The Truth about Hamas

No IDF bombing or drone attack in Gaza is carried out without the strictest approval protocols to avoid civilian casualties and collateral damage to critical infrastructure that is needed for medical or basic sustenance of Gaza citizens.

For a long time now, lawyers have been embedded with IDF forces to review tactics from the standpoint of the Geneva Convention and human rights legislation and standards.

All this is diametrically opposite to the inhuman behaviour of Hamas that demonstrators in London and New York seem to cheer on. How sick are these people that their own Jew-hatred blinds them to depravity.

 

 

Divine Calculus

We had so many questions when Trump was not re-elected as the most supportive president Israel ever had in the White House. Within 100 days, the Iran talks were put back on track and Palestinian funding was restored.  What kind of Divine plan could this possibly fit??

I think we found out last week, with another big question. Why didn’t Hezbollah open a northern front with its over 100,000 missiles, especially last Wednesday when domestic rioting seemed to stretch Israel’s resources to the limit?

The answer: Biden’s election.

As last week’s missile war was getting started, the fourth session of Iran talks began in Vienna. With their economy beyond bankrupt, the ayatollahs are desperate to get Trump’s crippling sanctions lifted. Any aggression by its Hezbollah proxies over the Lebanon border would have almost certainly torpedoed the talks. Had Trump been re-elected, the mullahs would by now have had nothing to lose.

This foresight and forward planning has happened so often in our history, just as G-d told Moses, in Exodus, 33:23, “You will see Me pass before you but you will not see My face, only the back of Me.”. In other words, you may not see Me at the time, but you will know that I was there. 

Days before the Hamas blitzkrieg began, Israeli politicians were actually on the verge of forming a government coalition that would have depended on the support of Arab lawmakers opposed to the State and who’ve openly sided with terrorist groups that seek our destruction. That plan evaporated with the first 500 missiles.

Time and again it seems that the Almighty has saved Israel from the folly of its leaders. In 2008 Prime Minister Olmert was ready to give up the Golan Heights for a peace agreement with Syria. By the grace of G-d that didn’t happen. Less than 5 years later, Syria became an Iranian military base. Just imagine Iran’s Quds Force in control of the Golan – and the Jews holding a worthless piece of Chamberlain paper signed by a neutered Assad?

The game of existential chess is played out on this earth, but the Grandmaster sits in heaven. 

May He continue to protect His people and our soldiers from all trouble and sorrow, and deliver us full victory over our mortal enemies.

Chag Shavuot Sameyach. 

Am Yisrael Chai ! 

Don't Lecture Israel on Defence

 

The Truth about Gaza

We vacated Gaza sixteen years ago, even taking our dead out of their graves. 

We left beautiful farms and high tech greenhouses. 

Leftist dreamers hoped it would turn the Arabs into productive and responsible neighbours - even create the building blocks of a future state.

But the people of Gaza were betrayed from Day 1 by their leaders and abused by the rabid ayatollahs in Tehran.

The greenhouses were demolished and the farms razed to form rocket launching sites for the continuing Islamist plan to liquidate the Jewish state.

The PLO leadership never wanted a Palestinian state.

They only ever wanted no Jewish state.

 

Liberman and 'The Day After'

There is no doubt that, short of sending in troops on the ground, the IDF dealt Hamas its most lethal blows in this last round of hostilities. It will take a lot more than Qatar's $15m to rebuild and a lot more time than after previous rounds of fighting.

Yes, the average Israeli taxi driver - usually the wisest of all people in Israel - will be baying for full revenge and the total flattening of Gaza or to take the strip back completely.

Isn't that exactly what the US coalition did in Iraq? They never planned for the 'day after' and now - 15 years after the allied invasion, or 'liberation' - Iraq is a basket case of terrorism and political corruption.

There is one person who wants Hamas destroyed even more than our Israeli taxi driver. That is PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas. And he desperately wants Israeli soldiers to do his work for him, and deliver him control of the 'other part' of his so-called Palestinian State.

Our mainstream Likud has always been opposed to a Two State Solution. The plain fact is that any serious notion of a viable Palestinian State is a non-starter so long as the leadership of its two parts - Abbas in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza - are in conflict with each other. Relations are now at their bitterest point, with Abbas trying the starve Gaza of salaries and other essentials needed to maintain civic life. This is why Qatar had to come to the rescue last month. Israel is not the bad boy in this game - it is merely a bystander caught in between these two terror enclaves.

