Weapons of Choice

The hard left is anti-Israel—period. They are obsessed with denigrating any policy that supports Israel, often aggressively backing efforts to roll back borders won in defensive wars. The left views the "palestinians" as if they were citizens of a actual country that was somehow invaded and destroyed by the Israelis (a canard) and characterizes a tiny nation of six million in the midst of more than 100 million Muslims (many of whom would gladly annihilate it) as an aggressor. Like most things the left believes, this is nonsense, but given voice by the Barack Obamas and John Kerrys of the world, the meme has force among the ignorant.

Victor Davis Hanson comments:

Secretary of State John Kerry, echoing other policymakers in the Obama administration, blasted Israel last week in a 70-minute rant about its supposedly self-destructive policies.

Why does the world -- including now the U.S. -- single out liberal and lawful Israel but refrain from chastising truly illiberal countries?

Kerry has never sermonized for so long about his plan to solve the Syrian crisis that has led to some 500,000 deaths or the vast migrant crisis that has nearly wrecked the European Union.

No one in this administration has shown as much anger about the many thousands who have been killed and jailed in the Castro brothers' Cuba, much less about the current Stone Age conditions in Venezuela or the nightmarish government of President Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, an ally nation.

President Obama did not champion the cause of the oppressed during the Green Revolution of 2009 in Iran. Did Kerry and Obama become so outraged after Russia occupied South Ossetia, Crimea and eastern Ukraine?

Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power was never so impassioned over the borders of Chinese-occupied Tibet, or over Turkish-occupied Northern Cyprus.

In terms of harkening back to the Palestinian "refugee" crisis that started in the late 1940s, no one talks today in similar fashion about the Jews who survived the Holocaust and walked home, only to find that their houses in Eastern Europe were gone or occupied by others. Much less do we recall the 11 million German civilians who were ethnically cleansed from Eastern Europe in 1945 by the Soviets and their imposed Communist governments. Certainly, there are not still "refugee" camps outside Dresden for those persons displaced from East Prussia 70 years ago.

More recently, few nations at the U.N. faulted the Kuwaiti government for the expulsion of 200,000 Palestinians after the liberation of Kuwait by coalition forces in 1991.

Yet on nearly every issue -- from "settlements" to human rights to the status of women -- U.N. members that routinely violate human rights target a liberal Israel.

The palestinians are a weapon used by Muslim countries in the Middle East to make the entire region Judenein. The palestinians failed attempts at self-governance, their culture of violence and corruption are not due to Israel, but to a decades old attempt, supported by leftists and much of the corrupt U.N., to demonize the only liberal democracy in the Middle East.

VDH continues:

Partly, the cause of global hostility toward Israel is jealousy. If Israel were mired in Venezuela-like chaos, few nations would care. Instead, the image of a proud, successful, Westernized nation as an atoll in a sea of self-inflicted misery is grating to many. And the astounding success of Israel bothers so many failed states that the entire world takes notice.

But partly, the source of anti-Israelism is ancient anti-Semitism.

If Israelis were Egyptians administering Gaza or Jordanians running the West Bank (as during the 1960s), no one would care. The world's problem is that Israelis are Jews. Thus, Israel earns negative scrutiny that is never extended commensurately to others.

Obama and his diplomatic team should have known all this. Perhaps they do, but they simply do not care.

No matter how the Trump administration interacts with Israel, it cannot be worse than the treatment meted out by the Obama administration. I can only hope that Trump takes an aggressive pro-Israel position and an aggressively anti-palestinian stance, as long as the people who call themselves "palestinians" continue to embrace terror and ignorance as their weapons of choice.

UPDATE:
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Here's a little guessing game. I've eliminated the name of the country from an environmental news story published in EcoWatch coming out of the Middle East:

Construction of the world's tallest solar tower is underway. The 820-foot tower, which stands in the middle of a 121-megawatt concentrated solar complex in {deleted} sun-drenched {deleted} desert, is slated for commercial operation by the end of 2017.

The {deleted} Solar Thermal Power Station, {deleted}, consists of more than 50,000 computer-controlled heliostats, or mirrors, that track the sun and reflect its rays onto a boiler on top of the tower. The boiler creates superheated steam that then feeds a steam turbine for power generation.

Like other concentrated solar power (CSP) plants, the beauty of the {deleted} complex is that it's designed to produce energy even when the sun isn't shining.

...

The electricity generated at the {deleted} facility will be enough to supply 120,000 homes with clean energy and avoid 110,000 tons of CO2 emissions each year.

In general, the Left would be cheering this accomplishment but let's see ... can you guess what country has achieved this—Egypt? Jordan? Lebanon? the palestinians? Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan? Nah ... It's Israel, but you already knew that. I have to wonder why.