India
Japan
England
France
For hundreds more, just look up pro-Israel Rally on YouTube.
The pro-Israel protesters are acting well, supporting peace and freedom for all in the Middle East.
Contrast that with the violence – both in words and actions – that accompanies the anti-Israel protests: shouts of ‘Heil Hitler’ and ‘Hitler was right!’ and calls for ethnic cleansing of the whole world to commit a genocide against Jews… Here is just one example from hundreds:
The violence that is committed against Jewish targets outside of Israel, against people who may or may not be Zionists themselves but are definitely Jews demonstrates beyond any doubt that these are not anti-Zionists or people who are critical of the policies of the nation state of Israel: this is anti-Semitic Jew hatred, pure and unadulterated by compassion or reason.
A large number of the civilian casualties in Gaza did not die as a result of the Israeli response to the unprovoked acts of war by Hamas (both rocket fire and territorial invasion via underground tunnels): they have died of the Hamas rockets themselves.
Do not be fooled into thinking these rockets to be ‘mere firecrackers’: without the Israeli defensive Iron Dome and the many bomb-shelters in Israel, the Israeli civilian casualties would be much, much higher.
This is no mere conjecture but a statement of fact.
How do I know this?
From the extensive deaths caused by these rockets when they accidentally land inside Gaza itself!
Certainly, non-Israeli reports of this are scarce because even though they don’t admit this, the reporters in Gaza are reporting under duress and thus act (willingly or not) as accomplices of Hamas: repeating in their reports only the numbers and things that Hamas wants reported, showing only the images that Hamas wants shown. Hardly ‘journalism’…
And if that is not enough, here is an excerpt from Wikipedia (hardly a Zionist source):
“The weapons, often generically referred to as Qassams, were initially crude and short-range, mainly affecting Sderot and other communities bordering the Gaza Strip. However, in 2006 more sophisticated rockets began to be deployed, reaching the larger coastal city of Ashkelon, and by early 2009 major cities Ashdod andBeersheba had been hit by Katyusha, WS-1B[8] and Grad rockets.[9] In 2012, Jerusalem and Israel’s commercial center Tel Aviv were targeted with locally made “M-75” and Iranian Fajr-5 rockets, respectively,[10] and in July 2014, the northern city of Haifa was targeted for the first time.[11] A few projectiles have contained white phosphorus.[12][13][14][15][16][17][18]“
Hardly ‘firecrackers’!
Estimates of PTSD among Israeli children living under constant threat of being targetted by these Qassam rockets is estimated at over 50% – yet these long-lasting scars are not included in the injuries incurred by Israeli civilians…
Of course, I pity the Gazan children no less – they suffer greatly and in more ways than the Israeli children…and will continue to suffer as long as Hamas is in power in Gaza and perhaps longer: until religious hatred of ‘the other’ stops destroying their young lives before they have a chance to get started!!!
A week ago today, there was a pro-Israel rally in Ottawa. I would really have liked to have attended, but, alas, I was out of town and out of internet reach, and thus did not get a word of it until after it happened. During this rally, an Israeli mother describes the effect living under constant fear of rocket attacks has had on her young family:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9kJaqlpYvE *
The world will not be a better place until we learn to set all dogmatic beliefs and irrational faiths aside and begin to live like moral human beings!
*sorry – WordPress just updated their ‘look’ and this seems to have broken the embedding mechanism – please, follow the link!
EDIT: More evidence of Hamas rockets being the source of Gazan child casualties is here.
That was a question CodeSlinger asked me.
I replied in a comprehensive manner, explaining my reasoning: but thought it worthy of a post of its own. So, here it is:
CodeSlinger,
I really, really don’t know that I would have them do anything other than what they are doing now.
The Israelis are in a very, very difficult position: the UN is stacked with anti-Semites, the Europeans are afraid to upset their anti-Semitic Islamist colonists (and yes – the Muslims who are true immigrants are integrating as best as they can – it is the Islamists who are entering Europe who are colonists, not immigrants who are preventing them), and the US is more anti-Semitic than ever. It seems that Canada is the only major ally of Israel – and we are small potatoes on the world stage.
So, the Israelis are stuck in a highly unenviable situation.
Israeli civilians are bombarded by rockets fired from Hospitals and UN schools within Gaza. It is only because of their investment in bomb shelters that the Israeli casualties are minimal.
But, the Hamas ruled Gazans have taken billions in ‘humanitarian aid’ and instead of bomb shelters and the equivalent to the iron dome, they built underground tunnels into Israel, often undermining kindergartens as particular targets in order to add shock value to their anticipated attack during a Jewish holiday. They have even worked several hundred Gazan children to death in mining these tunnels…
The Israelis MUST do something to primarily stop these tunnels which are extensive and through which Gazans dressed in Israeli military uniforms have snuck into Isrel and murdered people, secondarily to stop the rocket fire because a civilian population cannot indefinitely function under such conditions.
But, if the Israelis do not take extreme care to do what they are doing – dropping leaflets to warn people, phoning them to let them know an attack is coming, sending a harmless, warning shot against a building with enough time for civilians to evacuate before the real missile which will demolish the building is fired, if they did not call off air strikes when children are in the target area….they would be sinking beneath their own level of civilization!!!
