Let it be understood that our nerves are still raw and our restraint in wording may suffer a tendency towards the extreme but we will attempt to keep it civil as the United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, Nickolay Mladenov has insisted in his statement that, “On this second day of Ramadan and at the start of the Shabbat, I call on all sides to exercise the utmost restraint, to maintain calm and promptly bring the perpetrators to justice.” We will attempt to exercise the ‘utmost restraint’ but that will be difficult. Still, odds are you will never hear about Danny Gonen who at the tender age of twenty-five was gunned down along with a friend who remains hospitalized in moderate but stable condition simply for the crime of being Jews passing a barbarian with blood in his eyes seeking his sacrifice to his gods or martyrdom in their service. The one thing I can be assured of is he must not have worshiped as a member of the religion of peace as if he was, how such a barbarous act could have happened? This is a familiar story and Danny Gonen will be labeled a settler because Jews should know their place and not stray beyond the Green Line. There are those in the world demanding that Israel accept as many as five-million Arab refugees within the Green Line in order to make Israel the twenty-fourth Arab State behind the twenty-third Arab state of Palestine but Jews must know their place in the world. We must obey our masters at the United Nations, the European Union, countless western Capital Cities and whomever else demands our restraint, a restrain which is never truly demanded should in response to rioting and attacks on Israeli police or other security personnel result in an Arab Palestinian accidentally or in response to imminent threat to the life of said Israeli law enforcement personnel but always almost simultaneously with the viscous and unprovoked attack upon Jews, usually Israeli Jews but the victim can be a Jew visiting from outside Israel or even a Christian visiting or residing in Israel.
While this barbarity was being understood and calm was the response as it would have been even had nobody said a word, as Jews tend not to take vengeance as much as we try to understand, but to put some emphasis on this need for Jews to sacrifice more than our young but also risk sacrificing our entire nation, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius is jetting his way for meetings with the Arab League and then on to meet with Mahmoud Abbas and then complete his mission meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu where the demand of the combined Arab world will be delivered and the message will be to give them everything they demand before they murder more Jews, more Israeli youth. What all the caring souls such as French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process Nickolay Mladenov, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon who just finished his dressing-down of Israel for the use during the defensive response to terrorist assaults sending thousands of rockets into Israel last summer named Protective Edge consider is that it is all Israel’s responsibility all the time. Maybe you have heard about it in the recent report by Willy Stern of Vanderbilt Law School which complained of the IDF actions in the preliminary cautionary steps leading up to strikes on positions stating, “It was abundantly clear that IDF commanders had gone beyond any mandates that international law requires to avoid civilian casualties,” also made the point, “The IDF’s warnings certainly go beyond what the law requires, but they also sometimes go beyond what would be operational good sense elsewhere,” concluding in a cautionary tome with an actual complaint, something we and the IDF are used to, but this one was different claiming that, “People are going to start thinking that the United States and other Western democracies should follow the same examples in different types of conflict. That’s a real risk.” Yet Moon demanded Israel respond to the use by Hamas of children as shields for their rocket stores, rocket manufacturing facilities, and rocket launching locations while firing rockets statin, “I urge Israel to take concrete and immediate steps, including by reviewing existing policies and practices, to protect and prevent the killing and maiming of children, and to respect the special protections afforded to schools and hospitals.”
