END THE WAR? NOPE! ACTIVISTS WANT MORE DEAD

If your principles are killing the very people you claim to be advocating for, maybe water down the wine.

If you cared whether people live or die, you’d shut your O-hole.

How do you tell a peacemaker from a warmonger?

No, it’s not a joke. Far from it.

If someone is throwing all their energies into hysterically haranguing Israel for its war against Hamas, but the same people are absolutely silent on the one thing that could end the war today — the surrender of Hamas — there’s your answer.

This war could end now. If Hamas turned over the hostages and surrendered, Israel would agree to a ceasefire, and the rebuilding of Gaza could begin, a new day of peace and opportunity for Palestinians and Israelis could start.

With words, activists chant “Ceasefire” but with their every action, they chant “More dead Palestinians!”

Among the seemingly millions of Canadians, Swedes, Brazilians and South Africans marching doggedly against this war, surely a couple or maybe a dozen, somewhere, have clued into this basic truth.

That almost no one seems to have made the connection between Hamas surrendering and this war ending — or that no one seems to care — tells us a lot about the sort of people marching under the banner of “peace.”

They are advocates for peace like fast food chains are advocates of childhood health. They purvey a product that is delicious and addictive but ultimately deadly. The saddest part is that it is Palestinians who are dying for overseas activists’ bad choices.

Now, let’s be honest. No matter how extreme the protestors in places like Montreal, no matter how massive and outraged the gatherings of anti-Israel militants, their impacts on overseas events range somewhere from minimal to nil. Israelis don’t care whether a purple-haired girl with facepaint gives herself an aneurism screaming about an imaginary “genocide.”

What the unhappy campers and assorted rage-binging hordes don’t understand is that Israel was created precisely to protect the Jewish people from mobs like them. 

Their noisy stridency only convinces Israelis, Jews and their allies that Israel needs to exist and remain militarily unchallengeable if they and their crazed, overwrought obsessions are any hint of what the future of the non-Jewish world looks like.

What should concern them — and anyone who genuinely cares about the lives and well-being of Palestinians — is less that their activism entrenches Zionists in our certainty that Israel must remain strong and more that their activism is killing Palestinians.

Principles are lovely — in principle. But if your principles are killing the very people you claim to be advocating for, maybe water down the wine.

Sure. Condemn Israel (despite the counterintuitive impacts it has on Zionists like me). But if doubling down on your dedication to a Hamas victory — a victory that is never going to happen — at the cost of continued war and thousands more Palestinian dead, well, who is the peacemaker and who is the warmonger?

I’ve been an activist all my life and doing something is always better than doing nothing — even when the positive impact is seemingly negligible. Except when doing something harms, rather than helps, the cause we claim to support. This is especially true when that “cause” is the lives of civilians.

If those pup tent protestors suddenly changed tack and start calling for Hamas to surrender, would it change things for Israelis or Palestinians? Probably not a whit.

Here’s what it would do …

It would convince reasonable people that these activists actually care whether Palestinians and Israelis live or die.

It would demonstrate that Palestinians and Israelis are actual human beings in the eyes of the activists, not just bodies to be counted up and waved in a ghoulish competition in which the side with the most dead wins moral (if not actual) victory.

It would send a message to everyone watching — the people among whom these activists live, study and work — that they are not antisemitic, bloodthirsty, morally bankrupt, historically illiterate morons who can’t tell right from wrong.

But none of this matters, apparently.

Because this is not about saving the lives of Palestinians. It is, in the minds of most activists, about something larger and more important: Being right. Proving Israelis to be evil. Demonstrating 100% purity to a cause — even if that purity kills the people they ostensibly support.

You now know how to tell a warmonger from a peace activist. Depending on the social media silos and other echo chambers you live in, one can often be depicted as the other. Use this information wisely. And try to be on the right side.