Wrong to Have Animals Killed in War

From "Military dog killed in Gaza blast saved handler's life":

IDF canine Tamara took the worst of the impact in house explosion • Her handler, Staff Sgt. T., was moderately wounded • "She was his best friend; he's grieving for her," says his mother • Oketz Unit holds ceremonies for dogs killed in action.

A dog from the IDF's Oketz K9 unit who was killed last week when a booby-trapped house in Gaza exploded saved her handler's life.

I have to say that I consider immoral to have dogs or other animals take part in military operations - be it Israeli or any other - as they cannot give their consent.

Tower Hamlets Supports Palestinians: What a Surprise

Has the London borough of Tower Hamlets become a little Muslim enclave in Britain's capital city?

Lutfur Rahman, the directly-elected mayor of Tower Hamlets, in East London, today ordered the Palestinian flag to be flown from the town hall as a "gesture of humanitarian solidarity" with the victims of the fighting in Gaza.

Who is he to make such decision? What about people living in his council or in London who want to express solidarity with the Israelis killed by Hamas rockets?

Rahman also said that he was supporting a collection by the Tower Hamlets branch of Unison - Britain's biggest trade union - for the charity Medical Aid for Palestinians.

Muslim charities - or organisations giving money to Muslims - have to be treated with great suspicion until they have been subjected to thorough investigation as has been done in the USA, where the largest Islamic charities were shut down and prosecuted for financing terrorism. Britain's Charity Commission must do the same here. Islam's doctrine of zakat prescribes that one eighth of all obligatory Muslim charity must fund jihad, the holy war in the name of Allah.

Interestingly, it has come to light that the Palestinian Authority refused millions of dollars worth of medical aid from Israel twice in the last week.

The area of Tower Hamlets, which has been at the centre of electoral frauds and intimidations, has for years been colonised by Muslims who in local elections tend to vote for candidates of their "faith". Under Lutfur Rahman, Tower Hamlets Council has been trying to enforce Islamic law.

Students Tired of Studying Support Palestinians

"British students stand with Gaza against Israel’s assault" is the title of an article on the Stop the War Coalition website.

Today, the student movement issued a statement "in solidarity with the people of Palestine", signed by National Union of Students Officers - representing millions of British students - and over 100 pro-Palestine student leaders.

If all these luminaries concentrated on what they are supposed to do - educating themselves - instead of taking up fashionable causes about which they know next to nothing, maybe they could have learned that the correct spelling of the word for writing and other office materials is "stationery":

The Palestinians’ right to education has been particularly hard hit by the siege. Basic educational equipment including books, paper, computers, stationary and desks are all in limited supply and Israel routinely cuts off Gaza’s electricity supply.

Shame that these students don't even have that excuse for their lack of education.

HuffPo: Hamas Tactic Is to Require Israel to Cause Civilian Victims

Has the world finally come to its senses?

Even far-left publications recognize that Hamas is the most responsible for what is going on in Gaza or at least open the debate to this view.

After The Guardian, now The Huffington Post has started publishing commentaries defending Israel. Criminal and civil liberties lawyer Alan Dershowitz writes in "Hamas' Tactic: Require Israel to Cause Civilian Casualties" in the HuffPo:

As the rockets continue to fall in Israel and Gaza, it is important to understand Hamas's tactic and how the international community and the media are encouraging it. Hamas's tactic is as simple as it is criminal and brutal. Its leaders know that by repeatedly firing rockets at Israeli civilian areas, they will give Israel no choice but to respond. Israel's response will target the rockets and those sending them. In order to maximize their own civilian casualties, and thereby earn the sympathy of the international community and media, Hamas leaders deliberately fire their rockets from densely populated civilian areas. The Hamas fighters hide in underground bunkers but Hamas refuses to provide any shelter for its own civilians, who they use as "human shields." This unlawful tactic puts Israel to a tragic choice: simply allow Hamas rockets to continue to target Israeli cities and towns; or respond to the rockets, with inevitable civilian casualties among the Palestinian "human shields."

