What if Hamas rocket hit a BA plane?
Explain the difference.
Paramilitaries fire a missile which brings down a civilian airliner over Ukraine.
They are widely condemned as murderous gangsters and war criminals who must be hunted down and brought to justice.
Another ruthless gang of paramilitaries fires missiles at a civilian airport in Israel.
Thousands of protesters march through Whitehall in central London to call for an end to Israeli military action in Gaza
They are hailed as heroic ‘resistance fighters’ and receive widespread support in the West.
Let’s just imagine, for a moment, that a rocket fired from Gaza had hit a plane coming in to land at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv.
What if a British Airways jet had been brought down over Israel, with a similar loss of life to the 298 people who perished on Malaysian flight MH17?
Would it still be considered appropriate to hold yet another march through London this weekend, waving banners proclaiming ‘We are all Hamas now’?
At least 17 people climbed on top of this London bus during a protest in London earlier this month
Look, let me make one thing absolutely clear: what’s happening in Gaza is a terrible tragedy, especially the deaths of non-combatants. No one with a shred of humanity can fail to be disturbed by the plight of innocent children caught in the crossfire.
No, what depresses me is the one-sided apportioning of blame, the idea that Israel is the ‘aggressor’ in this conflict.
Everyone says they want an immediate ceasefire. Israel wants a ceasefire. But that will only occur when Hamas stops using Gaza as a launchpad to fire thousands of rockets aimed deliberately at killing Israeli civilians. Hamas has made it clear that isn’t going to happen.
Some people seem to think that because Israel has pretty effective air defences, it should absorb the pain and not retaliate.
Israel shelters behind sophisticated technology. Hamas hides behind women and children, in schools, hospitals and mosques.
Yet, as far as its useful idiots in Britain and Europe are concerned, Israel is the only one guilty of ‘war crimes’, no matter how many precautions it takes to avoid innocent deaths.
Hamas has no regard for human life, on either side. Every death is a propaganda victory, amplified by gullible sympathisers in the Western media.
But there is rarely any condemnation of this cynical campaign of terror, or of its oil-rich sponsors who want to wipe Israel off the face of the earth.
Is Iran going to stop supplying weapons to Hamas? No. Is Qatar going to stop bankrolling terrorism? What do you think?
Causing inconvenience: Crowds lined the main road in Kensington High Street, preventing any vehicles from using the road
So where are the demonstrations against Iran and Qatar? Come to that, where are the marches against Islamist slaughter in Syria and kidnapped schoolgirls in Africa?
Or, for that matter, the mass protests against Russia’s annexation of Crimea or Putin’s sponsorship of terrorism in Ukraine?
Precisely.
The Stop The War crowd are myopically selective in their indignation.
They’ll overlook all manner of atrocities in the Muslim world and in the former Soviet bloc, but become incandescent with fury when Israel exercises its inalienable right to self-defence.
Underlying all this is a nasty streak of anti-Semitism, the unholy alliance between the self-styled ‘liberal’ Left and stone-age Muslim headbangers, which I exposed in a Channel 4 documentary a few years ago.
Fortunately, it hasn’t manifested itself as violently in this country as it has on the Continent, where it is never far from the surface — especially in France.
The Israeli ambassador in Berlin has compared the level of anti-Semitism to 1938.
Despite the traffic jams and large crowds, police said the protest was largely peaceful as a whole
But indiscriminate anti-Jewish sentiment is rising in Britain.
Security has been stepped up at Jewish schools and synagogues.
A shop in Manchester, for instance, is targeted by pro-Hamas demonstrators every day because it sells some goods made in Israel.
Again, though, this is knee-jerk stuff. There’s no consistency.
Protesters call for a boycott of Israel, but they’re not prepared to throw away their mobile phones, laptops and satellite set-top boxes which would be useless without Israeli technology.
They’re like the ‘anti-globalisation’ crowd, kitted out in Nike trainers, sipping skinny lattes from Starbucks and organising riots on iPhones. The absurd contradictions are lost on them.
Most of this is mindless posturing, unthinking exhibitionism, part of the modern curse of everyone living in their own movie.
They all want to be in on the act, complete with fetching intifada scarf as fashion accessory.
There’s no calm analysis, no sober examination of the facts, just an incontinent outpouring of sentiment and emotion.
They can twist anything to suit their warped world view. We’ve even had a sitting Lib Dem MP, David Ward, announcing that he’d be firing rockets if he lived in Gaza.
Perhaps he’d like to do us all a favour and move there.
I keep wondering if we could ever win a conventional war these days.
You can just imagine the ‘We Are All Hamas Now’ crowd in 1944, marching on Downing Street.
Even as the doodlebugs were raining down on London, they’d be screaming that the D-Day invasion was ‘a disproportionate use of force’, wringing their hands over civilian casualties in Berlin and demanding that Churchill was prosecuted for war crimes.
Yet among the gormless rent-a-mob, there are dangerous people who wish not just Israel but all of us serious harm.
They’re the same hardliners who cheered as the planes hit the Twin Towers, who justified the London Transport bombings and want to impose Sharia law in Britain.
Israel is in the frontline of global jihad, but we’re on the list, too.
It’s all very well to lament that Israel is losing the battle for world opinion.
But Israel is fighting a real war, not a propaganda war, one that it can’t afford to lose.
And what if a rocket fired at Ben Gurion airport had hit a British Airways plane, killing all the passengers on board?
Does anyone seriously believe that Hamas would have genuinely regretted the innocent loss of civilian life, despite the widespread support it receives in Britain?
Of course not. We are all infidels now.
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London’s pro-Palestine rally was a disgusting anti-Semitic spectacle
4149 comments
19 July 2014 16:33
Douglas Murray
The Spectator
Protesters display placards and banners as they take part in a demonstration against Israeli airstrikes in Gaza in central London on July 19, 2014. Image: CARL COURT/AFP/Getty Images)
Thousands of anti-Semites have today succeeded in bringing central London to an almost total standstill.
They marched though the centre of the city before congregating to scream outside the Israeli Embassy in Kensington. It was interesting to watch this rather non-diverse crowd pass. Most of the women seem to be wearing headscarves or the burka, while their men-folk were naturally more appropriately dressed for a sweltering summer day.
But what a picture. These are the people who stayed at home throughout the Syrian civil war, stayed at home when ISIS rampaged across Iraq, stayed at home when Boko Haram and Al-Shabaab carried out their atrocities across central Africa and showed no concern whatsoever when the Muslim Brotherhood was running Egypt into the ground. Yet they pretend to care about Muslims.
And here they all are, coming out to scream because Israel is carrying out the most specific and targeted campaign in the history of warfare in order to stop Hamas – a group dedicated to the annihilation of all Jews – from firing thousands of rockets into the Jewish homeland.
This anti-Semite equates Israel with the Nazis - a shocking comparison for Jews Image: CARL COURT/AFP/Getty Images)
I suppose some of the people in London today might still try to pretend that they don’t hate Jews. Perhaps some of them would not even do what their co-religionists in France did last week when – intent on violence – they blockaded worshippers inside a Synagogue.
But there is only one explanation for their horrible beliefs and actions.
The truest expression of their views was given voice a few years ago by the popular al-Jazeera star and leading cleric (and former Left-wing Mayor of London Ken Livingstone's mate) Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi when
he said: