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  Hamas isn’t content with firing rockets and launching attacks from mosques, schools, and neighborhoods. It is also well-known for using hospitals as cover for its military operations. Hamas placed a rocket cache next to the Jabaliya Indonesian Hospital.33 Hamas stored weapons in the Al Wafa Hospital34 and frequently fired on IDF troops from the hospital with light weapons, antitank missiles, and rockets.35 Al Wafa Hospital is close enough to the Israeli border that one can view Israel from it.36 A tunnel opening used by Hamas was located adjacent to the Al Wafa Hospital.37 As such, Israel determined that Al Wafa Hospital was not being used for its normal protected purpose and was instead being used as a military installation, making it a legitimate military target.38 An IDF video showing the targeting of the hospital reveals extensive secondary explosions after the initial Israeli air strike, vindicating Israel’s position that the hospital was used by Hamas as a weapons storage facility.

  Hamas turned the hospitals into legitimate military targets when it conducted military operations from or near them. As such, these “purely civilian buildings [were] occupied [and] used by [Hamas] and such objectives may be attacked.”39

  Hamas launched forty-one rockets at Israeli civilians from hospitals during the most recent Gaza conflict.40

  As explained earlier, Article 52 of the Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Convention recognizes that “a place of worship, a house or other dwelling or a school,” although generally protected, can sometimes be used to make “an effective contribution to military action,” and the law of war allows attacking it if such an object makes “an effective contribution to military action and whose total or partial destruction . . . offers a definite military advantage.”41

  Thus, because Hamas uses otherwise protected buildings and facilities to store weapons, to serve as command centers, or as locations from which to fire at Israeli forces, they become legitimate military targets. Such facilities make an “effective” contribution to Hamas’s military action and the destruction of which offers a “definite” military advantage to Israel. As such, by converting otherwise protected civilian buildings into legitimate military targets, Hamas violates the law of war.

  It’s difficult to list in a short chapter all of Hamas’s war crimes. Hamas violated the law of war not just in the locations of its weapons but also in the targets it chose. When Hamas launches rockets at civilian areas in the hope that they’ll kill someone—anyone—it violates the principles of necessity and distinction with every single rocket launch. They are indiscriminate. Indiscriminate attacks are those that are launched without consideration as to where harm will fall42—just like Hamas rocket attacks into southern Israel. Indiscriminate attacks are defined as

  (a) [T]hose which are not directed at a specific military objective; [and]

  (b) [T]hose which employ a method or means of combat which cannot be directed at a specific military objective[.]43

  Specifically, attacks are indiscriminate if they are “expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.”44 When Hamas fires rockets into Israel, not knowing where they will land, there is no “concrete and direct military advantage anticipated,” and, hence, such firing violates the law of war.

  Hamas fired more than 2,900 rockets into Israel since July 8, 2014, before the end of the most recent conflict.45 At least 280 rockets that were intended to land in Israel landed inside Gaza instead,46 meaning that Hamas is killing and injuring its own people. Taking into consideration the inaccuracy of Hamas’s rockets alone allows one to conclude that Hamas’s rocket attacks are indiscriminate because they are a “means of combat which cannot be directed at a specific military objective.”47 Yet Hamas openly boasts that its rockets “accurately target the homes of the Israelis and the Zionists.”48 As such, by its own admission, Hamas’s rocket fire is not directed at a “specific military target,” but rather at civilian homes, thereby establishing—without question—a war crime. Sadly, the U.N. and Red Cross have not denounced this criminal activity, thereby leaving Israel unprotected by the very governing bodies that guide and restrict Israel’s defense maneuvers.

  As such, Hamas should be held solely responsible for the vast majority of civilian casualties in the current conflict, and the U.N., Red Cross, and governments across the world should be loudly condemning Hamas’s violations. Instead, they criticize Israel. The Obama administration went so far as to call a lawful Israeli strike—a strike similar to those that American forces have made hundreds of times in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere—appalling and “disgraceful.”

  That is shameful and despicable. And it objectively aids terrorists.

  Hamas’s actions violate and mock the principles of the law of war, whereas Israel’s actions seek at all times to comply with the spirit and letter of the law. The U.N., the Red Cross, and even—on occasion—the Obama administration have lost their own moral authority and credibility by siding with Hamas and advancing the jihadists’ interests and narrative of war.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE STAKES COULD NOT BE HIGHER

  Let’s be crystal clear: If the U.N., Red Cross, and even the Obama administration win the legal argument, nations like Israel and the United States will no longer have a meaningful right to defend themselves. If direct warnings of an attack are insufficient, when can a nation defend itself against jihadists who are violating the laws of war? Such rules would give terrorists (who care nothing for the law) safe havens throughout cities and towns as they appropriate and strike from civilian buildings.

  It has never been the law that any fighting force, anywhere, enjoys a safe haven when it strikes its enemies. Jihadists, who systematically violate the laws of war, should be the least protected of all combatants. To provide them with any protection at all merely guarantees that civilians will be placed in the crosshairs again and again.

