Some readers of geoffff's joint may know that the blog has shamelessly claimed for itself credit for coining the phrase "dead baby strategy" to describe the standing plan of the ruling Gaza authorities of the day, whoever and wherever they may be on the day and that is by no means necessarily in Gaza, to put civilians and especially children in the way of wars so as to harvest the propaganda value of the resulting lost lives for the war effort.
Ah huh. Dead baby strategy. We had seen it before so many times it could be predicted with certainty with Operation Pillar of Cloud in November 2012 when it reached a new low of this depraved theatre of the grotesque. Recall the Egyptian PM on a flash visit of solidarity just in time to carry for the cameras a freshly killed infant, son of a distraught BBC man no less. Turned out the child had been killed by a Hamas misfire.
Other images used have been of casualties of the Syrian conflict where there is an availability of dead kid stock several orders of magnitude over what is available in Gaza and is guaranteed to be always fresh in store.
All you have to do is lie that the Jews did the killing and that of course is no sweat at all. Been doing that for centuries.
It was time it was given a name. Snuff movie is morally in the same field but doesn't quite cover it. Death porn is closer.
Anywhere in the world , building vast war tunnels with the blood and resources of a brutally and unlawfully ruled people and placing war facilities, including operations, war tunnel entrances and enormous munitions stocks among whatever facilities the people have been left after the plundering, would be seen as an enormous crime. To then instruct the civilian population to stay put and ignore warnings to evacuate that they know will come as the criminals have already attacked the civilian population of the hated enemy would hardly be seen as a point in mitigation anywhere.
Except in Gaza.
Over 300 kids were killed digging those tunnels. Hamas and the PA are the sources for that. Apparently the kids were prized as diggers because of their size and agility. Likely they would have died horribly of course.
What do you call this. A war crime? It doesn't even begin to describe it. Of course it is a war crime, not just one, but it is something else besides. Can you call it genocide not only as a policy for the Jews but also as policy for the Gazans, even when it is part of a single coherent strategy that includes rapidly expanding the population of the ruled people for the purposes that include the waging of jihad?
A policy that enslaves women, entrenches poverty, grinds out never ending grievance and that has resulted in Gaza having among the highest birth rates and population projections anywhere going all the way back to 1967 when living standards in Gaza and other places nearby dramatically began to improve in key sectors.
But I digress.
That was way before Hamas was calling the shots and the policy settings, such as they were, were flung in reverse with all seven gears grinding like a Norwegian submarine right back all the way to the seventh century.
Not just Gaza by the way. The policy extends beyond Gaza. But how is a population explosion possibly in the same street as genocide?
Not the right word just now. But who knows what these maniacs are capable of and as the antizionist bigots in the West are fond of accusing Israel of genocide that involves the same population explosion it must be said that Hamas and its ugly sisters are guilty of a crime against their own people that is in the same dimension even now.
Not to mention the policy regarding the Jews.
Whatever else you could call this thing, you can say for sure it is uglier than a hatful of massacres and something else even uglier besides. You don't have to be a moral philosopher to note this.
Where else in the world and in history would there be any doubt about the nature of a crime like this? There may excellent reasons to not intervene including the most excellent reason of them all; that there is nothing that can be reasonably done. But whether it was genocide in Darfur, the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia or the crushing of the Tibetans there would be no lack of moral clarity about what we were seeing.
Except in Gaza.
Why is that? Isn't that being a little racist? Because it sure looks like it to me. A kind of double racism. The racism that relieves the rulers of Arab peoples and especially "Palestinians" from all responsibility for their terrible crimes even against their own people and the racism that places the burden of responsibility for these crimes squarely onto the Jews.
I've got to say this so please hear me through. We know it was determined Third Reich policy from the start to breed, as they saw and put it, as many Germans as possible so that they could be burned for a purpose that transcended the value of their lives. This was a core theme of the ruling ideology. Everyone knew this. It was taught in the schools. Beyond the individual is the state and beyond the state is the ruling ideology that must and will triumph even as the individual as an animal must die and whose duty therefore is to submit to the service of the state with his life.
In the light of events I guess one of the crimes you could accuse Hitler is the genocide of the German people. It is certainly true that Germans were his first victims and not just the Jewish Germans.
Which brings me back to Gaza.
As Hamas and its ugly sisters are being rewarded for their crimes and have people to burn as a result of a political culture that has a pathological attitude toward women and girls and a death cult attitude to the value of human life they will of course keep on doing this.
But here's the thing. The rewards for Hamas are mainly in the West. They can see for themselves the strategy is working in spades and at a cost to them that is negligible. Other people's kids that have been brought into the world for this purpose as policy.
The people of Gaza are oppressed and no one can seriously believe that there are not many among them who know what Hamas is up to and who just want a good and quiet life. But such thoughts are crimes in Gaza let alone words and how in any event supporting Hamas from the West can in any way be seen as in the best interests of the people of Gaza has to be dangerously close to racism in its own right.
Here is Alan Dershowitz nailing it at the Gatestone Institute.
Hamas quickly produces photographs of dead babies to be shown around the world, while at the same time preventing the media from showing its rocket launchers in densely populated areas.
Unless Hamas's "dead baby strategy" is denounced and stopped -- by the international community, the media, the academy and all good people -- it will be coming soon "to a theater near you".
If Hamas's dead baby strategy works, why not repeat it every few years? And why shouldn't other terrorist groups, like ISIS and Boko Haram, adapt this strategy as Hezbollah has already done?
On June 13, 2014, the commander of the Gaza Division of the Israel Defense Forces took me into a Hamas tunnel that had recently been discovered by a Bedouin tracker who serves in the IDF. The tunnel was a concrete bunker that extended several miles from its entrance in the Gaza Strip to its exit near an Israeli kibbutz kindergarten.
The tunnel had one purpose: to allow Hamas death squads to kill and kidnap Israelis. The commander told me that Israeli intelligence had identified more than two dozen additional tunnel entrances in the Gaza Strip. They had been identified by the large amounts of earth being removed to dig them. Although Israeli intelligence knew where these entrances were, they could not order an attack from the air, because they were built into civilian structures such as mosques, schools, hospitals, and private homes. Nor could Israel identify their underground routes from Gaza into Israel, or their intended exit points in Israel. Israeli scientists and military experts had spent millions of dollars in aneffort to develop technologies that could find the underground routes and intended exits for tunnels that were as deep as a hundred feet beneath the earth, but they had not succeeded in finding a complete solution to this problem. The planned exits from these tunnels in Israel were also a Hamas secret, hidden deep in the ground and incapable of being discovered by Israel until the Hamas fighters emerged. At that point it would be too late to prevent the death squads from doing their damage.
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| Sure to get this |
I was taken into the tunnel and saw the technological innovations: tracks on which small trains could transport kidnapped Israelis back to Gaza; telephone and electrical lines; crevices beneath schools and other civilian targets that could hold explosives; and smaller offshoot tunnels leading from the main tube to numerous exit points from which fighters could simultaneously emerge from different places.
This is one of your best efforts ever, Geoff.
ReplyDeleteExcellent piece.
The only thing that I would add is that the type of racism that we are seeing toward Arab political leadership is the type of "humanitarian racism" that we have often discussed here.