Daniel On Far Right! A List of Palestinian Wanton Killings Beginning in 1948! Liberals Live In Fantasy Land

From Daniel:  "Exhausted out of my mind but a great first day. "

"Dropping off supplies to a Druze Arab unit actively and happily defending the 'apartheid state.' "


Daniel second from left
Daniel 6th from right!





" Daniel on' far right' - like father like son!








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(See 1 below)
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Click on:  http://tinyurl.com/a8k6noo

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First, Obama abandoned Britain by returning Churchill's stature, then he abandoned America in Egypt and now he has abandoned Israel.  Has Obama switched?  Glick thinks so! (See 2 and 2a below.)

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This from one of my favorite liberals and fellow memo readers! 

http://www.cfr.org/peace-conflict-and-human-rights/sunni-shia-divide/p33176#!/?cid=dnb_callout-infoguide-sunni_shia_divide-072314

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Israel bends over backwards when it comes to fighting terrorists.

Having spent a little time in the military and having spoken with some who have spent much of their life in action they all tell me what Israel does is over and above. (See 3 and 3a below.)
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Truth continues to elude Liberals! (See 4 below.)
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Dick

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1)This is what a guy wrote on Facebook:

Just which Palestinians are you all talking about? The Palestinians who, in 1948, fled their homes to neighboring countries when the Arab world attacked Israel and told the Palestinians they can return after Israel is destroyed?

Or the Palestinians who lived in the West Bank under Jordanian (then Transjordan) occupation and annexation when Jordan attacked Israel in 1967 and lost both the war and the West Bank to Israel?

Or the Palestinians who, while living in Jordan in the 1970s, envisioned Jordan becoming their Palestinian state and started a civil war where King Hussein ultimately killed thousands of Palestinians and forcibly removed many from of his country, making them refugees?

Or the Palestinians who entered the Olympic Village in Munich, Germany, and murdered 11 Israeli athletes?

Or the Palestinians who infiltrated a high school in Ma'alot, Israel, took 102 students hostage, injured 50 and murdered 22?

Or the Palestinians who, among others, hijacked an Air France jetliner to Entebbe, Uganda, and held hostage more than 100 Israelis?

Or the Palestinians who were exiled from Jordan to a peaceful Lebanon and started a civil war that cost more than 120,000 lives and created more refugees, with many exiled from Lebanon?

Or the Palestinians who hijacked the Achille Lauro ocean liner and shot, murdered and threw overboard Leon Klinghoffer, a 69-year-old Jewish American paraplegic in a wheelchair?

Or the Palestinians in the Abu Nidal Organization who murdered an estimated 600 Palestinians from rival factions?

Or the Palestinians who wrote and live by the Hamas Charter that states, among other things, "… Israel will rise and will remain erect until Islam eliminates it as it had eliminated its predecessors"?

Or the Palestinians who enticed young and susceptible Palestinians to become suicide bombers with the promise that when they murder Israelis, they'll receive rich rewards in the afterlife and financial security for their families?

Or the thousands of Palestinians in Ramallah who cheered as the bodies of two Israeli soldiers were thrown from a second story window after they were tortured and hacked to death?

Or the Palestinians who honored a suicide bomber with a military funeral for murdering 15 people (including seven children and five from one family) at the Sbarro pizza café in Jerusalem?

Or the thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza captured on video cheering as two airliners purposely crashed into the Twin Towers on 9/11?

Or the Palestinian families who received $25,000 from Saddam Hussein for their children's "successful" suicide bombings?

Or a Palestinian like Yasser Arafat (although he was Egyptian born), who became a billionaire by stealing money from other Palestinians as they lived in squalor?

Or the Qatari born and Egyptian-raised Omar Barghouti (who refers to himself as a Palestinian), who co-founded the boycott, divestment, and [including educational] sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel while getting his doctorate at an Israeli university?

Or the Palestinians from Hamas (a group the U.S. and other countries label a terrorist organization) who, when they took control of Gaza, shot several hundred Fatah Palestinians in the legs, purposely crippling them for life?

Or the more than 100 Palestinians from Fatah crippled by Palestinians from Hamas who, at the confidential request from Mahmoud Abbas to Shimon Peres, received new legs and rehabilitation at a medical center in Israel

Or the two Palestinians who proudly confessed to the knife attack and murder of five members of the Fogel family, including the father, mother, and three of their six children, ages 11, 4 and 3 months?

