The Willing Suspension of Disbelief

Not the West's Finest Moment

Hamas and Israel are at war.  Hamas claims that Israel is shelling civilians and killing them.  The Western media and most politicians accept this at face value and the vitriolic reactionary bile pours forth.  Israel is a child-killing nation.  Hamas said so, and clearly children and non-combatants are being killed. 

The chattering classes and the Commentariat accept Hamas's statements and claims at their face value.  They assume their veracity.  But why?  The old adage has it that when war commences, the first casualty is the truth.  Surely the Western media and its Commentariat would not be so gullible or naive?  Well, unfortunately the West is just that gullible and naive. 

On one level it's understandable.  The vast majority of Western scribes and pundits have never experienced nor lived through a war.  They live in a culture which, due to its Christian vestiges, still values truth telling and condemns deceitful and misleading behaviour.  Politicians and media exposed as liars are usually rejected, losing all credibility.  The Commentariat projects these perspectives and experiences on to Hamas and Israel.


On the other hand, Israel claims that many instances of rocket fire upon Palestinian civilians has actually come from Hamas firing upon its own.  The allegation is not just that Hamas has trouble aiming its rockets, but that it was deliberately aimed fire.  Why on earth would Hamas do that?  To demonise Israel in the courts of international public opinion.  Can that be possible?  Commentators in the West assume that because "we" would not do such a thing, it is inconceivable that Hamas would be that treacherous and murderous.

Secondly, Israel alleges that Hamas has deliberately located its missile firing batteries, weapons caches, and tunnel entrances in civilian buildings and installations such as hospitals and schools.  Consequently, civilians are getting killed and injured.  The West dismisses this as the worst kind of lying propaganda on the part of Israel.  But, again, why?  The use of human shields is common in the Islamic Middle East: the "tactic" has been used in Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria,and the new Caliphate--usually in cases of Islam versus Islam violence.  Suicide bombing deployed against civilians is also exceedingly common--having become the new norm.  The burden of proof to establish that Hamas is not using its own people as human shields must surely rest with Hamas because Hamas has form.

The West's dismissal of even the possibility that Hamas might be putting its own citizens in danger looks wilfully gullible. 

But what else do we know?  It appears that every cease-fire negotiated and declared has been summarily broken by Hamas.  One blogger has presented a summary of events:

5 July: Israel accepted the ceasefire initiated by Egypt and stopped all fire at 09:00. However, terrorists fired more than 50 rockets at Israeli communities. Only after six hours of continuous rocket attacks did the IDF respond.

17 July: Israel agreed to a five-hour humanitarian ceasefire. The terrorist organizations rejected it and fired rockets, including at the city of Be’er-Sheva.

20 July: Israel approved a two-hour medical/humanitarian window in the area of Shejaiya, following an International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) request. Forty minutes after the ceasefire began, Hamas violated it. Nevertheless, Israel implemented the ceasefire, even extending it for two more hours.

26-27 July: Israel respected an UN-requested humanitarian ceasefire from 08:00-20:00 on Saturday, 26 July. Israel announced its readiness to prolong the ceasefire until midnight, but a few minutes after 20:00, Hamas renewed firing rockets at Israeli civilians.

On the same day (26 July), Hamas announced a 24-hour humanitarian ceasefire, at 14:00. Hamas violated its own ceasefire a short time later. Despite Hamas’ continuous fire, Israel decided to extend the humanitarian ceasefire a second time, from midnight Saturday to midnight Sunday.

28 July: Israel accepted Hamas’ request for a ceasefire in honor of the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr. The IDF was instructed to cease military attacks, but Hamas continued to launch rockets at Israel.

30 July: Israel announced a temporary humanitarian ceasefire between 15:00-19:00. A few minutes after the ceasefire began Hamas fired rockets at the southern cities of Ashdod and Ashkelon, as well as other Israeli communities.

This summary has been sourced from the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, hardly a neutral source. However, the Western media seem grudgingly to acknowledge Hamas has broken cease-fire agreements.

In the latest occurrence a humanitarian cease fire collapsed just a few hours after it began, as Hamas fighters emerged from a tunnel, killing Israeli soldiers and capturing one.  This was a bridge too far even for President Obama, according to the NZ Herald:

US President Barack Obama urged Hamas to show it is serious about wanting a ceasefire and called on Islamic militants to release an Israeli soldier reported captured earlier in the day.  "I think it's going to be very hard to put a ceasefire back together again if Israelis and the international community can't feel confident that Hamas can follow through on a ceasefire commitment," he told reporters.

Obama said the United States "unequivocally condemned Hamas and the Palestinian factions that were responsible for killing two Israeli soldiers, and abducting a third almost minutes after a ceasefire had been announced."  He was speaking after a humanitarian truce in Gaza collapsed only hours after it began Friday amid a deadly new wave of violence and the apparent capture by Hamas of an Israeli soldier.

So, Hamas has form on the matter of suicide bombing and using civilians as human shields.  It also believes in the ethic of lying.  As we wrote in an earlier piece:

 In classical Islam, it is permitted to lie under particular circumstances.  The doctrine of permitted lying is called taqiyya. It is supposedly only permitted for emergencies, but it has become the norm of public behaviour whenever there is a conflict between faith and expediency.  The doctrine, says Sookhdeo, is supported in the Qur'an, the hadith, and various commentaries upon the same.  One hadith supports lying in three situations: to one's wife, in war, and for the purposes of reconciliation.  A hadith, one recalls, is a recitation of a saying attributed to Muhammad.

Allah's Messenger (peace be upon him) said, "Lying is allowed in only three cases: falsehood spoken by a man to his wife to please her, falsehood in war, and falsehood to put things right between people. Al-Tirmidhi Number 5033: Narrated by Asma', daughter of Yazid. [Sookhdeo, p. 197.]

Hamas takes classical Islam seriously.  It seeks literal applications of the Qur'an and the hadith--and these make lying in war a moral virtue.  Since it is in a state of  war with Israel, nothing Hamas says about Israel should be taken as the truth, until it is proved so. Since Hamas has declared jihad upon Israel, with the end goal being the obliteration of Israel from the face of the earth, it regards itself as being in a perpetual state of war with Israel and thus permitted to lie in all dealings with Israel--whether the rockets and guns are firing or not. 

That's one reason why Israel's war against Hamas has such huge popular support amongst the Israeli population.  They have experienced the Islamic ethics of Hamas's duplicity often enough to discern the truth through the fog of war.

No doubt the average Israeli struggles to understand why the Western chattering classes are so gullible and easily duped.  Not the West's finest moment.