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[Pre-order a copy of David Horowitz’s next book, America Betrayed, by clicking here. Orders will begin shipping on May 7th.]
Last week Israel mistakenly attacked with missiles a humanitarian convoy in Gaza, killing seven aid workers. As they have done for eight decades, Israel’s international enemies and alleged friends across the world immediately started demonizing Israel and accusing the IDF of intentionally targeting the aid workers. Biden also suggested just that when he said, “Even more tragically, this is not a standalone incident,” adding that the war in Gaza “has been one of the worst in recent memory in terms of how many aid workers have been killed.”
Of course, Biden claims as well that Israel’s alleged callous indifference to the lives and well-being of civilians and aid workers “is a major reason why distributing humanitarian aid in Gaza has been so difficult—because Israel has not done enough to protect aid workers.”
Sadly, such unjust reactions and mendacious slurs against Israel have been unexceptional for decades. And only Israel faces incessant criticism over the mistakes and miscalculations that are the tragic, eternal contingencies of war.
In every battlefield throughout history, fighters have had to face the “fog of war”–– the chaos, uncertainty, unforeseen consequences, mistaken intel, dubious tactics, mediocre leadership, faulty training and discipline, plus terror, panic, and a “thousand shapes of death,” as the Roman poet Vergil described the brutal sack of Troy. These all lead to inadvertently killing one’s own troops or civilians.
Moreover, these grim constants of armed combat are multiplied and intensified in unconventional guerilla wars, especially in the complex landscape of towns and cities, where terrorists like Hamas shelter, spring ambushes, hide explosives, store armaments, use civilians of every age and sex as human shields, and employ humanitarian aid vehicles and ambulances to transport killers.
But over the last century, these historical realities of war have come to be understood as residues from more primitive and savage times, anomalies that modernity fancies can be corrected and mitigated with international laws, multinational covenants, institutions like the Red Cross, self-defeating “rules of engagement,” diplomatic intervention, and the conversion of illiberal autocracies into liberal democracies that acknowledge universal human rights and humanitarian restraints on war-making.
Hence the Nato nations, especially the U.S. and Great Britain, are pressuring Israel to announce a cease-fire, even though Hamas had been clear that it’s not interested, calculating that stopping Israel now, when it is close to finishing the job of destroying a genocidal enemy, is an escape hatch for their survival. Equally short-sighted and incoherent, Western nations are reviving the long-moribund “two-state solution” that the majority of Palestinian Arabs have serially rejected, not least because it is contrary to orthodox Islamic doctrine.
As Michel Calvo wrote for the Gatestone Institute, this long-held foreign policy received wisdom of the West was recently repeated by erstwhile twice ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk, who said it’s “the only way to create lasting peace among the Israelis, the Palestinians, and the Arab countries of the Middle East.” In fact, Calvo points out, “radical Islam does not tolerate the existence of a sovereign non-Islamic entity (such as Israel) on land that once was conquered by Muslims (dar al-Islam, ‘abode of Islam’). As most Palestinians have been creditably straightforward about, there is no place for an Israeli state.”
More despicable is Biden’s suggestions that Israel had intentionally targeted the aid van, or “has not done enough to protect aid workers” and “civilians.” In fact, Israel’s tactic and protocols focused on protecting non-combatants have led to a low civilian-to-terrorist deaths ratio unprecedented in the history of war, especially urban guerilla warfare.
Take, for example, the IDF’s two-week operation at the end of March against Hamas terrorists using the Shifa hospital as a redoubt. In a tweet, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett (@naftalibennett) reported:
– 6,000 civilians were evacuated by the IDF to keep them safe.
– 200 Hamas terrorists were killed.
– 500 Hamas terrorists have been captured.
– *No civilian was killed*. Not one.
Similarly, claims by Israel’s critics that it is fomenting a famine among Gazans, are, as Park MacDougald explains on The Scroll Substack.com, dubious. More telling, MacDougald writes, “According to United Nations and Israeli numbers, Israel is already delivering twice the amount of food into Gaza than what the U.N. World Food Program (WFP) says is necessary to meet Gazan civilians’ needs.”
