RUTHFULLY YOURS

Group blames Israel for cave-in, the seventh in recent months, amid redoubled efforts to dig across the border.

A tunnel being dug in Gaza under the aegis of the ruling Hamas group collapsed on Thursday, killing a member of the organization’s military wing, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas said.

The dead man was named as Muhammad Musa al Astal from Khan Younis.

The tunnel caved in near the city of Khan Younis in southern Gaza, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades confirmed. It was the latest in a spate of such collapses. Only five days ago, another tunnel caved in near the Zeitoun neighborhood in the eastern part of the Strip, injuring five members of Hamas’s military wing.

Members of Hamas accused Israel of collapsing the tunnel, saying they had seen soldiers on the Gaza border using liquid explosives and “causing small earthquakes” to bring down tunnels dug by the group.

The past two months have seen seven tunnels collapse, most of them in the Khan Younis area, and two in Zeitoun.

Around a month ago, the 23-year-old nephew of Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahar was killed in a tunnel accident.

Just before that, a tunnel collapsed in the area of Jabalia, in the north of the Palestinian enclave, after heavy rain and floods, killing seven excavators and injuring others.

So Osama bin Laden was an environmentalist. In between plotting the mass murder of kaffirs and the destruction of the West, he penned teary-eyed missives about the dangers of “catastrophic climate change.” Coming off like an earnest member of Greenpeace who had read one too many Naomi Klein tracts, he wrote a letter in 2009 calling on Americans to do everything within their power to “save humanity from the harmful gases that threaten its destiny.” Released by the Obama administration this week, the letter says mankind is living in “the shadow of catastrophic climate conditions” and we need a “revolution” to make the planet cleaner. If you read the letter out at the next IPCC gathering, you’d probably get a rousing round of applause.

Some people seem freaked out to discover that OBL had green tendencies. How is it possible that this finger-wagging lunatic could have been as one with the West’s own respectable chattering classes on the issue of climate change? One columnist seems perturbed that bin Laden had what he describes as a more “progressive” take on climate change than the current GOP presidential candidates. But why the surprise? It makes perfect sense that this anti-Western, anti-modern medieval throwback should have warmed to green thinking. After all, bin Laden’s biggest beef in life was that the modern West was an overly cocky, supremely destructive entity that needed to be taken down a peg or two — which is exactly what environmentalists think, too.

Bin Laden’s 2009 letter, written to coincide with the coming to power of Obama, is not the first time he got moist-eyed about man-made planetary doom. In 2002 he attacked the U.S. for pursuing progress at the expense of poor, sad Mother Earth. “You have destroyed nature with your industrial waste and gases more than any other nation in history,” he hectored, like an agitated hippie. Hilariously, he lambasted President George W. Bush for “refus[ing] to sign the Kyoto agreement” on climate-reduction targets. There’s something deliciously surreal about a terrorist outlaw who was then running from hideout to hideout lecturing the president of the United States for failing to sign on the dotted line of global treaties.

In 2007 he lectured the foul, greedy West again, claiming that “all of mankind is in danger because of the global warming resulting to a large degree from the emissions of the factories of the major corporations.” He beat Occupy Wall Street to the punch by four years, slamming the “greed and avarice of the major corporations and their representatives.” Then, in the 2009 letter released this week, he outlined his solution to all this Western wickedness: “The world should put its efforts into attempting to reduce the release of gases.” In a nutshell, join Greenpeace. Take eco-action. Put pressure on corporations. Bin Laden basically had two feelings about the American people: that they should die or, failing that, become dutiful warriors against climate change

Sabeel’s theology distorts the Old Testament by denying Jews any ongoing connection with the land of their origin, and treating them as a people abandoned by God. There is also repeated disparagement of Judaism as “tribal,” “primitive,” and “exclusionary.”

Where most modern churches have left the anti-Semitism of the past behind and recognize that the Romans, not the Jews, crucified Jesus, this cult of what has been called “Christian Palestinianism” denies any historical or theological connection between the biblical Israel, the Jewish people, and the State of Israel.

Perhaps the gravest error made by Kairos, Sabeel, and other Christian groups who pursue a one-sided campaign is that they take away from the Palestinians any form of agency or self-reliance. If the Israelis are to blame for all that is wrong and the Palestinians are only victims, then Palestinians must be treated as children, without the will and power to act on their own behalf. Or who can act only through violence and hate.

Are these campaigns, replete with fraudulent charges, as in the Inquisition, really not about Palestinians at all, but just the latest incarnation of the old racist and religious hatred of Jews, and a clear expression of the “New Anti-Semitism”?