Hi, N.,

I am so sorry for these upside-down wars driven by a malevolent mindset.

When Ayesha Siddiqa writes, “It is interesting to see how people engaged in social media are calling out people who seem to be slow or timid in condemning Israeli atrocities,” one wants to note, even merely suggest, that its Hamas that invites war by making war on the Jews, Israel first (Israel, incidentally, is 20 percent Muslim).

Smuggling tunnels, tunnels into Israel, tunnels leading to underground launch sites, tunnels for everything but use as bomb shelters for the residents of Gaza . . . that’s the truth: then humans and civilian sites, including UN schools, for shielding rockets, launch sites, manufacturing elements.

As with most anti-Semitic / anti-Zionists (the two are inseparable) political cant, the lie appears in the first or second paragraph. Baldfaced dishonest, meddling, mischief-making. It sounds loyal to the ear. It panders. But it does not bear examination.

By the accidents of fate and technology, I have been a part of the Islamic Small Wars for more than seven years, not a long time in a scholar’s life, but long enough to note that Muslim-on-Muslim violence predominates in the world’s obviously troubled Islamic-majority states, that “more Islam” as al-Qaeda to Taliban would have it has meant only more death and plunder for the Islamists, and that the demonizing of Jews and the Jewish-majority state of Israel, which is actually a vibrant people-aiding — ALL people aiding — secular society, again itself 20 percent Muslim with the same treated by law like everyone else, Jewish, Christian, Sunni, Shiite, Baha’i Buddhist, Hindu, and so on. Wherefore then Ayesha Seddiqa’s familiar Jew hate in the name of Islam?

Take another look at Israel: hospital care for Palestinian children: routine; provision of all basic services continuing despite open warfare; higher education services for qualified Palestinian students — long offered and often fulfilled (some of that has changed, I don’t know the details); trade economy — Israel is Gaza’s first export customer, and it does not impede business and trade development by Gaza beyond Israel.

Pakistan has its own now long history of suffering directly at the hands of bomb-making, mosque-destroying fanatics. Jews have never been a part of that and never will be. That is not who we are. With regard to Gaza, we regret every single death with perhaps the exception of those actually doing the building, aiming, and firing of rockets at our own children. Our IDF frequently aborts launch-site or rocket-destroying missions in light of the presence of noncombatants in the target. Ask Bashar al-Assad — or Baghdaddi’s Islamic state now sowing mayhem and murder throughout Iraq — to consider that kind of consideration for humanity.

A well funded and long-planned propaganda campaign has been launched against Israel, but the funny thing is it has been launched against you too. It takes you in. It tells you that for being Muslim, you are wonderful, which might be true, Muslim or not, but then your nominal co-religionists in the Muslim Brotherhood, and they show the world what their idea of Islam is about, and then they push children and families — not their own — in front of an army legitimately defending its children, its families, its people, Jewish in majority but larger than that and democratic, open, and generous.

The “sides” engaged in The Islamic Small Wars may not be anything like what they first appear to be.

The Jews tell the truth. We don’t lie. We accept criticism. We believe in ourselves and we believe in mankind, and we go to work on those beliefs, providing emergency and health services — and emergency charity services to all, worldwide, and much including Pakistan: we’re a small entity in the world, but when there’s an earthquake, we give what we can give.

Those who wish to destroy us would seem to be manipulated to rally around bigotry and hate as well as a mode poisoning every aspect of their lives and their communities. Where they would exclude, we include. We don’t know where the current fighting will go, but if Hamas is gone and war is finished for a time in this enclave between Israel and Egypt, who have been pushed more together because of this deeply egotistical Brotherhood affiliate, we will be there to help our neighbors, even deeply resentful with enmity, recover.

Referenced: Ayesha Siddiqa’s article appearing today in Pakistan’s Express Tribune

The Palestinian Cause as a rallying point, the tropes that go with that, belie an inhumanity most apparent in Pakistan where terrorists have for years routinely attacked facilities, including mosques, and populating,much including minorities, with near impunity, and the state has fought back with military and paramilitary forces in ways that have gone dismally hard on innocents caught in the middle of the violence.  Those victims of the Islamic Small Wars would seem to be forced to experience the worst of both worlds, for who really embraces their well being and security?

It should not take a Jew to ask that question.

However, apparently, it does.

# # #