BBC World TV has spent much of the day whining that Israel is refusing to allow the international media entry into Gaza despite an Israeli court ruling that it should allow the media in. This is amongst the reasons why it isn’t choosing to do so: Police were searching Saturday night for a foreign reporter working for an Iranian TV network who reported the IDF incursion into Gaza before the military authorized the release of the information to the public. Also Saturday evening, a reporter for the Lebanese LBC network who was broadcasting near the Gaza Strip said the IDF wasmoving from Nahal Oz towards the Nezarim junction. The reporter surmised that the military was planning to sever the Gaza Strip in half, effectively isolating Gaza City in an effort to minimize Hamas terrorists’ Such people have made no protest at the bombardment of Israeli towns by more than 6000 rockets in the past six years, deliberately targeting innocent civilians. They have made no protest... Daily Mail, 5 January 2008 War is always terrible and to be avoided if humanly possible. War in Gaza, where Hamas terrorists are embedded within densely crowded areas, is particularly awful. No one wants to see civilians being killed. Every decent person will be dismayed that it has come to this. What is profoundly troubling, however, is that as the Israeli ground offensive escalates hostilities still further, so many in Britain don’t understand that, appalling as this war is, the alternative is even worse. This is a war that Israel spent more than seven years trying to avoid, while no fewer than 6,000 rockets and other missiles rained down from Gaza upon its southern towns. No other country in the world would have sat on its hands while its traumatised children were raised in bomb shelters. The often-made comparison with IRA terrorism spectacularly misses the point. Hamas actually run Gaza. The equivalent would have been the Irish government firing 6,000 rockets at England. Does anyone seriously doubt that, in such a hypothetical situation, Britain would have been at war with Ireland long before that total had been reached? Far from acting out of political opportunism, as some so offensively suggest, Israel has taken massive risks on every front with this operation. A ground war almost certainly means many of its soldiers will die. If just one of its shells were to go astray and hit a school or hospital, a hostile western world would unleash the furies against it. And in Lebanon, Hezbollah may launch its ferocious arsenal of rockets pointing at northern Israel, forcing it to fight on two fronts. But the brutal fact is that tiny, besieged Israel is damned if it does and dead if it doesn’t. While Arab countries such as Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia as well as Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas blame Hamas for provoking this war, it is Israel which is drawing western protests. These are not confined to the thuggish demonstrations organised by an alliance of Islamists and the far-Left we have seen on the streets of London at the weekend. Many others also share the view that Israel is in the wrong. So why is a country under attack from genocidal fanatics pilloried for defending its citizens against slaughter? The main complaint is that Israel’s response is ‘disproportionate’, since some 500 Palestinians have been killed compared with ‘only’ four Israelis since the war started nine days ago. This is absurd. In World War II, 20 times more civilians were killed in Germany than in Britain. Did that make the war against the Nazis ‘disproportionate’? Of course not. Then there’s the belief that the Hamas rockets are some kind of homemade, harmless Dad’s Army effort which could and should be ignored. But the only reason more Israelis haven’t been killed by them is that in the south, the population has been all but living in bomb shelters. And there is nothing ‘homemade’ about the Russian-designed Katyushas and Iranian Grad rockets now putting around one-tenth of Israel’s population within their range. Contrary to Arab propaganda, the Israelis are taking enormous pains to avoid civilian casualties in their attempt to curb these rocket attacks. The UN has confirmed that the vast majority (75 per cent) of the dead in Gaza have been Hamas terrorists. Given the huge number of bombing sorties that have been conducted, this proves that the Israelis are specifically targeting the Hamas infrastructure. Alas, the civilian death toll will unavoidably mount, which is deeply regrettable. But what must be understood is that Hamas have deliberately situated their weapons under apartment blocks, in mosques and in hospitals. The Israelis build bomb shelters for their civilians; Hamas store bombs underneath their civilians in order to create as many civilian casualties as possible to manipulate world opinion. What people find so hard to grasp is that Hamas actually want to maximise the number of Palestinians who are killed because, as they boast: ‘We desire death as you desire life.’ Despite this fanaticism, many fear that Israel’s attack will merely create yet more suicide bombers. There is a grain of sense in this — but only a grain. This is because every single act of self-defence against Islamist aggression is used as a recruiting sergeant for the Islamic holy war. So if this is allowed to dictate world responses, it follows that no one can ever defend themselves against Islamist rockets and bomb attacks — not just in Israel but in Afghanistan or against Al Qaeda anywhere. Islamists such as Hamas are galvanised into battle by the perceived weakness of their victims, and are deterred only by implacable strength. That’s why the ferocity of suicide bomb attacks actually rises after peace initiatives. Gaza’s rocket barrage against Israel went up by 500 per cent after Israel ended its occupation. And the 2000 Intifada which killed thousands of Israelis was the Palestinians’ response to being offered more than 90 per cent of the West Bank and Gaza for a state of their own. What is so distressing is the desperate unfairness of so much Western reaction. Thus Israel is accused of causing a humanitarian disaster in Gaza, even though it is allowing hundreds of trucks of supplies through the crossing points — so that at one stage aid agencies in Gaza said their storehouses were full. Few are aware that wounded Gazans — 65 per cent of whom voted for Hamas — are continuing to be treated in Israeli hospitals. Nor are they aware that in a Gaza hospital, by contrast, Hamas shot dead five suspected Palestinian ‘collaborators’ — and murdered a further 30 elsewhere. The reason for this grotesquely unfair reaction is that so many in Britain now believe as fact the Arab lies about the Middle East impasse. Many think, for example, that the Palestinians are the rightful inheritors not just of Gaza and the West Bank but Israel itself. But this is totally false. The Jews are the only people for whom ‘Palestine’ was ever their nation state, hundreds of years before Mohammed was even born. It was in recognition of that inalienable right that in the 1920s the British undertook the legally binding international obligation — never rescinded — to settle Jews in every part of Mandatory Palestine. That included not just modern Israel but the West Bank and Gaza, too. Despite this, Israel is willing for the Palestinians to have their own state — as was first offered to them in 1937 — but not if its only purpose is to be a launching pad for the final destruction of its Israeli neighbour. No other country on the planet has ever been expected to make suicidal concessions to its enemies even while they continue to try to destroy it. Yet that is what the world expects of Israel. Now the British Government, among others, has called for an immediate ceasefire. But this would effectively mean victory for Hamas. Gordon Brown wouldn’t dream of calling for a ceasefire with al Qaeda. So why the double standard where Israel is concerned? Most important of all, this war is not actually about Israel and the Palestinians. Hamas is controlled by Iran. Unless Hamas is stopped, Iran’s growing influence in the region will be entrenched and put Britain and the West in even greater danger from Islamist aggression and blackmail. Israel may or may not eventually manage to stop the Hamas rockets. But the Middle East conflict will not end until and unless the West comes to realise that Israel is in the frontline of the West’s own fight for survival, and starts properly defending the country struggling to defend civilisation instead of siding with those waging holy war against it. Jewish Chronicle, 30 December 2008 A few days before 9/11, the UN hosted an appalling explosion of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel hatred at an obscenely named ‘human rights’ conference in Durban, South Africa. While the worst of these gross libels and Nazi-style caricatures were expressed by the NGOs attending the conference, the official governmental declaration also made its underlying anti-Israel agenda clear. Cursory references to antisemitism and never forgetting the Holocaust were tossed in as a trade-off for singling out the ‘racism’ of Israel, which was responsible for ‘the plight of the Palestinian people under foreign occupation’. There was no mention of the gross Jew-hatred and mass murder of Israelis by the Palestinians. Instead, an equivalence was drawn between antisemitism and Islamophobia. But equating a prejudice based on irrational hatred with a defence against that hatred effectively denies the true prejudice of antisemitism while sanitising and validating those who perpetrate it. Next April, there is to be a re-run of this hate-fest at another UN conference, to review progress in implementing Durban I. Accordingly, despite its being held in Geneva, this is being referred to as ‘Durban II’. This too is shaping up to be a vicious and racist onslaught against the human rights of the Jewish people. Its draft declaration singles out Israel for vilification. It accuses it of committing ‘apartheid’, a ‘crime against humanity’ and ‘a form of genocide’. It says the Palestinians are