As I prepare to write this commentary, I anticipate that I will likely take some heat because of what I have to say on this subject matter. That’s fine – let her rip.

I just heard on the news that Israel has rejected Secretary of State John Kerry’s proposal for a cease fire in their attacks on Gaza. I say, hooray for Israel. It’s about time somebody said no to the Obama Administration and its continuing refusal to be supportive of perhaps our greatest ally.

The Israelis did not start this mess, but I am pretty sure they intend to finish it. They are not fighting the Palestinians. They are trying to protect themselves from attacks from Hamas, a terrorist organization that hides itself in the midst of innocent people. It is certainly unfortunate that innocent lives are being lost in Gaza, but whenever people allow terrorists to exist and operate from within the populace, the people can expect casualties. For Israel, this is a war. They are fighting to protect themselves.

People seem to lose sight of the fact that Hamas is a terrorist organization. The United States declared war on terrorism nearly thirteen years ago, and asked the peace loving nations of the world to join us in that war. That war has not been won. So why in the world are we now interfering in Israel’s fight against the same enemy? Sure, they (Hamas) have a different moniker than Al Qaeda, but they are still terrorists. A war on terrorism should not be limited to certain factions or groups. If the world has identified a group as a terrorist group, they are the enemy regardless of what they call themselves.

Israel sets a fine example for the United States to follow. We cannot continue to let these terrorist groups push peace-loving people around. Israel took quite a few hits from Hamas before they started to retaliate. Even then, they told them, essentially, to knock it off or they were going to blow them away before they ever started the assault on Gaza. They warned the people in Gaza that unless Hamas stopped firing upon them, they were coming. Israel is a respected military force in the region because of that stance. They have demonstrated many times over that they mean what they say when it comes self-preservation.

The United States, on the other hand, just sends out little powder-puff bluffs and ever-receding lines in the sand. No one respects us anymore. As a result, people like Putin in Russia are jumping on the terrorist bandwagon, except that he is doing it under a recognized national flag. We know that Russia is backing and arming the separatists in Ukraine but we do nothing about it other than send MREs to the Ukrainian forces. I’ve never heard of an MRE stopping an artillery barrage. C'mon America!! We are letting the world walk all over us and I’d be willing to bet that we are not very far away from another strike on the homeland.

Even the immigration problem we are having on our southern border should be considered a threat to our national security. I’ll bet there are a whole lot more than refugee children streaming across that border. I see maps on the Internet showing the locations of known terrorist camps within our borders and spread across the nation. If we know they are there, why aren’t we eradicating them?

It is going to be painful, America, but we have got to toughen up and we have got to do it now. If we do not toughen up and dig our heels in, all the pain is going to be inflicted upon us, not upon our enemy.