by Charles Moore
Hat Tip: Dr. Carolyn Tal
It’s Hamas and Isis who are willingly sacrificing the lives of men, women and children - not Israel
'Disproportionate” is the key word deployed against Israel over Gaza. Israel is criticised because so few Israelis have died compared with the number of Palestinians. Israel is held more morally culpable because its Iron Dome anti-rocket defence system actually works. Would it be better if hundreds of Israelis had died?
It is true – and terrible – that Israel has killed many Palestinian civilians. But why has this happened? Israeli carelessness – or callousness – might not be the only factor. You might think that if a militarily inferior force (Hamas) fires rockets at its powerful neighbour (Israel), and digs tunnels so that its fighters can pop out and murder or kidnap that neighbour’s citizens, it is asking for trouble. Being a democracy, Israel won’t stand idly by when its demos – its people – are attacked.
You might also think that if that militarily inferior force attacks from densely populated areas – occupying hospitals, schools and mosques, sheltering beside hotels and hiding in people’s flats, it must actually want civilian martyrs. Certainly, if you watch Hamas propagandists on Al Jazeera, they praise women and children for sacrificing their homes, their blood and their body parts, as if this were all an intended part of the struggle. They are not challenged about how their actions put those women and children in harm’s way. Nor are the people of Gaza consulted about their fate: Hamas does not run a democracy.
The Western media do not offer much challenge either. The fiercest anti-Hamas stuff is not here, but on Egyptian television. Egypt also has a border with Gaza, and regards with dismay how Hamas exploits the Palestinians. “Our people are one thing. Hamas is another,” I saw one commentator say. “The whole world is going to hell because of you,” declared a second.
News editors think it is too complicated for our poor little Western telly-watching heads to be told that large chunks of the Muslim world – e.g. Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia – hate and fear Hamas and the dislocation, misery and death it brings. You do not have to be a huge fan of these governments to see that such feelings might be justified.
Earlier this week, newspapers carried photographs of masked, armed Isis gunmen attending the funeral of an Islamic Jihad comrade in Gaza. They could do so, obviously, only with the permission of Hamas. This same Isis (which has now extended its geographical claims by calling itself simply Islamic State) is trying to convert, expel or exterminate Christians and Yazidis in Iraq, an atrocity so appalling that even President Obama has bestirred himself to intervene.
No doubt theologians can point to significant differences between the beliefs of Hamas and Isis, but these distinctions are like those of Soviet Russia and Mao’s China in the Cold War. The main point of which the world needs to take notice is the similarity. Both the Russian and the Chinese governments were Communist – implacable enemies of the Western way of life. Both Hamas and Isis are Islamists – implacable ditto. Communist ideology preached world revolution, and Communist countries incited it through subversion. Islamist ideology and Islamist organisations, ditto.
So let me return to the word “disproportionate”. The whole range of moral obloquy is hurled at Israel. At the posh end is the decision by the Tricycle Theatre in north London to withdraw its traditional hospitality for the UK Jewish Film Festival because the festival is, as in the past, part-subsidised by Israel. The theatre says it “cannot be associated with any activity directly funded by a party to the [Gaza] conflict”. Why? How many arts organisations normally refuse subsidies from dictatorships, such as, say, China? Israel is not a dictatorship, and does not fund terrorists, yet its money is declared tainted.
Then we have Baroness Warsi resigning because the British Government’s “approach and language during the current crisis is [sic] morally indefensible”. Apparently she complained in Cabinet that Britain was nastier to Russia than to Israel, as if an Israeli proxy had shot down a non-combatant civilian aeroplane pursuing its usual permitted flight-path.
And then we go on downhill. Here is some Liberal Democrat MP saying how he’d like to fire rockets at Israel. There is Yvonne Ridley tweeting that an independent Scotland will be a “Zionist-free zone” (which reminded me of a National Front election manifesto in the 1980s which explained that “Patriotic Jews need have nothing to fear”). Right at the bottom of the range, we get attacks on synagogues and the repetition of blood libels against Jews.
One of the things discovered by Peter Clarke in his recent report on the “Trojan Horse” affair in Birmingham was that the headmaster of Park View, the main school in question, had run an online discussion group. This featured a lavatory roll with the Israeli flag on it, and postings, unchallenged by the head, claiming that the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby was a hoax.
All the above attitudes are disproportionate. They accord a privileged moral status to one side in a painfully ambiguous question, and ask no questions of their own. They are so burnt up about the supposed wickedness of Israel that they ignore infinitely greater injustices.
If you walk by St James’s Church, Piccadilly, you see a replica of the security wall which guards Israel against the West Bank, erected in protest against it. Mightn’t you expect a Christian church to cry out more loudly against Boko Haram, which burns Christian girls in churches in Nigeria, or Isis (see above) which believes that the only good Christian is an ex-Christian or a dead one, and this week is acting accordingly?
Behind such disproportion lie various bad qualities – anti-semitism among some, a hatred of the West among many, and that peculiar, self-righteous mentality which is so keen to reach the moral high ground that it rushes out of base camp without provisions, breathing apparatus or a Global Positioning System (GPS).
Lady Warsi looked at David Cameron’s policy, and did not like it. But a GPS is what his policy has. It is aware that supplying military equipment and sharing human and cyber intelligence with Israel helps defend wider interests in the Middle East – the stability of Jordan and the need to prevent Iran getting control of the world oil price. It is also aware how closely other extremists, such as Hezbollah, watch each battle with Israel for signs of Western weakness.
Even more important, the Government has some sense of the relationship between a man who fires a rocket in Gaza, a man who slaughters a Christian in Iraq, an imam who preaches hate online from the safety of Qatar, a Muslim “charity” which is actually raising money for politics and conflict, and an Islamist school governor or teacher in Birmingham, Bradford or Luton who is trying to bring up British children to detest their own country. It was to handle this problem that Mr Cameron ill-advisedly appointed Lady Warsi in the first place. He soon found she was a symptom not a cure. The only fault of his policy is the exact opposite of what she believes. It has not yet been fully, repeatedly stated, and consistently applied both here and abroad.
Charles Moore
Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/11021663/The-West-is-ignoring-the-practitioners-of-disproportionate-violence.html
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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