“The most toxic weapon in the Left’s post-colonial armoury is the concept of Holocaust Inversion, which Mike Carlton wields in his op-ed: that is, modern-day Israelis are the equivalent of the German Nazis while the plight of the Palestinians is comparable to that of the Jews of the Shoah. ”
We shall never know exactly how many Gazans have been murdered by their tyrannous subjugator over the years, let alone the number of Gazan homosexuals incarcerated and tortured, women brutalised and forced into the hijab against their will.
Hamas, also known as the Islamic Resistance Movement, excels at only two things—terrorism and propaganda. On August 26, 2014, an open-ended ceasefire began with Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri declaring to the world: “We have won.” What they had won did not seem entirely clear. This was the same deal Hamas had rejected—and Israel accepted—on July 15. But terrorism is propaganda and propaganda is terrorism, and so Zuhri felt free to boast that Hamas had accomplished “what no Arab army has done. We have defeated them.” With victories like this Hamas need never experience defeat.
Hamas is the first cousin of the Islamic State (IS). Hamas fighters might not bury civilians alive with their own shovels, but they fire off rockets in an attempt to entomb Jewish, Christian and Muslim civilians in Israel. Moreover, Hamas fires off rockets from hospitals, schools, mosques and built-up residential areas in Gaza with the express purpose of initiating retaliatory Israeli fire on those very same hospitals, schools, mosques and built-up residential areas. Hamas-style butchery could be categorised as more grotesque than IS atrocities because Hamas connives to bring about the burying alive of its own people for the purpose of advancing a propaganda agenda. Hamas dismisses the charge of adopting a human-shield strategy as a Zionist lie, although genuine investigative reporters in Gaza—including NDTV’s Sreenivasan Jain—have now provided incontrovertible proof to the contrary. Should we believe the Islamic Resistance Movement or our lying eyes?
There are some who claim that Operation Protective Edge had its genesis in the June 12, 2014, abduction of the Israeli teenagers Gil-Ad Shaer, Naftali Fraenkal and Eyal Yifrah, and that the assault on Gaza was an expression of Israel’s blind fury that the boys were kidnapped and later found murdered. One major drawback to this argument is that Hamas began its unprovoked rocket attacks on the citizens of Israel on June 11, the day before the kidnapping. By the time the bodies of the three teenagers were discovered in the West Bank, on June 30, Hamas’s attack on Israel had been proceeding for nineteen days. On that day alone sixteen rockets were fired off, a number of them landing in the Negev. Hamas had been keen for war irrespective of—or, more likely, in conjunction with—the slaughter of the three Israeli boys. This is corroborated by the fact that Hamas, and not the Netanyahu administration, broke at least eleven ceasefire arrangements before August 26.