the victims of Israeli oppression, implies that Zionism itself is racism, and calls for the end of Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem and (as in Durban I) for the ‘right of return’ for Palestinians, which would mean the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state. There is no mention of any Arab or Muslim denial of human rights; no mention of the genocide in the Sudan; no condemnation of Arab states — including the putative state of Palestine — for being barred to Jews; no condemnation of the Iranian threat of a second Holocaust. Worse, the declaration attempts to brand all discussion of Islamic terrorism as ‘racism’ or ‘xenophobia’ and so to shut it down, as well as similarly declaring all counter-terrorist surveillance of Islamic institutions to be ‘defamation of Muslims’. In other words, the claim that Durban II is about human rights is merely a cynical ploy. It is nothing other than a platform for Jew-hatred and Islamic intimidation. Israel, the Netherlands and Canada have said they will have nothing to do with Durban II. Everyone else is being utterly pathetic. Britain, America and others are teetering on the edge of withdrawing but are pursing their lips while playing ‘wait and see’. So, too, is the leadership of Britain’s Jewish community. The Jewish Human Rights Coalition (UK) says it is trying to negotiate changes to the declaration, which is only in draft form. If the offending passages are not removed, it says, it will then urge the UK government to pull out. This is grievously to underestimate the true nature and scale of this monstrosity. The very fact of negotiating with such people is grotesque. Would Jewish leaders negotiate with, say, Nazis or Holocaust deniers or the Ku Klux Klan to get them to tone down their noxious claims? One reason the JHRC gives for doing so is the ‘huge numbers of young Jews around the world who want to engage as Jews with a genuine human rights agenda’. These are the kind of people, however, who think the UN can do no wrong — that it was hijacked at Durban by a few horrible NGOs and can be shepherded back to decency. But there is no ‘genuine human rights agenda’ at the UN; it has been hijacked not by the NGOs but by the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, the body representing the world’s Islamic states. That’s why — surreally — the Durban II preparatory committee is chaired by a Libyan, Najat al-Hajjaji, with Iran as the vice-chair, Cuba as the rapporteur and other major human-rights offenders such as Russia and Pakistan also among its members. In short, the UN has turned ‘human rights’ into their antithesis — and specifically into a weapon to destroy the right to statehood of the Jewish people. Last month, the UN General Assembly President Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann said Israeli policies amounted to apartheid and ‘must be outlawed’ and met by a ‘campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions to pressure Israel’. It is the UN and the architects of Durban II who are the racists and murderous bigots. Negotiating with them at all merely gives them legitimacy. For those committed to genuine human rights, there is only one option. Denounce this sick farce, and pull out now.
Monday, 5th January 2009
An MP is shocked by al Beeb
11:17am
Three cheers for Tory MP Michael Fabricant, whosays he has been ‘horrified and angered’ by the BBC’s coverage of the Gaza conflict, and will be making a formal complaint to the Chairman of the BBC Trust about it:While paying scant regard to the provocation of 10,000 rockets fired at Israeli civilians from Gaza over the last seven years, the BBC has chosen to broadcast 'human interest' stories reminiscent of salacious photos in the cheaper red top newspapers. Thus I heard a heart rending report from a Palestinian in Cyprus how he imagined - yes: IMAGINED! - Gaza's streets would be running with the blood of dead Arab children. After that, the BBC located individuals in Gaza who have taken the opportunity of repeating over the BBC what they have already said on Al Jazeera. No balance
...Sunday, 4th January 2009
The real agenda
9:57pm
...The moral battleground
12:53am
And so now begins the second and most difficult stage. Inside Israel, there is both determination and dread as tens of thousands of Israel’s conscript army are called to the front. Untold numbers of these soldiers will lose their lives as the result not merely of the genocidal aims of Hamas (and its Iranian puppet-master) but also the indifference and pusillanimity towards Palestinian terror displayed by world governments over the past six decades of Israel’s fight for survival, along with the active encouragement of genocidal Islamists by leftists, Jew-haters, Muslims and useful idiots who were on such thuggish display yesterday in the co-ordinated demonstrations in British and other western cities.
Monday, 5 January 2009
January 5, 2009
War is terrible, but the alternative in Gaza was worse
January 5, 2009
The sick farce of Durban 2
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