The Verbal Double Standard of the Progressive Socialist Left

Good day, dear reader!

I had originally planned to address this topic myself, but I discovered an article by a respected historian and expert, Victor Davis Hanson*. Therefore, I'll let him address the linguistic double standard being used in regards to the recent terrorist attack on Israel.

Gaza and the Corruption of Language

“Apartheid” - Like most leftist smears, it reflects projection. Arab citizens inside Israel…over half of whom are Muslims…vote, run for office, and have organized political parties. As a fifth of the population, they enjoy more security, prosperity, and freedom than do their counterparts in the surrounding Arab nations.

In contrast, can one envision non-Arab Christian or Jewish residents of Gaza voting, running for office, forming political parties, or criticizing Hamas? This projected charge of apartheid, it applies to Hamas, which considers anyone other than Arab Muslims as inferiors to be kept out of Gaza.

“Ceasefire” - A ceasefire, truce, or armistice rarely ends the conflict for good unless both sides are worn out, and mutually agree that neither can win and the war is thus regrettable—a rare phenomenon in military history. More often, ceasefires are mere breathers for one or both sides to frantically resupply and rearm for rounds two, three, four…

Ultimately, wars…even those that last decades…end when one side loses and the other wins (often most clearly via ‘unconditional’ surrender), or both suffer such calamitous losses that each believes victory is unachievable and will in the future continue to be so. Unless the antithetical political agendas that lead to war are resolved, then breathers and truces and time-outs eventually ensure lengthy or multiple wars. Victory leading to the loser’s abandonment of political agendas more often leads to lasting peace.

“Disproportionate” - Can anyone recall a war won by proportionate measures? When war is proportionate it more often turns into a Stalingrad…or perhaps a Ukraine…until one side finds a disproportionate response that will change endless stasis to victory. World War II was not won by a proportionate response to Pearl Harbor. And what would be a proportionate response to the murder of a thousand civilians?

Under the logic of “proportionality,” ought the Israeli state then invade Gaza and likewise murder a thousand of its civilians? The whole concept of a “proportionate" response to an unprovoked massacre of women and children asleep in their homes and during a peace is absurd.

“Civilian casualties” - In this war, almost all intentional civilian deaths are due to Hamas. The civilian dead consist of three unfortunate categories:

1) Over a thousand Jewish civilians, at a time of holiday, butchered by invading Hamas killer squads.

2) Gazan civilian shields whose homes and places of work are deliberately used to protect and enable Hamas rocketeers and shooters to wage war with impunity—in the expectation that Israel regards Gazan life as more valuable than does Hamas, and therefore won’t retaliate to missile launches by indiscriminately killing civilian shields. Hamas expects, even hopes, that they will be killed and thus bring them political advantage by their numerous deaths.

3) The general population of Gaza. The charter of Hamas ensures that its apparat will wage perpetual war at any cost against Israel. Hamas has no interest in a two-state solution, lasting armistices, or using billions of dollars in foreign aid to ensure modern power, water, and sewage plants for its people. Instead, it treats its own population as expendable and subordinate to its own tunnel-making and rocket-launching.

“Cycle of violence” - This phrase almost suggests that violence is organic, autonomous, without culpability, and thus not incited by one side. War, however, never works that way. Instead, there is usually definable 51% and more culpability on one side. In the case of October 7, who invaded the country of another to enact a year-long premeditated plan of savagely murdering and mutilating women and children? Was Israel intent on violence or was Hamas? Did Hamas call up their intended targets and urge them to flee before they arrived? Is that IDF trait even conceivable within Hamas? While Hamas spent the year planning the precivilizational massacres of Jewish women and children, Israel…naively convinced that Hamas was concentrating on domestic affairs rather than its usual savage agenda of torching, stabbing, and shooting Jews…was at the time negotiating détente with Saudi Arabia and inviting nearly 20,000 Gazans a day to enter Israel to work and earn a living?

“Innocents” - All collateral damage is tragic, and, for example, children in Gaza are obviously innocent. But, while any noncombatant can be an innocent civilian, not all innocent civilians are created equal. Their collective innocence or guilt may not be absolute, but it can be fairly determined by their support for the agendas of its combatants and government. That is, whether they are empowering something like the SS or trying to stop it.