Every democracy would choose the latter option if presented with a similar choice. Although Israel goes to great efforts to reduce civilian casualties, the Hamas tactic is designed to maximize them. The international community and the media must understand this and begin to blame Hamas, rather than Israel, for the Palestinian civilians who are killed by Israeli rockets but whose deaths are clearly part of the Hamas tactic.

Every reasonable commentator has agreed with President Obama that Hamas started this battle by firing thousands of rockets at Israeli civilians. Every reasonable commentator also agrees with President Obama that Israel has the right to defend its citizens. But many commentators fault Israel for causing Palestinian civilian casualties. But what is Israel's option, other than to simply allow rockets to be aimed at its own women and children. As President Obama observed when he went to Sderot as a candidate:

"The first job of any nation state is to protect its citizens. And so I can assure you that if...somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that. And I would expect Israelis to do the same thing."

Israel should continue to make every effort to reduce civilian casualties, both because that is the humane thing to do and because it serves their interests. But so long as Hamas continues to fire rockets from densely populated civilian areas, rather than from the many open areas outside of Gaza City, this cynical tactic--which constitutes a double war crime--will guarantee that some Palestinian women and children will be killed. And the Hamas leadership prepares for this gruesome certainty by arranging for the dead babies to be paraded in front of the international media. In one such case, the Palestinian radicals posted a video of a dead baby who turned out to have been reportedly killed in Syria by the Assad government, and in another case, they displayed the body of a baby who had been killed by a Hamas rocket that misfired, falsely claiming that it had been the victim of an Israeli rocket.

As Richard Kemp, the former commander of British forces in Afghanistan has said, the Israeli Army does "more to safeguard civilians than any Army in the history of warfare." This includes dropping leaflets, making phone calls and providing other warnings to civilian residents of Gaza City. But Hamas refuses to provide shelter for its civilians, deliberately exposing them to the risks associated with warfare, while it shelters its own fighters in underground bunkers.

The Hamas tactic is also designed to prevent Israel from making peace with the Palestinian Authority. Even Israeli doves are concerned that if Israel ends its occupation of the West Bank, Hamas may take over that territory, as it took over Gaza shortly after Israel ended its occupation of that area. The West Bank is much closer to Israel's major population centers than the Gaza. If Hamas were to fire rockets from the West Bank at Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, Israel would then have to respond militarily, as it has in Gaza. Once again, civilians would be killed, thus provoking international outcry against Israel.

What we are seeing in Gaza today is a replay of what happened in 2008 and 2009, when Israel went into Gaza to stop the rocket fire. The result was the Goldstone report which put the blame squarely on Israel. This benighted report--condemned by most thoughtful people, and eventually even critiqued by Goldstone himself--has encouraged Hamas to go back to the tactic that resulted in international condemnation of Israel. This tactic will persist as long as the international community and the media persist in blaming Israel for civilian deaths caused by a deliberate Hamas tactic.

The Guardian: Israel Is Only Justly Defending Itself

If even The Guardian publishes online a comment siding with Israel, by no less than Israel's Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Danny Ayalon, it must really mean that it is becoming obvious to everyone with an ounce of brain that, defending itself after years of restraint, the Jewish state is only doing what any other country in the same situation would do.

Are The Guardian's falling readership numbers making the paper take into more consideration the opinions of people who are not totally blinded by ideology?

Hamas leaves Israel no choice:

Israel will not allow the lives of its citizens to be endangered. If only Gaza's leaders felt the same.

Hamas's charter includes the aspiration that "The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews)". While many concentrate on its death-cult worship, its bloodthirsty killing of adversaries, or its contempt for women, Christians and homosexuals, it is this aspiration for genocide that is at the root of Hamas activities. This is the primary reason why Hamas, the governing regime in Gaza, will never recognise or accept a peace accord with Israel in any form.

