The Jewish New Year on September 24th could have been Israel's 9/11

“Hamas uses the Palestinian population as human shields. Hamas’s strategy is to intensify the suffering of Gazans, based on the belief that Israel is to be blamed.” Israeli official quoted in the Daily Telegraph

AN INTERESTING PIECE written by Con Coughlin in today's Daily Telegraph [1] suggests that Hamas was planning an attack on Israel settlements next month to capture as many Israeli civilians as they could and returning them through their system of tunnels back into Gaza.

            

            The date for the attack was to have been September 24, the Jewish New Year. The information was gathered by Israeli intelligence from those Hamas fighters it captured during its incursion into Gaza. Whether this story will make any headlines on the various UK news channels… I very much doubt. By any standards of objectivity the BBC, Sky, and Channel Four's coverage has been an absolute disgrace. No wonder the BBC refuses to release the Balen Report into the corporation's coverage of Israel…even to the extent of spending hundreds of thousands of viewers tax pounds on lawyers to help them bury it.

            

            Also in Mr Coughlin's piece he gives an insight into Hama's tunnels and the threat they presented to Israel: "… when you examine the impressive scale of the network of tunnels, the location and the equipment stored in them, it is hard not to sympathise with Israel. For, far from being a conduit for smuggling bags of rice and medical supplies to needy Palestinians, it is clear that they have been constructed with a far more sinister purpose in mind."

            

            Mr Coughlin reports an Israeli officer comparing the system of tunnels baring a favourable comparison to the London Underground; some of them large enough to drive lorries through, and many of them extending beyond the Gazan border into Israel.

            

            In a Hamas manual recovered by the IDF on urban warfare; the manual, to quote Mr Coughlin, "extols the benefits of civilian deaths, arguing that 'the destruction of civilian homes increases the hatred of the citizens[2] towards the attackers'."

I HAVE NO DOUBT that (presumably) Mossad gathered the information about the September 24^th attack, and therefore it will be dismissed by Hamas as being solicited under torture and therefore valueless…and the Western media will be in sympathy with Hamas's judgement, as they always seem to be.

            

            It makes me wonder what the latest crop of journalists were taught at our universities; many of whom have banned Israeli academics from speaking or debating on their resentful and ever more bigoted academic premises. We have to ask. Do any, or many television journalists have an inbuilt prejudice, gleaned while at a liberal university, toward Israel?

            

            One up and coming young journalist that Sky News sent into Gaza for the first two weeks of the conflict was a young lady called Sharene Tadros. This hyperactive and ambitious young journalist, ambulance chased all over Gaza in those first two weeks looking for bruised, bloodied, and dead children with little regard for journalistic impartiality. She was like a demented train spotter, but seeking suffering instead of steam. Her displays became almost pornographic.

            

            The more she could pin on the Israeli's the better. Only a cursory reference to Hamas pouring some 3,000 rockets into Israel passed her lips - a feeble attempt at impartiality? Her behaviour reminded me of that episode from Drop the Dead Donkey where a grim-faced television journalist stood before a pile of rubble buried under which were meant to be children; and to prove the point he had planted a teddy bear on top of the rubble, and the camera focused in on it as a final image to his piece.

           

             Gaza as far as UK television reporting is concerned emulates satire such as we saw in Drop the Dead Donkey. It is as if journalists from the various broadcasters were competing for an award…a BAFTA maybe? It is true that the media gain great kudos from such trinkets to boast about among their competitors. And perhaps this has allowed editors and producers of our 24-hour news service to create a kind of gold standard of suffering; of the type Ms Tadros was attempting to deliver, while ignoring in the process the journalists personal antipathies; which I believe Ms Tandros has by the bucket full regarding Israel.

HAMAS ARE leading the 24 hour UK news media by their collective nose. But those journalists working for the media seem to be the willing propagandists in the Palestinian cause; which is the very negation of the impartial values they signed up to when they joined the profession, and especially when they are sent forth to report on foreign soil.

            

            Hamas has brought its own people on the Gaza Strip to this sorry mess. How can you blame the Israelis' for defending themselves? But as far as the UK 24-hour media news is concerned… you can.

            

            The UK liberal media blames the Israelis for Iron Dome, and by doing so making it an unequal contest. If those 3,000 missiles sent from Gaza had not been intercepted, and untold hundreds or even thousands of Israelis had been killed by them; then the incursion would have been justified …this is liberal proportionality at work.

            

            This word proportionality, when related to a nation trying to defend itself from another that seeks to destroy it, is a contemptible concept but one which is being used by the liberalarti in all of the main political parties within the UK and the West generally.