Ban Ki-Moon’s admonitions came right on the heels of the UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) Commissioner-General Pierre Krahenbuhl who managed to make an admission buried between a litany of complaints, accusations, admonitions and spurious excuses, reasons and explanations that there indeed were rockets and other stores, but left out any comments on the UNRWA clinic built with explosives within the walls so as to be used at a later date as a trap to kill IDF soldiers, were indeed found in UNRWA schools and other structures. He also had to include such tales of his noble and brave actions stating, and we fear this will be another long quote as he was long winded in his self-congratulatory-orations stating, “We were the ones who found the weapons caches in our facilities during inspections,” not entirely true as the IDF found and reported the first two of the finds, not Commissioner-General Pierre Krahenbuhl and friends. Continuing, “The reason that the whole world knew about it is that we told them,” after initially denying the reports then feigning surprise, shock and complete protestations of innocence and having no prior knowledge of such transgressions. But wait, there’s more, “We knew the revelation would lead to harsh responses against us in Israel, but try to imagine what would happen if we weren’t the ones who published it. The act of publishing proves we aren’t ready to allow it and show restraint,” such restraint such as calling Hamas rocket removal services to remove the rockets from the first location and having a collapse of memory on who they called to remove the rockets from the subsequent locations but we have our suspicions, we know, so cynical of us. Additionally we have the self-aggrandizement phase of his response, “I was the only senior international official who condemned the rocket fire from the Gaza Strip at Israel. And I didn’t do that from a place where it was easy and convenient to talk like Jerusalem or Geneva, but rather from within the Gaza Strip itself. I can say of myself that I take international law very seriously, and if I know that rockets are fired intentionally at regions where there is a population that can be harmed by it – I condemn.” Now comes more self-involvement and self-congratulatory rhetoric while condemning Israel and the IDF along the same venue as Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, “The day after the strike I visited the wounded children at the hospital, and I saw with my own eyes their parents who stood by them; what does that mean when you don’t have the ability to protect your children. When I see whole neighborhoods in Gaza that were destroyed by the IDF, or that there are UNRWA schools that were harmed after we gave the IDF their locations a dozen times and clarified that there are citizens there, then certainly we will put out condemnations. The price of the last operation was very high: 540 killed children and 3,000 wounded children. That doesn’t match with the Israeli statement that all steps were taken to reduce to a minimum the number of wounded.” Noticeably missing from his diatribe was any mention about his dear friends and combatant-in-arms Hamas and their usage of locations such as schools, hospitals, refugee centers and clinics to store, fire and place positions all in efforts to maximize civilian casualties with a special effort to include as many children as possible by such means as asking young children in an excited and playful tone if they would like to come and ‘help’ the brave Jihadist warriors as they fire rockets at those demonic Israelis, what youth could resist? Perhaps a recount of the report from Professor Stern of Vanderbilt Law School’s content.
“It was abundantly clear that IDF commanders had gone beyond any mandates that international law requires to avoid civilian casualties. The IDF’s warnings certainly go beyond what the law requires, but they also sometimes go beyond what would be operational good sense elsewhere. People are going to start thinking that the United States and other Western democracies should follow the same examples in different types of conflict. That’s a real risk.” A further conclusion from the report added that the IDF, “is setting an unreasonable precedent for other democratic countries of the world who may also be fighting in asymmetric wars against brutal non-state actors who abuse these laws.” Pnina Sharvit Baruch, a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) concurred with the report adding her assessment stating legal advisers from other militaries around the world confront her with “recurring claims” that the IDF “is going too far in its self-imposed restrictions intended to protect civilians, and that this may cause trouble down the line for other democratic nations fighting organized armed groups.”
Still, the violence which added the name of a blessed young adult, Danny Gonen, barely beyond his childhood, and actually would be considered a child in any report which lists the children killed in any IDF action as child seems to go as far in life as a few years past thirty if the cause is righteous and favored by those purveyors of Human Rights. Meanwhile Israeli and Jews who are murdered are often cast-off as deserving of such as they are “settlers” or were taking unadvisable and dangerous, life-threatening risks hiking in the wrong location, that location is anywhere in Israel according to the growing numbers of extremist reporters and commentators. Recent reports have introduced one more the concept that all of Jerusalem should be made the capital of and Arab nation formed out of the hide of the Jewish State as Israel already has a city worthy of the title as their capital, Tel Aviv, after all, is that not where the European and American embassies are located. I wonder if the Israelis moved their capitals from Paris to Marseilles, Berlin to Frankfurt, Moscow to St. Petersburg, London to Manchester, Rome to Milano, Warsaw to Krakow; would the world accept the Israeli media using these replacement capital cities in their news reports or would there be a holy stink and caseloads of indignation showered onto such acts of perceived disrespect for national pride and the self-determining right of nations to choose their own capital city, at least in the rest of the world. The same also applies to the Israeli citizens living or visiting the contested areas which were legally repatriated through a defensive war which liberated them from Jordanian internationally declared illegal occupation even by the Arab League and the Arab nations individually. Since Jordan was occupying Judea and Samaria which she illegally renamed the West Bank, a name that has become so popular it has all but erased the lands real names, and Egypt was occupying Gaza, and the Golan Heights by Syria, from whom were they occupying these lands? The answer can be found in numerous places and historic treaties, conferences and documents; they were occupied Israeli lands and were liberated, not conquered during that fateful week in June of 1967. Israel has returned the lands she has occupied over her short history where she has responded to attacks and gained legal right to those lands, but she has exited them and returned them. Israel has returned the Sinai Peninsula and returned after the 1973 defensive war, one where Israel was almost overrun and would have been if not still possessing the Sinai, the lands west of the Suez Canal and the control over the Suez Canal as Israel was well on her way to Cairo in the south and withdrew back to the Golan Heights from her advance almost to Damascus in the north, responding to simultaneous assaults by Syria and Egypt. The remaining lands, with possible discussions as to where exactly in the Golan Heights region the border needs to be drawn, are all rightfully belonging to Israel by treaties reaching back to the 1920s. That is the simple truth nobody cares to mention in polite conversation.
