Posted on 05/19/2021 3:44:59 AM PDT by Conservat1
In a statement last week, a Hamas spokesman expressed the mentality behind the suffering in Gaza in a nutshell. “The decision to bomb Tel Aviv, Dimona and Jerusalem,” he boasted about the 3,000 rockets Hamas has fired at Israeli communities in recent days alone, “is easier for us than drinking water.”
You bet it is. As in the past, the calculation by Hamas, deemed a terrorist enterprise by the European Union, the United States and others, to use Palestinian civilians as human shields from which to attempt the murder of Israeli civilians, isn’t just easy. It is a no-brainer.
Here is what Hamas knows: It will fire missiles at innocent Israelis, using innocent Palestinians in homes, hospitals and schools as collateral damage-in-waiting. No Israeli government can permit its civilians to be used as lambs to be slaughtered. The only way for it to stop the rockets is to stop those who fire them. Israel will try to minimize the harm to Gazans, even those whom Hamas is happy to sacrifice. Innocent Palestinians whom Hamas has effectively designated for death will die.
And that isn’t all Hamas knows. It knows that the cycle of inanity on the left will be replayed again, with those holding themselves out as progressives blaming not Hamas for firing the rockets, but Israel for trying to protect itself from them.
Hamas’ expectation that inanity would reign was rewarded last week by Reps. Ayanna Presley (D-Mass.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who recited the customary blather. Disregarding the rocketing of Israeli civilians that was intended to elicit Israeli self-defense and which required it, Pressley chose to condemn Israeli “state violence” and called for an end to American aid to Israel. Ocasio-Cortez denounced President Biden for noting that Israel had no choice but to protect its civilians, demanding that the President “stand up” to Israel.
One supposes that neither Pressley nor Ocasio-Cortez has had their families forced into underground shelters, while missiles aimed at annihilating them landed all around. The painful appearance is that neither congresswoman “sees” Israelis. Both seem to regard Israelis as somehow not quite human. Israeli life evidently holds little value or interest for Pressley, Ocasio-Cortez and certain of their colleagues.
“We cannot stand idly and complicitly by and allow the occupation and oppression of the Palestinian people to continue,” said Pressley, opting for a platitude both sophomoric and inapposite. The idea that Hamas, which has consigned Palestinians to needless suffering since it seized control of the Gaza Strip in a 2007 coup, acts out of concern for Palestinians’ welfare is risible. No one need take Israel’s word for it; ask Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Hamas’ sworn enemy. Thumbing its nose at the opportunity to help construct a Palestinian state, Hamas has effectively enslaved Gazans in service of its own fanaticism. It is an organization that progressives should not indulge, let alone embrace.
Just as the congresswomen have no particular interest in standing in Israelis’ shoes, so too are they disinterested in material facts. Were it otherwise, they would know that over the past two decades Israel has repeatedly agreed to an independent Palestinian state encompassing the West Bank and Gaza, in return simply for peace. Each time the offer was made, Palestinian leadership rejected it. Whether Pressley has the vaguest idea of this when she whitewashes the targeting of Israeli civilians by invoking “the occupation and oppression of the Palestinian people,” one can only guess.
Israel has plenty of flaws, like everyone else. But the left’s devil-may-care attitude toward the use of innocent Palestinians as human shields to terrorize innocent Israelis isn’t merely foolish. It badly hurts those on both sides of the conflict.
For the left, political expedience is everything and human lives are just capital to expend in support of the political cause. One need know very little to understand that is what drove Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot to sacrifice millions. American leftists are no different. Shallow false compassion is just a ploy to gain support from and use any dissatisfied group to acquire power from, and they’re totally expendable.
A 2014 piece has well exposed the media’s “help” in Arab-Palestinian terrorists strategy of bringing about the killings its people..
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The Media’s Role in Hamas’ War Strategy
Richard Landes
August 5, 2014
Hamas’ PR strategy can only work if international news media follows the script, whether willingly or under coercion.
[...]
According to its critics, Hamas’ war strategy works like this:
Episodically attack Israel’s civilians in such as way as to provoke a counter-attack.
Hide behind Palestinian civilians (preferably in crowded neighborhoods, schools, and hospitals), while encouraging them, even forcing them, to stay, guaranteeing that the return fire wounds or kills civilians and damages civilian structures.
Encourage the Western news media to play up the civilian suffering, play down Hamas’ role in it, and accuse Israel.
Conjure a firestorm of outrage around the world that eventually pressures Israel into desisting from counteroffensive measures.
Survive to reap the propaganda victory and prepare the next round of hostilities.
Repeat, with each exchange hurting Israel more, and each round of international news coverage further savaging the Jewish State’s international reputation.
No matter what the Israeli response, the Hamas strategy is win-win. If the Israelis abort a strike to avoid civilian casualties (as they often do), then Hamas is spared the blow; if an Israeli strike causes civilian casualties, Hamas has dead babies to parade before the cameras. And eventually, the bloodletting will get so bad, the pictures so damning, that Israel will stop. Hamas’ endgame goals, at least at this stage of its asymmetrical war, are actually threefold: tie Israel down with constraints on its use of power, delegitimize and demonize it in the eyes of the world, and stir an aggressive “Muslim Street” in the West, where genocidal chants can
https://www.the-american-interest.com/2014/08/05/the-medias-role-in-hamas-war-strategy/?utm_content=buffer84617
Hamas has brought on this suffering by doing the bidding of Iran.Iran provided the rockets and whatever financing was needed The purpose of this “rocket barrage” is for Iranian intelligence operatives to observe the capabilities and tactics of Israel’s Iron Dome. Unless Iran can effectively deliver its own ballistic missiles into Israeli targets, they will have no effective way to counter, and thereby disuade, a definitive Isreali attack on their nuclear facilities.
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