Or the Palestinian mother, Raida Abu-Mustaffa, whose baby's life was saved through funding and a rare heart operation by a Jewish doctor at an Israeli hospital, yet the mother dreamed that her daughter would one day become a martyr?

Or the gay Palestinian man who, while living in Tel Aviv (considered one of the gay-friendliest cities in the world), pleaded with Israel's high court not to be deported to the West Bank because it would lead to persecution by his family and his detention, torture and death by Palestinian security forces?

Or the Palestinians in the West Bank who, in 2013, committed 27 honor killings against their wives, sisters and daughters?

Or the Palestinians who, since childhood, have been educated by books and newspapers that claim Jews are sub-human, satanic and animals, and that Israel is the root of all of their problems?

Or the Palestinians who grew up in refugee camps while Saudi Arabia, Libya, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Kuwait and Brunei became some of the wealthiest countries in world, gave virtually nothing to help the Palestinians and have purposely kept them in refugee camps as political tools since 1948?

Or the Palestinians who, for decades, promoted terrorism against Israel forcing Israel to build a security wall (that virtually ended all suicide bombings) and now call it the Apartheid Wall?

Or the Palestinians who, after Israel voluntarily withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005, giving the Palestinians land and self-determination, have fired more than 11,000 rockets at Israel, killing Israelis and causing thousands of injuries?

Or the Palestinians who, since the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993, have committed thousands of terrorist acts (not including rocket attacks from Gaza), murdering 1,472 Israelis?

Or the Palestinians from Hamas who kidnapped and murdered three Jewish teenage yeshiva (Torah study) students?

Or the Palestinians who denounced Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas because he condemned the kidnapping and murder of the three Jewish teens?

Or the Palestinian mother of Abu Aysha (one of the suspected murderers of the three Israeli teens) who said if he truly did it … "I'll be proud of him till my final day. … I raised my children on the knees of the [Islamic] religion … their goal is to bring the victory of Islam"?

And you want Israel to stop the bloodshed"?

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2)-   Under Obama, America has switched sides

By Caroline B. Glick

Americans need to be alarmed by what Obama's actions on behalf of Hamas reveal about the general direction of American Middle East policy under his leadership.

When US President Barack Obama phoned Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Sunday night, in the middle of a security cabinet meeting, he ended any remaining doubt regarding his policy toward Israel and Hamas.

Obama called Netanyahu while the premier was conferring with his senior ministers about how to proceed in Gaza. Some ministers counseled that Israel should continue to limit our forces to specific pinpoint operations aimed at destroying the tunnels of death that Hamas has dug throughout Gaza and into Israeli territory.

Others argued that the only way to truly destroy the tunnels, and keep them destroyed, is for Israel to retake control over the Gaza Strip.

No ministers were recommending that Israel end its operations in Gaza completely. The longer our soldiers fight, the more we learn about the vast dimensions of the Hamas's terror arsenal, and about the Muslim Brotherhood group's plans and strategy for using it to destabilize, demoralize and ultimately destroy Israeli society.

The IDF's discovery of Hamas's Rosh Hashana plot was the last straw for any Israeli leftists still harboring fantasies about picking up our marbles and going home. Hamas's plan to use its tunnels to send hundreds of terrorists into multiple Israeli border communities simultaneously and carry out a massacre of unprecedented scope, replete with the abduction of hostages to Gaza, was the rude awakening the Left had avoided since it pushed for Israel's 2005 withdrawal from Gaza.

In other words, in their discussion Sunday night, Netanyahu and his ministers were without illusions about the gravity of the situation and the imperative of winning — however defined.

But then the telephone rang. And Obama told Netanyahu that Israel must lose. He wants an unconditional "humanitarian" cease-fire that will lead to a permanent one.

And he wants it now.

In contrast, the Obama administration is insisting on concluding a cease-fire immediately.

And by the way, the eventual terms of that cease-fire must include opening Hamas-controlled Gaza's borders with Egypt and Israel and ending Israel's maritime blockade of the Gaza coast. That is, the cease-fire must allow Hamas to rebuild its arsenal of death and destruction quickly, with US political and financial support.

Until Obama made the call, there was lingering doubt among some Israelis regarding his intentions. Some thought that US Secretary of State John Kerry might have been acting of his own accord last Friday night when he tried to force Israel to accept Hamas's cease-fire terms.