            

             Israel is the one democratic nation fully prepared to protect its nationhood. It rightly refuses to bow to its Hamas nemeses, uninterested in any kind of a two-state solution, only in the herding of Jewish back into the Diaspora. Unlike the UK, which is all too willing to abandon its sovereignty and nationhood, to be part of a kind of Hitlerian or Napoleonic Greater Europe, the Israeli's prefer to hold on to their homeland, and not sell it cheaply, as we are prepared to do in the UK. The Jewish state will not go quietly into that last goodnight, as they did during the Holocaust. After 2,000 years of being kicked, and unable to kick back; they are now doing so - and they deserve all the support they can get

           

           

           

             

           

           

           

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[1] The paper which has, up to now, provided the fairest coverage of the Gaza crises.

[2] Not only the hatred if the citizens, but the Western media. A fact that Hamas may add as an amendment  to the next edition.

Warsi has finally played her hand

BARONESS WARSI has resigned from the government over her government's position on the ongoing crises in Gaza; describing it as 'morally indefensible'. She has also said she supports the government on the economy but when it comes to foreign policy, she is a Muslim (which begs many questions).

            

           I believe I am a moral person. I am 64, and of an age where I was taught right from wrong by my parents. My morality is pretty unsophisticated having never been to university to study the Greats. As far as moral philosophy is concerned, I tucked into the Penguin classics in the 1970s, and what little I understand of philosophy was self-taught, and probably, as a result, I absorbed a lot of inaccuracies in my understanding. Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy was a task, but an enjoyable one to complete, although, to be fair, moral philosophy seemed far more complicated than most everyday circumstance require.

            

            For instance, Baroness Warsi accuses her party leader's approach to what is happening in Gaza as morally indefensible: implying that the prime minister himself was in some way immoral for the stand he made – it may have been cowardly regarding his limited support for Israel, but it was not in any way immoral.

            

            While the Western media rampaged throughout Gaza once the Israelis were forced into a ground incursion, the media images of suffering became almost pornographic; and you began to question the motives of the journalists infestation of Gaza. If anyone has had a damoclean sword of immorality hovering above their heads, then it the Western media have – as they always have whenever Israel take any responsive action against Hamas.

            

             It has for instance, taken an Indian television crew, to capture the first footage of Hamas preparing and launching rockets in a heavily populated part of Gaza – download this   https onto your browser to watch the footage: ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_fP6mlNSK8

           

            But back to the baroness's resignation. It is being reported that the lower echelons of the Foreign Office support her in her decision. I believe that this report is being disingenuous to the rest of the Foreign Office. The higher-ups, the higher echelons, and the diplomatic grandees; have always been Arabist in outlook and anti-Semitic by prejudice, as have been large parts the British establishment for centuries leading up to the Second World War.

            

            Warsi may, in the coming days, add to her Twitter announcement and expand upon what she considers to be the immoral act by her prime minister. The Baroness is herself a Muslim of Pakistani origin, and being an important (establishment wise) figure will be praised to the rafters for what she considers to be her moral position.

            

             I do not wish to go into the history of this conflict. But just into the events of this current fracas leading to such a tragic loss of Palestinian civilians, as opposed to their terrorist  overseers on the Gaza strip.

HAMAS HAD UNLEASHED hundreds of rockets into Israel, before Israel was drawn into its response. It seemed as if Hamas were deliberately taunting Israel into making such a response, and using their own people as human shields. Israel understood this, and only responded after three young Israeli men were taken and killed in such a brutal way by Hamas, or Hamas supporters. There then followed a revenge attack upon some Palestinian youths who shared the same brutal fate with what they would have considered to be their enemies.

            

            Israel caught and arrested those murderers who killed those Palestinians. But as we know, one thing led to another. After the deaths of the Palestinians, Hamas stepped up its rocket attacks on Israel. This led Israel with no option but to responded. It called up its reservists and waited. Israel, because of the grip Hamas has over the Western media and its concerns for its own servicemen and women, were reluctant to launch a ground incursion. But the greater punch now being delivered from Hamas's rockets, and incursions into Israel by Hamas through their tunnels forced Israel's hand; and they went into Gaza.

            

             Has this scenario been part of Baroness Warsi's decision to resign? Did she use this scenario in her calculations when resigning? She probably did, using what the Left refer to as  'disproportionate' response by the Israeli's as an excuse, for it is all it was. Proportionality is a barren argument to follow through with when a nation is being attacked. The nation being attacked uses all the power it has at its convenience to deter or destroy its enemy - proportional responses have no part whatsoever to play. When your nation is set upon, you do what is needed to continue its survival – this is the true meaning of being morally defensible

            

             I mentioned above that I am 64 years-old. You may ask what relevance this has. Well I will tell you. In the Second World War, any suggestion of  proportionality between combatants would leave the respondents to such a suggestion scratching their heads.

