By Bruce Thornton, MOSAIC
July 21, 2014
Israel’s military operation to degrade Hamas’ ability to rain rockets down on Israeli cities has stirred up the usual noisy and nasty protests in Europe. We need not dwell on demonstrations by Muslim immigrants, whose genocidal Jew-hatred has been an Islamic tradition for 14 centuries. More revealing is the hatred of Israel by so many Europeans, ranging from leftover leftists and idealizers of the dark-skinned “other,” to far-right xenophobes and morally addled Christians. Whatever its origins, one thing their bitter hatred of Israel does not have is any foundation in coherent principle.
Take the displeasure aroused by the continually publicized disparity in deaths between Gazans and Israelis in the current ground operation to stop the rockets. Many critics seem affronted that Israel has taken great pains to protect its citizens by building bomb shelters and developing the Iron Dome anti-missile defenses, and so have suffered only 2 civilian deaths. They see the videos of dead Palestinian Arab children and blame those deaths on Israel’s “disproportionate response” instead of Hamas’ indifference to their own people’s safety. They ignore Hamas’s tactic of using their own women and children as human shields, ordering them not to flee the fighting, and storing explosives and munitions in tunnels under mosques, hospitals, apartment buildings, and schools, subterranean space that could be used to protect their people. They wink at Hamas’ conscious aim to engineer such casualties in order to create the “propaganda of the deed,” the purpose of which is to elicit precisely the uncritical condemnations of Israel that European useful idiots reflexively provide. They disregard Israel’s unprecedented efforts to warn civilians that bombs are headed their way––phoning them on cell phones and land-lines, sending text messages, scattering leaflets, and dropping warning duds on the roofs of targets. And of course, the Israel-haters don’t care that Israel’s actions are always a defensive response to terrorist aggression.
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