There is no moral equivalence between the Israelis
and the Palestinians.
There is a political case on both sides
of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,
but in the conduct of the war there is a difference.
In the intifada the Palestinians have
descended to the lowest moral level,
where they
(a) deliberately kill civilian women and children,
and (b) celebrate doing so.
The Israelis do not do this.
They try to hit military targets.
This is not by chance, but rather reflects their different moral universes.
The Israelis have a religion
(and a western philosophy)
that believes in basic human morality,
where in war one should try only to attack military targets.
The Palestinians, sadly, do not have a religion
that defends
basic human morality,
and so have become simply barbaric and racist,
supporting the killing of all Jews, even
children and infants.
The majority of Palestinians
support
the killing of Jewish civilians.
There is a political case on both sides of this conflict,
but there is no moral equivalence between the two sides.
Image
from
the killing of Danielle Shefi, age 5,
by Hamas, 27 Apr 2002.
She was sitting awake in her bedroom in the morning,
with her mummy and two baby brothers,
when the Hamas
gunman came in and sprayed them with automatic fire.
Image from here.
See photos
and account of the killing.
Israel sites its military facilities as far from civilians as it can.
Palestinians and other Arabs could easily attack these and avoid civilian deaths.
They choose not to.
They choose to attack civilian areas instead.
Why?
Because Palestinian and other Arab fighters are happy to kill enemy civilians
of all ages.
They are all infidels - it doesn't matter to them.
Because Palestinian and Islamist fighters have no morality, no honour
and no sense of shame.
They do not have the code of morality that normal people have,
such as avoiding the innocent in war.
Because attacking civilians is safer.
Attacking an IDF base is extremely dangerous, and liable to get you killed
without achieving anything.
Much easier to attack defenceless women and children in homes and shops
- if your morality allows you live with that.
Hezbollah (and Palestinians and other Arabs)
could easily launch their military attacks far from their own civilians.
They choose not to.
They choose to embed their military in their own civilians.
Why?
Because it will restrain the Israelis, because they are civilized.
Israel doesn't want to kill enemy civilians,
so they can be used as effective human shields.
Hiding in civilians
gives the Islamists a military advantage.
This would not of course work in reverse.
Israel embedding any target in civilians
would not restrain Islamists attacking it in any way.
Because if enemy civilians are killed by Israel,
it is good for the enemy.
It may be the only thing that will stop Israel,
if the (normally hopeless) Islamist military attacks can't.
Why? Not so much because of international opinion
as because Israeli domestic opinion will restrain their military.
Again, this would not work in reverse.
Israeli civilian deaths would encourage, not demoralise or slow down, their enemies.
The Palestinian way of war.
Picture credit unknown.
Tell me here.
Of course, this is only one aspect of the shameful Palestinian/Islamist way of war.
Another aspect would show the Palestinian "soldier" shooting into the baby carriage
when it was alone.
I'm not being over-dramatic.
You're familiar, of course, with the Palestinian attack
where, in cold blood,
they machine-gunned a baby in a baby seat at close range.
Here's a question:
Why don't Israeli civilians form human shields around targets?
If you can answer that question,
you are well on the way to seeing past the propaganda
and finally understanding the
Arab-Israeli conflict.
The study
An Engineered Tragedy
shows that
70 percent of Israeli deaths are non-combatants.
15 percent of Palestinian deaths are non-combatants.
Why the difference?
What causes this difference?
Also, 95 percent of all Palestinian deaths are male.
Why is this?
The difference comes because of the difference
in Israeli and Palestinian morality in war.
From An Engineered Tragedy:
The Palestinians kill a broad section of society,
including old people and
people minding their own business in coffee shops and on buses:
The Israelis kill young men engaged in violent attacks and riots,
and stupid kids standing around watching:
At around age 12, Palestinian boys (but note, not girls)
start watching riots, helping, spotting,
running back and forth,
throwing stones and carrying toy guns, and, inevitably, getting shot:
The fact that Palestinian girls aren't being killed indicates that
the Israelis aren't randomly killing civilians,
but engaging in combat, and only those stupid enough to be in the middle of the combat
are in danger.
In fact, more Israeli girls are killed than Palestinian girls.
Israel's rules of engagement against children and youths throwing rocks:
First, it should be noted that
if you don't want to get hurt,
stay at home. Don't throw rocks.
Parents, don't let your children throw rocks and
Molotov cocktails
and pipe bombs,
while snipers fire on Israeli troops from the background.
Ultimately, that is the answer.
Whatever rules of engagement Israel uses,
children participating in riots and shooting
will get killed.
