I came across a moving and insightful blog post from the mother of an Israeli soldier. First she writes about the people in the UN school that Israel bombed yesterday.
Everyone in that building yesterday KNEW that the school was being used as a launching ground…and yet, apparently not one of those thought it would be a smart thing to leave.
…And the people who now mourn the “innocents” who died in yesterday’s attack on the United Nations school don’t question why people remained in the building from which these weapons were fired. They don’t question that this defies human instinct and certainly what should have been every parent’s first reaction.
She goes on:
People will ask how it is that I don’t blame Israel and the answer is simple. Fire came from that building. Call it what you want – a school, a refuge, a mosque, a home…if you shoot at an enemy…common sense would say the enemy will shoot back. Do it from inside a mosque, and the mosque becomes a target. Do it from inside a school, and the school becomes a target. Do it from behind your citizens and families, and you show the true nature of your society, your culture, your cause.
The nature of their society is sick and evil. As many people have been pointing out, the Palestinians’ goal is to kill civilians, both Israel’s and their own. Israel’s goal is to get Hamas to stop attacking them; they target the attackers, but kill civilians only because the attackers ALWAYS locate themselves among civilians.
So this woman shows pictures to illustrate what Hamas and their supporters are like. We don’t post pictures here at RRW, so you’ll have to go to the link to see them, and it’s well worth going. First, “the images they show.” The suffering children. Then, “the images they don’t show.” A long string of photos — a little boy holding a grenade, children trampling on the American and Israeli flags, forming an army, throwing rocks, with fake blood on their hands, and so on — in other words, being trained for their future. She ends:
And what they forget to tell you – is the people who allowed these many pictures to happen, the ones who posed these children with guns, painted their hands with “blood” and strapped “explosive belts” to their bodies, the ones who raise them to believe death should be attained for the glory of God and the more Jews and heathens and infidels you take with you, the higher your place in Heaven – they are the ones responsible for the horror that happened yesterday because they are the ones who put hundreds of people into a place that should have been a sanctuary and then they turned it into a launching ground.
Thank you, Soldier’s Mother, for your perspective.