Hamas Attacks a School Bus near Kibbutz Sa'ad:
Filling in some Details of the Story By Howard Rotberg In late March, Hamas and <http://newstopics.jpost.com/topic/Islamic_Jihad_Movement_in_Palestine> Islamic Jihad fired over 100 rockets and mortar shells into Israel in under a week. Hamas is a terrorist organization. The Israelis voluntarily vacated Gaza. After elections dividing power between Fatah and Hamas, Hamas seized sole power. Islamofascist parties in the Middle East often use elections as a way to assume democratic legitimacy and then undemocratically force out the opposition; this was the technique used by Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Ayatollahs in Iran. And, many observers fear that this will be the future course for Egypt, where the Muslim Brotherhood may well use the present instability to eventually seize sole control. Accordingly there is a justifiable fear that if the Palestinians create another state in what Israelis call Judea and Samaria and what the Palestinians and their supporters call the West Bank (being the West Bank of the Jordan River), it would surround Israel with terrorist rockets, from Hizbollah in the north, from Hamas in the southwest, and then the Palestinian area on the east. The width of Israel, if all the land of the West Bank were to be given to Arab sovereignty, would at one point be no more than 15 kilometres wide) The Hamas Charter includes the following: "Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it." (The Martyr, Imam Hassan al-Banna, of blessed memory). "The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgement Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up. " "There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors." Hamas fires rockets deliberately into Israeli civilian areas, like Sderot, Ashkelon and Beersheba, all cities contained in the original 1948 borders of Israel; that is, they do not pretend that they are after only so-called occupied areas. Israel responds to take out the rocket-launchers, which Hamas deliberately puts in civilian areas, so that they can protest that the Israelis too kill civilians. The only difference, which is the whole point, is that the Israelis do not target individual citizens and take great pains to avoid that, while Hamas intentionally targets only civilians and does not bother firing at military instillations. After Operation Cast Lead, where Israel took military action against Hamas, there were outcries that the Israelis were morally equivalent to the Hamas operatives. These outcries were politically motivated and were not substantiated in fact. The United Nations chose to do a quick investigation headed up by a noted critic of Israel, with committee members who had made comments indicating that they had pre-judged the issue under study, and the so-called Goldstone Report (named after the South African Judge, Richard Goldstone who headed it) indicated that Israel might have committed war crimes. However, after his report was shown to be erroneous, Judge Goldstone recanted that allegation in a recent piece in the Washington Post and stated that the Israeli army in fact took steps to prevent civilian casualties. (The Israelis used leaflets and even cell phone calls to warn civilians if they were targeting nearby Hamas rocket installations.) On Thursday, Hamas fired a rocket that hit a school bus, outside an Israeli kibbutz, critically injuring a 16 year old boy and less critically, injuring the school bus driver. Photos showed that the entire bus was destroyed (the rocket was of the type that can take out an armed tank). Fortunately, the boy was the last student being delivered and only he and the driver were on the bus when it was hit, or else many students might have died or been seriously injured. The Israeli government has undertaken attacks on Gaza to try to stop these rockets. Of course, most newspapers in the world will report this story with a kind of moral equivalence - they will doubtless talk about reciprocal attacks and make sure to stress the number of Gazans killed or hurt, and then compare it to the number of Israelis killed or hurt. This moral equivalency builds on a failure to study the causes of the violence and understand who it was who intentionally attacks civilians - and who has an army that tries at tremendous cost to minimize civilian casualties, even though Hamas positions intentionally its rockets in urban areas. This moral equivalency is the view of cultural and moral relativists, who hold that one cannot determine right and wrong or Good and Evil and that in fact every culture is as good and right as every other culture. The view often is accompanied by an anti-Westernism that holds that unempowered groups have a right to use violence against empowered groups, and that only the politically correct can decide who is powered and who is unempowered and therefore which side is justified and which side is to be condemned. In my writings (such as my recent book, TOLERism: The Ideology Revealed, Mantua Books), I have dealt in detail with the mischief brought to our western political culture by the moral and cultural relativists, and their hiding behind the concept of Tolerance, as a way to appease the Bad who are attacking the Good. So, in order to try to clarify what exactly is behind the headlines, I wish to provide some context about what is the situation on the Israeli side of the border. Most people know that Gaza under Hamas is an Islamofascist terror state, with no fundamental human rights for women, minorities, children, arrested persons or those who wish to speak out against breaches of human rights by Government. What of the Israeli neighbours, who must deal with attacks on their school buses against their children - who are they and what do they stand for? Since I doubt than any mainstream media will be interested in this topic, I think it is important for me to write about it. The bus bombing was just outside of Kibbutz Sa'ad. Although Israel is today largely a capitalist high tech nation, much of the country was settled in a communal framework, and there are still a good number of settlements which retain various communal aspects. As such, these institutions