But then Obama made his phone call. And all doubts were dispelled.

Kerry is just a loyal steward of Obama's foreign policy.

Obama is siding with Hamas, and its Muslim Brotherhood patrons in Qatar and Turkey, against Israel, and its Sunni Arab supporters — Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates.

It is Obama who demands that Hamas have open borders so it can resupply, and receive billions of dollars — starting with an immediate cash injection of $47 million from US taxpayers — so it can pay North Korea for more missiles and import building materials to reconstruct its tunnels.

The fact that the US's current preference for genocidal, Jew-hating jihadists over the only liberal, pro-American, stable US ally in the Middle East is a White House position, rather than that of a rogue Secretary of State was actually exposed even before Obama's phone call.

Sunday CNN's Candy Crowley interviewed Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes. She asked him what the administration thinks Israel can do to prevent civilians from being killed in Gaza beyond what it is already doing. Rhodes replied, "I think you can always do more."

In other words, Rhodes said that no matter what precautions Israel takes to try to minimize Palestinian civilian deaths in Gaza, the administration will never be satisfied. The White House will never acknowledge that Israel is in the right, or that it is fighting a moral war against a barbaric foe. And since the administration will never be satisfied, Israel can expect to be condemned by various UN bodies, including the Security Council, because no matter what it does to try to earn the support of the administration, it will never receive such support.

The discovery that the Obama administration is entirely in Hamas's corner hit all of Israel hard. But it hit the Left the hardest. Few on the Right, which recognized Obama's hostility from the outset of his presidency, were surprised.

As for political leaders, the government cannot risk giving the administration justification for its anti-Israel policies, so senior ministers have all said nothing.

Consequently, the harshest criticisms of the administration's pro-Hamas position were heard from quarters where rarely a peep of criticism for Obama has been heard.

The Israeli Left went ballistic.

Haaretz, the far-left broadsheet that has seldom taken issue with even the harshest rejections of Israel's rights, went bananas after its reporter Barak Ravid received the details of Kerry's cease-fire agreement. As Ravid put it, Kerry's document, "might as well have been penned by Khaled Mashaal. It was everything Hamas could have hoped for."

Ravid continued, "What Kerry's draft spells for the internal Palestinian political arena is even direr: It crowns Hamas and issues Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas with a death warrant."

And that is really the crux of the issue. The crowd at Haaretz is far more wedded to the PLO and Mahmoud Abbas than it is to the government of Israel. And the administration's support for Hamas exposed the PLO as an irrelevance.

As the paper's Amos Harel wrote the next day, Kerry's pro-Hamas behavior convinced the Egyptians and other actors that the administration is "continuing its secret love affairs with the Muslim Brotherhood in the region."

The Left understands that the administration's behavior has destroyed it.

Leftists can no longer say that Israeli territorial withdrawals will win it international support.

They can no longer say that Israel will receive US support if it places the security of Palestinian civilians above the security of its own civilians and military forces.

They can no longer say that the PLO is the answer.

The Israeli Left has been Obama's ace in the hole since he first ran for office, fresh from the pews in Jeremiah Wright's anti-Semitic church. They were the grease in the wheels that legitimized the administration's anti-Israel pressure group J Street. They were the ones who could be counted on to tell the US media and the American Jews that Netanyahu is to blame for Obama's hostility.

Yet, rather than backtrack, and try to save the Israeli Left, the administration doubled down on Monday, releasing a series of statements condemning the Israeli media's condemnations of Kerry's pro-Hamas position.

By Monday afternoon, the administration went so far as to say that by criticizing Kerry, Israel's media were endangering their country's alliance with the US.

In other words, through his actions, Obama demonstrated that his "love affairs with the Muslim Brotherhood in the region," are so central to his foreign policy calculations that he is willing to destroy the Israeli Left in order to strengthen the Brotherhood.

And this leads us to the larger point about Obama's foreign policy, which his Sunday night telephone call to Netanyahu revealed. As rattled as Israelis are over Obama's decision to support Hamas against Israel, Netanyahu made clear in his remarks Monday night that Israel has no choice but to keep fighting until we defeat this barbaric enemy.

Netanyahu didn't mention Obama, but it was obvious that he was respectfully refusing to hand Israel's head on a platter to Hamas's friend in the White House.

