A Rather Contemptible Ilk Who Attempt to Tie Israel’s Hands

...Running interference for a terrorist group should be beneath a supposed “human rights” group, and propagandizing against Israeli self-defense should be beneath the standards of a Western newspaper. But Israelis continue to value human life far more than their critics do.

Seth Mandel..
Commentary Magazine..
16 June '14..

For the sake of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and the politically correct fictions necessary to sustain it, several facts must be ignored: that the Palestinian side regularly initiates rounds of violence to which Israel responds; that Mahmoud Abbas is decidedly opposed to full IDF withdrawal from the West Bank, since his own security team can’t protect it from Hamas; and that the international community asks far more of Israel than of anyone else, and indeed than is reasonable.

All of them come crashing into the open the moment violence intrudes. This week’s crisis over the three New York Times paints the destabilizing act not as the Hamas-Fatah unity deal or the kidnapping, but Israel’s response. It’s especially risible since we don’t yet know the fate of the boys, and so an all-out search is both warranted and eminently reasonable. Yet here is the Times’s Jerusalem chief Jodi Rudoren:
kidnapped yeshiva students highlights the way the press treats every action as if it were in a vacuum in order to hamstring Israel’s self-defense. As such, the

The teenagers, Eyal Yifrach, 19, and Gilad Shaar and Naftali Frankel, both 16, were last heard from Thursday night as they tried to hitchhike home from Jewish settlements in the West Bank where they study in yeshivas. The growing search for them and their captors further destabilized Israeli-Palestinian relations, and challenged the new Palestinian government’s ability to hold together disparate political factions and reunite the West Bank and Gaza after a seven-year split.

What destabilized Israeli-Palestinian relations in the eyes of the Times? The search for the kidnapped boys. What challenged the Palestinian government’s unity? The search for the kidnapped boys. The way Rudoren phrases that paragraph, it’s clear she–and those who share the Times’s world view–see the events of the past week as challenges to Palestinian unity rather than the result of Palestinian unity. If the unity government can survive only by being permitted to carry out terrorism against Israel without response or consequences, it is not so much a government as a sadistic terrorist gang.

And that’s probably why the Times and their ilk don’t want to recognize this for what it is. If Hamas were behind it, supporters of the unity government would have egg on their faces, for they would have been proposing the unleashing of Hamas. But even if Hamas isn’t behind this kidnapping, the response to Israeli self-defense is still shameful.

Not that the Times is the only voice that can’t quite seem to confront the reality of the situation. Here are two tweets from the last several days from Kenneth Roth, the director of Human Rights Watch. I thought the contrast was particularly disturbing. First on ISIS, the terrorist army on the march toward Baghdad:


ISIS in #Iraq reportedly tried not to alienate local population, unlike PM Maliki & his violent, sectarian repression http://trib.al/LqfFrjZ

That kind of moral equivalence should offer a preview of how Roth reacted to the kidnapping of Jewish boys:

Attending school at illegal settlement doesn’t legitimize apparent kidnapping of #Israel teens. They should be freed http://trib.al/lBrgfoF

Amazing, no? Roth has to begin his call to release kidnapped teens with an implicit condemnation of where they go to school (hint: in a town Roth believes should be Jew-free). The director of a group called Human Rights Watch has a pretty strange idea of who is entitled to which human rights and why. His first words about the boys are that they shouldn’t have been where they were in the first place. One wonders what other victims Roth would talk about this way.

What Roth and the Times seek is to tie Israel’s hands. Thus the Israeli response–to search for the kidnapped boys–is deemed a threat to Palestinian stability. It is never asked, apparently, what kind of stability it is that features the kidnapping of innocents, or why Israel should be obliged to help prop up such a government by abandoning its citizens to the terrorists.

Running interference for a terrorist group should be beneath a supposed “human rights” group, and propagandizing against Israeli self-defense should be beneath the standards of a Western newspaper. But Israelis continue to value human life far more than their critics do.

Link: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2014/06/16/a-disgraceful-attempt-to-tie-israels-hands/

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