behavior.

All of which makes democracy seem a feeble prescription for evaporating the volcanic discontents of the Middle East. On the contrary, democracy in Gaza and Lebanon has only complicated the chaos, allowing Hamas and Hezbollah to add political power to their arsenals. Nor has American-sponsored democracy brought peace to Iraq.

If the IRA can have a political wing why not Hamas and Hezbollah? If we can suffer communists to live I'm not quite sure what your problem is.

The start of the policy to murder and expel the Palestinians was by Jabotinski's Revisionist movement in Zionism. The Likud is the descendant of the Revisionist movement. Their favorite tactics were bombs in Arab markets and kidnapping cum murder of British troops. Why is it allowed political power? Does that not complicate things too?

Once again the United States has plunged into a part of the world that seems like a baffling alternative universe. "These people don't understand anything but force," we say, and after all we have plenty of force. But they think the same thing about the infidel: that all we understand is the deadly universal language of terror and torture.

So why do Europeans, which includes the Zionists, insist upon putting themselves in harm's way? If Iraqi troops had overthrown the US government and were running loose in our country Americans would be killing them. Americans would be doing their best to slaughter them for any reason or for no reason, perhaps just for sport. Uninvited foreign troops have no right to life in the country they invade. They are lawful targets. Iraq never surrendered.

I greatly regret American troops were put in the position of being lawful targets and in daily risk of their lives but I cannot find fault with what Iraqis are doing to them. I know I would be doing the same thing to Iraqi troops.

Europe's old religious wars, bloody as they were, seem like family disagreements compared with the conflicts of the Middle East. The first European settlers came here to escape them. Centuries later, Jews migrated to Palestine to escape European persecution. But the scattered native tribes of North America proved easier to subdue than the Muslim Arabs, united (up to a point) by faith. After more than half a century, Israel is far from the safe haven its founders hoped it would be.

It is a fallacy that Israel was ever expected to be a safe haven. No person past the idealism of early adolescence could have rationally expected life in Palestine to be other than it is today. That claim might have been in the sales brochure: caveat emptor.

But let me ask you, what have been the religious conflicts in the middle east in the last 1300 years? It doesn't take long to find Europeans instigating religious problems one way or another. The British let the Zionists into Palestine. The British shoved three provinces of the Ottoman Empire into Iraq and then justified a king/dictator to control the violence. If they had been left apart there is no guarantee of no violence but forcing them together was a guarantee of violence.

It's all very well to call Islam a "religion of peace," but that seems to depend on who is practicing it. Does the Koran have passages urging its votaries to forgive their enemies, to turn the other cheek, and to pray for those who persecute them? If so, these injunctions are not widely known.

On the other hand the New Testament passages in the bible calling for violence are well known and oft quoted by Christian Zionists. The Jewish Zionists have the Old Testament passages regarding slaughter of everything living imprinted in their hearts. And that is before we get into the Talmud.

I have been asked to explain this. What is in the New Testament calling for violence?

The most obvious is Revelation. This has inspired the Christian Zionists to unconditionally support every Israeli slaughter. It has lead to the "Left Behind" series filled with nothing but violence hung on the Scofield nonsense interpretation of Revelation. If you believe these are the end times then all things are permitted.

Let us look at one of the accepted principles taught by Jesus that all men are brothers. In light of this the paraphrase 'I will set father against son and brother against brother' takes on an entirely different meaning.

In the practice of Christianity the call for pacifism is rare. The greatest Christian teachers and philosophers have always supported some wars, in some cases lead them, and have rationalized ways to justify war in light of the presumption that Jesus taught peace.

It is no different for everyday Christians. The Battle Hymn of the Republic and Onward Christians Soldiers are better than calls for a Jihad because of the great tunes. The people who claim to be the most devout Christians have always been the greatest supporters of war. Even the devil can quote the Bible and Koran for his own ends. What is does one tell a Christian with doubts about military service? Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and similar platitudes as though a person's life belongs to Caesar and the injunction against killing applies only when and where Caesar decrees.

