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The Only Permitted Racism

It is interesting to note how many people I have spoken with since arriving back in the UK a couple of days ago who are sickened by the anti-Israel reporting on the supposedly fair and equal handed BBC and other news organizations in this country as compared to the US, where many non-Jewish public figures have come out in support of Israel's position. I won't revisit all the obvious arguments already aired elsewhere including my own articles, suffice it to say that Israel is being demonized and de-legitimized by a vicious propaganda campaign that takes no account of the facts.

If any other country had been attacked by thousands of rockets over a period of years it would have retaliated to stop the attacks and no one would even have questioned it. This is not the case with Israel, it alone is supposed to accept being repeatedly attacked and provoked without the right of self-defence that is inscribed in the charter of the United Nations. Israel is defending her citizens from incessant and continuing attacks and the fact that Hamas is discussing a cease-fire is in recognition that they are being seriously hurt by the combat despite their blood curdling threats. Through the logic of Alice Through The Looking Glass all of the actions for which Hamas and its friends are guilty get reflected in this crazy distorting mirror to become Israel’s crimes and misdemeanours. Israel hits the targets in which terrorists are hiding, even if they are behind or within civilian centres, they have no alternative. Remember the reason for this is the terrorist’s belief that hiding amongst civilians is their safest option and, in addition, any concomitant increase in casualties suffered as a direct result of their cynical actions wins them support from the international media organizations. We have become soft in the head if we allow such anti-Jewish and anti-Israel slurs to remain unanswered. Israel not only has the duty to defend its citizens but it also has the moral duty to fight the terrorists and to seek their destruction. Whilst we discuss how people behave during war how many Jews do you know, presently or in history that intentionally killed or maimed children or people at prayer?

Can you name a time or place in which Jews sought to force unwilling people to convert to Judaism or threatened with death anyone who was Jewish who wanted to follow some other faith or no faith at all. In case you don’t understand current events might I remind you that extreme followers of Islam still swear death onto any Muslim who wants to leave that faith. How many Jews do you know who have bombed places of worship to murder indiscriminately? How many times have Jews desecrated the graveyards of other religions? How many Jews strap bombs on themselves to intentionally murder civilians?

Many are not aware that even during the present battles in Gaza Hamas is murdering any suspected Palestinian collaborators and counting them amongst those considered to be casualties of Israel’s combat units? How many times in modern history has an air force leafleted a targeted site to warn the inhabitants that it is about to be attacked? That is precisely what the Israeli air force has been doing. Israel has to fight the fanatics around its border in order to survive. It is only through its strength that it can move forward with anything approaching a normal life for its citizens. If Hamas and the other extremists stopped attacking Israel there would be peace and all the outstanding issues could be addressed.

But Hamas and their fellow travellers claim their strength is that they love death, and the weakness of those they fight for Western democratic values is that we love life. They are right about what we love, but wrong about one aspect of their despicable calculation, loving life is our strength, not our weakness. Many false and unedifying accusations listed above have been aimed at Israel and are not true. Israel has had to target their enemy wherever they hide but Hamas and their friends have, as a matter of continuing policy, targeted innocent civilians for many years, but apparently only a few of us noticed!

It is laughable but sinister for the media to draw any moral equivalence between the actions of their beloved terrorist murderers and the reactions of Israel or the West in general. The Western powers make many mistakes but intentional genocide is not one of them in recent times. The only common denominator that media organizations, the politically hard left, the fascists and the Islamic militants have in common is their knee jerk unreasoning hatred of Israel and the Jewish people's right to a Jewish homeland in its ancestral home? Because in the end that is what this argument is really all about.

Many learned commentators and pundits, Jewish and otherwise have been faced with the question of why Israel is clearly judged by a different set of criteria to any other country and the truth is obvious but mostly remains unsaid in polite society, it is the oldest question sparked by the oldest hatred, the words we dare not use, anti-Semitism.

It seems as if this is the only permitted racism in the world of today and it sickens me. The difference between now and the last two millennia is that now there is a country called Israel and the lives of these Jews don’t come cheap. If the Jews had to rely on the goodwill of the rest of the world there might soon be no Jews.

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