Editors Note: This article was written in August.
Where are the massive Free Kurdistan rallies?
As the barbaric Islamist terror group ISIS overruns Iraq, the Kurdish population there, in addition to religious minorities, is being threatened. There have been numerous documented cases of ISIS thugs beheading children. Sometimes these heads are placed on pikes in the town square for all to see. This is so horrifying that it almost doesn’t sound real, and yet anyone can see the pictures with a quick Google search.
But don’t expect any anti-ISIS rallies to be held anywhere, including the Western world. Instead, it is Israel, one of the few beacons of modern morality and civilization in the chaos of the Middle East, which receives all the bile and hate. Anti-Israel rallies in France, mostly composed of Muslim immigrants but not exclusively so, quickly degenerated into riots with attacks on Jewish businesses reminiscent of Kristallnacht. All over Europe, there were anti-Israel rallies, and many of these featured explicitly Jew-hating rhetoric.
A quick recap on the recent conflict in Gaza: Three Israeli teens were kidnapped and murdered in the West Bank, which is run by the Palestinian Authority. The Israeli government conducted a massive operation in which it arrested hundreds of suspects as a result of these gruesome murders, an operation that the Palestinian Authority cooperated with. To retaliate for this wave of arrests, Hamas started firing rockets into Israel. The rockets are fired from densely populated civilian areas. The foremost responsibility of a government is the protection of its citizens from violence, so Israel began an air campaign against Gaza to stop the rocket fire. Israel took extraordinary measures to minimize civilian casualties, but inevitably many innocents Gazans were killed.
There are a variety of reasonable views that one can take of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but any rational person comprehends that the behavior of the Israeli military cannot even be compared to the unbridled evil of the ISIS jihadists. And yet, all the malice is directed against Israel. The prime minister of Turkey, a country that is a member of NATO, recently said: “Just like Hitler, who sought to establish a race free of all faults, Israel is chasing after the same target. They kill women so that they will not give birth to Palestinians; they kill babies so that they won’t grow up; they kill men so they can’t defend their country…They will drown in the blood they shed.”
Israel pulled out of the Gaza Strip in 2005. It left behind greenhouses that the Gazans could use to grow crops for export, and allowed the Gazans to govern themselves. They reacted by demolishing the greenhouses and launching a rocket barrage against Israel. The Jews of Israel originate from all over Europe and the Middle East, and there are even Jews from Ethiopia as well. In addition, Israel is home to over a million Israeli Arabs, who are full citizens. Does this sound like a Nazi country?
And yet, all around the world, by millions upon millions of people, Israel is labeled with this epithet. What could the reason be? The answer is unpleasant but readily apparent. Anti-Semitism, a disease that is over a thousand years old, is alive and healthy. And in the cause of anti-Zionism, it has found its most vocal and politically correct expression.