The ironies abound. The headline of this Reuters story is "Israeli planes bomb Gaza tunnel." Only in the fourth paragraph do we learn that this strike was in retaliation for rocket and mortar attacks upon Israel from Gaza, and only in the sixth paragraph do we learn that Palestinians crossing into Israel in an ambulance for medical treatment were at the border crossing when the jihadists fired upon it.
By the way, during World War II, did Great Britain allow Germans to enter the country for medical treatment? Of course not. The very idea is absurd. Yet Israel admits people from a land whose leaders have again and again vowed to destroy Israel, and yet we still hear about the "humanitarian crisis:" in Gaza.
"Israeli planes bomb Gaza tunnel," from Reuters, August 10 (thanks to JCB):
Israeli warplanes bombed a tunnel under the Gaza Strip border with Egypt today in the first such attack in almost two months, the Israeli military said.Witnesses and officials of the Islamist group Hamas which rules the enclave confirmed the pre-dawn strike. There were no reports of casualties.
Gaza's smuggling tunnels, which still number in the hundreds despite air attacks and an Egyptian crackdown in which some have been blown up or flooded, are a frequent target for Israeli retaliation for attacks by Gaza's armed Palestinian groups.
Today's raid was launched in response to recent mortar and rocket attacks, an Israeli military spokeswoman said. It was the first aerial bombardment of the Gaza Strip since June 18th.
The aircraft had targeted a tunnel under the border at Rafah which was suspected of being used to smuggle explosives into Gaza from Egypt, she added.
Yesterday, two mortar rounds were fired near Israel's fortified Erez border crossing as a number of medical patients going for treatment in Israel were being ferried out by ambulance....
Re-posting the original comments for this article as made at IntenseDebate; or at least, such of the comments as were kept by me, Dumbledoresarmy.
Part the first.
NAKAL said - There is Democracy and there is perversity. Israel is so Democratic, on a daily basis Arab-Israeli members of the Knesset routinely criticize Israel and call it "Fascist" with no sense of the obvious irony that Israeli Law allows them to do so. I guess IRONY is not one of the Arab's stronger suits.
RUSLANT said - Israel is up against forces of pure evil. But look at all those American, English, Norwegian Quislings in the media, academia, "intellectual", "cultural" and "artistic" elites and trade unions totally aiding the Islamo-Nazi enemy against Israel. They should be all put on trial for treason not only against the only democracy of the Middle East but against the entire Western civilization at the time of existential global war. But who will bring that human refuse to justice? Who will?1 Who will?!!
Ruslan Tokhchukov, EnragedSince1999.
GREATICON said - Don't take in these barbarians into Israel for treatment. They don't give a damn to as to who they kill as long as he is an Israeli. Why does these kind of heartless people require any kind of kindness? They think of destruction of Israel 24/7 and teach their children only killing and violence. Long Live ISRAEL and to its people humanity cheers.
MUHAMMADBEAR said : This is a comment on "Gaza jihadists lob shells at Israeli border crossing as Palestinian patients enter Israel for medical treatment."
It never ceases to amaze me how much denial and self deception a person has to undergo in order to lay the blame for this at Israel's doorstep.
One has to first close one's mind to the initator of such egregious violence.
Then one needs to ignore the underlying ideology to justify said violence; the underlying tenets of Islam's religious texts and in the charter of its political bodies.
Then comes the moral equivocation whereby peaceful settlements are seen as provocative as missile attacks.
One also needs to ignore 1,400 years of violent expansion and conquest. I could go on and on, but you get the point.
Yet, somehow, the liberal mindset manages to do all this and still claim the moral high ground.
I can only conclude from all of this that liberalism is a mental deficiency. The liberals I speak to actually believe all of this stuff.
HUGH FITZGERALD said:
I do not understand why the local Arabs cannot be treated by their own, as are most people in the world.
Nowhere else in the world is it taken for granted that those who are sworn to destrroy another people and nation can receive, from thatsame people and that nation, treatment, as do the local Arabs (carefully calling themselves the "Palestinians" for obvious propagandistic reasons) when they take advantage of Israel's generosity.
