Nas Daily, choosing between Hamas and Israel, should not be difficult.
On May 16, 2018 Nas Daily posted a video in which he stated that he can’t take sides in the conflict between Israel and Hamas because “both sides are wrong” and “people are dying.”
With all due respect to Nas Daily, who appears to mean well in addition to being inclusive and peaceful, it is precisely because “people are dying” that he should pick a side.
After all, people were dying when the Brits and French both finally found their respective backbones and stood up to Hitler and the Nazis; but those deaths didn’t justify neutrality … to the contrary, those deaths, and the likelihood of future loss of life, compelled making a moral choice; compelled picking a side.
My guess is that since Nas Daily is a very smart guy who has benefitted rather dramatically from growing up in a largely democratic, tolerant and inclusive Israel, he knows what the correct moral choice is, but because of the difficulty Nas Daily perceives of being unambiguously pro-Israel, he chose the path of likely least resistance, put up his hands, and employed the “both sides fallacy” or cop-out.
In the unlikely event this is not the case, below are some objectively verifiable facts, which should help Nas Daily pick the good guys in this conflict:
First, let’s look at the foundational documents for both sides.
In Israel’s Declaration of Independence, in pertinent part it provides:
THE STATE OF ISRAEL will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles. It will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants. Be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel. Ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex. Guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture. Safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.
WE APPEAL – in the very midst of the onslaught launched against us now for months – to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the building-up of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.
WE EXTEND our hand to all neighboring states and their peoples in an offer of peace and good neighborliness. And appeal to them to establish bonds of cooperation and mutual help with the sovereign Jewish people settled in its own land. The State of Israel is prepared to do its share in a common effort for the advancement of the entire Middle East.
Contrast this with the Hamas Charter. First with their crazy (on par with the Nazis and the KKK) Jew-hatred:
“With money they [the Jews] have taken control of the world media – news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting services, etc. With money they sparked revolutions in various countries around the world in order to serve their interests and to reap profits. They were behind the French Revolution and the Communist Revolution and [they are behind] most of the revolutions about which we hear from time to time here and there.
With money they have formed secret organizations, all over the world, in order to destroy [those countries’] societies and to serve the Zionists’ interests, such as the Freemasons, the Rotary Clubs, the Lions, the Sons of the Covenant [i.e. B’nei B’rith], etc. All of these are organizations of espionage and sabotage. With money they were able to take control of the colonialist countries, and [they] urged them to colonize many countries so that they could exploit their resources and spread moral corruption there.
There is no end to what can be said about [their involvement in] local wars and world wars. They [the Jews] were behind World War I, through which they achieved the destruction of the Islamic Caliphate, reaped material profits, took control of numerous resources, obtained the Balfour Declaration, and established the League of the United Nations [sic] so as to rule the world through this organization. They were [also] behind World War II, through which they reaped enormous profits from commerce in war materials and paved the way for the establishment of their state.
They [also] suggested the formation of the United Nations and the Security Council to replace the League of the United Nations [sic] and to rule the world through this [new organization]. Wherever there is war in the world, it is they who are pulling the strings behind the scenes. “Whenever they ignite the fire of war, Allah extinguishes it. They strive to spread evil in the land, but Allah does not love those who do evil.” (Koran, 5:64)”
Or their overt calls for violence:
“Leaving the circle of the conflict with Zionism is an act of high treason; all those who do this shall be cursed.”Whoever [when fighting the infidels] turns his back to them, unless maneuvering for battle or intending to join another [fighting] company, he incurs Allah’s wrath, and his abode shall be hell. Most unfortunate is his fate.” (Koran, 8:16)”
“Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it”
“The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree [a boxthorn plant native to the Levant that apparently likes Jews], would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.”
So, is it really difficult to decide which side is interested in peace and which side is being run a group of malevolent, theocratic, violent, intolerant, hate-filled despots? Hint, it is the side spewing Nazi propaganda and literally calling for the obliteration of an entire nation.
If their respective foundational documents are not enough, then perhaps we should look at how at each side treats minorities, gays and women? After all, based on his videos, Nas Daily is a strong proponent of tolerance and acceptance of peoples of all faiths and sexual orientation.
In Israel – as Nas Daily certainly knows from first-hand experience – all of its citizens may vote in all elections and have full civil rights. Further, Israeli Arabs are the only Arabs in the entire Middle East that vote in genuine, regular elections and enjoy civil rights that most people in the West take for granted, but that Arabs in other Middle Eastern countries can only dream of (such as freedom of speech, assembly, religion, etc.). In Israel, Arabs and women are Supreme Court Justices, Knesset members (Israel’s parliament), senior army officers, university professors, CEOs of corporations, doctors, lawyers, etc.
And Israel is the only place in the Middle East where being openly gay does not automatically place one’s life in danger. There are openly gay Israeli Knesset members, army officers, doctors, lawyers, etc. and Israel hosts annually one of the biggest Gay Pride Parades in the world.