The answer is children should stay at home.
Let's Talk About the Children
by Naomi Ragen
- "I cannot help but gasp every time I see it: children in front of tanks, throwing stones at armed soldiers.
And nowhere, but nowhere, is there a single mother running to grab their hands and lead them home.
Where are the Palestinian mothers? And what in Heaven's name are they thinking when they let their children
endanger their lives, and the lives of others"
None of the above are very convincing in showing
actual intent
by the Israeli state
to kill civilians.
Again, it seems to any objective observer that
the Israelis try to follow the rules of war.
THE CHALLENGE:
If you believe the Israelis are "just as bad" as the Palestinians,
find me a single incident since 1960
in which the Israeli state deliberately targeted and tried to kill civilians
in the same way the Palestinians do every day.
The Palestinians routinely and deliberately target and attack
schools, shops, restaurants, nightclubs, buses, aircraft,
civilians in their cars and houses,
and so on, with no military target in sight.
Show me a single incident since 1960
when the Israelis did this.
Tell me about it
here.
There is no ambiguity on the Palestinian side.
It is policy (and always has been)
to deliberately target and kill all civilians, from the old to the young.
Endless attacks are made on civilian targets, with no military target in sight.
Islam seems to possess no fundamental rules of warfare.
Judaism seems clearly morally superior to Islam,
since it opposes targeting civilians in warfare.
Suicide bombers
believe they will go to some kind of paradise in the sky
(or somewhere) as a reward for killing innocents.
Unfortunately for them, there is no such place.
They are just dead, and so are their victims.
The killing of the children in the Sbarro pizzeria in 2001
sums up the mental sickness (and I am being quite literal)
of Palestinian society.
It's not just that they targeted women and children.
It's that they openly celebrated it afterwards.
The worst thing about the Palestinians
is that
- unlike the Israelis -
the Palestinians deliberately target
women and children.
The Palestinians have no basic human morality
in their conduct of war,
and believe in killing all Jews, including children,
toddlers and babies.
Opinion polls show
the majority of
Palestinians support killing Israeli civilians.
The Israelis are not like this.
No opinion poll in Israel
has ever shown majority support for
killing Palestinian civilians.
The Israelis fight a war against military targets.
The Palestinians' war consists of almost
nothing but war crimes against civilians.
The Islamists are quite open about
targeting women and children
in their homes, schools,
and in their daily life:
"All the Jews are targets, whether military or civilian.
It's our land and they are in the wrong place.
It's their duty to pay attention to safety of their own families
and move them away from the battlefield."
They are openly depraved. The Islamist above says:
"With the exception of Israel, we do not target civilians",
making clear that in Israel they do target civilians.
The creepy Irish poet Tom Paulin
exemplifies the moral sickness on the western left.
Tom Paulin's
call for the killing of Jewish civilians
(also here
and here).
See transcript,
4-10 April 2002:
"If there is one thing Paulin clearly abhors about Israel, it is the Brooklyn-born Jewish settlers.
"They should be shot dead," he says forcefully. "I think they are Nazis, racists, I feel nothing but hatred for them.""
The use of "Nazi" language is nauseating
- like, as if someone like Paulin
would have been opposed to the Nazis
first time round.
5 year old Danielle Shefi,
shot dead cowering in her bedroom with her baby brothers
by brave Islamic fascist heroes,
27 April 2002,
a few days after Paulin's call for such killings.
They also shot her 4 year old baby brother.
In fact, the "Nazi test" is staring him straight in the face
and he is failing it.
The world is full of latter-day Nazis,
and Paulin is an ally of theirs, not an enemy.
The butcher behind this attack was
Salah Shahade.
He was killed by a 2,205-pound bomb dropped by an IAF F-16
later that year.
Terry Eagleton,
another Irish-origin,
British academic
apologist for fascism.
So when the starry-eyed young Islamist walks into the
Sbarro Pizzeria
and incinerates toddlers, babies and their mummies,
the crime is being committed against him?
So the Iraqi bombers
"have to" fight to stop democracy?
His ignorant article is full of unthinking assumptions,
such as the assumption that the suicide bomber must be living a
"wretched" life of "dispossession"
and "lack of self-determination"
(as opposed, for example, to simply being a
religious fanatic).
PZ Myers
on Eagleton's incoherent attack on atheism.
The Hatuel family
(and here)
- 4 children
shot dead with their mummy, May 2004.
The idealistic twentysomething Islamic fascists
moved in on the stopped car
and shot the four children
- including a 2 year old in a baby seat -
repeatedly
at close range.
