With the exception of the United States, nearly all the world’s nations have condemned Israel over the Gaza-flotilla incident, as have the United Nations and nearly all the world’s newspapers, radio and TV-news stations, leftist academics, and leftist organizations. Their characterizations of the Jewish state range from a society so evil that it should not be allowed to exist to a villainous nation that is responsible for a) the suffering of millions of innocent Palestinian men, women, and children and b) the lack of Mideast peace; and therefore c) the Muslim world’s anger at the West; and therefore d) Islamic terrorism itself.
Let’s hope the world is right.Israel is almost totally isolated. A visitor from another planet would have every reason to report back home that the greatest problem on Earth is the planet’s Jewish state. Although Israel is the size of the American state of New Jersey and smaller than El Salvador, and although its population is smaller than that of Sweden, Burundi, and Bolivia, it is the most censured country in United Nations history. Let’s hope the world is right. Though Israel is a thriving liberal democracy for all its citizens — including the one citizen out of five who is Arab (83 percent of whom are Muslim) — and has an independent judiciary and an independent press, though it signed an agreement establishing an independent Palestinian state, and though it returned to Egypt every inch of the Sinai Peninsula, a land mass larger than Israel itself with major oil reserves, the world deems Israel a villain. Though Hamas runs a theocratic police state based on torture and terror, though it recognizes no freedom of speech and no freedom for any religious expression outside of radical Islam, though it seeks to annihilate the Jewish state, and though its state-controlled media depict Israelis and Jews as worthy of death, the world sees Israel, not Hamas, as the villain. Let’s hope the world is right. Here is a random sampling of world reactions: “The EU condemns the use of violence that has produced a high number of victims among the members of the flotilla.” “The President [of France] expresses his profound emotion in the face of the tragic consequences of the Israeli military operation. . . . He condemns the disproportionate use of force.” “Spain unequivocally condemns the Israeli attack on the humanitarian flotilla and it does so as a country and as the acting president of the EU Council.” |