            

             Disproportionality ruled. It ruled when Nazi Germany through, its Blitzkrieg helped carve up Europe and bring it into the Greater German fold. Cities were bombed by the Nazis as far back as 1937 when Germany 'disproportionately' bombed Guernica. It happened in France, Holland, Poland, and Czechoslovakia.

           

             Churchill would have feigned incredulity, in a comic sense, if we were told that we had to respond proportionally to the advancement of Nazism throughout Europe.

PROPORTIONALITY has no place in war; especially when a nation is fighting for its survival - as is Israel. It is Baroness Warsi who has to question her actions, not David Cameron. Israel has continued to do what she has always done to keep the Jewish homeland safe, and it will continue. The Jews are going nowhere. For 2,000 they were kicked from pillar to post wherever they settled within the Diaspora, and without the ability to kick back. A Jewish homeland gave them that ability; and if they end up fighting their aggressors with nothing more than bows and arrows, they will still stand fast as a people.

BARONESS WARSI said that when it comes to foreign policy, she is a Muslim. So if at some time in the future, she prefers her loyalty to her religion above her British citizenship; what happens when Islamism threatens the UK? The baroness would probably say that she is as much against Islamism as any UK citizen.

            

            If so, what does she think Hamas is, if not Islamist? Hamas is an Islamist terrorist organisation recognised as such by the UN, EU, and America. Hamas are Muslims. Hamas wishes to see the extermination of Israeli Jewry; and if they had it within their power, all Jews throughout the world as the Nazis once thought they had.

            

            Cameron has nothing to apologise for regarding Warsi's resignation. Warsi will no doubt be lorded by the liberal media establishment for her courageous and self-sacrificing 'moral' stand, and in doing so will hope to embarrass David Cameron. She will, in the coming days, no doubt, be invited to perform on the media; a media inducted into multiculturalism, and already receptive to an anti-Israeli bias; which the good baroness will be eager to subscribe to.

            

             It is not the Palestinian people of Gaza, or the Israelis that are responsible for the distressing position the Gazan civilians find themselves in. It is Hamas and only Hamas that bares the full responsibility for the current state of its people in Gaza. There are to be no ifs or buts…only Hamas is to blame for their peoples suffering in Gaza. All Israel did was to try and keep her people safe, as she has always done- and will do in future …Israel is going nowhere.

           

           

             

           

           

                       

Israel undermined, by Obama and Kerry

NEITHER PRESIDENT OBAMA or his Secretary of State, John Kerry have any particular love for Israel or its prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It is sad that at this moment in history of the United States, that there is such a pair governing their nation and managing the free world.

            

            Both Obama and Kerry have made off the cuff remarks about Israel and its prime minister; the comments were made off camera showing their personal rather than public attitude toward Israel and its prime minister.

           

            A piece written in the Wall Street Journal and reported in Israel Hayom[1]; reflects a growing consensus among many in the West: "Since coming to office, Obama administration policy toward Israel has alternated between animus and incompetence," The Wall Street Journal said. "No wonder the Israelis are upset. It's one thing to hear from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that he wants to wipe you off the map: At least it has the ring of honesty. It's quite another to hear from President Obama that he has your back, even as his administration tries to sell to the public a make-believe world in which Iran's nuclear intentions are potentially peaceful, sanctions are working and diplomacy hasn't failed after three and half years."         

            

            It was Kerry, who in April of this year, opined that Israel was becoming an apartheid state, thus trumpeting the familiar liberal mantra. He was urged by House Majority Leader, Eric Cantor, to apologise to Israel; while Republican Senator Ted Cruz called for his resignation .

            

            By the end of the day Kerry was forced into an apology[2]: "I have been around long enough to also know the power of words to create a misimpression, even when unintentional, and if I could rewind the tape, I would have chosen a different word to describe my firm belief that the only way in the long term to have a Jewish state and two nations and two peoples living side by side in peace and security is through a two state solution.” You can find other such instances of such overwhelming support for that state of Israel, by these two on-line. The circumstantial evidence for them being pro-Palestine is overwhelming.

            

             Both president and secretary of state are liberals, and if there were an extreme variant of this timid beast, they would both fit into it. After leaving the navy in 1970, Kerry took to the streets with members of the anti-Vietnam war movement, and he typified that 60's generation of naive idealists; that to this day still harbour the same naivety within their breasts.

BUT LET US PAUSE FOR MOMENT. Let us put Obama's hostility to Israel to one side. Because Obama has also proved his own inherent liberal feebleness to act in another area of crucial foreign policy for the West.

