Selective Protests

Ben­jamin Pro­grund make an excel­lent point:

But where were the pro­test­ers when mis­siles were falling on south­ern Israel? Had they come into the streets then and demanded that Hamas stop fir­ing we wouldn’t have the gory mess in Gaza today.

The rock­ets and mor­tars first struck on April 16, 2001. Since then, there have been more than 6,300. Last year’s toll was more than 3,000…

WHY DID the world keep silent for so many years? Could any­one really expect Israel to do noth­ing for evermore?

That there is much anguish and anger about Pales­tin­ian suf­fer­ing while there was so lit­tle response to what Israelis were endur­ing raises wor­ry­ing ques­tions. Are pro­test­ers giv­ing vent to gen­uine com­pas­sion for Pales­tin­ian vic­tims, or is there some­thing dark and ugly under the sur­face in sin­gling out Israel as though there has never before been a war in which inno­cent civil­ians are trag­i­cally caught in the fire?

How else to explain the extreme con­dem­na­tion of Israel? The out­pour­ing of so much hatred and the wild abuse of lan­guage and his­tory in accu­sa­tions of “geno­cide,” “Holo­caust” and the “War­saw Ghetto”?

But it just not stop at won­der­ing why thou­sands of peo­ple around the world are protest­ing Israeli attacks on Hamas but not the ter­ror­ist group’s attacks on Israeli civil­ians. Why is there such an empha­sis on the Israeli-Palestinian con­flict at all? Even if one believes that the Pales­tini­ans are unjustly treated, there are dozens of places around the world — Dar­fur is the most sig­nif­i­cant exam­ple — in which peo­ple are suf­fer­ing much worse than peo­ple in Gaza and the West Bank are report­edly far­ing. But where are the sig­nif­i­cant world­wide protests for that issue?

There are two pos­si­bil­i­ties: Either there is some­thing unique and spe­cial about Israel as an alleged abuser, or there is some­thing unique and spe­cial about the Pales­tini­ans as vic­tims. If either one (or both) of these are true, then the rea­son for the protests in gen­eral — and the lack of anti-Hamas ral­lies in par­tic­u­lar — can only be one thing: anti-Semitism dis­guised as anti-Israel rallies.

If one needs proof, one only needs to see that anti-Semitic inci­dents around the world have increased as a result of the Gaza conflict.