Santa Ana Councilmembers Johnathan Hernandez and Ben Vasquez asking their council colleagues to support their resolution calling on Israel to declare a permanent ceasefire in its war with Hamas – a war Hamas started with a murderous surprise attack by Hamas targeting Israeli civilians. Again – it doesn’t call on Hamas to declare a ceasefire, but puts that onus on Israel.
That is like asking, in 1941, for the US to declare a ceasefire with the Japanese Empire after its sneak attack on Pearl Harbor in order to “bring an end to the violence.” The Babylon Bee used that comparison as satire, but it is spot on.
Vasquez and Hernandez breeze past the war guilt of Hamas and cast Israel as the villain. Their resolution is a gruesome exercise in false moral equivalence.
Let’s re-capitulate to the facts of the matter.
On October 7, Hamas terrorists invaded Israel and committed mass murder. They deliberately targeted innocent civilians simply because they were Jews. Hamas terrorists targeted women, children the elderly for death in cruel and gruesome fashion. They killed them up close, in cold blood. They beheaded babies, burned their victims alive, tortured and killed them in front of their families, raped women of all ages. These monsters in human form reveled in their murderous rampage, broadcasting it over social media, committing atrocities that beggar the imagination.
Those are the cold, hard, bloody facts.
Vasquez and Hernandez breeze past this calculated slaughter of 1,200 innocents, sanitizing it as merely an “unprecedented attack” and say nothing more about it for the remainder of the resolution, which condemns Israel’s war of self-defense as “a relentless and ongoing campaign of air strikes on the people of Gaza, killing tens of thousands of civilians in the occupied territory, with the death toll continuing to rise with each passing day.”
Hernandez and Vasquez Don’t Know What Genocide Is
When announcing his co-sponsorship of the resolution last month, Councilman Hernandez accused Israel of committing genocide. This is the sort of shallow sloganeering we’ve come to expect from the young councilmember.
Hernandez and his fellow anti-Israel radicals need to educate themselves on what genocide is. They can start by studying the experts: the Nazi regime.
When the Germans invaded a country during World War II, the SS followed closely in the Wehrmacht’s wake. Einsatzgruppen units didn’t issue warnings as they approached villages and towns, warning the Jews who lived there to leave town before they arrived. They fell upon communities and rounded up any Jews they could find for execution or deportation to forced labor camps or death camps. Their goal was the extermination of European Jewry.
That’s genocide.
On October 7, Hamas terrorists invaded southern Israel without warning, targeting Jews for murder, torture and kidnapping because they were Jews – part of Hamas’ goal of wiping Israel and its Jewish citizens off the map.
That’s genocide. That is war waged in contravention of the laws of war.
Israel – after being savagely attacked Hamas – is waging war to destroy an unrelenting and genocidal enemy, and doing so with as much restraint as possible, endeavoring to avoid civilians casualties, urging civilians to leave war zones, and opening safe corridors for humanitarian supplies.
That is NOT genocide – that is a just war waged in self-defense according to the laws of war.
Councilman Hernandez is simply shallow. Councilman Vasquez should know better. His sponsorship of a resolution that equates Israel acting in self-defense with Hamas committing pre-meditated murder on a mass scale says more about his warped world view than anything else – it is frightening that he is shaping young minds as a teacher in the Santa Ana Unified School District.
The resolution illustrates how blinded Hernandez and Vasquez are by ideology. Their minds are so saturated with the anti-“settler colonialism” narrative that it interferes with their ability to grasp moral realities that are obvious to ordinary people. From their world view, Israelis are “white people” oppressing brown people – and Israelis are perpetrators of “settler colonialism” who were basically asking for it when Hamas terrorists embarked on their October 7 killing spree.
Tracy La, the head of the radical social justice group VietRise and a leader in organizing opposition to Israel and in support of a ceasefire, re-tweeted this post on X from a Hamas apologist reflecting the “Israel asked for it” philosophy and justifying Hamas terrorism as “resistance”:
Hamas Is Morally Responsible For The Deaths of Innocent Gazans
When they launched their October 7 killing spree, Hamas knew they were provoking a massive Israeli military response that would inevitably entail the deaths of civilian Gazans, exacerbated by the population density of the Gaza Strip. Hamas knew they were signing the death warrants of thousands of Gazans – people for whom they are ostensibly waging a war of liberation – and embarked on their inhuman terror attack nonetheless.
War is awful. Innocents always suffer, even during just wars waged for good moral ends. Civilian casualties are unavoidable, regardless of of how sophisticated and accurate weapon systems are. That is why we endeavor to avoid war.
Hernandez and Vasquez ignore this in their litany of accusation against Israel.
They ignore that Israel delayed its military response for days while it called on Gazans to evacuate the areas where the IDF would striking – while Hamas sought to prevent Gazans from escaping what everyone knew would be war zones. Vasquez and Hernandez are silent about this.
Israel pressed for the creation of corridors of safe passage out of Gaza, while Hamas tried to prevent Gazans from escaping the coming carnage. Vasquez and Hernandez are silent on this outrage.
Innocent Gazans are being maimed and killed because Hamas uses them as human shields and is using civilian infrastructure such as hospitals as military facilities. Vasquez and Hernandez are silent about this.
