RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/05/24/the-media-must-stop-demonising-israel/

On the BBC News at Six on Friday, Jeremy Bowen spoke to a Gazan man who, he said, is proudly ready to give not only his life for Jerusalem, but also those of his wife and child. We were left to wonder how on board with that his wife is. Certainly Bowen didn’t seem surprised by such an outrageous statement, or seem to want to question the sense and rationality of it. His report showed many hundreds of young Gazan men, parading along the streets and rubble, proudly claiming they have achieved victory over Israel – despite the considerable ruins of many buildings – and saying they will never give up until Jerusalem is theirs.

I switched over to Channel 4 News at 7pm and Matt Frei was also in Gaza. Presenter Fatima Manji told viewers that the ceasefire had been secured, despite ‘Israeli police firing teargas and stun grenades at demonstrators holding Palestinian flags at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem’. To be fair, at least Bowen, who also reported this skirmish, mentioned that it was in response to the demonstrators throwing a petrol bomb at police. Matt Frei’s report was merely simplistic and childlike. This is the same Frei who, during an interview with a Palestinian woman on LBC recently, did not once question or challenge her claim that Israel was a colonial and apartheid state.

In his report from Gaza, Frei reminded us of how many Gazans have been killed in the most recent conflict compared with how few Israelis have been killed. ‘Of course the casualties on that side [Israel] were minimal compared with the casualties on this side – 250 dead, many of them women and children’, he said. The question we seem to be asked repeatedly in the media at the moment is: ‘How can Israel justify having so few casualties?’

Frei, like almost every reporter I see on the news at the moment, either brushes aside or says nothing about the avowed murderous intentions of Hamas and its supporters. That they want to kill Jews, to wipe all Jewish Israelis off the land of Israel, ‘from the river to the sea’, is barely ever mentioned on television. What we do see thrashed out time and again is the mismatch in military strength. Why is it, in effect, that so few Israelis die?

On social media the same comments are made over and over. Israel is behaving like the Nazis. Israel is an apartheid state. Israel (or the Jews) wants to grab all the land in the Middle East. Israel shouldn’t even exist. Delve a bit deeper and you’ll read about organ stealing and the drinking of the blood of Palestinian babies.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17401/blinken-palestinian-voices

The renewed talk about a “two-state solution” comes amid a significant increase in the popularity of Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group whose charter openly calls for replacing Israel with an Islamic state. It also comes at a time when Abbas’s popularity is at its lowest ebb.

The Palestinians are telling Blinken that he is wasting his time if he thinks that they would accept “so-called peaceful solutions” or “renounce any part of Palestine.” They are also sending a warning to Abbas that recognition of Israel’s right to exist and acceptance of the “two-state solution” is tantamount to treason, a crime punishable by death.

Abbas is afraid that Hamas will try to stage a coup against the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank…. Abbas, however, does not feel comfortable talking about the Palestinians’ two rival entities, Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and prefers to continue pretending that the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel is still a realistic option.

As long as Israel maintains overall security control over the West Bank, Abbas can feel safe sitting in his office or at home in Ramallah. It is only Israel’s presence in the West Bank that is keeping him in power and preventing Hamas from extending its control beyond the Gaza Strip.

A recent public opinion poll showed that 57% of the Palestinians are opposed to the two-state solution. Another 57% said they support the “armed struggle” and “popular resistance” against Israel. According to the poll, 68% of the Palestinians want Abbas to resign.

Blinken needs to go out and talk to ordinary Palestinians. There, he will get a good grasp of the Palestinians’ profound anti-Israel sentiments and their deep support for Iran’s proxies and others who wish to wipe Israel off the map.

On the eve of his first official visit to the Middle East, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken reaffirmed support for a two-state solution as the only way to provide hope to Israelis and Palestinians that they can live “with equal measures of security, of peace, and dignity.”

