A major event with potentially massive repercussions took place on Sunday.
Ismail Haniya, the leader of Hamas, traveled to Lebanon for the first time in 30 years to meet with Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah. The purpose of their meeting was to discuss their joint goal to destroy Israel. This is not mere conjecture. Al-Manar, Hezbollah’s television station, reported that the two leaders reaffirmed their “axis of resistance” against Israel.
Why don’t you know that two well-armed terrorist organizations met to coordinate their effort to gang up on the one democracy in the Middle East and the only Jewish state in the world?
Because barely any major international news outlets outside of the Jewish and Israeli press even bothered to mention it. News editors who rush to condemn Israel for any missteps when confronting its enemies should be asking themselves why they are not making sure to inform their audiences about this tangible threat to Israel’s very survival.
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Countless media outlets failed to report that Haniya was met by hundreds of Palestinians who came from the many refugee camps in southern Lebanon to see him. He declared, “Not long ago, our rockets only reached close to the Gaza border. Today the resistance in Gaza possesses rockets that can reach Tel Aviv and beyond Tel Aviv.”
Had the media actually reported the story, they would have needed to note that Hamas and Hezbollah have made their mission to destroy Israel and kill Jews very clear in their founding documents.
The Hamas charter includes the following declarations:
- Article 6: “The Islamic Resistance Movement is a distinguished Palestinian movement, whose allegiance is to Allah, and whose way of life is Islam. It strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine.”
- Article 7: “The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight Jews and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: ‘O Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.”
- Article 13: “Palestine is an Islamic land… Since this is the case, the Liberation of Palestine is an individual duty for every Muslim wherever he may be…There is no solution for the Palestinian problem except by Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are but a waste of time, an exercise in futility.”
Hezbollah’s founding manifesto states “our struggle will end only when this entity [Israel] is obliterated. We recognize no treaty with it, no ceasefire, and no peace agreements.”
Hezbollah leader Nasrallah says openly that “There is no solution to the conflict in this region except with the disappearance of Israel” and that he is against any peace agreements with Israel. Just this past May he gave a public address in which he called Israel a “cancerous tumor” and proclaimed that “Palestine from river to sea must be liberated” and “Israel must be destroyed.”
Nasrallah is also known for making outright antisemitic statements like his speech on September 28, 2001 in which he said, “What do the Jews want? They want security and money…If you look all over the world, you will find no one more miserly or greedy than they are.”
Two factors make the Hamas-Hezbollah alliance extremely disturbing:
- Hezbollah is Shia Muslim and Hamas is Sunni. The two have been in conflict since they disputed who should succeed Muhammed following his death in 632 CE. Much blood has been shed between the two sides over the centuries and has ravaged the Middle East in recent decades. The fact that Hamas and Hezbollah are willing to put centuries of conflict aside in order to gang up on Israel, demonstrates the degree of their commitment to this cause.
- Hezbollah is estimated to possess 150,000 rockets including hundreds of Zetzal-2 missiles that can reach anywhere in Israel. Their arsenal includes precision guided missiles and their army includes 45,000 well trained soldiers.
Hamas has approximately 6,000 rockets including the Fajr and J-80 which travel 100 kilometers, the R-160 with a range of 120 kilometers and the M-302 which can reach 200 kilometers – essentially covering all of Israel. They have 30,000 well trained soldiers and 7,000 reserves in case of emergency.
A coordinated missile strike against Israel from Hamas in the south and Hezbollah in the north would be catastrophic for Israel. And now their leaders have connected to form an axis against Israel.
The consequences of this meeting could be severe. And the decision of countless media outlets to allow the public to be entirely uninformed of its occurrence demonstrates a massive failure to discharge their journalistic duties.
Featured image: Wikimedia commons
