Unknowing Propagandists for Iran

Yesterday, I opened my local newspaper to the weekly Letters to the Editor, and was unsurprised to count two letters (one by my rabbi) supporting Israel's Operation Cast Lead, and seven or eight letters accusing Israel of violations of international law and war crimes or worse.

We know where we stand. Whenever Israel responds to a violation of her borders, the anti-Israel propaganda machine gets going, and we can expect Israel (and by proxy, Jews) to be called all of the old names and some new ones. I am not going to reiterate the tired and the new epithets here. As Jonah Goldberg says in today's column (I read it in my paper but you can click the link to find it at the NRO), you can simply go to You Tube or do a web search to find them.

We know where we stand, but I wonder if those who write letters to the editor in support of Hamas really know who they are supporting? One letter said:

" . . . Israel's response is excessive and disproportionate to the handful of homemade bombs fallen randomly upon the Israeli-Occupied territories of Palestine . . ."

Let's unpack this in view of the facts. A handful? There have been more than 8,000 missiles lobbed into Israel over the past eight years. Homemade? The terrorist organizations Hamas and Hizbollah receive weapons, funding, and ideological support from Iran. The weapons are smuggled across the border into Gaza by Hamas for the purpose of attacks upon Israeli sovereign territory. Fallen randomly? Here the writer would have us believe that these weapons simply fall from the sky. They have been targeted to schools, daycare centers and other areas where civilians gather in southern Israel. Hamas intentionally targets civilians. So far, it has been a very good thing for Israelis that Hamas has very bad aim. Upon Israeli-occupied territory? These rockets have been fired into Israeli sovereign territory. Israeli citizens in border towns like S'derot have 15 seconds from the time of launch to seek shelter.

Several of the letters stated that Israel had not ended "occupation" of the Gaza because it controls the borders. Occupation? Actually, the Gaza strip, which was partitioned to Palestine by the UN in 1947 was occupied by Egypt following Israel's War for Independence in 1948, just as the West Bank was occupied by Jordan, which was also supposed to be part of the Palestinian state. Neither of these Islamic states established the UN- mandated Palestinian state in these places. In 1967, Israel was threatened by numerous surrounding states with a war of conquest. In June of that year, Israel pre-empted that attack and in six days, took the Sinai, Golan, Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza. These lands were conquered by Israel in response to threats (aired publically from many places including Radio Damascus) to "drive the Jews into the Sea." It took some time, but Israel withdrew from the Gaza in 2005. Israel did what Egypt and Jordan did not, ceding both the Gaza and the West bank to the Palestinian state. The West Bank is controlled by the PA/Fatah, but the Gaza is ruled by Hamas, following a coup in which Hamas killed and tortured Palestinians who supported the PA. Hamas has since turned the Gaza into an armed terrorist operation, to the detriment of any state building or support of the residents there.

Israel does control the borders between Gaza and Israeli territory, just as any country controls its own borders. And Israel has shut the borders using sanctions in an attempt to stop the flow of arms into the Gaza; arms that are then used to attack Israel. Egypt does the same with its border with the Gaza. Apparently, they don't want Hamas crossing into Egypt any more than the Israelis want Hamas in Israel.

None of these letter writers appear to have a grasp on even the recent history of the area. One claimed that this war has been ongoing for 4,000 years. That is also untrue. The Palestinians of today are not the Canaanites of the Bible. The movement of peoples across the Middle East (and across the face of the earth for that matter) has been ongoing for a very long time. It is possible to make the case that Islam's war against Jews has been ongoing since Mohammed's flight to Medina, where Arabian Jews were first massacred for not submitting to the messenger of Allah, but that was also before the Palestinian's time.

In any case, who are these people really supporting? Whether they know it or not, they are supporting Achmadinejad and Iran. It is Iran that tells Hamas and Hizbollah what to do, and it is Iran that supports these Islamist terrorists groups morally and materially. In the summer of 2006, Hamas raided Israeli territory, killing Israeli soldiers and taking two hostages. As Israel responded, Hizbollah then began incursions across Israel's northern border, starting what Israelis call the second war with Lebanon. Iran was in the background, orchestrating it all.

The president of Iran, Achmadinejad, has publicly called for the destruction of Israel, and has said many times that he will "wipe Israel off the map." (In the West's current bout of Chamberlain-style appeasement, no one wants to admit that Iran might actually do it). In the past few weeks, the French President Sarkozy has received a report that Iran will pass the nuclear threshhold this year, and will be a full-fledged nuclear power by 2011. The report, based entirely on open-sourced material that Iran freely verifies, also states that this year is likely the last in which the world has the opportunity to stop Iran from getting the bomb and ICBMs to launch it. There are some commentators who believe that Iran's decision not to back Hamas with Hizbollah this time may be a diversion. Whether or not this turns out to be true, the stated purpose and only goal of Hamas is to destroy Israel, and to kill not only "the Zionist Entity", but Jews everywhere within their reach.

And Jews are just the appetizers. The stated goal of the Islamist Jihad is to make every human being on the face of the earth submit to Sharia law as Dhimmis or to become Muslim. Israel is seen by the Jihadists as "the little Satan." It is the United States that is "the Great Satan."

And the Palestinians? They are pawns in the current ambitions of Iran.
Hamas and Hizbollah are both content to use them as human shields.

FYI: A short video about Operation Cast Lead from IDFdesk at You Tube.