When You Are Called ‘Child-Killer’…writes Rabbi Laibl Wolf

 Email this story

Print

1 Comment

The world underwent a major test these past few weeks. Truth versus Lies. Good versus Bad. Innocent versus Guilty. I refer to the Gaza War. Did the world pass? The jury is out.

Rabbi Laibl Wolf

Israel, as well as many Jews around the world, has been accused these past weeks of being ‘child-killers’. Why? Because millions of screens in millions of homes displayed ‘human interest’ visuals of bloodied women and children – victims of the new Goliath on the middle-eastern block : Israel.

Unfortunately, integrity has taken a distant back seat. Newspapers are no longer disseminators of objective news. They are exponents of partisan views. And only a view that sells newspapers, in a highly competitive industry where the print media is on the losing end of economies, will see light of day. The newspaper reporter and the cameraman need the best story and the most dramatic bloodied picture to stay in business. Newspapers need to sell to a populace whose threshold of horror has been systematically raised by increasingly gruesome cinematics. And the reporter and cameraman must outdo sensibility to be rewarded.

It was easy to get human-interest stories in Gaza. When you force women and children to surround rocket launching pads in schools and mosques and hospitals, how can you fail? When you threaten every newsman that he will be deported and miss out on the best stories and photos of his life if he doesn’t ‘toe the Hamas line’, how can you fail? If you appeal to every antisemitic cockroach that crawls out from under the rock to emulate his Nazi god, how can you fail?

All that the terrorists of Hamas had to do was to keep lobbing rockets indiscriminately over Israeli cities. It doesn’t matter that the Iron Dome swallowed them up. They knew that Israel must fire back to eliminate the launchers. It was that easy. Put the launchers in the middle of your population and that way the front page newspaper reports around the whole world will win Hamas huge ‘pay-off’ bundles of ‘hush money’ when the war was over. Why? Because as a headline-winning magnanimous gesture they will ‘promise’ to be ‘good guys’ and ‘behave’ if they receive a $billion or two to help the Gaza ‘recovery’ process, of which most of the funds would line their pockets to buy better rockets to penetrate the Iron Dome next time round – usually in two year war cycles. Oh, and it can buy lots of concrete and cement – for you know what!!

So this week we were called ‘child killers’. Is the world so facile, so superficial? Or is the world malicious? Or maybe it’s simply intellectually lazy? Perhaps it is a combination of all of the above. Let me ask you: when a killer shoots at you from an ambulance every single day, and not once or twice, but incessantly, do you hesitate before taking the ‘ambulance’-cum-gun-car out? If your neighbour lobs bombs at you from next door while surrounding himself with women and children, do you simply take it on the chin, and watch your own family be slaughtered? Are people so stupid so as to believe that Jews who suffered so much throughout history have suddenly turned into callous cold-blooded monsters?

I have lived through an era when a sophisticated and intellectually endowed society did go mad – a madness called Nazism. And I have been witness to how that madness continues to reverberate in Europe even today, 75 years later, as demonstrated in Paris’s recent ‘Krystallnacht’, or exemplified in its more sophisticated guise of one Cathrine Ashton..er excuse me.. the ignoble Baroness Ashton of Upholland, foreign minister of that self-styled ‘super-power’ called the European Union, laughable as it is. And of course we will inevitably find ‘honourable people’ pushing hard for the prosecution of Israel for ‘War Crimes’ – for what – for defending itself, resulting in another cynical Goldstone report. (By the way, did you know that firing rockets indiscriminately onto one’s neighbours’ cities is a war crime?)

So am I a ‘baby killer’? No I am not. But Hamas terrorists are. They are cowards who surround their rocket launchers with women and children, cold blooded killers who care not about the sanctity of life but are depraved, egotistic, self-centred, depraved, international have-nots, who seek a name through ‘martyrdom’ (and whose exploitative leaders, well removed in luxury hotels in Qatar, seek self aggrandisement, money, and wealth at the expense of their plebeian fodder fighters – and women and children.)

Forget the media. They are just ‘news’ scavengers seeking scraps in a dung heap. But you, dear reader, aspire to be a person of integrity. Make it your business to look beneath the veneer of noisy talking-heads and well-paid anchor-men. And ask yourself the basic question – if your family were under attack, would you think twice about wiping out the enemy?

Rabbi Laibl Wolf, is the Dean of Spiritgrow – The Josef Kryss Center, Australia