And while it is hard for Israel to ignore Obama, it is impossible for Americans to ignore him. He runs their foreign policy.

Americans are the ones who need to be most alarmed by what Obama's actions on behalf of Hamas reveal about the general direction of American Middle East policy under his leadership.

For the past five years, Americans from all quarters have concluded that the manifold failures of Obama's Middle East policies — from Iraq to Iran, Libya, Afghanistan, Egypt, Syria, Israel, the Palestinian Authority and beyond — owe to a combination of Obama's personal disinterest in foreign affairs and his presumed preference for withdrawal and isolationism over engagement.

Obama himself has often encouraged this perception with his endless golf games and his talk about fighting "the war at home."

Obama's open, public engagement in Hamas's war against Israel shows that the popular assessment is wrong.

Obama is as involved in the Middle East as all of his immediate predecessors were. He is personally leading US policy on every front. Kerry is not an independent actor.

The problem is that in every war, in every conflict and in every contest of wills that has occurred in the Middle East since Obama took office, he has sided with Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood, against America's allies.

Under Obama, America has switched sides.

2a )  Obama the Blamethrower

By Ed Lasky

Is Obama the most pathetic president in American history? That was a rhetorical question.

Barack Obama promised so much: to heal our racial divisions, slice the deficit, provide health care that was cheaper, more widely available and that would not add one dime to the deficit.  More grandly, he promised to stop the rise of the oceans and heal the planet. He was so cool. He was transcendent –an enlightened being -- a “Lightworker” and a “sort of God.”

Yes…well...how did all that work out?

Critics have judged him by his own words and he has been found wanting. The meaningless chant “Yes We Can,” hypnotic to so many during the Obama hysteria, now reads like a high school motivation poster curling at the edges because actually he can’t do (fill  in the blank).

The cascade of failures are too numerous to list but a good proxy for all of them is the judgment of Americans.  

They consider himincompetent; think he is untrustworthy  and lies about major issues, and that he cannot be trusted to make the right decisions. People increasingly are blaming him for the border crisis, the civil war in Iraq, the IRS scandal, our poor standing in the world and much more (and there are still over two years to go).

A recent Quinnipiac poll found Obama is regarded as the worst president since World War Two. And now blame him for the sorry state of the nation.  This is divine justice, since he has since the early days of his presidency been blaming others for his mistakes and record of incompetence.  Indeed, no president has ever dodged responsibility for his own failings as has Obama. But the ruse can only last so long and the expiration date has been reached.

Obama can already be considered a failure as a president.

So as the Obama presidency (along with America and much of the Free World) spirals down the drain, how has he responded? Has he stepped up his work habits?  Perish the thought! He has done the exact opposite.

Recently, there have been a spate of reports that have noted he has all but checked out of the Oval Office, as Matt Lewis writes in The Telegraph (maybe preparing for this mansion in this ritzy Southern California enclave of the rich and famous).

 But he checked out long ago. Even liberal Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus astutely commented years ago that Obama was consistently AWOL (Obama’s Where’s Waldo Presidency) and consistently passive and missing in action when work was calling (see also my 2013 column “ Barack Obama, Derelict). Charles Krauthammer commented on the Vacant Presidency.

There is no there, there; but there never was.

So how does Barack Obama deal with his failure as a president?

There is denial and lying. Hence, his press secretary announced just recently that the world is more tranquil because Obama is president. Does it feel tranquil? Syria, Iraq, Ukraine, Afghanistan, all disintegrating as the blood flows. Al Qaeda controls more territory than ever before. Even former Secretary of StateMadeleine Albright says the world is a mess.

American borders are more secure than ever before, according to the White House. Is it really?

 Obamacare is working exactly as it should, according to Barack Obama. There isnot a smidgen of corruption at the IRS.

One could list a litany of false self-congratulatory claims made by Barack Obama because the Don’t Worry, Be Happy President lives in a Wonderland and thinks he can tell Americans stories they will swallow since Americans are stupid.

There are of course many tricks up Obama’s sleeve: distraction (all those pivots); stonewalling until the media and people lose interest; sending out the tweets; hashtag this or that issue -- to satisfy the superficial; claim scandals are phony scandals whipped up in Washington; the stifling of criticism; claims of ignorance until the media alerts him to a problem (a lie based on his recent boast that he doesn’t watch the news because “whatever they are reporting about, I usually know”).