            When Assad of Syria was said to have been using chemical weapons against his citizens; Obama said if this proved to be true then Assad would have crossed a red-line and he would act. In the end it was crossed and Obama twisted and turned from belligerency in the morning to capitulation by the evening - as I wrote at the time in 2013: "President Obama blinked last week; while Assad smiled. The 'Great Satan' was merely a paper tiger[3] after all. If Obama's conscience got the better of him between am last Friday when he was prepared to take limited military action; and pm, when he decided to abdicate his responsibility to Congress; then he should have had the courage to stand down and let his vice president do what he threatened to do when he declared his 'red line' was crossed."

           

             As I wrote, the last thing the West needs at this moment in its history are two arch liberals, each seemingly competing to become America's Neville Chamberlin; who to them, no doubt, was an honourable man who, like Jimmy Carter wanted only peace in their time, at whatever the price to the West.

            

             I am not an anti-Democrat; for I think if Hillary Clinton had remained secretary of state she would have proven to be a far greater ally to Israel than the current incumbent of  her former position as secretary of state, including the one who governs in what she hopes will be her future position come the next American Presidential election.

            

            Israel is the West's one hope in the Middle East – a democratic oasis in a dessert of overreaching anarchy and dictatorship. It has always been the case. Syria, Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Yemen, etcetera: all are tribal societies ill-fitted to democracy, as has already been proven by the dispatch of Hosni Mubarak, Saddam Hussein, Muammar al-Gaddafi  and the attempted delivery to his purgatory of Assad of Syria.

            

            Israel is the one stabilising factor in the region that the West may come to regret not going to greater lengths to support, who provides a watchtower of intelligence in the region. If the West, as they profess wishes to bring democracy to the Middle East; then Israel is its only exemplary example; and so-called democrats had better rally behind it – the Left will not; because historically, they live quite happily with totalitarianism as long as it fulfils their socialist dream, and rails, like Hamas, against the West.

AS SOMEONE who lives in a nation ready to sell its soul off to a European Union; I find Israel's determination to remain a Jewish nation state almost intoxicating. The nation state embraces a singular identity; a singular culture; and a singularity of sovereignty incorporating  finance, the law, and above all a history. The very functions, in fact, that country's such as India and China readily subscribe to, and would not tolerate multiculturalism for one moment; and who could blame them?

            

            Israel only wished a small strip of land to bring its people too, to create a Jewish state after the Nazi Holocaust, and when the Jews could no longer trust Europe to care for them and treat them with any kind of equanimity within the Diaspora.

            

            In 1948, the Jews were given, by the UN, the right of statehood, and were then given a sliver of land which had been, after all, once part of the territory of ancient Judea, and proved perfectly adequate for the future Israel. The founders then cultivated the dessert and created fertile soil. They prospered. Orange groves replaced sterile sand; and in the years following the Six Day and Yom Kippur wars; Israel started to settle.

            The state of Israel from its very inception in 1948, attracted the hostility of its Arab neighbours who tried militarily to undermine and hopefully vanquish the Jewish presence  once and for all; and Hamas and Hezbollah, are continuing with what is becoming an age old tradition.

THE TERRIBLE SUFFERING experienced by the civilian population of Gaza can be ended by one simple instruction by Hamas to the world - ceasefire . Israel are in the right and no matter how much the suffering being inflicted on the Gazan people, this will not change. Hamas has gotten away with the appalling way they treat their own people for far too long, using them as human shields and welcoming in the porno-journalists from Sky and the BBC, and then taking them on a guided tour of the human misery unfolding to photograph, and emote over, knowing that Israel will be skewered by those sympathetic BBC journalists – Hamas' useful idiots.

            The BBC boasts that they are the most trusted news broadcaster; and it may have once been true, but it is no longer the case: especially, but not exclusively, as far as the Israel-Palestinian conflict is concerned. There needs to be a new perspective; one which replaces not the Palestinian people but Hamas, as the real villains instead of Israel – and the Western media are as yet proving incapable adapting to this reality.           

           

           

           

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[1] This is where we stand.

[2] Fox.

[3] As Chairman Mao described the USA

Hamas are the murderers of their own people

HAMAS DOES NOT want, or seek a two-state solution to the Israel/Palestinian crises. Their own constitution makes this quite clear; its website is a toxic wasteland of Hebrewphobes. Hamas sees the Jews in racist terms - in anti-Semitic terms. They do not want to live alongside the Jews, but, given the opportunity would willingly murder everyone of them in their beds and see it as ridding the Middle east of a deadly virus.

            

            One way or another Hamas wants what they consider to be vermin to disappear from their portion of the atlas. It cannot be any clearer to any sane person that this is their sole purpose; it was the main reason they broke from Fata and Abbas - they no longer believed in the two-state solution

            

            Yet the West, even those calling themselves allies of Israel, still play the silly game of a two-state solution with Hamas. It is wishful thinking and will never happen. It is an intellectually barren 'solution'  As far as Hamas are concerned their 'solution' is either driving out or cutting the throats of the Israelis.

