Following our July 11 alert regarding Gwynne Dyer’s Hill Times column which accused Israel of carrying out recent counter-terrorism operations in Jenin, not to combat armed Palestinian terror groups who seek to murder Israeli civilians, but instead to distract the world from the Jewish State’s alleged efforts to continue “seizing ever more Palestinian land,” one of our subscriber’s, Larry Shapiro, was published in The Hill Times on July 19 countering Dyer’s false anti-Israel claims and commenting on the Israel Defense Forces’ remarkable achievements by eliminating only terrorists & combatants and by completely avoiding any civilian fatalities in the two-day operation.
Read the letter in full by clicking here or see immediately below:
Dyer wrong about Israel’s ‘malice,’ and should look inward, says Calgary reader
Re: “Israel is ‘mowing the lawn’ again, but with malice aforethought,” (The Hill Times, July 6). Israel’s military operation in Jenin resulted in not a single civilian casualty. According to the United Kingdom’s former military commander in Afghanistan Col. Richard Kemp, who is an observer of Israel’s military actions, the complete avoidance of civilian fatalities over two days in Jenin constitutes a “remarkable achievement by the IDF,” which is “probably unprecedented in modern warfare.”
So where is the malice Gwynne Dyer ascribes to Israel? Here’s the malice: it is in Dyer’s heart against the Jewish state. Decades of anti-Israel columns attest to this bias.
Why did Israel invade Jenin and eliminate universally designated terrorist group Islamic Jihad’s (IJ) weapons-storage facilities? Because they were financed and supplied by Iran that uses IJ and Hamas as surrogates in its war against Israel.
If Dyer has an ounce of journalistic integrity he should know that most of the terrorists fled, and it was not in Israel’s battle plans to pursue them.
Israel was not mowing the lawn, it was removing the tumours that are the Iranian incursion into the West Bank. It’s sad that Israel’s successful defence manoeuvres are looked on in some quarters as malicious attacks on innocent civilians. The Hill Times is not doing anyone any favours by enabling this kind of propaganda.
Larry Shapiro is an HRC subscriber from Calgary, Alberta
