Stand for Israel

The McClatchy-Tribune newspaper chain has just published an incredible story from former New York Times correspondent Joel McBrinkley. What’s incredible is not the facts in it — it’s pretty accurate — but that a mainstream newspaper chain is running it!

McBrinkley argues that the plight of the Gaza population is unfairly blamed on Israel, when the real culprits are the terror chieftans of Hamas, who don’t seem to care about their own people:

Still, most of the people behind the continuing reproval take little note of Hamas’ own campaign of terror in the previous months, lobbing hundreds of missiles toward Israeli population centers. No matter. That’s a debate for another day. The point is, a year has passed.

What political concessions has Hamas offered that might have enabled it to make repairs, improve the lot of its people? None. So, poverty and malnutrition are growing so fast that these pernicious blights are reaching epidemic status. The United Nations reported this fall that one in five Gazans now live in what it called “abject poverty.” That is why many parents are no longer sending their children to school. They need the pennies their children can earn at menial jobs to buy food.

Their chieftains don’t seem to care. I have interviewed the leaders of Hamas many times over the years, and all of them offered one consistent refrain, time and time again: We are patient. Our resistance will continue as long as it takes – even centuries – until we reach our goal, full control of Palestine.

Of course, that includes the state of Israel. One of them, Ismail Abu Shenab, now deceased, once told me: “There are plenty of open areas in the United States that could absorb the Jews.” Even Shenaeb, zealot that he was, must have known that nothing like that was going to happen even in his grandchildren’s lifetimes – if ever. But he and all his colleagues, then and now, pursued that ludicrous goal in exclusion of all else, and now it is leading to the social destruction of their own…