If you defend Israel’s right to defend itself, and accurately point out that Hamas is committing war crimes on an ongoing basis, you’re a “right-wing activist,” but if you are a member of International A.N.S.W.E.R, cheering on the terrorists of Hamas, you’re merely a “protester.” As is pointed out, apparently 80% of Israelis are “right-wing activists.” News to many of them, I’m sure.

And here are some thoughts on Israel’s war objectives:

Israel will stop the operations not when the rockets stop, but rather when Israel thinks it has crippled Hamas and hindered its regenerative ability to the point where the next incredibly challenging step can be taken: Assist and empower Fatah enough in Gaza that it can once again raise a significant challenge to Hamas’s violent domination there. Fatah was decimated in Gaza by Hamas in ’06 and ’07. It must be rebuilt.

This would be consistent with the reports that Fatah is providing the IDF with targeting coordinates.

Jihad has come to America’s streets:

How ironic, really, how tragic, that Muslims, who want us to believe that Islam is the religion of peace, would behave in such a hateful and violent way!

Oh yes. And without shame, and with great pleasure, the protestors call Jews: pigs, apes, donkeys, vermin, and faggots. They hurl curses at their far more sedate opponents. They threaten to rape their opponent’s mothers and visit a slow and painful death upon their opponents’ wives and children. “Nuke Israel” screamed one young woman in hijab, over and over again in Ft. Lauderdale. “F–k you Jew” was also a favorite chant.

I guess that wearing hijab does not necessarily make a woman modest or kind.

By and large, the world media is watching Hamas’s back and presenting the case for terrorism, not for democracy or the rule of law. The potential menace of these mobs has flown far below the mainstream media’s radar as well.

I began writing about this kind of unleashed Nazi-like “brownshirt” behavior in 2003-2004, right after I first encountered it when I lectured on campus. What was once contained on campus, has now taken to the streets. These demonstrators are clone-versions of the speakers and organizers of the International Solidarity Movement’s annual conference, (a pro-Palestinian terrorist support group), but they are now on the march, no longer confined to a single campus; a version, perhaps, of an Islamist street mob, whipped into a frenzy by prayer, sermons, and televised propaganda that then surges out into the street, burns American and Israeli flags, kills Christian Arabs, Christian Africans, and Christian south Asians, but also lynches, rapes, and stones Muslim and Christian women to death.

As Glenn Reynolds often notes, they’re not anti-war. They’re just on the other side.

[Late morning update]

Here’s more on the atrocious and shameful behavior of the press in Gaza:

Hamas only gains a real advantage to having Palestinians suffer if they, who do so much to inflict that suffering, can blame it on Israel. It would be absurd for Hamas to stand in front of the world and say, “Look at how much we make our own people suffer; join us in hating Israel.” So the game is intensely hypocritical. It depends on getting public opinion, both in the Arab-Muslim world and in the West, to accept a scapegoating narrative — the Palestinian Guernica — that deflects responsibility.

And the pathetic thing is that it works. In the Arab world gory images of dead and wounded play round the clock, inciting furious demonstrations. But, alas, it also works in the West. And it works primarily because of the behavior of the Western media, who systematically frame the conflict in terms of the Israeli Goliath and the Palestinian David, who do not hesitate to challenge Israeli spokesmen, interrupt them, contradict them — but who fail to do anything of the sort with their Arab interlocutors.

Thus, for hours and days after the story of idling ambulances first broke, BBC never mentioned it. On the contrary, they continued to run footage of complaints from Gaza about the terrible condition of the hospitals and calls for international intervention to save the poor people of Gaza. This enables the worst kind of hypocrisy, of demopathic behavior — accuse others of violations of a humanitarian code which you flout, not only with your enemies, but with your own people.

The next day, when Christian Fraser finally got some more airtime again, the border was open even if sluggish. No mention of the earlier, revealing incident ensued. Kristy Lang, the anchor, begins with a leading question that does not allow for much elucidation:

KL: “I’m with BBC correspondent Christian Fraser who’s at the Rafah crossing between Egypt and Gaza. This, just to remind you, this is a crossing that has been closed for the last few days. They are letting some people through, isn’t that right Christian?”

