|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
The Ukrainian and Israeli wars are similar and yet also different conflicts—but in more ways than we can imagine.
Ukraine was invaded by a huge Russian state, with a population three-and-a-half times greater, a gross national product ten times larger, and an area thirty times its size.
Hamas, by contrast, is a terrorist clique of about 50,000-70,000 gunmen and terrorist kingpins who run Gaza. It is dwarfed by the Israeli population (20 times larger), economy (27 times greater), and area (60 times larger).
Both Russia and Hamas started the wars. Russia was convinced it would easily crush the smaller neighbor. Hamas hoped to spark a pan-Islamic jihad against the Jewish state.
Most of Europe, the United States, and the West understandably supported arming Ukraine to repel Vladimir Putin’s Russian aggression.
By contrast, such support for democratic Israel was strangely mixed.
In many elite, political, academic, and media circles, Israel is criticized for its massive retaliation after October 7, 2023.
The Western attitude toward the two wars grows even more inconsistent, if not incoherent.
There are constant calls for Israel to be “proportionate” in Gaza following the massacres of nearly 1,200 Jews, the vast majority civilians.
But Westerners understandably seek to give Ukraine more and better arms than Russia to ensure a disproportionate response necessary to win the war.
Israel is faulted for collateral damage from its efforts to destroy Hamas—even though terrorists are burrowed in and beneath hospitals, mosques, and schools.
Israeli hostages are used as human shields to protect Hamas gunmen.
No matter. Israel is expected to text or drop leaflets warning Gazan civilians to keep clear of impending air attacks, despite Hamas launching 7,000 rockets with no such warnings into civilian centers in Israel.
On October 7, Hamas, along with some Gazan civilians, tortured, decapitated, raped, and murdered hundreds of Israeli civilians to start the war.
By contrast, no one in the West asks the Ukrainians to warn surrounding civilian populations in occupied Ukraine or inside Russia to keep clear of their intended targets. To do so, apparently, would lessen the surprise effect of Ukrainian attacks.
The West has relentlessly hammered Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for his supposedly right-wing government and its “disproportionate” retaliation in Gaza.
He is closely watched by his American patrons for any sign of absolutist rule or failure to create an inclusive wartime cabinet representative of a wide diversity of Israeli political figures.
Yet, Ukrainan President Volodymyr Zelensky has not only suspended elections during the war but also declared martial law over his entire country.
Instead of facing Western censure, Zelensky remains a rock star in the West. Few seem bothered that he suspended most political parties, blurring the higher-ground difference between autocratic Russia and a supposedly democratic Ukraine.
Note that Israel, like the United States during World War II, has not declared martial law. Instead, it has formed a bipartisan coalition government with members of the opposition.
The U.S. keeps lecturing Israel to restrain its response to avoid a wider regional war in the Middle East. It fears Israeli retaliation for October 7 is apparently more incendiary than Hamas’ unprovoked invasions and murder of Israelis.
Yet, supplying a Ukrainian proxy to attack Russia, sometimes on the Black Sea or inside Russia, appears a far more dangerous gambit.
Hamas’ allies lack the 6,000 nuclear weapons of Russia and have no allies comparable to those now aligning with Moscow, such as China and North Korea.
Western media and politicians correctly discount Russian propaganda emanating from Moscow, especially its unsubstantiated claims of relative Russian and Ukrainian casualties or Ukrainian setbacks or atrocities.
Yet many of these same Westerners oddly take Hamas’ casualty totals at face value.
They have been gullible enough even to swallow Hamas lies that the Islamic jihad rocket that hit a Gazan hospital was an Israeli bomb.
By any fair standard, Hamas has proven to be no more honest, and perhaps far more inaccurate, than even Russian state-controlled media.
So what accounts for these strange disconnects in Western attitudes toward these two wars?
It certainly has nothing to do with consistently siding against those who started the war, or standing always with the more democratic power—or even logically against the side that is more likely to commit atrocities.
The answers seem as obvious as they are disturbing.
Many in the West have a bias against the Jewish state, as anti-Semitism rebounds in Europe and the U.S.
Popular Western culture often romanticizes Hamas killers as freedom fighters and demonizes collectively the Russian people as stereotyped Hollywood villains.
Middle-East oil money and massive immigration into Western countries dwarf the influence of an ailing Russia.
Left-wing politicians in Europe and the US court their growing Muslim constituents and have no worry about a commensurate Russian lobby.
And so the disconnect grows into absurdity.
Odd … I would compare Ukraine’s propaganda efforts to those of Hamas …
… then again …
I guess that’s the difference between knowing people from all sides and just reading about it …
… or talking to ‘trusted’ mouthpieces.
Hamas enjoys the protection of the multi-generational existance of Arabist protective group in the State Department. I have wondered if these folks were enhanced when, at the end of WW2, those in the State Department squelching news of Nazi atrocities found their client deceased
Whilst recognising that the first casualty of war is always truth. There are two distinct differences between Russia and Palestinian invasions.
Russia aimed for military bases.
Palestinians aimed for babies and young children and the elderly.
I have to assume you just like being provocative because no-one could make the absurd comments you do in all seriousness. Either that or you just like commenting, never mind your pure ignorance of the subject matter.
Please disregard previous comment. It was made in error though I do have to disagree on Russia only aiming for military bases. One only has to see the devastation of civilian cities and dwellings in Ukraine to know that isn’t true.
