Groundhog Day Revisited

I first used the phrase Groundhog Day with reference to the Palestinians in April 2013, in Groundhog Day In the Middle East. Having forgotten that post, I used it again last Monday in For Anti-Semitism, It’s Deja Vu All Over Again. The reference is apt. Anyone observing Hamas’s attacks on Israel, Israel’s effort to neutralize Hamas’s terrorist capabilities, and the international reaction to that effort–not, of course, to Hamas’s terrorist acts–can only feel that he has lived through these events way too many times.

Daniel Greenfield admirably captures the pitiful nature of the Leftists who turn out for anti-Israel protests on these occasions. In France, however, it is Muslims who take to the streets, and the “protests” are considerably more violent:

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Over the last two weeks, 434 Palestinians (mostly terrorists rather than human shields, one hopes) and 20 Israelis have died, according to Reuters. That makes Gaza officially more dangerous than Chicago, where 40 people were shot over the weekend. Gaza is even more dangerous, at the moment, than Air Malaysia. But not by much.

Turkey’s Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, one of Barack Obama’s five “best friends” among foreign leaders, says that Israel has “surpassed Hitler in barbarism.” If Erdogan has a similarly negative opinion of Vladimir Putin, he is keeping it to himself.

All of this is crazy, of course, and I think everyone knows it, with the possible exception of Muslims in certain backward countries like Pakistan and France. Israel, in my view, should pay zero attention to “world opinion” when world opinion is certifiably insane. Israel should do whatever it takes to reduce the terrorist threat from Gaza as thoroughly and as permanently as possible. At this point, the world needs Israel–second, perhaps, only to Silicon Valley as a center of technological innovation, and now the possessor of vast natural gas resources–a lot more than Israel needs the world.

On the other hand, the world needs ISIS not at all. And while Israel is entirely innocent of the “massacres” and “genocide” of which it is tiresomely accused, ISIS is guilty, and proudly so. In Mosul, ISIS has decreed that Christians must convert to Islam, acknowledge their status as dhimmis and pay the Jizyah tax, or be beheaded. This shouldn’t be surprising; it is nothing more than what the Koran prescribes. To their credit, Mosul’s Christians have mostly left their homes behind and fled toward Kurdish-controlled areas where they believe they will be safe.

ISIS, meanwhile, has burned down the 1,800-year-old Syriac Catholic Archdiocese in Mosul:

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In a sort of reverse Passover, ISIS activists have marked the homes of Christians with the letter N for “Nassarah,” an Islamic term for Christian, to identify the homes whose inhabitants were to be slaughtered.

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Somehow, though, events such as these don’t lead anyone to riot and start fires in Paris, Boston or anywhere else.

Evil is indeed on the march over much of the Earth. One of the few places where it is not advancing is Israel, where bloodthirsty Hamas terrorists–some of them, anyway–are getting their just deserts, sadly, but by design, taking human shields with them. That fact is so painfully obvious that I suspect all but the most rabid anti-Semites are feeling embarrassed.

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