The kidnapping: the Arab counteroffensive begins

Today is Thursday, June 19, 2014. It is day seven following the kidnapping of three Jewish boys last Thursday night. The boys are civilians. They are students at a Yeshiva (religious seminary).

Two of the boys are 16 years old. One is 19.

We unite to pray. We pray for their safety. We pray to see them return to us alive and well.

Today, we awaken to an Arab counter-attack against Israel. It’s not a military offensive. It’s a propaganda campaign.

Don’t laugh at Arab propaganda. The Arab has become an expert at propagandizing against the Jewish state. One may even reasonably argue that the Arab propaganda war against Israel has been far more successful these last ten years than anything Israel has done to defend itself.

Today, we see how the Arab counter-attack comes together. It’s an eye-opening process. It’s driven by Arab hate—and by those who support that hate.

The main moral supporter for the Arab war against Israel in this world is Humanitarianism. Humanitarians have become the moral basis for anti-Zionism. Humanitarians use their carefully-crafted vocabulary to demonize and criminalize Jewish Israel. We know this to be true because Humanitarians no longer attempt seriously objective investigations of anti-Israel Arab claims. They simply parrot Arab accusations.

This is why the Arab press pursues its anti-Israel agenda through a Humanitarian vocabulary. The Arab knows an ally when he sees one.  

Humanitarianism began as a wonderful idea. It aims to help us all. But it has been hijacked. Humanitarianism is no longer a path to peace. It is a weapon of war.

The Arab likes that weapon. It works for him. He wants to destroy the ‘Jewish entity’. He sees how eagerly Humanitarians join his war.

The Arab has learned how to create the vocabulary necessary to keep Humanitarians on his side. He also knows that, for whatever reason, Humanitarians accept every word he utters to demonize Israel.

The Arab has always been a good horse-trader. He will not look a gift-horse in the mouth—especially if he can use that horse to hurt Israel.

The specific anti-Israel Humanitarian vocabulary for this IDF-inspired 2014 campaign against Israel began a couple of days ago. At first, we saw accusations of arbitrary detention, collective punishment and mass arrests—all terms familiar to the Humanitarian industry. Some Arab news stories called IDF arrests of Arabs ‘kidnappings’. But until late yesterday, that label didn’t stick.

Today is a different story. Today, the use of Humanitarian vocabulary in the Arab press to criminalize Israel becomes more focussed. Here’s your chance to judge that process.

For the first time since the kidnapping, we see a concerted effort to establish a Humanitarian legal brief against Israel for its actions in Judea-Samaria: IDF arrests are now ‘abductions’ and ‘mass-kidnaps’. The IDF campaign into Judea-Samaria (where the boys were kidnapped) is no longer a search for missing boys. It’s ‘punishment’ of 'Palestine' for the boys’ disappearance within the Palestinian Authority territories.  

These morally-laden phrases are wrapped within a carefully constructed package designed to excite the Humanitarian: Israel’s behaviour, the Arab press reports, represents the most severe violation of human rights ever (“Minister dubs Gaza siege most notorious Israeli violation of human rights”, Hamas, June 18, 2014).

Arabs want the world to turn against Israel. The Arab press wants the world to see Israel as a brutal violator of Human Rights. That press wants the world to see the IDF’s arrests as mass kidnappings, to suggest a moral depravity far worse than the kidnapping of three boys.

To buttress its case for an immoral, oppressive Israel, the Arab press has begun to describe the IDF search as an ‘invasion’. It no longer calls the IDF actions in Judea-Samaria a ‘search’; it calls the IDF actions a retribution for the kidnappings.

Retribution against an entire people, you see, is supposed to be far worse than kidnapping ‘three army-age boys’ (16-year old boys may be army-age to Hamas, but they are not to Israel).

This propaganda campaign presents an interesting challenge. It attempts to tilt the moral table against Israel. But its premise is not morally sound: we kidnapped three, the propaganda suggests, but Israel has mass-kidnapped more than 300. Israel no longer looks for missing ‘soldiers’; it punishes us with a ‘frenzied’ retribution (apparently, a ‘frenzied’ retribution is far worse that a run-of-the-mill retribution).

Here is today’s bottom line for this Arab propaganda campaign against Israel: the Arab press wants you to contrast the criminal severity of the kidnapping of three Jews against what they call a brutal collective retribution against the entire ‘Palestinian’ people. The Arab press wants you to conclude that the Arab kidnapping of three Jewish ‘soldiers’ is nothing compared to the IDF's so-called mass-kidnapping of Hamas terrorists.

How would you grade that moral argument?