During his visit to Israel and the West Bank, Blinken is expected to meet with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who has been urging the Biden administration to work toward “achieving a just and lasting peace that would ensure the Palestinian people’s right to freedom and independence” and the establishment of a Palestinian state with east Jerusalem as its capital.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2021/05/israel-and-gaza-euphoric-psychosis/

This is the euphoria of victory!” proclaimed Khalil al-Haya, a senior Hamas figure, in front of thousands of Gazans celebrating the end of hostilities between Hamas/Islamic Jihad and Israeli Defence Forces (IDF). An estimated 232 Gazans were killed during the latest hostilities, some by Hamas and Islamic Jihad’s own rockets. The local real estate was (once again) left partially in ruins. But a victory is a victory for the two terrorist groups that jointly rule Gaza – even when they have suffered a defeat. Now why, exactly, might that be the case?

This latest “triumph” by Hamas and Islamic Jihad over the Isreali Defence Forces (IDF) follows on from their brilliant “success” in the 2008-09 Gaza War and the 2014 Gaza War. If Hamas and Islamic Jihad keep up their winning ways a prospective 2026 Gaza War, or perhaps a 2028-29 Gaza war, will see the entirety of Gaza reduced to rubble. But our Islamo-terrorists can dream, can’t they? Approximately four thousand rockets were fired at Israel during the 11 days of the 2021 Gaza War, some even making all the way to the Isreali heartland of Tel Aviv. Next time there might be be 6,000 or maybe 8,000 Iranian-financed missiles raining down on “the brothers of apes and pigs”. Armageddon conceived along these lines is what keeps the like of Khalil al-Haya forever posing before the world’s media with a V-sign for victory. Once Jerusalem is vanquished (or obliterated) by Hamas’s Izz as-Din al-Qassem Brigades, or so the Salafi-jihadist narrative goes, a millenialist Islamic state will arise as surely as night follows day.

Inevitably, perhaps, the euphoria of radical Islamic psychosis is interpreted by our PC commentariat as something quite different. Informed by a bohemian-socialist sensibility, they see the 2021 Gaza War as a case of Jean-Jacque Rousseau’s “Noble Savage” defying colonialist “white Jews”. Our left-wing identiarians view the latest death and mayhem in much the same way  Walt Disney’s Pocahontas (1995) portrays the plight of the immaculate Powhatan Native Americans up against the “ravenous wolves” from across the sea who “devour everything in their path”. To put it in the parlance of the woke mob, the “white supremacists” have just spent eleven or twelve days waging an unprovoked war on People of Colour.

If you can make a fact-pattern fit the shape of your screwball ideology, then reality is just a mere distraction. The Sydney Morning Herald, perhaps chastened by the embarrassment of then-columnist Mike Carlton’s critique of the 2014 Gazan War, “Israel’s Rank and Rotten Fruit is Being Called Fascism”, played it more shrewdly this time. The SMH invited Asma Abu Mezied to write her eyewitness account – “I Don’t Think Gaza can Rise from the Ashes This Time” – of the damage inflicted on Gaza by the IDF. As an eyewitness to the events, Dr Mezied, the so-called women’s economic empowerment co-ordinator in Gaza, might be expected to have a touch more credibility than the buffoonish Carlton. And so, we should take her account seriously:

Over the past 12 days, more than 220 people have been killed, at least 63 of them children. Apartment blocks have been destroyed, roads critical to economic centres are pockmarked with craters, clinics and schools have been ruined and international media bureaus have been flattened on live television.             

Nowhere in Mezied’s account, however, is there any mention that Hamas kicked off the latest carnage by firing 100 missiles at Jerusalem or that Hamas/Islamic Jihad ended up firing 4,000 missiles in the direction of Israel. Or that some of those dead 63 Gazan children, if that is a genuine figure, were as likely killed by misfiring rockets from her side of the border. Or that Gazan civilians were put in harm’s way not so much by the IDF but Hamas deliberately positioning their mobile launch sites in the vicinity of hospitals/clinics, schools and civilian apartments.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/ceasefire-between-israel-and-hamas-death-israel-jason-d-hill/

The recent “ceasefire” between the terrorist organization, Hamas, that rules Gaza, and the ethical state of Israel is a recipe for future disaster. There is one winner, which is Hamas. The loser in this pitiful surrender is Israel.