Since Israel left Gaza in 2005, thousands of rockets have rained down on Israeli cities and towns in deliberate contravention not just of international law, but all humanity and morality. While some might suggest the so-called blockade is the cause of the attacks, it is actually a consequence. The restrictions were only implemented two years after Israel left Gaza, when it was clear that instead of building a "Singapore of the Middle East", Hamas was interested in importing stockpiles of weapons from places like Iran. Instead of building a future for its people, Hamas built an open-air prison for the million and a half inhabitants who fell into its grasp.

However, Gaza was never enough for an organisation whose raison d'etre is the annihilation of Israel, and whose charter begins with the ominous warning that "Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it".

Every rocket from Gaza is a double war crime. First, the rockets are aimed at civilians; second, they are fired from built-up civilian areas, often close to schools, mosques and hospitals. And about 10% of Hamas rockets fired from Gaza don't reach Israel, exploding in Gaza. Mohammed Sadallah – a four-year-old killed on Saturday, his body displayed in a press conference with Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas's leader – was, according to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, most likely killed by an errant Hamas rocket.

Hamas leaders frequently declare that their people actively seek death. Fathi Hamad, a senior member of Hamas, stated in 2008 that "for the Palestinian people, death became an industry, at which women and children excel. Accordingly we created a human shield of women, children and elderly. We seek death as you [Israelis] desire life."

Hamas seeks conflagration and war. Death and destruction is seen as a win-win calculation, as any Israeli death is considered a glorious achievement and every Palestinian death that of a "holy martyr", providing badly needed propaganda locally and internationally. Seemingly there are not enough deaths for them, so Hamas's military wing, the al-Qassam Brigades, has been busy sending out pictures of massacres in Syria, claiming they were taken in Gaza.

Israel has been left with little choice but to root out this nest of hate and destruction. No nation on earth would allow a third of its population to live in constant fear of incessant fire emanating from a neighbouring territory. Our government exercised restraint. We gave the international community time to act. However, there was a deafening silence, demonstrating to Israelis that we had to take action to protect our citizens.

Those who refused to condemn the attacks on Israeli citizens have no right to condemn Israel's response to establish peace and quiet for its citizens. This is the basic obligation of any sovereign nation, and we will continue taking any action necessary to achieve this aim.

In the face of this undeniable truth, the usual accusation is that Israel is responding with "disproportionate force" or carrying out "collective punishment". I urge all who make this accusation to consider that Israel has successfully targeted in excess of 1,300 weapons caches, rocket launchers and other elements of Hamas's terrorist infrastructure. Yet despite this, the number of Palestinian casualties remains around one for every 13 strikes, the majority killed being active members of Hamas and combatants.

Israel will not allow its citizens' lives to be endangered. The international community must call on the Palestinian leadership in the Gaza Strip to take the same approach with its own people.

Douglas Murray and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown Debate

I've chosen this video of a debate between Douglas Murray and renowned UK Muslim leftist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, a columnist for the (self-proclaimed) Independent newspaper, because it is very representative of several things.

Alibhai-Brown starts by saying that the last time the two of them debated they were very civilized and "British", which we must assume she now regrets because this time she was anything but.

Then, after reprimanding Murray for his - in her view - generalizations about Muslims and fundamentalism, she berates British culture which, she says, is a drinking culture. So he is accused of what he does not do and she, on the other hand, does: tarring everyone in a group with the same brush.

After this nice example of inconsistency, we are treated to her description of herself as "very well-integrated", in the same breath as her protest against imposing "Britishness" on everybody living in the UK.

Many similar inanities follow before the conversation begins revolving around freedom of speech and then Iran, Israel and nuclear arms.

About freedom of speech, I'm glad to see that Douglas Murray appears to believe what I believe regarding Holocaust denial. The gist of what he says is that imprisoning David Irving for denying the Holocaust gives the President of Iran, the madman Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a pretext to accuse the West of double standards by showing its Achilles' heel in the defence of free speech.

