As Ilhan Omar Cheers on Palestinians, Hamas Continues Its Deadly Rocket Barrage
For Ilhan Omar, the only real terrorism is when Jews fight back.
As the Israel Defense Force retaliated this week for a barrage of terrorist rockets launched from the Hamas-controlled territory of the Gaza Strip, the Minneapolis Democrat launched an offensive of her own on social media.
She wasn’t attacking the Palestinian groups that have spent the better part of a century murdering civilians and trying to exterminate the Jewish state, of course. Her target was the Israeli military’s efforts to fight back.
And she specifically highlighted the Iron Dome, Israel’s air defense system aimed at protecting its citizens from murderous terrorist missiles.
Israeli air strikes killing civilians in Gaza is an act of terrorism.
Palestinians deserve protection.
Unlike Israel, missile defense programs, such as Iron Dome, don’t exist to protect Palestinian civilians.
It’s unconscionable to not condemn these attacks on the week of Eid. https://t.co/vWWQfMqBkT
— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) May 10, 2021
“Israeli air strikes killing civilians in Gaza is an act of terrorism,” Omar wrote in a Twitter post on Monday.
“Unlike Israel, missile defense programs, such as Iron Dome, don’t exist to protect Palestinian civilians.
“It’s unconscionable to not condemn these attacks on the week of Eid.”
Omar was referring to the Eid-Al-Fitr, the holiday that marks the end of Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting during daylight hours.
This year’s Ramadan ends this week (Eid begins Wednesday), and Omar is apparently steamed that Israel is picking this particular moment to launch its airstrikes. It might have occurred to her that maybe Hamas terrorists might have chosen to honor Ramadan their own way – by, say, not launching a barrage of deadly missiles.
The latest violence was sparked by a combination of a dispute over land in East Jerusalem, which could mean the evictions of a half-dozen Palestinian families from a neighborhood by Jews whom Israeli courts have named the legal owners of the land, according to The New York Times. In a statement Friday, according to The Times, the Israeli Foreign Ministry said the militants were “presenting a real-estate dispute between private parties as a nationalistic cause in order to incite violence in Jerusalem.”
As of Tuesday, at least two Israelis and 26 Palestinians had been killed in the latest violence, according to CBS News. The Israelis were civilians, CBS reported. On the Palestinian side, 26 deaths were reported by CBS. According to the Israeli military, 15 of those were identified as militants.
The Hamas decision that unleashed the destruction doesn’t appear to bother Omar, though. Only the Israeli reaction.
The Israel Defense Forces had a different – considerably more understandable – view of the proceedings.
One of the 100s of rockets that were just fired from Gaza toward Tel Aviv and central Israel exploded on a civilian bus.
Hamas’ intentions are clear: kill Israeli civilians.
We won’t stand by and let this happen. pic.twitter.com/aNsA3dlgMe
— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) May 11, 2021
In a Twitter post containing what it said was an image of the destruction wrought by just one of the hundreds of Palestinian rockets that have been launched in indiscriminate attacks that endanger soldier and civilian alike, the IDF included a simple vow:
“We won’t stand by and let this happen.”
The two Twitter posts sum up the views of the latest clash perfectly. To the IDF, and sensible observers, the launching of continuous rocket attacks with the express purpose of destroying innocent lives is exactly the kind of violence a state exists to protect its citizens from.
For Omar, the attacks are an opportunity to cheer on the Palestinian cause – the doomed, decades-long effort to destroy the state of Israel in favor of a Palestinian statehood that’s never existed in history. They’re a chance to attack Israel for defending itself.
And the timing allows her to cloak it all in a shroud of religious zeal, as though Israel were committing a special kind of sacrilege by retaliating during an Islamic holy month – even though that’s the time Islamic terrorists chose to launch their latest round of murderous mayhem.
As an American lawmaker, Omar has no responsibility in the Israel-Palestinian fight other than to be honest about what’s taking place. As what’s known of her life shows, honesty is not her strong point in either the public or private areas, so it’s not really surprising that she fails when it comes to the Levant — spectacularly so, in this case.
The Israeli military, on the other hand, has a pretty clearly defined responsibility — to protect its country’s citizens and do harm to those that wish Israel’s destruction.
Regular testing in combat, in the war of independence in 1948 and the numerous wars that have followed, it’s proven its ability to that over and over.
With the passage of decades, and the groundbreaking efforts of the Trump administration, some of Israel’s Arab enemies have apparently come to realize the futility of constant warfare. It was underreported shamelessly in the American mainstream media, but the Abraham Accords that have led to normalized relations between Israel and the Muslim states of Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco and Sudan, effectively opened a new era in Israel’s relations with its neighbors, an era that isn’t held hostage by the radical-chic cause of Palestinian terrorism.
The Biden administration, of course, refuses to accept that new reality of the Middle East. In addition to its reckless, feckless pursuit of a renewal of the Iran nuclear deal with an Islamist terrorist nation that avowedly for the destruction of both the United States and Israel, the Biden White House has been openly cool to Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, putting off an introductory call between Joe Biden as president and Netanyahu for weeks after Biden’s inauguration.
The chill between Israel and the United States couldn’t go unnoticed by Israel’s enemies, and could only hurt Israel’s security.
In a statement on Monday, former President Donald Trump laid the blame for the latest outbreak of violence cleanly on the Biden White House, according to The New York Post.
“Under Biden, the world is getting more violent and more unstable because Biden’s weakness and lack of support for Israel is leading to new attacks on our allies,” the statement declared, according to the Post.
“America must always stand with Israel and make clear that the Palestinians must end the violence, terror, and rocket attacks, and make clear that the U.S. will always strongly support Israel’s right to defend itself.”
“Israel’s right to defend itself” is a cause Trump understood, and his policy initiatives showed it.
It’s a cause any sane person understands — self-defense being the primary right of every individual or nation, particularly one that was founded, like Israel, on the ashes of an organized effort to destroy an entire ethnicity.
And it’s a cause the IDF has spent more than 70 years proving to the world and especially its Arab enemies that it understands intimately – and can pursue effectively.
What it’s not, however, is a cause understood by progressives like Ilhan Omar and her political allies.
To them, Israel, the only true democracy in the Middle East, is always the oppressor. To the left, Palestinians who have spent decades spurning any possible peace deal while engaging in an endless war that targets military and civilian alike, are always the victims.
And violence is only “terrorism” when Jews fight back.
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