Contrast this level of tolerance and inclusion with the other side in this conflict.
In Gaza, under Hamas’s theocratic and totalitarian rule, it is laughable to talk about minority rights, as there are barely any minorities in Gaza. In fact, other than in Israel, where (due to its freedom of religion and religious tolerance) the Christian population is thriving and increasing, the Christian population in the rest of the Middle East is dwindling (rapidly) and in Gaza, it is practically non-existent. Of course, in Gaza no one has any civil or political freedoms, so how could minorities (assuming there were any)?
In Gaza, as in many of the Arab-controlled dictatorships surrounding Israel, women are chattel and a woman can be beaten by her husband with impunity. As for gays, in Gaza being gay is a capital crime. And just like their ideological counterparts in the Taliban, Hamas goons often murder people just for the suspicion of being gay. And, without any concern for the rule of law or due process (a sadly non-existent concept among all of Israel’s enemies), Hamas often engages in summary executions of alleged “collaborators” and barbarically drags the bodies of their victims through the street:
So again, is it really that difficult to pick a side?
If the issue for Nas Daily is which side has tried harder to make a peace deal with the other side; then again this should be an easy call.
Both the 1937 and 1948 offers to partition the Jewish people’s indigenous homeland and the Palestine Mandate into a Jewish state and a second Arab state (Jordan, created by Winston Churchill in 1921, was the first), were accepted by the Jews and rejected by the Arabs; who in 1948 chose to launch an all-out war to annihilate Israel, rather than accept a partition plan that would have led to two Arab states on almost 90% of the original Palestine Mandate.
Since 1948, Israel continues to make offers to create the first ever independent Arab state west of the Jordan River (1967, 2000, 2001, and 2008), all of which have been rejected without even a counteroffer from even the “moderate” Palestinian Arab leadership. As for Hamas, they reject even the idea of a peaceful resolution of the conflict:
“The [Palestinian] state will come from resistance, not negotiation. Liberation first, then statehood…. We will free Jerusalem inch by inch, stone by stone. Israel has no right to be in Jerusalem.” — Khaled Meshal, Hamas Political Leader (and aid money billionaire), 2012
“Removing the Jews from the land they occupied in 1948 is an immutable principle because it appears in the Book of Allah” — Mahmoud al-Zahar, Hamas Co-Founder, 2016
Given this contrast, why would someone like Nas Daily – who preaches about the need for peace and co-existence – have such difficulty choosing sides?
Perhaps, as a person who plainly appreciates charity and acts of kindness, Nas Daily is finding it difficult to decide which party is more charitable and does more good for the world?
After all, on the Israeli side we have a country that sends its military as well as teams of people from IsraAid all over the world to help people dealing with tragedy, whether it is a typhoon in the Philippines, a tsunami in Japan, or earthquakes in Nepal, Mexico or Haiti. And Israel’s Innovation Africa is incredibly bringing clean water technology to drought-ridden villages all over Africa. At the same time, Israel’s Save A Child’s Heart has saved thousands of children, mainly from Africa and the Middle East, who were born with life-threatening disabilities. And, the Israeli Army and Israeli hospitals in northern Israel have provided life-saving medical treatment to thousands of Syrians injured in the barbaric Syrian civil war. In fact, it would take literally an entire article just too briefly summarize the many ways in which Israel and Israelis are saving lives and our environment.
On the other hand, Hamas caused a significant local ecological and environmental catastrophe by burning thousands of tires along the Israel-Gaza border. It has also taken millions of dollars in aid money meant to better the lives of Gazans and used that money to create nearly two thousand Hamas millionaires, to build over 36 terror tunnels (at an average cost of nearly $6,000,000 per tunnel) and it spends countless millions of dollars on rockets and mortars to fire on Israeli civilians. It also uses child labor to build its terror tunnels. Child labor that has led to at least 160 children being killed in “work-related” accidents.
Of course, when they are not killing children in order to build terror tunnels, stealing aid money to enrich themselves or to invest in weapons of terror instead of in hospitals, schools, medicine, creating jobs, infrastructure, etc. Hamas engages in the slave trade of indigenous Africans (just as their fellow Jihadists are in the Sinai and in Libya).
So one can certainly understand why Nas Daily finds it so difficult to pick a side …
Perhaps when he was explaining that both sides are “wrong” with such certainty in his May 16 video, Nas Daily was ignoring: the history of both sides in the conflict, which side’s foundational documents exude tolerance and which side’s scream xenophobic anti-Semitic hate and glorify violence, which side offers civil and human rights to all its citizens, minorities, women and gays, and which side is a nightmarish hybrid of the Nazis and the Taliban?
