… and kills his hero-worshippers.

“Allahu Akbar!” the bewildered survivors cry as they run up and down amidst the strewn body-parts.

To watch this MUST SEE video – which we cannot move to this site – go here.

Please. Do yourself a favor.

July 23, 2014. The United Nations holds an emergency session on the battle in Gaza as the Israeli Defense Force destroys the invasion-tunnels and rocket bases of the Islamic terrorist organization Hamas.

Delegates from countries that specialize in mass murder, such as Sudan, Syria, Cuba, and Iran, accuse Israel of “war crimes”. Most of the rest of the world’s delegates are on the terrorists’ side too.

A lone voice defends Israel, and accuses its accusers. It is the voice of Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch.

The United Nations must be destroyed.

“This whole conflict,” the foreign journalist said over coffee, “is a prime time show; the Palestinians provide us with the more romantic story.”

We quote from an article by documentary film-maker Pierre Rehov at Gatestone:

Terrorism is a show; it needs a producer and a distributor.

Without a certain complicity from the international media, terrorism would not be so effective and might even disappear altogether.

While Hamas is raining rockets and missiles on the Israeli civilian population, and in return is suffering a high level of destruction and hundreds of casualties as a result of collateral damage, one might ask: “What is the purpose?” The same question is also true of suicide terrorism. The genuine aim seems to be to gather sympathy while terrorizing the enemy, with an audience on an unlimited number of channels. …

If a rocket succeeds in going through Israel’s anti-missile defense and causing damage to Israel, Hamas is “showing its strength,” by hitting the Jewish state. If a retaliation by Israel sadly results in the death of Arab civilians, Hamas is “showing how inhuman Israel is,” and therefore how much Israel deserves the world’s opprobrium. For Hamas and similar terror groups, therefore, the “show” is always a win-win. …

The media are the real leaders of the free world. …

And to a large extent they are abusing that power.

There should never be a moral equivalence painted between the deliberate killing of civilians, and a retaliation that tragically leads to casualties among civilians. Yet, in the eye of the camera, there is. A dead child covered with blood is the strong moment of the show. [So] Hamas is asking [ordering] the population of Gaza to stay in their homes, while Israel is asking the civilians in Gaza to run away from places it might bomb. I imagine the leaders of Hamas, who are running the show, hiding in the basement of schools, mosques, hospitals, and tunnels, making comments on the latest developments: “More blood. We need more blood.”

The media who are pro-Palestinian, when they do not find enough horrific images from inside Gaza, recycle old pictures, Photoshop them, or use footage from other conflicts, mostly from Iraq and Syria. In the current conflict, they are already doing just that.

Even though YouTube, Facebook and other social media are useful in building a larger audience for the show, reporters and journalists play their role. Sadly, they do not have a choice.

We think this article is good, but just there we have to disagree. They do have a choice: “Report what Hamas wants  you to, or lose your accreditation with us and so possibly your job”. (Almost all of them make the wrong choice.)

– As Rehov goes on to demonstrate:

As the journalist went on to explain, “Palestinians have written the scenario of this prime-time piece. As the editors say, ‘If it bleeds, it leads’.” 

On the field, they are urged to send back a “juicy” story that might even make the front page. 

A reporter is a professional, making a living by writing up what he sees and hears … Reporters risk theirs lives.

In the West Bank, they are taken in hand by Palestinian “translators,” fixers trained to escort journalists the same way that in the Soviet era, sputniks, or “minders,” were trained to promote communism, and to make sure that the tourists and journalists saw only what the government wanted them to see, and, even more, that thy did not see what the government did not want them to see. … In the Middle East, reporters are threatened, except in Israel.

Their choice becomes a simple one: promote the Palestinian point of view (or whichever), or stop working in the West Bank (or wherever).

Rehov himself was offered a lucrative opportunity by a Palestinian to get world attention by filming a dead child whom he would have to say was “killed by an Israeli soldier”.