            

            Israel's only possible action is to protect itself from Hamas in order to keep itself in existence. The only time Israel ever attacked first was done pre-emptively in the Six Day War in 1967. Ever since the founding of the state of Israel, the Jews have sought only to hang on to the small strip of land they call home. A home they found covered only in sand from which they built an oasis; a fertile land, and a modern successful economy. Its high-tech industry is in demand throughout the world. They invented Iron Dome, and designed their houses and cities to accommodate underground bunkers that their population could retreat into when attacked, saving thousands of lives in the process.

            

            Of the billions of pounds that have been poured into Gaza, not a single penny seems to have been spent by Hamas on any similar protection for Gaza's Palestinian civilians. They preferred rockets and tunnels, and to use their own people as human shields to discredit and make Israel the villains  –  after all this Israel is still seen as the aggressors by many in the liberal West.

ISRAEL HAS TO continue to uncover and destroy the network of tunnels that are the vehicle for Hamas terrorists to infiltrate and murder Israeli civilians. They also have to destroy as many of the rockets targeting its citizens as they can.

            

             Israel does not expect to destroy Hamas, although if the opportunity occurred both Netanyahu and Abbas would be dancing a jig. No, Israel, as she has always had to do, is to buy time where she can continue in peace and prepare for the next battle, when once more  she will be required to protect the nation. This is the price the Israeli state has to pay for its existence. In this sense the Israeli's are like the ancient Spartans, surrounded by enemies who treated them with a mixture of fear and contempt. Israel has been forced to become a military society, continually under threat from the Arab and Persian world.

            

             Unlike the British, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and the Belgian colonialists, the Jews are not empire builders. Israel just wants peace; and if Hamas said tomorrow that it would halt all military activity against Israel, then, with the proviso that Israel could continue with its dismantling of tunnels, this conflict would end  - until the next time.

           

            Israel knows that the existence of a Jewish state would require great sacrifice on behalf of its people if it was to eventually  succeed. In this strange and peculiar sense (and I do not mean to trample on the sacrifices the Israelis have made in this conflict) the Israeli army will be the stronger for Hamas's latest stupidity.

            

            The IDF will be the stronger for this conflict as all victorious armies are who overcome an enemy. Hamas thought that if they managed to kill a dozen or so IDF soldiers, the Israeli population would succumb, and Netanyahu would be forced to withdraw Israel from Gaza, and even lift the embargo on Gaza.

           

             The Spartans were brought up to be warriors and each war kept them proficient; and sadly the Israelis are having to tread the same path to peace, if not happiness.

HAMAS EXPLOITES the weakness of the Western politicians by using Gaza's wretched population as a weapon in the media war: which the Western media are all too willing and eager to comply with; and thus puts pressure on Western politicians like the hopeless Clegg, and especially the abject Milliband, who puts his political career before his Jewish ancestry in order to rule over a nation well into its pitiful decline.

           

             It is both pathetic and contemptible for a Jew to put his political career before his own ancestry – especially considering his own peculiar history of persecution; reflected in his own father's experience of such persecution from the Nazis.

            

             Hamas, as far as the Jews are concerned, are the offspring of Nazism. Yet this cruel amoral organisation are either supported or, rather embarrassingly, sniffed at by the Left, preferring to ignore them and concentrate upon the civilian casualties in Gaza.

            

             Israel has only one option regarding Hamas – to oppose it. If in doing so Hamas uses its people in Gaza as a weapon in the struggle to rid the Middle East of the Jews, then so be it. Hamas believes that every Muslim death secured in overcoming the infidel will be martyred. So every Gazan civilian caught up in the current conflict are potential martyrs, and Hamas sees nothing wrong in delivering them up to such a martyrdom especially if it means overcoming the Jews and using the Western media, in its ambition to destroy Israel.

ISRAEL MUST STAND FAST. Only when its objectives are realised should she end this latest conflict, but one which will not turn out to be the final battle against Hamas. Israel has to plough a hard, and at times barren field. It has to continue to do so for the sake of the Jewish race. Israel has nothing to apologise for. The nation's people have no need for contrition regarding the sad deaths of civilians in Gaza…if contrition is needed, then Hamas has to supplicate itself before Allah; not the Israeli's before Jehovah.  