Hamas does have allies with nuclear weapons. Pakistan, Iran, Tueky, Syria, Lebanon the Fourth Reich, Brazil, Venezuela all back Hamas.
Destroy Hamas to the last thug
Thankfully, that destruction is in progress. Netanyahu has apparently learned from 76 years of failure that there can be no peace with subhumans Hellbent on the annihilation of Israel and genocide of the Jews. Diplomacy is impossible with islamopithecines as their unholy axis of unholy scripture and debased cultures attest.
Such a pity that we didn’t smite and kill the Amalekites to the last man, woman, and child when we were ordered to 3300 years ago. Now? It keeps getting harder as they keep proliferating. And their PR is infinitely better than Israel’s.
Can’t let the Israelis soundly trounce the barbarians. It could set an awkward example, and who knows where it might lead? Besides, the Israelis are. . . are. . . well, Jews. Time to cut them down to size again. Ask Obama, and his crowd at the state department.
3000 yes 3000 Arabs from tiny Gaza attacked women and children but they accept Israel?
Russia has invaded the Ukraine and seized territory three times now, and nobody gives a shit about the United Nazis. (I stole that term from somebody else because it’s a good one.)
How can Israel occupy itself? Gaza is a freeloading part of Israel, even though Ariel Sharon rendered it Judenrein in 2005. And if Hamas has no control over Gaza how does it rule the Paleosimians there with an iron fist and how did it murder 1200 Jews on 10-7-23? How could a place with no autonomy be a jihad factory that attacks Jews daily?
You’re obviously a fan boy of Putin and Hamas.
Zionism is the belief that Jews should have a homeland. Israel is that homeland, and it includes the Gaza Strip, Judea and Samaria. As part of Israel, Gaza, Judea and Samaria cannot be annexed. There is no such place as “the West Bank.”
Paleosimians aren’t all Arabs. They’re a noxious mix of Arabs, Druzes, Circassians and other ethnicities.
Hamas, the PA and all the Paleosimians REJECT a two state solution in favor of annihilation of dem Joos, and they aren’t shy about saying it and writing it.
You’re full of shit, Mohammad.
Do you own a map? Have you ever seen a map? Do you know what a map is? You appear to have not the slightest sense of geography.
Please disregard previous comment. It was made in error though I do have to disagree on Russia only aiming for military bases. One only has to see the devastation of civilian cities and dwellings in Ukraine to know that isn’t true.
What a bizarre comment tinged with the hate that VDH points out. Gaza was UNoccupied for about 20 years by any Jewish person. Israel provided some power and water. They did not somehow need to be responsible for a terror culture that has as its charter to annihilate `Jews from the earth and a culture receiving more billions from taxpayers around the globe than has ever happened. Egypt would not open its border, you fool, not Israel. What almost all Israelis and other decent people want is a wide open border with Egypt so these unusually coddled people who can magically be refugees for generations unlike any other people on earth, can finally leave and go back to their family’s various original homelands. And live as they wish. Your distortions are an abomination. You’re a disgrace in light of the atrocities your friends in Hamas committed after Hamas broke a ceasefire and enacted a rape murder beheading burning cooking babies to death attack.
If only there were a report, mute, or block button here to protect the rest of us from your longwinded hate.
The other issues of contradiction:
1) That leftists want their governments to keep sending weapons to Ukraine, while leftist protestors demand their governments cut off supplying weapons to Israel.
2) That leftist rely upon the flimsiest of pretense to continue supplying Ukraine with weapons such as the death of Alexei Navalny. One thing has nothing to do with another, Putin is known for having a long reach to eliminating his domestic enemies. But so what, that’s irrelevant to keep funding a futile stalemate on a battlefield. Yet these same leftists rely on the libelous pretense that IDF is committing genocide in the Gaza Strip, thus our government needs to immediately stop sending weapons to Israel.
3) That even though both Russia and Ukraine have shutdown the freedom of the press, Western mainstream media states Ukraine is fighting to preserve democracy. That even though both Russia and Ukraine are drafting men to fight and military aged men in both countries are fleeing their homeland, Western governments only demonize Russia regarding its forced conscription. Meanwhile Israel still maintains a free press even during times of war, such as fighting a 2 war front (Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in its defacto mini state in southern Lebanon). Yet somehow young leftist useful idiots on post-secondary campuses protest that Israel is an illegitimate and undemocratic country. Also where Hamas and Hezbollah fighters are fundamentalist Jihadists, seeking to convert all non-Muslim lands to submit to the will of Allah; the IDF by contrast is a professional military designed to defend its people and its country.
4) People protest for a free Palestine, yet the Fatah run area of the West Bank and the Hamas run Gaza Strip last held elections in 2006 and both Islamic political parties have indefinitely suspended elections. Meanwhile Israel’s last election was held in November 2022, yet leftists blame Israel for Arabs not having free elections.
5) That Western useful idiots protest that Israel is an apartheid state, yet Israel has no apartheid laws on their books to discriminate against Arabs. Meanwhile, Muslims who were given the ability to control the Temple Mount after the 6 Day War as an offer for peaceful coexistence have used their power to prohibit Jews and Christians from praying on the Temple Mount.
I could go on but I leave it to other readers of this website to contribute to my list.