When making one of my documentaries, the Palestinian who was leading my crew offered me a scoop. As I was French, he trusted me to be on the Palestinians’ side. “You know,” he said, “what pays well? When an Israeli soldier kills a child. Are you interested?” he continued. “We can arrange that. For $10,000, I can organize everything.” Was he talking of a staging, or the real killing of a child? I did not dare to ask. I still nurture hope, despite the facts, that people would not willingly sacrifice children just to promote a show.

Our guess? Had it been some other Western film-maker and the offer had been accepted, a child would have been killed in front of the camera by “an Israeli soldier”; the “Israeli soldier” would have been fake, but the killing of the child would have been real.

Too far-fetched? Beyond any human being’s capacity for evil? Not at all. Hamas is having hundreds of real children killed by real Israeli soldiers right now in order to have them photographed and shown in newspapers and on television and computer screens all over the world. For that and that only they are forcing their children to suffer and die.

Could anything be more immoral, more absolutely evil, than this: to insist, despite advance warnings, that civilians, including as many children as possible, stay in or on the building – a house, a school, a hospital – from which rockets are being launched, so that they will be killed and maimed and dismembered when the rocket base is struck, simply in order to exploit the moral sentiment of the Western world by showing it the wounded and the dead with help from complicit media? Children as theater props, bleeding and dead.

As Rehov says:

Everything in Palestinian society is designed to promote martyrdom.

In fact the Palestinians were created as a separate nation by the Arab states in order to be martyrs. That is their function in Arab and Islamic politics and international relations. That is why rich and powerful Arabs don’t help them. That is why their sympathizers in the UN and wherever else keep them dependent on aid.

The Palestinians have embraced that role. And they will go on martyring themselves as long as the West allows them to. And no longer.

Into its socialist democracies, slowly dying out of indigenous populations, Europe has admitted hordes of its worst enemy.

None is yet ruled by them – as we think the United States is at present. (Fortunately the United States is much more robust – we dare to say virile – than decadent Europe. Here it is the ruling that is feeble.)

When all of Europe is governed by sharia law (and all European women ambulant black bags), it will be very bad for America.

We sorrow most for Britain which has long been the sanest, the soberest, the most reasonable of nations. Now the blood of native Britons, citizens of London, members of Her Majesty’s armed forces, stain its streets from time to time and ever more frequently, shed by the barbarian colonists of Islam. And every time distant Israel wages war on its perpetual barbarian attackers, the colonists of Britain turn out in force in the capital to yell hideous, vicious, racist hatred and calumny, in a quiet avenue lined with dignified embassies.

Douglas Murray, who always displays moral clarity, writes at Gatestone:

The barricades are up again outside the Israeli Embassy in London, as they are across many capitals of Europe. Given that even more rockets than “normal” have been raining down on Israel in recent days, any sane country would need further barricades outside the Israeli embassy in order to contain yet another demonstration of support for Israel. But no, another day in London and another Palestinian-ist and Socialist Worker party protest is going on against the Israeli state.

The protestors are not, of course, demonstrating because they especially care about the lives of the people of Gaza. If they cared about the lives of Palestinians – or the people of the region in general – they would have spent night after night outside the Syrian, Iraqi, Jordanian, Turkish, Egyptian and Saudi Arabian embassies, among others. …

I have watched them a bit in recent days, watched the contorted hatred on their faces as they scream at the embassy and then watched their friendly sociability as the headscarfed women are driven away by their menfolk, often with their children in tow – a family day outing in “diverse” modern London. Behind their smiles and the increasingly competent public relations that the pro-Hamas faction is managing in Britain, it is possible for some people to forget that what brings these people out is one simple thing: a hatred of the Jewish state and a desire to see it annihilated by the terrorists of Hamas or anyone else at hand.

There are those who will say this is not a not-sufficiently-nuanced observation, that the motives of those protesting Israeli action are something other than a great hatred of Jews and the Jewish state. But if this were true, why would their posters say, “Stop the Holocaust in Gaza?” There is no “Holocaust” in Gaza. Anybody can see there is no similarity between the organized and systematic murder of 6 million Jews by the Nazis and the precision targeting of some Hamas rocket sites, some of which are deliberately hidden under hospitals, in the Gaza strip. Why do the protestors say “Holocaust” then? They know that this way they will hurt Jews as deeply as possible. By using the term “Holocaust” for this, they will either give the impression that the Holocaust was a small and minimal thing in the history of war – such as the confrontation between Hamas and Israel currently is – or else that the Israelis are, in their view, currently carrying out precisely the same barbarism which made the creation of the state of Israel such an added necessity for Jews in the 1940s, and that by supposedly becoming the Nazis they are meant to abhor, the Jews have forfeited any right to be regarded as part of acceptable humankind.

Either way, these protestors clearly mean to harm, not to help. But their presence – and the growing manner in which they are trying to wake up a far-away country to the actions of Israel, and condemn them as they would condemn Nazism – displays a trend worth dwelling on.

Israel has been through an exchange like this with Gaza every couple of years since Condoleezza Rice had the brilliant idea of pushing for elections in Gaza and allowing Hamas to finish with guns what they had failed to achieve at the ballot box. In the wider world’s response – as well as the facts in the ground in Israel – certain trends can now be spotted. One is that, since the 2006 war in Lebanon, protests against Israel in cities such as London have increased in number and vitriol year on year. This is not because the confrontations between Israel and her enemies during this period are getting larger. On the contrary, no exchange since 2006 has been anything in size like the war which had to be engaged in then. Each time, however, despite the actual conflict diminishing, the protests in London and other capitals in Europe have grown.

So how can one account for this? One reason, simply put, is that you cannot have a country in which the Muslim population doubles each decade (as in Britain) and radical Islamist groups teach young Muslims to make the Israel-Palestine issue their prime concern, and expect the result to have no impact.

The young men and women who pack their banners back in the car after a good day’s shouting at the Israeli embassy may or may not have British citizenship, yet it is hard to say that they are British in any recognizable sense of the term. If they were, they might think that a simple sense of fair play, among other things, ought to dictate that a country being bombarded with missiles on a daily basis should, every now and then, have the right to respond by hitting the sites from which those missiles are fired as well as at the people who order the launchers to let loose.

Israel, one can probably say with some confidence, can very well look after itself. Like everyone else who has spent time in the country, and admires and even loves it, I worry for it, but I can think of no nation on earth that is better equipped or better motivated to look after itself and its people. So when I see these young protestors in London, protesting against Israel, I do not worry for the country they are shouting against. They cannot touch her. But I worry for my country — Britain.

It is a country that is finding it so difficult to integrate the millions of Muslims who have come here that (in a figure that ought to be better known) there are now at least twice as many young British Muslims who have gone to Syria to fight alongside ISIS and other such groups than there are Muslims fighting for Queen and country here in the British armed forces.

By any standards, this is a symptom of a disastrous immigration and integration problem. The people shouting outside the Israeli embassy – the knackered and foolish old minority of Trots aside – can do Israel no harm. But they can do great harm to the country they are in.

Europe’s Israel-haters are no real problem for Israel, but they are the greatest possible problem for Europe.

We have been inclined to take a pessimistic view of the near future since Barack Obama came to power, weakened the United States, damaged its economy, and restricted the liberty of the people.

In that time, Islam has gained influence in Europe, the Middle East has erupted in civil wars, and an Islamic State – a “caliphate” no less – has been proclaimed by the army of ISIS, which continues to conquer, kill, crucify, decapitate, and oppress fellow Muslims.

Now the Muslim Brotherhood’s terrorist force in Gaza, Hamas, is waging an almost continuous rocket war on Israel.

But David P. Goldman, better known as Spengler, writes this optimistic personal report of the Hamas attack and Israel’s defense:

Sunny with light missile cover in Tel Aviv this morning. I awoke to muffled thuds in the distance, Iron Dome shooting down Syrian-made missiles launched from Gaza, according to news reports. I attended the obligatory morning mixer for hotel guests at the bomb shelter, which fortunately lasted only five minutes before the all-clear sounded. …

Hamas is making a demonstration out of weakness. Money is tight, 44,000 Gaza civil servants haven’t been paid for weeks, and the IDF did significant damage to its infrastructure on the West Bank after the kidnapping-murder of the three yeshiva boys.

Netanyahu will look indecisive and confused, because he has to deal with an openly hostile US administration on one side and his nationalist camp on the other.

Time, though, is on Israel’s side: economically, demographically, strategically. The proportion of Jewish births continues to soar. The fruits of a decade of venture capital investing are ripening into high-valuation companies.

And the Arab world is disintegrating all around Israel’s borders.

I have no idea whether the IDF will go into Gaza on the ground, or what they will do if they do so: that’s a tricky cost-benefit calculation, and no-one outside the government has relevant information. But the broader point is that Israel will win a war of attrition. Hamas has shot off hundreds of rockets (including one that landed a few kilometers from me up north in Zichron Yaakov while I had lunch there yesterday) without causing a single injury. Iron Dome has worked brilliantly. Traffic was a bit lighter than normal last night, but there wasn’t a free table at any of the hundred or so cafe terraces on Dizengoff St., Tel Aviv’s main drag.

There will be no Intifada on the West Bank: the Palestinian Arabs are older, more resigned and less inclined to destroy their livelihoods than in 2000.

Syria and Iraq continue to disintegrate, Lebanon is inundated with Syrian Sunni refugees (weakening Hezbollah’s relative position), and Jordan is looking to Israel to protect it against ISIS. Egypt is busy trying to survive economically.

Medium term, the boycott and BDS threat become irrelevant. “Startup Nation” is becoming market-cap nation as hundreds of Israeli firms exit the venture capital stage and become profitable, mature enterprises. There’s never been anything like this. India and China beckon with a combined market of 2.5 billion people. To the extent that the Europeans threaten Israel with sanctions, the term “Middle East” gradually will be replaced by “Western Asia”. 

(I was interrupted by another brief visit to the bomb shelter, again for five minutes.)

In the short-term, to be sure, Israel must proceed with caution. It is still vulnerable to pressure from the US, which provides the bulk of its military hardware, and economic pressure from Europe, which accounts for a third of its trade. Nonetheless, Israel is winning and its adversaries are losing.

Could there be any more nonsensical tactic of war than an attempt at a proportional response?

`

A defensive war should be fought with overwhelming force to end the aggression as soon as possible.

We are of course alluding to the current aggressive war being waged on Israel by the Nazi-like terrorist power in Gaza, Hamas, and the far too restrained response by Israel.

As quite often happens, Daniel Greenfield expresses an informed opinion on a headline event so well that we cannot resist letting him speak for us:

The bodies of three murdered Israeli teenagers, 16-year-old Naftali who liked to play basketball, 16-year-old Gilad who had just finished a scuba diving course and 19-year-old Eyal with his guitar, will be met by the same ghastly parade of pallbearers who accompany every victim of terrorism.

The reporters will scribble down something about “settlements” and the “Cycle of Violence.” The diplomats will urge restraint and remind everyone that the only solution can be found through negotiations with the terrorists. And the pundits will put it all into perspective burying them under layers of words and weighting their coffins down with stones of forgetfulness.

But all the empty words about the “Occupation” and the “Cycle of Violence,” the invocation of a peaceful solution that is always about to arrive, but never does, and the maps that cede more territory to terrorists are addressing a problem that doesn’t exist.

It’s not about physical territory. It’s about spiritual territory. It’s not about nationalism. It’s about Islamism.

It’s not about the “Occupation.” It’s about Islam.

“I raised my children on the knees of the [Islamic] religion, they are religious guys, honest and clean-handed, and their goal is to bring the victory of Islam,” the mother of one of the Hamas killers said.

Not a Palestinian nation. Not a Two State Solution. Not forty percent of this and sixty percent of that.

The victory of Islam.

Naftali, Gilad and Eyal were murdered for the same reason that countless people have been killed in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan.

Not to mention the United Kingdom and the United States.

They were murdered in the name of a religious war that has been going on for over a thousand years. Muslims did not suddenly begin killing Jews in 1948 or 1929. They did not begin killing Christians over American foreign policy or the oil business.

Muslims did not begin killing Jews and Christians over foreign policy. They began persecuting and killing their Christian and Jewish neighbors because their religion told them to.

