Monday, December 24, 2012

Newtown Shootings: In Which US Campaign to End the Occupation Massacres the Truth

It's really difficult to comprehend the moral depths to which the anti-Israel movement in this country has sunk lately.  It wasn't enough that supposedly "pro-peace" groups remained silent while Hamas ramped up its missile attacks on Israel, knowing that it would provoke an Israeli response to defend its citizens, and then condemned Israel for taking action.  That's pretty much to be expected.  It wasn't even a surprise that "pro-Palestinian" groups remained silent while Bashar Assad has slaughtered Palestinians (as well as Syrians) in numbers that far exceed those killed in Gaza and in a genuinely indiscriminate fashion. Because we all know that dead Palestinians only matter to these organizations if Israel can be blamed (accurately or not) for their deaths.

But now, while the families in Newtown CT and all over America grieve over the murders of schoolchildren, the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation has sunk to a new level of intellectual cowardice.  Even though Israel supplies a total of 0.31% of the American supply of firearms (h/t to Avi Mayer for researching the statistics), the US Campaign attempted to link Israel's miniscule contribution to that supply to the Newtown shootings  (for the record, Adam Lanza used US, Austrian and German weapons).

And what does Israel's handgun industry have to do with ending the occupation, the ostensible goal of the US Campaign? Nothing, unless you want to exploit a horrific event to smear people who had nothing to do with it.

But that's not the worst of it.  The real ugliness was the attempt to link the deaths of children in Connecticut-- children who were not being cynically exploited as human shields by radical Islamists, children whose playgrounds were not deliberately used as rocket launch sites, children whose homes and neighborhoods were not turned into a staging ground for jihad-- to the tragic deaths of children in Gaza who were placed into harm by those who have a responsibility to protect them.    Nowhere is the US Campaign's e-mail is there a mention, much less any condemnation, of the over 10,000 rockets launched by Hamas, 100% of them aimed at Israeli children.  Nowhere is there any admission that Hamas had been busily arming itself with Iranian long range rockets with the intention of inflicting as many civilian casualties as possible.

Hamas leadership knew that Mahmoud Sadallah, the dead child in the posed picture with Hamas' Ismail Hanieyh and Egyptian prime minister Hesham Qandil was killed by Hamas itself, because one of its rockets fell short and landed in a Gazan neighborhood. We expect this cynical manipulation from an organization whose charter is based on the principle of "itbach el-Yahud" (Arabic for "Kill the Jew").    With this cynically manipulating e-mail, the US Campaign and its advocacy director, Josh Ruebner, have put themselves into the same moral sewer.




1 comment:

  1. Sorry I couldnt find your email address So I think this is the only way i can contact you.
    I just wanted to suggest a an important video for your blog -

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qJ31DyFH2E

    It is a different video because it shows how countries such as Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria are involved in the Palestinian oppression instead of the usual of just blaming Israel. It is very professionally done and most of the information is not seen on the main-stream media at all.
    Please let me know if it would be something you might be interested in posting.
    Thanks for your time!
    -Mike (michaelkupfer@ymail.com)

    ReplyDelete