Brendan O’Neill
Spiked, May 28, 2024
“If you hate what has happened to Rafah, if you hate that it’s been sucked into the vortex of war, then you should hate Hamas.”
The anti-Israel set is right about something for once: it is unconscionable that Rafah has been turned into a warzone. It is an affront to humanity itself that a city once teeming with civilians fleeing the ravages of war elsewhere in Gaza should now be reduced to a hellish battleground. But who did this? Who was it that decided to use this former city of civilians as a launchpad for war? Who was it that posted their military commanders there, hid their ammunition there, fired their missiles from there, and dragged hostages there? Who was it who hid the machinery of war among the women and children of Rafah, knowing full well that bloodshed would ensue?
It wasn’t Israel. Israel helped to facilitate the evacuation of over 900,000 civilians. No, it was Hamas. To see the evils of Hamas, look at Rafah.
There is ‘global outrage’ following Israel’s firing of a missile that hit a camp in Rafah for displaced Palestinians. According to Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry, 45 civilians were killed. Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has called it a ‘tragic mistake’. The footage from the burning camp is grim in the extreme. And Hamas bears ultimate responsibility for it. It was Hamas that forced Rafah to become the frontline in its apocalyptic war against the Jews. It was Hamas that turned this former ‘safe zone’ into one of the least safe zones on Earth. Nothing captures the ruthlessness and cynicism of these Islamofascists better than the cruel fate befalling Rafah right now.
Not that you’d know it from the public discussion. Peruse the mainstream media or the tweets of the woke and you could be forgiven for thinking Israel is attacking Rafah for sport. Both the cranky left and batshit right are even referring to the ‘tragic mistake’ in Rafah as the ‘Rafah Holocaust’. This is Holocaust inversion of the most rank variety, where Israel’s rightful pursuit of the fascists who carried out the pogrom of 7 October is rebranded as ‘fascism’; where a war on the genocidal terrorists of Hamas is reimagined as ‘genocide’. War is peace, freedom is slavery, and anti-fascism is fascism.
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