By Mordechai Ben-Menachem
“Everyone needs to know how to give, not just in combat service, and not necessarily in military service, but to enlist and be devoted to your people.” Lt. Hadar Goldin, the Israeli officer murdered 90 minutes into the “cease-fire.”
Ambassador Ibrahim Kraishi, the Palestinian representative to the UN’s misnamed “Human Rights Council” said on July 9, in Geneva, to Palestinian Authority TV, that every rocket and mortar fired from Gaza toward Israel is a “crime against humanity.” He was referring to Palestinian Authority risk should their leaders solicit joining the International Criminal Court (ICC), which they continually threaten to do. Their thinking is that Europeans are universally antisemitic, and will always find against Jews in any tribunal. This then is a prime tool to gain Israeli concessions without giving anything.
Kraishi, claimed that indiscriminate firing of rockets at Israel and at Israeli civilian populations is the “Palestinian international law weakness.” “The missiles that are now being launched against Israel, each and every missile constitutes a crime against humanity, whether it hits or misses, because it is directed at civilian targets,” said Kraishi during the interview.
By contrast, the ambassador said, Israel’s actions follow legal procedures, because the IDF warns Gazan civilians to leave sites and areas before they are bombed.
“Many of our people in Gaza appeared on TV and said that the Israelis warned them to evacuate their homes before the bombardment. In such a case, if someone is killed, the law considers it a mistake rather than an intentional killing because [the Israelis] followed the legal procedures. As for the missiles launched from our side, we never warn anyone about where these missiles are about to fall or about the operations we carry out.”
Egypt and Egyptians know, from intimate, firsthand, bitter experience, who and what the Muslim Brotherhood is about. Their country was forcibly taken over by the MB. Some Americans think it was via a fair election; they are naïve and silly. As Stalin knew, it doesn’t matter who votes, what matters is who counts the votes. Or as Professor Jack Golbert (Int. Law, ret.) knew, you need to first have built a republic, then, and only then, are elections of value.
An Egyptian journalist, Azza Sami, wrote, “Thank you Netanyahu and may God give us more [people] like you to destroy Hamas!” Hamas is not just a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. It is the armed wing, the army, of the MB. Is Hamas a terrorist organisation? A fair question. Is a fifteen to twenty-thousand-man army a terror group? I would argue that is an army of conquest; as is Hezbollah, as is ISIS. We need to realign thinking. Correctly thinking about things begins with accurate terminology.
That is why one dimension of the Hamas War is a public opinion war. Hamas fully expects the press, prime ministers and prelates to invariably take the Hamas-Palestinian side. Palestinian propagandists count on media for footage of dead and wounded Palestinians, even if the pictures come from a totally different war (much European press footage was actually from Syria). They count on Church leaders (Catholic and Protestant) to bemoan the “slaughter of the innocents” – even when those are not innocent, even a slight bit. The problem with this is, of course, that none of these groups are truly monolithic. Some “go” one way and some do not. Assuming all are the same is simply wrong. Collective thinking works in movies, not real life.
The Hamas Charter calls for elimination of Israel and Article Seven envisions extermination of all Jews, all over the world – yes, even if they are not Zionist.
As Colonel Richard Kemp (ret.), the much decorated British former commander of British forces in Afghanistan said, a double standard equals moral cowardice. “If Western leaders will not support Israel’s fight against terror, how will they fight the same terrorists when they reach their own shores?”
One can contend that one displays neutrality; that is what moral equivalency is. Does anyone really aspire to detached impartiality between valuing human life and celebrating death? The “beings” that apparently killed Lt. Hadar Goldin were not genetically monsters, but they might as well have been, because they are taught to reject life from kindergarten.
A political movement bent on genocide may come next for you, wherever you may be.
———-
Mordechai Ben-Menachem is a former researcher/lecturer at Ben-Gurion University and an author of 30 book ranging from engineering to poetry. He is also an ordained clergyman and a former soldier.
———–
