Israel and the US: Whose Survival Instinct Is Stronger?

By Diana West

Monday, August 11, 2014

There’s something darkly coincidental in the fact that the latest weapon to be deployed against the survival instinct of both Israel and the United States is an alleged “heartlessness” when it comes to children.

The people of Israel are castigated in news media, social media and the “international community” (read: the scoundrel United Nations, of whose budget U.S. taxpayers pay 22 percent) as lacking in “humanity” itself. Why? Because as the IDF fights to end Gaza’s endless rocket barrages against Israel, many children under the age of 18 number among the civilian dead. This London Telegraph headline is not untypical: “Israel’s offensive in Gaza has ‘killed more children than fighters,’ say human rights groups. Israel has been accused of waging ‘war on the children’ of Gaza …”

No mention in the article, however, of Gaza’s purposeful, strategic use of “human shields,” which leads to such civilian casualties. No mention of the directive from the Hamas-controlled Ministry of the Interior instructing civilians to remain in their homes on receipt of advance warnings from Israel to vacate before a military attack, as the Washington Free Beacon first reported. No mention that despite building networks of military tunnels, Gaza authorities neglected to build any bomb shelters for civilians! No mention of Gaza’s use of schools and other civilian sites to store rockets and other military material, and of its use of hospitals as Hamas command centers.

No, the story is tightly focused on Israel’s supposed “war on children.” This libel is tweeted, screamed and news-anchor-intoned into poisonous propaganda designed to sap the life from Israel’s survival instinct, or at least alienate her supporters. In the stage-managed furor, the pressure on the Jews of Israel builds: Stop defending your borders, your people and your nation. Stop everything and “save the children of Gaza.”

Only emotion to the point of frenzy bursts into such agitprop, but it is vital to note that the emotion showing through is hatred for Jews, not love for children. If it were the latter, we would see rage directed at the society that steeps its young in the Jew-hatred of jihad and then turns them into “martyrs” – not at the Jewish society seeking to protect its people, young and old, and, at far too much risk, Gaza’s as well.

Admittedly, there are great differences between Israel’s plight and our own. For one thing, the Israelis are more fortunate in having a government that actually wants to protect its people from invaders. Israel enforces its own border, having fortified it with a fence. Now, it fights for its inviolability. Our government, meanwhile, has left our border effectively open, even after 9/11, and has demonstrated no interest in re-establishing national sovereignty.

That said, there are similarities to note in the political attacks on Americans who hope to repulse what they see as deathblows to our remnant republic coming out of the “border crisis.” Anyone worried about the nullification of the southern border; the accelerating usurpation of dictatorial powers by the president; the perils to national security and public safety of open borders; the perils, also, to the survival of our English-speaking culture rooted mainly in Europe, is excoriated in the public square for having no “humanity.” Just like Israelis, such “mean-spirited” Americans must hate children, too, because this is all about “immigrant kids” in need, right? No – but that’s the dominant narrative.

Such a narrative tells us that the only “humane” solution to the “crisis” is asylum for “the kids” (and throw in their gang-banger brothers, felon-uncles and whoever else is leaving those prayer rugs on the border). Talk of “rule of law,” and “deportation” is “racist.” Talk of already overstretched American towns where the social fabric has ripped under the stress of refugee resettlement, talk of local public school systems broken by the extraordinary demands of supporting impoverished, illiterate alien populations, is the talk of the “xenophobe.”

What becomes clear is that such “humanity” is only for the foreign-born. Such “humanity,” such concern, is never expressed for our own people – the Americans who, far from TV news studios and government offices, live with and support the aliens and refugees, young and old, in many of America’s hardscrabble cities and less affluent towns.

And perhaps that’s another difference between the Israeli and the American predicament. Israel still prizes the lives of its citizens very highly – not above all, as we see in their all-too-costly efforts to avoid civilian casualties (an effort the U.S. military also makes at similar high cost). But I can’t say the same for America.

Our government doesn’t enforce our border – its basic charge – and it is frantically engaged in a vigorous program of what I can only describe as population replacement. We seem to be poised before an unprecedented, anarchic demographic shift bringing large swaths of Central and South Americans into the USA – and the federal government seems to be doing everything it can to enable the shift and make it permanent. My late father ruefully predicted the U.S. would one day become the northern tip of South America. I don’t know if he thought it would happen so quickly.

Who would have imagined, though, that the existence of Israel, surrounded by Islamic enemies sworn to its annihilation, could in some ways seem more assured than our own?