Seven aid workers at the World Central Kitchen mission in Gaza were tragically killed this week in an Israeli attack while delivering trivial amounts of food, bolstering imaginary accusations of “famine” and “genocide.” The man who sent them into a war zone, celebrity chef José Andrés, now contends the workers were “targeted deliberately” and “systematically killed” by Israel. The war in Gaza, he says, is “not a war against terrorism anymore” but a “war against humanity itself.”
One might forgive Andrés, who is likely racked with guilt, for spreading this slander. But there isn’t, of course, a scintilla of evidence to back up the accusation.
Israel has absolutely no logical, tactical, or military reason to target aid workers. For ethical reasons, Israel does not kill innocent civilians, nor would it want to hand Jew-haters and anti-Israel activists more fodder. Israel is a liberal democracy with civilian oversight of the military, where investigations into military misconduct regularly occur, and the guilty are punished.
Whatever mistakes it makes, Israel fights to preserve life. It does more to protect civilians than perhaps any military, despite its enemy intentionally putting civilians in harm’s way.
And the best way to protect Palestinians and Jews is to destroy Hamas. Recall, though, that Andrés called for a “ceasefire” only a week after the mass murder, rape, and kidnapping of more than 1,000 Israeli civilians — before Gaza had even invaded. “Ceasefire,” obviously, is a euphemism for Israel’s capitulation. That is what Andrés demanded.
Indeed, Andrés has harsher words for the Jewish state than for Hamas, the entity wholly at fault for propagating this conflict and bringing misery to its people. What am I saying? In a New York Times column headlined “Let People Eat,” Andrés doesn’t even bother mentioning Hamas by name.
The day Andrés published his self-aggrandizing essay, 217 trucks of humanitarian aid were delivered to Gaza with 179 food packages carrying more than 150,000 meals. I wonder if any of the women who have been kidnapped and sexually tortured by Hamas will get one?
As with other celebrities, it’s highly probable Andrés was just a naive ignoramus on the issue, rather than the kind of mendacious, Jew-baiting Hamas apologist who writes for the Washington Post or inhabits the far right of social media. But once you accuse those who defend themselves of engaging in a “war against humanity” while giving a truly barbaric terror army a pass, you become a fellow traveler.
Many Democrats have taken to cynically spreading this blood libel to help Joe Biden mollify the (un-mollifiable) pro-Hamas faction within the Democrat Party. David Axelrod, who helped Barack Obama turn the mainstream left towards Iran, says Israel had no right to “indiscriminately kill innocents or valiant men and women who are working to save them from starvation.”
Does Axelrod believe that Obama haphazardly killed innocents when the United States repeatedly bombed a Kunduz hospital, leading to the death of 42 civilians including aid workers, in 2015? Or is it only the Jewish state that exhibits this kind of wanton bloodlust? He does not say.
Biden, too, who contends to be “outraged and heartbroken by the deaths of seven humanitarian workers,” went on to imply that Israel did nothing to protect civilians. Why was Biden not “outraged and heartbroken” when the French accidentally killed 19 civilians at a Mali wedding in 2021? We don’t know. Probably because there aren’t many Malian voters in Michigan.
Or why was the president not “outraged and heartbroken” when his administration killed 10 civilians, seven of them children, in a face-saving political-theater droning in response to his botched Afghan withdrawal? We do not know, because the president has never said. At the time, Gen. Mark Milley not only referred to the strike as “valid” and “righteous” but lied about a “secondary explosion” and a plethora of other evidence justifying the bombing.
Neither the United States nor Israel nor France targets civilians, although that is the goal of Islamists in Afghanistan, Gaza, and Mali. Of course, there has never been a war where innocents do not tragically suffer. But Israel is held to a higher standard than any other country, even by its allies.
Israel does not target aid workers, engage in genocide, or cause famine. It fights Hamas, Iran, and all the multitude of enemies who refuse to live in peace.
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