If only the Nazis had access to Social Media! Today, they do!
AP NEWS, December 1943 - As Rabbi Joel Wise reads the newspaper, he reads article after article with photos of dead German children, parents holding their lifeless bodies with screams caught in their throats and eyes sunken with grief.
Like millions around the world, he has been haunted by the gruesome scenes flooding out of Nazi Germany, where civilians have endured more than two weeks of an Allied attack and bombing campaign that has collapsed homes, destroyed vital infrastructure and sparked a humanitarian crisis.
The bombing raids have killed more than 4,600 Germans so far, including an estimated 1,900 children, and wounded at least 14,000 others, according to Joseph Goebbels of the Ministry of Propaganda in Nazi Germany. Another 1.4 million people have been internally displaced, according to the League of Nation’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
“It’s wretched. I wake up every single morning with tears in my eyes, rage in my heart and I channel it into action,” Wise, a rabbinical council member with Jewish Voice for Peace, told AP. “My coping mechanism is to yell into the void, yell into the halls of Congress.”
He feels the same grief and horror over the Nazi’s surprise attack on Poland, when the fascist dictatorship brutally killed more than 1,400 people, including civilians and military personnel, and abducted over 200 others, according to Allied Defense Forces.
The Allies say their mission in Nazi Germany is to root out and destroy Nazis, which govern the small country. But it is the 2.2 million Germans living there, unable to escape, who are bearing the brunt of the attacks.
It is these lives that Wise and other Jewish American peace activists are mobilizing to save with their calls for an urgent ceasefire.
On Wednesday, thousands of Jews and their allies marched on Capitol Hill, where they carried German flags and rallied in support of German rights, while Wise led a smaller sit-in with hundreds of activists inside one of the Capitol buildings. The action was organized by Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow, two of the largest US Jewish groups calling for a just and peaceful resolution to the Allied-German conflict.
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The above article is taken, word-for-word from a CNN article, with a few words changed using global cut-and-replace. When you look at it now, it makes no sense. Who would vote for a "cease fire" with Nazi Germany just because "innocent Germans" are caught up in the conflict?
And make no doubt about it, a lot of innocent Germans were annihilated during World War II - probably even some working with underground groups to thwart Nazism. Kurt Vonnegut, in his novel, Slaughterhouse Five, recounts the fire-bombing of Dresden, where American bombers reduced the city to rubble during the day, and British bombers set fire to the rubble with incendiary bombs at night. As he put it, all the "Hansel's and Gretel's" were baked alive in their basement bomb shelters.
Dresden was an "open city" supposedly, and not involved with the war effort. But like Hiroshima, we bombed it anyway. We also firebombed Tokyo, which cause a higher death rate than Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as wood-and-paper houses lit up like torches. Today, there is a lot of hand-wringing about these attacks, but back in the day, as V-1 and V-2 "vengeance weapons" rained down on London, few people thought it was "unfair" to go after "innocent civilians" in Germany. And certainly Japan had no qualms about bombing civilians in China and the rest of Asia.
The reality is - or was - of course, that even "innocent civilians" had supported Hitler and the Nazi party and had voted Nazis into power. Innocent civilians went to work every day and supported the Nazi war machine - or even worked directly in the armaments business. It is hard to be an "innocent civilian" in a country that is annihilating millions and leveling cities. Even if you are just a train conductor or a trash collector, you are helping the cause.
I had a client who, as a young man, was sent from France to Germany to work as a trash collector. The Nazis needed labor, and my client's father felt he would be "safer" in Germany than in France. When he returned to France after the war, he was accused of being a collaborateur! and shunned. He left France for Argentina, which did little to quell the rumors. The point is, even collecting trash arguably helped the Nazi war effort, as that freed up one additional German to fight as a soldier at the front.
I am not saying there are no innocent civilians, only that it is damn hard to be one. How many of us voted for politicians who voted for the Iraq war? Are we innocents as well?
Hamas is a terrorist organization and a fascist dictatorship. They were elected by the people in Gaza back in 2006 and haven't held an election since. The "innocent civilians" chose this government, and they have paid a price for that mistake ever since. Their leader is now calling for a cease-fire, claiming that Hamas has "achieved all of its goals" in the recent attacks. What goals? Killing innocents and taking hostages?
Yes.
You see, Hamas is a passive-aggressive bully, and bullies like to bait people into responding and then get the other person in trouble. You've seen it before. A kid throws spitballs at you in class, hoping you finally get fed up and say, "Hey, stop that!" or better yet, punch them in the face. The teacher turns around, angry at you for "disrupting class" and you get sent to the Principal's office, while the bully smugly grins at you.
Hamas is doing just that - goading Israel into retaliatory attacks and then playing the victim. Already forgotten are the over fourteen hundred Israelis - many women and children - innocent civilians - who were slaughtered. No one seems to care about those innocents, not even one news cycle later. Sadly, it seems Israel has a shitty social media presence, as stories of Hamas atrocities are muted while fake stories of a "hospital bombing" are amplified by the media - until days later, they are found to be false.
