Saturday, June 12, 2010

Beyond Bigotry


Clifford D. May

Hamas wants a “final solution.” Its supporters must know that.


Israel is at war, and if Israel were to be defeated, much of the world would not shed wet tears. What would happen after such a defeat? No one can seriously doubt that Hamas has genocidal intentions. Abdallah Jarbu, Hamas’s deputy minister of religion, recently asserted that Jews “want to present themselves to the world as if they have rights, but, in fact, they are foreign bacteria — a microbe unparalleled in the world.” Jarbu thien offered this prayer: “May He annihilate this filthy people who have neither religion nor conscience.”

Jarbu is restating what Hamas’s Iranian sponsors have been saying for years. Kayhan, the newspaper that speaks for Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, recently called Israel a “cancerous tumor” that must be excised from “the Islamic Middle East.” The goal, Kayhan added, must be Israel’s “total annihilation from the political geography of the region.”

One of the flotilla’s organizers, Greta Berlin, a 68-year-old American with a background in theater and communications, was candid enough to acknowledge that the flotilla’s primary purpose was not to deliver aid but to stop Israel from inspecting cargo heading for Gaza. Israel does that in order to reduce the number of missiles, explosives, and other weapons Hamas receives. In other words, Berlin wants to increase Hamas’s ability to wage war against Israel — knowing that more Israelis and more Palestinians will be killed as a result. “War is peace,” George Orwell wrote in 1984. In 2010, war activists are peace activists. Actually, it’s worse: Even arms smugglers are peace activists — so long as they are smuggling arms to be used to murder Israelis.

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