To the editor: Hamas does not care about peace

5/16/2018
Palestinian woman waves the Palestine national flag during a protest at the Gaza Strip's border with Israel, east of Khan Younis on Tuesday. Israel faced a growing backlash after Israeli troops firing from across a border fence on Monday, killing dozens of Palestinians and wounding more than 2,700 at a mass protest in Gaza.
Palestinian woman waves the Palestine national flag during a protest at the Gaza Strip's border with Israel, east of Khan Younis on Tuesday. Israel faced a growing backlash after Israeli troops firing from across a border fence on Monday, killing dozens of Palestinians and wounding more than 2,700 at a mass protest in Gaza.

Josie Setzler’s May 12 guest op-ed, “Gazans march to the wall for justice,” is factually and morally distorted to the point of being obscene.

To draw a moral equivalence, as Ms. Setzler does, between the American civil rights movement of the 1960s on the one hand, and the terrorist theater in today’s Gaza on the other, leaves out some rather obvious differences. The movement here led by Martin Luther King, Jr., for example, did not involve digging terror tunnels in order to pop up next to kindergartens to murder white children, nor did it involve using African-Americans as human shields behind terrorists firing rockets at white communities.

OP-ED: Gazans march to the wall for justice

Her claim that the current action in Gaza is the product of a “coalition of varied Palestinian movements” is simply a bold-faced lie. Nowhere in her article does she mention the governing authority in Gaza, which is the internationally recognized terrorist organization Hamas. No matter what groups are represented as having contributed to this “march,” nothing happens in Gaza without the approval of Hamas, who seized power there in 2007 through a campaign of violence in which their political opponents were either murdered or forced to flee.

Hamas’ program is not about any sort of “justice,” but is instead about genocide and annihilation. Because they are physically incapable of carrying out such a program against Israel on their own, they simply order their own civilians to be used as cannon fodder in order to garner sympathy from gullible outsiders who apparently believe that appeasing terrorists and weakening our Israeli allies will somehow bring about “peace.”

Palestinians are murdered in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria by various governments and terrorist organizations without a blink of an eye from so-called western “peace” organizations. Where was the outcry for the dozens of Palestinian women and children murdered in the Yarmouk refugee camp in Syria by the Islamic State?

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In Jordan, their vast majority Palestinian population is ruled over by a minority-sect autocratic monarchy that denies the rights of Palestinians there at many levels. Zero outcry.

Those who focus solely on blaming the Israelis for the plight of the Palestinians aren’t really interested in helping the Palestinians, but are instead merely determined to dismantle or destroy Israel.

ROB VINCENT
Perrysburg

Editor’s note: Rob Vincent is the Israel Advocacy Coordinator for the Jewish Federation of Greater Toledo.