However, the strategy that makes him the most pathetic president in history is the blamethrowing.

The Lightworker has become the Blamethrower.

No president has so routinely engaged in the canards, the whiny scapegoating, the name-calling and the petulant insults that Barack Obama has for years. He always blames others for problems he has created. Obama’s blamethrowing began very early in his presidency and has proceeded apace with increasing intensity as his failures multiply.

That is juvenile; that is pathetic; that is not presidential.

In the real world he would have been fired long ago. No one has confidence in someone who constantly blames others for his mistakes. As John Boehnerplaintively asked , “When is Obama going to take responsibility for something?” The same question has been asked many times over the years.

Barack Obama has been blamethrowing so many straw men over the years it has been hard to collate all the burning they have suffered. As Scott Johnson of Powerline wittily writes in the Weekly Standard, calling his claims straw men is an insult to straw men everywhere.

But for Obama all his mistakes are someone else’s fault. And he always imputes bad motives to them.

Among the targets of his blamethrowing: greedy doctors; greedy insurance companies; greedy one-percenters; greedy fat cats; greedy banks; and  greedy businessmen (who aren’t responsible for their own success).

The IRS scandal? Blame a couple of low-level employees in Cincinnati.

The VA scandal? Obama responds by making a scapegoat of the man he selected to head the agency, though Obama had been warned for years of deep-rotted problems.

Then there is always George Bush. As Ira Stoll wrote recently:

On foreign policy as on the economy, President Obama and his team kept blaming George W. Bush for problems so often and for so long to the point that it became a laugh line for Wall Street Journal columnist James Taranto.

It’s not funny, though, when a president does not man up and instead blames a predecessor for his problems. Presidents, good ones anyway, do not whine about past presidents.

Bad economic numbers? Blame Mother Nature: bad winters -- and that has been every winter of the Obama presidency, according to the White House -- are blamed for a weak economy; Hurricane Sandy gets the same treatment meted out. Then it was the Arab Spring; then it was economic upheaval in Europe-all derailed the oft-predicted and never-happened Summer Recovery. No president has ever passed the buck like this one..

Even ATMs get some blame. Why should they be immune from his blamethrowing?

A stalled climate change agenda? Blame skeptics  who are derided as members of the Flat Earth Society who believe the moon is made of cheese.  His inability to work with others –or just work, for that matter -- is the fault of their stupidity.

Of course, Obama blames conservative media for his failures…over and over . But Obama now blames all the media for not spreading all the good news about his accomplishments

The Supreme Court has been blamethrown  -- repeatedly and disgracefully (especially his lambasting of them at the 2010 State of the Union address for its Citizens United decision  affirming the First Amendment) -- for the times it has defended the Constitution from Obama’s depredations.

Slow progress of his agenda? Poor job numbers?  Mock and blame Republicans as people who would make meanwhiches and stinkburgers, who hate Hispanics so much they would build a moat on the US-Mexican border and fill it with alligators to eat them as they cross the border (indeed, he blames Republicans for the border crisis); who don’t do their work; are racists and misogynists ; andobstructionists who stand in his way.  They are people who have blocked every serious idea to strengthen the middle class.

Republicans “have no agenda other than making government not work.”

Obama:

And so they obstruct, and they obfuscate, and they bamboozle, and they sometimes don't tell exactly what's true--that was a euphemism.

Obama says that whenever things go wrong, it is the fault of Republicans in Congress, writes Victor Davis Hanson. The blamethrowing never stops -- and never will.

Obama has even blamed our Founding Fathers and the Constitution for his failing presidency. George Washington University law school professor Jonathan Turleytook Obama to task for blaming the Constitution for blocking his agenda. Obama finds fault with each state being accorded two senators:

“Obviously, the nature of the Senate means that California has the same number of Senate seats as Wyoming. That puts us at a disadvantage.”

Turley writes, “the Constitutional structure was given to us by the Framers and has served us well. It has certainly served us better than our leaders.

In other words, what is “obvious,” Mr. President, is that it is not the Constitution that is the problem.”

Finally, Obama blames you for his mistakes. Americans are not only poor listeners who cannot comprehend the story he is trying to tell them but have disappointed him in so many ways.