It is fundamentally foolish to argue chapter and verse from either the Bible or the Koran. As the saying goes even the Devil can quote it to his own ends. Both Zionists and anti-Zionists are equally versed in the skill.

On the contrary, one gets the impression that Islam is the fighting faith par excellence, a religion of the avenging sword. (Tom Jones's tutor, Thwackum, "was for doing justice, and leaving mercy to heaven.") Today's Islamic terrorists may not be typical, but they seem to be normative and predominant in the Muslim world. It doesn't take many fanatics to set the tone for a whole society, especially when they are honored as martyrs.

To the world and to the US the neocons have set the same tenor for the US. And they claim to be Zionists both Christian and Jewish. In 2002 and 2003 it was hard to find any public statement that was not warlike. They are not that easy to find even today. The country has not turned against war rather the country has turned against this war.

It may seem paradoxical to us that murderers should be honored at all, but it's a big world, and different religions seem strange and savage to each other.

Not only does Israel have the assassins (Iscaria) of Masada as national heroes but Japan does not condemn its Kamikazes from WWII. In drama the premise of the suicide mission is standard plot device. I do not see what problem you have with understanding suicide missions.

But if the issue is simply murderers, members of a military who die defending their country from unprovoked, unjustified foreign aggression are murdered pure and simple. Why do we honor the US military for murdering so many of the Iraqi Army troops? Why do we honor them for murdering members of a legitimate resistance to occupation troops?

If the issue is Israeli civilians you should read this article. To summarize, all military members are lawful targets, on or off duty, active or reserve. There is no distinction in international law between active and reserve or on and off duty. It is nearly impossible to attack any group of Israelis and not have one member of the military in the group. Anyone else is no more than collateral damage. Israel uses its buses as military assets making them lawful targets. A few years ago there was a disco bombing of "young, innocent" Israelis who happened to be on leave from duty in the West Bank. They were lawful targets by any standard and by any measure.

Think of Hilaire Belloc's epigram "The Pacifist":

Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight;
But roaring Bill, who killed him, thought it right.

When the West called itself Christendom, the Muslims learned to think of Christians as "Crusaders," a term that unhappily persists to this day. And at this point the Middle East still seems inhospitable to interfaith comity and to seeing the other fellow's point of view.

Oddly there are three countries where interfaith comity is the norm. Those countries are Lebanon, Iran and Syria. There was a fourth, Iraq, but the US put an end to that knowing what it was doing.

But is Crusaders a legitimate term today? Do you recall Bush specifically approving private humanitarian relief efforts by proselytizing Christians? Tracts in Arabic included with food? Charismatic Christians allowed into Iraq to run loose making trouble? There were even complaints when their meetings with their Maker were advanced a few years. And then they were honored as martyrs.

It's a little late in the day for Americans to have second thoughts about invading the Muslim world; the only question is whether it's far too late.

We should have invaded earlier? Was not WWI early enough for you? Were the Crusades not early enough? What do you propose can be accomplished by an invasion? Kill their leaders and convert them all to Christians? Conversion by M-16? At least the M-16 has turned into a meaningful symbol of Christianity.

Joseph Sobran
Copyright © 2006 by the a division of Griffin Communications

It is contrary to US interests to make Iran a major influence in the region by eliminating Iraq but the neo-cons deliberately did that. If it was not deliberate then they are stupid and ignorant. Everyone who was familiar with the region knew it would happen including an amateur like me.

An amateur like me knew Iraqis would kill Americans. A point of pride for the Muslims in the Baghdad region is they expelled Ghengis Khan in one year.

But your main point is Israel and what is it to do? Given the sequence of events what Israel should have done was respond to Hezbollah's call for a civilized prisoner exchange instead of bombing the hell out of Lebanon. In fact this long response is many, many times too long.

You have mixed Hezbollah with suicide bombers and bombing Lebanon with the rockets that followed the bombing.