The Last Israelis -

Archive for July, 2014

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July 24, 2014

A Thank You Letter From Hamas to the Media

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Dear Members of the Mainstream Media,

You’ve been awesome! Everyone knows that we start unwinnable wars with Israel because the real victory happens when you predictably side with us each time. And you’ve been so supportive of our strategy that we really want to acknowledge your helpfulness. In particular, we thank you for:

Focusing so much more on our suffering than anyone else’s. Nigerians must die in far greater numbers before you take notice, so we’re glad that you value our lives so much more.

-Minimizing your coverage, if any, of our attacks that led up to Israel’s military response and generally providing so little context that outsiders think that Israelis kill Palestinians just for fun. We’re especially grateful to the French media for this. Their distortions of the conflict are so one-sided that they incite Muslims across France to attack Jews and synagogues, and that is welcomed by our anti-Semitic worldview (although, unfortunately, such attacks remind everyone why Jews need a state).

-Emphasizing our civilian death toll without explaining that (1) our casualty reports are hasty and inflated, and (2) we maximize that total by using Palestinians to shield our weapons and by urging them to stay in the very areas that the IDF — in its annoying effort to minimize our civilian deaths — warns Gazans to evacuate.

-Never mentioning the fact that if we could kill millions of Israelis, we would (after all, our charter calls for Israel’s destruction). Just as the 9/11 hijackers made the most of what they had but would have liked to kill far more Americans (for example, with the help of WMD), we too would love to kill far more Israelis. Indeed, we have purposely targeted Israel’s nuclear reactor on several occasions, with that very goal in mind. Fortunately, you never highlight the genocidal intent behind our attacks when mentioning Israel’s “disproportionate” response.

-Never calling us jihadists even though we persecute Christians (like the ISIS, which just compelled Mosul’s Christians to convert to Islam). The forced conversion, expulsion, or murder of Christians and other religious minorities by Islamists has been happening for millennia, as assiduously documented in Crucified Again, but such historical context is thankfully absent from your reporting on our conflict with Israel.

-Downplaying how bad we are for Gazans by not reporting on, for example, our attack on the very Israeli power station that provides electricity to 70,000 Gazans. Thankfully, you also ignored how the Israelis — in their stupid display of goodwill — exposed their workers to the perils of our rockets so that they could restore power to Gaza.

-Minimally reporting on our corruptionunfair wealth, or vast expenditures on tunnels to attack Israel while ordinary Palestinians grew poorer.

-Overlooking how — to maximize Palestinian deaths — we store our missiles in an UNWRA-run school and how, when UNWRA finds out, they just hand us back our missiles.

-Disregarding Arabs who have the courage to critique us — like Dr. Tawfik Hamid, an Islamist-turned-reformer who blames Palestinian suffering entirely on us.

-Ignoring Israelis’ humanitarian folly in providing medical aid to the very terrorists trying to kill them.

-Failing to acknowledge Israel’s immense restraint. Had we been fighting Syria’s Assad regime, by now Gaza would have been flattened — devastated by barrel bombs, poison gas, and other attacks that are far more indiscriminate than Israel’s intelligence-directed strikes. And of course, if Syria were killing us, you’d hardly care. But luckily, we’re dealing with Israel — that country that everyone loves to hate — so we can count on your helpful coverage here.

-Omitting how Israel chose to sacrifice dozens of IDF soldiers when destroying our tunnels and weapons in densely populated areas like Shejaiya because doing so with airstrikes (which risks no soldiers) would have killed many thousands of Palestinians. Your friendly omission of such crucial facts reminds us of how wonderfully you covered Jenin in 2002, when (again) — rather than praise Israel’s humane but costly decision to use ground troops rather than airstrikes — you very helpfully and falsely accused Israel of a massacre during another IDF operation to stop Palestinian terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians.

-Not sharing with your English readers what we openly say in Arabic: that we view any truce as just an opportunity to rearm for our next war against Israel (as our spokesman, Musheer Al Masri, recently declared on TV).

-Not underscoring that Israel can do nothing to make peace with us (after all, Israelis ended their occupation of Gaza in 2005 and we’ve been rocketing them ever since). It’s a bit nervy of Israel to use its border controls to limit our ability to rearm and rebuild cross-border attack tunnels, but — with your help — maybe the next cease-fire will remove Israel’s blockade so that we can more easily replenish our weapons and restore our tunnels for our next attack. And yes, we’re embarrassed that our fellow Arab Muslims in Egypt also choose to blockade us because of the problems that we’ve caused them.

-Not reminding readers, when you mention potential truce arrangements, that world powers are no more capable of ensuring a demilitarized Gaza than they were capable of disarming Hezbollah in south Lebanon.

Seriously, you’ve been AMAZING. Please keep it up!

Love,

Hamas

p.s. Many thanks also to the countless protesters around the world who follow your lead, embolden us, and make us look legit!