It is obvious to any reasonable and informed person that the moral onus for the civilian carnage in Gaza rests overwhelmingly on Hamas. Yet Vasquez and Hernandez and their leftist allies refuse to see it. They ignore the atrocities and war crimes of a genocidal Islamist terror organization and focus their fury on the Jewish state’s legitimate war of self-defense. At some point, it is difficult to avoid concluding that Vasquez, Hernandez and their allies simply hate Israel.
A Cease-Fire Helps Hamas Wage Its Genocidal War Against Israel
The so-called “Palestine Cease-Fire” resolution sponsored is effectively pro-Hamas.
Hamas knows it cannot defeat Israel in a conventional military conflict. It’s strategy going into this war was to draw it out, using hostages taken on October 7 to demand ceasefires and pauses. A fighting force that is on the run and subject to relentless pursuit quickly degrades and ceases to be effective. Ceasefires disrupt the tempo and momentum of Israeli forces, and afford valuable respite to besieged Hamas forces – who use the ceasefires to regroup, re-supply and re-fit for further fighting.
The IDF is pushing Hamas out of northern Gaza and working on neutralizing the terrorist groups massive tunnel network. Hamas is losing the war militarily, and wants nothing more than to slow the IDF down with a ceasefire they would like to make permanent in order to save themselves.
Think about it.
In early 1945, who would have benefitted from a permanent ceasefire: the Allies or Nazi Germany?
In July of 1950, who would have benefitted from a ceasefire: the invading North Korean communists or South Korean and US forces crowded into the Pusan perimeter?
After the Union victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg in 1863, who would have benefitted from a ceasefire: the Union or the Confederacy?
Since Hamas cannot beat Israel on the battlefield, their strategy is to use ceasefires and “pauses” to buy time to sap Israeli resolve and build US and international pressure on the Jewish State to stop prosecuting its war on the genocidal Islamist group.
Anyone with half a brain can see that a ceasefire helps Hamas and rewards its murderous October 7 massacre.
American leftists like Hernandez and Vasquez, their thinking marinated Marxist “anticolonialism” ideology, are critical components of Hamas’ strategy. They are the terrorist group’s “useful idiots.”
Ceasefires prolong the fighting in Gaza, and the suffering of innocent Gazans. The sooner Hamas is defeated, the sooner the re-building of Gaza can move forward.
Furthermore, Hamas has already demonstrated it won’t respect a ceasefire. Five days ago – in the middle of the recent “ceasefire” – two Hamas terrorists opened fire on a bus stop in Jerusalem, killing three Israelis and wounding 16 others.
But Hernandez and Vasquez have nothing to say about that.
The resolution draws an unconscionable moral equivalence between the murderous Hamas pogrom of October 7 and Israel’s subsequent war of self-defense – and calls into question the two councilmembers’ capacity for moral thought.
Councilmembers Vasquez and Hernandez falsely assert Israel is waging against “the people of Gaza” and engaged in illegal “collective punishment.”
Vasquez and Hernandez note that collective punishment is a war crime and go on to claim that “Israel is engaging in collective punishment against the Palestinian people in Gaza in response to the attack by Hamas.” This is demonstrably false. Israeli defense forces have gone out of their way to avoid civilians casualties in the dense urban environment where Hamas terrorists hide. The IDF has hit more than more than 15,000 targets. If they were practicing the “collective punishment” campaign claimed by Hernandez and Vasquez, Gazan civilian casualties would be astronomically higher.
Israel is waging war against Hamas. It is Hamas that is waging war against the people of Israel and engaging in collective punishment by murdering Jews simply for being Jews.
Hamas’ rocket attacks against Israeli communities, are by definition, indiscriminate. Hamas rockets cannot be used for precision strikes, only for firing indiscriminately at civilian populations as a terror weapon. That is a war crime, which Vasquez and Hernandez, blinded by ideology and hostility to Israel, refuse to acknowledge.
Vasquez and Hernandez refer to Gaza as “the world’s largest open-air prison” – but neglect to mention that Hamas terrorists are the true jailers, keeping Gazans in squalor. The citizens of Gaza are human beings who deserve to live in peace and freedom under the rule of law, governed by their consent by government chosen in free elections. Instead, they are ruled by an illegitimate, genocidal Islamist regime that brings them hate, misery and death.
It says a lot that in their resolution, Hernandez and Vasquez evoke little concern for the natural rights of Gaza citizens, nor do they call for free elections, the rule of law and the securing of those natural rights that are preconditions for human flourishing. Instead, their pre-occupied with hating on Israel and spewing “anti-colonialist” rhetoric.
The resolution sponsored by Johnathan Hernandez and Ben Vasquez is pro-Hamas. It is po-Hamas in the effect of the policy it advocates. It is pro-Hamas in spirit. It is pro-Hamas in its shameful equivalency between the October 7 massacre and Israel’s war of self-defense. It is pro-Hamas in its regurgitation of the Hamas narrative about Israel. It is pro-Hamas in turning a blind-eye to Hamas atrocities and Hamas’ war guilt.
A vote for this resolution is a vote to excuse murder and oppose justice.