Also left from polite conversations is the fact that from May 15, 1948 through June 8, 1967 the lands of Gaza, Judea and Samaria were held by Egypt and Jordan respectively and during that nineteen year and three weeks interval the Arab citizens within these areas, they had yet decided that they were Palestinians as they still identified as Syrian, Egyptian, Iraqi, Turkish, Saudi, Yemenis, and Balkans; anything but Palestinian as that was still the reference for the Jews who had resided in these lands returning in numbers and joining the Jewish communities which could be found largely in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, on Kibbutzim, working farms, in Shechem (Nablus), in Hevron, Beersheba, Eilat, Jaffa, Haifa, Jericho and numerous other cities, towns, villages and such where many of the families had resided for as long as close to three-thousand-years and many could trace their heritage in these lands which are Israel back to before the Greek invasions having resided in these lands since returning from the Babylonian exile and some since the Exodus itself. These so-called ‘Palestinian’ Arabs never once during those nineteen years of Egyptian and Jordanian occupation muttered a peep about their ancient and holy land of Palestine as they were as content as an unkosher animal in a mud-puddle. There were no riots even after the Israelis liberated the lands and were well on the path to patronizing these Arab populations to potentially Israeli citizenship while offering them opportunities they had never even dreamed of before Israel arrived on their scene, as Israel opened new schools, a university, hospitals, paved many roads, new sewage treatment facilities, new water mains and pipes to virtually every town and farm and electricity from the Israeli grid and phone service which reached out to the world. It was not until KGB agent and provocateur Yasser Arafat and his second in command Mahmoud Abbas arrived and stirred up racial strife and began the first Intifada, invented a new meaning for Naqba Day which originally referred to the partitioning of the area into French and British Mandated lands thus separating those Arabs living mostly east for the Jordan River but in British Mandate lands from their holy city of Damascus where they were required to make regular pilgrimages since the Mecca was denied them during much of the Ottoman Empire which preferred the Damascus location of the Hajj as it meant more money for their empire. These Arabs who cast their allegiances as being citizens of the southern region of greater Syrian Province with Damascus as its capital city and thus considered a place of importance that any perception of difficulties preventing travel to Damascus as being life-altering and thus given the name Naqba meaning catastrophe. This all started after World War I and the setting of the Mandate Lands and the division of their governance during the 1920s.
The recent report which came from the United Nations decrying the unnecessary and needless deaths of children would not have included any reference to Danny Gonen just as it did not mention anything about Yaakov Naftali Fraenkel age 16, Gilad Michael Shaer age 16 and Eyal Yifrah age 19, who were kidnapped, possibly tortured and then brutally murdered and hastily buried in a shallow grave on June 12, 2014, which prompted a weeks’ long search before the bodies were recovered. Let us pass on some more names not covered by the United Nations report of violence against children where Israel received far more coverage for her ‘crimes’ than were ISIS, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Iran, North Korea or elsewhere, surprised? We weren’t. There is Adele Biton who was three-years-old when injured and received serious head wounds and brain damage in early 2013 and has subsequently died under two years later succumbing to her horrific wounds. Yonatan Palmer died on September 23, 2011 on a roadside in the family van striking a tree at speed as his father, Asher Palmer, slumped over the steering wheel dead with his face smashed partially through his skull with a rock which bore a striking resemblance to the horrific wound; Yonatan Palmer was barely one-year-old. There was the Friday, March 11, 2011 attack on the Fogel family where both parents were murdered with the father having his throat cut while he slept and his wife murdered after a brief struggle with her attacker who slit her throat as well just to make sure she was dead. The children murdered were Hadas age three months, Yoav age eleven years and Elad age four years all except little Hadas from having their throats slit while sleeping on a Friday night Shabbat evening. Tiny little Hadas had initially escaped notice as had two of her older brothers sleeping in the living room rather than their beds and the families’ oldest, their daughter who was still attending a Shabbat late prayer session and young adults’ Torah session who returned to find the family slaughtered. Little three month old Hadas was not in a crib but was mostly concealed by the covers as she slept next to her father who had his arm holding her even in his death. Something woke the little, nay, infant girl as the two Arab teen cousins from the Arab town bordering the Jewish community of Itamar, a place unfortunately all too familiar with such terror attacks, were making their escape and when she started crying they heard her. One of the cousins returned to silence the infant, a mere three-month-old barely out of the womb tiny girl, helpless, innocent, no real cares in the world as we adults know it, everything was a new and fascinating experience until that Shabbat night. She lie there next to her father probably aware that something was amiss, little children have a built in alarm system which warns them when there is a tear in their world and she likely sensed there was quite a bit wrong with her world. The Arab teen returned and murdered little Hadas quite measurably more brutally as she had her little neck slit like the other members of the family murdered that night but before slitting her throat this barbarian had plunged his knife violently and viscously into her chest piercing her heart multiple times during that four or so stabs into her little torso in such a brutal and hateful way.