If bands of Israeli soldiers surprise-invaded Gaza with orders to grab hostages and focus on murdering women and children and then desecrating their corpses in hopes of psychologically devastating Gazans, they would likely be brought up on charges by the IDF or shunned and ostracized by their own people. In contrast, when hostages were paraded in Gaza, civilians there seemed to enjoy spitting on and striking them. The return from Israel of the Gazan hostage-takers and murderers was met by ecstatic crowds.

The German population, similarly ruled by a “one man, one vote, once” dictatorship, was ebullient over Hitler’s success from 1939 to 1941, but lost their enthusiasm from 1942 to 1945, and feigned innocence (out of alleged ignorance or powerlessness) after the war was over.

So too, Gazans on Saturday, October 7 were enthralled by news of a thousand murdered Jews, only two weeks later to pose as innocent civilians not deserving retaliation for the inhuman violence against the innocent that they had so recently and so eagerly supported and cheered on.

Be well, Dear Ones! Until next time...

* Victor Davis Hanson is the Wayne and Marcia Buske Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a professor of classics emeritus at California State University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services. He has written for several publications, including The Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New Criterion, and the Daily Telegraph. A recipient of the National Humanities Medal and the Bradley Prize, he is the author of numerous books, including A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War, The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, and The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America.

The Truth About Palestine and the Terrorist Attack On Israel

Good day, Dear Reader,

Today, I am saddened, disheartened, and angry. This past Saturday, 7 October 2023, The Islamic terrorist organization, Hamas, premeditatively planned and executed, with no military or other specific objective, a barbaric attack on Israel on multiple fronts, indiscriminately butchering, raping, and massacring civilians from the border of the Gaza Strip to Tel Aviv. As of this morning, the death toll is over 1200 souls, mostly civilians, and includes 260 attendees at a musical festival celebrating the Jewish Holy Day of Simchat Torah, as well as 30 Americans. There were also over 2200 people wounded and, at last count, over 160 people of all ages kidnapped whom Hamas has hinted would be executed during live broadcasts. These actions rise to the legal definition of War Crimes.

The attack began with Hamas randomly launching thousands of rockets into various areas of Israel in an attempt to overwhelm the Israeli Iron Dome anti-missile defense system, striking civilian targets that included hospitals and apartment buildings as far as 50 miles away from Gaza. While raining destruction down from the sky, Hamas’ shock troopers invaded Israel by land, sea, and air. They swarmed into Kibbitzes (small rural communities) and breeched security checkpoints by force and by dressing in stolen Israeli Defense Force uniforms. They flew over the border security walls using motorized paragliders. They used military-grade Zodiacs to invade seaside communities from the Mediterranean. They used motorcycles and armored cars to crash through border checkpoints. They used the stolen uniforms to infiltrate IDF border security bases, killing soldiers, creating confusion, and hampering Israeli attempts to protect civilians.

Once inside Israel, the terrorists indiscriminately raped and butchered women, children, and men, often in front of their families. They burned homes with people still inside them. They murdered every man and older boy they saw. Then, as they began their retreat, they grabbed women and children and dragged them off to be hostages, often after raping them.

None of this is speculation or hearsay. Because of the inveterate presence of smartphones, hundreds of videos were made of the atrocities as they happened, many by the terrorists themselves, most of which were posted to the various social media sites. The videos clearly show the members of Hamas laughing with unholy glee as they rape, maim, dismember, and kill the terrified civilians.

Israel, in an attempt to reduce the terrorists’ military capability and minimize the possibility of a follow-up attack, blockaded the Gaza Strip, the location of Hamas’ headquarters, and launched rockets at the terrorists’ military and administrative facilities. Unfortunately, being the cowards they are, Hamas routinely places all their facilities in the middle of dense urban areas. In fact, their main administrative headquarters was in a 17 story apartment building. However, not being the pathetic cowards the terrorists are, and wanting to only harm Hamas and not the civilians living in Gaza, the Israeli Defense Force provided advanced warning of their attacks, urging the civilians around and among the targets to evacuate quickly before the IDF began their counterattack. After giving the civilians time to evacuate, they reduced their targets to rubble.