are a form of socialism, and one would think that for American and European Leftists, this communal, socialist element would create some admiration; it is sad, of course, to see that the anti-Semitism (composed of the demonization, delegitimization and double standards applied to Israel) have superseded what should be an attraction to socialist ideals at work. Kibbutz Sa'ad was established on June 30th, 1947 by a group of pioneers from the B'nei Akiva religious Zionist movement, whose dream was to start a kibbutz which would embody values of Torah and work. It was substantially destroyed in 1948 when the Egyptian army invaded to try to wipe out the UN authorized new state of Israel. It is now a blooming, prosperous community in the Northern Negev region just south of Ashkelon. Kibbutz Sa'ad's multigenerational population generates its income from agriculture and industry. Sa'ad members enjoy a rich religious, social, and cultural life. The Kibbutz Sa'ad community is made up of 140 families, with a population of about 700. Members and residents are employed according to their occupation and career choice, either within the kibbutz structure or outside it. Sa'ad's members live according to many ideals and religious values, with an emphasis on contribution to Israel society as a whole. The kibbutz runs and participates in several unique educational frameworks such as <http://www.saad.org.il/noar.htm> Youth Education, a school and dormitory framework for teenagers from broken homes; Foster Family, for grade school children; Conversion Ulpan, for families and young people; and Nativ, a one year program in Israel for American teens. In other words, this group of people, working in both agriculture and industry, have made it a priority in their lives to help others - especially children from broken homes. They are religious people who also make time for Torah study and prayer. They are a good example of how adherence to the values of Justice, both individual justice and social justice, can be translated into the actions of a community and the events of daily life, in a setting where everyone contributes to the financial viability of the community and the not-so-fortunate who the community helps. Sa'ad's crops include carrots, potatoes, avocados, almonds, citrus fruit, and more. Sa'ad has a large dairy farm and a poultry farm. Sa'ad's industries include <http://www.syfan.co.il/> Syfan, a plant that manufactures plastic shrink film for packaging, and <http://www.saad.org.il/popli/index.html> Popli, which supply popcorn products and pet food. Syfan supplies shrink wrap to the huge Swedish furniture chain, IKEA. Kibbutz Sa'ad also has a fashion outlet called <http://www.saad.org.il/kavlkav.html> Kav LeKav, which sells clothes for men, women, and children; <http://www.saad.org.il/jewel.html> Ahinoam Jewlry where are created handmade jewelry in sterling silver; a graphic design studio <http://www.saad.org.il/kesem.htm> "Kesem", and an auto service center. One of Sa'ad's newest establishments open to the public is <http://www.saad.org.il/beitshekma.html> Beit Shikma, a beautiful convalescent and geriatric home where patients receive round-the-clock care. One of the members of the Kibbutz is artist Joseph Bernhard. He has been a member of Kibbutz Saad since 1950. He graduated from the Bezalel Academy of Art, Jerusalem, in 1976. Among his works are internal and external wall facades made using various techniques such as mosaic, burnt brick, river stones, as well as murals of many kinds. In 1995 Joseph Bernhard created the giant (3700 square meter) mural on the power station at the Dead Sea Works in Sodom, Israel. In recent years he has been developing and expressing an interest in environmental art. Many of the Kibbutz members have advanced university degrees. For example, the accounting manager, Ron Weisel, has a B.A. in Economics from UCLA, and a MBA from University of Chicago. The school bus bombing is not the first bombing to hit the kibbutz area. On July 7, 2006, Hamas hit the Kibbutz with a Kassam rocket, and there were numerous others up to the most recent incident. It is clear to me that Israeli attempts to strike back at the rocket launching sites will result in deaths of Palestinians and the world media will report all of this as just the latest in what they term (as part of their moral relativism) a cycle of violence. So, hopefully, this short account gives a little knowledge about the targeted Israeli community - that suffers from attacks on its civilians as part of an Arab and Islamist attempt to destroy the country of Israel and replace it with an Islamic state. It is up to the reader to determine whether the state of Israel and its people are really morally equivalent to Hamas and its ilk. We have recently seen how the western media aided and abetted Palestinian terrorism by failing to dignify the story of the Fogel family in Itamar when they, including a three-month old baby, were savagely butchered. Instead, many newspapers dismissed them as "settlers" and implied they deserved what they got. Putting a name on the Israeli victims and talking about their lives, is, I believe, a first step in defending Israel against the media war against it. Accordingly, I hope that this short article about Kibbutz Sa'ad will help humanize the Israelis who live under such constant terror. Howard Rotberg is the author of various books including The Second Catastrophe: A Novel about a Book and its Author, Exploring Vancouverism: The Political Culture of Canada's Lotus Land, and, most recently, TOLERism: The Ideology Revealed. He is president of Mantua Books ( <http://www.mantuabooks.com/> mantuabooks.com) and, as a former practicing lawyer, is an active developer of housing, with a special interest in affordable housing for low income working people. He has written for various magazines including FrontpageMag.com, Pajamas Media, Scragged.com and newspapers such as the Vancouver Sun, the Kitchener-Waterloo Record and the Vancouver Observer. Howard can be reached at: <mailto:[email protected][email protected]> [email protected] [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? 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