What Seattle-Bellevue has to do with Israel-Gaza
Jul 22, 2014, 2:52 PM | Updated: Jul 23, 2014, 6:12 am
Smoke and fire from the explosion of an Israeli strike rise over Gaza City, Tuesday, July 22, 2014, as Israeli airstrikes pummeled a wide range of locations along the coastal area and diplomatic efforts intensified to end the two-week war. (AP Photo)
(AP Photo)
Taken from Monday’s edition of The Jason Rantz Show.
I want everyone out there reading this to pick a side: Seattle or Bellevue. I know not everyone lives there, but pick a side, whichever city comes more natural to you. The first one you side with, say it out loud.
So presume for a moment that Bellevue is getting pummeled by rockets from Seattle, thousands and thousands of rockets getting fired against Bellevue from Capitol Hill. If you’re in Bellevue, you probably feel kind of on edge.
The folks who chose Bellevue, just think about what it would be like if you were going about your day, maybe shopping at Bellevue Square for some clothes, maybe seeing a stand-up comic at the Parlor Live, maybe taking an accounting course at Bellevue College.
Imagine if at any moment one of those rockets will be fired off at you. You’d feel on edge. You’d feel scared, exhausted, and stressed. You’d feel really, really bad.
At some point, folks in Bellevue will have enough. They can’t just take on the rockets. That’s not how you live and that’s not how Bellevue will survive. They have to fight back.
So they do.
Bellevue decides enough is enough. They decide to target the sites shooting off these rockets. They decide to target the bad guys sending over the rockets. They send over their own missiles, powerful missiles.
Now the group behind the Bellevue attacks. They’re a small group of radicals living in Seattle, amongst the hipsters in Capitol Hill maybe. They know they can never do more damage than Bellevue’s missiles, so they need another way to fight this war. They need to win this in the court of popular opinion. They need to show the rest of Washington state how bad Bellevue really is.
So this group puts their weapons, rocket launch sites, and leadership groups scattered throughout the neighborhood, but they’re very specific in where they camp out.
They set up shop outside of Neumos, the concert venue. They put a weapons cache by Seattle University . They put some high level leaders right by the Polyclinic.
Now, they do this for a reason, well, two reasons:
1) Put military targets right next to vulnerable civilian targets and they’re less likely to be targeted.
Or, and even better for these bad guys:
2) Let them be targeted, so hopefully there could be civilian deaths that we can parade around on TV to show how evil Bellevue is.
Let’s fire off some rockets from outside Neumos, get hit by a missile from Bellevue, and show some images of dead concertgoers. Or even better, if you’re one of these bad guys, you get a school to take on some collateral damage because there’s nothing better than the image of a dead kid to put out there and claim Bellevue is the enemy.
Meanwhile, Bellevue is like “Look, I don’t want to kill any innocent folks, but you’ve got bad guys living amongst you, you’re not kicking them out, and we can’t live with rockets hitting us every day. What do you want us to do?”
And that’s the question, right? What are they supposed to do?
Now, Tacoma leaders get involved. They want a ceasefire. It’s in their best interest. Now, Tacoma has a weird history with Bellevue, but they’ve patched things up for the most part and they want the violence to stop. So they come up with a ceasefire pact and Bellevue says, deal, we just want the rocket attacks to stop.
But Seattle’s bad guys? They won’t accept it! They don’t like Bellevue. They hate them. They want to see Bellevue and every resident of Bellevue dead. They don’t think they have the right to live. They’re a cancer on Western Washington.
You can’t reason with them, so, what’s Bellevue supposed to do in this scenario?
Now, I bring Bellevue and Seattle into this because to truly understand what’s happening and what it’s like, you have to personalize it.
Like KTTH host Michael Medved has said, it’s hard to truly understand it unless you’ve visited Israel.
Well, you’ve visited and maybe even live in Seattle or Bellevue. If this were you, what would you do? Would any American city stand for what Israel is dealing with? If Surrey BC fired off a rocket into Blaine, Wash. what do you think our response would be?
Taken from Monday’s edition of The Jason Rantz Show.