Hamas, the terror group that murdered the three teens, is not a Palestinian nationalist organization, though it occasionally plays the part. Its charter begins with Allah and ends with Allah. Article Five of its charter states that the group extends to “wherever on earth there are Muslims, who adopt Islam as their way of life.”

Its goal is to create an Islamic state. Everything else is secondary.

The Hamas charter describes it as part of the worldwide “Muslim Brotherhood Movement”. Brotherhood terrorists kill Jews in Israel for the same reason that they kill Shiites in Syria or Christian Copts in Egypt.

Article Seven of the Hamas charter concludes with the infamous Islamic Hadith which proclaims that the Muslim end times will come only when “Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him!”

Aside from the obvious genocidal bigotry, this is a quote from a text that is over a thousand years old. Its author was not preaching the mass murder of Jews because of settlements in the West Bank. At the time Muslims had subjugated and ruled over the Jewish population of the Middle East. The Jews were no threat to them. The idea of a Jewish army was as ridiculous as traveling to the moon.

The hatred that leaks out of that text has nothing to do with Israel and everything to do with Islam.

The insistence on a foreign policy explanation for Muslim anti-Semitism is as ahistorical as claiming that Hitler only hated Jews because of the Yom Kippur War. Except that at least both of these events took place in the twentieth century. Islam has been hating and persecuting Jews for over 1300 years before the rebirth of the modern State of Israel.

There are two ways of looking at the worldwide plague of Muslim terrorism. One is to treat every Islamic conflict with Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus and a dozen other religions as being due to some local political grievance of recent vintage. The other is to understand them as local expressions of a historical religious war and the continuation of the wave of conquests that made Islam into a worldwide religion.

We can be like the six blind men feeling around the Islamic elephant and assuming that its trunk and tusks are entirely separate phenomena. Or we can open our eyes and see the elephant in the room.

Hamas’ charter begins with the Koran’s praise for Muslims “as the best people” and damns Christians and Jews to be “smitten with abasement” for having “incurred the wrath of Allah.”

This is not a statement of Palestinian nationalism. It’s Islamic supremacism.

There is nothing negotiable about supremacism. Supremacism cannot be appeased. Supremacism does not want a piece of the pie. It wants the whole pie. The allies learned that the hard way with Hitler. So did the countless kingdoms that attempted to live in peace with the armies of the Mohammedan conquerors.

If Israel had never existed, Hamas would still exist, just as the other branches of the Muslim Brotherhood exist elsewhere throughout the Middle East. Even if Zionism did not exist, the Muslim Brotherhood would persecute the Jews under its control, just like the Christians in Egypt and Syria.

If Netanyahu, Sharon, Begin and a thousand other Israeli villains of the apologists of Islam had never been born, the followers of Mohammed would have gone on killing Jews just as they had for over a thousand years.

If the blue and white had never waved over Jerusalem, if Jews had remained as downtrodden and persecuted in the lands of Islam as the Copts and the Zoroastrians, Naftali, Gilad and Eyal would still have been murdered by two killers who were raised by their mothers to usher in “the victory of Islam.”

There is no political solution to a supremacist conflict.

If a thousand years of Jewish humiliation and persecution did not satisfy the ancestors of the murderers of those three teenagers, how will handing over part of Jerusalem do the job?

Solutions begin with truth. The truth is that Islamic violence against Jews is not recent or exceptional. The murder of Jews by Muslims, whether in Israel or Belgium, is not any different than the Muslim butchery of Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and even minority Muslim splinter faiths. These conflicts cannot be resolved through appeasement. They can only be addressed through resistance.

Yes. Once that truth is fully accepted, the only remaining question is, what form should the resistance take?

Our answer is: military force wherever it can be effective; and everywhere, at all times, a de-Islamization campaign along the lines of the de-Nazification campaign pursued intensely in Germany after the military defeat of the Third Reich.

Islam needs urgently to be criticized; constantly, relentlessly, daily; in schools and academies; by the mass media, on all the social media. It should be so denounced and reviled that if anyone chooses to adhere to it he would feel it necessary to do so in secret, furtively, surreptitiously, in shame and fear of being found out.

Islam is an ideology as evil and destructive as Nazism.