Then, to add insult to injury, Islamic immigrants and refugees…as well as many Progressive/Liberal Marxists…in cities around the world took to the streets to celebrate the rape, dismemberment, and murder of the women, children, and men of Israel. Pro-Hamas celebrants took to the steps of the Sydney Opera Hall in Australia and chanted, “gas the Jews.” Here in the United States, traditionally Israel’s staunchest ally, four members of the House of Representatives refused to condemn the actions of Hamas and instead bemoaned what they considered to be Israel’s “overreaction” to some “civil unrest” displayed by Hamas. Thirty-five different student organizations at Harvard University, one of America’s most revered educational institutions, issued statements expressing support for the ‘Palestinians’ and declaring that the attacks were Israel’s own fault. Every disgusting one of them have openly and cheerfully expressed support for vicious animals who raped and murdered children.

Aside from the abominable actions by the terrorists, these fools are actually expressing support for a lie: THERE IS AND NEVER HAS BEEN A NATION CALLED PALESTINE NOR A PALESTINIAN PEOPLE! What many people call “Palestine” was originally a sparsely populated southern region of Canaan. Ethnically, the area has primarily been populated by Canaanites, Akkadians, Semitic Hyksosians, the nomadic Philistines, outcast Egyptians and Arabs (known regionally as the Habiru), and remnants of the various empires who conquered and controlled the area throughout the millennia. The first recorded mention of the name, “Palestine,” came from the Romans when they moved into the area in 63 BC and established the ‘Administrative District of Palestina’ in Judea, based in the market village of Palestine. Some historians believe that the name came from the Greek name for the Philistines.

In 31 AD, during the reign of Augustus, the Romans put their puppet king Herod the Great in power and renamed the region that included the ‘Administrative District of Palestina’ to the ‘Province of Roman Judea’ and moved the administrative and military headquarters to Jerusalem. A hundred years later, after the Bar-Kochba Revolt, Emperor Hadrian renamed the region, ‘Syria Palestina,’ after the Syrians and the Philistines (the two traditional enemies of the Israelites) and banished all Jews from the region as a way to punish them for revolting against the empire. Even in the 7th Century, the Muslims who conquered the Levant renamed the region ‘Jund Filistin,’ (Military District of Filistin).

The region changed hands numerous times over the next thirteen centuries. Then, in World War I, the British won most of the central part of the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula from the Ottoman Empire, making them a Protectorate within the British Empire. After the war, the British Foreign Minister issued the Balfour Declaration that promised to create a Jewish National Home in the historically Canaanite portion of the Protectorate, in addition to the Arab State promised in the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence. The newly formed League of Nations initially issued the British and French Mandates, splitting control of the region between the two nations, but toward the end of WWI, British forces captured Jerusalem and solidified their control of the Central Levant by defeating the Turkish forces at the Battle of Megiddo.

Under the authority of the British Mandate, the United Kingdom administered the southern and western portion of what before the Great War had been known as “Ottoman Syria,” which included the Emirate of Transjordan on the eastern bank of the Jordan River, the State of Iraq to the east and south of Transjordan, and the southern region adjacent to the Egyptian border which was given the English designation ‘Palestine,’ derived from the Arabic ‘filastin’ and the Hebrew ‘palestina’. The entire British Mandate was administered from the city of Jerusalem. North of the British Mandate lands were the Kingdom of Syria and Lebanon, both of which were part of the French Mandate.

From 1920 AD to 1948 AD, the British dealt with rising nationalism in both the Arab and Jewish communities, working to keep the peace between the two cultures through the Arab riots and revolts before World War II, and the influx of Jewish refugees during and after the war. The very first historically documented reference to ‘Palestinians’ without qualifying them as Arabs was in a series of formal complaints submitted by the Permanent Executive Committee (composed of Christians and Muslims) to the British authorities on 28 July 1928.

