Victor Sharpe
“Oh, what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practice to deceive.”
“But when we’ve practiced for a while,
How vastly we improve our style.”
The domestic and international mainstream media, by ever falsely blaming Israel for the endless and barbaric Palestinian Arab acts of terror against Israeli men, women and children simply encourages the terrorists and their Iranian financiers to continue their brutal crimes. They do this while hiding their lethal weapons within their own Arab settlements. This, while the same Palestinian terrorists cower behind their own women and children and repulsively use them as human shields, hoping that they will be killed and exploited as propaganda tools. These evil acts alone are Palestinian crimes against humanity.
Jenin is not a refugee camp but a city of some 15,000 residents. It has been deliberately transformed into a veritable hotbed of terror. Over 50 such terror attacks have been launched at Israeli civilians from Jenin in recent months and no country in the world would accept such aggression and endure a mounting civilian death toll without ending it. But when Israel does, the media then vomits forth its mendacity and bile.
Here are just a few of the 25 Israeli civilians murdered by Palestinian terrorists during the few months. On February 26th, 2023, two brothers, aged 19 and 21 years old, Hallel and Yagel Yaniv, were driving through the city of Huwara when they were gunned down in cold blood. The two brothers left behind their parents and three younger siblings.
Just a few weeks later, on April 7th, 15-year-old Rina, 20-year-old Maia, and their mother Lucy were driving in the Jordan Valley when terrorists fired on the car, causing it to crash; the terrorists again fired on the vehicle killing the defenseless sisters and critically wounding the mother, who died three days later.
Just over a month ago, Meir Tamari was murdered while driving home to his wife Tal and two young daughters, Yahav, aged one, and Alma, age two. The family had just finished building a home in Samaria. At the funeral, the bereaved mother said, "today we were supposed to have a fun day with the children, to celebrate your birthday. Instead of congratulating you, we are here eulogizing you. This is a reality that does not make sense...We were supposed to grow old together and have more children. To do so many things. Now I’m alone with them."
These are just three of the heartbreaking stories that have become all too commonplace in Israel. Jews murdered simply for being Jews living in Israel, their ancestral and Biblical homeland, their families left grieving and bereft of their fathers, mothers, daughters, sons, brothers, and sisters. And in grisly contrat, what do the mothers of the Arab terrorists do? They joyously celebrate their sons’ barbarity by handing out candies.
The IDF attack on Jenin focused solely on reducing the murderous Palestinian terror nest from where the jihadis target innocent Israeli civilians. Arabs in terrorist occupied Jenin were ordered to leave their homes temporarily whilst their own Palestinian gunmen, armed and financed by Iran, turned their homes into arms depots and heavily armed terrorist command centers.
The Israeli counter-terror activity in Jenin focused solely on combating this murderous Palestinian terrorism targeting Israeli civilians throughout the Biblical Jewish heartland of Judea and Samaria – known by a hostile world as the West Bank – but which is the ancestral Jewish territory invaded and illegally occupied by Jordan from 1948 until 1967.
And it is the media, which time and time again, remains motivated by a warped bias against the embattled Jewish state and a delusionary glorification of naked Arab thuggery.
Take the usual suspects such as the Washington Post, the New York Times, CNN, the Associated Press, PBS and, perhaps, worst of all, the BBC. They all characterized Israel’s legal and moral right as a sovereign nation to defend its citizens from Palestinian terror as perhaps “illegal” by falsely implying that the IDF was operating against the law in carrying out its obligation to prevent terrorism. This was a low point in objective journalism. The Washington Post descended into characterizing the murderous Palestinian killers of Israeli women and children as “resistance” fighters.
Here below are some of the predictably anti-Israel statements spewed by the media including quoting the negative words by the Secretary-General, António Guterres, of the morally bankrupt UN.
Finally, and tragically, most mainstream news outlets referred to the dead terrorists simply as Palestinians without revealing that each had been gun toting killers. The result is that most readers are left with the false impression that they were innocent Arab civilians.
How evil and manipulative can the printed word so often be.
Colonel Richard Kemp, the former commander of the British military forces in Afghanistan, spoke about the Israel Defense Forces ‘Operation Home and Garden’ and the condemnation Israel has received internationally over the operation in Jenin despite the military action resulting in no civilian fatalities.
