by David Halpin FRCS on 30th July 2014

Jon Snow, the lead journalist on C4 News, returned from Gaza a few days ago. It was clear from this blog and in the one written as he flew back to Britain that he had been deeply affected by the deliberate injury and killing of children in Gaza. This was evident too in his colleague Jonathan Miller, and in Lyse Doucet of the BBC.

Last night he tried to elicit truth from Michael Oren aka Michael Scott Bornstein, on C4 News. Oren was 'Israeli' ambassador to a surrogate US until last year. He is described as an historian and in the Wikipedia profile as being one of the ten most powerful Jews in the US. There is no hint as to how that is measured.

Mr Snow was unable to tease out any humanity from the Tel Aviv spokesperson about the carnage and 'infra-destruction' within the Gaza ghetto, even though the occupier is bound in international law to safeguard the welfare of its 1.8 million humans. He was interviewing a robot. He did say that 'Israel' tries not to kill and hurt civilians, as with the four boys on the beach by the little fishing port. But pull the other one Oren. Furthermore, he inferred they were warned by the 'tap on the roof' (a fine euphemism) or by air dropped leaflets to flee wherever from more of the massive quantities of 'ordnance' aimed at their homes. These rockets, bombs, shells and bullets are supplied in the main by the surrogate eg thermobaric Hellfire missiles, but the apocalyptic bombardment is aided by many NATO countries. Britain has supplied the head-up cockpit display kits for those US F16s, and now or previously the bomb release mechanisms (EDO – Brighton).

After he attempted to deliver a lecture to this eloquent, senior journalist, he got round to saying that Hamas was a 'vicious, medieval, racist, genocidal organisation'. This was said with a grim determination and with the intention that it would enter the minds of the gullible like the shrapnel cut through the spinal cord of dear Maha in Jon Snow's blog above. The automaton did not see the great irony or the brass neck in his description of Hamas.

He will not recognise that Hamas candidates were in a majority of those elected fairly in 2006 when the turn out in Gaza was 74.6%–76.0%, nor that it sacked a deeply corrupt Fatah crew in a pre-emptive coup in 2007 after three large consignments of US weapons had been trucked in from Egypt for Fatah. He would not know that Hamas got guns off the streets, the children educated in spite of having three shifts in some schools and that they had done their best with what passes for infrastructure although completely hamstrung by a most brutal siege since '07. Frequent homicidal and utterly lawless convulsions from the people that robbed their land required its superhuman efforts

Is Oren deluded or is he simply parroting a script uploaded from hell to IOF command?

What in the black mind of the Jewish state allows it to lay wide waste to lives, homes, schools, and hospitals on the pretext of revealing 'terror' tunnels and the launch sites of cottage industry rockets? Although the material destruction is enormous, the physical injury of thousands will crystalise in tears and the mental injury to thousands upon thousands will defy counselling and all the rest. The very high rate of bedwetting in adolescents following previous bombardments and invasions will be heightened as one instance of severe mental trauma.

What moral indications are there in contemporary Jewish teaching and leadership that might dissuade Oren, the high command, and the 90% of the Israeli Jewish population who support the present 'military' operations from such evil?

At the focus of modern Jewish memory, Yad Vashem, we read what the chairman Avner Shalev has to say.

Every visitor leaves Yad Vashem with a personal impression of an event that has universal dimensions. The new museum complex reinforces the commitment of Jewish visitors to their people and their ethical brotherhood with other nations. Non-Jewish visitors will empathize with the fate of the Jewish people, and will be inspired to join the drive to a more humane future for humanity as a whole.

“ ...and will be inspired to join the drive to a more humane future for humanity as a whole.”

Holocaust Memorial Day is largely state funded in the UK. I have written on this and concluded with the wise advice of Howard Zinn. These words are from the ceremony held in British schools to remember the 'Holocaust' and other genocides. The holocausts of holocausts, Hiroshima and Nagasaki do not figure.

On this day we can honour the survivors of these regimes of hatred and challenge ourselves to use the lessons of their experience to help create a safer, better future.

Though anodyne in force these words speak against the terror and the harm being done to a captive, native people down the coast. And what of the Ten Commandments as recorded twice in the Jewish Bible, the Torah. The two most outrageous crimes committed against the 'ten' are theft of land, and murder.

It is likely, is it not, that Oren and the psychopaths who rev the Machaver war machine have the Talmud in their minds, just as Ayelet Shaked, Netanyahu and many others do. The former saw the “entire Palestinian people as the enemy,” and the latter wound the racial hatred up as fast as he could.

This is the crux. The Babylonian Talmud and its morbid decrees run entirely counter to the laws of war and common humanity. Women and children are spared in the wars of men. Professor Geoffrey Alderman, whom I have met on a TV panel, is quoted here from the Guardian.

The Halachah is crystal clear. It is entirely legitimate to kill a rodef – that is to say, one who endangers the life of another – and this is true, incidentally, even if the rodef has not yet actually taken another life. So the Judaism that I practise permits what is generally referred to as "pre-emptive" military action.

In this particular case, the ruling power, Hamas, has advertised (in its charter) that its mission is to kill Jewish people. Therefore every member and supporter of Hamas may be considered a rodef.

What precise kind of pre-emptive military action might one take? A great deal has been said about "proportionality". This may be a Christian idea, but thankfully it is certainly not a Jewish one.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/jan/12/judaism-gaza-israel-halachah

For some the most violent prescriptions of a distant tribe from very long ago have meaning.

In this month Oren argued against a ceasefire and for the continuation of the 'conflict', a euphemism

if ever there was one. He called on the international community to leave Israel alone to defang and deprive Hamas of its heavy arms and make it pay a "prohibitive cost."

I say these words to Oren. They are adapted from surgical practice. 'Do your best to heal and not to harm.' And to agree with me that 'no mother and child should be in the least harmed anywhere in our still beautiful world.'

You must kneel with others Michael Oren before that G_d. Your crimes cannot be calculated.