     

                       

           

            

Proportionality - in war? An oxymoron

Hamas cleric:  "Our belief about fighting you [Jews] is that we will exterminate you, until the last one, and we will not leave of you even one. For you are the usurpers of the land, foreigners, mercenaries of the present and of all times. Look at history, brothers: Wherever there were Jews, they spread corruption... (Quran): "They spread corruption in the land, and Allah does not like corrupters." Their belief is destructive. Their belief fulfills the prophecy. Our belief is in obtaining our rights on our land, implementing Shari'ah (Islamic law) under Allah's sky."

[Al-Aqsa TV (Hamas), July 25, 2014][1]

THE IGNOMINIOUS ATTACKS on Israel, by the puffed-up and increasingly inconsequential United Nations, is hypocritical. They assailed Israel for the tragic deaths and injuries to Palestinian's sheltering in a UN school. The indignity expressed afterward by a UN spokesmen left one feeling whether his anger was directed at the deaths of women and children, or at Israel because UN property was attacked.

            

            The Israelis say that mortars were fired from within the vicinity of the school at their position and they responded. Israel does not target civilians; if they did the whole of Gaza would be a grave yard today; such is the military power at Israel's command.

           

            Spurious talk of genocide is just that, hollow and erroneous, charged with emotion rather than reason. All Israel wants is to live in peace; but Hamas will not let it do so. Hamas is a terrorist organisation (acknowledged as such, even by the wretched UN) dedicated, not to a two state solution but to the eradication of the Jews. Hamas's Charter openly proselytises Jewish extinction:

Hamas Charter Introduction:
"Our struggle against the Jews is extremely wide-ranging and grave..."

Article 28:
"Israel, by virtue of its being Jewish and of having a Jewish population, defies Islam and the Muslims..."

Article 7:

"Hamas has been looking forward to implement Allah's promise whatever time it might take. The prophet (prayer and peace be upon him) said [in a Hadith]: 'The time (of Resurrection) will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews; until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: 0 Muslim! there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him!'"[2]

TO THIS END Hamas is prepared to use its people as human shields; to this end they casually store their rockets under schools, and in homes; to this end they dig the entrances to their tunnels in homes hoping that, if Israel bombs them, they will kill (Hamas prefers the term Martyr) the civilians inside. To this end the Hamas leadership hide themselves away under hospitals, but one in particular.

            According to a headline in the Washington Post, the Shifa Hospital in Gaza City  ‘Has Become a De Facto Headquarters for Hamas Leaders, Who Can Be Seen in Hallways and Offices’. The report goes on; 'Contrary to international rules of warfare, Hamas has commandeered a large hospital in Gaza City as its “de facto headquarters,”'.

             The Post's reporter William Booth wrote on the 15^th of this month: 'At the Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, crowds gathered to throw shoes and eggs at the Palestinian Authority’s health minister, who represents the crumbling ‘unity government’ in the West Bank city of Ramallah. The minister was turned away before he reached the hospital, which has become a de facto headquarters for Hamas leaders, who can be seen in the hallways and offices.'

          But it is not only hospitals but also Mosques that provide rich pickings for Hamas. At the end of the article it was reported that during a lull in the fighting: '… a group of men at a mosque in northern Gaza said they had returned to clean up the green glass from windows shattered in the previous day’s bombardment. But they could be seen moving small rockets into the mosque.”

            Twenty Rockets were also discovered in a school in Gaza and photographed by officials from the United Nations Relief Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees which operated the school. These are by no means isolated examples but ones that have been discovered and reported

            Hamas excuses their cruel exploitation of their people by telling them and themselves that they face the grace of Martyrdom, a concept hard to understand by the will-sapping liberal West who cannot see beyond the images coming out of Gaza.

ISRAEL WILL SUCK IT UP. They know where Hamas's leaders are, and at a cabinet meeting in Israel yesterday, some members of Benjamin Netanyahu's cabinet voted to assassinate the Hamas leadership. According to Harutz Sheva[3] : 'Finance Minister Yair Lapid suggested, in a session of the Diplomacy-Security Cabinet, that Israel eliminate the heads of Hamas, reported Yisrael Hayom.

According to the newspaper, Lapid said that the IDF should “take down the heads of Hamas,” including Hamas-Gaza chief Ismail Haniyeh and the head of the organization's political bureau, Khaled Meshaal.

Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman (Chairman of Yisrael Beytenu) and Economics Minister Naftali Bennett (Chairman of Jewish Home) supported the idea.

The prime minister opposed it.

It was decided instead to bomb the homes of the Hamas leaders even though it is known that they are not residing in them.'

            Israel knows where they are and can act at a moment's notice; but Netanyahu overruled those within his cabinet who supported such an act.