The Palestinians were not ashamed of this sick war crime
committed in their name,
but rather
celebrated it.
Also here.
The thug Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority
described the killers as "heroic".
They described the children as "terrorists".
Al Jazeera
jihad TV described the killing as
a "resistance strike".
None of this is unusual.
The leader behind this attack on defenceless children was
Mohammed Khalil,
leader of Islamic Jihad in southern Gaza.
Justice came calling for him in Sept 2005.
A commenter
expresses how I feel:
"That murder has haunted me since it happened. What kind of human could machine-gun a baby
in her carseat? Hatred, pure evil."
Einat Haran,
a 4 year old girl
whose head was smashed on a rock until she was dead
by the Lebanese monster
Samir Kuntar
in 1979.
Sinai Keinan,
a 14 month old
killed
in a suicide bombing of civilians.
See photo
(and here).
Avia Malka,
9 months old,
killed by Palestinians at a wedding.
See photo.
Shoshana Nathanson,
5 months old,
horribly injured
in a Palestinian suicide attack on children on a bus.
Her 3 year old sister
Tehilla Nathanson
was murdered.
See photo
(and here).
Noam and Matan Ohayon,
two baby boys shot
by a brave young Palestinian Islamofascist
as they cowered in their bedroom with their mummy.
See photo.
Palestinians dance in celebration at the killing of Israeli women and children
in Aug 2004.
Images from Reuters.
Found through
here.
Original source lost.
They are celebrating the Islamist suicide bombing of two buses of women and children
doing back-to-school shopping in
Beersheba,
which killed 16 innocent civilians -
including a 3 year old little boy,
Aviel Atash -
with no military target anywhere in sight.
The women and children on the bus were the targets.
And the Palestinians are not embarrassed by this.
Instead they dance in the streets.
Palestinians openly celebrate bus bombings:
"Hamas, Hamas, Hamas, the apple of my eye
...
A bombing every minute;
Soldiers are afraid;
In black bags;
Chunks of flesh of Jews;
In black bags;
Chunks of flesh of Jews"
Comment on the above:
"I apologize for re-stating the obvious, but if Americans or Israelis openly celebrated
the murder of innocent civilians, pictures of the celebration would be plastered
on the front page of every newspaper on the planet."
Opinion polls show that
the majority of Palestinians celebrate killing civilians.
The Palestinians, with their primitive racist tribalism,
want to kill women and children.
The Israelis, with their sophisticated modern universal morality, don't.
They only want to kill combatants.
That
is the difference between them.
There are other differences of course, such as that Israelis believe in democracy
and Palestinians are fighting to set up a tyranny.
But the most fundamental distinction is that
of targeting non-combatants.
That is the difference between
the Israelis and the Palestinians.
An attempted answer:
Leftist
Max Blumenthal
posts a video
of American Jews celebrating the attack on Hamas in Gaza in Jan 2009.
This is too ambiguous.
After all, in these attacks the Israelis killed terror leaders
Nizar Rayan
and
Said Seyam,
and hundreds of Hamas terrorists.
There would not be anything wrong with Jews celebrating that.
What we need is something unambiguous
- an attack where only civilians die, and no one else,
and then Jews or Israelis celebrate.
Tell me about such an event here.
Afterwards:
"But in the fanatic Jewish precincts in Hebron, settlers danced in the streets and praised Goldstein's martyrdom. The Purim parades continued as if nothing had happened, and some residents of Kiryat Arba called his act "a great gift." One settler, stopped by a soldier as she tried to assault a Palestinian journalist, shrieked, "We should kill 500, not 50!""
Shame on those settlers.
There are still some differences with Palestinian terror attacks though:
Every Israeli party condemned the Cave of the Patriarchs attack in absolute terms.
The killer, Baruch Goldstein, belonged to the
"Kach" movement.
The entire "Kach"
movement was outlawed by the Israeli government.
Providing funds or material support to Kach was made a crime.
The Israeli government arrested Goldstein's associates.
The Israeli government declined to prosecute the Arabs who beat Goldstein to death
after he was disarmed.
The Israeli government outlawed and destroyed a shrine erected at Goldstein's grave.
The Israeli Army bulldozed the shrine and prayer area set up at his grave.
Synagogues raised funds for Goldstein's victims.
A poll found only
4 percent of Israelis supported Goldstein.
No political party in Israel since 1994
has ever approved of the killing or praised Goldstein.
There were no further attacks by Goldstein's people.
His organisation simply disappeared.
His attack was a one-off.
Disgusting.
Samir Kuntar released by Israel in an exchange, July 2008.
Since 1995.
