A guest post by AKUS
Since it is Passover, and organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah, and a country like Iran, have thousands of rockets which they launch into Israel with great regularity, you may have been wondering why this single North Korean rocket is different from all other rockets.
If you’ve been able to avoid the endless repetition on US TV of the Trayvon saga, you have probably been watching the media obsessing over the North Korean rocket launch.
For example, this is the headline in the Washington Post:
Our friends at the Guardian also reported the launch, pointing out that the North Korean have defied “international warnings” about this “provocation”:
This is what Time Magazine had to say about it in the build-up to the “scarier than you think” launch:
North Korea’s Space Threat Is Scarier Than You Think
But just the idea of North Korea aiming for space — and having the missile muscle to get there — led to hair-on-fire panic in east Asia and a more measured but very real angst in the rest of the world. A loonytoons country with nuclear weapons and global reach is no one’s idea of a good thing. The key questions — still unanswerable — are whether North Korea may soon have the technical chops to reach orbit and if they do, does that mean anything?
But, for example, this blasé mention of 300 Israeli casualties is how Guardian ace reporter Harriet Sherwood reported on the threat Hezbollah’s thousands of Iranian-supplied rockets represent to Israel:
So why is one rocket from North Korea creating such panic, while thousands aimed at Israel are not?
Well, you see, it turns out that Hezbollah’s rockets cannot reach Europe or the USA.
But North Korea’s rockets, eventually, will be able to.
It’s funny how attitudes change when the possibility of a rocket crashing through your roof becomes more real.
Lest I forget – the issue being hyped up now that the rocket launch failed is that in the past this kind of show-piece has been the lead-up to an underground nuclear test by North Korea.
It’s also funny how upset some countries seem to be about this, while being rather complacent about Iran’s nuclear program and assistance from North Korea to various Islamic countries. But perhaps they feel that Iran’s nuclear threat is, shall we say, more local at this time. It will be interesting to see if that changes when Iran launches its first intercontinental ballistic rocket and conducts its first underground (we hope) nuclear test.
And that, dear reader, is why a North Korean rocket, launched coincidentally during Passover, is different from all other rockets.