What does Hamas have to gain by a ceasefire? An awful lot. It claims an indefinite time frame in which to rebuild its arsenal of destruction that will be levied against Israel in a relatively short space of time. It has a chance to showcase to the world the destruction of its infrastructures and civilian habitats. A great segment of the anti-Semitic world will refuse to acknowledge that Hamas is literally responsible for all these civilian deaths — as it is the only army in human history that uses the lives of its civilian population as weapons of war by using hospitals, infant nurseries, schools, civilian homes, and mosques as launch pads for its rockets. Hamas also refuses to allow its citizens to evacuate buildings and targeted areas of attack announced well in advance of any military strikes by the IDF.

Hamas has the infernal impertinence — after initiating an unprovoked war against Israel — to occupy the moral high ground by claiming that it will agree to a ceasefire with Israel on two conditions: that Israeli forces must stop incursions into the Al-Aqsa compound and respect the site. And second, that Israel must stop the forced evacuation of the Palestinian residents in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. Where does some primordial and savage terrorist organization that has already evicted itself from the ambit of rights and that, as a retrogressive tribe, exists way outside the historical process, dare to dictate domestic policy inside Israel? In doing so, it appeals to some mawkishly sentimental sense of brotherhood with the war refugees existing in Judea and Samaria and, by default, it wins a popularity contest with the equally execrable, racist, thuggish, and anti-Semitic United Nations and many European countries, that, while paying unconscionable lip service to Israel’s right to exist, secretly hope for Israel’s demise.

A terrorist organization that starts a war, one that is not bombed into oblivion but is altruistically allowed to remain in existence and lectures to Israel the terms of a ceasefire which it intends to use to simply recoup losses and re-strengthen its moral stranglehold over Israel, is so obscene a phenomenon in human history, that Israel, one of the most moral nations on earth, should be ashamed of itself. Israel should be ashamed of itself for allowing such a ghastly enemy that, even in the absence of a war, spews rockets into its country as a way of openly showing its contempt and intention to one day, perhaps visit a nuclear Holocaust on it by coupling with another well-known enemy who wishes Israel obliterated from the earth.

In fundamental terms, what exactly does Israel have to gain from a ceasefire with Hamas? The delay of a final showdown in which Hamas lines up all of its own women and children and fires rockets from behind them and dares Israel to respond — while the world looks on in self-righteous judgment of Israel to make a so-called false move? Will Israel ever realize that, contrary to what the world thinks, it is not and can never be responsible for one civilian casualty in Gaza? No country that is attacked can altruistically bear the responsibility for protecting the lives of the citizens of the aggressor country. That country has abrogated the rights of its citizens. That country is the conferrer of justice and the protector of rights. Israel is no more responsible for the rights of the civilians than you would be for the life of the child of a gunman who uses his child as a shield while shooting at you to gain access to your house. The child’s life cannot and should not supersede your right to your life. The moral responsibility for the child’s life lies entirely with the gunman. You cannot be morally blamed for protecting your life because your bodily integrity is violated by being put in harm’s way.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-5-22-settler-colonialism-more-of-t

Several years ago, in connection with a family trip to Israel, I looked into the issue of Israeli “settlements” in the areas of East Jerusalem and the West Bank. I then had a post in June 2017 titled “Do You Know The Difference Between ‘Settlers’ And ‘Immigrants’?” .

The Israeli settlements, and the “settlers” who inhabit them, have come in for constant attacks from the international left, culminating in condemnation from a UN Security Council resolution in 2016. The resolution was approved by a 14-0 vote in 2016 (on which vote the U.S., during President Obama’s tenure, abstained, rather than exercising its right to veto). Yet viewed in a broader context, the Israeli settlements are a tiny part of annual migrations of millions of people around the world, going from one political jurisdiction to another. All, or nearly all, of these other migrations are applauded by the international left. Indeed, these other migrations are applauded even when they are clearly violative of the law of the destination — illegal immigration into the United States being the most prominent example.