When the United Nations was created to replace the League of Nations, the devastated nations of France and the United Kingdom worked with the new UN to create the Partition Plan as a means to resolve regional unrest in several British Colonies and protectorates, and return all of the Mandatory lands to local, autonomous governance. The Partitioning of the British and French Mandate lands in the Middle East resulted in the creation of the separate, autonomous nations of the Kingdom of Iraq, the Republic of Syria, the Republic of Lebanon, and the Emirate of Transjordan. The region of Palestine was to be divided evenly…shared by an unnamed Arab state in the north, and the State of Israel in the south, with the City of Jerusalem to be made a neutral international city, or ‘Corpus Separatum,’ because of its importance to the adherents of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The majority of the Arabian Peninsula, to the east across the Gulf of Aqaba, was ceded to the powerful House of Saud and became the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Unfortunately, the Arab world categorically rejected the compromise for the region of Palestine, declaring that they wanted all Jews exiled from the region, and violence broke out as soon as the UN resolution was announced. The sectarian violence soon escalated to a full civil war between the Arab and Jewish residents of the region, with the independent Arab states creating an all-volunteer Arab Liberation Army that entered the region to fight for the Palestinian Arabs. For three months, the Yishuv (Jewish community) was constantly defending itself, occasionally pushing the aggressors back, until they mounted a counter-offensive in April 1948 AD that completely defeated the Arab forces. Without the support of the Arab Liberation Army the Arab society in the Palestine region collapsed. On 14 May 1948, David Ben-Gurion announced the official birth of the State of Israel.

Again, the Arabs in the region were offered an Arab state separate from Israel, but they refused to accept anything but the entire region, free of Jews. Transjordan took advantage of the confusion after the conflict to grab and annex land on the west side of the Jordan that was meant to be part of the proposed independent Arab state, creating the contested West Bank region that included the eastern part of Jerusalem. Egypt also took advantage of the confusion to occupy and claim the Gaza Strip. Syria and Iraq also tried to take advantage of the turmoil and sent a combined expeditionary force to attack Israel in what was to become known as the Arab-Israeli War, but it was a failure. The most intense fighting took place between Transjordanian forces and the Israelis over control of Jerusalem.

On the same day that Ben-Gurion made his announcement, the Arab League announced that it would establish a single Arab administration for all of the region of Palestine. The All-Palestine Government was established by the Arab League on 22 September 1948, during the Arab-Israeli War, and was soon recognized by all the members of the Arab League except Transjordan. While this new government claimed jurisdiction over the entire Palestinian region, it really only had power in Gaza, under Egyptian protection, and only for a short time. By the end of 1948, the All-Palestine Government had fled to Cairo where it remained until absorbed by the United Arab Republic in 1959 AD.

In 1949 AD, the neighboring Arab nations grudgingly signed an Armistice Agreement with the State of Israel, but publicly continued to state that there can never be an independent Arab state in Palestine as long as Israel exists. That same year, King Abdullah I of Transjordan, as part of a program to gain control of all of Jerusalem and the northern portion of the Mandate lands all the way to the Mediterranean, changed Transjordan’s name to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, outlawed the terms “Palestinian” and “Transjordanian,” and granted Jordanian citizenship to all Arab land holders of the Palestinian region of the British Mandate.

In June 1967 AD, the neighboring Arab states (primarily Egypt, Jordan, and Syria) tried to attack Israel once again, initiated when Egypt closed the Straits of Tiran to all Israeli shipping and placed a major military force along the border with Israel. Within six days, the Israeli forces had driven the invaders back to their respective borders. When the ceasefire was signed on 11 June 1967, Israel had Syria’s Golan Heights (the location of Syrian artillery shelling civilian settlements around the Sea of Galilee), the Jordanian West Bank (including East Jerusalem), and Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip. Israel chose to keep the captured territories so as to create a strategic buffer between themselves and the belligerent Arab states.

After the Six Day War, in September 1967, the Khartoum Arab Summit convened. The eight participating Arab states…Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Algeria, Kuwait, and Sudan…passed a unanimous resolution that there would be no peace, no recognition, and no negotiation with the State of Israel. This ultimately led to a coalition of Arab states…led by Egypt and Syria…attacking Israel yet again on 6 October 1973, the Jewish Holy Day of Yom Kippur. Israel handily drove the Syrians back to their border, but the Egyptians, supplied by the Soviet Union, proved to be more difficult. It wasn’t until the Israelis drove the Egyptians back to within 65 miles of Cairo and the Suez Canal that Egypt agreed to a ceasefire. The Yom Kippur War ended on 25 October.