CF: “Yes, they’re letting across the most seriously injured; they’ve just let 10 in the past several hours, up to about 40 in the last couple of days. These are the most seriously injured.”

Meanwhile, the headliner at the bottom of the screen reads: “Palestinian medical officials: 10 killed in latest attacks. … Palestinian medics say 360 people have died. … UN says 62 women and children killed.”

Nor is this kind of discreet silence passed over Hamas behavior restricted to the Beeb. CNN didn’t even mention the story, despite their anchors citing material from the wire services, where all the major ones covered it. Similarly, when a young girl described waking up in bed next to her dead sisters and then blamed it on Hamas — “Hamas is the cause, in the first place, of all wars” — ABC ran the footage without including the final, devastating comment. Why? Because it didn’t make sense to them? Because it violated the “grand narrative” and would only confuse the public?

Some of us aren’t confused at all. Just disgusted and appalled.

[Late morning update]

Ron Radosh writes about the (odious) return of moral equivalence.

[Early afternoon update]

More (depressing) thoughts from Victor Davis Hanson:

Almost no other issue in recent memory has illustrated the moral bankruptcy of much of the international community. Hamas has no pretensions, like the PA, of being a governing authority; it used violence to rout the PA and then bragged that its charter pledging the destruction of Israel remained unchanged. Israel evacuated Gaza; Gazans in response looted their own infrastructure, alienated both the PA and Egypt,and then sent off more than 6,000 rockets against Israeli civilians, while eagerly becoming a terrorist puppet of theocratic Iran.

Nothing could be more clear: either the fact that a constitutional republic was trying to avoid civilian casualties while a terrorist organization was intent on killing Jewish civilians as it used its own citizens as shields to protect mostly young male terrorists; or the world’s craven reaction to all this.

Again all very creepy — the stuff of Tolkien’s Mordor. It is now clear that the so-called and much praised “international community,” the hallowed U.N., the revered EU, all pretty much are indifferent to the survival of a democratic Israel, or are actively supportive of its terrorist Hamas enemy. Only the U.S. (for now) stands by a constitutional state in its war against a murderous terrorist clique, with annihilation its aim and religious fascism its creed.

It’s starting to seem like the thirties again in more ways than one.

[Update a few minutes later]

Mark Steyn, on the rocket scientists of Gaza:

…in the modern world there is no diplomatic vocabulary for the kind of cultural fault line represented by the Israeli/Palestinian dispute, so even a smart thinker like Dr. Rice can only frame it as an issue of economic and educational opportunity. Of course, there are plenty of Palestinians like the ones the secretary of state described: You meet them living as doctors and lawyers in Los Angeles and Montreal and Geneva … but not, on the whole, in Gaza.

In Gaza, they don’t vote for Hamas because they want access to university education. Or, if they do, it’s to get Junior into the Saudi-funded, Hamas-run Islamic University of Gaza, where majoring in rocket science involves making one and firing it at the Zionist Entity. In 2007, as part of their attempt to recover Gaza from Hamas, Fatah seized 1,000 Qassam rockets at the university, as well as seven Iranian military trainers.

At a certain unspoken level, we understand that the Huntington thesis is right, and the Rice view is wishful thinking. After all, when French President Sarkozy and other European critics bemoan Israel’s “disproportionate” response, what really are they saying? That they expect better from the despised Jews than from Hamas. That they regard Israel as a Western society bound by civilized norms, whereas any old barbarism issuing forth from Gaza is to be excused on grounds of “desperation.”

Hence, this slightly surreal headline from The New York Times: “Israel Rejects Cease-Fire, But Offers Gaza Aid.” For whatever that’s worth. Wafa Samir Ibrahim al-Biss, a young Palestinian woman who received considerate and exemplary treatment at an Israeli hospital in Beersheba, returned to that same hospital packed with explosives in order to blow herself up and kill the doctors and nurses who restored her to health. Well, what do you expect? It’s “desperation” born of “poverty” and “occupation.”

If it was, it would be easy to fix. But what if it’s not? What if it’s about something more primal than land borders and economic aid?

That wouldn’t fit the narrative.