In response to a link on Facebook, there was posted a link to a site called If Americans Knew, the goal of which is "to provide full and accurate information" about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, which the site describes as "one of the world's major sources of instability."
A cursory glance through the site shows so much distortion that it is difficult to know where to begin.
I shall begin with "the children", because liberals so often justify by saying they are being committed for "the children".
The website offers this graphic on the front page, along with a link to supporting information:
What they don't tell you is that it is deliberate policy of Palestinian-based terrorist groups to maximize suffering on behalf of innocent Palestinians in order to have data to support a propaganda campaign against Israel.
For example, an excerpt from statements made by PA Workers' Union Official Bassam Zakarneh indicates that Hamas leaders hid in tunnels and deliberately launched rockets from a position with a great many children and elderly (video clip/transcript):
After the [UN discussion of the Goldstone Report] was postponed, voices criticized us: "Because of you, the blood of 1,400 martyrs was spilt in vain." This was heard especially from the mouthpieces of the Hamas movement, from the same leaders who used these martyrs as sandbags, while they hid in tunnels. They would place a missile, cover it with a tent, amid buildings with 200 children and old people, and they would launch the missile and hide.
This tactic presents Israeli forces with a dilemma: do nothing, and innocent Israelis die, or suppress the rocket fire, and innocent Arabs die. Either way, the terrorists calling the shots are hidden in a safe place; either way, the terrorists either kill Israelis or they get something they can use as propaganda, knowing that their useful dupes in the West will spread the statistics without looking further into the matter.
And, this is not an isolated incident. From A Gaza War Full of Traps and Trickery, January 10, 2009 (see original for links which I did not reproduce):
Hamas, with training from Iran and Hezbollah, has used the last two years to turn Gaza into a deadly maze of tunnels, booby traps and sophisticated roadside bombs. Weapons are hidden in mosques, schoolyards and civilian houses, and the leadership's war room is a bunker beneath Gaza's largest hospital, Israeli intelligence officials say.
[snip]
Interviews last week with senior Israeli intelligence and military officers, both active and retired, as well as with military experts and residents of Gaza itself, made it clear that the battle, waged among civilians and between enemies who had long prepared for this fight, is now a slow, nasty business of asymmetrical urban warfare. Gaza's civilians, who cannot flee because the borders are closed, are "the meat in the sandwich," as one United Nations worker said, requesting anonymity.
Needless to say, the Israelis will get the blame for not allowing the civilians to leave. But, the real problem is that Gazans live under the domination of a terrorist thugocracy; unless and until they overthrow their terrorist government, Gazans will continue to be the meat in the sandwich.
Israeli officials confirm that they are trying to protect their troops; however, within the bounds of that, they try to minimize civilian casualties among Gazans, but this is difficult, since the terrorists use Gazan civilians as human sheilds.
Skipping down in the article:
But the most important strategic decision the Israelis have made so far, according to senior military officers and analysts, is to approach their incursion as a war, not a police operation.
Civilians are warned by leaflets, loudspeakers and telephone calls to evacuate battle areas. But troops are instructed to protect themselves first and civilians second.
[snip]
Today, he said, "the mind-set from top to bottom is fight and fight cruel; this is a war, not another pinpoint operation."
Israeli officials say that they are obeying the rules of war and trying hard not to hurt noncombatants but that Hamas is using civilians as human shields in the expectation that Israel will try to avoid killing them.
Israeli press officers call the tactics of Hamas cynical, illegal and inhumane; even Israel's critics agree that Hamas's regular use of rockets to fire at civilians in Israel, and its use of civilians as shields in Gaza, are also violations of the rules of war. Israeli military men and analysts say that its urban guerrilla tactics, including the widespread use of civilian structures and tunnels, are deliberate and come from the Iranian Army's tactical training and the lessons of the 2006 war between Israel and Iranian-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Violation of the Law of Armed Conflict is very deliberate policy on the part of Hamas terrorist leadership.
What else is left out of the story is that, in addition to using children and non-combatants as human shields to maximize casualties among the civilian population and thus have something for which to condemn Israel, the terrorists also train children beginning at a very early age for jihad against Israel; this, too, is a clear violation of the Law of Armed Conflict.
When they talk about "children", too many international sources refer to anyone under the age of 18. That is a trick the gun control crowd uses in the US: they decry gun deaths of children, not acknowledging that most of these are 16- and 17-year-olds killing each other in gang-related activity. Dig deeper; go to the little kids who are being raised to hate infidels and who are being taught to be suicide bombers throughout the Islamic world. Don't just take your information from one source; do your own research.
It is a question of the terrorist regimes that indoctrinate their people like this, and that kill those who oppose such extreme views, maintaining themselves in power by terrorizing their own people, so they can terrorize their neighbors in Israel.
There can be no peace with such a regime.
Israel is a democracy that is in a perpetual state of war or near-war, constantly having to defend itself or be ready to defend itself against neighbors who would rather die destroying Israel than have peace with a nation that they have claimed has no right to exist.
Depending on how you define "Arab", the Arabs have anywhere from a dozen to nearly two dozen countries in the world; Arabs in Palestine have had their own country, the Kingdom of Jordan, since before Israel existed. The Jewish people have only one country: Israel - and it is very small.
Yet, the regime that controls "Palestine" and claims to want self-determination in fact indoctrinates its people to seek death fighting Israel rather than to live in peace; these terrorists cynically maximize casualties among their own people for propaganda victories.
And, Westerners soak up terrorist propaganda and regurgitate it as if it were true.
There can be no peace with such people, other than the peace that is imposed after a military victory so decisive that the terrorist regimes dare not rise up while the generation is still alive that lived through the defeat.
Israeli military power and the sound, consistent defeat of aggressor nations that have attacked Israel is what brings some semblance of peace to a region that is involved in wars that often have nothing to do with Israel (Iraq/Kuwait, Egypt/Yemen, Libya/Chad, Iran/Iraq).
