“Hey you! You ain’t doing the Palestinians any favors.”

Over the last few weeks, I have been asked why I’m using my Facebook page to post so many articles about the newest of many Middle East Crisis. I have used my page or other people’s pages to post comments, retorts or rebuttals to the one geographical part of the world everyone and their mother seem confident in criticizing. I have usually saved opinions for friends or family members where we have heated discussions about what is happening in Israel and the Middle East at large.

This time things are different.

I have found myself vehemently motivated to begin using my voice to potentially counter some of the the anti-Israel, Anti-Semitic sentiment I am listening to or reading about, but more than that, I am finally ready to use my voice to rebut the silence of those who feel less inclined to “pick a side.”

What I am dying to ask those who protest, frankly, any move Israel makes in defense of its own, is that when you make your way to the downtown core of whatever city you happen to live in the world, and hold up your signs in protest or scream about the ‘brute force of the merciless Israelis,’ where are you when Hamas undisputedly uses small children as shields for a war itself provoked? Tell me because I will stand by your side.

Where are you protesting when this elected terrorist organization takes the billions of dollars in aid, one of the highest levels of aid in the world I might add, and squanders it for its own myopic reasons? Tell me because I will be there with sign held high.

When the Egyptian government offers to broker a cease fire and Hamas vehemently refuses, rather preferring to use the “poor Palestinian underdog” campaign to gain fervency around Jew slandering and hate mongering, where are your signs then? I, for one, haven’t seen them.

In fact, I haven’t heard much in defense of one of the only democratic countries in the entire region, a country that supports equal rights for both men and women, a country where children go to school and learn the same values that we purport to support here in Canada or in the United States, a country that holds elections, honors debate, mourns at funerals and celebrates at weddings. I am perplexed at the ranting and raving about what a bully Israel is, how uncivilized and inhumane it is with regards to the Palestinians and yet what really happens when all these anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian advocates preach and protest, is a stronger, even more dehumanizing, terrorist organization, one who doesn’t support the rights of women, the importance of education, the nature of democratic elections, the themes of life and liberty, gains strength and power and continues to use hate propaganda for its own campaign. I will even accept for a moment your right to dislike Israeli policy, your disdain for Israel as a country, maybe even your subconscious, laden Anti-Semitic values, but if you really care about the Palestinians or the larger Arab Middle Eastern world, why aren’t you protesting the governments that are dehumanizing their very own? Why aren’t you protesting the honor killings, the lack of equality between men and women, the propagandist textbooks that children are studying and memorizing every day in these very countries you seek to support, propaganda I might add that is predicated on destroying the very essence of who you are? Because when you start protesting that, I will again stand strong and steadfast by your side.

Until then, until the tired, same old adage directed at the one country in the world who seems to be authentically protecting the democratic values we pretend in the Western world to really believe in, changes, I say to you, ‘you ain’t doing the Palestinians any favors.’

But then again, perhaps the knee jerk reaction that results in further anti-Israel rhetoric isn’t about the Palestinians at all. Perhaps it’s really that most people in the world prefer a Jew in a gas chamber to the one with a gun in his hand, protecting his very right to exist.