February 25, 2009

Melanie Phillips, The Spectator

As Iran sprints towards the nuclear finishing line, the lethal and wicked isolation of Israel in the west is accelerating.

Yesterday, Amnesty called for an arms embargo against Israel based on a travesty of a report which accused Israel falsely of crimes it did not commit in Gaza – deliberately targeting civilians – while omitting the crimes Hamas did commit – using civilians as human shields. An arms embargo (of the type apparently favoured by Obama’s foreign policy guru Samantha Power) – would of course remove Israel’s ability to defend itself against an Arab and Muslim world bending every sinew for its destruction. It is therefore tantamount to calling for the destruction of Israel.

Amnesty proposes no total arms embargo on Iran, nor on any of the 22 states of the Arab league. Only on Israel, their designated victim. Oh, and on Hamas whose sole crime it says was to have fired rockets at Israel which hardly killed anyone anyway. Thus in its absurd attempt to appear even-handed Amnesty equates the victims of terror with those who would murder them. Israel alone of all the countries of the world is not to be allowed to defend itself against annihilation.

Thus also the truth of the devastating insight of Natan Sharansky who, writing of his experience – straight after last week’s London conference on antisemitism — at the hands of the BBC which purred over an Arab interviewee blaming Israel for the rise in global Jew-hatred, observes that, as on previous occasions, the Jews of Israel are being faced with this obscene choice:

Either live and be hated, or die and be loved.

[..]

Why are so many noted intellectuals always so drawn towards suicidal idiocy and totalitarian ideas?

But help is at hand for the Islamic ‘resistance’ from the White House. Obama is giving Gaza $900 million which is to be handed to UNRWA to ensure it does not end up in the hands of Hamas. This will ensure that it ends up in the hands of Hamas, due to the fact that nothing moves in Gaza outside Hamas’s control: UNRWA is riddled with Hamas members amongst its workforce, its ambulances and other vehicles are used to transport Hamas weaponry and terrorists, and the camps it administers are Hamas bomb factories. So Hamas will get a $900 million pay-off from America, in order to smuggle yet more weapons with which to kill yet more Israelis.

Meanwhile the Islamists’ western European front – aka Britain’s human rights lawyers – are feverishly searching for ways of using international law to persecute Israelis for the crime of defending themselves. NGO Monitor explains how ‘lawfare’ is being vigorously promoted by Palestinian and other Arab ‘human rights’ activists – who for some unaccountable reason are not taking similar action against Hamas or any of the Arab states which have murdered so many of their own citizens and deprived them of their human rights over the years. Thus the Palestinian NGO al Haq, working through British lawyer Phil Shiner, launched legal proceedings today against three British Cabinet ministers to stop all British aid or assistance to Israel on the false grounds that Israel is gratuitously attacking Palestinian civilians. According to NGO Monitor:

Al-Haq’s General Director Shawan Jabarin has been denied exit visas by Israel and Jordan on account of his alleged ties to the terrorist group Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). On July 7, 2008, the Israeli Supreme Court upheld the visa denial because it examined reliable evidence that Jabarin is ‘among the senior activists of the Popular Front terrorist organization.’

Amongst al Haq’s funders are the governments of Ireland, Netherlands, Sweden and Norway and the UK charity Christian Aid.

Such legal actions may have little chance of succeeding in court but their purpose is to propagandise, terrorise and demoralise, in which they have significant success. Thus Israel becomes progressively more isolated by the day, in a process of global delegitimisation — whose diabolical purpose is nothing less than to soften up the western world for genocide.