Sunday, August 3, 2014

The Middle East on Fire, Again


On Friday August 1st, in a full-page ad in the print edition of the Washington Post, Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Laureate Elie Wiesel directed a plea to Hamas, imploring it to reject what he termed the practice of “child sacrifice,” Hamas’s alleged military tactic of using children as human shields in its war against the State of Israel.

With the clarity of a survivor of WWII’s Nazi genocide, Wiesel stated that “what we are suffering through today is not a battle of Jew versus Arab, of Israeli versus Palestinian,” but that “it is a battle between those who celebrate life and those who champion death . . . . a battle of civilization versus barbarism.”

No matter how many fractured assumptions and conclusions are presented to challenge Wiesel’s assertions, the entirety of his essay should be carefully assessed by all responsible leaders in the West, as well as by clear-thinking power brokers of the Middle East.

In his entreaty to the world, Wiesel called on “moderate men and women of faith, whether that faith is in God or man,” toshift their criticism from the Israeli soldiers – whose terrible choice is to fire and risk harming human shields, or hold their fire and risk the death of their loved ones – to the terrorists who have taken away all choice from the Palestinian children of Gaza.”

Israel has had few supporters in its efforts to repel rocket attacks on its civilian population by Hamas, a group formally designated by the U.S. Department of State on October 8, 1997, as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.

Similarly, Israel has not garnered much backing in the West in its efforts to destroy the network of reinforced tunnels dug in Gaza by Hamas for the purpose of infiltrating Israel.

As a result of this tepid backing, America stood alone on July 24th  when, in a lopsided voting result of 29 to 1,  U.S. Representative to the United Nations Samantha Power cast the solitary “no” to a hypocritical UN ‘Human Rights’ Council resolution to investigate Israel’s “war crimes.”

Afraid to be on the record as decrying the actions of Hamas which precipitated this conflict with its rocket attacks on the civilian population of Israel, some of our putative allies in the West and in the Middle East simply abstained from voting.
 
Kuwait and Saudi Arabia – nations whose butts we pulled out of the fire in the First Gulf War – voted against the State of Israel.

Do you know who your friends are? 

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