Dear Fellow Liberals: I’m Done Apologizing for Israel
As a liberal American Jew, I’m tired of apologizing for Israel’s actions regarding its own security, and as of last month, I’m done with it. I’m done for the following two reasons: my eldest child, Sam, motivated by a desire to do something more meaningful than argue about religion, policy and politics, is currently serving as a lone soldier in the IDF, and he spent much of July in Gaza, as part of a team dismantling terror tunnels. In New Jersey, where the rest of his family lives, we didn’t know, from one day to the next, if we’d ever see him again. The second reason is that Israel, despite its highly imperfect record (unlike that of, say, America or France or England or Pakistan or Kenya or Argentina…) is the world’s sole guarantee against another frenzy of murderous hatred against my people, a hatred that is once again raising its voice, and fists, not only among the dispossessed Muslim residents of Europe, but, most especially, in the official organs of the chattering, and highly influential, classes—so much so that the off-hand remarks of my long-ago dinner companion seem almost reasonable.Anatomy of a hanging
Facts are such nifty things, so solid, so sure. Yet we as a species don’t seem to cotton to them, especially when it comes to Jews.
In Pakistan, one human rights group estimates that 1,000 women are murdered in honor killings by their families every year. In Nigeria, Islamic militants have killed more than 1,500 people in 2014, according to Amnesty International. And the death toll from the slaughter in Syria—just spitting distance from Israel—adds up to a robust 191,000. But the world—or at least the world as personified by the British law professor with his fondness for exaggeration—doesn’t pay a lot of attention to these Muslim but non-Palestinian corpses. Nope: you’ve got to be a dead person in Gaza or Hebron to claim the world’s sympathy. Merely being an Arab, or a Muslim, doesn’t cut the mustard, because when Muslims are murdering other Muslims—like more than 2,400 Iraqis killed by other Iraqis in June of this year. The civilized world, or at least the chattering classes, does little more than shrug.
The show trial is underway and the guilty verdict is guaranteed, as a United Nations panel makes a pretense of investigating human rights violations in the 50-day war between Israel and Hamas.UN Watch: UNHRC chair on Qatar: “I see no objection”
To his severe discredit, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has sanctioned a proceeding whose transparent rigging would be at home in a totalitarian regime. Israel is, of course, the defendant going down the tubes.
Hamas started the conflict by firing thousands of rockets indiscriminately into the Jewish state from heavily populated areas of Gaza, and prolonged the suffering by violating ceasefire after ceasefire that Israel honored.
While each Hamas rocket was a war crime, too much of the world attacked Israel for retaliating in self-defense. Among those in that camp is the UN Human Rights Council, a body dominated by Israel’s foes that has focused incessantly on Israel while turning a blind eye to abuses by the world’s worst regimes.
With the end of hostilities, the Council empaneled a commission “to investigate all violations of international humanitarian law” during the war. But it dispatched the panel with marching orders to convict Israel.
Mr. President,
No less than 78 out of the 84 country statements in this report offer praise for the human rights record of Qatar. That’s over 90 percent.
Yet the truth, Mr. President, is the opposite.
Let us be clear:
The truth is that the 1.4 million migrant workers in Qatar object to this report because they are dying at the rate of one a day from inhuman conditions. At the current pace, more than 4,000 migrant workers will die to build the infrastructure for Qatar’s 2022 World Cup.
The truth is that the women of Qatar object to this report because they are denied basic rights to equality, for example denied the right to be elected to the Shura legislative council.
The truth is that journalists and aid workers who are abducted by the ISIS terrorist group and face beheading object to this report. In the words of Germany’s development aid minister, Gerd Mueller, from August 20th: “Who is financing these troops? Hint: Qatar.”
The truth is that the Palestinians, Israelis and other victims of Hamas war crimes — their exploitation and targeting of civilian populations, mosques, hospitals and schools — object to this report. As one Arab diplomat said to the FDD, as quoted in its testimony before the U.S. Congress, “Qatar finances Hamas strongly.”