And no one calls out Hamas on this. And most of these people protesting still believe Israel was to blame and that 1,000 people died in an 80-bed hospital that is still standing.
So, Hamas gets what it wants - it nails itself to the cross, and foreign aid money pours in, to numbered Swiss bank accounts. As a bonus, they now have hundreds of hostages to rape and abuse and eventually trade (or trade their corpses) for captured Hamas "fighters" in Israeli prisons. The last time around, they traded one Israeli soldier for hundreds of Hamas terrorists. Sounds like a rotten deal.
No one felt sorry for Nazis or the Germans who supported them. We didn't feel sorry for the fascist Japanese government who brutally attacked and subjugated their neighbors - or the ordinary Japanese citizens who supported that government. What brought those governments down wasn't just attacks on military targets, but the bombing of their entire countries - Germany and Japan. Once the civilians realized that war would be their ruin, support for the war they started waned and sputtered out.
Hamas is doing a good job on social media, painting itself as the victim - while getting people to conveniently forget how this latest war got started. It wasn't Israel that crossed the border en masse and took hostages and murdered children. It wasn't Israel that invaded a music festival and raped women and mutilated their corpses and paraded the dead bodies around. Hamas lit the fuse, fully knowing what kind of bomb would go off and now they are relishing their role as "victim of Israeli aggression."
It is passive-aggressive bullying and we should not fall for it.
There are protesters around the world, calling for a "cease fire" in this war, which is convenient for Hamas, now that they have "achieved their goals." It would be akin to calling for a cease-fire after Hitler invaded Austria. Oh, wait, they did that. How did that work out? Maybe give him Poland as well. I mean, he must be tired of winning by now, right?
Some of the protesters are no doubt are being goaded on by social media which shows photos (some of which might actually be real) of Palestinians bombed by the IDF, but no photos of dead and tortured Israelis. I am not sure why this is, but I suspect that Jewish religious traditions and common decency forbid the use of photos of bloodied bodies for sensationalism. Buried by sundown - not paraded around for sympathy. Hamas seems to have fewer of such concerns.
UPDATE: Since I started writing this, the IDF has released some chilling videos of Hamas terrorists, dressed in IDF uniforms, flagging down motorists and then gunning them down. No outcry about those innocent civilians. Other videos have been shown to the media, but not published, as they are too gruesome to watch. And again, Jewish traditions about desecration of the body might be preventing release of such videos. Hamas seems less concerned in that regard. Much of the video recovered was from Hamas "body cams" that the terrorists used to record their evil deeds. It is just sickening.
Some of these "protesters" are blatantly celebrating Hamas terrorism and clearly showing their true colors. In one protest in London, a misguided "useful idiot" raised a "trans" flag, only to be beaten down by Muslim fundamentalists. Why anyone from a liberal Western country would support a group who has repeatedly and clearly called for the annihilation of liberal Western values is beyond me.
Liberals are decent people who care about the plight of others. Perhaps it is the weakness of "turn the other cheek" Christianity, but we allow "refugees" into Western countries on humanitarian grounds. Often the reason they are refugees is that they are fleeing from religious conflicts (often one Muslim group fighting another) that have destroyed their home countries. Hamas certainly has done a job on Lebanon, hasn't it? In fact, Muslim-on-Muslim violence has made a smoking ruin of much of the Middle East and beyond.
ISIS has called on its terrorists to attack the United States. And no doubt, we will see some attacks soon - if they are not occurring already, as wind-up soldiers are set off by social media.
Has Israel done some bad things in the past? Sure. But the tit-for-tat cycle of terrorism and retaliation is never going to solve the problem, but rather force people to entrench their positions even further. We saw this in Northern Ireland, where a conflict for control was masked with religious overtones (The Catholic v. Protestant divide making about as much sense as the Sunni/Shi'ite schism). Peace finally came to Northern Ireland, although there are still a few troublemakers about who prefer to make troubles.
And the end result? Nothing. The Protestants are still in Northern Ireland, having their obnoxious "Orange Parades" - trying to goad a response from the Catholic Irish. Nothing has changed, really, other than people finally got tired of killing, which seems to be the end game for all wars.
Terrorism never seems to win, in the long run. At least, I can't think of a single instance, in human history, where it has. How did the 9/11 attacks work out? Did Osama Bin-Ladle succeed in getting American air bases removed from his home country? I didn't think so. That was his goal, too. If anything, the 9/11 attacks only further cemented America's position in the Middle East, and caused untold misery in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
Terrorism provides a justification or at least an excuse for asymmetrical retaliation. That's why terrorism is, strategically, a bad idea. But it does do a good job of distracting people from the miserable failures of the Palestinian "government." When in doubt, start a war.
By the way, what did Italy's "Red Brigades" ever accomplish? Just asking. The only concrete thing I can think of as a result of terrorism is that we now have to take our shoes off before we get on an airplane.
If Palestinians want to advance their cause, terrorism isn't going to do it. In fact, each act of terror will set their cause back another decade - as it has today.
