March of the red/green brigades

The Red-Green alliance is on the march. On Wednesday, the leftist-controlled European Parliament in Strasbourg passed a resolution endorsing the Goldstone Report. That report, it will be recalled, denies Israel’s right to self-defense by alleging that Israel’s actions to defend itself from illegal Palestinian aggression during the course of Operation Cast Lead were war crimes.

The resolution did more than accept the Goldstone Report’s baseless claims. It sought to silence those who are trying to make the Red portion of the Red-Green alliance pay a price for its abetment of jihad.

The resolution "expresses its concern about pressure placed on NGOs involved in the preparation of the Goldstone Report and in follow-up investigations, and calls on authorities on all sides to refrain from any measures restricting the activities of these organizations."

This statement was inserted to defend the EU-supported Israeli organizations – overwhelmingly associated with the far-Left New Israel Fund – that took a lead role in providing Richard Goldstone and his associates with false allegations of illegal actions by IDF soldiers. Those organizations – and the New Israel Fund – have rightly been the subject of scrutiny in Israel after their role in compiling the Goldstone Report was revealed in January by the Israeli student organization Im Tirzu.

Israel is not the only target of the Red-Green alliance. Its operations span the globe. Sometimes, as in the case of the Goldstone Report, the Left leads the charge. Sometimes, as with the Hamas-led missile offensive against Israel that preceded Cast Lead, the jihadists move first.

In general, jihadists are motivated to attack non-Muslims by their religious belief that Islam must dominate the world. And in general, the Left’s justification of jihadist aggression stems from its neo-Marxist faith that the liberal nation-state is the root of all evil. Whether the Left recognizes that if successful, its collusion with jihadists will lead to the destruction of human freedom, is subject to debate. But whether or not the Left understands the consequences of its actions, it has played a key role in abetting this goal.

IN NIGERIA on Sunday night, the jihadists led the charge. With the apparent collaboration of the Muslim-dominated Nigerian army, Muslim gangs entered three predominantly Christian villages around the city of Jos and killed up to 500 innocent civilians, including children, with machetes, axes, and daggers.

According to eyewitness reports, some victims were scalped and many were raped. Most had their hands and feet chopped off. Infants and children were among the butchered.

The massacre was premeditated. According to government spokesmen, Muslim residents were tipped off two days prior to the attack. To ensure their victims were Christians, the jihadists addressed them in Fulani, the language spoken by local Muslims. If the victims responded in Fulani they were saved. Otherwise they were hacked to death.

Sunday’s massacre could have been expected to lead the news worldwide. But it didn’t. Indeed, it was barely noted.

That scant coverage the barbarous events received was itself plagued by obscurity and vagueness. Commentators and reporters alike hid the identities of the aggressors and the victims, characterizing the jihadist butchery as "sectarian violence."

They also sought to obfuscate its significance, claiming that the Muslim gangs decapitated infants in response to tribal property disputes.

Jessica Olien at The Atlantic not only made these claims, but brushed off the dimensions of the atrocity, writing, "It’s worth noting that police have confirmed only 109 dead."

After minimizing the death toll, Olien turned her literary daggers on the victims, claiming that they had it coming. As she put it, "It’s hard not to compare the weekend’s attack with one in January in which 150 people from the same Muslim community responsible for Sunday’s attack were brutally killed. The attack on March 7th drew considerably more international attention the previous incident."

Ah, so unfair. The over-reported atrocity unfairly portrays murdered Christians as victims. But Olien knows better. The Muslims were simply retaliating for the attacks they suffered.

Sadly for Olien and her erudite justification of barbarism, it is far from clear that the victims of January’s violence were Muslims. Writing in the London Times on Thursday, British Baroness Caroline Cox claimed that the primary victims of January’s slaughter were Christians, not Muslims.

According to Cox, eyewitnesses to the events in January "indicated that the killings began when Muslim youths attacked Christians on a Sunday morning on their way to church. Muslims were also killed as those under attack began to fight back."

Cox continued that Sunday’s attack followed a now familiar pattern. Attacks "are initiated by well-armed Muslim extremists, chanting militant slogans, attacking and killing Christian and other non-Muslim citizens and destroying homes and places of worship.

"In the early stages of the attack, the Muslim militants take corpses to mosques, where they are photographed and released to the media, creating the impression that these are Muslim victims."

The international media are only too willing to accept  at face value these false accusations of Muslim victimization at the hands of their actual victims. And so are their leftist comrades in international governing circles.

In the wake of Sunday’s massacre, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon both issued statements making no distinction whatsoever between the victims and the aggressors. Both called for "both sides" to act with "restraint."

