Nidra Poller
Paris
What did we do wrong this time? It looked like Cast Lead would be appreciated at its just value, but no… international opinion couldn’t stomach a 3-week military operation against the jihadis of Hamastan. The repercussions in Europe and even in the United States were more radical than the “Al Aqsa Intifada” episode. To the point of punishing our six million victims of the Shoah by cancelling commemoration ceremonies. (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123309682003921603.html Daniel Schwammenthal of the WSJ thinks its time to stop the flow of crocodile tears.) The level of Jew hatred in the “free world” has risen drastically. IDF personnel are threatened with arrest and prosecution in European countries for “war crimes.” And we hear once again that Israel has lost the PR war. What if it is not a question of PR, hasbara, propaganda, or other familiar techniques of persuasion? Global jihad—the ongoing never-ending Islamic war of conquest—is armed today with a weapon that I have named “lethal narratives.” Let us see how the narrative functioned to transform a justified riposte against an unabashed enemy into a criminal assault on innocent civilians.
Surprised by the massive December 27 air strike, Hamas had nothing to show for its suffering but a courtyard strewn with the husky bodies of uniformed combatants (William Sieghart of http://www.forwardthinking.org:80/described them as worthy police rookies who had just completed training in conflict resolution The Times 31 December ‘08). For approximately three days the conflict was described realistically. Hamas and its allies, after attacking Israel for eight years from Gaza, broke a six-month truce with a massive onslaught of rockets. Israel, like any democratic country, was forced to act to protect its population. Israeli strikes were aimed at Hamas command and control sites. The continued launch of rockets aimed at civilian targets deep into southern Israel was in and of itself justification for the Cast Lead operation.
Then Palestinian spokespersons—Leila Shahid in France—rushed into the media and started firing their lethal narrative Kalashnikovs. Pom pom pom pom occupation, colonization, blockade, food shortages, checkpoints, breadlines, blackouts, overburdened hospitals, shortage of medicine, collective punishment and--the jackpot—population density. “Gaza, with a population of one and a half million, is the most densely populated place on earth.” The population figures are bloated, the density is an outright lie (Gaza is 300 times bigger than the Washington Mall where a reported 2 million worshippers gathered on January 20th for the Barack Hussein Obama inauguration), but facts cannot stand up to the Palestinian suffering story.
Meanwhile, back in the Strip, Hamas got its act together: Bloodied bodies of small children, wailing women arms outspread, husky men pretending to be simple citizens, crooked statistics and cockeyed testimonials from Haniyehs’s willing UNWRA executioners cleverly described as “UN sources.” The lethal narrative covered the truth with a blanket of Israeli guilt, a totalitarian story that leaves no room for facts or common sense, no space for civilized debate. Once the all-encompassing delusion is locked in, nothing can dislodge it. Feeding on its own fuel it rises to new heights day by day. It is so predictable, one could write the news reports a week in advance. And, because the narrative replaces reality, subsequent revelations are inoperative. Hamas gunmen did fire from schools, mosques, and hospitals. They stored weapons in private homes. The population is fed up. The good doctor’s daughters were killed by Hamas weapons not Israeli gunfire… French media didn’t bother to cover any of these boring details.
International opinion, bloated on Gazan hunger and thirst, was not interested to learn that food supplies brought in daily were commandeered by Hamas while plump matrons in hijab wailed hunger and thirst. The European Union was howling for a humanitarian ceasefire, a humanitarian corridor, humanitarian open borders (from the Israeli side…the Egyptian border did not interest them) as trucks laden with aid trundled into Gaza every day. But real trucks with real supplies could not enter into the delusionary world that had replaced reality.
On the diplomatic front, President Sarkozy immediately went into European negotiation mode. Though his 6-month term as rotating EU president was over at the year’s end, he upstaged his successor, Czech president Mirek Topolanek, and grabbed a major role in the Ceasefire Diplomacy Show. Sarkozy declared the Israeli riposte “disproportionate” and proceeded to use his boundless energy in a frenzy of slapdash meetings that could have only one outcome—protect Hamas from the full force of Israeli might and fuel the relentless Israeli guilt production machine. Barack Hussein Obama conserved a lofty silence during the 3-week military campaign, allowing hope-soaked Zionists to believe he truly meant what he said about Israel’s right to self-defense.
