In the Media

The Algemeiner – 16 September 2024

It’s been almost one full year since October 7, 2023 — one of the worst terrorist attacks in modern history, and the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. And the barbaric crime was streamed live in high-definition video on social media platforms by the Hamas perpetrators.

And yet somehow, 11 months later, much of the world seems incapable of telling the difference between a terror group that slaughters children and a sovereign state that tries to save them — a terror group whose own charter calls for the destruction of the Jewish State.

The world prefers to focus their attention on the actions of Israel — and applying pressure on the Jewish State — while seemingly ignoring the actions of Hamas, a terror army that deliberately uses hospitals and schools as bases, terror tunnels to hide hostages, and children as human shields.

Just days after Hamas executed six Israeli hostages who had been starved and tortured for almost a year, the United Kingdom decided to curb arms sales to Israel, suspending 30 of the 350 existing arms licenses because of “a clear risk that they might be used to commit or facilitate a serious violation of international humanitarian law.”

The UK saw fit to punish Israel — even though experts have said Israel is doing more to protect civilians than any military in modern history — and even as the bodies of these executed hostages were being laid to rest. One of these hostages, Eden Yerushalmi, weighed less than 80 pounds.

And shamefully the Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong “welcomed” the British move, as a means to “pressure” Israel to alleviate the suffering of Palestinians.

Notably, while she has on previous occasions, this time she didn’t speak about curbing Hamas — the terror group that launched this war in the first place and deliberately made it their strategy to get Gazan civilians killed to increase world sympathy.

On September 10, Canada announced a similar suspension of license exports to Israel. This comes after it had already decided to not issue any new permits for military exports to Israel since January 2024.

Unfortunately, this so-called concern for civilians ignores the more than 60,000 Israelis who have been forced from their homes in the north, where Hezbollah has launched about 8,000 rockets across the international border on an almost daily basis since it joined in the war on October 8.

Hezbollah’s crimes have also been largely ignored, with no condemnations, but rather weak calls for “de-escalation.”

All those who continually charge Israel with violating “international law” seem to forget that UN Security Council Resolution 1701 is also being completely ignored. That’s the resolution that ended the Israel-Hezbollah war in 2006, and called for Hezbollah to withdraw to north of the Litani River and for the Lebanese armed forces and UNIFIL to maintain security in southern Lebanon. For 18 years, this resolution has been flagrantly violated, but few seem to care about the violation of this “international law.”

And just this past weekend, the Houthi terror group fired a ballistic missile from Yemen at Israel that was thankfully intercepted, but could have had devastating effects had it been successful. Once again the world was silent.

Israel is a very small country surrounded by terrorist groups and Iran’s ring of proxies trying desperately to destroy the Jewish State, yet rather than stand with Israel against these evil entities, there are elements in the world who would seemingly prefer the easy option of punishing Israel instead because they cannot seem to deal with the evil of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran.

Justin Amler is a policy analyst at the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC).