Blaming Israel

In the name of “fairness” and politically correct moral equivalence, WAPO couldn’t simply have condemned the actions of Turkey and Egypt in its editorial without finding fault with Israel also.

First of all Israel doesn’t owe Turkey an apology since Turkey was clearly the aggressor which committed an act of war against Israel by sending the jiihadist IHH aboard the mavi marmara with the purpose of deliberately provoking Israel. Secondly, IDF commandos boarded the ship with paintball guns. How is that amount to the use of “excessive force”? The commandos only used deadly force after their own lives were in danger from being beaten with lead pipes, knives and whatever else they were attacked with upon descending the Mavi Marmara. And Egyptian guards wouldn’t have been killed had they not have either looked the other way or possibly aided the terrorists outright who murdered Israelis.

Why is it so difficult for the liberal media to admit that Israel is in the right, her enemies are wrong, period? Why is it that they ALWAYS equivocate? Why does the liberal media muddle these situations and find it impossible to see Israel’s conflicts with her enemies as what it actually is, an issue of black and white? Israel being the victim of her enemies attempts to destroy her while Israelis only want to live their lives in peace. There is no “cycle of violence” and there is not fault with both sides. There is aggressor and victim. Israel being the victim of constant arab and muslim aggression. One has to be morally deficient not to see the situation in those obvious terms.

Once again, Israel is scapegoated

By Editorial Board Opinion, WaPO, Tuesday, September 13, 2:34 AM


ISRAELIS WORRY that the Arab Spring is turning from a popular movement against dictatorship into another assault on the Jewish state, and their worry is not unfounded. Last week in Cairo a mob attacked the Israeli Embassy, forcing the evacuation of the ambassador and most of his staff; the previous week the Israeli ambassador to Turkey was expelled. Later this month Palestinians are expected to introduce a resolution on statehood at the United Nations, and Israel could be further isolated if, as expected, a large majority of the General Assembly votes in favor of it.

There’s little doubt that plenty of Arabs and Turks are angry at Israel. But it’s worth noting that, as often is the case in the Middle East, those passions are being steered by governments.

?Toles’s take on the situation in Libya, Egypt and beyond.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who aspires to regional leadership, has directed a campaign against the government of Benjamin Netanyahu and stoked it with incendiary statements. Mr. Erdogan is furious that a U.N. investigation concluded that Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip, and thus its intervention to stop a Turkish-led flotilla last year, was legal. He also finds it convenient to lambaste Israel rather than talk about neighboring Syria, where daily massacres are being carried out by a regime Mr. Erdogan cultivated.

The assault on the embassy in Cairo has been condemned by the leaders of Egypt’s popular revolution and by some leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood. Both they and Western diplomats blame the ruling military for failing to secure the embassy, and they suspect the omission may have been part of an effort to divert rising public unrest toward a familiar target.

In the West Bank, polls have shown that President Mahmoud Abbas’s U.N. statehood initiative is regarded as a low priority by the majority of Palestinians, 60 percent of whom said the better option was resuming direct negotiations with Israel. But Mr. Abbas fears he may be the next target of popular uprising; the U.N. gambit appears aimed in part at preempting that.

This is not to say the trend is benign. Israel is looking more isolated than at any time in decades. It is more than a hapless bystander: Mr. Netanyahu’s government could have avoided a crisis with Turkey had it been willing to apologize for the deaths of nine Turks during the interception of the flotilla, which the U.N. panel rightly judged to be an excessive use of force. An incident in which five Egyptian guards were killed when Israeli forces pursued terrorists crossing the border helped to trigger the upsurge in tensions with Cairo. And Mr. Netanyahu’s slowness to embrace reasonable parameters for Palestinian statehood provided Mr. Abbas with a pretext for his U.N. initiative.

It nevertheless is in the interest of Western governments, as well as of Israel, to resist the counterproductive and irresponsible initiatives of Mr. Abbas and Mr. Erdogan. In Egypt, the military has cited the attack on the Israeli Embassy as a pretext to apply emergency laws and censor the media; those, too, are steps in the wrong direction. The core demands of the Arab Spring have nothing to do with Israel: They are about ending authoritarian rule and modernizing stagnating societies. Scapegoating Israel will not satisfy the imperative for change.