So what makes the Israeli settlers so subject to widespread condemnation while other migrants are applauded? I thought the answer was not difficult to discern, but the intervening years made things even more obvious. In those years we have seen the ascent of another one of these trendy academic concepts, this one going by the name of “settler colonialism.” The basic idea is that you can tell the difference between (bad) “settler colonialists” and other (good) immigrants by a combination of racial identity and hatred of places that practice freedom-based economic systems.

But how do we know where to draw the line between the “settlers” and the “immigrants”? You can count on the left to take this immediately to the extreme. On May 19 the Black Lives Matter group tweeted its support for “Palestinians” in the current conflict between Israel and Hamas, and in the process associated Israel itself with the term “settler colonialism”:

https://nypost.com/2021/05/22/inside-the-democrats-betrayal-of-israel-goodwin/

As presidential press releases go, this one was very short and enormously consequential. Eleven minutes after Israel declared its independence on May 14, 1948, the  White House issued a two-sentence statement.

The first said simply, “This Government has been informed that a Jewish state has been proclaimed in Palestine and recognition has been requested by the provisional Government thereof.”

The second sentence made history: “The United States recognizes the provisional government as the de facto authority of the State of Israel.”

It was signed “Harry Truman.”

The president’s decision made America the first country to recognize the new nation and made him a hero to Jews around the world. It also helped make the Democrat Party a reliable ally of Israel for decades as war after war threatened its survival.

Unfortunately, Truman would not recognize his party today.

An anti-Israel faction has taken root among Democrats and was on full display during Israel’s recent clash with Hamas. Because that faction is largely synonymous with the party’s ascendant far-left wing, more moderate Dems are increasingly afraid to speak up for Israel, just as they are afraid to speak up against the emergence of socialism and anti-white racism in their party.

https://freebeacon.com/columns/the-revolution-comes-for-israel/

Israel has battled Hamas four times since the terror organization seized control of the Gaza Strip in 2007. Each battle unfolds the same way: Hamas launches rockets at Israel’s civilian population, Israel bombs Hamas targets, and the fighting continues until terrorist infrastructure is sufficiently degraded so that the rocket fire stops for a few years. Israelis call it “mowing the lawn.” The last major clash was in 2014. In its origins, order of battle, and strategy and tactics, Operation Guardian of the Walls, which began May 10, resembles these previous flareups.

So what’s different? Just about everything.

The region has changed. In 2014 the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, legitimizing the nuclear program of Israel’s archenemy Iran, was a gleam in John Kerry’s eye. Its adoption the following year, and America’s withdrawal from the agreement in 2018, realigned the Middle East along the axis of Iranian power. The result was an Arab–Israel détente formalized in the 2020 Abraham Accords. From a regional perspective, the Palestinian cause is less important than Iran’s ambitions.

Israel has changed. In 2014, Benjamin Netanyahu was at the outset of his third term and led from a position of strength. His indictment on corruption charges in 2019 initiated a political crisis that has led to four elections (and most likely a fifth) in the space of two years. On the eve of the latest violence, Israel’s bewildering politics became even more surprising when two of Netanyahu’s rivals enticed an Arab Islamist party to join a coalition government. That effort collapsed when the rockets blazed. The subsequent outbreak of intercommunal violence in cities with large Arab-Israeli populations is a reminder of Israel’s pressing domestic challenges. The security issue unites Israel. Just about everything else divides it.

America has changed. In the summer of 2014, Barack Obama was a lame duck, the Republicans controlled the House and were on the verge of winning the Senate, and Donald Trump was the host of Celebrity Apprentice. Obama’s dislike of Netanyahu and willingness to expose “daylight” between the United States and Israel was no secret. But anti-Israel invective was limited to the fringe. And anti-Israel media bias was nowhere near as bad as it is today.