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Fuck Islamic Jihad.(Fatima Shbair/Getty Images)
Once the sirens start wailing, we have 90 seconds to make it to the bomb shelter in the public park 500 yards behind the house. If the boys are asleep in bed, that means we have 90 seconds to get them up, ignoring their protests, and carry them up the road and into the safety of a concrete shelter.
When we arrived last week, we considered a rehearsal, making it into a game. How many times have parents tried to shield their children from the full reality of war by turning it into a game? As the rockets begin their downward trajectory, falling God knows where, we would be somewhere underneath singing “run rabbit, run rabbit, run, run, run”.
And what have we forgotten? Blankets, Ventolin, Lego Spiderman? No, forget everything. When the sirens go, you just run. Or choose to stay in bed and console yourself with the statistical improbability of a hit, or cower in the corridor and hope for the best. But cowering in the corridor was not the reason the boys have their Israeli passports. Jews hiding in the house from those who would murder them is too freighted with memory. No, we will let the boys sleep even if the sirens sound. Fuck Islamic Jihad.
“But what about…?” Here it comes. Even the people who mean well can’t help but qualify their sympathy with reference to the children of those firing the rockets. Of course, I inwardly weep for the children of Gaza who have been killed in this latest exchange. But I also feel little but contempt for those who want me to accept this acknowledgment as a condition of their concern. It is estimated that in the last few days, more of Gaza’s children have been killed by the clowns of Islamic Jihad and their misfiring rockets than by Israeli action. Israel has the Iron Dome, the fantastically successful anti-missile system that meant 96% of rockets from Gaza were shot down before they reached their intended target. A home was hit in Sderot, a wall damaged in Netanya. But beyond minor injuries, no Israelis were hurt. The Iranians, who fund Palestinian Islamic Jihad, do not get a lot for their money.
But still, Islamic Jihad has never been interested in peace. Founded in the Eighties, they seek the violent eradication of Israel, insisting on “the jihad solution and the martydom style as the only choice for liberation”. Their modus operandi is to deliberately target civilians rather than military targets — on public buses, in restaurants. Islamic Jihad exists to kill Jews. And Israel, which exists to protect Jews, has absolutely every moral right to defend itself against them.
Attacking their leadership — the people planning to kill Jews — is what protecting Jews means in practice. But in practice, it also involves complex moral judgments of the sort Islamic Jihad would never dream of making. Yes, targeting murderous antisemites who hide out in heavily built-up areas inevitably involves risks to the civilian population. And I believe the Israelis do their best to avoid these because it is absolutely not in their interest to kill Palestinian civilians and stir up more hatred against them.
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SubscribeThe Israelis did not “lay waste to much of” Gaza. There were no bombing of entire streets. There were precision strikes on specific targets, and extreme care was taken to minimize collateral damage; and if you choose to believe your News providers’ depictions of the one damaged building which cuts out the unharmed surrounding, then you are naive. Or worse.
Clearly, they were not very precise precision strikes. Like everyone else with the technology to avoid such “collateral damage”, from time to time they inflict it anyway, as a show of strength. Netanyahu is still breathing down this Government’s neck, so it had a point to make. But there is nothing singularly Israeli about this. Still, it has been the Israelis who have done it this time.
The only “clear” thing is that a notorious internet crank has re-emerged, thinking that his long history has been forgotten.
http://hurryupharry.net/2009/12/14/hubris-and-nemesis/
And more recently
https://antisemitism.org/corbyn-supporter-david-lindsay-threatens-violence-against-ehrcs-staff-and-caas-team-following-decision-to-investigate-labour-over-antisemitism/
Thank you for this superb article, full of heartfelt passion in the desire to tell the truth. I must however take issue with your comment about Meah Shearim and the Palestinian flag. Stylistically it is clever to compare to the flag at Pride, but it is simply not true. The Neturei Karta are a miniscule group of outsiders bent on outrage, they do not reflect the beliefs of the overwhelming majority of Chareidi Jews. If you go to Meah Shearim (as I have done many times) you will have to search long and hard to find a Palestinian flag. And if you do, it’s display will be for the same purpose as an American teen in the Bible Belt will put up a Black Sabbath poster, to prod and provoke a response.
just imagine if the Palestinians had been smarter over the past 70 years and had merely rorted the hard working and brilliant israelis – they would by now be living in the lap of luxury…….silly buggers!!
Aren’t they the same people? Who happen to read and believe different Books?
exactly….silly buggers
Complete and utter garbage.
If it were not for the Israelis then Gaza would not have any power at all. Neither is there a blockade.The border checkpoints have tons of goods passng over every day.