  The international left, the U.N., and the Red Cross understand this reality. They are not fools. One can only conclude that they are objectively siding with brutal war criminals, rendering them complicit (and in the case of the U.N., often explicit co-conspirators) in war crimes.

  Let’s take the example of the International Red Cross, a formerly respected international organization that loses its moral authority with every pro-Hamas statement. In a recent article, the Red Cross discussed an Israeli strike on a seven-story building in Gaza. In the article, the Red Cross made the following statement:

  The ICRC engages in discussion with “both parties” about the “rules of war.” We talk about principles such as “precautions in attack,” “legitimate targets,” “concrete military advantage” and “proportionality.” We remind everybody that if an attack is expected to cause “excessive incidental civilian casualties” in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated, it must be cancelled or suspended. We say loudly and clearly that in this war, as in any other, it is not acceptable that soldiers minimize their risks at the expense of civilians on the other side. We also say it is not acceptable to use civilians as human shields, in any conflict. We attend diplomatic conferences, we organize workshops, we “raise awareness” among belligerents to “minimize casualties.” How effective is all this?1

  Such statements are both self-serving and misleading—especially when it is clear that one side (Israel) is making herculean attempts to fully comply with the law of war and the other side (Hamas) violates the law as a matter of intentional, premeditated strategy. There is no moral equivalency here. Readily available evidence establishes beyond doubt that Hamas is routinely, openly, and notoriously violating the law of war. Yet Israel is singled out by the Red Cross, the U.N., and the Obama administration for actions it would have preferred to avoid altogether, but for the incessant attacks on Israeli soil from Hamas-controlled Gaza. The U.N. is going so far as to launch an investigation of Israel, the only party to the conflict th
at complies with the law of war.2

  The Red Cross and the U.N. consistently ignore or minimize the fact that Hamas built tunnels in civilian areas or stored weapons in hospitals and schools, or that the Israeli military warns civilians (the very civilians Hamas put in danger in the first place) through various means before attacking a military target. The paragraph quoted above does not state which party in the conflict is violating the “rules of war.” While Hamas spends millions of dollars to dig tunnels in civilian areas to attack Israel3 and puts Palestinian civilians (whom Hamas purports to represent) in the line of fire, Israel builds shelters for its people. While Hamas brags about its use of human shields,4 Israel makes conscious attempts to abide by the rules of war to protect civilians.

  In this book we have taken great pains to explain exactly how groups like Hamas and ISIS systematically violate the law of war in a depraved effort to create maximum human suffering. I would say that we have pulled no punches, graphically describing exactly how evil these enemies are. But though we want the reader to know the truth, the whole truth is simply too much for most people to bear. It is too graphic to print, to describe fully.

  Veterans of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—as well as the IDF’s veterans of conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon—will carry with them sights and experiences they can never forget. These memories will haunt them for a lifetime. They have witnessed evil as great as any the world has ever seen. They have witnessed evil acts from enemies that would re-create Auschwitz and Dachau if they could, from enemies who have openly declared war not just on Israel, but on the Jewish people themselves.

  The fact that millions across the world support those enemies over Israel and the United States, even going to great lengths to strengthen terrorists and weaken the IDF and the U.S. military, demonstrates that the spirit of murder and collaboration that haunted much of Europe under Nazi occupation has not disappeared. It has only morphed into the preening high-mindedness of leftist “thought.”

  History rightly looks at Neville Chamberlain and other appeasers of Hitler’s Germany as instruments of death and disaster. Today’s appeasers are not morally better and are indeed often much worse. After all, when Chamberlain appeased Hitler, Germany’s leader had not yet unleashed his murderous armies across Europe. When the U.N., Red Cross, and—sadly—even our own American president and State Department appease jihad, they do so with eyes wide open, fully aware of the evil they empower.

  They should hang their heads in shame.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  OPPOSE, DON’T APPEASE

  THE WAY FORWARD AGAINST JIHAD

  How many times do we have to learn the same lessons? Evil cannot be appeased, and the effort to do so leads invariably to death and heartbreak.

  Don’t believe me? Ask the Jewish people.

  The history of World War II is by now too well known to repeat. A Europe that was desperate to avoid repeating the horrors of World War I (then known as the Great War and the War to end all Wars) refused to believe that Hitler presented an existential threat to peace and democracy, preferring to believe he could be negotiated with, boxed in, and contained.

  Right the historical wrongs, grant him the territorial gains he demanded, and there would be “peace in our time.” But instead of the promised peace, there was death on a scale the world had never seen.

  And no one suffered more than the Jews.

  Fast-forward just a few years to 1948. The world, shocked by the Holocaust, finally facilitated the immigration of an ever-larger number of Jews to their ancestral homeland, Israel. There the Jewish people could carve out their own state, protect themselves from genocide, and—finally—have a land to call home.

