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| Image for illustration purposes (Time) |
What?! You don’t believe me?! Please. No explanation needed. Just watch the nightly news and see for yourself. You will see the genocide right before your very eyes. See the victims of Israeli aggression. Watch them crying bitter tears over the loss of a child. a parent, a wife, entire families. See all the body bags filled with victims of Israeli bombs, many of them small children.
Not to mention the utter destruction of their homes and all their worldly possessions. .Watch entire neighborhoods turned into rubble. Watch Palestinian doctors complain about their inability to provide lifesaving treatment to their hospitalized patients because of a lack of electricity. The list goes on. And you ask why I say there is a genocide?!
Hard to argue with those images. Except that the accompanying narrative isn’t true. First of all it is NOT genocide by any definition. No one is trying to eradicate an entire race. But Palestinians are suffering. The only problem is - who is getting blamed for it. Israel is fighting for its life. Fighting one of the most savage enemies in its long history. So savage are they - that they prefer getting their own people killed if it makes Israel look bad.
I don’t know how many times I have pointed this out. But it cannot be emphasized enough. The reason there are so many Palestinian casualties and so much suffering is because this is exactly what Hamas wants. That is why they embed themselves in the most populated areas of Gaza. Concentrating on areas like hospitals and schools for maximum impact. So that if they are attacked there will be a lot of innocent Gaza civilians being killed that Hamas can point to.
It’s a win/win for them. Either Israel will not attack them because of the massive civilian causalities that would result. Or if they do, they will be seen as targeting innocent civilians.
If Israel is going to survive they have no choice but to target Hamas wherever they are. Unlike Hamas Israel does not target innocent civilians. But when Hamas puts them in their way, what choice does Israel have? They cannot allow what happened last October 7th to ever happen again.
On that score (as a reminder - if one is even needed) it seems like every day another horror story from that day gets revealed. The latest of which was reported by JTA:
It was on the fourth day of the war between Israel and Hamas, Asher Moskowitz recalled, that he saw the baby among the corpses at Camp Shura.
Moskowitz had come to Shura, a military base near the central Israeli city of Ramle, as a volunteer with the United Hatzalah emergency response corps. The base had been transformed into a center for identifying those killed in the Oct. 7 massacre by Hamas... Moskowitz was soon pulled into the gruesome task of helping to unload and transfer dozens of bodies that arrived there.
The baby came from Kibbutz Kfar Aza, one of the communities hardest hit in the attack. It arrived in a small bag whose contents told a grim story: a tiny body, burnt and swollen, with the telltale marks from being pressed against a heating element.
“They took the baby and put it, literally, in a kitchen oven,” Moskowitz said in a video testimony recounting the assessment of professional staff at the base...
“The body hardened and, unfortunately, appeared to have also swollen,” he said. “And really, the heating element of the oven was on the body itself.”
The list of atrocities that has emerged from Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel is so long as to feel endless. First responders and survivors have related stories of burnt bodies, of people tied up and murdered, of partygoers gunned down en masse at a music festival.
The story has also drawn attention because it was shared publicly for the first time when Hatzalah’s founder and president spoke at an American political convention in Las Vegas.
“We saw a little baby in an oven,” Eli Beer, the founder and president of Hatzalah, said in a speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual conference on Saturday night.
This is what Israel is fighting. And they have every right to seek and destroy these savage excuses for human beings wherever they find them. They have no intention of harming a single hair on the head of a single Palestinian civilian. Hamas, on the other hand, seeks to allow thousands of their own people to be used as human shields.
This is very likely never mentioned by the antisemitic left wing BDS supporting academics that have outsized influence on their ill informed young college students. And their outsized influence should not be underestimated. Many of these young students are merely reacting to what they have been told by their teachers (along the opening lines of this post). Made easier to believe by the images broadcast on the nightly news.
That do many young students naïvely buy into that false narrative is a function of their own ignorance They are reacting to what they see - with an anti Israel perspective absorbed from their antisemitic BDS supporting teachers. They see genocide and are protesting it. Right alongside the actual antisemites joining them in protest.
Meanwhile the truth about who is really responsible for current Palestinian suffering doesn’t seem to matter to the media. They know the truth but they insist on broadcasting Gaza’s catastrophic humanitarian crisis without context. Which makes it easy for the uninformed casual observer to blame Israel. (Thankfully, the majority of American citizens aren’t buying it.)
The question is, do the Palestinians in Gaza understand this? I don’t see how they can’t. They know how brutal Hamas is. They know about Hamas’s Jew hating ideology. They know about their goal of a river to the sea Palestine. And they agree with it. But in almost every instance of media attention, they are seen blaming Israel for their misery. In the most bitter of terms.
As I have said (probably hundreds of times) their attitude towards the Jewish people is sourced in a lifelong indoctrination of hatred. Much of it religious hatred. In their homes, their schools, their textbooks, their mosques, their social media, and their entertainment. And the media does precious little do disabuse them of that.
My guess is that many student protestors aren’t even aware of how heinous the Hamas atrocities were that brought about Israel’s deadly response. Either that or they don’t care. Some have even refused to call Hamas a terrorist organization - calling for a cease fire as tough Hamas and Israel were moral equals that might be willing to iron things out with diplomacy..
I believe that some of these students are protesting out of a genuine concern for the Palestinian suffering for which they blame Israel. They have been indoctrinated to believe that Israel’s racist Apartheid and settlement policies is the source of the problem. This is the narrative they are constantly being fed by their left wing BDS supporting teachers.
No chance for a more balanced narrative being heard since anyone that doesn’t support their preconceived anti Israel narrative is hounded off the stage and considered a racist. But they are just misinformed naïve students that get their information about Israel from their anti Israel BDS supporting faculty.
Fortunately a sizable majority of the American people see what’s going on. They realize that Hamas as every bit the terrorist organization that the civilized world says it is. They realize that Israel is fighting for its life and that any civilians killed – no matter how great the number, is not because they were targeted. But because Hamas embeds themselves in densely populated civilians areas. focusing on hospitals, schools and mosques. Israel targets the Hamas leadership and its infrastructure. Which must be destroyed regardless of civilian human shields placed in their path by Hamas. They have no choice. The president, congress, and the military-intelligence establishment knows this. And they all support Israel fully. Both in word and in deed.
Last night on the PBS News Hour I was pleasantly surprised to see an interview of the former Commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, retired General Frank McKenzie. He fully defended and justified Israel's actions in Gaza. It is worthwhile hearing what he has to say. The transcript of which can be read here.
I only wish the media would spend more time articulating what what General McKenzie made so clear. That would ensure that coverage of the Israeli war with Hamas is truly fair and balanced. Unfortunately if past is prologue - it ain’t gonna happen. But at least the truth is occasionally referenced, even if most of the time they let images of the Gaza devastation imply that it’s all on Israel.