“The Dangerous Notion Is That There’s A Moral Equivalence Between The Actions Of Hamas, & Those Of The State of Israel" (includes videos)

"Kalb Yehud! [Jewish dog!] That, Allahu akbar, and "something about Gaza in Arabic" is what two young  men screamed as they jumped on and punched a former IDF soldier wearing an identifying T-shirt in a Jewish district of Melbourne last Thursday night, leaving him with cuts and a swollen face:

"I noticed them when it was too late.... One of them tried to pull me to the ground, I started fighting and punching back.  I grabbed one of them by the throat and screamed at them, cursing in Arabic as well. This shocked them, they ran off."

(Hat tip: reader Ian) 

"Jewish scumbag hail hitler let's finish what hitler left for us"

"Isreal[sic] the Jewish Terrorist State of the zionist bankers. It keeps forcefully evicting people from their homes and lands and expects there to be no retaliation? Then they accuse the aggressors to be the palestinian people? wake up up humans! This dirty jew rat bastard in new york is feeding you propeganda [sic] that he gets paid huge money to talk about. This is war crimes being excused because they are dirty JEWS. I will meet you in hell jew cocksucker"

Those are two intemperate comments left by obvious antisemites beneath the following video on YouTube in which Senator Charles (Chuck) Schumer (Democrat, New York), in an able and fair speech, talks of 

“The dangerous notion is that there’s a moral equivalence between the actions of Hamas, and those of the State of Israel.  It must be said, there’s no moral equivalence between the actions, and reactions, of Israel, and Hamas and the Palestinian Authority to the violence that has occurred there.”

The current "Operation Protective Edge" waged by Israel against Hamas in Gaza has of course garnered a predictable outbreak of outrage against the Jewish State, forcefully expressed, though of course not invariably in nakedly antisemitic terms, by the usual suspects.

Biased and/or inept reportage, which harps on the "asymmetrical" nature of the conflict and presents it as a "tit-for-tat" exercise, helps, unwittingly or not, to stir prejudice against Israel among the general public (the BBC, to its utter shame, has excelled at this; see here and here): after all, who can remain unmoved by the spectacle of suffering civilians and dead and injured children?

In the shrewd words of one pro-Israel commenter responding to criticism of Israel's current response to Hamas terror:

'Imagine this ...: A group of your neighbors have repeatedly and consistently declared their intent to murder you and your entire family (See the Hamas Charter, especially Article 7, for a sample of what they say).

 They regularly fire home-made rockets at your house. You build a shelter. The continue firing, threatening all the while to drink your blood  and elevating their hatred of you to a religious principle. They teach their kids that killing you is a sacred duty. They build luxury hotels for their leadership but no shelters for their children. Instead, turn their places of worship and schools and hospitals into arms depots and launch rockets from them. When you retreat they use the place you left as another launching pad.

 They encourage their women, elderly and children to be human shields for anyone trying to murder you and boast that they love death more than you love life.  Then they import much more sophisticated rockets from other people who regulalrly boast that they want you murdered and launch hundreds of those rockets at you and your family from within civilian areas (and accuse you of committing "aggression " and "war crimes" when you start to defend yourself) A disproportionate casualty count is completely misleading in a situation when one side wants only death for you - is willing to commit suicide to see you dead - and consistently encourages their children to be killed in the attempt to murder you.

 Now do you see the situation more clearly? ... The Israelis are not bombing indiscriminately. Unlike any other army in this region - and indeed the world - they call the people living in houses where arms tunnel entrances are located to warn them of an impending strike. The IDF also sends SMS's and drops leaflets and fires warning shots - Hamas tells people to ignore these warnings and encourages them to expose themselves to danger.

 If you had neighbors so determined to murder you and your family - exploiting pictures of those killed in the process in order to get others to hate you, too. Now, for the hard question: How do you respond to this scenario? Think carefully, knowing that the the your life and the lives of all you hold dear are at stake. See the problem?'

 The perceptive Daniel Pipes writes:

 'Why ... did Hamas just provoke a war with Israel? Out of nowhere, on June 11 it began launching rockets, shattering a calm in place since November 2012....  The battlefield outcome of Arab-Israeli wars in last 40 years have been predictable; everyone knows Israeli forces will prevail. It's more like cops and robbers than warfare. Ironically, this lopsidedness turns attention from winning and losing to morality and politics. Israel's enemies provoke it to kill civilians, whose deaths bring them multiple benefits.

