Michael Lucas: Europe's Trouble with Israel

It was only a day or two after the Israeli navy stopped the "peace flotilla," which was trying to break the embargo on Gaza, and Europe was already awash in huge anti-Israeli demonstrations. Look through European newspapers and you will find plenty of photos of demonstrators, faces distorted with fury, carrying pictures of Israeli politicians with swastikas painted on their forehead.

The facts were furiously re-written: Hunting knives, sling shots, and sharpened metal rods are presented as "normal" seafaring equipment. Videos, which show the peaceniks as highly trained hand-to-hand combatants, are ignored. And nobody wonders where naive peace activists have learned to disable hovering helicopters.

But I am neither surprised nor impressed to once again witness the outburst of anger and dishonesty directed at the state of Israel.

Muslims are killing Muslims (and quite a few non-Muslims) by the thousands -- in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in Iran; in Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen; in mosques, marketplaces, schools, and private homes. Yet in the face of all this slaughter, the world, and Europe in particular, is quiet, as it is in the face of many other outrages that we witness around the world every day and that are much more significant than the deaths of nine Turks. But when Israeli is involved, it becomes the only occasion in which Europe suddenly unites in outrage. I'll be frank: Europeans care about Palestinians as much as I care about Europeans -- which is not at all.

The scope of the outcry has become so ridiculous that the organizers of Madrid's Gay Pride have disinvited an official Israeli delegation. Security concerns, supposedly, and pressure from some unnamed pro-Palestinian groups. The delegation, mind you, from the only country in the Middle East where LGBT people can live in peace, happiness, and safety.

I think this idea should be taken a step further -- Madrid Pride, this rollicking drug, sex, and dance fest, should be taken to another location: Gaza, maybe, or Ramallah? Tehran or Riyadh? With optional excursions to Mogadishu and Sanaa? Once again, Europe mindlessly capitulates before Muslim pressure.

No surprise here. The double standard is long established. Muslims are given a free pass. But Europeans will jump on any opportunity to demonstrate their hate for the state of Israel. The demonstrations against Israel's stopping of the flotilla have nothing to do with empathy for the victims of a military operation. Their purpose is to leverage the trap the terrorists have so cleverly laid, to pressure politicians, and to escalate to the point of complete destruction of Israel.

Only 60 years ago Europeans collectively murdered 6 million Jews. You don't need to be an expert in mass psychology to detect in the current vilification of Israel a collective, retroactive attempt to justify the Holocaust. Even at the risk of prompting a second Holocaust, Europeans are using every opportunity to give Muslims the freedom to kill another 6 million Jews, the Jews of Israel. It would create a perfect symmetry.

Why build ghettos, gas chambers, and crematoriums if you can do it through the hands of Muslims, stuck in the Middle Ages?

And to give this new vendetta some sort of respectability, history must be rewritten just like the incident on the Mavi Marmara was rewritten.

The most insidious rewrite is inherent in the frequently used phrase "democratically elected Hamas government in Gaza." Hamas was indeed the winner in a democratic election in 2006. But it subsequently consolidated its power through a coup d'etat in July of 2007, dismantling the opposition and violently removing the Palestinian Authority's security forces and civil servants from the Gaza strip. It now holds absolute power in the strip. Hamas' democratic credentials are about as solid as the Nazis', who also came to power through a democratic election and, two months later, issued the Enabling Act, abolishing all opposition and assuming absolute power.

The parallel does not end here. The Hamas Charter still calls for replacing the state of Israel with a Palestinian Islamic State in the area now comprised of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. Make no mistake: Hamas is a mortal enemy of Israel and the Jews, and Israel must defend itself against Hamas. Whoever doesn't accept this is abetting Israel's destruction.