Moreover, it’s shamefully hypocritical for the West to slander Israel as peculiarly callous about civilian casualties, given its own track-record of lethal blunders during the “war on terror” military operations in the last few decades. Here’s a list from the Elder of Zyon site:
9,000 civilians were killed by the US-led coalition in Iraq between 2003-2005.
In July 2008, the US hit an Afghan wedding party, thinking they were a large number of terrorists. 47 Afghan civilians were killed including the bride. And in November, a similar airstrike at a wedding killed 37 civilians, mostly women and children.
Between 86 and 147 Afghan civilians were killed in another 2009 US airstrike.
In September 2012, a US drone shot at a truck in Yemen, killing 12 civilians, including three children and a pregnant woman.
In 2015, the US fired over 200 shells at a hospital building in Kunduz, Afghanistan, killing 42 patients and staff. Days later, it admitted the mistake, saying that it had intelligence that the Taliban were in the building.
In March 2017 , the US dropped a 500-pound bomb on a building where about 50 people were sheltering in ISIS-controlled Syria.
In 2018, the US Army shot a Hellfire missile at a mother and daughter in Somalia, and when one tried to flee, it hit them again, killing them.
In 2021, a US drone shot and killed 10 civilians in Kabul, including an aid worker and seven children. It wasn’t a split second decision – they watched the vehicle for eight hours without considering that perhaps the people they were watching were innocent.
Last May, the US announced the killing of an Al Qaeda leader – but the victim was really a 56-year old former bricklayer.
As recently as February of this year, US airstrikes in Iraq killed civilians. In nearly all of these cases, the US didn’t admit their mistakes until weeks or months later, if ever, and only when pressured would they release any results of investigations.
And as NRO’s Jim Geraghty pointed out last week about the hypocrisy of Israel’s Western critics, “let’s note that lots of people who can shrug their shoulders at Russia’s egregious ongoing human-rights abuses in occupied Ukraine, or the Chinese government’s concentration camps and attempted genocide of the Uyghurs, or any action by the mullahs in Iran, will get out in the streets and furiously denounce Israel. When the only country that stirs your ire in terms of human rights is the one with a Jewish star on its flag, the rest of us can conclude what really motivates you.”
The point is not to demonize the U.S., as its enemies do, but to remind us of the tragic reality of all wars. Most friendly fire deaths and killings of civilians happen because “someone had blundered,” as Tennyson said in his poem about the suicidal charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean War. And war is eternally subject to what Abraham Lincoln called the “awful arithmetic”: that some people, including the innocent, die now so that more people don’t die later.
Finally, aside from the hypocrisy, Biden’s implied moral equivalence between Israel and Hamas is despicable and morally idiotic. As a liberal democracy, Israel’s government is accountable for its actions. So far, two officers have been dismissed for their actions during the strike, and three reprimanded; an independent investigation has been launched; and “Israel’s Prime Minister, President and Defense Minister have also apologized and announced steps to try to prevent it from happening again,” the Wall Street Journal reported.
Israel also has opened the Eretz border crossing and Ashdod port, and has pledged to allow more aid for Gazans, despite the fact that most aid, as it has for decades, will be stolen by Hamas to feed its terrorist forces, build and repair military infrastructure, or sell to Gazans at inflated prices on the black market.
Nor, needless to say, has Hamas, let alone its patron Iran, ever apologized for its savage violence, rape, and mutilation of Israelis. Instead, it proudly publicizes its depredations with gruesome videos posted on the internet, and openly boasts of its intentions to repeat them until the Jews are annihilated.
Our government’s selective outrage and unjust double standards are a blot on this country’s honor. And Biden’s bullying and threatening of Israel––which seems to be working, as Israel has withdrawn most of its forces from Khan Yunis in southern Gaza––will join the dishonorable abandonments of Saigon, the Bay of Pigs Cuban freedom fighters, and our Afghan partners as the worst betrayals of allies in our history.
