Submitted by Charles Knighton
The Palestinian murderers do not want to build a state, they want to destroy a state and they say it out loud. They do not murder for peace and they do not murder for human rights. Netanyahu says UN chief Ban Ki-moon encouraging terror – January 28 Advocate
We have to be honest enough to admit that more than 70 years after the Shoah, anti-Semitism is still alive in our ‘civilised’ European Union. Federica Mogherini, the European Union’s top foreign affairs representative, Holocaust victims honoured 71 years after Auschwitz liberated – January 28 Advocate
The juxtaposition of these two articles on page 17 of the Advocate’s Thursday edition certainly caught my eye. Israel’s most vehement critics, and Barbados hosts not a few, like to accuse it of Nazi-like “genocide” when it defends itself against militant Palestinians, particularly in Gaza. Now, there’s a legitimate debate about whether Israel could have caused fewer civilian deaths in defending itself against Hamas’s rocket attacks and tunnel building last year as well as its response to the recent spate of shootings and stabbings directed against Israeli civilians.
But genocide has a specific meaning, which is the deliberate, total annihilation of a people. Where do we find actual genocide in Gaza? In Hamas’s “Covenant—its statement of its sacred mission. “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it,” the Covenant states, adding, “The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews).”
When Hamas, and Hezbolla before it, fired thousands of rockets into Israeli towns and cities, its leaders MEANT to kill as many Jews as possible and failed only because of the Iron Dome defense system. If these terrorists were to acquire more-sophisticated missiles or tactical nuclear weapons, they would happily kill millions of Jews in a Second Holocaust. All critics of Israel are not anti-Semitic. But those who ignore the genocidal intent of groups like Hamas and Hezbolla and then hurl the word “genocide” at its intended victims, give themselves away.
The frequently heard rationalization/justification that blames Israel for anti-Semitism misses the point. For about 2000 years, anti-Semitism both existed and thrived when Israel did neither. The pogroms of Europe—and the occasional ones of the Muslim Middle East—took place with no Israel in sight. The Holocaust consumed 6 million Jews, and not because Hitler was pro-Palestinian. Anti-Semitism infected ancient Egypt, ancient Rome, the subtle mind of T.S. Eliot and the tinkering brain of Henry Ford way before any future Israeli had pushed around any future Palestinian. Anti-Semitism does not need a reason. It needs only an excuse.
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