It was quite understandable that Liberman resigned in frustration at a cabinet that was preventing him from carrying out the duties of Defence Minister the way he saw fit. But in our view it is not right for him to make this an election issue. This is a time for cool heads, not elections. Nothing makes Hamas and its Iranian paymasters feel more victorious than seeing their 24-hour barrage throwing the "Zionist Entity" into disarray and toppling its government.

Unlike Liberman, living in the moment and wanting to pander to the masses with a show of force to match his physical stature, Prime Minister Netanyahu has much broader considerations in his calculus.

Firstly there is Iran, and the Trump sanctions which are literally crippling the 'ayatocracy' in Tehran. If and when the mullahs come to heel, Trump will almost certainly insist on their withdrawal from Syria and Gaza as two key demands for the removal of sanctions, over and above the imperatives of nuclear inspection. If Iran stops sending money, Hamas ceases to exist. Gazans may soon have to sell their rockets for fuel and food.

Then there is the unpublished Trump peace plan hanging in the firmament. As we have said above, the reality of a Palestinian State is a non-starter without reconciliation between Abbas's PLO and Hamas. We should not help that happen.

Beyond that there is the wider regional picture and our good relationship with Egypt's president Sisi who has significant influence over Hamas, not least in holding the keys to their vital smuggling routes. For the Hamas leadership the two top priorities are killing Jews and making money - lots of it.

And beyond Egypt there's the new relationship with Saudi Arabia and other Arab states opposed to Iran's regional hegemony. A new Gaza War may kill that nascent Israeli-Arab axis in the crib.

All this is not to say that Israel can allow Hamas to fire off hundreds of rockets and then declare a ceasefire every other month. Short of launching a war that may put another 1.7m Arabs under 'occupation', it may be wiser to move a tank division to the Gaza border and keep it permanently stationed there, ready for the army to move in at the next rocket barrage. Hamas needs to know that the IDF can and will roll in and flatten them all within a matter of hours.

The combination of such visible deterrence on the ground, plus the economic pressures coming through Iran seem to be a much smarter means of dealing with the situation than firing from the hip without a clear plan for the day after.

Gaza is is not a city or a country ...

As we retire safely to our beds in London, Paris and New York, our brothers and sisters in Israel will have no sleep this night. 

Some will be in bomb shelters, others will be kept awake by the sound of sirens. Most will be glued to their TVs and phones. And, many parents will be packing up their sons and daughters called up by the army for deployment to the front.

Tomorrow the media will be all over the story, with the usual bias against Jews for daring to defend themselves. They will point to this or that incident which sparked the latest round of fighting - but the consensus will always be the same: "it all started when Israel retaliated".

The truth is that Gaza is is not a city or a country.
It is simply an Iranian rocket base, filled with human shields.
And make no mistake about who is fanning the flames here, in total disregard for civilian life on either side. 
It is the rabid ayatollahs in Tehran.
And right now they are desperate, wounded animals.

Trump's sanctions have all but crippled their precious Islamic Republic. Its currency is in free-fall, its cities are crippled with power cuts for large parts of the day and its citizens are without basic food and medical essentials for lack of hard currency which is being burned unceasingly as rocket propellant in Gaza, Syria and Lebanon.

Their way of getting back at the Great Satan is to unleash, through their Hamas proxies, fire and fury at Little Satan, and Israel is once again having to pay a heavy price.

There is no doubt that this amount of damage and ferocity has crossed a red line with Israel's leadership, and this time there will be no retaliation against soft targets. The vipers' nest will now have to be cleared out once and for all. The Hamas leadership must be sent to their virgins like Sheikh Ahmed Yassin - in scorched bits.

And this time, thank G-d, there will be no calls from Bush and Obama to show restraint and withdraw.

Gaza: A soldier's letter

Whilst in Israel over Sukkot, I went down to the Gaza border to see the extent of fire damage caused by Hamas’s flying petrol bombs. It’s distressing to see large swathes of blackened landscape. Our people were so proud to make the desert bloom – whilst our so-called peace partners are into scorched earth and wanton destruction.

Whilst in the border area I visited Black Arrow, a memorial to the many IDF units which operated in the south, including Unit 101 which was commanded by Ariel Sharon. A young girl in a baseball cap was standing at the lookout and asked where I was from. She told me that she had immigrated to Israel from Los Angeles a couple of years earlier. I was scanning the Gaza horizon for incoming fire balloons when she said; “My boyfriend served in Gaza, was injured and lost his sight. We’re getting married next year.” She said this so matter-of-factly, it left me stunned and I was still dwelling on the thought many days afterward.

