Any well meaning person who has been following what I write through the years knows that these are my views.
Whether right or wrong, it is my opinion. No one else’s.
This is actually what kept me as the only full time columnist ever in #Cyprus for twenty years, until I decided it was time to move on.
I have also been writing about #Israel and #antisemitism for as long as I can remember, more cautiously in the past — and quite wrongfully so. So many years of demonisation in Cyprus, imposed a fear which, thankfully, many of us shed long ago.
There is no way to handle mud in such quantities. There is no logical response to all those with whom I shared my leftist youth and many others, when they read entire texts I have written and all they have to say is that you are «an agent» and get paid for writing an opinion they don’t like.
Or when their brain, stuck in Soviet «Socialism» or whatever other deficiencies they may have, blocks in front of another opinion.
There is no room in me, nor interest in even responding, when people who are vocal about everything else now keep quiet or, even, worse start to say «yes, but…» or talk about «peace» (sic) in the aftermath of the slaughter of over a thousand people.
There is no point to respond when people say that you support the murder of children (!) in order to insult you and make you look inhuman.
I have never advocated such things and I certainly do not do so today. The difference between us and them is that while they were indifferent to the daily murders of innocent people in Israel and remained amazingly uninformed not only about history but also about the present, so much so that they believed the fairy tales about children being killed while they were actually Islamists trying to kill civilians, I took the time to see what was going on. Like many others in Cyprus now.
Thankfully.
Anyone who has a better plan for what Israel should have done with Hamas after the massacre so that no children (used as human shields) in Gaza were killed, should tell us.
No one talks to terrorists who are using the Palestinians, even that 30% more or less in Gaza who doesn’t support them, yes. Because Hamas is not in power by accident.
During the previous unprovoked missile attack on Israel, those of us who dared to say that it was unthinkable to allow that to happen, got tons of mud.
Those of you who stood by the lies of the Islamists of Hamas and their mentors in Iran and in Turkey should have had no doubt after the new unthinkable massacre, on what you then did and what you are still doing.
At least most of you.
Anyway. This text has something very simple to say. I have no issue with ordinary Palestinians other than that, pretty much like extremists in Israel, they have unfortunately proven that they do not want peace.
Five times they have been given a state, five times they have rejected it. They only thing most of them want is to destroy up Israel. And they have been saying it all along. But many of you chose not to listen.
However, whether they like it or not, whether you like it or not, Israel will live. It survived wars that simple logic dictated it would have lost in days and it will survive now that it grew stronger.
And the Palestinians instead of teaching their children from kindergarten that the purpose of their coming into the world is to slaughter the Jews and take «back» the legally recognised territories of Israel, instead of invoking Allah forgetting that the Qur’an itself tells Muslims that this land belongs to the Jews, instead of refusing to admit that the new war of annihilation of the Jews that they again started also ends in their own defeat, should come to terms with a simple fact: That until the 1960s when the Eastern Bloc instructed them to accept the term «Palestinians» for its own reasons (I will write about this shortly and with all the evidence once again) this term was only accepted by those Jews who had already returned to the land of their ancestors.
In fact, Jerusalem already had a Jewish majority based on the British census decades before Israel. The Arabs themselves admitted it. It’s all written by me.
So instead of their elite nibbling away at the massive foreign aid given to them — to no good if one sees where it ends up and what it leads to — and themselves dreaming of the destruction of Israel and killing the Jews who lived there for two millennia before the lands were taken over during Arab invasions, they should sit down and take a serious look at peace.
Golda Meir once said wisely: «Peace will only come when the Palestinians learn to love their children more than they hate us.»
Until then, and for as long as we live, yes we will stand by Israel, a legitimate and recognised democracy which many of you refuse to learn about and absurdly despise. A country built and maintained on the sacrifice of tens of thousands of people, where ten million people live in a populated area smaller than Cyprus.
A country that is a pioneer in all areas, a model for those who want to see it, if they feel like taking off their Soviet and other blinders and their ignorance.
Know this: it is mud that makes us stronger and makes us more stubborn. The opinion of those of you who either live in prejudice and are now sweet-talking the games played by Russia, Iran and the axis they are forming in the Middle East out of your sick anti-Westernism or for any other reason, is none of my business, is none of our business, just as it is none of Israel’s business.
You can call us all you want.
I mean, personally, all those years of making a living out of writing my opinion and saying it on radio I couldn’t give a damn about anyone’s hang-ups and demands about what I would write and how I would write it.
Imagine how easy it is now!
Unfortunately we live in a country where 1,000 plus people can be slaughtered by terrorists right next to us and most of the people are concerned because in one text you said something their political correctness couldn’t stand.
Being comme il faut and keeping equal and socially accept distance from what happens, are all traits of a small society that is to a large extend uninformed by choice, shallow, hypocritical but also attached to the clichés instead of the substance. A society like ours. And that is especially true here on social media.
But all this is a matter of choice.
So say it any way you want. Some things are infinitely more serious than your condescension and hypocrisy. And those things can withstand the insults, the mockery and the smears.
So yes, we stand and will stand with Israel.
And with the people, yes. All of them, Jews and Arabs as long as the support peace and respect each others’ rights.
For as much as many people’s minds can’t handle it, Jews are human too. All evil starts from anti-Semitism, overt or subliminal in everyone’s minds. This is what deprives them of that status.
I will not take any of that. Many will not take any of that.
Whether you like it or not.
I could tell you more clearly what you can do with you rejection and your prejudice. But let’s keep it kosher.
Oh and something else. Many of you send me articles of the Haaretz. I (politically) don’t agree with Haaretz most of the times and neither does the majority of Israel, hence the very low circulation of Israel’s most historic newspaper nowadays.
They moved extremely to the left and just like their like-minded people and their comrades everywhere they have a totally different, absolutely utopian in my understanding, view of things.
But you know what? That exactly IS Israel. A newspaper supporting Palestinians more than Israelis and demonstrators going around with Palestinian flags in Tel Aviv.
That is the level of a democracy many here never bother to see.
And it’s lightyears ahead of our democracy!
עם ישראל חי
The people of Israel live!
Costas Constantinou