Comprehensive report on Israeli soldier at Hampshire college

A great report on the speech of IDF Sergeant Benjamin Anthony towards a hostile audience at Hampshire College on February 3.

“No soldier relishes going to war—if you doubt that, ask yourselves how you would feel if given ten minutes to prepare” for a mission that could cost your life and the lives of your friends. But one nonetheless goes willingly, he said, when the task is to intercept a band of terrorists planning an attack against civilians inside the borders of Israel, with the intention of murdering “children as they sleep in their beds at night.”

The soldiers, he said, fight simply in order to defend their homeland. A reference to that homeland as “Israel, the home of the Jewish people,” provoked another chorus of blowing whistles.

Heckler: “It has been occupied Palestine for over sixty years!”

...Israel, Anthony explained, had never known full peace or been free of threat: “For an Israeli soldier, the battle is one into which they are born. The clock starts ticking at birth.” It was not a fate that they would have chosen voluntarily.

“There is nothing glorious about war, and anybody who believes that is sorely mistaken.”

A student suddenly stands up and shouts that, “As-a-Jew” who had “lost relatives in the Holocaust," she cannot support the racist State of Israel and its policies.

More commotion. Some members of the audience rise, in agitation. Some protesters walk out.

A heckler again blows a whistle.

Sergeant Anthony: “Excuse me, the lady who’s Jewish—the lady who’s Jewish—and therefore uses her Judaism as validity for her opinion, could you please give me the title of last week’s Torah portion?”

Read the whole thing at To Find The Principles.