“Perceptions,” by Gerry Warner

Op-Ed Commentary

There are no heroes in this war.

Not in Gaza. Not in Israel. Not anywhere.

And certainly not in the university campuses across Canada and the United States, which have been occupied by a gaggle of protesters erecting “encampments” to show how truly ignorant they are despite receiving what is generously described these days as being “educated?”

Tell me what is “educated” about a swarm of Hamas terrorists illegally crossing a sovereign border and savagely slaughtering more than 2,000 innocent civilians as they were enjoying breakfast, attending a music festival in a park or engaging in other innocent activities as civilized people are wont to do? Oh yes, some of these crazed killers were likely chanting “from the river to the sea” as they carried out their genocidal dream of ruthlessly eliminating every last Jewish person from the face of the earth.

You don’t like reading this? Well, I’ll tell you something. I don’t like writing it, but it’s the truth and it needs no one to defend it because it’s the key factor that too many people are ignoring in this tragically senseless war.

If you want to talk the war guilt question, Hamas, and Hamas alone, is clearly the guilty party. And even worse, Hamas knew they had little or no chance of winning the war but they did it anyway consigning thousands of innocent Palestinians to certain death by a larger, stronger and better equipped opponent.

What kind of human being would do something like this? Well, they’re certainly not “human” in the normal sense of the word. About the only way I can describe Hamas is to say they’re cut from the same cloth as the Twin Tower bombers. They too knew they were going to die in the flames of the blasted buildings, but they didn’t care. Allah would take care of them in heaven. What else could they have believed?

This brings us to Israel, the other guilty player in this immense international tragedy.

Does anyone doubt Israel is winning the war? Surely not! But in the broader sense of the word “winning,” Israel is actually losing the war and losing badly.

In the court of international public opinion, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that Israel has lost the war no matter what the outcome. Even in the best of times, Israel is battered by anti-Semites, conspiracy theorists and Jew haters who hate the Middle East’s only democracy for historical reasons too numerous to mention here. Now they hate Israel even more for the ferociousness of the way Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pursued the grim conflict.

Even in war time, what do you call the mass killing of more than 35,000 Palestinian civilians? To many in the world, the only answer is genocide. How ironic is that? Now, many in the world feel Israel is committing a holocaust of its own and who can blame them?

Where does that lead us? Surely to a God-awful place, in international diplomacy there’s a principle that when a country is attacked, especially when the attack is without warning, the response must be proportionate. In no way has Israel’s response been “proportional.” To date, Israel’s attack on Hamas has killed more than 35,000 Palestinians, many of them Hamas fighters for sure but the great majority women and children. This is totally unacceptable or should be under anyone’s moral compass and calls out for something to be done and done right away and the only thing that should be is an unconditional ceasefire now.

And short of some kind of political miracle, there’s only one individual who can make this happen, “Bibi,” or Benjamin Netanyahu, who has the blood of 35,000 Palestinians on his hands and whose only chance of redemption is to order a ceasefire now.

I don’t pretend to know what happens in the afterlife, but this much I know. The afterlife, whatever it is, is filled with dead Palestinians aching to be the first to toss Netanyahu into the fiery furnaces of hell. Hamas too.

And yes, you can quote me on that.

Gerry Warner is a retired journalist, who’s not ashamed to admit he believes in some sort of a deity.

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