All religion is a drag on enlightened civilization. Islam is the only religion now that is actively destroying it. Islam itself must be defeated – not only on battlefields, but with argument.

It is the ideology, not the people (except those actively engaged in jihad), who must be boldly attacked.

The ideology called Islam is a lethal disease. The human race must be cured of it. 

In plain reason –

Those who say they believe in freedom of speech cannot tolerate Islam.

Those who believe in freedom cannot tolerate Islam.

Those who believe in equality of the sexes cannot tolerate Islam.

Those who believe in “the golden rule” cannot tolerate Islam.

Those who believe in “diversity” cannot tolerate Islam.

Those who hate cruelty cannot tolerate Islam.

Those who believe in tolerance itself cannot tolerate intolerant Islam.

Know it, understand it, loathe it, despise it, talk about it incessantly, forbid it, exclude it, abolish it.

Is there any other way?

This month, Hamas captured and murdered three young men on the West Bank (see the post immediately below).

Hamas is the government of Gaza. They butcher their own people at will. They are kept in power by endowments, billions of dollars (abut $500 million per annum) paid to the “unity government” of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas by the Obama administration. In other words, US taxpayers are supporting this evil organization.

Here is a video made by an Arab to show: that Hamas kill their own people out of sheer savagery; how they danced for joy over 9/11; how they teach their infant children to kill …

The bodies of the three teenagers, two Israeli and one American, who were captured by Hamas on June 12, have been found murdered.

Their names were Naftali Fraenkel, 16, (the US citizen), Gil-ad Shaar, 16, and Eyal Yifrach, 19.

The US continues to fund Hamas.

So does the EU.

As a member of Cobra, the UK national crisis management committee, I was involved in British efforts to rescue our citizens kidnapped by Islamist terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan. No modern-day military action is so fraught: the odds are stacked against the captives, the whip hand is with the captors, it is a race against time, and it becomes extremely personal.

So the admirable Colonel Richard Kemp, former  Commander of British Forces in Afghanistan, writes at Gatestone.

The world has undergone gut-churning revulsion this week at the videos of rows of kneeling young Iraqi men callously gunned down by Al Qaida terrorists in Mosul. But time and again, in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, Hamas has shown itself to be just as capable of such brutal cold-blooded killing. That knowledge has galvanized Israel’s desperate hunt for those who abducted teenagers Naftali Frenkel, Gilad Shaar and Eyal Yifrach as they hitchhiked home from their school in Gush Etzion a week ago. …

Nothing – nothing – stands in the way of our efforts to bring them back. Although we hope for the best, we prepare for the worst.

From the outside, it is difficult to read the realities of a kidnapping. Those with the responsibility of saving lives are forced into a cat and mouse game in which they must both reassure the public and sow seeds of disinformation among the captors. So far, for Naftali, Gilad and Eyal, the signs are not encouraging. As far as we know a week later, there is no proof of life, no demands, no negotiations.

Yesterday, June 19, the Palestinian Ma’an News Agency apparently reported that Hamas leader Salah Bardawil said that the “Palestinian resistance” (Hamas — the acronym for the “Islamic Resistance Movement”) had carried out the kidnapping.

The first priority is always to establish the identity and the motive of the captors. Early on, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asserted that Hamas was guilty. [Even] US Secretary of State Kerry agreed, and this seems to be the view throughout Gaza and the West Bank.

Hamas leader Mohammad Nazzal, for his part, described the kidnapping of three teenage civilians as “a heroic capture”, and “a milestone” for the Palestinian people. He said that every passing day in which the Israelis failed to find the teenagers was “a tremendous achievement”. 

The sheer sadism of the Palestinian Arab leadership, though bloodily demonstrated over and over again for nearly 100 years now –  and so is fully expected –  still shocks and revolts, and shows no sign of abating.

Nazzal’s comments reflect long-standing views on the abduction and butchering of Israelis by the leadership of Hamas, the internationally proscribed terrorist group responsible for firing thousands of lethal rockets indiscriminately against the civilian population of Israel from the Gaza Strip, the latest salvoes only this week.