I recall this again here after reading a letter recently published on an Israeli website from an anonymous soldier, telling the true story of what they face at the Gaza border on a daily basis.

Whilst I empathise with the frustration of this soldier, his letter reminds me of the speech made by Colonel Richard Kemp to the UN in Geneva when he said the IDF had done more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare.

Here is the letter: 

“I monitor the news media and am dismayed how it ignores what’s really going on at the Gaza border fence. These aren’t “riots” but war in every sense of the word. When I go home and tell people what’s really going on here, they’re shocked.

For a long time now, on a nightly basis, we’ve been facing Hamas groups that throw hundreds of grenades and petrol bombs at us. They fire at us from within crowds of women and children so that we are prevented from responding. Not that we would otherwise shoot them because the rules of engagement for opening fire are confused and frustrating. All of this goes on against a backdrop of powerful exploding balloons and fires that fill the air with black smoke.

We don’t approach the border fence because it is rigged with land mines and explosives which are hidden in all sorts of things; even the inside of Hamas flagpoles. Hamas has studied our weaknesses and is taking full advantage of the situation.

They send children to break through the fence and they come towards us close enough to see the whites of our eyes. We then have to withdraw leaving Hamas to destroy our positions. We are not allowed to return fire and, instead of going on the attack, we have to take cover due to warnings of sniper fire.

We have been abandoned on the battlefield. We feel alone. This week there were warnings of the incendiary balloons being loaded with chemical substances!

And it’s not true that we haven’t suffered injuries. Perhaps not mortal injuries but many soldiers have been wounded in these clashes. The fact that there haven’t been losses on our side is a mystery which can only be explained as Divine protection from Above.

I write this so that Am Yisrael will know the truth of what is going on here.”

A Heartwarming Torah Story

With the Knesset soon to vote on a new Basic Law (much like a constitutional amendment) declaring Israel as a Jewish State, it’s nice to see that this is not just a legal definition but a reality.

I'd like to share with you this story which was told in shul the other week by Rabbi Yehoshua Hartman in London.

He told of his nephew in Israel who became part of a group of young men who decided that they would each put aside 200 shekels a month for as long as it took to pay for a Sefer Torah to be written. They maintained this commitment for 17 years, many months with great sacrifice as young people with heavy mortgages and some bad patches at work and in business.

At the end of the 17 years, after paying the scribe they had to decide on a ‘home’ for their new Torah.

They decided to advertise for suitable shuls and communities that didn’t already have a Sefer Torah of their own. There were many replies. But the one that impressed them most was from a secular kibbutz right on the edge of the Gaza Strip. It’s called Kibbutz Kerem Shalom – famous for the nearby crossing point for transporting goods to Gaza and also the regular target of mortar attacks from Hamas.

A date was fixed for the dedication ceremony and the first shabbat reading. Two days prior, there was an outbreak of missile attacks from Gaza, and they thought about postponing it to another quieter week. In the end they decided to go ahead as planned and read from it on their first shabbat service.

Here is a video of the celebrations, and an announcement from the head of this secular kibbutz that, from now on, there will be a minyan every shabbat in Kerem Shalom.

Thank you Hamas !

Thank you Hamas !

You may have caused needless deaths and injuries to Gazans, but your border campaign has done an enormous service to Israel.

You see, until now, the peaceniks were happy to see Israel’s borders rolled right back to the pre-1967 lines. Sipping decaf lattes in Tel Aviv, they didn’t pay much mind to such details as borders. So long as there was a handshake and kumbaya with Mr Abbas, all was going to work out just fine.

That was until they saw your mob of 40,000 at the Gaza border. Through the belching smoke of burning tires, they glimpsed pure murder in the eyes of your ‘civilians’. They read about the maps and knives that you’d given to infiltrators directing them to the nearest Israeli homes with orders to slaughter anyone in sight – man, woman or child.

These Haaretz-reading elites may never have cared much for what happened down in Sderot, but right now, they are very wary of seeing your rabid mobs a lot closer to home.

Pre-1967, Israel had a tempting waistline just nine miles wide at its narrowest point and Jerusalem was surrounded on three sides by your people.

