Tomorrow the so-called “Gaza Freedom Flotilla” is expected to reach the waters off the Gaza Strip. I am interested in what is in the heads of the ‘progressive activists’ that are on board or that support the goals of this operation.
They claim that it’s all about ‘humanitarian’ aid to break the ‘siege’ and end the suffering of Gaza residents. It’s remarkably easy to show that there actually is no ‘siege’ and no ‘humanitarian crisis’. A siege is not a siege when the besieger permits 15,000 tons of food, medicine and clothing a week into the besieged area. And the Hamas rulers of Gaza have options to ameliorate the minimal pressure that is being applied to them. Want the crossings open? Release Gilad Shalit, who’s been held hostage now for almost four years.
Only the very dumb ones believe their own propaganda. The smarter ones would probably admit the above. But they would say that they are fighting a war against colonialism and racism. They would say that they are fighting on the side of freedom against oppression.
In other words, they are helping Hamas because Hamas represents freedom and opposes racism. Really?
The Western idea of freedom includes such things as freedom of speech, press, and religion. It includes the idea of equality between men and women, fairness to ethnic and religious minorities, gays, etc.
Hamas is violently (and I mean violently) opposed to those freedoms. It also believes that the land of Israel belongs only to Muslims, and that the proper behavior of a Muslim toward a Jew is to kill him (I call that racism, don’t you?)
None of this is hidden; it’s spelled out in the Hamas covenant, which also repeats traditional antisemitic themes.
It’s likely that some of our progressive friends would agree that Hamas is a little primitive, but it’s necessary to work with them in order to stand up for international law, which Israel supposedly violates in multiple ways.
In fact, Hamas — and the massive anti-Zionist apparatus of delegitimization that’s been constructed over the past few years (financed by Arab money and built by Western ‘progressive’ intellectuals) — are doing their best to abet the violent destruction of a UN member state whose existence is more firmly grounded in international law than many Arab states.
Hamas itself controls Gaza after a violent coup against the Palestinian Authority in which many of its opponents were murdered. Hamas launched murderous suicide bombings to kill Israelis, and fired thousands of rockets into Israel. Insofar as anyone is violating international law, it’s Hamas.
Well, they say, now running out of arguments, “the Jews took the Arabs’ land.” This is a longer story, because you need to talk about the history of the land, the provenance of the Jews and the Palestinian Arabs in it, the various wars and who started them, the opportunities for coexistence and who rejected them, the behavior of the Palestinian and other Arab leadership, and — importantly — the way the Palestinian Arabs express their ‘frustration’ at the presence of Jews in ‘their’ land. But at the end of the day, the simple fact is that a Jewish state in the land of Israel is completely legitimate — and it has a right to defend itself.
What’s left for these ‘progressives’? Just that they really, really hate the Jewish state. They hate the idea that Jews, who are not even proper human beings, would have the audacity to insist on a state, as if they were France or something!
In their confusion they like to make analogies between the Jews of Israel and Nazi Germany, although it was the Palestinian Arabs that collaborated with Hitler. They compare ships that support Hamas to the ships that brought Jewish Holocaust survivors to this same coast before 1948. They like to use the words ‘apartheid’ and ‘genocide’ to describe Jewish self-defense against murderous terrorism, when it is Hamas that actually advocates apartheid and even genocide. The more absurd the inversion, the more effective it seems to be as a propaganda device.
This mass derangement is caused by hatred. It is an old, old story and the Jews are familiar with it. Our response has finally been to create a Jewish state, like other states. Some may have expected that the simple fact of Israel’s existence would put an end to the hatred, but that was apparently a vain hope. But the state does provide us with a means to defend ourselves against the hate, as it waxes and wanes like a fever from generation to generation.
Today anti-Jewish hate is in a growth phase, and the ‘freedom’ flotilla is another expression of this. But it’s no more an expression of the love of freedom than the Nazi rallies at Nuremberg.
Technorati Tags: Gaza, Freedom Flotilla, Israel, Hamas
