'Comment is Free' contributor: Israeli leaders murder Palestinian children to score electoral points

Up to 37,000 people (mostly civilians) have been killed in the Syrian civil war since an uprising against President Bashar al-Assad’s regime erupted 20 months ago.

During the Libyan Civil War, roughly 15,000 were killed.

At least 846 Egyptians (mostly civilians) were killed during the Egyptian revolution – the 3 week uprising which toppled Hosni Mubarak. Many were killed by police forces “shooting protesters in the head and chest with live ammunition.”

Around 219 were killed during street protests in Tunisia.

The death toll thus far in operation ‘Pillar of Defense’ has been 40 Gazans and 3 Israelis.

But, guess which country Egyptian ‘Comment is Free’ contributor Ahdaf Soueif demonizes as vicious killers of Arabs?

In ‘Gaza is no longer alone‘, Soueif not only advances the insidious narrative that Israel’s operation ‘Pillar of Defense’ was launched by Netanyahu to win an election (a meme parroted by Guardian journalists Harriet Sherwood and Simon Tisdall) but characterizes the conflict as a “killing spree” inspired by Zionist blood lust.

Soueif writes the following, in a post which was highlighted at the Guardian’s ‘live blog’ on the conflict:

“Israel has always sold itself to the west as a democracy in a sea of fanaticism. The Arab spring has undermined that narrative, possibly fatally. So Israeli politicians have been pushing hard for a war against Iran and, in the interim, they’ve gone on a killing spree in Gaza.

…

If they had wanted to instigate violence against themselves they could not have done better than to assassinate Ahmed al-Jaabari, the Hamas commander who’s prevented attacks on Israelis for the past five years. With his killing they’ve raised the probability of these attacks resuming, as is happening now. They can then try to hijack the narrative of the Arab spring and wind the clock back to “Islamist terrorists v civilised Israelis”. Meanwhile, they take the heat off Bashar al-Assad’s murderous activities in Syria – and, of course, score hawkish points for Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak before the coming elections.

But they have served to remind the world that Israel is a democracy where politicians may order the murder of children to score electoral points. [emphasis added]

So, for Soueif, murdering Palestinian children is quite popular among the Jewish electorate.

The enormity of this smear – a staggering moral inversion which evidently was unchallenged by Guardian editors – is difficult to even fathom.

Speeches which literally call for the murder of ‘every last Jew on earth‘ have been made by Hamas leaders and other leading Islamist figures – calls for genocide which can be found on several reputable websites.

And, such extreme, homicidal antisemitism isn’t confined to Palestinian leadership, as suicide bombing, for instance, against Israeli civilians remains disturbingly popular among the Palestinian electorate.

In fact, after Palestinian terrorists from the West Bank butchered five members of the Fogel family in 2011 – brutally stabbing to death parents Udi and Ruth and their children aged 11, 4 and 3 months – there was celebrating on the streets of Gaza.

LiveLeak-dot-com-cd070d538afa-gaza2 — A Palestinian man distributes sweets in the streets of the southern Gaza town of Rafah to celebrate murder of five Israelis (Getty Images)

Not only is there no celebrating on the streets of Tel Aviv or Jerusalem when Israeli strikes against Hamas terror targets inadvertently injure or kill Palestinian civilians, but the IDF goes to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties during anti-terror operations. This is one of the reasons why, according one leading British military expert, the ratio of civilian deaths to combatants killed in Gaza wars has been unprecedentedly low.

While there are no Israeli electoral benefits for causing Palestinian civilian casualties, you have to wonder which political crowd Guardian editors are trying to appease by sanctioning Soueif’s hideous smear against the Jewish state.