Barack Obama does not hold Americans in high esteem.  We are bitter people that cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them, gripped by xenophobia; we are certainly not exceptional; we are a fearful and frustrated people who listen to and are controlled by Fox News and Rush Limbaugh; we were reluctant to vote for him because his face did not look like the faces on dollar bills and he had a funny name; Americans have gotten “soft” and “lazy” and are consuming way too many resources compared to people in other nations. Barack Obama blames us for his failing presidency.

Obama’s incessant Blamethrowing displays weakness that our adversaries and enemies are exploiting all over the world.

As Obama’s presidency becomes even more of a failure in the years ahead, Hitler’s experience in the bunker during his final days comes to mind (Obama is not Hitler -- so just don’t go there; but he certainly is insular and egomaniacal-and increasingly bitter and brittle). Hitler increasingly blamed Germans for failing him and came to believe Germany deserved the disaster that had befallen it.

We don’t need invading foreign armies to damage our nation; that is one job Obama is doing quite well on his own.

Maybe the only one.

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3)   Israel Does Not Violate the Laws of War in Gaza

By Jonathan F. Keiler

The other day Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, appeared on the "Huckabee Show" on FOX News to make the case that Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza. Huckabee is a strong supporter of Israel, instinctively on the right side of the issue, but could do little but respond with exasperation to Roth’s technical sounding claims of Israeli law-breaking. While the pro-Huckabee studio audience didn’t buy it, Roth’s calm, prim, and professorial accusations against Israel might easily sway a neutral observer who didn’t actually know the law. His weak but carefully articulated claims help establish the pseudo-legal sounding framework which the left-wing media, most of Europe and the Obama administration use to pressure and condemn Israel. It works to encourage Hamas’ own continuing war crimes, rather than promote adherence to the law.

None of Roth’s accusations are based on a correct reading and interpretation of the laws of war, but his claims need to be debunked precisely, not just ignored or belittled because one supports Israel. Roth and his cohorts have very real influence that is based in part on an appeal to cool legal rationality. The problem is that this coolly rational legal framework, at least when it comes to Israel, is a chimera. 

Roth’s brief against Israel (and by extension that of the Left in general --- to include Obama) is that Israel’s actions in Gaza do not comply with the laws of war, to wit: 

• Israel targets civilian structures
• Israel is strictly liable for civilian casualties
• Israel violates the general rule of proportional combat
• Israel disproportionately kills civilians
• Palestinian civilians who voluntarily put themselves in harm’s way are not “human shields”
• Precision military strikes are required when engaging any target in an urban area
• Israel does not prosecute soldiers for war crimes

None of these claims are either factually true or legally legitimate, but when presented calmly and academically, without direct rebuttal, are convincing for many people, and create fodder for op-ed writers and talking heads to muddy the waters or drum up anti-Israel sentiment. What is the actual case with regard to these claims?

Israel targets civilian structures: A civilian structure loses its protected status when it is used for military purposes. A home that serves as a Hamas command post or hides a tunnel entrance is by definition not a civilian structure any longer. Israel targets such buildings, but does not target structures that are not used for military purposes. A church or a mosque that houses a sniper loses its protected status under the laws of war.

Israel is strictly liable for civilian casualties:  Strict liability is a very limited legal concept that has no little or no place in the laws of war. 

Overwhelmingly in criminal jurisprudence, whether civil or military, the key question is intent. However, in limited situations, strict liability applies, e.g., injuring somebody while driving drunk being an example. It is a way to apply criminal liability to reckless but perhaps otherwise innocent conduct. Within the laws of war the prohibition against “indiscriminate” actions covers this issue. 

The problem for Roth is that Israel is exceedingly discriminate in its actions, while Hamas is completely indiscriminate. To get around this problem Israel’s critics simply assert that causing “excessive” civilian casualties (whatever that means) is illegal. On Huckabee, Roth proposed that killing one civilian for one terrorist might be okay, but not ten. There is no law of war rule to this effect. Suppose the one civilian is an innocent child, and the ten rabid civilian supporters of the terrorist. It is an impossible legal question to resolve and so the laws of war don’t address it. The guilt in both cases is on the terrorist for creating the danger in the first instance.