As with every other Arab aggression against Israel, the Arabs were offered their own autonomous state in the region of Palestine as proposed in the original UN Partition Resolution and in UN Resolution 242. Even after the Camp David Accords of 1978 and the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty of 1979, where Egypt became the first Arab nation to officially recognize the existence of the State of Israel, the other Arab nations continued to maintain that there would be no peace as long as one Jew resided in the region. The rhetoric was even intensified by Lebanon, Syria, and Iran in the late 1980s and through the 1990s as they all declared that there would be no rest until “Israel is driven into the sea.”

In the 1993 Oslo Accords, Israel agreed to self-rule for the Palestinian Arabs in the territories they captured during the Six Day War. The Palestinian Authority was created, which was openly accepted and recognized by Israel. However, terrorist organizations such as the Palestinian Liberation Army (PLO), Hezbollah, and Hamas began to infiltrate the Palestinian Authority, as well as the commuters traveling between the areas under the jurisdiction of the Authority and the Israeli-controlled areas. Once again, the flames of a jihad (holy war) against the “Zionist infidels” began to be fanned. Palestinian suicide bombers indiscriminately murdered countless civilians in attacks on restaurants, markets, hotels, and concerts, which inspired Israel to create secure borders around the Palestinian regions with limited secure access points in order to protect its citizens and visitors.

As we saw this past weekend, the terrorist violence has continued into the Twenty-first Century, in spite of the attempts by the UN and multiple nations around the world to mediate and stop the violence between the Israelis and the Arab Palestinians. In 2002 AD, the UN, United States, European Union, and Russia came together to jointly propose the Israeli-Palestinian Road Map to Peace which proposed an independent Palestinian state living side-by-side with Israel. Israel embraced it and, in 2004 AD, unilaterally began to implement it by removing Jewish settlements from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, relocating the inhabitants into the main body of Israel. However, in January 2006, the terrorist organization Hamas managed to win control of the Palestinian Authority Legislature in the general elections and drove the moderate Fatah party out of Gaza and to the West Bank. When the President of Palestine (a member of Fatah) tried to dismiss the Hamas-controlled legislature and call for a new election, Hamas turned on their own and attacked all Fatah supporters in Gaza, ultimately winning. Now, there are two Palestines: Gaza Palestine controlled by the terrorist organization Hamas, and West Bank Palestine controlled by the moderate Fatah.

In the last 16 years, terrorist attacks upon Israel from Gaza have only gotten worse. Hamas primarily targets civilian facilities such as schools, apartment buildings, hospitals, hotels, and entertainment venues, rarely going after military targets. They have constructed a network of tunnels running under the Israeli security wall from Gaza into Israel for the sole purpose of killing Jews. Since 1948, every action by the Israelis has been in self-defense, while every action by the Arabs in the Palestinian region has been an attempt at eradicating the Jews.

The pro-Palestinian activists claim that the Jewish citizens of Israel are ‘colonizers’ who took the land from the Palestinian Arabs. The truth is that the area was the Kingdom of Israel and Judah centuries before any of the Arabs lived there. If they really want to go after ‘colonizers,’ they should go after the descendants of the Canaanites, the Egyptians, the Phoenicians, the Aram-Damascans, and the Philistines…all who occupied the area before the Israelites; not to mention the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Hellenic Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Mamluks, and even the Mongols…all who conquered and occupied the region after the fall of the Kingdom of Israel and Judah.

These activists also maintain that there is ‘ethnic cleansing’ occurring in this region. In this, they are correct, but it is not Israel who is perpetrating this heinous act. Rather, it is Hamas and other terrorist organizations in the Middle East who are determined to ‘cleanse’ the region of every last Jew. Basically, these terrorists are not Human Beings. The actions of these terrorists are clearly inhumane and depraved. These terrorists are nothing but rabid, cowardly animals who should be treated as all rabid animals are treated…they need to be eradicated.

I know this post is longer than my usual posts, but I feel it is too necessary to edit or expurgate this topic. If you read to this point, thank you for staying with me.

Be well, Dear Ones! Until next time…