  But then the world washed its hands of the problem, largely leaving the Jews of Israel to fend for themselves when, just three years after the end of World War II, Arab armies massed to destroy the brand-new Jewish state. As the young Israeli state fought armies equipped with modern weapons with the scraps they could beg for, borrow, and steal, the Arab countries launched a systematic and massive ethnic cleansing of Jews within their borders:

  It is, sadly, a little-known fact that almost a million Jews lived in Arab countries when Israel declared independence in 1948. Now, there are less than 10,000. To take a few examples, 250,000 lived in Morocco, 140,000 in Iraq, 80,000 in Egypt, 140,000 in Algeria, and roughly 50,000 in Yemen. But now? 3,000 in Morocco, 100 in Iraq, 100 in Egypt, none in Algeria, and only a few hundred in Yemen. This [was] ethnic cleansing on a grand scale.1

  How did this happen? The typical way:

  Jews were shot, homes were burned (sometimes in front of cheering crowds), and governments confiscated their property. Anti-Semitic mobs surged through streets, and the Jews fled, often airlifted to Israel as they left the homes of their fathers (and their fathers’ fathers) behind.2

  A world weary of war refused to confront jihadists and Arab nationalists who had not yet begun to fight. Only Israel’s fierce resolve prevented yet another genocide, a genocide only three years after the Holocaust—only three years after the world promised “never again.”

  In the United States we thankfully don’t have a history of genocide, but we do have a recent history of failed appeasement.

  During Bill Clinton’s presidency, the Palestinian terrorist Yasser Arafat was invited to spend more time in the White House than any other foreign leader—thirteen invitations.3 Clinton was dead set on helping the Israelis and Palestinians achieve a lasting peace. He pushed the Israelis to grant ever-greater concessions until the Israelis were willing to grant the Palestinians up to 98 percent of all the territory they requested.

  And what was the Palestinian response? They walked away from the bargaining table and launched the wave of suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks known as the Second Intifada.

  And what of Osama bin Laden? Even while America was granting concessions to Palestinians—and thereby theoretically easing the conditions that provided much of the pretext for Muslim terror—bin Laden was bombing U.S. embassies in Africa, almost sank the USS Cole in Yemen, and was well into the planning stages of the catastrophic attacks of September 11, 2001.

  After President George W. Bush ordered U.S. forces to invade Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003, respectively, bringing American troops into direct ground combat with jihadists half a world away, many Americans quickly forgot the recent past and blamed American acts of self-defense for “inflaming” jihad.

  One of those Americans was Barack Obama.

  Soon after his election, Obama traveled to Cairo, Egypt, where he delivered a now-infamous speech that signaled America’s massive policy shifts. The United States pulled entirely out of Iraq despite the pleas of “all the major Iraqi parties.”4

  In Egypt, the United States actually backed the Muslim Brotherhood government, going so far as agreeing to give it advanced F-16 fighters and M1 Abrams main battle tanks, even as the Muslim Brotherhood government was violating its peace treaty with Israel and persecuting Egypt’s ancient Coptic Christian community. The Obama administration continued supporting the Brotherhood, even when it stood aside and allowed jihadists to storm the American embassy, raising the black flag of jihad over an American diplomatic facility.

  In Libya, the United States persuaded its allies to come to the aid of a motley group of rebels, including jihadists. Then many of these same jihadists promptly turned their anger on the United States, attacking our diplomatic compound in Benghazi the afternoon and evening of September 11, 2012—killing the American ambassador and three more brave Americans.

  Compounding this disaster, the administration had steadfastly refused to reinforce the American security presence in spite of a deteriorating security situation, afraid that it would anger the local population. This naïve and foolish administration decision cost American lives.

  During the most recent conflict between Hamas and Israel, the administration consistently rebuffed both Israel and Egypt, preferring instead to advance proposals that empo
wered Hamas’s most staunch allies—Qatar and Turkey. This action not only undermined Israel but also—ironically enough—undermined Egypt as well as every other Palestinian group that had chosen not to join the latest round of fighting.

  In other words, the Obama administration rewarded Hamas for its terrorist violence.

  Even when the crisis in Iraq became so grave that tens of thousands of Christians and Yazidis faced imminent massacre, the Obama administration’s military response was feeble. It consisted of pinprick attacks combined with a promise that ISIS had nothing to fear over the long run from the United States. The Obama administration emphatically emphasized, “This is not the authorization of a broad-based counterterrorism campaign against [ISIS].”5

  And as it made these declarations, it still refused to provide our Kurdish allies with the heavy weapons they needed to repel an ISIS invasion.

  * * *

  In other words, the Obama administration rewarded Hamas for its terrorist violence.

  * * *

  Again and again, President Obama appeased jihadists.

  In the meantime, the jihadists only grew stronger and more dangerous, contemptuous of the United States.

  But when it comes to jihad, America must oppose, not appease.

  How can it oppose jihad? Does it necessarily have to engage in indefinite ground combat in the Middle East? Do we confront even more frustrating “nation building”?

  At this time, we do not believe large-scale ground combat is necessary to battle the latest wave of jihad. In Iraq, we have willing allies, much stronger allies than we had at the time of the 2003 invasion. And Israel has more than enough military strength to repel attacks on its homeland; it needs only American support to resist crushing international pressure to stand down in the face of jihad, pressure that always allows jihadists to ultimately live to fight another day.