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Jewish World Review March 12, 2010 / 26 Adar 5770 The march of the Red-Green brigades By Caroline B. Glick
On Wednesday, the leftist-controlled European Parliament in Strasbourg
passed a resolution endorsing the Goldstone Report. That report, it will be
recalled, denies Israel's right to self-defense by alleging that Israel's
actions to defend itself from illegal Palestinian aggression during the
course of Operation Cast Lead were war crimes.
The resolution did more than accept the Goldstone report's baseless claims.
It sought to silence those who are trying to make the Red portion of the
Red-Green alliance pay a price for its abetment of jihad. The resolution,
"expresses its concern about pressure placed on NGOs involved in the
preparation of the Goldstone report and in follow-up investigations, and
calls on authorities on all sides to refrain from any measures restricting
the activities of these organizations."
This statement was inserted to defend the EU-supported Israeli organizations
— overwhelmingly associated with the far-Left New Israel Fund — that took
a lead role in providing Richard Goldstone and his associates with false
allegations of illegal actions by IDF forces. Those organizations — and the
New Israel Fund — have rightly been the subject of scrutiny in Israel after
their role in compiling the Goldstone Report was revealed in January by the
Israeli student organization Im Tirzu.
Israel is not the only target of the Red-Green alliance. Its operations span
the globe. Sometimes, as in the case of the Goldstone report, the Left leads
the charge. Sometimes, as with the case of the Hamas-led missile offensive
against Israel that preceded Cast Lead, the jihadists move first. In
general, jihadists are motivated to attack non-Muslims by their religious
belief that Islam must dominate the world. And in general, the Left's
justification of jihadist aggression stems from its neo-Marxist faith that
the liberal nation-state is the root of all evil. Whether the Left
recognizes that if successful, its collusion with jihadists will lead to the
destruction of human freedom is subject to debate. But whether or not the
Left understands the consequences of its actions, they have played a key
role in abetting this goal.
In Nigeria on Sunday night, the jihadists led the charge. With the apparent
collaboration of the Muslim-dominated Nigerian army, Muslim gangs entered
three predominantly Christian villages around the city of Jos and killed
innocent civilians, including children with machetes, axes, and daggers.
According to eyewitness reports, some victims were scalped and many were
raped. Most had their hands and feet chopped off. Infants and children were
among the butchered.
The massacre was premeditated. According to government spokesmen, Muslim
residents were tipped off two days prior to the attack. So too, to ensure
their victims were Christians, the jihadists addressed them in Fulani, the
local language spoken by Muslims. If the victims responded in Fulani they
were saved. Otherwise they were hacked to death.
Sunday's massacre could have been expected to lead the news worldwide. But
it didn't. Indeed, it was barely noted.
That scant coverage the barbarous events received was itself plagued by
obscurity and vagueness. Commentators and reporters alike hid the identities
of the aggressors and the victims, characterizing the jihadist butchery as
"sectarian violence." They also sought to obfuscate its significance
claiming that the Muslim gangs decapitated infants in response to tribal
property disputes.
Jessica Olien at the Atlantic, not only made these claims, but brushed off
the dimensions of the atrocity writing, "It's worth noting that police have
confirmed only 109 dead."
After minimizing the death toll, Olien turned her literary daggers on the
victims claiming that they had it coming. As she put it, "It's hard not to
compare the weekend's attack with one in January in which 150 people from
the same Muslim community responsible for Sunday's attack were brutally
killed. The attack on March 7th drew considerably more international
attention the previous incident."
Ah, so unfair. The over-reported atrocity unfairly portrays murdered
Christians as victims. But Olien knows better. The Muslims were simply
retaliating for the attacks they suffered. Apparently Olien would kill
babies too if she were in their shoes.
According to Cox, eyewitnesses to the events in January "indicated that the
killings began when Muslim youths attacked Christians on a Sunday morning on
their way to church. Muslims were also killed as those under attack began to
fight back."
Cox continued that Sunday's attack followed a now familiar pattern. Attacks
"are initiated by well-armed Muslim extremists, chanting militant slogans,
attacking and killing Christian and other non-Muslim citizens and destroying
homes and places of worship."
"In the early stages of the attack, the Muslim militants take corpses to
mosques, where they are photographed and released to the media, creating the
impression that these are Muslim victims."
The international media are only too willing to accept these false
accusations of Muslim victimization at the hands of their actual victims at
face value. And so are their leftist comrades in international governing
circles.
In the wake of Sunday's massacre, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and
UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, both issued statements making no
distinction whatsoever between the victims and the aggressors. Both called
for "both sides" to act with "restraint."
In the Left's apparent willingness to hide the nature of January's attacks
and then underplay Sunday's massacre, we have an example of Leftist
facilitation of jihadist violence. In Nigeria of course, the jihadists are
the main actors and the Left are merely their help-mates.