The four conflicts since 2006 have restored Hamas' tarnished reputation for "resistance," built solidarity on the home front, stirred dissent among both Arabs and Jews in Israel, galvanized Palestinians and other Muslims to become suicide bombers, embarrassed non-Islamist Arab leaders, secured new United Nations resolutions bashing Israel, inspired Europeans to impose harsher sanctions on Israel, opened the international Left's spigot of vitriol against the Jewish state, and won additional aid from the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The holy grail of political warfare is to win the sympathy of the global Left by presenting oneself as underdog and victim....

The tactics of this new warfare include presenting a convincingly emotional narrative, citing endorsements of famous personalities, appealing to the conscience, and drawing simple but powerful political cartoons (Israeli supporters tend to excel at this, both in the past and now). Palestinians get even more creative, developing the twin fraudulent techniques of "fauxtography" for still pictures and "Pallywood" for videos. Israelis used to be complacent about the need for what they call hasbara, or getting the message out, but recent years find them more focused on this.'

And those in the media and elsewhere who present Hamas's rocketry as of the homemade, pipsqueak kind are economical with the truth. The Israeli ambassador to Washington, Ron Dermer, pointed out last Wednesday that about three-quarters of the Israeli population are now within striking range of Hamas's rockets, thanks largely to shipments, since 2012, of long-range rockets from Iran.

"You remember that ship that we interdicted a few months ago in the Red Sea was carrying 40 long range rockets. Well, one of those types of rockets was actually fired yesterday into Israel. But in addition to the rockets being smuggled in—and the smuggling route went from Iran to Sudan and up through the Sinai into Gaza—in addition to that, Hamas has developed a domestic manufacturing capability for these long range rockets and part of Israel’s military operation is to not only go after the missile batteries but to go after these factories that are essentially making these weapons."

Moreover, it's reported:

"In addition to Hamas, the Iranian-funded Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) has been firing many rockets into Tel Aviv and southern cities such as Be’er Sheva.

PIJ, which acts at Iran’s behest, is in possession of multiple Iranian-made rockets, including the Fajr-3 and Fajr-5 missiles...."

 and that 

"If the fighting with Israel escalates, the organizations are likely to launch more of these missiles toward the Greater Tel Aviv area and northern cities (Hadera, Haifa), believing that to put an end to Israeli attacks, they will need to ramp up the pressure on Israel with strikes on major cities to create a balance of terror that will force Israel to end its operation."

To quote analyst Jonathan Spyer, author of The Transforming Fire: The Rise of the Israel-Islamist Conflict:

"....There is a tendency to see the Israeli-Palestinian arena as somehow set apart from the rest of the Mid-East neighborhood. But this is an illusion.

Firstly, in the most tangible way, the most potent elements of the Hamas assault on Israeli cities of recent days is made possible only by the movement's link with Iran....

Similarly, the Islamic Jihad movement, which has been rapidly gaining strength at Hamas's expense in Gaza in recent months, is a full proxy of Iran.

But in a deeper sense, both Hamas and Islamic Jihad are local manifestations of the particular, pathological Islamist political-religious-paramilitary style and ideology which has challenged order and made life a misery all across the region in recent decades, and with added strength in the wake of the so-called Arab Spring of 2011.

Take a look around the neighborhood. In Syria, Iraq and Lebanon, rival, equally implacable versions of political Islam are at each others' throats. In Syria, upwards of 160,000 people have died over the course of the last four years. In Lebanon, a Shia Islamist terror group, Hizballah, enjoys unrivalled dominance. In Iraq, a Sunni Islamist killing machine has conquered the west of the country and is poised to assault Baghdad.

So why then have Israel and its environs nevertheless managed to avoid the general collapse of these other countries? The reason is deterrence.

 There is a single, dominant military element west of the Jordan River. This element is the Israel Defense Forces.

But deterrence, alas, is a perishable substance, which must be periodically replenished. Hamas, facing difficult economic straits, with its tunnels sealed by Sisi's armed forces, with newer and yet more radical Islamist elements inspired by ISIS emerging from within, evidently decided that it was time for another round.

As of now, Israel is engaging in a far reaching operation designed to hit at Hamas' capabilities. But more profoundly, in the simple and brutal logic of the neighborhood, Israel is trying to remind Hamas of the cost of tangling with the Jewish state.

The objective of this is not to re-conquer Gaza, nor to impact on local politics, still less to impose suffering on the Palestinians for its own sake.

When one's neighbors are Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the modest objective of quiet can only be bought at the cost of periodic military actions intended to remind the enemy of the cost of aggression and thus reinforce deterrence.

Because of the strength of Israeli arms, the conflict between Israel and the PA territories don't resemble those roiling Iraq or Syria. The relative balance of forces, however, is a lesson which those who wish to turn the country into something resembling those hell-holes must periodically re-learn - through bitter experience."