Column One: The march of the Red-Green brigades

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 13:05:16 EST

Column One: The march of the Red-Green brigades
By CAROLINE GLICK the Jerusalem Post

The Red-Green alliance is on the march. On Wednesday, the leftist-controlled
European Parliament in Strasbourg passed a resolution endorsing the
Goldstone Report. That report, it will be recalled, denies Israel's right to
self-defense by alleging that Israel's actions to defend itself from illegal
Palestinian aggression during the course of Operation Cast Lead were war
crimes.

The resolution did more than accept the Goldstone Report's baseless claims.
It sought to silence those who are trying to make the Red portion of the
Red-Green alliance pay a price for its abetment of jihad.

In the resolution, the European Parliament "expresses its concern about
pressure placed on NGOs involved in the preparation of the Goldstone Report
and in follow-up investigations, and calls on authorities on all sides to
refrain from any measures restricting the activities of these
organizations."

This statement was inserted to defend the EU-supported Israeli
organizations - overwhelmingly associated with the far-Left New Israel
Fund - that took a lead role in providing Richard Goldstone and his
associates with false allegations of illegal actions by IDF soldiers. Those
organizations - and the New Israel Fund - have rightly been the subject of
scrutiny in Israel after their role in compiling the Goldstone Report was
revealed in January by the Israeli student organization Im Tirzu.

Israel is not the only target of the Red-Green alliance. Its operations span
the globe. Sometimes, as in the case of the Goldstone Report, the Left leads
the charge. Sometimes, as with the Hamas-led missile offensive against
Israel that preceded Cast Lead, the jihadists move first.

In general, jihadists are motivated to attack non-Muslims by their religious
belief that Islam must dominate the world. And in general, the Left's
justification of jihadist aggression stems from its neo-Marxist faith that
the liberal nation-state is the root of all evil. Whether the Left
recognizes that if successful, its collusion with jihadists will lead to the
destruction of human freedom, is subject to debate. But whether or not the
Left understands the consequences of its actions, it has played a key role
in abetting this goal.

IN NIGERIA on Sunday night, the jihadists led the charge. With the apparent
collaboration of the Muslim-dominated Nigerian army, Muslim gangs entered
three predominantly Christian villages around the city of Jos and killed up
to 500 innocent civilians, including children, with machetes, axes, and
daggers.

According to eyewitness reports, some victims were scalped and many were
raped. Most had their hands and feet chopped off. Infants and children were
among the butchered.

The massacre was premeditated. According to government spokesmen, Muslim
residents were tipped off two days prior to the attack. To ensure their
victims were Christians, the jihadists addressed them in Fulani, the
language spoken by local Muslims. If the victims responded in Fulani they
were saved. Otherwise they were hacked to death.

Sunday's massacre could have been expected to lead the news worldwide. But
it didn't. Indeed, it was barely noted.

That scant coverage the barbarous events received was itself plagued by
obscurity and vagueness. Commentators and reporters alike hid the identities
of the aggressors and the victims, characterizing the jihadist butchery as
"sectarian violence."

They also sought to obfuscate its significance, claiming that the Muslim
gangs decapitated infants in response to tribal property disputes.

Jessica Olien at The Atlantic not only made these claims, but brushed off
the dimensions of the atrocity, writing, "It's worth noting that police have
confirmed only 109 dead."

After minimizing the death toll, Olien turned her literary daggers on the
victims, claiming that they had it coming. As she put it, "It's hard not to
compare the weekend's attack with one in January in which 150 people from
the same Muslim community responsible for Sunday's attack were brutally
killed. The attack on March 7th drew considerably more international
attention the previous incident."

Ah, so unfair. The over-reported atrocity unfairly portrays murdered
Christians as victims. But Olien knows better. The Muslims were simply
retaliating for the attacks they suffered.

Sadly for Olien and her erudite justification of barbarism, it is far from
clear that the victims of January's violence were Muslims. Writing in the
London Times on Thursday, British Baroness Caroline Cox claimed that the
primary victims of January's slaughter were Christians, not Muslims.

According to Cox, eyewitnesses to the events in January "indicated that the
killings began when Muslim youths attacked Christians on a Sunday morning on
their way to church. Muslims were also killed as those under attack began to
fight back."

Cox continued that Sunday's attack followed a now familiar pattern. Attacks
"are initiated by well-armed Muslim extremists, chanting militant slogans,
attacking and killing Christian and other non-Muslim citizens and destroying
homes and places of worship.

"In the early stages of the attack, the Muslim militants take corpses to
mosques, where they are photographed and released to the media, creating the
impression that these are Muslim victims."

The international media are only too willing to accept at face value these
false accusations of Muslim victimization at the hands of their actual
victims. And so are their leftist comrades in international governing
circles.

In the wake of Sunday's massacre, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon both issued statements making no
distinction whatsoever between the victims and the aggressors. Both called
for "both sides" to act with "restraint."

