Who has a finger on the trigger?

I've had an unusually (and delightfully) lazy day today, and can't bestir myself to any serious blogging.  Fortunately, others are willing to do the heavy lifting.  For example, here is James Lewis, at the American Thinker, writing about the fallacy between the attacks on Israel's nuclear weapons that seek to apply to Israel the same standards that need to be applied to Iran:

In a WaPo opinion piece this Sunday, Avner Cohen and William Burr present a critique of US policy on Israel’s nuclear weapons capacity. As usual in the liberal media, they take their facts completely out of context: This is Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark.

They fail to mention, for example, such little facts as the repeated genocidal attacks on Israel by Egypt, Syria and even Jordan over a forty year period. They fail to mention that Israel came close to being overrun  by a massive tank assault in 1973, which would have meant the second genocide of the Jewish  people in three decades. And they do not mention that Israel is in greater danger today than it has been since the Holocaust, as its Defense Minister has just said.

This is the standard leftist line. By suppressing history, it conjures up a moral equivalence between attackers and defenders, between free societies and what Sharansky has aptly dubbed Fear Societies.  Fear Societies do not represent their people, but brutalize them. They lack popular legitimacy and therefore moral authority. Today’s Iran is a Fear Society that has killed tens of thousands of its own people to give the Mullahs dictatorial control. Israel is both a free society and one that has its back against the wall, time after time.

Read the rest here