After all, some of these Gazans may have voted in Hamas, but others did not and the children, of course, are innocent. Brainwashed – yes, but killing them would be barbaric. Israelis would be abandoning their own civilized state – not in the past, but now.
But if this were not a sufficient reason, if you wanted a purely pragmatic one, I can supply one of those as well.
Israel cannot survive if the whole world – with the exception of Canada and a few other little nations, like the Czech Republic – refuses to trade with them and completely isolates them.
And every dead Palestinian child – whether killed by Israeli weapons or by Palestinian rockets aimed at Israel and accidentally landing in Gaza – is a source of money for Hamas. So, Hamas will make sure that each and every real and imagined dead Palestinian child makes headlines. (And, yes – they have been caught not only passing off scenes from a horror movie as ‘Palestinian children killed by Israel’ – but also passing the photographs of the Isaeli Fogel children(including a suckling infant) who were murdered by a Palestinian terrorists as they slept in their beds, these too are being passed off as ‘Palestinian children killed by the Israelis’!!!
The Israelis – both Jewish and non-Jewish – may have much going for them, but they are a tiny country surrounded by nation states that share an ideological imperative to destroy Israel as a State AND to kill every Jew alive on this tiny little planet. And if the Jews pack up and colonize another planet, the Islamists will follow them to that planet nd try to murder them there.
Because their desire to kill every Jew in general and destroy Israel in particular is dogmatic, rooted both in the Koran and in the Hadith.
Regarding Israel:
The Islamic prophet Muhammad had sheltered with both Jewish and Christian communities while he was, for reasons not known to history, excommunicated from Mecca. Both the Jewish and the Christian communities excommunicated him in their turn, also for reasons unknown. At least, that is what I was taught at Carleton University many decades ago when I took a course on Arab history.
While with the ‘People of the Book’ (Christians and Muslims), he learned a lot of their mythology. In particular, he latched on to the idea that the Jews had been God’s chosen people – which is why all the Old Testament killing and raping and genocide to get the Jews their ‘promised land’ was OK. God was fine with genocide – as long as the genociders were God’s ‘chosen people’. But, according to Muhammad, the Jews got too comfortable and broke their covenant with God (the whole Jesus thing, money-changers in the Temple and all that stuff) – which is why God punished them by kicking them out of the magical promised land, Israel.
Because, if Israel is ‘the promised land’, then only God’s chosen people get to live there – right?
And, the punishment that Muhammed is said for God to have inflicted on the Jews – to prove they were no longer his favourite people – was to deny them a homeland at all. As in – no matter where the Jews would have set up their new nation state, it would have made Muhammed wrong for saying they will never have a homeland as divine punishment. That is, the moment the Jews have a nation state of their own, Muhammed is proven wrong and all of Islam is proven to be a false religion…
But, setting it up in the promised land is an order of magnitude worse, because that is reserved for God’s favourites. And if the Jews get a homeland there, that means that they ARE God’s favourites…which means the Muslims are not, which means that Islam is not 100% correct….which it claims to be, so if one part is falsified, then all of it is….which is why them Jews have got to be kept out of Israel.
As do the Christians and everybody else.
Because if the Muslims are not God’s favourite people, then their whole religion is proven to be false…
So, now that we know why only the Muslims may live in Israel, we get to the secondary reason: all the Jews, including children, must be killed.
Why?
Because the Koran says that only when all the Jews are exterminated will the day of judgment (and paradise on Earth) take place.
So, you see, the Palestinian Islamists have very logical reasons for not wanting peace with Israel:
1) More dead Palestinian babies = more money for Hamas
2) Permitting Jews in ‘the promised land’ would bestow the title of ‘God’s favourite people’ on them and not Muslims, falsifying Islam
3) Killing all the Jews will bring Paradise to Earth and ought to be accelerated
Thus, Israel has no hope of a peace treaty with Hamas.
If Israel acts as any other country would to protect its people, the international community (weighted by Muslim and Islamist-fearing State votes) will destroy it through isolation.
Therefore, doing what they are doing now – pursuing their objectives while taking every possible precaution to save civilian lives is the only reasonable course of action open to the Israelis.
This is the big difference between the Palestinian terrorist of Hamas and the law-abiding Israeli Military: The Israeli military warns civilians to get out of the region they are about to attack so that non-military people, civilians, will not be caught in the crossfire and injured or even killed…while the Palestinian terrorists of Hamas are telling the innocent Palestinian civilians to stay, so that they will be hurt and killed and they, the terrorists, can use the civilians’ suffering in a propaganda war!
Yes, I have been saying this for years – but now, even the Palestinian Envoy to the UNHRC is daring to speak this truth:
If you still don’t believe that the ancient hatred of anti-Semitism is the same beast in a new cloak, styling itself as ‘anti-Zionism’ and ‘reasonable’ criticism of the country of Israel, just listen to the venom of the ‘anti-Zionists’ and their unbridled Jew-hatred:
While I am not familiar with the Tamarrud movement in Gaza, and thus I cannot comment at length on their goals/actions, I think it is newsworthy that they have made this call and that they are willing to fight against the Muslim Brotherhood incarnation in Gaza, the terrorist organization Hamas.
Let’s keep our eyes on this one!