[JohnKassNews] We’re hearing a lot of talk these days about the rules of war. All of it is aimed at Israel. No one is calling on Hamas to follow those rules.
There’s a simple reason for that.
No one — no one — thinks Hamas will do anything other than what it always does. And what it did on Oct. 7. The music concert massacre. The murders of civilians from babies in cradles to grandmothers. The rapes. The mutilation and burning of bodies. The beheadings. The hostage-taking of civilians, including 20 children, one of them in a wheelchair. The use of Palestinians as human shields.
No one expects Hamas to obey civilization’s standard for conducting warfare. No one even thinks of calling on Hamas to do so.
But it’s a different case with the Jewish state. Israel is getting a lot of, what’s the right word — advice, guidance, cautions, veiled warnings? — whatever the word, Israel is hearing from various corners about its conduct of the war against Hamas.
Make sure to avoid civilian casualties.
Don’t do anything that would be "disproportionate."
Don’t let "rage" affect your decisions, as President Biden put it in talking about the need to adhere to the rules of civilized warfare.
Delay the ground invasion of Gaza in hopes of getting more hostages out now that four have been released, say some European nations and the U.S. government.
Others, such as the Democrat squad in the U.S. House of Representatives, aka the congressional antisemitic caucus, demand a cease-fire.
All this is coming from people who bear no responsibility for protecting the citizens of Israel.
I mean, who else is going to step up to make Hamas pay for the terrible war crimes, the pogrom of Oct. 7?
Will the International Court of Justice based at The Hague issue an indictment and send a posse of steely lawmen into the Gaza Strip to arrest the Hamas war criminals and bring them to justice?
Dream on.
Will the United Nations assemble an army, equip it and dispatch it to Gaza City to wage the unbelievably complex and dangerous mission of urban warfare necessary to bring retribution to these terrorists?
There’s a reason the UN is called the Useless Nations. Even worse, the UN secretary general tried to justify the Hamas savagery of Oct. 7
Will the European Union call up soldiers from its member nations to rout Hamas out of the Gaza Strip?
Hell, European countries can’t even handle backing the Ukraine war on their own without the spine-enforcing support of the United States.
And what about all the Arab nations that are so, so concerned about the fate of the innocent Palestinians in Gaza? Will they tell the Israelis to stand aside while their armies invade Gaza to protect civilians and capture the Hamas terrorists?
A fantasy beyond the imagination of any sane human being. This is true even though Hamas is funded, armed and advised by Shia Iran, the committed enemy of the Sunni Arab world.
No, Israel knows — as it has tragically learned time and again — that only it will step up to protect Jews, only it will fight to save Jewish lives, only it will endure the terrors of war to combat a wretched bestial organization that in its charter is dedicated to genocide and mass murder of Jews.
While Israel has assimilated the lessons of history, incredibly too many in the world have not — even after the horrors of the Holocaust.
Worse, as we have seen, in some of our most esteemed institutions like Harvard, UPenn, Columbia and other elite universities ruled by extreme left thought, in some Muslim immigrant communities resistant to Western ideas of civilized warfare and even in the halls of Congress, the cancer of antisemitism is alive and well — and metastasizing.
No one but Israel is going to fight and bleed to protect Jews.
To his credit, Biden has committed America to providing military assistance to Israel and he has dispatched U.S. naval forces to Mideast waters with the goal of preventing Iran and other bad actors from widening the genocidal war against Israel.
Some have seen weakness on Biden’s part because the leaders of Jordan, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority canceled a summit with him during his recent visit to the region. I understand that argument.
But it masks a greater, more serious, more depressing truth. These Arab leaders have never even started preparing their populations for a real, lasting peace with Israel. Now they tremble in fear that anger in their streets from people fed lies for decades about Israel will threaten their rule.
That fear was intensified to the point of canceling the summit after Hamas falsely accused Israel of bombing a Gaza hospital. It should have been no surprise that intelligence and evidence quickly revealed it was an errant Islamic Jihad missile that fell into the hospital parking lot.
The news media should be engaging in serious soul searching after so many of our prestigious newspaper, broadcast and cable news outlets accepted uncritically and published/broadcast an accusation against Israel from an organization whose fundamental, essential, core belief is that the only good Jew is a dead Jew.
That’s the neighborhood that Israel must live in.
The Jewish state needs no sanctimonious advice, smug guidance or veiled warnings about how to defend its people.
And what does proportionality actually mean in war?
Hamas fired thousands of unguided missiles into Israel with the obvious intention of killing Israeli civilians. Would it be proportionate for Israel to fire the same number of unguided missiles into Gaza?
Would it be proportionate for Israeli troops to rape Palestinian women? To target babies for murder? Mutilate and burn bodies? Capture civilians as hostages?
That would be doing exactly the same thing as Hamas did. Isn’t that the very definition of a proportional response? Do exactly the same thing and in the same numbers as Hamas did?
Tit for tat, proportionality.
| All real moral systems are based on reciprocity. Fake ones are based on (spiritual kin selection) |
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