Christian Attitudes

Link: http://www.indcatholicnews.com/gaza338.html

Oh dear. Just let the Jews defend themselves from attack, and refuse to accept the role of helpless victim, and the anti-semites start to scream.

Unfortunately, this particular scream ? long, irrational and full of wild accusations ? is picked up and amplified by a Catholic news outlet: Only Gazans suffer, not Jews.

Since Israeli war planes bombed and destroyed Gaza's only power plant, as part of their efforts to rescue a kidnapped soldier - life for the 1.3 million people living without electricity or water is becoming increasingly difficult, with the threat of widespread disease just days away. Dr Virginia Tilley has written a graphic account of conditions there.

Reminder: not only are they trying to rescue a kidnapped soldier, but to defend themselves from a ceaseless barrage of missiles. For a long time Israel has reacted to these acts of war with great restraint.

Tilley doesn't seem to mind the missiles, but she isn?t happy that the terrorist-supporting Palestinians, who voted for the Party who Promised to Drink the Blood of the Jews have lost the use of their fridges and televisions.

Mass terror, despair, desperate hoarding of food and water. And no radios, television, cell phones, or laptops (for the few who have them), and so no way to get news of how long this nightmare might go on.

There are millions of truly poor people in the world who don?t enjoy such luxuries as fridges and televisions in the first place. They have difficulty finding food and never enjoyed anything as sophisticated as clean water coming out of taps.

And now for the obligatory blood libel bit:

In the hot darkness, massive explosions shake the cities, close and far, while repeated sonic booms are wreaking the havoc they have wrought before: smashing windows, sending children screaming into the arms of terrified adults, old people collapsing with heart failure, pregnant women collapsing with spontaneous abortions.

?Old people collapsing with heart failure, pregnant women collapsing with spontaneous abortions?? Is there any evidence for this? It looks more like an attempt at the ?Jenin massacre? style of propaganda. The only known death of an innocent recorded recently was of a young Jewish man, murdered by terrorists.

Does she care how the people of Sderot feel as they endure a bombardment of Palestinian missiles? Hamas declared "We have decided to make Sderot a ghost town" ? in other words, to carry out ethnic cleansing, but she voices no objection.

Or how about the people of Ashkelon? But, I forgot ? they are Jews, so perhaps she thinks they don't matter. At any rate, she wants to see the destruction of the Jewish state and promotes the One-State Solution (which, in practice, would be very like the Final Solution)

No, Palestinian Quassams are not harmless, home-made toys, as we are reminded by Simply Jews, pointing to some earlier examples: Collective Punishment: Quassam Rockets Kill - the Agony of Sderot. As you will see, most of the victims have been children.

Tilley's full original article, at Counterpunch (more about it here) says: ?Israel has done many things argued to be war crimes?, including ?aerial bombardment of civilian areas?. Tilley seems to have forgotten that the Palestinians have been carrying out that particular war crime, along with others, for a long time.

She gives herself away when she suggests that Israelis are like Nazis.

But destroying the only power source for a trapped and defenseless civilian population is an unprecedented step toward barbarity. It reeks, ironically, of the Warsaw Ghetto. As we flutter our hands about tectonic political change, we must take pause: in the eyes of history, what is happening in Gaza may come to eclipse them all.

A restrained attempt at self-defence, which deprives some Gazans of their fridges and tellies, is going to be worse than the Holocaust?

If you are wondering who Tilley is:

Dr Virginia Tilley is a chief research specialist in the Democracy and Governance Research Programme. She holds an MA from the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University, and an MA and PhD in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

What is regrettable is that Independent Catholic News, one of the news sources linked by the Bishops? Conference of England and Wales site, sees fit to reproduce the uncorroborated, unjust and wild accusations of this woman.

ICN frequently publishes material which demonises the Israelis, even including material like this by the notorious anti-semite mentioned in this article, but never anything critical of the Palestinians and their terrorism.

In other words, it contributes to the present growth of anti-semitism, which, as the Vatican recognises, has found a new disguise as ?anti-Zionism?.