The further to the left or the right you move, the more your lens on life distorts.

Saturday, May 19, 2018

2013, 2014, 2015 and 2018

The denizens of the anti-Israel left, along with far too many progressive followers in the USA and Europe, supported by their trained hamsters in the main stream media, are doing what they always do when Israel defends itself against violent attacks by Hamas.

Wrapping themselves in moral outrage, the Left ignores Hamas' long and sordid history of lies and deception, violence and disregard for their own people. Leftists wail about "war crimes;" they demand UN investigations; they characterize acts of was as "protests" or uprising" giving them a revolutionary patina that they so adore; they lament the deaths on "innocent palestinian civilians" and reject subsequent evidence that those civilians are neither "innocent" nor "civilians." They demand "proportionality" implying that an Israeli must die for each Hamas attacker killed. They are useful idiots in an Islamist war to eradicate Israel.

Nothing changes. Hamas becomes violent; Israel protects itself, and the Left wails and spews its own form a bias and hatred ...

Don't believe me? Here are three excepts from posts I made after/during other violent Hamas "uprisings" over the past five years:

I wrote this as palestinian violence escalated in 2015:
No one has been paying much attention to the palestinians lately, so like a small child that demands that his parents give him time, the palestinians do the only thing they're really, really good at. They throw their version of a violent tantrum. Their leaders incite the populace using phony claims, their imams incite further anger from the mosque, and street gangs use violent attacks against Israeli civilians, police, soldiers and infrastructure to emphasize their "plight." Their intent, of course, is to provoke an aggressive response from the Israelis, after which, they will wail about the disproportionality of the response, the resultant physical damage to their "refugee camps," (actually cities with shopping malls, gas stations, hospitals and the like), the inevitable occurrence of civilian injuries, and the "war crimes" that have resulted.

Leftist politicians and their trained media hamsters in the West will cluck their tongues and condemn Israel for protecting itself, redouble their monetary support for the murderous Hamas regime, and look for UN sanctions against Israel. It's all so predictable, it would be laughable, if not for the carnage.

-----------------------------

I wrote this as palestinian violence escalated in 2014:
As Palestinian violence escalates in Israel, the Obama administration and their fellow leftists in the worldwide media ramp up the rhetoric that condemns Israel rather than the palestinians who drive cars into civilian crowds or stab innocents on the street. This open letter by Dr. Arieh Eldad, an Israeli Plastic surgeon,(validated by Snopes) has been making the rounds. It presents a counter-narrative:
I was instrumental in establishing the Israeli National Skin Bank, which is the largest in the world. The National Skin Bank stores skin for every day needs as well as for war time or mass casualty situations.

This skin bank is hosted at the Hadassah Ein Kerem University hospital in Jerusalem where I was the Chairman of plastic surgery. This is how I was asked to supply skin for an Arab woman from Gaza, who was hospitalized in Soroka Hospital in Beersheva, after her family burned her. Usually, such atrocities happen among Arab families when the women are suspected of having an affair.

We supplied all the needed Homografts for her treatment. She was successfully treated by my friend and colleague, Prof. Lior Rosenberg and discharged to return to Gaza. She was invited for regular follow-up visits to the outpatient clinic in Beersheva.

One day she was caught at a border crossing wearing a suicide belt. She meant to explode herself in the outpatient clinic of the hospital where they saved her life. It seems that her family promised her that if she did that, they would forgive her.

This is only one example of the war between Jews and Muslims in the Land of Israel. It is not a territorial conflict. This is a civilizational conflict, or rather a war between civilization & barbarism.

Bibi (Netanyahu) gets it, Obama does not ...

-----------------------------

I wrote wrote this as palestinian violence escalated in 2013:
A cease fire in the current hostilities between Israel and Hamas was announced a few hours ago. It will accomplish nothing, except to give the Palestinian terrorist group a chance to re-arm by smuggling still more long range rockets from Iran. Incredibly, Hillary Clinton has "negotiated" an agreement that has the Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood policing the Gaza border to keep weapons smuggling from happening. Yeah ... right.

Throughout 2012 and prior to recent hostilities, Hamas and its sister terrorist groups in Gaza have launched almost 1000 rockets with the intent of killing Israeli citizens. I was in Eilat, Israel in April when one such rocket landed with a very loud explosion in an empty field. Israel did not respond to that rocket or hundreds of others.

Finally, it did something that Barack Obama has done dozens of times in Afghanistan—it used a weaponized drone to assassinate the terrorist leader of Hamas. When rocket fire escalated, Israel finally acted with precision air power, destroying missiles sites purposely embedded in civilian neighborhoods, next to schools, hospitals, and mosques. Even with precision weapons and great skill, collateral damage in the form of civilian deaths had to occur.

These deaths are the fault of Hamas—and Hamas uses them in what Charles Krauthammer calls "Grief Porn." First, Hamas purposely puts Palestinian civilians in harm's way, then when injuries or deaths inevitably occur, it parades the results of its use of human shields to an all too complicit western media. As I mentioned a few posts back, this is standard operating procedure for Hamas.

Worse, far too many Western diplomats and virtually all Leftists condemn Israel for being "disproportionate" in their defensive response. Michael Goodwin discusses the idiocy of this position:
Double standards are par for the course in the Mideast and all the Jew-hating salons from Turtle Bay to Paris. While the hatred is shouted with a clenched fist on the smoldering streets of Gaza City, equally absurd claims are made by striped-pants diplomats and left-leaning sophisticates who insist Israel is guilty of “disproportionate” force because it uses its huge military advantage.

Their argument moves the goal posts. They tacitly accept Israel’s right to respond, but only up to a point. No matter its losses, the Jewish state must never “escalate” because that would be unfair.

Think about that: Affirmative action has come to the battlefield, where the results must be level for the sake of fairness. Coming soon, the demand that Israel turn over half of its weapons to its enemies. Perhaps Hamas would like an Iron Dome of its own?
But none of this comes as a surprise.It's all part of the Groundhog Day feel to this conflict. The only real outcome is more of the same, postponed until Hamas can smuggle still more weapons under the less-than-watchful eye of the Muslim Brotherhood. Someday, when Hamas' weapons become more deadly, Israel will act more forcefully—as it should. That will be the day that affirmative action on the battle field dies. It will also be the day that Hamas will finally meet its bloody end.
-----------------------------

Only one thing has changed during all of this time. We now have an American President who is considerably less receptive to the anti-Israel bias of the Left. That won't change things in Gaza, but it certainly will change the American position toward the conflict.

UPDATE:
----------------

I used the phrase "useful idiots" at the beginning of this post. Jonah Goldberg does the same thing, but provides a profoundly more detailed description:
The people who insist that the Palestinians are unalloyed victims remove human agency from them. [The soft bigotry of low expectations] According to this thinking, they are not making choices; they are playing their parts. How dare you ask why someone would bring a (very sick) baby to a riot? How dare you suggest that there is subtext to the story of Palestinian righteousness? [How dare you ask why a man on crutches in a palestinian propaganda video is shown running like a gazelle in an independent video?] ... Populists always tell a story about the righteousness of “the people,” but they invariably mean only “the right people”; the rest are barely people at all.
Oh ... how true that is.