The Right Needs to Get Serious About a War

As I updated myself on the recent escalation in the long-simmering war between Israel and the terrorist-backed entity called Palestine, I came across the following passage in a major conservative outlet:

This was a bus. A five-year-old girl died here due to an unprovoked and immoral attack by Islamist combatants hiding in Gaza.(Image by Yoav Keren, via Wikimedia Commons, license.)

Then again, the warning would have fallen on deaf ears because Hamas paints a target on its own civilians by hiding explosives in residential neighborhoods and putting rocket launchers near schools. If it spent half as much on schools, medicine and civilian infrastructure as it spends trying to kill Jews, Gaza would be far better off. [bold added]

This fact does not bear repeating or emphasizing often enough: The blame for any civilian deaths caused by Israel having to defend itself from Hamas lies with Hamas. This not only exonerates Israel, but reveals as farcical any claims by Islamists and leftists to the effect that Hamas is fighting in the interest of the people in the areas it controls -- at least not by any rational understanding of the term interest.

Israel goes the extra mile by often warning Arab civilians by telephone to evacuate buildings it is targeting, showing more concern for them than Hamas does.

Does Israel make mistakes, and sometimes hit innocent civilians? Of course. But these are accidents, while Hamas targets Israeli civilians. Where's the outrage over that?

The latest media huffing and puffing involves a charge that the Israeli military spread a false claim that a Gaza invasion was underway, with the aim of luring Hamas fighters to tunnels, which Israel promptly bombed.

If true, the deception wasn't kosher, but the outrage carries a whiff of hypocrisy. It's as if the media demands a monopoly on fake news from Israel. [bold added]

By warning before it attacks, Israel is acting at best very benevolently and at worst committing a sacrifice. In fact, it is the whole idea -- that civilian deaths due to its defensive actions merit outrage against Israel -- we should be outraged about. Hamas, by recklessly lobbing rockets at innocent people, who must then defend themselves at the cost of the lives of other people (innocent or not) should bear the full brunt of the outrage. As for Biden, he should not just "let Bibi fight." Biden should ask how the Unites States can help.

Calling Israel's brilliant tactical move of luring combatants into a tunnel system and bombing it is far from not "kosher," even by the ridiculous modern standard of sparing civilians during a war. To the contrary, insofar as it makes the current hostilities more manageable much sooner, it deserves praise. With the first rocket it fired, Hamas lost any claim to hear the truth from the people it would murder.

The fact that nobody is speaking of Israel seeking complete victory just about says it all.

The right, judging by this piece and others like it, seems to have adopted the standards of the pacifistic left. The best it can do is scream that the left are hypocrites, which is true but lets them off the hook -- for their various crimes against justice, ranging from moral equivalence to actually siding with Hamas -- and try to be clever by joking that the press wants a "monopoly on fake news from Israel."

With "support" like this, who needs the Associated Press or Al Jazeera?

-- CAV