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July 11, 2014

Gaza Shows (Again) How The Underdog Can Be Wrong

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Sometimes the underdog is wrong. The ruthlessly brutal regimes of Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, and Idi Amin were all weaker than the forces that ultimately vanquished them.
But for decades the Palestinians have mastered the art of persuading everyone that because they die in greater numbers and have inferior arms, they are more deserving of sympathy and support in their conflict with Israel. Here’s why they’re wrong:
1) Israel’s military edge safeguards its survival in the world’s toughest neighborhood. But if a SWAT team is better armed than a wild gunman they must neutralize, does that mean that they’re at fault when the gunman dies?
2) Israel’s casualty figures are smaller because Israel tries to protect life by investing in anti-missile defense, shelters, and early warning systems to minimize the deaths caused by Palestinian rocket attacks.
3) By contrast, Palestinian terrorists purposely endanger life by targeting Israeli civilians while using Palestinian civilians as human shields (to maximize the PR benefits of any Israeli reprisals).
4) Israel’s death toll should be adjusted for its tiny population, to feel the true “national pain” of each loss. When Hamas terrorists abducted and murdered three Israeli teenagers last month, that’s like the murder and abduction of about 118 Americans teenagers. How many Taliban would die from a US military response to the Taliban abduction and murder of 118 American teenagers?
5) Gaza-based terrorism is inflicting collective punishment on about 8 million Israelis living under the constant threat of rocket attacks. How much could you focus on anything if blaring sirens regularly compelled you to seek shelter in under a minute? How much sleep could you get? Drivers must get out of their cars, lie on on the pavement face down with their hands over their heads, and wait ten minutes until the danger has ostensibly passed. Many elderly or disabled persons must descend flights of stairs to access the shelter, and the scramble to safety can be as dangerous as staying unprotected (an Israeli woman in her 70s died while trying to take shelter from an incoming rocket in Haifa). How long would the US expect its citizens to live like that before deploying overwhelming firepower to eradicate the threat?
6) In the Middle East, the weak perish quickly, and Israel — the only Jewish state (with 8 million people in a NJ-sized territory) surrounded by 22 Arab Muslim states (totaling about 370 million people) — can’t afford to lose a war. So the fact that Israel doesn’t cause far greater casualties to strengthen its deterrence should highlight Israel’s morality and restraint.
Yet most observers are oblivious to these key considerations, and simplistically look at comparative casualty figures before reflexively concluding that Israel is wrong. This cartoon aptly captures how Palestinians manipulate world opinion like a mischievous schoolboy misleading his teachers about who caused school spats.
When world leaders and media are duped into simplistic thinking, the result is a glaring double standard.
Consider the UN. On July 3, Israel gave Hamas 48 hours to stop firing rockets, even though 40 rockets had already been fired at Israel in the previous 24 hours. The Palestinian attacks continued until Israel finally took action on July 8. By the end of July 10, over 350 rockets had been fired at Israel, the Israeli Air Force had carried out almost 900 airstrikes on the Gaza Strip, resulting in at least 90 Palestinians killed (according to Palestinian reports), and a UN Security Council emergency session to address the hostilities. So when Israel launches a justified military operation against Palestinians, it takes just three days and 90 Palestinian dead for the UN Security Council to convene an emergency session about the issue. Note that there was no emergency session to address the scores of unprovoked rocket attacks that forced Israel to respond in the first place.
But in neighboring Syria, it took about 1,650 civilian deaths and 141 days (from March 15 to August 3, 2011) for the United Nations Security Council, in a non-binding statement, to make any pronouncement at all on the Syrian war (which has killed over 4,000 people per month on average). Are Syrian lives less valuable than Palestinian lives? Incredibly, when the Palestinians are killed by Syrians or other Palestinians, this too is hardly noticed or addressed. It is only when Israelis are killing Palestinians — even if that killing is justified, accidental, or actually caused by Hamas’ use of human shields — that the diplomatic obsession with Palestinian security reaches a fever pitch.
The same double standards color the media’s coverage of the conflict. Even after Israel’s Ambassador Ron Dermer deftly exposed egregious journalistic failures by the New York Times, its biased and misleading coverage continues.
No matter how much restraint Israel may exercise, Palestinian propagandists and their pliant media sympathizers will vilify Israel. Abbas has already called Israel’s Operation Protective Edge a “genocide” (as if it wouldn’t be far easier and faster for Israel to raze the entire Gaza Strip instead of using pin-point strikes preceded by warnings telling residents to evacuate terrorist hideouts and weapons caches targeted for destruction). And yet somehow Abbas’ hyperbole — which cheapens the real genocide in neighboring Syria and elsewhere — in no way diminishes his credibility with the media and diplomats. He is still presumed to be some kind of honest partner for peace, even though — rather than disavow his government’s partnership with the terrorists responsible for the current conflict — he attempts to score propaganda points on their behalf.
Even more outrageous, US State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki admitted that the Obama administration is willing to continue funding a Palestinian government with ties to a terrorist group — something that violates US law, betrays Israel, and harms US interests by supporting terrorism, increasing regional instability, and signaling to other radical groups that terrorism sometimes pays.
In the end, Israel must simply defeat the evil to its south, regardless of the double standards that will be hurled at it. To that end, and to help Gazans realize that its time to overthrow the Islamist thugocracy strangling their society, Israel should stop supplying power and water to Gaza. What rule of international law says that a state must provide resources to a neighbor trying to kill its citizens?