Israel - why all the fuss ? (part 7)
Miracles, schmiracles!
Miracles? Bah! There's no such thing as a miracle! Then how do we explain ...
(vi) 1991: The Gulf War
Operation Desert Storm was a war fought between the oil-hungry West and a fanatical dictator called Saddam Hussein who'd just invaded the nursery and pinched a few toys. Put it this way, if Kuwait produced fruit and not oil, we wouldn't have given a fig!
When political and economic interests are concerned, moral issues can go out of the window! Forget that Britain and other western nations had just profitably re-armed Saddam and the Iraqis and that the Iranians who had recently been excommunicated were now our friends, along with the Syrians.
Let's play silly word games - whoever's an enemy of our enemy is now our friend! Let's forget the Rushdie fatwa, we're all friends now, at least until we get our toys back! If you think that's crazy and mixed up, spare a thought for King Hussein of Jordan at this time, on the one hand English educated and a friend of the British Royal Family , but on the other suddenly now Saddam's biggest (and only) chum!
So where does Israel fit into all this? While the might of the coalition forces were pounding the stuffing out of Iraq's infrastructure (whatever that is) and playing war games with computers and thinking missiles, Iraq was lobbing over 40 or so Scud missiles at the Zionist Entity, hoping to lure Israel into the conflict, which would have upset the nursery totally and made Nanny very cross indeed!
A miracle of this indiscriminate and unprovoked attack was that only 2 people died as a direct result of the missiles, although many more died of heart attacks brought on by stress. One interesting statistic that came out of this was that, during this time, less Israelis died than they would have done if life had been normal - less road accidents for example.
After forty days (a 'biblical' number if there ever was one) of missiles attacks on Israeli cities the war came to an end. And the biggest miracle of it all was that of all the days that the War could have ended, it had to end just before the most poignant day of all - Purim. Purim is the day of Jewish deliverance. A festival day of national rejoicing now had a special ring to it. The evil Haman, who tried to annihilate the Jews at the time of Queen Esther, now became the evil Saddam, who tried to knock out the Jews with the Scud missiles. Saddam joined the long line of 'Hamans', symbols of anti-Semitic hate and a natural successor to Hitler, the previous 'Haman of this age'.
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By Steve Maltz

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