On Monday, the Democratic Party of Orange County published this statement condemning the savagery of the surprise Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel. In addition to condemning Hamas, the DPOC statement also mourns “all losses of life, including those lost as a result of Israel’s defensive response to Hamas’ attacks.”
Who could object to condemning a planned terrorist assault that intentionally targets innocent civilians, from babies to the elderly for murder?
Radical progressive activists, that’s who. Nearly every comment on the DPOC’s Facebook post expresses outrage and seeks to paint the party’s statement as evidence of a “moral double standard.” You can read them in all their deranged glory here.
Some examples: Hussam Ayloush, the CEO of CAIR-California, denounced the statement as “shameful” and “biased propaganda” that must have been written by “anti-Palestinian and Islamophobic bigots:”
Who knew that condemning the organized murder of unarmed women and children was not only “insensitive” but “bigoted”?
Ayloush has also been comparing the Hamas terrorist attacks to the 1945 Warsaw Ghetto uprising against the Nazis by Jews destined for slaughter in death camps:
Astonishingly, Ayloush appears to paint the Hamas massacre of innocent civilians as “death with honor.”
Former Anaheim Councilman Jose F. Moreno lambasted the DPOC condemnation of the Hamas terrorist attacks as betraying a “moral double standard” while drawing moral equivalence between Hamas terrorism and Israel defending its citizens against Hamas terrorism:
Maybe Dr. Moreno could call upon Hamas to cease the intentional, up-close-and-personal slaughter of unarmed civilians and to stop putting innocent Palestinians at risk by mingling their rocket batteries and other offensive capabilities in Gaza neighborhoods.
Ayloush and Moreno aren’t alone. They’re representative of a significant radical segment of the modern Democratic Party that is training its rhetorical fire on the more traditional elements of the party that retain the ability to distinguish terrorism from self-defense.
Here’s Berniecrat Democrat Andy Lewandowski:
What is astounding is these folks are so blinded by radical ideology that they cannot or will not distinguish between the deliberate targeting and murder of innocent civilians – women, children, babies, the old and infirm – simply for being Jewish, and Israel taking military action to defend itself from that evil.
Contrary to Ayloush’s claim, there is no “honor” in Hamas’ war of against Israelis. It is depraved.
War is a terrible thing. And civilian suffering and death is one of the inescapable consequences of war, no matter how precise weapons systems are or the care taken to avoid civilians casualties. Hamas rules Gaza, and hides its military capabilities among the populace – knowingly using them as human shields. How does that show concern for innocent Palestinians?
Are Palestinian civilians being killed and wounded as a result of Israel’s retaliatory strikes against Hamas military targets? Yes. It’s an awful reality of war, especially when the instigator of this war hides among the civilians population and uses them as human shields. Does the deliberate killing of civilians form Israel’s self-defense strategy? No.
The actions of Hamas and Israel this past week are not comparable in degree, scale or kind. Israel is acting in self-defense and unleashing its military capabilities to destroy a terrorist mini-state – Hamas – whose goal is the destruction of Israel. Hamas is engaged in an organized campaign to kill Jews because they are Jews.
The moral logic of these radicals treats all violence as equal by draining it of context and intention. Hamas terrorists entering a village and intentionally murdering dozens of babies, or intentionally killing hundreds of innocents at a peace concert is very different from civilians being killed and wounded as a result of an Israeli airstrike on a missile battery located in a neighborhood. The former is murder, the latter unavoidable but unintentional casualties. Normal people readily grasp the difference.
Treating them as morally equivalent – as these radicals do – is like treating the Babi Yar massacre to German civilians killed during Allied air raids on the Nazi war machine. It takes a particular brand of ideological nuttiness to become blind to the difference. Then again, it takes ideological nuttiness to compare Hamas’s organized, up-close, Einsatzgruppen-style murdering of unarmed civilians with persecuted Jews fighting for their lives and dignity against a Nazi regime preparing to ship them off to death camps.
[Editor’s note: an earlier version misidentified Andy Lewandowski and Andy Thorburn. The error has been fixed.]