According to Col. Kemp, the complete avoidance of civilian fatalities over two days in Jenin constitutes a “remarkable achievement by the IDF,” which is “probably unprecedented in modern warfare.”
Colonel Kemp added: “To conduct an operation of such intensity in an urban area without killing any uninvolved civilians at all is a remarkable achievement by the IDF and probably unprecedented in modern warfare,” he explained, adding: “I doubt any other army in the world would be able to achieve what the IDF did in Jenin.”
Col. Kemp noted that avoiding civilian casualties in a terrorist stronghold such as Jenin “is even more remarkable given that the terrorists in Jenin hid behind the civilian population, used human shields and deliberately tried to lure the IDF into killing civilians in order to attract world condemnation.”
Responding to the statement by UN Secretary General Guterres that the IDF was guilty of using disproportionate force. Col. Kemp replied that, “No innocent civilians were killed and Guterres was also wrong to say that the use of air strikes is inconsistent with this type of operation. Jenin was a war zone full of terrorists heavily equipped with arms and explosives, many supplied by Iran to kill Israelis. The IDF chose to use drone strikes because they calculated that this would be the most effective way of dealing with the threat while minimizing civilian casualties, and again, in this case, the facts proved them right and Guterres wrong.”
Colonel Kemp explained why there is such ignorant condemnation of Israel whenever it must defend itself. He points out: “Israel’s critics will condemn Israel, whatever it does to protect its citizens. This criticism is not about Israel’s military action but about Israel’s right to operate in Judea and Samaria at all.
These people have bought into the propaganda campaign that says Israel is illegally occupying this territory which is not the case. This is Israeli sovereign territory that is disputed. Israel does not just have the right to act with force to protect its citizens, it has a duty to do so, as would every other country in the world. All these accusations against Israel show the double standards that are consistently applied.”
Tragically, few in the world are even aware of the horrifying destruction by the so-called Palestinian Authority (PA) of Jewish and Christian Biblical archaeological sites throughout the Land of Israel, including the hideous bulldozing of the well over 3,000 year old Jewish antiquities on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. A crime against humanity and civilization which remains unpunished to this day.
As the media is quick to print and make false charges against Israel, it is also guilty of repressing all stories of humanity and kindness that daily take place in the reborn Jewish state. This recent heartwarming story occurred, but one would look in vain to find it in the national and international mainstream press. Here it is:
A 12-year-old Palestinian Arab boy’s head was internally severed from his neck after he was hit by a car while cycling last month. An injury of this type is almost always fatal. Yet Suleiman Hassan was successfully discharged from Jerusalem’s Hadassah Ein Kerem Medical Center this week, his life saved by complicated emergency surgery followed by intensive care.
Orthopedic surgeons Dr. Ohad Einav and Dr. Zvi Asa explained that the worst of Suleiman’s injuries from the crash was a fracture in the internal connection between his head and neck, along with the tearing of all the supporting ligaments. Due to the serious injury, the head was almost completely detached from the base of the neck.
The child was airlifted to the medical center from the Jordan Valley. Doctors estimated his chances of survival were 50-50. In a surgical procedure lasting several hours, Einav and Asa repaired the area using new plates and fixations. Dr.Einav added,“Our ability to save the child was thanks to our knowledge and the most innovative technology in the operating room.”
Suleiman went home wearing a cervical splint to aid his full recovery. Dr. Einav noted that the child suffers no neurological deficits or sensory or motor dysfunction.
“Bless you all. All I can say is a big thank you,” said Suleiman’s father to the medical staff as he and his son left the hospital. “I will thank you all my life for saving my dear only son. Thanks to you he has regained his life even when the odds were low and the danger was obvious.”
What saved him was professionalism, technology, and quick decision-making by the Israeli trauma and orthopedics team.
The hope now is that he will not succumb to the insistent indoctrination and hate propaganda against Jewish Israelis that exist in the corrupted Palestinian school system and become a future terrorist.
© Victor SharpeThe views expressed by RenewAmerica columnists are their own and do not necessarily reflect the position of RenewAmerica or its affiliates.