‘THEY BURNT OUR TREES. Let’s plant even more….”
By Paul Merkley.
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The organization United with Israel is putting out an appeal for funds based on this message:
Thousands of trees have been destroyed from devastating kite and balloon fires sent from Gaza. Now more than ever, Israeli farmers need your help… so that they can buy over 20 kinds of fruit trees to replace the thousands of trees that have been destroyed from devastating kite and balloon fires sent from Gaza Together, let’s plant many more trees than were destroyed.
Bring them on, this says to the terrorist-arsonists. Just keep on burning. As you do so, we will go on for ever, on a matching basis, buying and planting and buying and planting. Singing in the rain until the end of time…
Am I alone in thinking this is madness?
Apart from other more complicated considerations: does it not occur to these people that a planted tree does not replace a mature tree immediately.?
United With Israel describes itself as a “Jewish organization, open and welcoming to all people, Jewish and non-Jewish, regardless of race, religion or region… a global, grassroots movement comprised of individuals who are deeply committed to the success and prosperity of Israel.”
It is also, apparently, an organization that imagines that zealous contributors are as countless as the sand: they stand ready to respond with zeal to the challenge of replacing any and all of the trees that the enemy, in his madness, decides he must destroy – from now until doomsday. “They burn. We will plant more, is the motto that they recommend.
Perhaps we need to take a deep breath ad think back to how we got to this point.
First we must reflect on how Gaza became the fully-owned fiefdom of one of the darkest of all that host of dark Islamist gangs whose names only a tiny group of security experts know but whose numbers are growing daily.
Try counting back twenty-five years or three and one-quarter Presidents to September 13, 1993, when President Bill Clinton held a fabulous reception for three thousand guests on the White House Lawn — witnessed on television by virtually all of the grown-ups in the world. The entire Congress (both houses), the Supreme Court, the Cabinet, the entire diplomatic corps and several hundred other dignitaries were also there to be seen, enjoying the champagne and canapés on the American taxpayers’ dime. On this occasion, the Prime Minister of Israel, Yitzhak Rabin, and Yasir Arafat, the head of the Palestine liberation Organization, each declared his commitment to “the Peace Process.”
What followed upon that festive reception is a long story: the simple version is that Israel, coaxed at every step by the American President and his State Department, began at once giving over to Arafat’s gangster regime custody of more and more of the land painfully acquired by Israel in the wake of several failed invasions of its sovereignty by armies of the Arab world. The concessions inevitably made Israel, more vulnerable to terrorism. The Palestinian side has conceded nothing but taken everything that the U.S and the United Nations could dream up to give away.
Early in this process, Israel invited Yasir Arafat, the exiled Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization to “return”, at first to Jericho, and then to Ramallah, in order to preside over the Palestine Authority — pending conclusion of diplomacy between Israel and Arafat’s organization over a few matters that needed agreement before sovereignty was ceded over Arab “Palestine.”
But from the moment when he set foot on the ground of “sacred Palestine” Arafat made it clear that he had no intention of living at peace with the People of Israel and that he would not release his followers from their sacred duty of ceaseless warfare to the death against Jews until every inch of what we have called Israel now for seventy years should be incorporated into the Muslim world.
The PLO has turned the “Palestinian” educational system into a propaganda machine dedicated to preparing subsequent generations of local children into regimented, anthem-singing uniformed robots – along Hitlerian lines.
Like every other Arab ruler in a comparable situation – a virtual dictator in a one-party-State — Arafat, and then Mahmoud Abbas, failed so completely at governing the Palestine Authority” that, after several seasons of brutal inter-party conflict, Abbas went to his corner while a new champion took over the other corner and “Arab Palestine” broke in two. The new contender was Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of Hamas, a terrorist organization beloved by the masses of Palestinian people.
Without doubt, Gaza is today on the very short list of places in the world where none of us would want to find himself. It is an Islamic theocracy, a dictatorship sustained by fear of eternally-active consequences, where governmental thugs enforce (selectively) Islamic notions of good behavior. Think of Yemen or Central African Republic or Somalia. Think of at least twenty other Muslim polities in the Arab world today. What they all have in common is their incapacity to govern. The appearance of government is achieved through extorted acquiescence of the masses. Like the leaders of all these other Arab-Muslim states – and like Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of Arab Palestine and the leader of Fatah — Gaza’s leaders wallow in billions of dollars of undeclared personal wealth, acquired over the years by ruinous taxation and extortion, (See “Gaza’s Millionaires and Billionaires,” www.algemeiner.com, July 28, 2014; http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/134537/lifestyles-rich-and…Lifestyles of the Rich and Infamous. … Mahmoud Abbas ) while holding out the begging bowl on behalf of their “oppressed citizens”- “oppressed,” that is by Israel, which has not an iota of legal responsibility for the care and feeding of the people of Gaza.
Ismail Haniyeh, the head of the government of Gaza and the head, of course, of Hamas has the Jewish state next door to blame for everything that his regime is too incompetent or too indifferent to achieve. Judgment of the character of that Jewish state is a matter left to the most prestigious of Muslim clerics. A representative voice is that of Sheikh Ibrahim Mujdeiris, the Imam of the al-Aqsa Mosque, a paid appointee of the Palestine Authrhoity, who reminds his flock:
We have ruled the world before, and by Allah, the day will come when we will rule the entire world again. The day will come when we will rule America. The day will come when we will rule Britain and the entire world – except for the Jews. .. Listen to the Prophet Muhammad, who tells you about the evil end that awaits Jews … . And the day of resurrection will not come without the victory of the believers [the Moslems] over the descendents of the monkeys and pigs [the Jews] and with their annihilation.
To the Muslim-Arab population of Gaza, living in expectation of this ultimate War to End All Jews of which the Prophet speaks, Ismail Haniyeh looks like being the man of that hour. Since April, the gangs of Hamas, operating at all times within camera range of the BBC, have been spilling out of Gaza to set fire to the length and breadth of Israel. Kites and balloons carrying containers of burning fuel and several kinds of explosive devices have sparked several hundred fires in southern Israel, burning more than 2,600 hectares of Israel’s limited, precious forest and farmland and causing hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage.
Today, after several weeks of being jerked about by Haniyeh and his theologically-driven pyromaniacs, Prime Minister Netanyahu is speaking of ”using a “heavy hand” against Hamas.
Let’s hope that Netanyahu uses that heavy hand soon for the purpose of toppling this monster.
The worst possible plan is that recommended by Friends of Israel. Their call for a no-holds-barred contest between planters and killers of trees sounds as heroic as all-get-out. But it concedes all freedom of action to the forces of darkness while consigning the forces of light forever to rushing about with fire-hoses. in the desperate hope of keeping ahead of the great conflagration.
The secret to the Hamas strategy is their contempt for the lives of their enraged masses. We see it over and over again. Totally defenseless zealots dashing out into the Israel defensive forces, seeking the bliss of entering heaven before the sun sets. We cannot reason with this demonic mindset. But we have an obligation to keep our own spirits under rational and ethical control.
United With Israel is promoting the idea of challenging THEM to a contest with US. You go one burning and we will go on planting. This is mindless—a surrender of everything moral so that we can enter into the kind of game that children are playing out today in schoolyards.
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