            It is better to degrade Hamas until the people become fed up with Israeli bombardments, almost bi-annually, against Gaza. It is hard to believe today that fifteen years ago there were trade links between Gaza and Israel to each of their mutual advantage. All sorts of commodities were traded and Gaza's Palestinians even crossed into Israel to work. Those who support Hamas on the Left cannot, or refuse to, remember theses pre-Hamas times. Hamas however, rose like a satanic emblem, and destroyed any understanding between Gaza's Palestinians and the Israeli's.

            Hamas were freely elected and have been ever since, to the detriment of their people, to whom, one has to ask the question – why do you continue to support Hamas?

             Israel has always reacted to what the Arab world has thrown at them including the Palestinians. Israel has no wish to do to the Palestinians that which Hamas wishes to do to them.

            Israel has only ever countered an attack which wishes to seek their demise. They have never taken the offensive, without provocation. In the Six Day War, Egypt built up its forces along the Sinai, flagging to Israel an offensive. Syria and Iraq also were manoeuvring their forces for an attack from their borders with upon Israel. Israel, at the time, pleaded with Jordan not to join in, but were ignored. Which left Israel little recourse but to defend itself; and after the Six Day War found itself in the occupancy of the Sinai, the Golan Heights, and a part of Jordon west of the River Jordan - today known as the West Bank.

            Israel has since given back the Sinai to Egypt and has left Gaza; but has insisted on keeping the Golan Heights because of their strategic importance to Israel. Israel has no imperial ambition. If it still holds on to land it once conquered it is because the land was used by their previous owners to try and conquer the state of Israel (as far as the Golan Height are concerned) from a military and geographical advantage.

THE WORLD IS TURNED upside down; and the weak-willed leadership of the West have steered a course of appeasement when confronted by its enemies. The West has  overwhelming military power; which could have proved successful in Afghanistan but for that wretched and ridiculous concept known as proportionality - a political construct imposed on Generals by politicians, thus tying the hands of the young men the politicians send into battle; often to clear up some political mess or other of the politicians own making.

            Israel does not do proportionality; just as the UK would never have understood it as concept when fighting Nazism, or the Americans when fighting the Japanese. Churchill, Eisenhower, and the Generals and officers under their command would have also been bemused by such a concept.

            Churchill, like Netanyahu, believed that if your nation is attacked you do what you have to do to defeat your enemy and protect your people, or face your enemy's victory over you. You do what you have to do to save your country and defend its people (thus Iron Dome). Proportionality in war, at the very least would prolong it; and at its worst would lead to hundreds if not thousands of unnecessary deaths among your own young men and women fighting in the field.

            Instead of condemning the Israel's, Western leaders should have the courage to support them. If the Israeli government are war criminals and are to be considered as such in the age of proportionality – then so must Churchill, Eisenhower; and Truman (the latter who, you will remember, ordered the atomic bombs to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki with a conservative estimate of  225,000 killed or wounded) also be posthumously given war criminal status by whatever fatuous UN human rights committee looks into it.

            Israel is in the right – the 'right' being its own survival; and no concept of proportionality has any part to play when the very existence of the state of Israel is at stake. I only wish our Western leaders shared Netanyahu's and Churchill's belief in total war as the only means of shortening it. We have had several incursions into Gaza by Israel, and each time pressure has been put on the Israeli state to end it prematurely; thus storing up further interventions later, with even more civilian deaths.

            Israel is any exemplary example of how a nation should protect its people, and keep the nation safe. Churchill would have understood Netanyahu and what he was trying to do; and would have had nothing but contempt for the hapless contemporary Western leadership who are without the courage and incapable of facing up to and living with their liberal guilt.

            Shalom! 

           

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[1] Palestinian Watch Media (PWM)

[2] Thanks to the PWM

[3] Israel National News.com

MH17 – Europe played its part

COMMENTATORS HAVE WORKED themselves up into a frenzy of emotional turmoil over how to react to Vladimir Putin since Flight MH17 was brought down with such catastrophic consequences.

            

            It was not only the shooting down, but how and why the bodies were treated and the way the crime scene was abused with such indifference by Russian separatists which has increased the fury of Western journalists toward Putin. But then when you are impotent to act, all that is left is blind fury; not only toward the villain of the peace but toward Europe who have refused to take any real measures to punish Putin. Frustration has been the navigator of the presses keyboards; with each commentator trying to outdo the other to pour scorn on Europe for failing to act.

            

            Cameron, in his usual way of seeking a praiseworthy headline, joined in by challenging Europe to make a further stand against this modern Tsar Ivan. He demanded ever greater sanctions against Russia exceeding those that had taken place after Russia took back the Crimea. He elevated himself to become Putin's nemesis, imploring and cajoling his European partners to stiffen their spines, and bring Putin to his knees.

            

             If the situation was not so grave; Cameron's hypocritical performance, as leader of a much diminished nation; which is now taken very little notice of in the world, would be comedic (be it of a black nature). No sooner had he made demands of his European allies, than we learnt of our own arms industry's provisions to Russia: which had followed the exposure of France's contractual obligation to provide Russia's modern tsar with two helicopter carriers, one of which was paid for and due for delivery. The French had not only the right, but the obligation to deliver on its contract.

BOTH GERMANY AND FRANCE had made themselves obligated , on a near wholly depended reliance upon Russian energy supplies. Neither nation seemed to fear Russia or Putin's governance of it before agreeing to such a reliance. Even the UK welcomed the Russian oligarch's billions, and the migration of Russian billionaires on to London's premiere street codes, buying up properties and herding out the poorer residents of Sloane Square (that dominated the 1980s) into parts of Fulham no less.

            

            Our own great and good have also enjoyed the indulgences of Russian oligarchs, such as Peter Mandelson and David Owen to name but two. Our former politicians have cashed in on the bounty on offer. Putin's face must distort itself into an expression of contempt when he hears David Cameron trying to act the principled strong man, a pitiful specimen who has allowed his armed forces to become dilapidated at the expense of oversees aid; and renders any such convincing military option to himself, obsolete.

           

            Economic sanctions will not work. The Russian people have learnt to survive the barren diet of living under Tsars, Commissars, and the rape by Nazism. Why do you think it was that the Russian separatists showed little respect for the bodies of Flight MH17? Because once put under threat, as was the Soviet Union from the Nazis, and seeing for themselves what could be done to humanity, and brought up to understand what could be expected from the Tsars, Communists, and Nazis, the Russian people adapted to suffering. During the Second World War  21,800,000 to 28,000,000 died fighting Nazism. This does include the millions of others sent to the Gulags, who eventually met a similar fate under Stalin

            

            No other country on this planet has suffered the kind of suffering Russia had to endure under the years of Soviet imperialism.

            

            Flight MH17 was a mistake. It was probably not even targeted properly but assumed to have been a Ukrainian transporter carrying soldiers; as had happened in the days before when such a military transporter was hit, killing 45 Ukrainian soldiers who were being delivered to the east of Ukraine to tackle Russian separatists.

THIS CONFLICT, and the West's response, may become far more serious for Europe than any Gazan distraction – and I do not mean this cruelly regarding innocent Palestinians on the Gaza Strip. The EU is expansionist by nature and sought to include eastern European nations once under the Soviet hegemony to become part of their own European hegemony

            

           Whatever the appalling nature of Putin; he set himself against his boarders being challenged by the EU. Which is exactly what has been done by the expansionist EU. It was the EU itself that set this ball rolling; and before it is brought to a stop I fear many thousands of lives will be brought to a summery end on both sides.

            

            I now read that 1,300 British troops are being sent to Poland in response to Putin's behaviour. It is a meagre and pitiful response, but one associated with a country that has pared down its own national defences to such an extent that it is building two aircraft carriers that will have no aircraft to take off from - unless they are French: and one of the carriers, once completed may even be sold off – what a pathetic excuse for a national defence.

           

            Putin must be laughing at such a pitiful offering from a once great military nation, if, that is, he has even noticed the Ministry of Defences announcement of it. Our politicians are seen as stand-up comics by the likes of Putin. He is almost daily entertained by either our prime minister or Foreign Secretary boasting on the world stage. Believing themselves still believing in this country punching above its weight. When in fact, they are an embarrassment to the country.

            

            It was Douglas Hurd, who as Foreign Secretary, first used this "punching above our weight" aphorism. It was embarrassing then and it is even more so now. The trouble is our Foreign Office is only as influential as our armed forces capabilities allows; and these are meagre thanks to the Cameron government preferring the ring fencing of foreign aid over the nation's defence.

RUSSIA IS INCREASING its defence budget by £400 billion over the next five years; while Europe has decreased its own defence spending, and lacks the ambition to increase it; probably because of its reliance on the USA for its defences.

           

             So in five or so years time Russia will be militarily more powerful than the Europhile's Greater Europe. America, by now self-sufficient in its energy needs through fracking, will no longer require a dependence on the Arab world for its oil. America will also see no purpose in remaining in Europe, especially as the USA is so despised among European nations, for delivering them from the Nazis.

AMERICA WILL turn to the Pacific region for its trade, and will continue to prosper; while Europe continues on with its decline; but without the protection of America. European nations have despised the so-called Anglo-Saxon economic agenda which included the USA.

            

             America must remove its military might from Europe. Europe, while despising America, has relied upon its military protection. America's military removal from Europe is the only way that Europe will see that its own military budgets have to increase to defend the continents people. But what's the betting that such a lesson will go unlearned?