When the IDF accidently shot and killed escaping hostages, did the world’s press demonize Israel – of course not. Were there opinion pieces in Western mainstream pressing for a change of government in Israel and that Israel was ripe for a colour revolution – nope! But somehow the rules were flipped when a NGO food delivery convoy was accidently hit and employees (or volunteers) from World Central Kitchen (WCK) died.
The problem with such NGOs is the hubris of its founders and support workers. They have such self-importance, they reek of savior complex, where they believe in such things as war tourism. Where they feel entitled to just intrude in the middle of a raging conflict to provide their services and expect to possess magical properties of being immune from falling bombs and flying bullets!
Also WCK’s motivation is suspect when there are many other places in the world where there’s food insecurity and where there’s no military conflict. But does WCK deliver food to these people – nope! How about other conflict zones where there is dire starvation like in the Sudan, where Africans are being killed and ethnically cleansed off of their land by Muslim Arabs – does WCK deliver food to these Africans – nope!
Yet when WCK takes sides in a conflict and deliberately decides to prioritize its organization’s resources for the Arabs of Gaza, doesn’t this setup RED flags for anyone with a sound mind? I have no doubt, WCK founder José Andrés shares the same motivation of Western raging anti-semite doctors that volunteer to work in Gaza. Just like Andrés, these doctors angrily speak out against Israel, while showcasing injured children. Andrés went on a mouth foaming anti-Israel rant when some of his staff were killed by the IDF.
As the old saying goes, the enemy of my enemy is my friend and that’s the underlying motivation of all Western individuals and NGOs that go into Gaza. They don’t do so to help the Arabs as much as voluntarily go to Gaza in order to reinforce their hatred of Jews and Israel. I hazard a guess, if Hamas wasn’t in conflict with Israel but was instead fighting a war against Egypt, these Westerners wouldn’t be in Gaza!
What is an NGO? A nongovernmental organisation, why are they not called charities? The answer lies in their funding sources which is largely the UN which gets its funding from governments that get their funding from us.
well said Bravo – we were all thinking it
Your 2nd paragraph was spot on!
Those pricks are there aid & abet the enemy, all the while embellishing for themselves a “war record”.
I have zero respect for those narcissistic low-lifes & glad they found out what happens when they play humanitarian hero to feed Hamas’s support base.
(80%+ civilians support Hamas. Hence, the civilian population IS Hamas.)
Ive read that several in that aid convoy were British ex military and hired to be there by a security company. In other words, not your usual bleeding heart aid worker. It was said they were there to gather intell for Israel. But, given UK recent behavior toward Israel. London streets brimming with loud Jew hate and Obama’s recent visit to 10 Downing street, I have to wonder if British special ops guys were there, which side were they really there for?
I don’t know what is real or what is conjecture. But maybe this wasn’t a mistake but a necessary act in a hostile world war against the Jewish nation.
Notice no aid, except Jewish aid, for people fleeing Northern Israel and survivors of the massacre.
How can the killing of the seven aid workers ,Westerners except for the interpreter, be an ”accident” when we know they were in contact with the Isaeli army even as they were being killed by a drone. Jose Andrés, the founder of WCK, had formerly been feeding the Israeli army,had said it was false that Israel was doing a genocide, and is a close friend of Biden.
It was done so WCK would cancel its food relief in Gaza.WCK is the doordash of famine relief.All the other Western famine relief organizations also canceled their deliveries.No mistake or accident,as José Andrés said,the targeting was ”deliberate”.
José Andrés is a professional,all had been approved of in advanced,all the people verified in advance,even at the last moment,with the Israeli army. There was no Hamas operative there.
It is amazing to me how this purposeful killing of civilians can be inverted. The writer of this article has no shame.
What has not been mentioned was that this aid convoy was targeted and bombed 3 separate times, kilometers apart. Once might be considered an accident, two times is suspect, but three times is on purpose.
Andres has no evidence the targeting was a deliberate attack on aid workers. He’s obviously upset it was “his people”, and it only takes a touch of latent antisemitism, a belief that “Jews” do such things, to generate a new blood libel.
