On December 30, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas announced that Palestinians had joined the International Criminal Court to pursue war crimes charges against Israel.
“We want to complain. There’s aggression against us, against our land. The Security Council disappointed us,” Abbas said at a meeting of the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank.
Abbas has plenty to complain about. The Palestinian terrorist organization, Hamas, opened hostilities with Israel on July 7–and promptly lost the war.
In June, 2014, three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped and murdered. Israeli authorities suspected the culprits were members of Hamas, the terrorist organization that’s long called for Israel’s destruction.
In a desperate search for the missing teens, Israeli forces killed 10 Palestinians, injured 130 and arrested 500 to 600 others.
Hamas, in turn, began launching rocket attacks on Israel from the Gaza Strip, which it has controlled since June, 2007. By July 7, 100 rockets had been fired at Israel.
Israeli planes retaliated by attacking 50 targets in Gaza.
On July 8, during a 24-hour period, Hamas fired more than 140 rockets into Israel from Gaza. Saboteurs also tried to infiltrate Israel from the sea, but were intercepted.
A Hamas rocket streaks toward Israel
That same day–July 8, 2014–Israel launched Operation Protective Edge, a full-scale military attack on Gaza.
Hamas then announced that it considered “all Israelis”–including women, children, the elderly and disabled–to be legitimate targets.
On July 8, Hamas–acting as though it were laying down peace terms to an already defeated Israel–issued the following demands:
- End all attacks on Gaza;
- Release Palestinians arrested during the crackdown on the West Bank;
- Lift the blockade on Gaza; and
- Return to the cease-fire conditions of 2012.
Only then would Hamas be open to a ceasefire agreement. Egypt offered a cease-fire proposal. Israel quickly accepted it, temporarily stopping hostilities on July 15.
But Hamas claimed that it had not been consulted and rejected the agreement.
Palestinians continued to blithely launch hundreds of rockets at Israel–but went into ecstasies of grief before television cameras when one of their own was killed by Israeli return fire.
As a result, Israel has come under repeated verbal attacks by Hamas-sympathetic nations. The charge: Israel is being too effective at defending itself, killing more Palestinians than Hamas is able to kill Israelis.
Reuven Berko, a former soldier in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) recently addressed this charge in a guest column in the online newsletter, the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT).
A major reason for so many civilian deaths among Palestinians, writes Berko, is that Hamas turns them into human shields by hiding its missiles in heavily-populated centers.
On July 17, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Far East (UNRWA) discovered approximately 20 rockets hidden in a vacant UN school in the Gaza Strip.
“UNRWA strongly condemns the group or groups responsible for placing the weapons in one of its installations,” said the agency in an announcement.
“This is a flagrant violation of the inviolability of its premises under international law.” UNRWA claimed that “this incident…is the first of its kind in Gaza.”
But Israel counters that this is just one of many proven instances of Hamas hiding its fighters and munitions among a heavily civilian population.
Click here: UNRWA Strongly Condemns Placement of Rockets in School | UNRWA
At the heart of Berko’s editorial is the subject of “proportionality.”
Writes Berko: “Israel is held to an impossible moral double standard. “Israelis, proportionality advocates seem to believe, should be killed by Hamas rockets instead of following Home Front Command instructions and running to shelters, to say nothing of Israel’s blatant unfairness in protecting its civilians with the Iron Dome aerial defense system….
“Anyone who demands that Israel agree to a life of terror governed by a continuous barrage of rockets and mortar shells on the heads of its women and children in the name of restraint and ‘proportionality’ would never agree to risk the safety of their own families in a similar situation.”
war against radical Islam if we can’t even name the enemy?”
Berko points out that during World War 11, the Allies didn’t hesitate to retaliate for the Nazi blitz of London. In February, 1945, British and American planes firebombed Dresden, killing about 25,000 people.
Nor did America feel guilty about dropping two atomic bombs on Japan, killing about 250,000 civilians.
Summing up his argument, Berko writes: “The ridiculous demand for proportionality contradicts every basic principle of warfare.“
According to American strategist Thomas Schelling, you have to strike your enemy hard enough to make it not worthwhile for him to continue…. “
In the Western world, killing someone in self-defense is considered justifiable homicide.”
Berko could just as easily have ended his column with the words of Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman, whose Union forces cut a swath of destruction across the South in his famous “March to the Sea.”
William Tecumseh Sherman
Wrote Sherman: “Those people made war on us, defied and dared us to come south to their country, where they boasted they would kill us and do all manner of horrible things.
“We accepted their challenge, and now for them to whine and complain of the natural and necessary results is beneath contempt.”
