Andrew L. Urban
As Israel movies in on the last of the Hamas terrorists embedded among the unarmed permanent and temporary residents in Rafah, the US and its echo in Australia, are demanding that Israel hold off. That Israel not endanger those unarmed Palestinians. That naïve and unrealistic political position ignores reality about those Palestinians.
The main difference between a Hamas terrorist and most other Gaza residents is that the former carries a gun, a grenade, a sword. Curb your outrage; let me explain.
Hamas was elected to run Gaza, albeit back in January 2006. According to a recent (March 2024) survey by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research, 71% of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank back the October 7 massacres. Support for atrocities increased from 57% to 71% in Gaza in the past three months and dipped from 82% to 71% in the West Bank.
They don’t mind the baby decapitations, the rapes, the vicious murders, the boastful carnage of October 7. They rather like all that. So much for the “innocent population”.
Other questions in the survey ask who Palestinians would vote for if new parliament elections were held today. A plurality — 30% — say Hamas, followed by 14% for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah movement, which was just below the 15% for none of the above. Six percent of respondents say they’ll back third parties while 36% won’t vote.
Naïve wringing of hands at the fate of Gazan lives whose safety was never a concern for their rulers is a sign of not just moral confusion but moral bankruptcy. It is Hamas who have made the Palestinians of Gaza pay – willingly it would seem – for their wild-eyed fantasies of the destruction of Israel. It is Hamas who confiscate the food and medical supplies to build their own underground shelters. It is Hamas who would see their compatriots killed to draw condemnation on Israel, rather than save them.
Clearly, the Palestinians of Gaza hate jews more than they love life – as many have often said.
It is mostly the rest of the world that worries about their safety as Israel closes in on Rafah and the last remaining battalions of Hamas, smuggling themselves among the unarmed population, hiding in the tunnel network paid for with billions in aid dollars from the West. They don’t mind about the unarmed population being harmed or killed during the Israeli offensive. They celebrate it because it brings uninformed, misplaced opprobrium on Israel. Among the world-wide condemnation of Israel’s response to the barbarity of the Hamas attacks, the sound of tut-tutting about the Hamas atrocities is whispered, muttered, qualified or simply silenced.
Alarmingly, US President Joe Biden, along with the craven Australian political leadership (I use that word referring only to official position not to actual characteristic) and others in the ever-cowering West, demand Israel avoid the collateral damage of the war and save the lives of the Gazans who Hamas will simply discard as their own collateral damage.
‘infantada’
It is this sort of naïve virtue signalling from a distance that reveals the hollow sensibilities and political self-serving politicians with an eye on the composition of their local electorate. Certainly in Australia, as we can see with Western Sydney electorates calling the political tune. They are joined by what we might call the ‘infantada’, in which Macquarie University academic Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah participated in a protest alongside children as young as five who chanted “intifada” in their cute, innocent little voices, like a scene from a horror movie where innocents are actually evil.
But the worst aspect of all this is that the weakness it displays, encourages the West’s enemies to encroach on our democracies, to infiltrate tolerant communities and to prepare for a wider war to empower Islamist terror.
A video surfaced in late April of what appeared to be masked pro-Palestinian protesters outside of Columbia University’s gates shouting, “The 7th of October is going to be every day for you,” at Jewish students. It’s not clear whether those shouting were affiliated with the university. In another report on Fox News, police said of 17 arrested in one group, 14 were not students.
In Gaza, many ‘innocent civilians’ are not so innocent.