Murray seems to think what I also believe about freedom of speech in general, namely that criminalizing Holocaust denial, Nazi and fascist speech is a violation of freedom of expression.

In fact, as many people have observed during the recent Muslim riots against the Muhammad film, making crimes of Holocaust denial and the rest paves the way to the Islamic world's request to impose on the West blasphemy laws outlawing criticism of Islam.

About Iran, the "very well-integrated" Yasmin Alibhai-Brown makes several attempts at morally equating it to Israel and Britain, saying that nobody should have nuclear weapons but, if some countries have them, then all countries ahould be allowed to have them too.

I found the best answer to that in a comment to the video:

In the words of Salman Rushdie:"There is only one group in the world that wishes to get nuclear weapons to use them... radical Islamists". Every country that is armed with them has them for deterrence. There are those who have them not to use them and there are those who want them to use them. Yasmin simply does not get it.

As we well know, Islamists have among their midst many suicide - nuclear or not - bombers.

The most revealing thing in this very enlightening video is the parallel in the irrationality of Alibhai-Brown's performance: she talks as irrationally as she acts irrationally during the discussion.

The lack of logic in her words is not only mirrored but confirmed and reinforced by her continuous interrupting, shouting, patronizing, forcing the others to pay attention to her, treating them like idiots, telling them what to do, pointing fingers under their nose and other hysterical behaviours.

If, at any moment, you may be tempted to take her pseudo-arguments seriously her behaviour serves as a reminder of what degree of irrationality we are dealing with here.

AFDI Ads Put Anti-Jihad on the UK Media’s Agenda

Jihad Watch has published my article AFDI Ads Put Anti-Jihad on the UK Media’s Agenda:

Pamela Geller’s subway ads have achieved the very important objective of making anti-jihad reach the headlines in the UK.

Even though the coverage was, as was to be expected, mostly unsympathetic to the ads, it’s not often that an ordinary person in Britain turns the TV on and hears the word “jihad” and even less “anti-jihad”, unless in connection with terrorist activities. Counterjihad posters in US main cities’ subways are a revolutionary novelty.

So I think that even if the media reports can distort and give the wrong impression about the campaign, the very fact that the general public learns about it has the positive effect of letting people know that there is a resistance to Islamic violence and arrogance, and a response to anti-Israel ads.

There are many in Britain who don’t believe the propaganda by the political classes and the media. The idea that the BBC, for example, is strongly politically biased is becoming increasingly popular, so we can expect that lots of people will take what it says with a pinch of salt.

The BBC covered the judge ruling in favour of the ads in the New York subway with “Pro-Israel 'Defeat Jihad' ads to hit New York subway”, clearly and predictably sympathetic with the MTA and CAIR point of view:

"Pro-Israel adverts that equate jihad with savagery are to appear in 10 of New York's subway stations next week, after officials failed to block them.
…Aaron Donovan, spokesman for New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), told the BBC they had no choice but to run the ad.

"'Our hands are tied,' he said. 'The MTA is subject to a court-ordered injunction that prohibits application of the MTA's existing no-demeaning ad standard.

"'That standard restricted publication of ads that demean people on the basis of their race, sex, religion, national origin or other group classification. The judge recognised our intention but found our attempt to be constitutionally deficient.'"

What “race, sex, religion, national origin or other group classification” is jihad? It is linked to a particular religion, yes, which is why we should be free to criticize Islam. But the ads don’t demean people for being Muslim, but just for embracing arms and killing other people. Who could object to “demeaning” murderers and terrorists?

Paradoxically, it is those like the MTA spokesman and the others who keep telling us how the vast majority of Muslims are peaceful, who in practice, when they hear “jihad”, have the knee-jerk reaction of thinking “Muslims”.

Sky News similarly headlined: “Anti-Jihad Adverts To Run In New York Subway”:

"The controversial leader of the group behind the adverts says she believes that America is at risk from some Muslims.

