The Modus Operandi

"Jews want to present themselves to the world as if they have rights, but, in fact, they are foreign bacteria - a microbe unparalleled in this world. May He annihilate this filthy people who have neither religion nor conscience." Abdallah Jarbu, Hamas Deputy Minister of Religion

This is Islam, the religion of peace and good fellowship. And these are words spoken by a 'minister of religion' representing Hamas, the political entity that rules the Gaza Strip under Sharia law. Reflecting the Islam that teaches its followers that their obligation to their religion is to pursue jihad. And while millions of the world's Muslims pursue a jihad of the mind and soul, to make themselves more worthy of their religious obligations, millions more of the world's Muslims believe in another kind of jihad, that compels the world's infidels to recognize and to honour Islam.

Among those millions who believe that it is their duty to pursue a mission to spread Islamic thought and worship to the world at large, there are those who embrace violent jihad as their contribution to the virtues of the Islamic ideal. After all, from its inception this is the very manner in which Islam managed to insinuate itself within the consciousness of aggressively warring tribal units, pitting clan against clan, through bloody conquest. This is a tradition which is honoured and emulated to the present day.

And, despite proof issued on a daily basis of the intention of international jihadists whose activities plague the world, from China to India, the Middle East to Europe, North America to Africa, the democratic world of Western nations simply refuse to credit the realities that beset them. Instead, they concern themselves with the civil niceties of extending opportunities and equality to the benefit of Muslims migrating to their shores in search of a better life. That better life excludes the embrace of Western democratic realities, while accepting as their just due the benefits that fall to them through entrance to Western countries.

Although migrating Muslims seek shelter in countries other than their original home countries to found their communities in isolation of the greater social, cultural, religious and political inhabitants of their adopted countries, they will defend all Islamic ideals, shunning as degraded and unworthy those of the indigenous social compact. The single common enemy of Muslim communities is the very religion and its adherents from which Islam was extracted.

Universally, the Muslim umma appears in accord with its suspicion of Jews and Israel.

And they have plenty of company. Among Europeans and South Americans and North Americans among whom there appears to be an almost instinctive abhorrence of Jews. The impolite issue of anti-Semitism rears its ugly head as it has done throughout the history of world Jewry, in a boomerang effect related to the world economy, and struggles that erupt between countries. There is always a free-for-all on Jewish slander and a general degrading of the Jewish experience.

Latterly, the world has turned with disfavour upon Israel because of its purported occupation of the Palestinian Territories. The road blockades through which Palestinians must move so that the purpose of their passage can be verified and checked is held up as an example of Apartheid. As is the protective wall erected for the purpose of shutting out suicide attackers. And the blockade of goods and commodities entering the Gaza Strip since the entrenchment of the terror group Hamas has earned Israel the contempt and condemnation of the world.

An extraordinary situation, given that most countries striving to protect their territory from declared intentions to destroy it, clarified mightily by the ongoing lobbing of missiles across borders, along with any country's requirement to protect its people from suicide attacks, would be supported by the outside world. Israel is held to a vastly different standard, one that makes no practical sense, and one that does not reflect fairness or justice, but one that is imposed nonetheless.

While those who seek to destroy Israel and who slander its good name - and who fulminate their disgust with it, and who dedicate deadly plans to wreak havoc within the country portray it as the aggressor and they as the victims - they are rewarded by support from an international community that sees Israel as disproportionately self-protective. Lies and calumnies that clear sight and intelligence should identify, are taken as truth where Israel is concerned.

The suffering Palestinians, seen by the world as they prefer to be identified, as poor refugees, take as their due international aid funding, remaining content to present as welfare recipients incapable of struggling against their fate as dispossessed, even while they occupy land that is their own, and deny opportunities open to them to become fully independent and operationally functional. The West Bank Palestinians have begun to thrive economically, yet still from their ranks erupt those who run murderously amok, killing Israelis.

Within the Gaza Strip whose population now submits to a fanatical type of Islam increasingly favoured within the world of Islam, humanitarian aid ensures that Palestinians in Gaza have available to them medicines, food and commodities required for daily living. Much of their utilities are supplied from Israel. But the Palestinians exist for the most part on international welfare; employment is scarce because no one is interested in investing in job-producing factories in such an unstable environment.

Hamas unconditionally refuses to accommodate itself to the reality that Israel's existence in the Middle East is beyond contest, a legal country dedicated to the well-being of its Jewish population by mandate of the United Nations; the only country in the world actually created by unanimous consent of the Security Council. As long as Hamas is content to speak of Israel and of Jews in language pioneered by Nazi Germany to consolidate its viciously antagonistic position, the situation for Gazan Palestinians will not change.

The humanitarian flotillas comprised of dedicated human-rights activists so engaged with their sense of righteous indignation over the plight of the Palestinians, who remain deliberately ignorant of the plight of Israel, will effectively alter nothing. Israel has the legal, universal right of self-protection in the very real face of an existential threat, from a number of sources, including Hamas's state mentor, Iran.

The situation in the Middle East has served to re-energize the world's closet anti-Semites who insist that in criticizing and demonizing Israel they are merely exercising their right to form the alliances that best serve their humanitarian impulses. Even the best-intended human rights activists lending themselves to the blockade-and-embargo-breaking enterprise of the flotilla must be aware of the political-ideological underpinnings of the agenda.

It strains intelligent credulity that the 'activists' with no agenda but to rescue Gazan Palestinians from their existence of state-enacted, punishing poverty would have had no iota of a suspicion that they were being groomed as dupes for the larger purpose of Islamist-entities, from terror groups to state-sponsored mischief, to act as a civilian cover for a militant purpose.

This is, after all, the normative modus operandi of terror groups like Hezbollah and Hamas who fire off missiles against Israel from within the crowded civilian enclaves of 'refugee camps', inviting responses that will harm the civilians to ensure the world responds with horrified censure against Israel.