Hamas, Hiroshima, and Sleeping Giants

By Investor's Business Daily

Threats: As a somber anniversary nears, "proportional response" has replaced "victory" in the lexicon of war. But no nation facing an existential threat should apologize for winning or for saving the lives of its own people.

The other day Navi Pillay, the United Nations' high commissioner for human rights, after a meeting of the U.N.'s Geneva-based Human Rights Council, said that Israel, despite dropping leaflets, dummy bombs and even sending text messages and using social media to warn citizens in Gaza, was not doing enough to protect civilians — and "international law has been violated, in a manner that could amount to war crimes."

Among a litany of Israeli sins, Pillay even said that Israel's refusal to share its Iron Dome missile-defense technology with Gaza's "governing authority," otherwise known as the terrorist group Hamas, constituted a war crime, since it meant that Israeli citizens weren't dying in proportional numbers.

"No such protection has been provided to Gazans against the shelling," she said.

Pillay has in the past condemned the ongoing mass killings in Syria, South Sudan, North Korea, China, Pakistan, Sudan and Iran, all of which have served or are currently serving on the Orwellian-named council. And while she did condemn Hamas for using civilian areas and buildings to launch rockets at Israel and for storing 20 rockets at a school in Gaza operated by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), Pillay routinely reserves her harshest criticisms for Israel.

In 2008, for instance, she accused Israel of "egregious war crimes" merely for defending itself against Hamas rockets.

UNRWA, in a statement, says it found the weapons in "the course of the regular inspection of its premises," adding that the school was vacant.

But, as a senior Israeli official told the Times of Israel, it goes a bit beyond that. "The rockets were passed on to the government authorities in Gaza, which is Hamas," the official said. "In other words, UNRWA handed to Hamas rockets that could well be shot at Israel."

This situation brings back memories on how UNIFIL, the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon, stood by for years, silently watching Hezbollah import its missiles and other weapon and dig its bunkers, all in preparation for using Lebanon and its people as human shields in the terrorist group's unprovoked attack on Israel.

We find the notion that Israel is guilty of war crimes for successfully defending itself a tad obscene. Israel is guilty only of winning a battle started by a group that has annihilation of Israel in its charter.

The same view is shared by Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood, ISIL and, of course, the patron of them all, Iran. Iran quietly builds a nuclear bomb to make the job quicker and easier.

On the 59th anniversaries of Hiroshima (Aug. 6) and Nagasaki (Aug. 9), we are reminded of how others have tried to lay a similar guilt trip on us. In both cities, civilians died in unprecedented numbers.

This was a great tragedy. But the bombings were the end result of murderous tyrants' seeking to extinguish freedom and liberty from the world, not unlike the campaign being waged by Islamists across the Middle East.

We were fighting for our survival as a nation then every bit as much as Israel is today. Our critics remember the devastating bombings that won World War II but not the world that would have existed had we lost.

As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said, "If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence. If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel."

This is the reality that Israel faces: an implacable enemy sworn to its destruction.

Hamas now is merely experiencing the dread expressed by Japanese Fleet Admiral Yamato's prophecy after Dec. 7: "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve."

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