U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin claims Israel is ‘driving’ Gazans ‘into the arms of the enemy’
By Jihad Watch
Austin and the generals don’t realize that Hamas would recruit jihadis regardless of what Israel does. Western analysts have a paternalistic and ethnocentric assumption that jihadis are passive reactors with no agency of their own. All they can do is react to what the U.S. or Israel does. The idea that they might have reasons of their own to be violent, regardless of what others do, never occurs to them.
US generals wrongfully blame Israel for ‘creating terrorists’ – opinion
by Rafael Medoff, Jerusalem Post, December 10, 2023:
US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, a retired general, says Israel is “driving” Gazans “into the arms of the enemy.”
A few weeks ago, another general, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Charles Q. Brown, charged that Israel’s anti-terror actions in Gaza are turning the average person there into “someone who now wants to be the next member of Hamas.”
Generals deserve our deepest respect for their service and sacrifice. But that doesn’t mean they are always right. General George Patton used Nazi Party members in the postwar US administration in Germany, resulting in his dismissal. General Douglas MacArthur was fired for defying President Harry Truman’s orders in the Korean War. General Curtis LeMay wanted to use nuclear weapons in Vietnam.
When it comes to understanding what causes young Palestinian Arabs to become Hamas terrorists, President Biden’s generals are getting it all wrong.
It is not Israel that drove Gazans into the arms of Hamas or turned young Gazans into terrorists. It is the Gazans themselves who long ago chose Hamas as their leaders. Democratic elections were held there in 2006, and Hamas was allowed to participate, at the insistence of Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice. Hamas won 76 out of the 132 seats in parliament.
Afterward, Rice acknowledged she was “caught off guard” by the outcome; the result “does say something about us not having a good enough pulse,” she conceded. At the same time, Rice defended the inclusion of Hamas, on the grounds that “You ask yourself, ‘Are you going to support a policy of denying the Palestinians elections that had been promised to them at a certain point in time because people were fearful of the outcome?’”
For the Truman administration and the US military governors of postwar Germany, the answer to an earlier version of Rice’s question was a resounding “yes.” They barred the Nazi Party from running in postwar elections, regardless of how many Germans wanted to vote for it.
Defense Secretary Austin and General Brown might want to ask themselves why it is that children in postwar Germany did not grow up to be Nazis. The American military’s devastation of much of Germany did not cause those children to embrace antisemitism or terrorism. Yet tens of thousands of Gazan children, who grew up in a region from which Israel completely withdrew in 2005, embraced antisemitism and terrorism; they are the ones who fill the ranks of Hamas today….
AUTHOR
ROBERT SPENCER
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