"The head of a group that has won its fight to run controversial adverts in New York subway stations referring to some Muslims as 'savage' has told Sky News that she will fight 'to the death' for the right to offend people.

"Ms Geller told Sky News that she was unconcerned the adverts might make the subway network a target for violence.

"She said: 'Were there similar ads on the London buses and trains on 7/7? You know
there weren't.

"'I will not abridge my freedoms so as not to offend savages.

"'I won't take responsibility for other people being violent.

"'I live in America and in America we have the first amendment.'

"Ms Geller, who is a prominent supporter of Israel, stressed that she was not referring to all Muslims as savages, only those who engaged in what she characterises as ‘Jihad’.

"She believes that America is under threat from some Muslims who wish to impose Sharia law on the country, and her group has launched similar campaigns before."


She believes that. And so believes everybody who has taken the time to look at the evidence as objectively as possible. That reference to “some Muslims” is ambiguous because it seems to imply, again, that Pamela Geller targets Muslims, although, for some unknown reason, not all of them.

Reporting on this without any attempt to explain the reasons behind someone’s actions is in itself deceiving. Telling that Geller “believes that America is under threat from some Muslims who wish to impose Sharia law on the country” to an audience that has never been informed about what Islam preaches, how its history unfolded, what its effects globally today are, and what Sharia law involves, is implicitly portraying her as a conspiracy theorist.

Russia Today, another news channel that broadcasts in Britain, reported on the Washington court ruling:

"Judge Collyer openly described the posters as ‘hate speech’, but said the message was protected under the First Amendment as ‘core political speech’ and did not accept the Metro’s argument that it incited violence and constitutes ‘a gamble with public safety’.
AFDI, whose poster has been condemned by over 200 public organizations, had to fight a similar legal battle in New York, again winning the right to place the ads."


The word “hate” is another of those over-used and abused words, like “racism”. The politically correct and those protected by them never hate, they are just righteously angry (against injustice, presumably). Anti-jihadists who write ads hate, but Muslims violently rioting are just angry (even rightly so, because someone provoked them with – how dared they! - a film). The English Defence League staging a peaceful demonstration in Walthamstow is hate, but the far-left extremists and Muslims who pelted them with bottles and bricks only showed their anger against these “bigots”.

Hate has obviously come to mean the thought crime of not thinking politically correctly.

In the press, both The Daily Mail and The Guardian have run several articles on the subject.

They both reported, among other things, on the Mona Eltahawy incident. The MailOnline had an interview with Pamela Hall in which she talked about her plans to sue Eltahawy for the damages she caused to her clothing and equipment during her 'defense of free speech'.

The Guardian, in Comment in Free, asked its readers, “Mona Eltahawy and the anti-Muslim subway ads: is hers the right approach?”. The comments to the post are mostly answering no, drawing a distinction between exercising the freedom of speech and vandalism, and concluding that Eltahawy’s action was damaging public property and therefore illegal. This is one of the ever increasing number of cases in which the people who comment on liberal media’s articles reveal themselves to be much less on the left than the paper itself.

A commenter noticed the “anti-Muslim” in the headline, and wrote: “Strictly speaking, these ads are anti-violent-Jihad rather than anti-Muslim. That is, unless you believe that all Muslims automatically support violent Jihad. But, as we are told here so often, only a tiny, tiny minority of Muslims -- who misunderstand their Religion of Peace -- support violent Jihad. It is these people who are described in the ads as savages.”

Douglas Murray Video on Iran and Israel on the BBC

Douglas Murray is a very brave British commentator, not afraid of defying the political correctness dominating every UK public debate, even when he has to face the sancta sanctorum of that orthodoxy: the BBC.

Douglas Murray is former director of the British think tank Centre for Social Cohesion and is now an associate director of another UK think tank, the conservative, pro-Israel Henry Jackson Society.