Once Israel pulled out of Gaza, a report by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs found a striking increase in the amount of internal violence as the majority of deaths were now being caused by clan feuds.
During 2007’s battles between Israel and Hamas, as many Palestinian Arab children died in clan feuds as they did in Israeli air strikes. And unlike air strikes, children killed in clan feuds aren’t accidents.
The dirty little secret is that while Palestinian identity is as phony as a three dollar bill, clan identity is a powerful and defining force. Furthermore it is often hard to tell whether Hamas and Fatah terrorists are aligned with a movement because of personal belief or because their clan is aligned with a movement.
Hamas and Fatah aren’t just ideologies. They are also large extended clan families which fight over land, honor and economic control.
The origins of Israel’s struggle with terrorism go back to the roots of the al-Husayni clan which arrived in Jerusalem after the Crusades and has been trying to control the city and everything else ever since.
Prominent members and associates of the clan include Hitler’s Mufti, Hajj Amin al-Husayni, and Yasser Arafat. (Arafat however was more directly associated with the Al-Qudwas, a clan which extends from Iraq to Egypt. Both clans considered themselves to be a sort of titled aristocracy, yet another fact which makes their post-colonial posturing as oppressed peoples ridiculously hypocritical and laughable.)
Muslim children being killed in clan feuds between huge families whose local branches claim to be the leaders of the Palestinian people even as they fight with equal ferocity for control over Syria and Iraq is not a subject that any of the placard wavers are interested in. Open that door a crack and their whole self-righteous campaign collapses into incoherent bleating as they struggle to justify the primacy of one terrorist group over another based on the claims of descent from Mohammed by its leading clans.
There are stories that are simply not told.
When UN inspector and anti-war activist Scott Ritter visited Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, he encountered a prison which, in his own words,
“appeared to be a prison for children — toddlers up to pre-adolescents — whose only crime was to be the offspring of those who have spoken out politically against the regime of Saddam Hussein. It was a horrific scene.”
Ritter refused to discuss it any further, “because what I saw was so horrible that it can be used by those who would want to promote war with Iraq, and right now I’m waging peace.”
Scott Ritter, who was later arrested for soliciting underage girls on the internet, wasn’t waging peace. No more than the placard wavers in London, Sydney and Montreal are waging peace. He was fighting to keep Saddam Hussein power. And he was willing to sacrifice a prison full of children to do that.
He was willing to sacrifice little girls like Anna, who had her feet crushed in a torture chamber, to keep Saddam Hussein in power. Ritter was willing to do it because he had the same morals as Saddam.
That is the same attitude that the placard wavers have toward the children of Gaza, of Iraq and of countless other places. They use them to wage war in the name of peace when they come in handy.
And when they die of Hamas rockets and clan feuds, when they are killed by ISIS and the entire murderous alphabet soup of Islamic terrorism, they drop them like yesterday’s garbage.