Gaza - this is who we are.

“War is chaos and full of mistakes. But mistakes are not war crimes” 

[Col. Richard Kemp, Geneva 2009. UN debate on Goldstone findings]

If we were Britain which bombed the German city of Dresden killing 25,000 people in two days, we could have silenced the Hamas rockets in the same two days without loss on our side.

If we were NATO which bombed Serbia and its capital Belgrade, killing 2,000 civilians and destroying 300 schools libraries and 20 hospitals, we could have been finished in Gaza within a week without committing ground troops.

If we were Russia which bombed Chechnya and its capital Grozny, with civilian deaths never officially revealed, we could have stopped the rockets within a few days without loss of a single soldier.

If we were the USA which nuked two Japanese cities vaporizing nearly 250,000 people, we could have ended the Hamas rocket fire within an hour, without burying a single one of our boys.

But we are not any of the above.

We are the people of the book.

It is not in our nature or our DNA to indiscriminately bomb any city, even when our own families are under fire.

The only moral option against an enemy hiding behind and under civilians was to send in our boys to closely check targets and risk their lives to enter booby-trapped buildings and tunnel entrances.

By dropping warning leaflets as well as phoning and texting thousands of warnings, our army gave up its most valuable tactical weapon: the element of surprise.

For this morality in war – truly unmatched by ANY army in the history of military conflict – we are now burying our 56th soldier.

May the Almighty grant comfort to their grieving and yet immensely proud families.

עם ישראל חי – לנצח

The only Gaza destruction photo we need to see ...

Whilst the TV networks portray Gaza destruction photos in a continuous loop, I would like to add one of my own.

This is what remained of the Neve Dekalim Synagogue, demolished along with a dozen other shuls, at the time of our Gaza pullout in 2005.

We did this awful thing and uprooted 8,000 Jews from beautiful homes and farms in order to give peace a chance.

We left the Arabs our greenhouses, our farmed land, municipal buildings and a lot more.

They stripped the concrete and steel from our synagogues to build rockets and terror tunnels.

They voted for Hamas which is the sole cause of their misery and destruction today.

In these days before Tisha B'Av we should weep for the synagogues and yeshivas that were destroyed for nothing.

Let us never do this again.

Hamas - their most powerful weapon

7 a.m.  Day 5. The commander awakens, bathed in sweat, his throat raw from a long night of chain-smoking.

He sees the empty corner where the portable air-conditioner stood and gutturally curses the strident nurse who keeps taking it back to the children’s ward. Rolling out his prayer mat he feels the thud of a missile in the street, three floors above his head. Sounds like one of their own. He frets about these misfires hitting today’s Israeli shipment through the Erez Crossing. His third wife’s Teva medication is due in today.

Now desperate for some sunlight and fresh air he cracks open the door and barks a command to summon his driver and fetch the kids.  His minders clear the way upstairs and through the yellowed corridors of Gaza’s main hospital. His dark glasses dim the pitiful scene of gurneys parked end-to-end and the blur of their heaving cargo, but he cannot block out the sounds of pain and wretchedness which follow him out into the entrance lobby.

Beyond the glass entrance doors what used to be a street is now a bombsite, the buildings opposite in a grotesque repose of charred concrete and exposed steels, with shop signs hanging only by their electric wires. The kids are already out in the street, admiring the commander’s shining SUV. It started out as a brand new UN vehicle, but was quickly stolen and re-sprayed in a Hamas rocket foundry.

At the sound of a clap and a “Yallah!” the kids rush to the entrance and form a scrum around the emerging commander. As they escort him to the car, he looks up at the unseen drone he knows is watching his every step. He smiles at the thought that he is this morning’s star attraction for the enemy’s best and brightest all glued to their screens in a Tel Aviv bunker.

The scrum of kids reaches the open rear door, the commander steps in and three of the boys jump into the tailgate. The rest step back before the SUV races off in a cloud of fresh debris.

An ambulance of the Red Crescent pulls up sharply into the empty space. Two veiled women step out of the back, and call to the remaining kids to gather round. The hospital doors swish open and two men in green gowns wheel a covered trolley out to the ambulance. There is a jangling of metal beneath the tarp, sounding like oxygen cylinders but they are not. Two more trolleys follow and, once loaded into the ambulance, the women order three of the youngsters to pile in before slapping the doors shut. The ambulance makes off toward the forward launching site, siren blaring.

Meanwhile the commander has arrived outside his home. More kids are waiting at what’s left of a kerbside. He looks up at his building to the figures peering over the roof parapet. There are well over 50 of them up there, mainly women and children, in their second week of sleeping nights on mattresses to keep his family safe.

As he is escorted towards the embrace of his wives, the commander looks up again at the unseen drone in the sky. He is smiling again.