Gaza is far from an open-air prison. It receives boatloads of money from The West and Arab allies – maybe its leaders should spend it on infrastructure rather than missiles and tunnels form which to attack Israel. Should they do this then there would be no Israeli aircraft flying over the territory.
Better yet, negotiate a sincere peace with Israel so it’s people can find some peace and prosperity. But no, folks like the above like to keep the pot boiling. Their concern for the people of Gaza is quite touching.
May I just add to that? When Israel left Gaza to the Palestinians, it left them infrastructure to create businesses. It supplied electricity and water, and indeed, hospitals (Gaza’s infant mortality under Israeli jurisdiction had been significantly reduced.
Instead, the Palestinian leaders reciprocated by sending over rockets against Israeli civilians living alongside the borders. Hundreds of millions poured (and continue to pour) into Gaza to improve living conditions, but their feckless leaders chose Jihad instead.
Israel got harder on the supply of electricity to Gaza because there’d been an agreement that they would pay for the power supply, but they didn’t. Being professional “victims” they know how to cry about their “plight” but can’t even dream about adhering to their side of the bargain.
I don’t understand the political and religious intricacies, but Israel is a great country, a beacon of civilised democracy surrounded by medievalism. One of the things that most fascinated me, when I was there in 2002, was the number of people queuing to get in at every border checkpoint. I’d always imagined they were surrounded by enemies, but no, people want to live, and work and share in prosperity.
And therein lies the true basis of the most protracted stalemate .. if only Western media would follow a similar path, to report the true failure of Palestinian leadership which has caused to much suffering for it’s own people, fuelled ‘today’ by Iran.
I sometimes ask the fervid Palestinian supporters usually of the left where the gay bar in Gaza is. It somehow contradicts their other stances on trans rights and abortion rights to be vocal supporters of Hamas.
Would someone be good enough to explain who exactly, are “Islamic Jihad” here? If they are not Hamas, then who are they? The ideology is the same, how about the actual agents?
You have to think of Hamas as the People’s Republic of Judea, and Islamic Jihad as the Judean People’s Republic. That gives you an idea of the difference.
Hamas is the organization that has a civic and a military (terrorist) wing, that fought a civil war with Fatah and seized control of Gaza and has the strategic military intention of destroying Israel. They are the de facto government of the Gaza Strip. Palestinian Islamic Jihad is an Iranian-funded terrorist organization, primarily in Gaza. Both organizations are working to develop a presence in the territories governed by the Palestinian Authority (the West Bank or Judaea & Samaria, depending on whose nomenclature you’re using). They also exist to destroy Israel, but do not have administrative responsibility for the Gazan civilians. They’re strictly terrorists. PIJ is more extreme than Hamas, but Hamas is hardly moderate as a terrorist organization.
What does the author intend by making the distinction, then?
I guess Israel can negotiate with Hamas, but not with IJ?
It’s not directly, but usually done through Egypt, considering that the Gaza Strip was previously part of Egypt (until 1967) and most of the people livng there today were of Egyptian or Saudi origin. Egypt cooperates with Israel because the Egyptian government is against the Muslim Brotherhood. That’s because the MB want to take power in Egypt. This is a very complex situation, with no simple solutions.
“And who do we hate more than the Romans?” “The Judean People’s Republic!”*
(For purists: The Judean People’s Front.)
They are two separate groups, both offshoots of the Muslim Brotherhood and both committed to Jihad. From what I understand the difference between them is that Hamas understands the word “pragmatism” (which is why they stayed out of the present round) whereas Islamic Jihad reckon that makes them softies. When you are on the receiving end of their murderous violence, it indeed makes little difference.
For more details you can look at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Jihad_Movement_in_Palestine
Hamas is actually an offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Islamic Jihad gets most of its backing from Iran. Fear not, as was the case with the PLO (PA – Palestinian Authority), chased out of Gaza (or murdered) by Hamas, it can’t take too long before the IJ and Hamas are battling it out for supremacy in the region.
Perhaps you should study Nancy Pelosi’s voting record on this interesting subject?
Its a truism of human nature that people of one ilk never like being lorded over by another, no matter how benevolent the overseers imagine themselves to be. The Romans were pretty decent colonial administrators by classical standards, but even so, Jewish zealots, the Sicarii, would randomly stab Roman soldiers, or even Jews they considered excessively pro-Roman, before dropping the knife and melting back into the panicked crowds. Eventually the Romans cornered the Zealots on a hilltop fort called Masada whereupon they all collectively necked themselves, Jim Jones style, the mothers taking a knife to the throats of their children. Even today, Israeli officers receive their stripes on the same hill in solemn commemoration of their sacrifice, conclusively proving the adage that one man’s terrorist is another one’s freedom fighter.