In the Left's apparent willingness to hide the nature of January's attacks
and then underplay Sunday's massacre, we have an example of Leftist
facilitation of jihadist violence. In Nigeria, of course, the jihadists are
the main actors and the Left is merely their helpmate.

IN ISRAEL, the roles are generally reversed. Here it is the Left that leads
the jihadists by the hand. Take the Left's campaign against Jewish property
rights in Jerusalem. In the Sheikh Hatzadik neighborhood,
buildings owned by Jews were seized by Jordan in 1948 after its conquest of
the city. For the past decade Jewish property owners have been working
through the courts to assert their rights to their buildings and remove the
Arab squatters who took them over.

Court after court upheld their rights to their property. And, indeed, more
than a decade ago, the squatters reached a settlement in which they
acknowledged the owners' property rights and the owners agreed to let the
squatters stay so long as they paid rent. But when the squatters stopped
paying rent, the Left pushed them to refuse to vacate the premises and to
try to re-litigate the old settlement. Finally, the case made it to the
Supreme Court, which also recognized the rights of the Jewish owners and
ordered the police to enforce its ruling and remove the illegal squatters.

The police removed the squatters last month and within hours, Jewish
residents moved in, in accordance with an agreement with the buildings'
lawful owners. Since they moved in, the Jews have been under constant attack
from their Arab neighbors. They have been beaten and threatened with murder.

In the meantime, the Left has turned the case of the illegal Arab squatters
into a cause celebre. Last week, thousands of leftists staged an
anti-Semitic demonstration outside the compound, demanding that the Jews be
removed from their homes. The argument, of course, is that allowing Jews to
exercise their legal property rights by peacefully residing in a
predominantly Arab neighborhood is an unacceptable "provocation." The Arab
squatters attempting to steal the property, on the other hand, are
"victims."

Rather than characterize the protesters as anti-Semites who are stoking
violence against innocent Jews for their crime of lawfully living where they
choose, the local and international media have described the demonstrators
as "peace activists" and "human rights activists."

For turning reality on its head and championing the cause of jihadists
against the human rights of their victims, these leftist demonstrators are
lionized by their comrades in the media and in the chanceries of the Western
world. The State Department said it was "unacceptable" that Jews moved into
their homes.

So, too, the UN raced to accept the Left's claim that human rights demand
the denial of Jews' property rights due to their ethnicity. Its peace
process boss Richard Miron said, "I deeply deplore the totally unacceptable
actions by Israel in which Israeli security forces evicted Palestinian
refugee families... to allow settlers to take possession of their
properties."

It is a depressing commentary on our times that spokesmen of democracies and
supposed champions of human rights are willing to state publicly that
granting Jews the equal protection of the law is an unacceptable imposition
on their bigoted neighbors. But the notion that Jews have an equal right to
buy and own property in areas of Jerusalem from which they were illegally
ethnically cleansed by the Jordanians in 1948 is now a great cause of the
Left. And one can only assume that the jihadists will soon make their move -
to the gratification of their leftist comrades - against the innocent Jews
of Jerusalem.

THIS BRINGS us to the events surrounding US Vice President Joseph Biden's
visit to Israel this week. On the first day of his visit, as a matter of
routine governance, the Jerusalem Planning and Building Committee approved
plans to build 1,600 housing units in the Ramat Shlomo neighborhood. Ramat
Shlomo is a neighborhood with more than 20,000 residents located between the
even more populous Ramot and Sanhedriya neighborhoods. From an Israeli
perspective, it is just as uncontroversial as Yad Eliahu in Tel Aviv or
Hadar in Haifa.

But not from a Red perspective. Just moments after the decision was
announced, the Left used it as proof of Israeli venality. For approving the
construction of new homes in its capital, the government was condemned again
and again. The Palestinians and the Arab League jumped on the bandwagon. And
now, owing to the Left's anti-Israel onslaught, anyone murdered in
Jerusalem - or anywhere else for that matter - will be dismissed as a
product of fully justified Muslim anger.

Observing the Leftist charge, led in this case by the frothing-at-the-mouth
Israeli media, Biden moved swiftly. The man who came to Israel on a charm
offensive could no longer hide the truth about where the Obama
administration's true sympathies lay. After declaring his undying love and
fidelity to Israel just hours before, Biden switched gears and condemned
Israel for "undermining" prospects for peace.

On Wednesday morning as he referred to his condemnation of Israel's decision
to build homes in its capital, Biden said, "Sometimes only a friend can
deliver the hardest truth."

And at least in this case, he is correct.

And so, in the spirit of that sentiment, it must be said: When those who
purport to support peace and human rights join forces with the Red-Green
alliance, what they are actually supporting is bigotry, violence, murder
and, ultimately, the destruction of human freedom. Whether the Left
recognizes the significance of its actions or not, it is time that it be
held as accountable for its defense of jihad as the jihadists are for
carrying it out.

caroline@carolineglick.com

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Column One: The march of the Red-Green brigades