Talking to my kids about war and anti-semitism

I, along with many of you, have been glued to the news channels on my tv over the course of the past week to keep abreast of the situation in Israel. My kids of course, have taken notice. Especially since I am not so willing to change the TV to the Disney Channel or Noggin in the morning. They want to know why, all of a sudden, that Daddy insists we watch the news.

How do you explain what's going on to your kids? How do you explain to them, that there are some very evil hateful individuals in this world that want to blow up houses and kill people simply because they are Jewish like us, and live in the land that G-d promised us? And of course, the bigger kicker - that its okay for us to bomb them back.

Before you flame me, I believe that Israel is 100% right in what it is doing, but nonetheless, how do you tell your kids that it is wrong for them to blow us up, but it is okay for us to bomb them back into the stone age. Kids don't understand the complex nature of individuals. They don't understand that there are people in this world like Nasrallah, Ahmednijad and Assad that don't value a life the way that we do. That don't care how many people they kill or how much damage they cause because their goal is to destroy us. How do you explain to a child that someone that they have never met, and that they will never even likely be in the same room with, hates them from the moment that they were born and wouldn't hesitate to kill them. Then explain, while they fire weapons at us without warning, how we first blanket the area with leaflets telling people to leave, lest they be blown to bits.

We are a nation that prides ourselves in bringing back not only our captured and our injured but our dead, and their body parts too. We are a nation that has been bullied for six decades by all of our "poor defenseless neighbors" and the terrorists that they harbor. If they kidnap 3 people and we give them 3000, we all know what the outcome will be - they will kidnap more of our people.

Regardless of your opinion on the matter, and regardless of who is to blame, the end result is that tens will die, hundreds will be wounded and thousands more will be adversely affected by all that's going on. Let us up that this madness stops soon.

As for my kids, for now, I have left it as "There are some bad people who don't like the Jews and Israel." When they ask "why do they hate us so much?" my only answer is "I wish I knew. Because if I did, maybe we could fix the problem."

What Israel needs - to go back to the days of Chutzpah!

For those of you who don't know the meaning of the word Chutzpah or can't use it in a sentence, I will not be naive enough to presume that I can translate it well. But, IMVHO, chutzpah is epitomized by something that happened 30 years ago last week. While the USA celebrated its 200th anniversary of independence, a group of Israeli commandos flew 2000 miles through the night into Entebbe, Uganda, and released 100 hostages from a hijacked jet. It was a bold and daring move that every world leader involved in the "War on Terror" wishes that they could match. It took bravado, planning, skills, cojones and a ton of chutzpah to get that raid done. It was the true exhibition of the tenacity of the then young State of Israel and a prime example to show the terrorists that their crimes against humanity will never bear fruit.

Yet only ten scant years after that, we learned the hard way that the war on terror didn't end in Uganda, but rather it is still an uphill battle. Ron Arad has been captured and in captivity for 20 years. So have so many other countless soldiers been kidnapped and in the past few weeks Gilad Shalit, Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser, have joined their ranks. Of course, the insane despots that hold the three of them captive are more than willing to give them up in exchange for 1000's of known murders and terrorists - as if Gaza and Lebanon don't have enough of them already.

How sad is this, that in order to save our precious soliders we're expected to send 100 murderers free. Imagine for a moment, that three US Soliders are taken captive and their captors ask us to free everyone at Gitmo, or to free 3000 rapists, arsonists and murderers out of Sing Sing. What do you think our reaction would be? We'd come in shooting. Just like we did to Khadaffi, Koresh, and Saddam. Heck, we've spent five years blowing up camels and horses in the Afghan hills looking for Osama. Yet somehow the world expects Israel to allow missles to rain down on Tzfat, Haifa and Nahariya and sit perfectly still while they prepare to release 1000's of degenerates in exchange for 3 people.

While I don't like where this is going, I am proud that Olmert has the Cojones to take on the Hezbollah and Hamas, and I am glad that President Bush is so far backing him (despite Secretary Rice). Once and for all, we need to show the world that our chutzpah didn't die in Beirut the first time, that we have many more Osiraks and Entebbes left in us, and that it is all still very much worth fighting for. We need to cut off Hamas by their balls, and suffocate Hezbollah's oxygen.

But more importantly, we need to go after Iran. Syria is toothless (ironic, seeing its president is a dentist) , and I am 90% sure that both Jordan and Egypt want no part of this war. Neither to the Saudis and the other countries on the Peninsula. Iran, quite frankly scares the daylights out of me. Ahmednijad is such a lunatic and loose cannon that he actually makes Saddam and Hitler seem almost normal.

We need to go after that kook before he does any harm and show the world that the spirit of Yoni Netanyahu and Elan Ramon is still with us, and that we still have all chutzpah in the world to stand up for ourselves.