The evidence is they were in constant contact with the Israeli army all the way,the route had been planned and approved,the time of departure had been approved ,who would be in it. As soon as the first attack occurred,it was communicated by WCK to the Israeli army,and the one in charge of the drone should have stopped.
WCK was about to deliver 300 or 400 tons of food to Gaza and had already delivered some of it,its ships had sailed from Cyprus. Now no more food,
There is what is called ”distinction”.Distinction is a principle under international humanitarian law governing the legal use of force in an armed conflict, whereby belligerents must distinguish between combatants and protected civilians.
WCK gave all the information proving all the 7 people killed were non-combatants.
Doesn’t this information make you suspicious that, if it wasn’t an accident, there was something going on that we don’t know about? Who would stand to gain from such a strike? The only obvious beneficiaries seem to me to be the UNRWA, if other aid agencies are deterred from going into the area, so that only they can (literally) deliver the goods.
Bruce, we can continue to put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still sadly a pig. We can show over and over again the hypocrisy of world countries who have no problem killing civilians. But the fact remains they hate Jews, and until American Jews stand up together and say no more will we support you without getting in return like everyone else for our only Jewish country in the world to stop the betrayal and abandonment at the U.N. refuse to allow Hamas to survive, and make sure when Iran attacks either with a proxy or itself that while Israel has never once asked for a foreign soldier to come to our aid, only that Military hardware will be available without restriction.
Historically the percentage of friendly fire casualties has been surprisingly high. Hence training to avoid such is needed.
Seems that at least 1/3 of the ‘casualties’ don’t exist
https://www.israellycool.com/2024/04/10/hamas-admit-their-casualty-statistics-are-inaccurate/
Israel has the lowest noncombatant to combatant ratio in the history of modern warfare in the entire world
If I may, it is Biden and his maladministration who are a blot on this nation’s honor. The circumstances of the droning of the WCK trucks are a lot more complicated than portrayed by the administration and our garbage “news media,” although I repeat myself. The Jerusalem Post ran a comprehensive report on the strike. I would say that, under the circumstances, it is completely understandable and, although a mistake, is unworthy of the purposes to which it has been put by the Biden regime, purely for his domestic political purposes.
The biggest problem here is… the world does NOT understand the issues of the Middle East and Israel…
To put it in perspective…
satanic islam is NOT a Abrahamic religion !!! Abraham did NOT worship the fake god allah !!!
the fake god allah is NOT the same One True God of Abraham !!!
2ndly…
satanic worshiping muslims believe they will get all sorts of rewards in paradise by dying while killing Jews & Christians… !!!
These satanic worshiping muslims are taught to die as martyrs killing other humans in order to dominate the world with satanic islam !!!
You cannot stop people who want to die for rewards !!! Who believe they must kill everyone that isn’t a muslim !!! In order to force the world under satanic islam…
Until the world understands what satanic islam’s goals are… it’ll only get worse…
Support Israel !!!
“Friendly Fire” has happened throughout history…even within the US military.
When it is COMPOUNDED by a BARBARIC eneny that DELIBERATELY puts innocents
in harms way there is no choice but to continue an attack.
Any other response lets the savage barbarians survive and continue their murderous
aggression.
In the case of Hamas and Israel the reader can assign the roles.
Correct… and sadly… the Women and Children will only breed more and more of these satanic islamic savages…
Thus… they will also have to be exterminated… eliminated… removed… killed…
It’s not Israel’s fault… it’s the world’s fault for not educating these satanic worshiping muslims !!!
Israel began it’s existence in 1922… NOT 1948 !!! And ever since then… the satanic worshiping muslims have broken peace Treaty after peace Treaty !!!
Enough is enough !!! Wipe every satanic worshiping islamic FAKE Palestinian out to sea !!!
Has it occurred to anyone that there would be no need for UNRWA, the WCK or any other NGO aid organizations in the Gaza Strip if the Palestinians would spend there time building their society, growing food and providing a better life for themselves and their children instead of spending all of their time and money slaughtering Jews, building tunnels and trying to destroy Israel?