His rockets may soon be spent and his men killed or captured. But his most powerful weapon will never run out.

The humanity of his enemy, Israel.

Message to London's Useful Idiots

Pro-Israel groups are staging a solidarity rally in London this Sunday afternoon. It’ll be another opportunity to trade chants with the useful idiots of the Jihad who protest Jewish self-defence against incessant rocketing as a ‘war crime’.

Here I am referring not to the baying Muslims in the crowd but to their Anglo-Saxon supporters. You guys who chanted “we are all Hamas now!” during the last round of Gaza hostilities. 

You people who never got off your backsides whilst over 150,000 people have been killed in Syria and you who’ve sat silently through the 10-year genocide in Darfur.  

I have a message for you.

Take a good look around you on Sunday. I don’t mean at the Chassidic buffoons of Neturei Karta – but to your comrades in keffiyehs and hijabs. The ones with spittle running off their chins chanting: “Hamas, Hamas … Jews to the gas!”

Do you even know who they really are?

Let me introduce you.

These are the people who brought you 9-11, whose ideology is the same as those who bombed London, Madrid and Mumbai.  In calling for death to the Jews, they distort the same religious teachings as those responsible for the massacre of kids in the Beslan school and the audience of a Moscow theatre.  All told there have been over 23,300 deadly terror attacks by Islamists since September 11 2001*.  

  

These militant friends of yours are followers of the same religious perversion as the barbarians who decapitated soldier Lee Rigby in broad daylight on a London street in a grotesque show before horrified witnesses.

This is the brotherhood which tries to blow people up at 30,000 feet with explosives hidden in shoes, underwear, water bottles and inkjet cartridges. Whose footsoldiers even now are developing new methods of murder in the skies. They are the reason why all passengers have to take off shoes and belts to go through all that scanning and frisking before getting on a plane. Without these new friends of yours, air travel might still be the enjoyable experience it used to be before another of their brothers,Yasser Arafat, brought terrorist hijackings into our peaceful world in 1969.

For those of you in academia: know that the folks you join hands with on Sunday are in the same tent as those who bullied English headteachers out of their jobs in order to radicalise the next generation in Britain’s own state schools.  The ‘Trojan Horse’ scandal is thought by investigators to be just the tip of a very ugly iceberg.

And to those of you who work in the media: spare a thought for the 100 and more journalists imprisoned in Islamic countries. Mr Erdogan’s brotherhood government of Turkey (a NATO country!) holds top spot for the 3rd year running, with more jailed reporters than even Iran. 

And do you even remember the name Daniel Pearl?  He was the Washington Post reporter who was decapitated on camera by the same brotherhood you stand with.  I don’t recall any of you media hacks protesting against that outrage on one of your own people. Maybe that’s because he also happened to be one of our people.

Make no mistake chaps – these agitators are all of a piece. They are not the decent Muslims I happily work with or like the vast majority of Israeli Arabs who enjoy more freedom in the Jewish state than exists anywhere else in the region.

No, your rabid friends are perverters of a faith who feed nightly on gory incitement videos. They marvel at the progress of the new Islamic standard-bearers in ISIS as they butcher their way to the grand caliphate and vow the subjugation of kuffars like you by the sword.

And by the time all the demos and boycotts are over and they have no further use for you, they’ll have taken over more than just your schools. They will move on to all the other things you hold dear, from alcohol and miniskirts to gay rights. And you will truly wish you had been on the right side all along. The side that cherishes life with the same passion as they glorify death. The side that respects freedom of all religions and champions personal liberty, democracy, a free press and women’s rights.

But here’s the really important message I have for you guys.

History has shown that what starts with the Jews ends with all the rest of you. Read up on Hitler and WW2.  As the initial targets of terrorism, the Jewish state has adapted very well. Whether it’s the passenger profiling you’re still too shy to introduce, or the protection of malls, restaurants and public transport. And then there is the Iron Dome, a brilliant Israeli invention not a moment too early for its calling.

So, whilst you are paralysed by your own pathetic political correctness, we’ve been calling out evil by its true name and we have taken this war right to the enemy’s door. As their leaders cower in the basements of hospitals and UN schools, we flatten their houses and destroy their weaponry. We were the first to engage this Islamist evil and, with all your heads buried in the sand, we may well be the last.

But if you think by taking sides against us we Jews will again walk quietly into the night, you are gravely mistaken. We are a nuclear power and as children of the Holocaust, we have more reason and right to have that ultimate deterrent than just about any other nation on the planet.

As the sign on the lithium battery says: “Dispose of Carefully”.

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[* Source: www.thereligionofpeace.com ]

Bibi’s gift to the killers

Demolishing the homes of terrorists is 1970’s technology and these days is nothing but a gift to the families of those who murdered our three boys.