The peaceniks now have this horrible vision of returning from Pesach holidays in Turkey and flying into Ben Gurion over a pall of burning tires, just seconds away from the runway, not knowing what kind of missiles your jihadists might be aiming at the belly of their aircraft.

They worry about burning kites wafting into the fields of Hadera over the new 1967 border, which might now bring Netanya into mortar range. And they worry about what the future might hold. Perhaps cheap drones launched over the fence carrying Sarin or Novichok a few miles into Tel Aviv.

Of course we on the Right, the realists, have always known that ‘land-for-peace’ was just an illusion and that the only border acceptable to you people was always the sea, with the Jews inside it.

But your two-week show has woken up the dreamers in Israel. They’re now smelling the coffee, or the burning rubber. They will now think twice before signing up to what Abba Eban referred to as Auschwitz Borders.

So thanks for that Hamas, we on the Right are most grateful for promoting reality in Israel’s lofty circles.

'Bashert' is Yiddish for: it was meant to be.

In 1960 my father wrote a book about his time in Auschwitz and Buchenwald and of the murder of his parents and most members of his family during the Holocaust.

‘The Yellow Star’ was recently republished after 50 years.

This is the story of how it got to be republished.

It appears as the afterword to the new book.

It’s sad to see how so much of the world seems to have descended into a new epoch of Jew hatred. However much they try to disguise themselves as anti-Israel or anti-Zionist, these are anti-Semites just like the duck analogy walks and talks and looks.

And just as in Germany the Nazis emerged from a highly cultured and educated society, the main sources of this resurgent Jew-hatred are in academia, the arts and cultured classes where anti-Semitic parlour chatter is rife and almost trendy.  Israeli scientists with ground-breaking medical cures are boycotted whilst artists who immortalise Palestinian suicide bombers are lauded and awarded. Most people agree that being supportive of Israel is ‘the kiss of death’ in media and academia; no advancement, no promotion, no prospects.

I am therefore always amazed when any non-Jewish personality actually stands up for Israel. ‘Why do they do it?’ I wonder. ‘What bad dream did this person have that compelled them to risk ridicule and eternal peer-abuse by standing up for the Jewish state?’

Such a question came to me on October 16^th 2009 when a British army officer and commander of forces in Ireland, Bosnia and Afghanistan stood up at the UN in Geneva and delivered this speech:

“I am the former commander of the British forces in Afghanistan. I served with NATO and the United Nations; commanded troops in Northern Ireland, Bosnia and Macedonia; and participated in the Gulf War. I spent considerable time in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, and worked on international terrorism for the UK Government’s Joint Intelligence Committee.

Mr. President, based on my knowledge and experience, I can say this: During Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli Defence Forces did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare.

Israel did so while facing an enemy that deliberately positioned its military capability behind the human shield of the civilian population.

Hamas, like Hizballah, are expert at driving the media agenda. Both will always have people ready to give interviews condemning Israeli forces for war crimes. They are adept at staging and distorting incidents.

The IDF faces a challenge that we British do not have to face to the same extent. It is the automatic, Pavlovian presumption by many in the international media, and international human rights groups, that the IDF are in the wrong, that they are abusing human rights.

The truth is that the IDF took extraordinary measures to give Gaza civilians notice of targeted areas, dropping over 2 million leaflets, and making over 100,000 phone calls. Many missions that could have taken out Hamas military capability were aborted to prevent civilian casualties. During the conflict, the IDF allowed huge amounts of humanitarian aid into Gaza. To deliver aid virtually into your enemy's hands is, to the military tactician, normally quite unthinkable. But the IDF took on those risks.

Despite all of this, of course innocent civilians were killed. War is chaos and full of mistakes. There have been mistakes by the British, American and other forces in Afghanistan and in Iraq, many of which can be put down to human error. But mistakes are not war crimes.

More than anything, the civilian casualties were a consequence of Hamas’ way of fighting. Hamas deliberately tried to sacrifice its own own civilians.

Mr. President, Israel had no choice apart from defending its people, to stop Hamas from attacking them with rockets.

And I say this again: the IDF did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare.

Thank you, Mr. President.”

I was brimming with admiration, but yet still wondering: why?

I got the answer two years later on a plane out of Tel Aviv where I spotted the officer, Colonel Richard Kemp, in the opposite aisle seat. 

I said I wanted to shake his hand and thank him for his courageous defence of my people. We exchanged cards and deplaned in London.

