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In her July 25 opinion column in Le Journal de Montréal entitled: “Indecency has a name: Netanyahu,” columnist Yasmine Abdelfadel took issue with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent speech to the U.S. Congress, calling it “not only inappropriate, but also dangerous.”
She bemoaned his characterization of Israel’s war with Hamas as “the resistance of good against evil,” and complained that he did not speak “a word about the illegal colonization of the Palestinian territories.”
If fighting Hamas, a genocidal Islamic terrorist organization that rapes, tortures, murders and kidnaps Israeli civilians – and uses its own people as human shields – is not “evil,” then the word has lost all meaning. Yet Abdelfadel bristled at calling Hamas evil.
This is hardly surprising, given that Abdelfadel refused to even mention the word of Hamas even a single time anywhere in her column, as if Israel is fighting some invisible ghost in Gaza, and that there are not well over 100 Israeli hostages still being held by the demonic death cult that is Hamas.
As for her complaint that Netanyahu should have spoken about the “illegal colonization of the Palestinian territories,” Abdelfadel is engaging in fictional storytelling. Israel possesses extensive legal and historical rights to the lands it controls, and never before in history has there ever been a Palestinian state, and ergo, Israel cannot be occupying, let alone colonizing, its own land, nor from a country that has never existed.
But perhaps the most unintentionally comedic line in Abdelfadel’s column is when she deplored what she considers a missed opportunity for Netanyahu to speak “about a lasting peace plan, a two-state solution, where everyone, Israelis and Palestinians alike, can live in security and dignity.”
Netanyahu’s speech aside, Israel has long pursued a two-state solution, from agreeing to the United Nations Partition Plan, which divided up historical Israel into a Jewish and Arab land (which was rejected by the Arab parties), to the famous 2000 Camp David offer by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, which offered the Palestinians all of Gaza, eastern Jerusalem and virtually all of Judea & Samaria (“West Bank”), which was met with a violent uprising, or intifada, from the Palestinians.
For a columnist too pusillanimous to ever mention Hamas’ name, the gall to demand that Israel’s leader discuss the “two-state solution” with a genocidal terrorist organization seeking the country’s violent destruction is simply too ludicrous to even countenance. How would Abdelfadel propose that Israel engage in a peace plan with a terrorist organization whose mandate makes clear that it will stop at nothing but the total destruction of Israel, because it sees it as its religious obligation under Islam?
Rather than acknowledging the central role that Hamas plays as the architect of suffering both for Israelis and Palestinians, Abdelfadel instead simply airbrushed it out of the equation altogether, focusing exclusively on Israel as the ultimate villain.
At first glance, Abdelfadel’s practice in her column of erasing Hamas all while demonizing Israel appears to be nothing more than a rhetorical tool in her childish argumentation, it is a symptom of a larger, more dangerous problem: to ignore the uncomfortable reality that until Hamas is defeated, there will be nor peace nor justice for Israelis and Palestinians alike.
But for some columnists, it seems, rhetoric is more important than human rights for all.