And now, President Obama, his European friends and moderate Muslim allies, basking in their newfound complicity, are undermining Israel’s dissuasive capacity with hollow promises of a helping hand and a remake of that all-time flop—the Peace Process-- the new guilt-free way to lead Jews into the valley of death without an ounce of antisemitism.
Aided and abetted by EU peace-hawking diplomacy, Hamas, the Iranian proxy, made progress toward its stated goals of destroying of the State of Israel, killing Jews and establishing sharia in every last corner of the earth. How did Hamas fight? By hiding combatants dead or alive, displaying civilian wounds, and pumping out the lethal narrative. Instead of having the decency to thank Israeli citizens for bearing the full burden of this episode in the ongoing jihad conquest, European media and officials closed ranks behind Sarkozy the Ceasefireman and---deliberately or inadvertently-- spawned the most shameful public display of support for jihad ever witnessed in democratic nations. The pro-Palestinian demonstrations of 2000-3 were a mix of leftists, peaceniks, ecologists, and assorted do-gooders with a large contingent of jihadis. The recent marches in France were almost pure products of the Muslim Brotherhood, with a sprinkling of far left leaders and a surprisingly small contingent of black African Muslims. French media deliberately underplayed the virulence and the violence of these demonstrations, leaving the majority of the population dismally ignorant of the growing danger.
The enraged mobs that stormed through the streets of European cities and towns and, with equal virulence, in American cities as well, recall the murderous mobs that invaded Jewish neighborhoods in Arab countries in the late 40s and 50s. Today’s Jew-haters marched as conquerors, draped in keffieh, displaying Hamas, Hizbullah, and Palestinian flags, brandishing portraits of Izzedine al Qassam, shouting Death to Israel, Death to the Jews, equating the Magen David with the swastika, carrying bloodied dolls in winding sheets, burning Israeli and American flags, confident that no one would stop them.
These strikingly uniform marches must be recognized as an international show of force and an authentic conquest of territory achieved, not by fighting man to man but by provoking—and losing-- a military confrontation in Gaza. The civilian casualties are a weapon, the ruins are a weapon, and the bombed tunnels that are used to smuggle rockets into Gaza are transformed into victims of Israeli aggression. We can not understand these jihad strategies within a traditional war and peace framework. If, however, we understand that the aim is to kill Jews, to justify the killing of Jews, and to make that justification apply throughout the once free world, we will stop wasting our energy in futile attempts to prove that we—the Jews, Israel—are not evildoers.
Once the lethal narrative was locked in place, Hamas disappeared from the public mind, the rockets aimed at Israeli civilians lost their sting, and Israel was in the hot seat, accused—guess what—of killing children. The al Dura effect! Whenever an Israeli or a local Zionist appeared on a TV or radio debate in France, he was asked to explain why the IDF was killing children. The accused Zionist would open with a heartfelt expression of distress at the death of any child, every child, even a child used to shield armed men, and then explain the measures taken by Tsahal to avoid killing civilians. He might accuse Hamas of using “human shields” or regret the inevitable “collateral damage”…but could he explain how Hamas uses dead children as weapons aimed at the destruction of Israel?
How cruel! To leave Israeli soldiers with no alternative but to kill civilians, and then condemn them as heartless murderers. Could we lift that crushing burden off our shoulders and heave it at the insolent inquisitor? “Why do you keep throwing those dead children in my face? Do you really think I take pleasure in killing children? Do you think I am so stupid that I would go out of my way to kill children instead of attacking the armed men who want to kill my children? Do I kill children to endear myself with international opinion? Let me ask you something. Why don’t you convince Hamas to stop trying to kill Israeli children in Sderot, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Beersheva and beyond? Why don’t you force Hamas to stop aiming at Jewish civilians? You can’t. Because you have no influence on Hamas. Your words fall on deaf ears, your clever negotiating schemes leave them cold, your threats, if you made any, would not faze them. The only way to “convince” Hamas is by military action. That is precisely what we are doing. You do not have the courage to admit it, so you ask me why we are killing children.”
An inquisitor enclosed in the lethal narrative of Israeli guilt cannot be convinced by facts; perhaps he can be shocked back into reality? They don’t like disproportion? Give them proportions! One thousand dead in Gaza is equivalent to one dead Jew in proportion to their respective populations. Palestinian suffering? A drop in the bucket. Palestinians are a tiny minority of the world’s Muslims, the vast majority live in their own splendid countries, or enjoy equal rights in our democratic nations.
