This Time Israel Should Finish Off Hamas

This Time Israel Should Finish Off Hamas
A picture shows the explosion after an Israeli strike targeted a building in Gaza City, on May 14, 2021. (Mahmud Hams/AFP via Getty Images)
Roger L. Simon
5/14/2021
Updated:
5/19/2021
Commentary

Sometimes when psychopaths, religious and otherwise—people whose charter urges the faithful to “kill all Jews,” even Jewish trees, whatever that is or could be—rain missiles on your country again and again, try to destroy you any way they can, dig tunnels under your property, loft flaming balloons over your schools and farms, fly drones toward your airports and even nuclear installations, it’s time to say “enough!”

Or, in the local parlance, “dayenu.”

It is time to put paid once and for all to the evil terror organizations Hamas and Islamic Jihad that have been attacking the heartland of Israel virtually ever since Israel freely gave Gaza to the Palestinians, first to the Palestinian Authority and then to Hamas after they murdered the PA officials in a mini-civil war and took over the territory as a fanatical dictatorship.

Every few years Hamas (and their now-billionaire leadership) seizes on something, some issue on the Temple Mount, a neighborhood where, in their view, too many Jews are moving in, and start a missile barrage, aiming to hit as many innocent civilians as possible and ignite the “Arab street.”

The current barrage, thanks largely to Iran, is the biggest ever, with modern weapons that can reach the entire Jewish state with significant payloads.

Several times the Israel Defense Force has been constrained to enter Gaza to put a stop to these barrages.

That appears to be happening again now. At this writing the IDF seems on the edge of a ground incursion, if not actually over that edge.

Whatever the case—this time they should finish the job. Finally.

They shouldn’t listen to the United States or anybody.

It’s too bad that life in the region had been improving so dramatically for all—Arabs and Jews—while the dreaded orange-haired man was in office, and almost the moment Joe Biden replaced him, things went immediately South, like everything else. (Was Hamas waiting for this? Probably.)

But recent as that was, that was then and this is now. We can’t be nostalgic, tempting as it is. With those lethal Iranian missiles—why is Biden negotiating with the mullahs now of all times, by the way… don’t get me started on that—in the hands of Hamas, the facts on the ground are overwhelming and must be dealt with.

I didn’t always feel this way. I supported negotiation and a two-state solution, even when it became apparent, unless your head was buried so deep in the ground it was coming out the other side, that the Palestinians had no interest in one. I also wanted the Israeli army to show “restraint,” at least to the degree possible.

I was proud the IAF was the only air force to “knock on the roof” of their target, phoning the occupants to give them a half hour to vacate the premises and save themselves, before the building was destroyed.

No longer. I don’t care how polite the Israeli armed forces are now. I only care that they win.

I have been all over the land of Israel several times, over multiple years as it grew into an extraordinary country, and I hate to see it overwhelmed by rioters who act like an Arab-clone of Antifa. I have lost all patience. In fact patience, which is often one of the more laudable traits, no longer has any point in this instance.

Turn to social media and you can see why. The current situation has stimulated a veritable freak show of anti-Semitism on all platforms (particularly Tik Tok), almost without opposition. Everything, and I mean everything, is Israel’s fault. You might as well be in Russia during the pogroms or in Nazi Germany.

(You will, of course, hear that this is coming from the “extreme right,” but this is as big a lie as you can find. Almost all is coming from the left.)

Good, old fashioned Holocaust denial is back with a vengeance, reaching down, it appears from one Tik Tok video with umpteen likes and shares, to American eleven-year-olds, one of whom insisted to her family the gas chambers never existed—her teacher had told her so—and were made up to distract the public from the evil of slavery.

This should be news to Hamas, however, one of whose favorite English-language chants (for media consumption, no doubt) at demonstrations is “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas.”

You can’t have it both ways. Not that that matters to any of these people. The purpose of propaganda is to convey things that have little or no relationship to the truth, in fact are counter to it.

The Jerusalem Post has an article on what can be done about these myriad social media lies about Israel. The Post’s intent is laudable, but the reality is it’s unstoppable. Social media, we should all know by now, is the Devil’s spawn. Believe it at your, and the world’s, peril.

But there is something that can be done about Hamas.

Israel, and those of us who support her—even some liberal Jews, if they can be shaken from their morally narcissistic lethargy—can ignore public opinion for once, it’s not going to get better anyway, forget this “light unto the nations” business that no one could live up to in the first place, and go full bore on the terrorists of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

No mercy, this time. Full Dresden—or enough Dresden for them to know for once you’re very serious, desperately wave the white flag and disarm the way Germany and Japan did.

If you don’t win a war, I mean really win it, as both the United States and Israel have seen to their detriments, you are going to fight it again and again and again.

Roger L. Simon is an award-winning novelist, Oscar-nominated screenwriter, co-founder of PJMedia, and now, editor-at-large for The Epoch Times. His most recent books are “The GOAT” (fiction) and “I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If It Hasn’t Already” (nonfiction). He can be found on Parler as @rogerlsimon
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Roger L. Simon is an award-winning novelist, Oscar-nominated screenwriter, co-founder of PJMedia, and now, columnist for The Epoch Times. His latest book “American Refugees” can be ordered on Amazon. “Roger Simon is among the many refugees fleeing blue state neoliberalism, and he’s written the best account of our generation’s greatest migration.”—Tucker Carlson.
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