If Hamas murders 1400 Jews, does it make a sound?

By Patrick Hall

Not to make light of the tree falling in the forest philosophical thought experiment. The events surrounding the rape and slaughter of Jewish civilians on October 7th and the subsequent reaction of many in the world community vividly calls into question the ability of some to delineate between observation and perception, if not objective reality! The brutal carnage suffered by Israel would be equivalent to 40,000 Americans murdered, along with 8000 hostages taken by a designated enemy combatant. Remember, Israel’s total population is less than 10 million.  Would we as a nation want to talk about “negotiating” and “cease-fire” after undergoing a similar attack upon our soil? Also, keep in mind that at the time of the attack, Israel and Hamas were already under a cease-fire agreement.

To be more candid, many within the pro-Hamas anti-Israel cabal seem to think, if not believe, that women being raped, babies placed in microwave ovens, families being murdered, and many taken as hostages are just unsubstantiated opinions or perceptions. Hey, according to many of the Pro Hamas, America-hating student demonstrators at our most prestigious universities, it was all made up, a slick Zionist lie. Even more ridiculous, according to the Palestinian enclave's health ministry, Israel is accused of killing over 32 thousand Gazan civilians, even though the IDF goes out of its way to limit civilian causalities. At the same time, Hamas and other terrorist governments deliberately used their populations as human shields.  I would like to believe that these Pro Hamas, death-to--America students and their professional agitators are just confused. However, they long ago crossed the line between legitimate protesting and exercising their free speech rights, becoming and acting like “enemy combatants.”

 Over fifty years ago, as a graduate student, I read the biography of Moshe Dayan, one of Israel's most successful Defense ministers. Prophetically, he once quipped after the 1973 Yom Kippur War that there would come a time when the world would not only deny the 1930s/40s murder of 6 million Jews, and thousands of Christians like Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer who tried to curtail the brutality that was Hitler’s Third Reich.  However, here in 2024, some 80 years later, it has become fashionable once again to kill Jews.

When you hear the chants “from the river to the sea” by thousands of students in places like Columbia and UCLA, which is a call for genocide of the Jews, coupled with the absurd propaganda, or outright lie, that Israel’s Defense forces kill indiscriminately, the level of hate germinating for decades against the Jewish State goes beyond embedded cultural anomie. It is political-religious dogma within a large segment of the Pro Hamas and Hate America catechumenates. Even when Israel foolishly gave away Gaza to the Palestinian authorities under the recognized terrorist constituency, which is Hamas. From and before 2005, Hamas not only began firing rockets and attacking the Jewish state, but they have used millions of dollars that were supposed to go for building the newfound state of Gaza and redirected this international aid into indoctrinating thousands of young Gazans and Arabs about the murdering colonial oppressors call the Jews.  Unchallenged outright right lies were commonly spread to the population of Gaza for decades.

One such “lie” spread throughout the Middle East by Radical Islamic factions was the 2002 massacre of innocent Palestinians in Jenin on the West Bank by the Israeli Defense Force. That attack or slaughter of innocent Palestinians never happened. During the Bush administration, CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC, Reuters, PBS, and the BBC, along with a host of other news outlets, ran the story that Israel blatantly killed hundreds of Palestinian civilians. This was a purposely crafted falsehood authored by Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and others.

Palestinian mouthpieces claim that the Israeli military killed as many as 500 civilians in Jenin. When the Israeli forces cleared the booby traps and allowed Western media into the city, the reality was different. It was a difficult door-to-door infantry fight where 23 Israeli soldiers were killed along with dozens of terrorists. No massacre!    

No correction of this damaging fabrication about the Jews was ever given.   Even Christiane Amanpour, who later became the Rosetta Stone of all things related to Israel and the Palestinians, continues her imprimatur status at PBS and other news outlets despite the fallacy of Jenin.¹ 

Meanwhile, the feckless, if not dangerous, situation taking place on college campuses as well as in the EU goes on. The Israel Defense Force (IDF) randomly kills Palestinian children goes the by-line repeated ad infinitum, whether it be in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, or throughout far too many precincts of the Moslem Arab world.

In an interview done years ago by the BBC with former Israel Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, he once answered the “lie” that the IDF indiscriminately and with premeditation kill innocent Palestinians, who for decades have been employed as human shields by the so-called leadership of the Hamas, Hezbollah, and other terrorists’ “liberators.”   Sharon said that if the IDF ever comported itself like Hamas or Hezbollah, the war with Israel would be over in less than six weeks. The point is that Israel goes out of its way to mitigate civilian deaths, while their Hamas counterparts knowingly put their people in the way as human shields.   It's beyond sick!  But what do you expect from the monsters that are in charge of many terrorist-sponsoring nations?  Will the protesting students at our universities and in the EU understand this? Probably not!  There is no way in hell that the educated troglodytes at Columbia or in segments of the Democrat and Republican Party will entertain Sharon's bluntness.

I have come to the regrettable conclusion that this is the greatest failure of our Government's approach to the religious-political hydra that is Radical Islamic Terrorism.  To paraphrase the late political columnist Charles Krauthammer, Western cultures continue to prolong a badly incoherent, morally timid, and illogical strategy in the fight against radicalism and terrorism.  With the current open border policies, which means we have no border. President Biden, the Democrats, and sadly, some “controlled opposition Republicans” like Mitt Romney are deadly misinformed. We may soon pay for it with our freedoms or even our lives.

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1. Jenin was back in the news in 2023.  The IDF according to a terrorist spokesperson and of course, along with many within the mainstream media, accused Israel of once again targeting civilians. First of all, Israel did not indiscriminately attack Jenin or Palestinian civilians.  It was a counter-terrorist operation targeting Radical Islamic weapons stashed in schools, hospitals, and Mosques. Once again, the terrorist playbook is to use their people as cannon fodder.  The college student dawning the Palestinian Keffiyeh and covering the faces, (which reminds me of the KKK) cannot digest the fact, that Hamas and others use their people as human shields.  They then matter-of-factly blame these deaths on those monsters called the Jews.