Christiane Amanpour and Jon Stewart Should Remember: Israel Did Not Seek War in Gaza

Let’s recall to mind once again, for the sake of the Old Fish Christiane Amanpour and her willing collaborator and host Jon Stewart, doesn’t want anyone to think he has any special feelings for Israel, a few home truths. To wit:

1. Israel did not seek, and did not want, a war with Hamas in Gaza. For decades, Hamas has been launching rockets into Israel, to further its stated aim of destroying the Jewish state and replacing it with a twenty-third Arab one. Wearily, the IDF has every few years found it necessary to go into Gaza to teach Hamas a lesson, and to obtain a modicum of calm until Hamas-launched rockets again make life sufficiently unpleasant and dangerous for Israelis so that the IDF must again suppress the fire. The Israelis call it “mowing the lawn.”

2. The Gaza war began on October 7, 2023, when 3,000 Hamas operatives smashed into Israel, by car, on motorbikes, and on paragliders. They proceeded to rape, torture, mutilate, and kill 1,200 people and kidnap 263. They had help from some of the Plain People of Gaza, who accompanied the Hamas killers in order to join in the fun — raping, killing, that sort of thing.

3. The IDF is doing in Gaza what it always does: it makes colossal efforts to minimize civilian casualties. It does this by warning civilians away from areas, or buildings, that the IDF will soon be targeting. Israeli pilots also call off missions at the last minute if they detect too many civilians near the target. These are the reasons that the IDF has been called — by British Colonel Richard Kemp — the “most moral army in the world,” and described by West Point Professor John Spencer as having “implemented more measures to prevent civilian casualties than any other nation in the history of warfare.”

4. In Gaza, Hamas did what it always does: it tries to maximize civilian casualties, by embedding its operatives and its weapons among civilians, using them as human shields. Hamas also tries to prevent civilians from fleeing areas the IDF has warned them about; Hamas killers shot Gazans dead who were trying early in the war to flee from northern Gaza, leaving their bodies on Salah al-Din Street as a different sort of warning: don’t try to flee.

5. Many of the soi-disant “journalists” who have died in Gaza were also Hamas and PIJ members, who only became journalists at the beginning of the war, when foreign news agencies were desperate for people on the spot in Gaza, and not too inquisitive about their backgrounds. Amanpour accuses Israel of the “killing of journalists,” as if the IDF does this deliberately. It does not. It would make no sense.

6. Amanpour believes that Al Jazeera is a legitimate media organization, that is “trying to tell the truth in this waging [sic] war.” Everyone in the Middle East knows that Al Jazeera is the wholly-owned propaganda organ of Qatar, and Qatar is the main financial supporter of Hamas; it also provides refuge to dozens of Hamas leaders. You will never find a word of criticism of Hamas in any of Al-Jazeera’s print or television coverage. But for Amanpour, Al Jazeera is “trying to tell the truth.” Just the way that The Tehran Times, The People’s Daily, and Argymenty i Fakty try to “tell the truth.”

7. Jon Stewart believes that the Hamas-supplied figure of “10,000 dead children in Gaza” is “without precedent” in history. Perhaps he should brush up on recent history. How many children does he think died in the Holocaust? In Rwanda in 1994? In Nigeria, during the Biafra War that was fought between 1967 and 1969 and again, in recent years, from attacks by Boko Haram on Nigerian Christians? How many children does he think were killed in the Syrian civil war? In the Yemen civil war? It’s time to burn the midnight oil, Jon Stewart, so you don’t continue to make a fool of yourself.