THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Volume XI, Issue # 30, January 24, 2009
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Government Committed to & Acting in Accord with Conservative Principles
Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity
THE EUROPEAN LEFT: MARCHING FOR HAMAS
By Denis MacEoin
THE UNITED NATIONS, THE EUROPEAN POLITICAL LEFT, & THEIR ATTITUDES TOWARD THE CONFLICT IN THE MIDDLE EAST:
WIDESPREAD ANTI-SEMITISM -- ANTI-ISRAELI & PRO-ARAB BIAS REGARDING THE ISRAELI-ARAB CONFLICT --
APPEASEMENT OF HAMAS -- WILLINGNESS TO ALLOW HAMAS TO RULE TYRANNICALLY OVER THE GAZA STRIP & MURDER
BOTH ISRAELIS & PALESTINIANS
FULL STORY:
Hamas is a bully aided by a bigger bully, Iran. And, just as strident and threatening human bullies get away with their
aggression so long as no one calls their bluff, so Hamas has been getting away with murder and torture because the
United Nations and many sovereign states won't call its two-faced self-portrayal as the victim in the piece. In the
struggle to take over Gaza from Fatah, it went on a rampage that killed hundreds of Palestinians. Even during this most
recent assault, in early January, it executed Fatah members for violating their house arrest. A few weeks ago, Hamas
determined to hurt yet more of its compatriots by introducing Islamic hudud punishments to the Gaza Strip, from
amputations and stonings, to crucifixions and hangings.
Like all bullies, Hamas likes to taunt its victims. It did just that for years after Israel left Gaza, firing rockets every day
into Israeli towns like Sderot or Netivot. No one who has dismissed these rockets as harmless homemade toys has
ever had the guts to spend a few weeks in Sderot, scurrying from shelter to shelter. And, oh yes, Hamas also built up
an arsenal (supplied by Iran) of Grad missiles that certainly aren't anybody's toys.
Like all bullies, Hamas likes to make boastful threats. Its 1988 Covenant is replete with them. It threatens to destroy the
State of Israel by violence and violence alone. It says it will never accept the work of conferences or peacemakers, and
only jihad will solve its problems. Meanwhile, the Palestinians see their lives drained away in a culture that embraces
death and martyrdom, their children exposed to a steady diet of military training and preparation for violent death as
suicide bombers.
Even if the Palestinians want peace, Hamas won't let them have it, because Hamas knows best, and jihad "is the only
solution." Don't believe me, read the Covenant. Hamas likes nothing better than killing Jews, and the bigger bully in
Teheran thinks that's a damn fine thing too. No one says a word, because the UN is dominated by the Islamic states,
and the Western governments know where the oil comes from, and nobody likes the Jews much anyway. The people
calling for the end of Israel while they march on the streets of London and Dublin aren't all Muslims by any means.
There can be no greater indication of this boastfulness than what has happened in recent days. Having taken a heavy
battering from Israel, Hamas now proclaims a "great victory," and its supporters dance in the ruined streets of Gaza,
drunk on their own demagoguery. For all its bluster, Hamas, like all bullies, is a coward at heart. Watch those films of
Hamas gunmen dragging screaming children along with them to act as human shields, watch how they fire from behind
the little ones, knowing no Israeli soldier will fire back. And, even as they put their own children's lives at risk, they
shout to high heaven that the Israelis are Nazis and the Jews are child-killers. This blatant pornography spreads
through the Western media, and people never once ask "what does this look like from the other side," because they are
addicted to the comforting news that the Yids are baby-killers as they'd always known, that they do poison wells, that
no Christian child is safe come Passover. Hamas has become proficient at resurrecting the blood libel, just as its fighters
use the Nazi salute, just as their predecessor in the 1930s and 1940s, Haj Amin al-Husseini, conferred with Hitler about
building death camps in Palestine and raised a division of SS troops in Bosnia to fight for the Reich.
We watch The Diary of Anne Frank on television, and some of us attend Holocaust Remembrance Day events,
and others pay lip service to Jewish victimhood; we like our Jews emaciated and helpless under the SS boot. But the
moment real Jews stand up and show themselves the stronger for all their deaths, it awakens an atavistic fear, and
people recoil from them. Jews in uniform, how unseemly. Jews beating the bully, how unheard of. Jews with their own
state, what upstarts.