What makes a person so dead inside as to be capable of such an act? How does one desensitize someone to be capable of such brutality to a three month old baby girl, and mere infant whose life has barely begun and who is the most helpless and innocent amongst us. It is beyond reason and understanding and even human nature to take such action or is it. This was an act carried out in these lands four or five thousand years ago. Nobody knows when it was finally ended, or was it when we see what was perpetrated against little Hadas. The practice in prehistory and even into the age of written history was to sacrifice young children to the pagan gods, but not to all or any random of these false gods often represented by a stone idol. One of the chief gods to which children were sacrificed was Baal. Priests would hold a great ceremony of which was the culmination where a child or even many children were sacrificed depending on the whims of the priests. The Priests used the threat of granting you the honor of presenting your young child for the sacrifice as a way of governing and assuring that nobody opposed their will, or at least not for long. The method of sacrifice varied as some were thrown into pits of fire while another popularly used was to slit the child’s throat and then plunge the dagger into their heart several times, almost the same manner in which little Hadas was murdered. If this can be looked upon as a ritual sacrifice then we truly are dealing with barbarians and they are inside our gates. This is not to claim that all people who share racial, religious, societal or any other convictions as these two teens and the other perpetrators given to list of their victims above are all barbarians as there are monsters amongst all societies, just some more than others, but that alone does not make their actions the nourishment upon which it suckles. But should a society find that more and more of their youth have taken to such violent acts, then it is up to the adults and influential people to make an effort to end such barbarisms, and if they miss the opportunity to make such changes as required to end barbarous behavior, then their society may gain the label of barbarians and that should result in their being shunned and ostracized for the good of the society as well as for its own survival. When people exhibit such violent tendencies and show no remorse, or as the perpetrators of the acts above, show pride and the feelings that such acts are an accomplishment, then there is a serious problem which must be addresses with the utmost urgency and not necessarily taking steps to assure the exercise of the utmost restraint.
With our sincerest apologies to United States President Obama, European Union’s Foreign Policy Chief Federica Mogherini, United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, Nickolay Mladenov. Another note for Mr. Mladenov, the (so-called) Honorable Ban Ki-Moon, UNRWA’s Commissioner-General Krahenbuhl and all the other holier-than-thou human rights experts and other busybodies; the truth be told the Israeli public is getting good and fed-up with having to take the high road and always turn our rage aside and simply quietly and politely bury our dead and try and believe it is all over till the next time, which comes a lot more frequently the further we go down this road. When we look back down the road to see from where we have come there are too many bouquets lining the road on both sides and too close together to even try and pretend there is nothing wrong. There is something wrong and it is wrong here, in Europe, in the United States, it’s permeating the Western World and to a lesser extent, the entire planet. You ask us to “exercise the utmost restraint” or to “practice restraint” or as Ban Ki-Moon demanded when commenting on the commission report on the suffering of children from violence where he appeared to instruct Israel to, “take concrete and immediate steps, including by reviewing existing policies and practices, to protect and prevent the killing and maiming of children,” with no mention of Hamas practices or the report that Israel has set the bar too high for the rest of the Western nations to be capable of meeting those standards implemented and utilized by the IDF with the intent of decreasing, if not eliminating, not only children’s casualties but all noncombatant casualties. The day may come and come sooner rather than later when Israelis go out of their minds and show the world what the ethnic cleansing and genocide would look like if the political leadership decided to actually let loose the maximum capabilities of Israel to sew the whirlwind. Do not get all frantic as Israel would never actually commit such acts, but we could perform an operation by displaying in an exercised war scenario in conjunction with another nation providing the necessary opposing forces using the laser tagging vest system to depict what could happen if we were to actually commit the crimes which so many are so fond of accusing us of committing or intending to commit. If we intended to commit such acts, the world would know about it really quickly, but let us hope things never come to such a state as, oh, say Iran acquiring nuclear weapons and having used them on another nation, not necessarily Israel as though they have promised to destroy Israel, they never reserved the first slot for Israel, that is likely either for the United States or Saudi Arabia, and we might desire to strike back in their names. That would provide a definitive display of Israel letting loose the dogs of war and doing so with every dog we can muster.
Beyond the Cusp
Beyond the Cusp 