Later that evening I got the following email from him : 

“Many years ago I read a book called The Yellow Star by somebody who was I believe called S B Unsdorfer. Any relation?”  

I replied: “Wow .. what a coincidence. That was my father's book. Long out of print.”

He replied: “A remarkable coincidence. I never expected to have the honour to meet the author of The Yellow Star, or indeed his son. I read the book when I was about 14 or 15. A phenomenal work. Without question, of the many books I have read in my life, your father's made by far the greatest impression on me. I read a battered paperback copy that belonged to my aunt, and I still have it.”

Well – this time I got my answer to my eternal question about what makes such a person speak out for Israel.

I decided there and then to republish and digitize The Yellow Star with thanks to Richard for his inspiration and for agreeing to write a personal foreword.

We are now good friends and I continue to follow Richard's outstanding advocacy for Israel and her armed forces in forums all over the world, and his support of all those brave souls, in and out of uniform, who are fighting the just war against radical Islamist terrorism and the forces of jihad.

The Yellow Star is available at Amazon and other online vendors.

See Richard Kemp's blog here.
Watch his UN speech here. 

Tisha B'Av - 2014

I return home from shul and Eicha to a very quiet house  … no TV, no phone callers, just silence.

It’s just me alone with my PC checking on the past day's events in the only place in the world I really care about. 

I’ve watched many wars play out in Israel, but never felt as involved and joined-at-the-hip as this time. Maybe it’s the sheer impossibility of fighting an enemy which shoots from hospitals, hides behind children and counts its own civilian casualties as war gains. Maybe it’s because of the anti-Semitism it has unleashed here once again in Europe.

I am reading an article about the Hamas charter and its absolute and explicit commitment to the murder of all Jews, and how this was spawned by the Muslim Brotherhood’s collaboration with Hitler in the Second World War.

‘Gong-gong’ breaks the silence in the house. 

It’s the Code Red app on my smartphone.  

The readout says two towns in the south of Israel are again under rocket fire.

I see it’s 1 a.m. Israel time and I think of kids being dragged out of their beds into shelters for the umpteenth time.

It gongs again. More rockets. No peace even on our saddest national day.

A third gong goes, and I realise that it’s not the asymmetry of the war or the local anti-Semitism that has us all so much more closely involved in this conflict. It’s the app!

That Code Red that’s been gonging away for over three weeks now, at all times of the day and night. Each one jolts us out of the complacency of our diaspora life and daily pursuits, and reminds us that our brothers and sisters are under fire and that their children are being traumatised night after night. 

And why?  Simply because they are Jews.

The Hamas charter seems so clearly to be just a continuation of Hitler’s work, along with the fascism in the streets of Paris and London.

And I wonder about something else.

Imagine if there had been such an app in the Holocaust?

Imagine all those American Jews hearing a gong every time a single Jewish life was extinguished half a world away in Europe.

Six million gongs.

At one a minute, it would have taken eleven and a half years.

על אלה אני בוכיה -  עיני עיני ירדה מים כי רחק ממני מנחם משיב נפשי

For these I weep -  mine eye, mine eye runneth down with water, because the comforter that should relieve my soul is far from me.

Gaza: the city that wore a suicide vest

The John Travolta movie ‘Swordfish’ opens with a bank heist in which suicide vests strapped onto hostages are detonated. The resulting explosion is played out in slow motion with ball bearings ripping through glass and flying bodies. It runs for nearly a full minute.

This is Gaza today. A city in a suicide vest which has been exploding on our screens in slow motion over these last three weeks.  Just as in the movie, when this grisly scene finally plays out in Gaza there will be an eerie silence with little left but wreckage and body parts.  

Suicide bombings have become an almost daily occurrence in various parts of the world and we have become desensitised to them, so long as they don’t come too close to home or an airline route that we use. Whether it’s Mohammed Atta of 9/11, the Tsarnaev brothers in Boston or our home-grown Germaine Lindsay who bombed London on 7/7, the pattern is the same. They all started out as good students with a promising future. And then something ugly happened which destroyed them and all those around them.

What we’re witnessing in Gaza is a metamorphosis of Islamist terrorism. A new phenomenon: the world’s first urban suicide bomb.

In many ways the profile is similar.

Gaza started out with so much promise.

9 years ago Israel evacuated every Jewish man woman and child from the Gaza strip. 8,000 people were torn away from their homes and even the dead were pulled from their graves for reburial in Israel.  All this pain was inflicted by Israel’s most hawkish Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, just to give peace a chance.

