If you are old enough, as I am, to remember the days of Yasser Arafat and his Palestine Liberation Movement, then you will remember a number of horrific atrocities against Jews and Israelis, including the Olympic massacre and the hijacked passenger plane that landed in Entebbe, Uganda, dooming all the passengers on board.
Arafat was seen as a terrorist, a murderer of innocent people. But he and others of his bent learned a lesson: Propaganda is the key to world sympathy that could turn minds into accepting that the aggressor was really the victim. So out came all the ideas about genocide and a fabricated account of history regarding the inhabitants of the nation now called Israel.
Regarding the events going on today it was quickly forgotten even by decent human beings that Hamas still holds innocent people hostage and committed atrocities too horrific for most people to look at. But look at them. Take a long, hard look and see if there is any compassion to be had.
It is far too easy to sit in the comfort of your home or on the lawn of a pretty tree-lined campus and scream about Israel's atrocities and call for the wholesale murder of every Israeli citizen (from the river to the sea) without ever having lived in Israel under constant threat and attack by all of its Arab neighbors, with a long history of having been massacred, bombed, shot, and tortured at the hands of Palestinian extremists.
What we are experiencing is called the bandwagon effect and all logic has flown out the window. Israel has had the power to wipe out every Palestinian for the past seven decades or so, but it has not done it, because its goal is not genocide; it is peace. Yet on the eve of every single peace accord radical Palestinian groups, whether the PLO, Hamas, or you name it, has launched an attack. And these groups have always used human shields and abused their own people. And they have also pushed the same claim that if they were to rise to power they would murder and torture every last Jewish person in the region. How, then, can Israel afford to give an inch to promote their own demise?
Take a close look at what each and every Arab culture and society looks like — wholesale misogyny, every religion (Jews, Christians, B'Hai, Zoroastrians, Buddhists, etc.) expelled from the country, medieval torture and punishment, limited freedoms, severe abuse, control by religious extremists, and the list goes on.