Why does the entire Western world offer access to advanced medical care to rich Arabs who help fund Al Qaeda, and Tablighi al-Jamaat, and a thousand other groups intent on spreading the power of Islam, some by creating a cadre of new Muslims from converts within the West, some by spreading Islam through paying for mosques and madrasas, and some by funding Da'wa in prisons and among other economically and psychically marginal people, the kind most vulnerable to Muslim appeals.
And why train Arabs, giving them access to Western education, especially in fields -- such as any of the sciences (chemistry, physics, biology) or technical fields (computer engineering), where the knowledge or skills they acquire can, and have been, turned to the service of violent Jihad?
-GRAVENIMAGE replied to HUGH - (quoting) "And why train Arabs, giving them access to Western education, especially in fields -- such as any of the sciences (chemistry, physics, biology) or technical fields (computer engineering), where the knowledge or skills they acquire can, and have been, turned to the service of violent Jihad?"
........................
Because everyone in the West knows that education is civilizing--these Arabs will return to their native land flush with Enlightenment values and an appreciation that the West isn't "racist" after all--they will be ambassadors for peace and understanding.
Or, of course, they may just walk away with a great deal of technical knowledge, which they then can apply to furthering the Jihad. This idea is so alien to the liberal West that many reading this would be unable to credit it at all, despite how common this has become.
-HESPERADO said - (quoting Hugh) "Why does the entire Western world offer access to advanced medical care to rich Arabs who help fund Al Qaeda, and Tablighi al-Jamaat, and a thousand other groups intent on spreading the power of Islam...?"
Short answer: because they are brown people.
-JOCKAIRA said - Another answer: They don't have health insurance...just tons of cash from oil sales."
End of first part of original comments.
Second part of my record of original comments thread for this article.
Hugh Fitzgerald said (continuing from above)
This makes sense. Israel, and the other countries of the advanced West, should stop pretending that by constantly treating their Muslim enemies as if they are friends, they will somehow abandon the immutable, endless source of Muslim hostility toward them: the Qur'an, the Hadith, the Sira, and not only the texts, but the tenets elaborated long ago from them, and the attitudes and atmospherics of islam that suffuse societies and states where Muslims rule, and even suffuse communities, in the West, or single families in the West, where Islam controls the minds and hearts -- thus never to be "won" by Western acts of kindness or outright Western bribery -- of Muslims.
Why the refusal to face what should be obvious?
Why all the strategies, ever more elaborate, and ever more preposterous, and ever more futile, to pretend that there can be large-scale "integration" of Muslims, that somehow the problems with them can be overcome? How, with Muslims, does one overcome what Islam teaches?
Who has dared, in the camp of apologists and pie-in-the-sky-in-the-sweet-bye-and-bye pollyannas, on the whole fleet of ships, in the Western world, identically named the S. S. Naufragium, all of then at this point Narrenschiffen, Ships of Fools, commanded by captains and crews who are not leaders, but merely taking, as everyone likes to say nowadays, a "leadership role."
We need something else, a vessel commanded by those whose minds, are clear when it comes to Islam, because they have not assigned the task of understanding to underlings who will prepare little Executive Summaries of Talking Points but who will themselves have lived with, studied, thought about (yes, a little less televsion, fewer time-consuming adulterous shenanigans, a little less gladhanding of major contributors and not-always-feigned-deep-concern for constituents, and a lot more burning of the midnight oil in order to fulfill responsibilities), and thoroughly assimilated, the meaning, and therefore the menace, one that does not go away, and cannot go away, of minds on Islam.
It's not the ships of state that need to be cleaned up, it's the minds of the captains and their crews. In the United States, as in Great Britain and France and everywhere in the Western world, among the political and media elites that have been so criminally negligent, chosse those with minds that are clear and well-stocked -- minds all shipshape and bristol fashion.
RRWEST said - "I am always amazed how all that is reactionary and opposite to common sense seems to dominate Palestinian thinking. Hiding behind school children, headquartering in hospitals, bombing their own people to make Israel look like the enemy. Its all against what other people value, no matter what their religion.
I can understand that people are upset when their homes are bulldozed for Israeli settlers to occupy the land, but I have a suspicion that there are other reasons that they are moved. Reasons they won't admit to in public.
I feel that Israel made a mistake allowing the PLA to continue to live in Gaza. We see the results of that decision every day."
END of my record of original comments to this article - dumbledoresarmy.