History will frown upon Hamas’s useful fools in the West
While keyboard warriors across the West pump out Hamas and Iranian propaganda, it has been clear to all who understand Israel that the terror group signed its own death warrant on October 7.
This is not about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Nor about radical Zionism. The main Israeli opposition parties support the war.
Israelis will settle for nothing less than the destruction of Hamas after it crossed into Israel on October 7 to murder innocent civilian women, children and old people on the Sabbath.
On October 14 last year, a week after Hamas’s brutal murders of 1200 people, this column said Israel – a country that swapped 1027 terror prisoners for one Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, in 2011 – would struggle with the idea of losing 250 of its people to Islamist hostage takers.
A country shaped by the Holocaust sees Israel as the only place on earth where Jews can live in their own homes in safety.
Hamas was counting on just such an Israeli reaction and has been successful in shaping world opinion against Israel by using Gazan civilians as human shields.
Israel’s critics, who imagine this is a war against Palestinian civilians, should know Israel could have flattened Gaza in a week. Hamas’s leaders have promised repeats of October 7. Nor is it just Hamas.
Check the November 5 interview on Memri TV with Khaled Barakat, a Canada-based Palestinian activist and former People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine official. He says the only solution to the Palestinian problem is the end of Israel.
“Who supports the two-state solution? Arab reactionary regimes, liberal Zionists, fascists and some delusionists,” Barakat says.
History will be kinder to the IDF and to Israel than to the many useful fools in the West who knowingly repeat the propaganda of an Islamist group with direct historical links to the Nazis through its antecedents in Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood.
David Kilcullen, this paper’s pre-eminent military analyst, on March 26 argued – as many others have – that Israel has in fact done its best to limit civilian casualties given Hamas fighters are embedded with civilians.
Yet UN Rapporteur and ABC favourite Francesca Albanese after last week’s killing of aid workers, including Australian Lalzawmi “Zomi” Frankcom, argued on social media platform X that Israel is deliberately murdering aid workers.
IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari immediately promised an independent investigation, apologised to the world and spoke directly with Spanish chef Jose Andres, founder of the aid group World Central Kitchen. Hagari expressed the IDF’s condolences to the families of the victims and to WCK.
Albanese, a UN employee, wrote: “Knowing how Israel operates, my assessment is that Israeli forces intentionally killed WCK workers so that donors would pull out & civilians in Gaza could continue to be starved quietly.” There is a word for that kind of thinking, but here Antoinette Lattouf was quick off the blocks, retweeting the Rapporteur’s libel.
By Wednesday, IDF chief of staff Herzi Halevi was profoundly sorry about the attack, which happened in darkness. He praised the courage of WCK workers.
An overwrought interview by ABC RN Breakfast fill-in host Sally Sara on Thursday showed just how hostile some journalists are to Israel. Questioning Israeli government spokesman Avi Hyman, Sara insisted Gazans were racked by famine. She would not accept that the IDF, on the ground, disputes this, nor Mr Hyman’s correct view that arguments about famine are in fact future projections.
Her next interviewee, Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International, at the end of the 17-minute segment actually confirmed the famine numbers were in fact future projections.
Israel critics who claim the aid workers were deliberately targeted seem to have missed the many references by Israel last Wednesday and Thursday to the
“millions of meals” that WCK has supplied in Gaza and Israel throughout the war. These meals were delivered without aid workers being targeted.
Sara should have known Israel prefers WCK precisely because it is not staffed by UN aid workers, some of whom Hyman pointed out were involved in the killings on October 7 and 1000 of whom are known to be Hamas members.