In Israel the roles are generally reversed. Here it is the Left that leads
the jihadists by the hand. Take the Left's campaign against Jewish property
rights in Jerusalem. In the Sheikh Jarrah/Shimon Hatzaddik neighborhood in
Jerusalem, buildings owned by Jews were seized by Jordan in 1948 after the
Jordanian conquest of the city. For the past decade Jewish property owners
have been working through the courts to assert their rights to their
buildings and remove the Arab squatters who took them over.
Court after court upheld their rights to their property. And, indeed, more
than a decade ago, the squatters reached a settlement in which they
acknowledged the owners' property rights and the owners agreed to let the
squatters stay so long as they paid rent. But when the squatters stopped
paying rent, the Left pushed them to refuse to vacate the premises and try
to relitigate the old settlement. Finally, the case made it to the Supreme
Court which also recognized the rights of the Jewish owners and ordered the
police to enforce their ruling and remove the illegal squatters.
The police removed the squatters last month and within hours, Jewish
residents moved in, in accordance with an agreement with the buildings'
lawful owners. Since they moved in, the Jews have been under constant attack
from their Arab neighbors. They have been beaten and threatened with murder.
In the meantime, the Left has turned the case of the illegal Arab squatters
into a cause celebre. Last week, thousands of leftists staged an
anti-Semitic demonstration outside the compound demanding that the Jews be
removed from their homes. The argument, of course, is that allowing Jews to
exercise their legal property rights by peacefully residing in a
predominantly Arab neighborhood is an unacceptable "provocation." The Arab
squatters attempting to steal the property, on the other hand, are
"victims."
Rather than characterize the protestors as anti-Semites who are stoking
violence against innocent Jews for their crime of lawfully living where they
choose, the local and international media have described the demonstrators
as "peace activists," and "human rights activists." For turning reality on
its head and championing the cause of jihadists against the human rights of
their victims, these leftist demonstrators are lionized by their comrades in
the media and in the chanceries of the Western world. The State Department
said it was "unacceptable," that Jews moved into their homes.
So too, the UN raced to accept the Left's claim that human rights demand the
denial of Jews' property rights due to their ethnicity. Its peace process
boss Richard Miron said, "I deeply deplore the totally unacceptable actions
by Israel in which Israeli security forces evicted Palestinian refugee
families… to allow settlers to take possession of their properties."
It is a depressing commentary on our times that spokesmen of democracies and
supposed champions of human rights are willing to state publicly that
granting Jews the equal protection of the law is an unacceptable imposition
on their bigoted neighbors. But the notion that Jews have an equal right to
buy and own property in areas of Jerusalem from which they were illegally
ethnically cleansed by the Jordanians in 1948 is now a great cause of the
Left. And one can only assume that the jihadists will soon make their move —
to the gratification of their leftist comrades — against the innocent Jews
of Jerusalem.
This brings us to the events surrounding US Vice President Joseph Biden's
visit to Israel this week. On the first day of his visit, as a matter of
routine governance, the Jerusalem Planning and Building Committee approved
plans to build 1,600 housing units in Jerusalem's Ramat Shlomo neighborhood.
Ramat Shlomo is a neighborhood with over 20,000 residents located between
the even more populous Ramot and Sanhedriya neighborhoods. From an Israeli
perspective, it is just as uncontroversial as Yad Eliyahu in Tel Aviv or
Hadar in Haifa.
But not from a Red perspective. Just moments after the decision was
announced, the Left used it as proof of Israeli venality. For approving the
construction of new homes in its capital, the government was condemned again
and again. The Palestinians and the Arab League jumped on the bandwagon. And
now, owing to the Left's anti-Israel onslaught, anyone murdered in Jerusalem
— or anywhere else for that matter — will be dismissed as a product of fully
justified Muslim anger.
Observing the Leftist charge, led in this case by the frothing-at-the-mouth
Israeli media, Biden moved swiftly. The man who came to Israel on a charm
offensive could no longer hide the truth about where the Obama
administration's true sympathies lay. After declaring his undying love and
fidelity to Israel just hours before, Biden switched gears and condemned
Israel for "undermining," prospects for peace.
Wednesday morning as he referred to his condemnation of Israel's decision to
build homes in its capital, Biden said, "Sometimes only a friend can deliver
the hardest truth." And at least in this case, he is correct.
And so, in the spirit of that sentiment, it must be said: When those who
purport to support peace and human rights join forces with the Red-Green
alliance what they are actually supporting is bigotry, violence, murder and
ultimately, the destruction of human freedom. Whether the Left recognizes
the significance of its actions or not, it is time that it be held as
accountable for its defense of jihad as the jihadists are for carrying it
out.
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JWR contributor Caroline B. Glick is the senior Middle East Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC and the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post. Comment by clicking here.
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