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THE WORLD SEES HORROR IN UKRAINE; ISLAMICS SEE RACISM: PART ONE (OF TWO)
In Bureaucracy, History, Military, Politics, Social commentary on March 7, 2022 at 12:10 amOn February 24, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a massive invasion of Ukraine.
To Ukrainians, it’s a matter of life-or-death.
To Americans, Europeans and Westerners in general, it’s a horrific, unfolding tragedy.
But to nonwhites—and especially Islamics—throughout the world, the sympathies of these nations is a sign of racism and Islamophobia.
The day after the invasion began, CBS News senior correspondent in Kyiv Charlie D’Agata said: “This isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan that has seen conflict raging for decades. This is a relatively civilised, relatively European – I have to choose those words carefully, too – city where you wouldn’t expect that, or hope that it’s going to happen.”
CBS
On social media, his comment was strongly criticized as dehumanizing non-white, non-European peoples.
One Twitter user wrote: “Atrocities start with words and dehumanization. Atrocities unleashed upon millions in the ME, fueled by dictators labeled as reformists in the west. The racist subtext: Afghans, Iraqi & Syrian lives don’t matter, for they are deemed inferior—’uncivilized.'”
In fact, conditions in Ukraine have been relatively peaceful. Afghanistan has never actually been a nation, simply a patchwork of feuding warlords. This has been true from the time of Alexander the Great to the Taliban today. Dictators have always been the rulers of Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.
On February 25, Sky News broadcast a video of people in the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro making Molotov cocktails, explaining how grating Styrofoam makes the incendiary device stick to vehicles better.
A Twitter user wrote: “If this was done by Palestinians, Afghanistan or other nations resisting occupation, it would be terrorism. And during Mandela’s anti-apartheid era, it was also dubbed terrorism. For Europeans facing similar situations, it is resistance! Western duplicity knows no bounds.”
“Terrorism” is defined as “The unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.”
Defending one’s country from attack by another country is not terrorism. In fact, from ancient times, it has been seen as the highest virtue, calling forth loyalty and courage.
Palestinians have repeatedly targeted civilians—not soldiers of the Israeli Defense Forces—for death. In Afghanistan, women and children have been routinely massacred by warring factions.
There are solid reasons for fears of Islamic terrorism.
In his 2011 book, The Secrets of the FBI, Ronald Kessler notes the refusal of the Islamic community to identify known or potential terrorists within its ranks.
Said Arthur M. Cummings, then the Bureau’s executive assistant director for national security: “I had this discussion with the director of a very prominent Muslim organization here in [Washington] D.C. And he said, ‘Why are you guys always looking at the Muslim community?’”
“I can name the homegrown cells, all of whom are Muslim, all of whom were seeking to kill Americans,” replied Cummings. “It’s not the Irish, it’s not the French, it’s not the Catholics, it’s not the Protestants. It’s the Muslims.”
On BFM TV, France’s most-watched cable news channel, journalist Philippe Corbe said: “We’re not talking here about Syrians fleeing the bombing of the Syrian regime backed by Putin, we’re talking about Europeans leaving in cars that look like ours to save their lives.”
This was heavily criticized: “This war is just revealing the western hypocrisy and racism at its peak.”
There is a difference between a Syrian dictator waging war against his own citizens, and a nuclear-armed country waging all-out war on a smaller, democratic nation. The skin color of the peoples involved has nothing to do with either action.
“These are not the refugees we are used to… these people are Europeans,” Bulgarian Prime Minister Kiril Petkov told journalists of the Ukrainians. “These people are intelligent, they are educated people…. This is not the refugee wave we have been used to, people we were not sure about their identity, people with unclear pasts, who could have been even terrorists…
“In other words,” he added, “there is not a single European country now which is afraid of he current wave of refugees.”
Kiril Petkov
President.bg, CC BY 2.5 BG <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/bg/deed.en>, via Wikimedia Commons
This was treated as racism by Islamics: “A refugee is a refugee, whether European, African or Asian,” Syrian journalist Okba Mohammad said.
In fact: By early 2021, 10 years after Syria’s civil war erupted, European Union states had taken in one million Syrian refugees and asylum seekers; Germany alone took more than half. In 2016, the European Union paid billions of euros for Turkey to continue hosting 3.7 million Syrians.
On February 6, 2016, The World Post carried this story: “Geneva III: The Stillborn Conference and the Endemic Failure of the International Community.”
The first paragraph read:
“While approaching the fifth anniversary of the Syrian civil war on March 15 — which claimed more than 300,000 lives, approximately 700,000 wounded, 4 million fled the country, and another 6 million displaced within Syria — the international community has failed to put an end to bloodshed in this war-torn country.”
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights—which is safely located in Great Britain—the total number of dead [in 2016] was now more than 310,000.
And who did the Observatory—and The World Post-–blame for this Islamic self-slaughter?
The West, of course.
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