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,” to “shift 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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