Of course, if you wanted additional and more contemporary proof of that same sentiment, simply consider the Israeli prime minister that gave orders to assassinate a UN peace mediator, or to lynch British soldiers who were doing their level best to tamp down on the sectarian violence in 1940s Palestine. One man’s terrorist…
Where was I? Oh yes, the article. Even having regard to the author’s background as a clergyman, its a bit of a church service, isn’t it? To take one example, most serious analyses of the Iron Dome system put its efficacy at no better than 60%, and thats against the home made Palestinian rockets. I note that Zelensky’s offer to test it against the Russian arsenal seems to have been politely declined.
My grandfather was an old colonial of the East India variety. He made the point that the British never just fled their former colonies without at least making some sincere endeavour to leave functioning institutions in their wake. With the singular exception being the Palestinians, who were cast to the wind and effectively left to do penance for the sins of Europeans. One can hardly blame the Jews for brutalising them. They had just been decimated themselves and had neither the inclination nor the luxury to be magnanimous. Still, its a serious blot against the English copybook. For what its worth, as an Anglo, I offer my apologies. It was bad form.
The Americans managed to take out Ayman al-Zawahiri without laying waste to much of Kabul, and Israel has the most sophisticated military technology in the world. Thus equipped, it has no need to take out a terrorist commander by bombing his entire street and killing his neighbours’ children. At the last count, Israeli bombardment has killed 16 children in Gaza in the last week. They have been killed as a matter of political choice. This is about showing that the present Government is as “tough” or “hard” as Benjamin Netanyahu.
And of course you know this from your personal knowledge, yes? And Kabul is equivalent to Gaza, of course.
Google ‘David Lindsay blogger jailed for online harassment’. He was well known on the British political site, Guido Fawkes.
The closest Lindsay’s been to Gaza is being consensual with a Pally when he dropped the soap in the cell-block shower
ASD
a real t**d Gloria.
Isn’t ASD an abbreviation for autism? If so, “one should never mock the afflicted”.
I have an awful feeling that your name really is Charles Stanhope, a charming country town right here in the North West Durham constituency. You are one of those people who support the most hardline Israelis against others who are even worse by being brown and mostly Muslim, with the rest of them mostly adhering to forms of Christianity of which you disapproved. But you remain WASP anti-Semites to the core. You think that the place for Jews is Israel, not Britain, and that they control Medicine in general and Psychiatry in particular, such that you can use them to medicate forcibly those who might have the temerity to disagree with you politically.
That reads rather like, “My cousin the psychiatrist will commit you.” One would not want to feed into tropes, would one?
Here’s the scorecard
https://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2022/08/updated-database-of-gazans-killed-in.html
And here’s what the Gazans have done after the fight
https://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2022/08/after-fighting-gazans-go-right-back-to.html
The Americans managed to take out Ayman al-Zawahiri without laying waste to much of Kabul, and the Israelis could have taken out the leadership of Islamic Jihad without killing 15 children. This is about showing that the present Government is as “tough” or “hard” as Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel has the most sophisticated military technology in the world. Thus equipped, it has no need to take out a terrorist commander by bombing his entire street and killing his neighbours’ children. They have been killed as a matter of political choice.Make what you will of the Israeli ceasefire, but it is a humiliation for Liz Truss. The Foreign Secretary has been parroting the line of Tzipi Hotovely, who is so close to Truss that she, the Ambassador of a foreign state, appears 28 seconds into Truss’s campaign video for the Leadership of the Conservative Party, and thus for the office of Prime Minister, as an example of “core Conservative principles”.And who is Hotovely? It is no wonder that her appointment as the Israeli Ambassador to the United Kingdom was opposed by Melanie Phillips. Hotovely is linked to the church-burning anti-miscegenation activists of Lehava. She wants Israel to expand into Jordan and Syria. She denies that the Palestinians exist at all, yet somehow she wants their homes to be demolished. In 2017, she attacked American Jews in classically anti-Semitic terms as, “People that never send their children to fight for their country, most of the Jews don’t have children serving as soldiers, going to the Marines, going to Afghanistan, or to Iraq.” In 2019, she put out a video of Israel’s Jewish critics exclaiming, “Oy vey! My German euros!”Last May, she addressed a London rally that called for Arab villages to be burned. That was a meeting of supporters of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, whom in 1981 the Thatcher Government had had the courage to ban from entering the United Kingdom. That ban remained in place until his assassination in his native New York in 1990. Although Otzma Yehudit has links to them, both Kach, the party that Kahane founded, and Kahane Chai, originally a breakaway but with little in the way of division from it these days, remain illegal in Israel because they are terrorists organisations. In Britain, however, their rallies are addressed by an Israeli Ambassador whom the next Conservative Prime Minister hails as an embodiment of “core Conservative principles”.Meanwhile, the Shadow Foreign Secretary is apparently someone called David Lammy, who has said absolutely nothing about the latest Israeli bombardment of Gaza, which in this age of precision bombing has killed 15 children in order to make the point that it can. In Hotovely’s presence last November, Keir Starmer made the most racist speech to have been delivered since the War by anyone with the remotest claim to have been considered a mainstream British politician, including Enoch Powell. The choice of guest of honour to hear it also made it clear who was the terrorist sympathiser. Yet now, and whatever practical value it may or may not turn out to have, there is at least nominally a ceasefire. To have called for that would not only have been against Lammy’s and Starmer’s Kahanist principles, but it would also have been a breach of the IHRA Definition that Jeremy Corbyn was foolish enough to bow down and adopt. Of course, those two facts are inseparable. As a churchgoing product of miscegenation, I would cheerfully go back to prison rather than sign that Definition. I would sooner die than make such a subscription.
