The Death Of Tom Hurndall

As a Christian human rights activist I took some note in the saga of the late Tom Hurndall.

With 3.2 million Christians murdered by Islamic militias in Sudan, 300,000 butchered in East Timor, 70,000 killed in the Philippines, 60,000 in Northern Nigeria, and with becoming a Christian a capital offense in Saudi Arabia and Iran and an imprisonable offense even in Jordan and Egypt, I can only thank God for the one Middle Eastern nation that protects the human rights of Arab Christians. That nation of course is Israel. It is also the one country in that region where women have equal rights and the human rights of homosexuals and lesbians are also protected.

Tragically and foolishly, this is the nation Tom Hurndall chose to stand against. Instead his actions expressed a de facto solidarity with the same Islamic militancy that blew up the trains and buses in London on July 7th, and crashed hijacked airplanes into New York buildings September 11th, blew up a train in Madrid, and have rioted in Bradford, Paris and Sydney.

As is clearly proven by the popular support in Gaza for Hamas terror and the continued rocket attacks on Israeli civilians from Gaza following the Israeli withdrawal, attacks launched from residential areas using their own children as human shields, Israel is plainly the victim not the aggressor. I once watched a bus blown up by Islamic suicide bombers on a Jerusalem street practically right in front of me killing 17 people. The Israelis are but fighting the same jihadist barbarism responsible for the Bali bombings, Sept. 11th, and July 7th.

The Israelis attempted to return Gaza to Egypt in the 1978 Camp David accord but Egypt refused. Prior to the Intifada the UN World Health Organisation admitted that in everything from infant mortality and longevity to unemployment, the standard of living in Gaza improved by nearly 370% under Israeli rule. Every politician and diplomat in the world knows the suffering of the people in Gaza is the result of the billions in international assistance plundered and stolen by their own leaders. Ironically, left-centred editorialists argue that even more good money should be thrown after bad and aid to a terrorist government should be provided by the Bristish, European, and American tax payers. Every aid agency in the world also knows that human suffering in Gaza is not even a fraction as bad as the genocidal extermination of Christians in Darfur by radical Islam. The real tragedy of Tom Hurndall’s death is that he died not for a noble cause, but for a lie – the biased lie he chose to believe.

I have lived in the Middle East for 9 years and seen the plight of Christians, minorities, women, homosexuals, and others from one end of the Moslem world to the other. ‚  Was Tom Hurndall a peace activist or an apologist for terror? As a Christian I do not delight in the loss of any human life. However, the only one who can justly be blamed for the death of Tom Hurndall is Tom Hurndall. He reaped the consequences of his own stupidly misguided and biased actions.

Many of the victims of Islamic terror in Israel are in fact Arabs, just as most of the victims of Islamic terror in Iraq are other Arabs.

What the media ignored was that it was an Israeli Arab Moslem soldier who shot Tom Hurndall (not a Jew) and he has been sentenced by the Israelis, some (including his Bedouin Arab Moslem family) would argue unjustly. What is absolutely ‚  beyond dispute is that terrorist Hamas or the corrupt Palestinian Authority (who enjoyed the sympathies of Tom Hurndall) would never bring one of their shooters to trial; not even those who murder children, and who get their own children killed in the name of their religion, which other Moslems claim is not jihadist but a religion of peace.

The majority of Palestinian Arabs killed by Israelis are terrorists, bomb makers, and active collaborators in Islamic terror, while the majority of Israelis killed by the Islamists are civilians. Palestinian Arab civilians killed by the Israelis are inadvertent victims of collateral damage put as risk by their own leaders who operate, coordinate, and attack from residential areas using civilian lives as a human buffer making civilian casualties inevitable. The Islamists by contrast make civilians the target just as they did in London on July 7th. None of these facts mattered to Tom Hurndall. An activist he may have been, but not for the genuine cause of peace.

Yet it was Israeli surgeons who tried to save Tom Hurndall’s life after he got himself shot. It is only a noble nation that fights to save even the lives of its enemies. Morally, Tom Hurndall’s death was a ramification of his own biased choices, not an Israeli gun.

I do not expect a bereaved family to be objective. But I do expect the media to be fair and the courts to be just.

Once again, they have not been.

J.J. Prasch