Can our nonsense neutralize their nonsense? President Sarkozy promises to punish, with equal severity, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia [sic]! He will not allow anyone to import the Mideast conflict. How so? By confiscating satellite dishes? Forbidding domestic media to report on the conflict? Do Jews who import their loyalty to Israel attack Muslims, desecrate mosques, and burn hallal butcher shops? No. If Muslims attack Jews it is not because they import the conflict but because they import Hamas’ values and methods.
French Jews can’t defend themselves. While Jews were targeted in countless attacks—at least 150 to date—the media found time to focus on an incident in front of Lycée Jeansson-Sailly in the posh 16th arrondissement. Some Muslim pupils said they were attacked by extremists from the Jewish Defense League; the JDL denies all involvement. But the two 15 year-old Jewish boys accused of beating up the Muslims were immediately detained and charged. And the case was exploited to present a false picture of equally balanced inter-communitarian strife. Mainstream media present almost no details about attacks against Jews, give no details, identify no culprits, report no jail sentences.
Expression of sincere concern for Gaza’s civilians is like blood in shark-infested waters; it excites our enemies. Today, one week after the ceasefire, accusations against Israel have reached a paroxysm. Totally unrelated to reality, they are based on the jihad narrative that casts Palestinians as Jews to Israel’s Nazis. (Islamic tradition offers boundless sources of invective against Jews[1] in The Hamas jihadis who produce these lethal narratives and feed them to Westerners know their stories of Israeli exactions and atrocities are not true. (Charles Enderlin and Talal Abu Rahma, author and producer of the al Dura blood libel, had no shame in reporting this week on the senseless destruction of Mister Hammoudi’s orchards. Why Mr. Hammoudi? Why his harmless, unarmed, civilian olive trees? Why his plump ripe oranges? Oh, by the way, the Israelis claim—but who would believe them—that rockets were launched from this site.) And Israel not their only target. The vilification of Israel also subverts Western civilization by attacking its Judaic foundations, undermining its rationality, and drawing it into collaboration in a genocidal project that will, if left unchecked, destroy the West. While the EU plays peacemaker, its Brussels headquarters--with a 1/3rd Muslim population--goes wild with virulent anti-Zionist pro-Hamas demonstrations with all political parties except the xx (cite CDI). Freedom of expression is under attack throughout Europe, Geneva is preparing to welcome the Durban II hatefest, Geert Wilders will have to stand trial in the Netherlands for exposing truths about Islam. Will the United States resist this trend, now that Obama has launched his Yes We Can Mideast Peace Plan?
It is time for the rightful owners to take back the Warsaw ghetto image stolen by pro-Hamas demonstrators. Israel, not Gaza, is the Warsaw ghetto… no less courageous but, this time, sovereign and equipped to win. Many Diaspora Jews still refuse to believe that our fate is linked to Israel’s survival. But if conditions worsen in Europe and eventually in the United States, the balance will shift, greater support will be mobilized. Israeli citizens know how to fight to defend their country. Jews and non-Jews elsewhere in the free world will have to learn how.
As long as we don’t twist ourselves into guilt-ridden knots, we can be strengthened by the prevailing hysteria. It is time to admit, once and for all, that the problem in not the lack of reliable information. Anyone in his right mind can see that Hamas is a terrorist organization dedicated to the extermination of Jews. If the military operation against Hamas is not acceptable to “international opinion” it means that Jews are not allowed to fight back ever against anyone. We can only be victims. It is up to us to prove the contrary.
[1] Salah Abd al Fattah al Khalidi. Qu’ranic Truths regarding the Palestinian Issue, London, Muslim Palestine Publications, 1994 in Bostom, Andrew, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: 447
“We have displayed above a number of despicable Jewish traits, and we have demonstrated that they are inveterate and deeply rooted in the complex Jewish consciousness, and they have instigated themselves deep in the debased Jewish personality. We have also shown that this has been the situation throughout all of Jewish history in general and it is embedded in the Jews of today. The noble Qu’ran is the sole source on which we have relied, and from which we have recorded these Jewish traits and what we have written about them is sufficient.”
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