The world media, the United Nations, the European Union and the usual left-wing organizations instantly and predictably shrieked their condemnation of “Israel’s attack on Doha, the capital of Qatar.”
Midway through the howls we learn it was actually an attack on “Hamas headquarters,” not on the entire city.
Nor did the attack even destroy the small two-story building that housed the headquarters. Instead, Israel aimed its guided missile at rooms on the ground floor to “mark paid” to the Palestinian Arab leaders who, in that same place, planned the October 7, 2023, savage attack on Israeli civilians.
These terrorist leaders, along with their preening host--the devious Emir of Qatar—have deliberately dragged out a hostage nightmare for two years, allowing the Hamas kidnappers (feted by the deluded world as “resistance fighters”) to wrap their hands around the necks of their youngest hostages and, for their sick and sadistic pleasure, strangle Israeli babies to death.
People unaffected by antisemitism, who do not wish for Iran and its terrorist proxies to “wipe the Zionist entity off the map”; people of true moral character, whose egos do not have to be propped up by hating Jews—these people do not condemn the attack in Doha. Instead of wondering why such a lethal event had to happen, they wonder why it took so long to do it.
In another time, when similar murderers like Hamas spread even worse terror throughout the world, when the Nazis conquered one nation after another in an enfeebled Europe and slaughtered Jews, the German justice inspector Friedrich Kellner wrote in his diary in August 1942 of the listless response by America and the United Kingdom:
“After three years of war, the Allies are only now beginning serious efforts to win. No wonder Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels treats them with scorn and disdain. They keep talking about ‘opening a second front’ against Germany. Instead of talking they need to attack. And attack again. If the Allies are not led only by incapable people, they will most certainly beat the terrorist Germans and recover their nations. And then, after their victory, they no doubt will say, 'We were jackasses not to have done this sooner!'"
Israel prefers diplomacy and often holds back until the last moment to defend themselves.
But they are beset by numerous terror groups: the Palestine Liberation Organization, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Fatah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad —and Palestinian allies like Hezbollah and the Houthis in Yemen. All of them are supplied and driven by the Ayatollah in Iran and Qatari money.
Thoroughly prepared by their intelligence agencies (Mossad and Shin Bet), Israel’s prime ministers and chiefs of the Israel Defense Forces have successfully targeted leaders of these groups--and never more so than these past two years when Israel eliminated the entire leaderships of Hezbollah and Hamas and most recently the Houthis.
With a poke in the eye to the Ayatollah, Israel assassinated Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas political leader, when Haniyeh was in Tehran for the inauguration of Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian.
Israel had a great deal of practice to accomplish the astonishing defeats of so many enemies these past two years. Here are but a few that occurred in many places besides Doha:
Ali Hassan Salamen (PLO), mastermind of the Munich Olympics massacre: assassinated by a car bomb in Beirut, 1979.
Zuheir Mohsen (PLO), cross border raids from Syria: shot outside a casino in Cannes, France, 1979.
Khalil al-Wazir (Fatah), Yasser Arafat’s deputy responsible for 1978 bus hijacking: killed by Israeli commandos in Tunisia, 1988.
Atef Bseiso (PLO), intelligence chief: shot to death in Paris, 1992.
Fathi Shaqaqi (Islamic Jihad), suicide bombing campaign: killed while leaving a hotel in Malta, 1995.
And a host of Hamas terrorists killed in Gaza, among them: Yahya Ayyash (“The Engineer”), killed by an explosive device hidden in a mobile phone, 1996; and Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, Hamas co-founder and spiritual leader; killed by a helicopter missile strike outside a mosque, 2004.
If the deaths of each of these people, like those hopefully killed in the missile strike on Hamas headquarters in Qatar, were the only way a small Jewish nation--surrounded by unwelcoming and even murderous neighbors--could survive these past 77 years, then let the world’s antisemites howl until they run out of breath.
And let them reflect on this observation by Friedrich Kellner when the Hamas of his time kept assailing the Jewish people:
"This cruel, despicable, and sadistic treatment against the Jews that has lasted now several years—with its final goal of extermination—is the biggest stain on the honor of our country."
Robert Scott Kellneris a U.S. Navy veteran and retired English professor. Kellner taught at the University of Massachusetts and Texas A&M University. The grandson of German justice inspector and diarist Friedrich Kellner, he published his grandfather's anti-Nazi diary in its original language in Germany in 2011 and is the editor and translator of the English edition, My Opposition: The Diary of Friedrich Kellner--A German against the Third Reich, Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom, 2020.