In the Left’s apparent willingness to hide the nature of January’s attacks and then underplay Sunday’s massacre, we have an example of Leftist facilitation of jihadist violence. In Nigeria, of course, the jihadists are the main actors and the Left are merely their helpmates

IN ISRAEL, the roles are generally reversed. Here it is the Left that leads the jihadists by the hand. Take the Left’s campaign against Jewish property rights in Jerusalem. In the Sheikh Jarrah/Shimon Hatzadik neighborhood, buildings owned by Jews were seized by Jordan in 1948 after its conquest of the city. For the past decade Jewish property owners have been working through the courts to assert their rights to their buildings and remove the Arab squatters who took them over.

Court after court upheld their rights to their property. And, indeed, more than a decade ago, the squatters reached a settlement in which they acknowledged the owners’ property rights and the owners agreed to let the squatters stay so long as they paid rent. But when the squatters stopped paying rent, the Left pushed them to refuse to vacate the premises and to try to re-litigate the old settlement. Finally, the case made it to the Supreme Court, which also recognized the rights of the Jewish owners and ordered the police to enforce its ruling and remove the illegal squatters.

The police removed the squatters last month and within hours, Jewish residents moved in, in accordance with an agreement with the buildings’ lawful owners. Since they moved in, the Jews have been under constant attack from their Arab neighbors. They have been beaten and threatened with murder.

In the meantime, the Left has turned the case of the illegal Arab squatters into a cause celebre. Last week, thousands of leftists staged an anti-Semitic demonstration outside the compound, demanding that the Jews be removed from their homes. The argument, of course, is that allowing Jews to exercise their legal property rights by peacefully residing in a predominantly Arab neighborhood is an unacceptable "provocation." The Arab squatters attempting to steal the property, on the other hand, are "victims."

Rather than characterize the protesters as anti-Semites who are stoking violence against innocent Jews for their crime of lawfully living where they choose, the local and international media have described the demonstrators as "peace activists" and "human rights activists."

For turning reality on its head and championing the cause of jihadists against the human rights of their victims, these leftist demonstrators are lionized by their comrades in the media and in the chanceries of the Western world. The State Department said it was "unacceptable" that Jews moved into their homes.

So, too, the UN raced to accept the Left’s claim that human rights demand the denial of Jews’ property rights due to their ethnicity. Its peace process boss Richard Miron said, "I deeply deplore the totally unacceptable actions by Israel in which Israeli security forces evicted Palestinian refugee families… to allow settlers to take possession of their properties."

It is a depressing commentary on our times that spokesmen of democracies and supposed champions of human rights are willing to state publicly that granting Jews the equal protection of the law is an unacceptable imposition on their bigoted neighbors. But the notion that Jews have an equal right to buy and own property in areas of Jerusalem from which they were illegally ethnically cleansed by the Jordanians in 1948 is now a great cause of the Left. And one can only assume that the jihadists will soon make their move – to the gratification of their leftist comrades – against the innocent Jews of Jerusalem.

THIS BRINGS us to the events surrounding US Vice President Joseph Biden’s visit to Israel this week. On the first day of his visit, as a matter of routine governance, the Jerusalem Planning and Building Committee approved plans to build 1,600 housing units in the Ramat Shlomo neighborhood. Ramat Shlomo is a neighborhood with more than 20,000 residents located between the even more populous Ramot and Sanhedriya neighborhoods. From an Israeli perspective, it is just as uncontroversial as Yad Eliahu in Tel Aviv or Hadar in Haifa.

But not from a Red perspective. Just moments after the decision was announced, the Left used it as proof of Israeli venality. For approving the construction of new homes in its capital, the government was condemned again and again. The Palestinians and the Arab League jumped on the bandwagon. And now, owing to the Left’s anti-Israel onslaught, anyone murdered in Jerusalem – or anywhere else for that matter – will be dismissed as a product of fully justified Muslim anger.

Observing the Leftist charge, led in this case by the frothing-at-the-mouth Israeli media, Biden moved swiftly. The man who came to Israel on a charm offensive could no longer hide the truth about where the Obama administration’s true sympathies lay. After declaring his undying love and fidelity to Israel just hours before, Biden switched gears and condemned Israel for "undermining" prospects for peace.

On Wednesday morning as he referred to his condemnation of Israel’s decision to build homes in its capital, Biden said, "Sometimes only a friend can deliver the hardest truth."

And at least in this case, he is correct.

And so, in the spirit of that sentiment, it must be said: When those who purport to support peace and human rights join forces with the Red-Green alliance, what they are actually supporting is bigotry, violence, murder and, ultimately, the destruction of human freedom. Whether the Left recognizes the significance of its actions or not, it is time that it be held as accountable for its defense of jihad as the jihadists are for carrying it out.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.