Israel left behind farms and greenhouses on land that had never been cultivated in hundreds of years. Billions in foreign aid poured in from America and Europe, and the UN set up schools and welfare centres. Just like Atta, Tsarnaev and Lindsay - Gaza had everything going for it.

And then something ugly happened to Gaza, which is destroying it and everything around it.

Just as the suicide bomber is fitted with his (or her) explosive vest, so Gaza was fitted with its vest by Hamas and Islamic Jihad.  Just as the bomber watches the ball bearings being loaded and straps being tied, so the Gazans watched the rockets being shipped in and the tunnels being dug. In 2012 the Institute of Palestine Studies reported that over 160 children died digging those tunnels according to Hamas’ own sources.

With over 10,000 rockets stored in mosques, schools, UN facilities and within 6 years’ worth of tunnelling underneath their homes and streets, no resident of Gaza could fail to have realised that their city was being suited up as a giant suicide bomb to be deployed against the Jewish state.

Just as in the movie - and just as indiscriminately as the ball bearings - hundreds of Hamas rockets have continued to burst out of the Gaza suicide vest as if in slow motion over this 3-week campaign.  Under this hail of fire, Israeli soldiers have been fighting against time to peel off what remains of this deadly straitjacket. And under unprecedentedly strict orders of engagement they have paid with their own lives to save as many vital organs in Gaza as possible.

We don’t know how this campaign will end. Hopefully it will see the total destruction of Hamas and the liberation of their Gaza hostages to a life of enlightenment in place of incitement. But I fear this metamorphosis of Islamist terror is only the second of three stages.

Stage 1 is the ‘Human’ Suicide Bomber – an oxymoron if there ever was one.

Stage 2 is the Urban Suicide Bomb - prototyped in Gaza.

Stage 3 is the State Suicide Bomb – and this will be Iran.

Paymaster and gunrunner to all the major terror organisations of the world, the Islamic Republic is now within an ace of producing nuclear weapons.  After years of getting their sanctions act together, the western powers finally brought the mullocracy to the brink of surrender when the president of their Big Satan inexplicably handed them a lifeline. Now they are rehabilitated and more outspoken than ever on their rights to enrichment of weapons-grade uranium.

The ayatollahs’ calculus is simple. That Israel is a ‘one-bomb-nation’ compared with sustainable losses in the Islamic world if there is retaliation.

Think of a Gaza. Add one hundred million. Mix in the uranium.

That’s Stage 3.

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

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”.

.
[* Source: www.thereligionofpeace.com ]

Fakers for the British media

An Irish Convert

I got this by email. Apart from the fact that there was never any 'massacre' in Gaza, it makes interesting reading....


ISRAEL IS A REFUGE, BUT A REFUGE UNDER SIEGE
Through making a film about the Israeli-Arab conflict, artist Nicky Larkin found his allegiances swaying
by Nicky Larkin
Independent (Ireland)
March 16, 2012