It is the same terrorist group that the United Nations, the United States and the European Union – in a display of moral bankruptcy and betrayal – have all endorsed as a legitimate partner in a unity government for the Palestinian Authority (PA).

Just the day before the three boys were kidnapped, the EU’s foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, welcomed Hamas into the PA government while lambasting Israel for detaining terrorists and taking action to prevent Hamas terrorist attacks from Gaza and the West Bank.

Ashton, though never slow to condemn Israel, took five days to denounce this kidnapping. Both her words and actions have legitimized and encouraged Hamas. Her inaction in the face of repeated terrorist assaults has bolstered Hamas’s convictions.

The kidnapping will find favor with Ashton’s new best friends in Iran. Also desperate to appease the ayatollahs, British Foreign Secretary William Hague this week announced the re-opening in Tehran of a British embassy, closed in 2011 after being ransacked on the orders of the Iranian government. There are even reports of US military intelligence-sharing with Iran over the crisis in Iraq – where only a few short years ago, large numbers of American and British soldiers were being slaughtered — using Iranian-supplied munitions by terrorists trained, directed and equipped by Tehran and its terrorist proxy, Lebanese Hizballah.

As Ashton and the West cozy up to the ayatollahs, the ayatollahs are again cozying up to Hamas. A few weeks ago, Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hizballah, met with Hamas leaders to resolve the differences between Iran and Hamas that arose over the Syrian conflict. Hamas – isolated from Egypt following the demise of the Muslim Brotherhood regime – seems desperate to restore full relations with the Iranian tyrant. Iran is equally enthusiastic to bring Hamas back into the fold: Hamas remains an important instrument of the ayatollahs’ overriding, stated goal of destroying the State of Israel.

In these circumstances it is certainly not beyond probability that the three boys’ kidnapping was a goodwill gesture from Hamas to the ayatollahs.

It is hard to not be chilled to the bone by the thought of three teenage boys – who might easily be our own sons or brothers – spending night after night in the hands of ruthless terrorists… or worse. The anguish of the boys’ parents must be unimaginable.

Yet among the Palestinian Arab population of the West Bank and Gaza, including children, a new symbol has emerged – the three-fingered salute, signifying joy at the kidnapping …

Such celebration, including the handing out of sweets in the street, has been widespread. …

Both the US and the EU have paid the salaries of Palestinian terrorists by means of grants to the PA; they also fund this propaganda and incitement, no doubt including some of the imagery applauding the boys’ kidnapping.

The Israeli security operation has so far focused on finding the three boys. Over 330 Hamas suspects have been arrested, and illicit weapons and ammunition seized. Echoing the code-name of the rescue operation, “Brother’s Keeper,” the IDF Chief of Staff, Benny Gantz, has encouraged his troops to apply the same vigour to their task as if they were searching for their own brothers or members of their own platoon. He has also reminded them that most people in the areas they are searching are not connected to the kidnapping, and to treat them with care and humanity.

Concurrently, the IDF is taking steps to weaken and dismantle Hamas in the West Bank. In some quarters these have been criticized as an unnecessary and opportunistic widening of the operation. It is nothing of the sort. With this latest kidnapping, Hamas has confirmed its continued intent to abduct, attack and murder Israeli civilians in the West Bank. Like every government, Israel has an absolute duty to protect its citizens, and undermining this terrorist threat is an essential part of that responsibility.

All military operations are unpredictable; it is possible that Operation Brother’s Keeper could lead to an escalation of violence. Incidents have already occurred. It is unlikely that Israel will expand the current operation into Gaza, unless there is a serious upsurge in violence from there or a connection between Gaza terrorists and the kidnapping comes to light.

Whichever way this operation develops, the international community should avoid the same response to the current defensive actions that they have so often displayed whenever Israel has sought to defend itself from missile attacks from Gaza. The international community usually ignores repeated volleys of rockets fired at Israeli civilians, and then condemns Israel for taking defensive action to prevent further attacks. It is these responses from the international community that have encouraged Hamas, and amounted to nothing less than support for terrorism. And it is these responses, along with the endorsement of Hamas’s inclusion in a Palestinian unity government, that have led to the kidnapping of the boys in the West Bank.

We could not put it better ourselves.