IN MY home country of Ireland, we glamorize the great nationalist heroes who rebelled against the bullying forces of
imperial Britain in the uprising of Easter Sunday 1916. In France, they venerate the heroes of the Resistance against the
occupying forces of Nazi Germany. In Spain, they have not ceased to heap praise on those who fought against the
forces of Fascist bullies and lost. To stand up against an enemy bent on your destruction is everywhere counted an
act of bravery. But not when it comes to Israel. In 1948 and 1967 and 1973 and 2006, Israel fought off overwhelming
forces who made no secret of their plans for an imminent massacre of the Jews. But nobody now seems to care, no one
lauds the courage the Israelis displayed, and no one praises the extraordinary restraint they showed in victory.
In a bizarre reversal of all their commitment to human rights and the struggle of men and women for independence and
self-determination, the European Left has chosen again and again to side with the bullies and to condemn a small nation
struggling to survive in a hostile neighborhood. It is all self-contradictory: The Left supports gay rights, yet attacks the
only country in the Middle East where gay rights are enshrined in law. Hamas makes death the punishment for being
gay, but "we are all Hamas now." Iran hangs gays, but it is praised as an agent of anti-imperialism, and allowed to get
on with its job of stoning women and executing dissidents and members of religious minorities. If United Kingdom
Prime Minister Gordon Brown swore to wipe France from the face of the earth, he would become a pariah among nations.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threatens to do that to Israel, and is invited to speak to the UN General Assembly
Israel guarantees civil liberties to all its citizens, Jew or Arab alike, but it is dubbed "an apartheid state"; Hamas, ever the
bully, kills its opponents and denies the rest the most basic rights, but we march on behalf of Hamas. The Left prefers
the bully because the bully represents a finger in the face of the establishment? Almost no one on the Left has any
understanding of militant Islam. Their politics is a politics of gesture, where wearing a keffiyeh is cool, but understanding
its symbolism is too much effort even for intellectuals.
I have personally had enough of it all. The whining double standards, the blatant lies, the way their leaders have forced
Palestinians to suffer for 60 years because peace and compromise aren't in their vocabulary and because they won't settle
for anything but total victory. Painful as it was, in the 1920s, Ireland created a republic by compromising on the status of
the North. Ireland subsequently became a prosperous country and, in due course, one of the hottest economies in the
world. When the Israelis left Gaza in 2005, they left state-of-the-art greenhouses to form the basis for a thriving economy.
Hamas destroyed them to the last pane of glass. Why? Because they had been Jewish greenhouses.
LINKS TO RELATED TOPICS:
Jews & Anti-Semitism
Europe, Europeans, & Anti-Semitism
Europe, European States, Politics, & Public Policy
The United Nations, the Middle East, & the Israeli-Arab Conflict
Israel & the Arabs -- The Israeli-Arab Conflict
Middle East -- Arabs, Arab States,
& Their Middle Eastern Neighbors
American Foreign Policy -- The Middle East
Islamism & Jihadism -- Radical Islam & Islamic Terrorism
Page Three
Page Two
Page One
International Politics & World Disorder:
War, Peace, & Geopolitics in the Real World:
Foreign Affairs & U.S. National Security
Page Two
Page One
Islamist Terrorist Attacks on the U.S.A.
Osama bin Laden & the Islamist Declaration of War
Against the U.S.A. & Western Civilization
Islamist International Terrorism &
U.S. Intelligence Agencies
U.S. National Security Strategy
Denis MacEoin is the incoming Editor of the leading international journal, Middle East Quarterly, and the author
of a blog entitled "A Liberal Defence of Israel."
The foregoing article by Denis MacEoin was originally published in the Jerusalem Post, January 22, 2009, and
can be found on the Internet website maintained by the Middle East Forum, a foreign policy think tank which seeks to
define and promote American interests in the Middle East, defining U.S. interests to include fighting radical Islam,
working for Palestinian Arab acceptance of the State of Israel, improving the management of U.S. efforts to promote
constitutional democracy in the Middle East, reducing America's energy dependence on the Middle East, more robustly
asserting U.S. interests vis-à-vis Saudi Arabia, and countering the Iranian threat.
(Article URL: http://www.meforum.org/article/2056)
Republished with Permission of the Middle East Forum
Reprinted from the Middle East Forum News
mefnews@meforum.org (MEF NEWS)
January 24, 2009
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THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
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Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
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