I used to hate Israel. I used to think the Left was always right. Not any more. Now I loathe Palestinian terrorists. Now I see why Israel has to be hard. Now I see the Left can be Right -- as in right-wing. So why did I change my mind so completely?
Strangely, it began with my anger at Israel's incursion into Gaza in December 2008 which left over 1,200 Palestinians dead, compared to only 13 Israelis. I was so angered by this massacre I posed in the striped scarf of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation for an art show catalogue.
Shortly after posing in that PLO scarf, I applied for funding from the Irish Arts Council to make a film in Israel and Palestine. I wanted to talk to these soldiers, to challenge their actions -- and challenge the Israeli citizens who supported them.
I spent seven weeks in the area, dividing my time evenly between Israel and the West Bank. I started in Israel. The locals were suspicious. We were Irish -- from a country which is one of Israel's chief critics -- and we were filmmakers. We were the enemy.
Then I crossed over into the West Bank. Suddenly, being Irish wasn't a problem. Provo graffiti adorned The Wall. Bethlehem was Las Vegas for Jesus-freaks -- neon crucifixes punctuated by posters of martyrs.
These martyrs followed us throughout the West Bank. They watched from lamp-posts and walls wherever we went. Like Jesus in the old Sacred Heart pictures.
But the more I felt the martyrs watching me, the more confused I became. After all, the Palestinian mantra was one of "non-violent resistance". It was their motto, repeated over and over like responses at a Catholic mass.
Yet when I interviewed Hind Khoury, a former Palestinian government member, she sat forward angrily in her chair as she refused to condemn the actions of the suicide bombers. She was all aggression.
This aggression continued in Hebron, where I witnessed swastikas on a wall. As I set up my camera, an Israeli soldier shouted down from his rooftop position. A few months previously I might have ignored him as my political enemy. But now I stopped to talk. He only talked about Taybeh, the local Palestinian beer.
Back in Tel Aviv in the summer of 2011, I began to listen more closely to the Israeli side. I remember one conversation in Shenkin Street -- Tel Aviv's most fashionable quarter, a street where everybody looks as if they went to art college. I was outside a cafe interviewing a former soldier.
He talked slowly about his time in Gaza. He spoke about 20 Arab teenagers filled with ecstasy tablets and sent running towards the base he'd patrolled. Each strapped with a bomb and carrying a hand-held detonator.
The pills in their bloodstream meant they felt no pain. Only a headshot would take them down.
Conversations like this are normal in Tel Aviv. I began to experience the sense of isolation Israelis feel. An isolation that began in the ghettos of Europe and ended in Auschwitz.
Israel is a refuge -- but a refuge under siege, a refuge where rockets rain death from the skies. And as I made the effort to empathise, to look at the world through their eyes. I began a new intellectual journey. One that would not be welcome back home.
The problem began when I resolved to come back with a film that showed both sides of the coin. Actually there are many more than two. Which is why my film is called Forty Shades of Grey. But only one side was wanted back in Dublin. My peers expected me to come back with an attack on Israel. No grey areas were acceptable.
An Irish artist is supposed to sign boycotts, wear a PLO scarf, and remonstrate loudly about The Occupation. But it's not just artists who are supposed to hate Israel. Being anti-Israel is supposed to be part of our Irish identity, the same way we are supposed to resent the English.
But hating Israel is not part of my personal national identity. Neither is hating the English. I hold an Irish passport, but nowhere upon this document does it say I am a republican, or a Palestinian.
My Irish passport says I was born in 1983 in Offaly. The Northern Troubles were something Anne Doyle talked to my parents about on the nine o'clock News. I just wanted to watch Father Ted.
So I was frustrated to see Provo graffiti on the wall in the West Bank. I felt the same frustration emerge when I noticed the missing 'E' in a "Free Palestin" graffiti on a wall in Cork. I am also frustrated by the anti-Israel activists' attitude to freedom of speech.
Free speech must work both ways. But back in Dublin, whenever I speak up for Israel, the Fiachras and Fionas look at me aghast, as if I'd pissed on their paninis.
This one-way freedom of speech spurs false information. The Boycott Israel brigade is a prime example. They pressurised Irish supermarkets to remove all Israeli produce from their shelves -- a move that directly affected the Palestinian farmers who produce most of their fruit and vegetables under the Israeli brand.
But worst of all, this boycott mentality is affecting artists. In August 2010, the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign got 216 Irish artists to sign a pledge undertaking to boycott the Israeli state. As an artist I have friends on this list -- or at least I had.
I would like to challenge my friends about their support for this boycott. What do these armchair sermonisers know about Israel? Could they name three Israeli cities, or the main Israeli industries?
But I have more important questions for Irish artists. What happened to the notion of the artist as a free thinking individual? Why have Irish artists surrendered to group-think on Israel? Could it be due to something as crude as career-advancement?
Artistic leadership comes from the top. Aosdana, Ireland's State-sponsored affiliation of creative artists, has also signed the boycott. Aosdana is a big player. Its members populate Arts Council funding panels.
Some artists could assume that if their name is on the same boycott sheet as the people assessing their applications, it can hardly hurt their chances. No doubt Aosdana would dispute this assumption. But the perception of a preconceived position on Israel is hard to avoid.
Looking back now over all I have learnt, I wonder if the problem is a lot simpler.
Perhaps our problem is not with Israel, but with our own over-stretched sense of importance -- a sense of moral superiority disproportional to the importance of our little country?
Any artist worth his or her salt should be ready to change their mind on receipt of fresh information. So I would urge every one of those 216 Irish artists who pledged to boycott the Israeli state to spend some time in Israel and Palestine. Maybe when you come home you will bin your scarf. I did.
Nicky Larkin's 'Forty Shades of Grey' will premiere in Dublin in May;