Hypocrisy Is Thy Name, Condemning Israel Thy Game

Victor Davis Hanson, historian with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, has again hit the nail right on in comparing the Gaza Strip versus Cyprus (“Occupation hypocrisy: Gaza vs. Cyprus,” Washington Times, Aug. 13, 2014).

Hanson points out how the West yawns in uninterest about Turkey’s brutal occupation of the northern portion of the Mediterranean island of Cyprus since 1974 – while it’s continuously agitated over Israel’s self-defense measures against deadly threats like that from Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists in Gaza:

Turkish troops still control nearly 40 percent of the island — the most fertile and formerly the richest portion. Some 200,000 Greek refugees never returned home after being expelled from their homes and farms in Northern Cyprus … Thousands of settlers were shipped in by the Turkish government to occupy former Greek villages and to change Cypriot demography. … Why, then, is the world not outraged at an occupied Cyprus the way it is at, say, Israel?

[…]

Greeks in Cyprus and mainland Greece together number less than 13 million people. That is far less than the roughly 300 million Arabic speakers, many from homelands that export oil, who support the Palestinians.

No European journalist fears that Greek terrorists will track him down should he write something critical of the Greek Cypriot cause. Greek Cypriots would not bully a journalist in their midst for broadcasting a critical report the way Hamas surely would to any candid reporter in Gaza.

[…]

We see such hypocrisy when the West stays silent while Muslims butcher each other by the thousands in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya and Syria. Only when a Westernized country like Israel inflicts far less injury [in response to thousands of terrorist mortar and rocket attacks and infiltration tunnels] to Muslims does the West become irate.

[…]

Israel is inordinately condemned for what it supposedly does because its friends are few, its population is tiny, and its adversaries beyond Gaza numerous, dangerous and often powerful.

And, of course, because it is Jewish.

In other words, as Hanson notes, aggression and its continuing consequences on the part of Turkey, a large Muslim country with a geographic and demographic foothold in Europe, barely rates comment from Western countries. This is so — even when the object of Turkish aggression is a European state, Greece. But Israel’s invasion against Islamic terrorists in the Gaza Strip provokes criticism from the United States, a “war crimes” investigation by the United Nations, a threat to withhold future arms shipments by the United Kingdom and a general wave of hatred including mob attacks on French synagogues and beatings of individual Jews in several European countries.

If hypocrisy were a coin, its two sides would be anti-Zionism and antisemitism.