Your claim that Israel wilfully killed children in Gaza is a disgraceful lie. Israel now says that at least 12 of the 15 children were killed by PIJ’s own rockets falling short. Associated Press says its own reporting confirmed Israel’s assessment that close to one-third of the Palestinians who died last weekend may have been killed by errant PIJ rockets. As Giles writes, more innocent people in Gaza were killed last weekend by failed PIJ rockets than by Israeli airstrikes. Read the actual facts here and here.
He’s a well known nutter and jew-hater. He staled Steven Daisley and was sent down. The lunatic is still babbling away Melanie – ignore him
https://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/19262308.blogger-jailed-repeated-online-harassment/
I have never heard of Steven Daisley and I don’t know what staling is. Without any solicitation on my part, I was fast-tracked for very early release on the day that the right-wing Labour machine that had banged me up lost control of Durham County Council for the first time in 100 years. I had to do three months for the sake of form, but the letter came under my cell door that day, less than a fortnight after I had been given 12 months. The whole thing is a standing joke up here, and involves the same individuals who let Keir Starmer off over his lockdown-busting.
What of Lindsay’s claim that you opposed the appointment of Tzipi*Hotovely?
(* My predicted text gremlin didn’t like that!)
I am assuming that that is not the real Melanie Phillips, but the real one certainly did. A lot of people did.
Thank you, rather naive of me to think the ‘real thing’ would contribute to UnHerd I suppose.
I am nothing if not taken aback that she might have taken to replying to little old me. I agree with her about rather a lot, as it goes. Including the unacceptablity of Tzipi Hotovely.
I’ve always thought of her as a bit of a ‘Wolf in Sheep’s clothing’. The name for starters, redolent of the Shires,Spaniels, Pony Club, and the English Rose but quite patently not!
I don’t know, I associate conservatism, pluck, courage and decency with all those things and I think Melanie Phillips has such qualities in spades.
They would say that, wouldn’t they?
and the nutter/convict is still at it
https://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/19262308.blogger-jailed-repeated-online-harassment/
That’s a long and fairly tedious way of saying that the verifiable evidence fails to support your preconceived, amoral philosophy.
ah, about the Americans being able to use drone strikes without “collateral damage”: have you forgotten about the US drone strike that took out a family, including seven children? Oops.
From CNN when it happened almost a year ago, in case one has an aversion to Fox: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/08/29/asia/afghanistan-kabul-evacuation-intl/index.html
They managed to make their last point without any of this. They do it from time to time to prove that they can. As in this case.
The verbal diarrhea on display here is a terrific illustration of the obsessive lunacy that is David Lindsay’s trademark.
It was in paragraphs when I posted it. I do not know what happened. Anyway, you are clearly not the target audience. I can see and hear you now, indistinguishable from your horse. You like Israel. But you don’t like Jews.
Brian Goldfarb
David Lindsay has clearly no knowledge of the international law on defence when a sovereign nation is attacked. It boils down to the attacked nation having the right, in law, to retaliate in sufficient strength to stop the aggressor in their tracks.
The law makes no comment on a bullet for a bullet, a rocket for a rocket or a shell for a shell. It does stress the right to respond in sufficient force, etc.
Further, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah and any other similar organisations always stress martyrdom for the cause. Indeed, they deride the Israeli desire to save the lives of their civilian citizens (Israelis, Jews, Moslems, Christians) as well as those of their combatants. Where successful, this allow them to fight to defend their fellows another day. Once martyred, there’s no chance of that happening.
And any genuinely neutral observers of the latest round acknowledge that the Gaza children were certainly killed by Islamic Jihad rockets falling short within Gaza. Further, there is at least one recording on file from the latest round of an Israeli observer (presumably either a pilot or the controller of a camera carrying drone) calling of a strike because children could be seen playing in the open in the target area: and the strike was called off.