When Nas Daily was claiming that he can’t pick sides in this conflict because “people are dying,” perhaps he was simply referring to Hamas’s self-described “March of Return” and what caused the 62 fatalities that occurred on May 14?
It is certainly possible that Nas Daily has been watching too much RT and CNN and he actually believes that Hamas’s “March of Return” on Israel’s border was a peaceful protest. But Hamas’s theocratic and Jihadist rulers (who would certainly not tolerate Nas Daily’s lifestyle, beliefs, or his girlfriend for that matter) have made it very clear that this was never a peaceful protest.
After all, Hamas co-founder Mahmoud al-Zahar in an interview with Al Jazeera on May 13, 2018 said in an usual moment of candor that Hamas was “deceiving the public” when it spoke of “peaceful resistance.” In the interview al-Zahar said (three days before Nas Daily said he can’t choose sides):
“This is not peaceful resistance. Has the option (of armed struggle) diminished? No. On the contrary, it is growing and developing. That’s clear,” he said. “So when we talk about ‘peaceful resistance,’ we are deceiving the public. This is a peaceful resistance bolstered by a military force and by security agencies, and enjoying tremendous popular support.”
And Hamas’s military and overall leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, on May 10, 2018 expressly and clearly stated that he was hoping that the May 14 “protests” would result in thousands of Gazans crossing into Israel. Because, unlike Nas Daily, Sinwar and the Jihadists he commands don’t recognize Israel’s right to any border, which is why on May 10 he said: “What’s the problem with hundreds of thousands breaking through a fence that is not a border?”
Of course, before this May 10th interview, on April 6, 2018 Sinwar made it very clear to the people of Israel, in particular the people living near Gaza (who the Israeli Army is sworn to protect) what he expected the Gazans to do to the Jews if they were able to breach Israel’s border:
“Our people and our boys will surprise the entire world with what they have in store. Let them wait for our big push. We will tear down the border (with Israel) and we will tear out their hearts from their bodies.”
Well, Monday May 14 was their “big push.” It resulted in 50,000 Hamas organized and incited people rioting along Israel’s border, along with hundreds, if not thousands, of Hamas operatives burning tires to create smokescreens, throwing rocks, flying arson kites (some emblazoned with Swastikas – another excellent clue regarding who are the bad guys – when in doubt pick the ones flying Swastikas), throwing Molotov cocktails, etc.; all while trying to attack the border fence with wire cutters and bombs.
And in all of this – Hamas orchestrated chaos and madness, among women and children, where Hamas deliberately and cynically attempted to invade and attack Israel’s border – the Israeli Army responded by only killing 62 people (out of over 50,000) and before Nas Daily had exclaimed that he could not “choose sides” (and that anyone who did so was “wrong”), we had already learned, by Hamas’s own admission, that 53 out of those 62 people were confirmed military age male members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Now that doesn’t mean that the remaining 9 people were necessarily all innocent civilians. What it does mean is that over 85% of the fatalities were confirmed terrorists. It also means that during a day when Hamas’s leader promised a “big push” that would lead to “thousands” of Gazans breaching the border in order to “tear the hearts out” of the Israelis living near the border, the Israeli soldiers defended that border with nearly unheard of precision and judiciousness. At a time when the US Military, which is one of the most moral militaries in the world, would dream of even a 2:1 collateral damage ratio between civilians and combatants (and recently, along with the British Army, unintentionally killed around 500 civilian non-combatants in the battle against ISIS in Mosul), the Israeli Army incredibly achieved, at a minimum, a 6 to 1 combatant to civilian fatality ratio.
Again, against an enemy who hides behind human shields and whose very goal is civilian fatalities.
Thus, on the one hand, there is Israel: a country whose foundational documents speak of tolerance and peace. A country that despite offering to share the land over and over again has faced war after war, while building a thriving democracy for all of its citizens (including Nas Daily’s family). A country that helps people all over the world with its charity, scientific, medical, and environmental innovations, all while defending itself as morally as it can.
On the other hand, there is Hamas: a brutal dictatorship, which since seizing power in 2007, has brought nothing but misery to the people of Gaza, while staying true to its hateful Charter, a document wreaking of more Jew-hatred than Mein Kampf. A Jihadist terrorist organization more brutal (and just as tolerant of minorities and gays) as the Taliban. A group that spends millions of dollars to wage a futile war, all while it leaders get rich, its citizens get poorer, and its terrorists hide behind human shields.
So again, why is it so difficult for a smart guy like Nas Daily to choose sides?
If it is simply because “people are dying,” then that is plainly a really bad excuse, because “people are dying” because of an Islamist version of a Nazi party, Hamas.
This is the easiest call-I needn’t blink–Israel has every right to ensure her survival.
Thank you, Micha! Somebody needed to put that smug, self serving guy in his place.
Thank you – he has reaped the benefits of living in Israel – maybe he should live in Syria now and see if he can THEN take a side. Might be interesting.