There can be no doubt that the same funds which pay salaries to terrorists already in Israeli jails will have already moved these families into one or more of the 40 five-star hotels listed by Trip Advisor for the ‘Palestinian Territories’.

Or perhaps one of the many fine hotels in Gaza City like the 5-star ultra-luxurious Al-Mashtal hotel, pictured here.

Most likely they will stay in these hotels for 6 to 9 months while new villas are built for them, with all the trappings that befit the hero-status of those who executed three defenseless Jewish schoolboys.

Those funds for convicted terrorists were recently exposed by investigative author Edwin Black as coming from public and tax exempt funds in the US and EU.  

In his bestselling exposé ‘Financing the Flames’ Black shows how US/EU funds are used to pay prisoners’ monthly salaries according to the scale of their butchery.  

Ahlam Tamimi, the girl who assisted the Sbarro restaurant bombing in 2001 will have received a far greater salary for 15 dead and 130 wounded than Ziad Awad can hope to get for killing just one Baruch Mizrachi on the eve of last Pesach. 

We now know that Awad had previously been released in the exchange for Gilad Shalit.  

So incidentally was Tamimi.   We must wonder whether and when we shall be hearing from her again.

Things have moved on since house demolitions were useful as a deterrent.  Ariel Sharon realized this when upping the ante against Hamas in 2004, when the IDF took out their Sheikh Yassin and terror chief Rantisi, the so-called "Lion of Palestine” - within 3 weeks of each other.

Under Sharon it is doubtful that Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal would still be breathing 24 hours after the discovery of the three bodies.

So Bibi, let’s get serious.

For once, do what actually needs to be done … not what pleases other world leaders who don't seem to have a clue what it’s really about.

The Answer to “Why?”

Where there is faith there are no questions … without faith there are no answers.

The only thing more striking than the savagery of this event is the spontaneous outpouring of prayer and tehillim that took hold across the entire Jewish world for 18 days. There has hardly been a precedent on this scale in living memory.

On the first day even secular Israelis came to the Western Wall looking to join or at least associate with the swaying masses of praying Haredim from whom they were so recently alienated in the debate on army service.

We are told that the Almighty needs our prayers to reassure Him that we have not forgotten that there is a father in heaven. How sad that such terrible things need to happen to mobilise us to prayer.  But a father’s primary purpose is to teach his children and guide them in the right path.

This Father sent us the Yom Kippur War to warn us not to be complacent and that we could easily be taken by surprise. He sent us the Carmel fire to teach us that in a missile war we couldn’t afford to be without firefighting aircraft. And this event has also been a lesson. That that we must never release killers, least of all for the ‘privilege’ of sitting down with our enemies and negotiating away parts of our blessed land and our security.

They came to pray at the Wall because it is the last remnant of the Temple and it is where every Jew feels closer to G-d than anywhere else in the world.

And to those asking “Why did this happen?” – that Wall also provides the answer.

We could have been left many remnants of the Temple.  An arch, or maybe a pillar or a piece of a stone altar.

Instead we were left with a wall.

A simple but strong structure of partition.

We know that behind that wall lies the nemesis of our people and all that we stand for. Not far removed from the murderers of 9-11 or the barbaric beheaders of ISIS, they deny our Temple, our Shoah and our very right to exist. By their own admission they glorify death just as we cherish life.

Just as people forget that there is a father in heaven, many of us also forget - or refuse to accept - that there is true evil in this world. And so, things like this happen to wake us up and bring us back to the Wall in search of answers. To remind us never to lower our guard. Never to trust or build bridges with these forces of pure evil, under whatever guise they present themselves or for whatever short-term gains or plaudits are promised from the wider world.

The realists in Israel have recognised this and extended the Wall with a security fence across many hundreds of miles. Our detractors refer to it as a ‘separation barrier’ and, in this context at least, maybe they are right.

It’s no accident that we were left with just a wall.

After 2,000 years it’s now very old and cracked in many places.

What better way to insulate us from such a parallel universe of hate and brutality than with the thousands of notes squashed into those cracks, each one carrying the pleas and prayers of decent people who share and cherish our simple humanitarian values.

עַל־אֵ֣לֶּה ׀ אֲנִ֣י בֹוכִיָּ֗ה עֵינִ֤י ׀ עֵינִי֙ יֹ֣רְדָה מַּ֔יִם כִּֽי־רָחַ֥ק מִמֶּ֛נִּי מְנַחֵ֖ם מֵשִׁ֣יב נַפְשִׁ֑י הָי֤וּ בָנַי֙ שֹֽׁומֵמִ֔ים כִּ֥י גָבַ֖ר אֹויֵֽב׃

“For these I weep; my eyes flow with tears; for a comforter is far from me, one to revive my spirit; my children are desolate, for the enemy has prevailed.”