Israel violates the rule of proportional combat: This obscure law of war was almost entirely ignored by the media, political classes, and academia until the Second Lebanon War in 2006. It is a relatively useless and impractical concept of the law of war, not even mentioned in the Hague Conventions, the 1949 Geneva Conventions, and is noted only in commentary to the 1977 Protocol Additional. As I pointed out several years ago in an article for the Army War College, it is “ambiguous, lacks useful precedent, and as a practical matter nearly impossible to interpret or enforce.” It appears to only apply to Israel.

Here’s what the proportionality rule actually says: attacks must be proportionate to the military objective sought. That’s it.  Nobody mentioned this rule until it became a seemingly legitimate excuse to bash Israel. But it is pointless because almost all competent military organizations, including the Israel Defense Force (IDF), follow the principle automatically for their own benefit. In military doctrine it is called “economy of force.” No competent military leader wants to disproportionately apply force to an objective -- it wastes time and resources. Sometimes by mistake it is done, as, say, in the bombing of Monte Casino during World War II. But even that is not a war crime, because the attack must be intentionally disproportionate, not just a mistaken application of force. Even if you can demonstrate that Israel applied disproportionate force at some point, you would also have to show that misapplication of force was deliberate. Good luck.

Israel disproportionately kills civilians: The proportionality rule has nothing to say about this. Disproportionate civilian deaths have been a fact of war since war began, largely through famine and disease, but murder and massacre too. Modern war has increased risks to civilians due to heavier firepower and increased urbanization. Civilian deaths have exceeded military deaths in many modern conflicts, including World War II, but this in itself is not a violation of the laws of war. The legal question is whether the deaths were caused intentionally or recklessly, not the proportion of civilian deaths to military losses. Thus by correct measure, the legal question in the Gaza conflict is which side has intentionally or recklessly caused the most civilian deaths. The answer to this question is Hamas 6; Israel none. 

Palestinians who voluntarily put themselves in harm’s way are not human shields: Roth is technically correct on this (recently tweeting this claim.)  But this is because the laws of war never anticipated the depraved conduct of the Palestinian Arabs of Gaza. Human shields as envisioned by the laws of war are civilians who are coerced by a military force to protect soldiers or a military target. German soldiers in World War I who forced Belgian civilians to march ahead of them committed a war crime. A Nazi plan to shield aerial targets with Allied POWs would have also been a violation. 

There have been instances of Hamas doing these things, but also apparent instances where civilians rushed to a target to protect it from Israeli fire. In the latter instance these civilians were not technically human shields. Instead, they became legitimate military targets, and also war criminals. The laws of war require combatants to wear uniforms or identifying badges or marks. A civilian who takes a military position without properly identifying himself is both a legitimate target and a violator of the laws of war. But he is not, technically, a human shield. 

Precision military strikes are required when engaging any target in an urban area:  Roth claimed (without attribution or detail) that Israel attacked a hospital because Hamas place a rocket launcher 100 yards away, and that this attack was illegal because Israel had to use a “precise” munition in such an instance. Of course we don’t know what munition was used, or even if the attack actually took place, but for the sake of argument, let’s assume Israel attacked a Hamas Grad rocket launcher emplaced 100 yards from a hospital with a standard unguided 155mm artillery round. There would be absolutely nothing illegal about such an attack under the laws of war. If the round did not precisely hit the Grad launcher, or shrapnel from the explosion hit the hospital, the legal liability is on Hamas.  

Precision munitions are relatively new to war, limited in military inventories and very expensive. There is no legal duty to use them exclusively in particular instances. As a practical matter though, it is indisputable that Israel disproportionately uses precision munitions, also munitions with reduced explosive force, and engages in a historically to civilians who may be in a targeted area.  

Israel does not prosecute soldiers for war crimes: Israel of course does this. Even the highly biased and anti-Israel Goldstone Report from a previous Israel-Hamas fight acknowledged Israel’s well developed and sophisticated military legal system. What Roth and his like object to is that Israel does not prosecute its soldiers imaginary crimes. As demonstrated above, Roth’s brief against Israel is based on his own inchoate ideations of what comprises the laws of war, not what they actually say. If Israeli military prosecutors were to try an Israeli soldier for violating one these nonexistent or misapplied rules, he would be quickly acquitted because the Israeli military judicial system actually follows the laws of war, not the imaginings of so-called human rights activists.

