It’s A Mixed-Up, Crazy World
- 04.17.2008 - 4:59 PMFor the second time in a week, Hamas gunmen have assaulted a transportation hub supplying Gaza. Last week the fuel transfer station at Nachal Oz was attacked. Today Hamas attacked both the Kerem Shalom crossing, through which humanitarian aid is supplied to Gaza, and, once again, the Nachal Oz station.
But wait: aren’t the Israelis the ones who want to stop fuel and humanitarian aid from getting to Gaza? In a strange new twist, Israel and Hamas have reversed their alleged roles: Israel is trying to prevent a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and Hamas is trying to create one.
The reason for these attacks? Hamas needs media attention to survive. The worst thing that could happen to Ismail Haniyah and Khaled Meshaal is for the world to stop paying attention to the disaster they’ve created. So if Hamas can’t convince Israel to shut the lights off with Qassam rockets (which the group routinely aims at the power station inside Israel that supplies Gaza with most of its electricity), or by confiscating half the fuel supplies that do make it into Gaza, it attacks Nachal Oz and Kerem Shalom directly. Anything to advance the false narrative of the Israeli blockade, keep Gaza in the headlines, and demonstrate the efficacy of Hamas’s resistance.
I wonder whether those members of the international community whose consciences are finely attuned to Palestinian suffering will respond to all of this by denouncing Hamas for its collective punishment of Gaza, for attempting to instigate a humanitarian crisis, for endangering the ability of hospitals to remain open, etc. You know: all the things Israel is routinely accused of doing, but which only Hamas ever seems to perpetrate.
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April 17th, 2008 at 5:43 PM
noah,
to your rhetorical question, the answer is no.
finally the arabs have found a weapon to which israel has no answer: the gullible anti-semitic useful idiots of the international community, the same one that treated Hitler as it is now treating jihadis. and it will have the same consequences.
no wonder hamas is pushing with all it’s got. here’s what they and iran have learned from the western reactions in general, and the US ones in particular:
“Offering Israel American extended deterrence is even more futile. Iranian leadership believes that the decadent and feeble Christian world (this is how the West is seen by the Ayatollahs) is ready to sacrifice the Jewish state in order to achieve a truce with the rising Muslim world. Thus, any American threats to prevent a nuclear attack on Israel will not be taken seriously in Teheran.” — Efraim Inbar, Bar Ilan University
For all practical purposes, that sacrifice is a done deal. But then so is the west, because this will whet, not sate the appetite of the jihadis. Europe is already gone anyway.
oao
http://fallofknowledgeandreason.blogspot.com/
April 19th, 2008 at 4:38 AM
[…] Unsere verquere, verrückte Welt 19. April 2008 at 9:38 | In Nahost-Konflikt, Palästinenser, die Welt+Nahost | Tags: Gazastreifen, Hamas Noah Pollak, contentions, Commentary Magazine, 17. April 2008 […]