Useful Idiots of the International Left
A quick review of the facts is in order.
1. Hamas is designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department. It has had that status since the Clinton administration. Since 2007, Hamas has controlled governance of the Gaza Strip.
2. The charter of Hamas calls for jihad until the destruction of the State of Israel. They are funded and supplied by the Islamofascist regime in Tehran, where just yesterday the ayatollahs renewed their call for a final solution: destruction of Israel.
3. After Hamas took over, Israel instituted a blockade of Gaza to ensure that Hamas could not gain materials it could later use to kill Israeli citizens. The “international community” decried such a blockade, and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton cajoled the Israelis into easing the restrictions on things like concrete and steel for “humanitarian” purposes, materials the Israelis warned could be used to build tunnels into Israel.
4. Hamas has been indiscriminately firing rockets into Israel, hoping to kill as many people as possible and to provoke a military response from Israel. Further, it has been using a series of dozens of tunnels constructed with aid meant to be used in “humanitarian” projects as a means of infiltrating fighters into Israel. These fighters aim to kill as many Jews as they can find, and to capture prisoners they can later ransom.
5. When the desired Israeli response came, Hamas employed a human shield strategy to ensure that, if Israel wished to destroy Hamas rockets or tunnels, they would have to kill innocent women and children to do so. They’ve stored munitions in and around mosques, schools, and hospitals. (This is a war crime, by the way…look it up). This has, unsurprisingly, resulted in the deaths of many such human shields.
6. Predictably, the international left decry Israeli war crimes, racism, and terrorism. This includes the United Nations, in whose schools Hamas has been discovered (twice in a week) to have stored large caches of munitions.
Anti-Semitic Protests in Paris on June 20
So does the United States put its money where its mouth is and back its modern, democratic, anti-terrorist Israeli ally? Does it unequivocally denounce terrorist tactics and the unconscionable use of human shields? Does it repudiate involvement of the terrorist ayatollah regime in Iran for fomenting unnecessary and counterproductive violence? Does it chide the UN and other leftist organizations for failing to see the immorality of indiscriminate artillery fire into Israel?
HELL NO. Instead, Our Secretary of State has castigated the Israelis for defending themselves. The administration implemented an air travel embargo on Israel (later reversed after tremendous political pressure). It continues to pressure Israel (who didn’t start this battle, by the way) to institute a unilateral cease fire, while remaining under a rain of rocket fire from Gaza. It has essentially negotiated with the terrorists in Gaza, and it has written a big fat $49 million “humanitarian aid” check to Hamas (indirectly of course…we must keep up appearances). Any bets on how long before this “humanitarian” aid comes back in the form of death and destruction for Jews in Israel?
Worst of all, the actions by this administration have lent an unprecedented level of credibility to Hamas. Rather than shun them and sanction them and actually seek to disable and jail these terrorists (not my words, the words of the State Department), our government has lent them legitimacy by refusing to take a firm stand against them. Instead, the Obama administration pretends there is some sort of moral equivalency between Israel and Hamas as they play their mediation games, when in fact there is a moral gulf between the two.
On one side we have a prosperous, modern, multicultural, tolerant democracy that respects the rule of law and is a key bulwark for stability and our trade interests in the eastern Mediterranean. The other is a barbaric seventh-century, autocratic, misogynistic cult of violence with unsatisfiable demands and essentially no positive contributions to humankind.
Why are we pretending there is a middle ground, or that there is even a choice to be made here?