3a)Hamas must be destroyed now 

By Shlomo Gazit, General (ret.), former head of Military Intelligence 

: Shlomo Gazit, General (ret.) is a leading and prominent member 
of the Israeli ex-brass in the Israeli "Peace Camp" 


Even if we take the optimistic point of view and assume that IDF forces 
won't leave the Gaza Strip unless we know that all the attack tunnels, to 
the very last one, were destroyed (and I make this assumption despite the 
clear cut assertion of IDF officials that they cannot ensure this), what is 
to prevent Hamas forces from repairing the damage and digging new tunnels, 
on new routes, tens or hundreds of meters alongside the previous route? Our 
battle against Hamas will not end on 2014. The new tunnels could be for 
offensive operation in 2016 or 2017. 

We have neither attacked nor defeated Hamas. If we fail to hurt the Hamas 
leadership with such damage that they are unable to restore and renew their 
military capabilities - or alternatively reach an agreement with Hamas - we 
have not achieved anything. To reiterate - Hamas will succeed to organize 
and be better prepared for Operation Protective Edge 2, in a year, two years 
or three years. Hamas will do its very best to make it difficult for the IDF 
to re-enter. 

And on another front, and I will not elaborate, it is very possible that the 
international community will be less sympathetic to Israel in the next war. 

This is a serious and existential threat facing us today and this threat 
must be destroyed today. 

The battle against the tunnels will not stop this threat and will not 
disrupt it. 

It only diverted us from addressing the major threat before us. 

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4)  Here is an excerpt from an interviewwith Charlie Rose and Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal that’s noteworthy:

ROSE: I think I just heard you say — and this — we will close on this — you believe in the coexistence of peoples, and, therefore, you believe in the coexistence of Palestinians and Israelis in the Middle East?

MESHAAL (through translator): I can’t coexist with occupation.

ROSE: Without occupation, you can coexist?

MESHAAL (through translator): I’m ready to coexist with the Jews, with the Christians and with the Arabs and non-Arabs and with those who agree with my ideas and those who disagree with them. However, I do not coexist with the occupiers, with the settlers, and those who…

ROSE: It’s one thing to say you want to coexist with the Jews. It’s another thing you want to coexist with the state of Israel. Do you want to coexist with the state of Israel? Do you want to represent — do you want to recognize Israel as a Jewish state?

MESHAAL (through translator): No. I said I do not want to live with a state of occupiers. I do coexist with other…

ROSE: I’m assuming they’re no longer occupiers. At that point, do you want to coexist and recognize their right to exist, as they would recognize your right to exist?

MESHAAL (through translator): When we have a Palestinian state, then the Palestinian state will decide on its policies. But you cannot actually ask me about the future. I answered you. But Palestinian people can have their say when they have their own state without occupation. In natural situations, they can decide policy vis-a-vis others.

So there you have it. The leader of Hamas says, point blank, it does not want a two-state solution. Yet scores of liberal commentators continue to make arguments like this: “We have to get a solution. And it has to be a two-state solution. And it has to be basically encouraged, if not imposed, I think, from without.”

This is an example of what social scientists call “motivated reasoning.” It refers to when people hold to a false belief despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. In this instance, the Hamas charter and the Hamas leader don’t accept Israel’s right to exist. And yet liberals don’t seem to care. They appear to be content to live in world made of faith, and trust, and pixie dust. A world of make believe. And so in the context of Israel’s war with Hamas, they continue to revert to arguments that simply don’t apply–for example, arguing that Israel needs to “end the occupation” despite the fact that Israel completely withdrew from Gaza nearly a decade ago.

Israel, on the other hand, has to live and survive in reality. Israelis know the nature of the enemy they face–implacable, committed, ruthless, malevolent. Given all this, and given that Israel itself is a nation of extraordinary moral and political achievements, you might think that the United States government would be fully supportive of the Jewish state in its war against Hamas. But you would be wrong.

The Obama administration is racheting up pressure on Israel. Hamas’s war on Israel, combined with its eagerness to have innocent Palestinians die as human shields in order to advance its propaganda campaign, is pushing America (under Obama) not toward Israel but away from her. Mr. Obama and the left perceive themselves as reality based and their critics as fantasy based. It’s a conceit without merit. And in no case is it more evident than in the left’s stance toward Hamas and Israel.

This is a case where reality and all the arguments, including all the moral arguments, align on one side; and yet Obama and the left are on the other.

They live in a fantasy world. In this instance, doing so has diabolic consequences.

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