Should Israel Spare the Gazan “Innocents”?
By Madeline Brooks*
As the world knows, or very tellingly, should know, the Israeli Defense Force goes to great lengths to spare the lives of Gazans presumed innocent. In the moral smog of war, this important fact is usually overlooked by the international crowd of Israel critics.
The IDF gave abundant warning to Gazans with leaflets and even phone calls to go to the south of Gaza, out of the immediate war zone. Some Gazans did head south, waving white flags and getting shot at by their own Hamas government. Others stayed, even though they were offered a substantial reward and a safe place to live if they cooperated in getting the hostages out.
Just who is Israel sparing? The sixteen year old boy who at this moment does not have a rifle in his hand, although his school books teach him to hate Jews? Hordes of “civilian” young men, out of uniform, who nevertheless swarmed into southern Israel on October 7 after the uniformed jihadis to rape, behead and burn Jewish families? How about the mother who sings her child to sleep with lullabies about killing Israelis, or the young girl engaged to a jihadi, egging him on?
Most horribly, a huge crowd of military age Gazan men were shown a movie of the massacres of Jews on October 7. This was the same video put together by the IDF from the cameras of the terrorists. Somehow the video got into the Gazans’ hands and was shown at al Shifa hospital. When Israeli journalists watched the video, many were so upset they vomited or sobbed uncontrollably. What did the Gazans do? They cheered. They roared their approval. Allahu Akbar.
Please watch the reaction of the Gazans presumed innocent starting at the 18:05 minute mark and repeated at the 32:36 minute mark.
(Edits to full video for fast reference, but full video is important link)
.These are among the creatures that the IDF may have been trying to spare, even at the cost of their own lives since the whole area could have been bombed so thoroughly from above that it would be turned into a parking lot, with no escape from the tunnels. Such was the sentiment among some at the start of the war. Instead, the IDF is engaged in a prolonged building to building fight, which puts its own soldiers at great risk, all to spare presumed innocents.
Does it make sense to spare one’s enemies whose blood lust gets fed by reliving what they did to Israelis a month ago – what they can and will do again when they see more weakness? Since Israel’s inception, every time its guard went down and it trusted its sworn enemies, it paid a terrible price in blood.
Sadly, and adding to the complexity of it all, there are some Gazans who reject Hamas and are willing to describe its horrors to an Israeli, as seen in this video. These Gazans had to flee to Europe to be able to speak freely about Hamas without getting their legs broken or getting killed. One of them speaks of friends still in Gaza who hate Hamas as much as he does.
Yet if Israel goes down, diaspora Jews will have very hard lives. More than that, the rest of the world will be faced with a “barbarism that has no place in the modern world” as Isaac Herzog, Israel’s president, said in an open letter to university administrators.
Across the planet, protests are going on to stop the bombing and spare the “innocent” civilians. That would mean protecting the terrorists-in-waiting that we see in the hospital’s movie audience. Protests by the keffiyeh kiddos inspire the jihad and bring in fresh recruits, as well as putting pressure on weak government officials to stop Israel from fully defending herself.
Israel could have taken the Joshua option, eliminating all threats as in the Old Testament books of Deuteronomy and Joshua. But it has chosen a softer approach, one that may bring more war upon its head in the future, and still no world acceptance. As we see, anti Israel and anti Jewish protests began even before Israel went into Gaza, and grow stronger everyday. Hate has a life of its own. Holding back on war efforts has no apparent effect on rage against Jews.
Any other country would be widely praised for its self-sacrifice. But not Israel. Israel gets accused of committing genocide, a projection of what Hamas is clearly doing.
Israel has a hard choice to make: Dodge worldwide criticism or fight like Joshua and the Israelites in the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy, where the Almighty ordered the elimination of all who did not answer the call to surrender. Survival may only come by fighting Biblically. Granted, that sounds morally difficult in today’s climate, though it was practiced by the United States in Dresden, Germany and two Japanese cities during WWII.
Certainly, watching the video of Gazan men, who may be off duty jihadists, cheering as they watch their fellows chop, rape and burn other human beings…that should open new doors to careful thinking about Gazan innocents.
*Madeline Brooks, M.A., is the former head of the New York chapter of ActforAmerica and is a conservative and counter-jihad writer. Her articles have been published in AmericanThinker.com, CanadaFreePress.com, FamilySecurityMatters.org, and elsewhere. Her book, What You Need To Know About Islamic Jihad: Information The Main Stream Media Is Not Giving You, is available on Scribd. She can be reached at ResistJihad@aol.com.