And also if they did not divert taxes to terrorism. In every other country, the taxes of the citizens pay for governmental activity. In Gaza, governmental services are carried out by the UNRWA, financed by jizya from the rest of the world – but it isn’t because the Gazans don’t or can’t pay taxes, it is because that money is misappropriated. As far as I can see, the role of a refugee agency ceases as soon as the refugee starts paying taxes – i.e., he gets a job in which the wage is sufficiently in excess of subsistence level to be taxable. OK, there might be a period of tapering off help – but a good refugee agency seeks its own redundancy in any given situation, just as the UNHCR does.
The war in Gaza is unique because the enemy here, Hamas, has deliberately used human shields and located all their troops and weapons in humanitarian facilities such as hospitals and schools. The West has never fought an enemy that deliberately set out to sacrifice as many of their own civilians as possible. Yet nobody blames Hamas for all the suffering in Gaza. The truth is that Hamas is 100% responsible for all the deaths and destruction in Gaza, and Israel should be given the Nobel peace prize for their efforts to save the civilian population of an enemy dedicated to the genocide of Israel. Israel is fighting a war of self-defense, pure and simple.
Any of these hyperventilating pricks condemn Sleepy Joe’s hit on those aid workers (majority of which were children) in Afghanistan?
(Only a few mentions made, then flushed down the memory hole.)
To be fair to Sleazy Joe, he didn’t bomb those aid workers intentionally . . . just like the IDF didn’t intentionally bomb those narcissists feeding the enemy.
In Sleepy’s case, however, his friendly-fire resulted as a direct result of gross incompetence; made worse by the self-serving abandonment of Afghanistan.
Israel is God’s doing. It is therefore a spritual battleground for good and evil.
Ephesians 6:12 alludes to this: “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”
The flesh and blood are real enough, but they are the collateral damage. The interesting thing is where allegiances lie. Most of the world seems to be facilitating the present darkness by giving control over to the spiritual forces of evil and making what they think is a moral stand against Israel. Israel’s history is determined by God not by counterfeits like Allah. The current war, commonly called the War of Israel against Hamas is a deliberate misrepresentation to hide the fact that is really about Israel’s and the free world’s war against the forces of Islam. So far, the ‘free world’ is too naive to understand that Israel stands between them and Islamic world conquest through various forms of jihad. It’s a race. The evil forces of Islam started long ago. So far Israel is freedom’s only contender. The rest of the free world seems to be asleep or too afraid to wake up from comfortable slumber.
Agree. Satan bitterly resents the Jews because, from Abraham right down to Mary’s “Be it unto me”, they have been the means of God’s ingress into Satan’s usurped territory. The Holocaust occurred because Satan was determined that, if he couldn’t stop Israel from being established (with all that that implied in terms of end times prophecy) he would ensure that there would be no Jews to live there.
It is quite true that Hamas does not want a ceasefire. What they want is surrender – moral if not strategic. I would guess that there is a document somewhere with a list of demands that they can’t quite bring to the table yet, but it probably includes the following:
1. Israel to acknowledge that Hamas are freedom fighters, that their action on October 7th was legitimate resistance, and that no military response was warranted.
2. Israel to recognise that its own existence is not legitimate, that the Arabs are the only heirs of the land “from the River to the Sea”, and that massive compensation is warranted for the 75 years of its existence.
3. Israel to surrender all of its assets in payment of said compensation, and deliver all of its women to Hamas for their use and legitimate trade.
4. All male Israelis to leave, within a set period, or else convert to Islam.
5. Claims that captives from 7/10 are anything other than the legitimate property of their captors must cease.
6. The UN, EU, NATO, US, UK etc to apologise for having recognised Israel and to pay compensation for their actions in depriving the Arabs of land to which they, and they only, are entitled.
As nonsensical as this list is – Hamas has made massive strides in getting its narrative accepted by the rest of the world. And, in the end, a victory in the propaganda war may trump their military defeat.