What ‘Free Palestine’ and ‘Black Lives Matter’ Have in Common

Hamas Terrorists Gang-Raped Israeli Woman Before One of the Rapists Shot Her in Head While One Was Still Indulging in Sexual Act: Report (ibtimes.sg)  (possibly not the woman pictured here.)

 Wilfred Reilly, Commentary Magazine  . . ."Same for the Palestinians. In the bluntest possible logical terms, most of the problems of, specifically, Gaza cannot be laid at the feet of Israel…because Israel has not occupied or ruled the Gaza Strip since 2005. Far more of them, in fact, can be laid at the feet of Hamas, the terrorist group that has been in charge of the area since 2007. Among many other objectively insane actions, Hamas’s leaders ordered or allowed the destruction of the great majority of the infrastructure left behind by some 10,000 departing Jews, who fled the region following an Israeli pullback (thus, of course, being “forced to abandon their family lands”)—including the once-legendary floral greenhouses of the Strip.

"Since that point, Hamas has systematically looted the potentially rich lands under its control—at one point rather literally beating plowshares into swords by using miles of state-of-the-art sewer pipe sent by the international aid community to make rocket-launcher tubes. Gaza and the other component region of recognized Palestine (the West Bank) have in fact received many billions of dollars in recent humanitarian aid, because of the sympathetic nature of some Palestinian claims, and much of this lucre has simply vanished or been stolen. Quite a bit of it, to judge from viral retrospectives of what Gaza City looked like before the Israel–Hamas war, was diverted into luxury villas for Hamas commanders and their dependents—some of whom could give even BLM lessons on mansion purchase and maintenance.

"More seriously—although the theft of billions from poor people is serious enough—legitimately unpleasant realities of day-to-day Palestinian life such as Israeli checkpoint monitoring of the Gaza and West Bank borders are also caused almost entirely by the behavior of the Palestinian governments. Tens of thousands of rocket attacks against the Jewish state have taken place just since 2001. " . . .