Another time for choosing

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Ronald Reagan’s “A Time for Choosing” speech set forth choice facing free societies in the fight against Communism:

After the attacks in France and throughout Europe on Jews, often motivated and perpetrated in the name of anti-Zionism, it’s no longer possible to sit on the sidelines.

It’s another time for choosing.

Whatever Israel’s problems with regard to balancing the fight against terror with preservation of freedom, such problems pale in comparison to what goes on in the rest of the region and most of the world, where balance is not even attempted.

We saw it in the intimidation and threats against “journalists” in Gaza during the 2014 summer conflict, where Hamas bullying resulted in refusals to report key facts such as Hamas using schools, hospitals and other civilian infrastructure as rocket firing locations. Some evidence, however, slipped out, particularly after “journalists” left Gaza.

That is true also in areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority, where there is no independent journalism except directed at Israel.

Israel and Israel alone is under a microscope from hundreds of journalists and Non-Governmental Organizations whose primary job is to wake up every morning and find something wrong that then can be broadcast through Western and Arab media. 

There is no such scrutiny of the societies and governments that wish Israel’s destruction.

The microscope under which Israel and Israel alone operates distorts, rather than reflects, reality.

That distortion is used as war material in the international anti-Israel campaign undertaken by a dizzying array of well-funded groups, including on our own campuses and in our own classrooms.

That distortion has turned groups like Human Rights Watch, Oxfam International, and Amnesty International into tools undermining the principles for which they once stood.

Yet reality is reality. Israel is a comparative land of tolerance and freedom.

You don’t get to choose perfection in this world. But you do get a choice.

Choose freedom and free societies. And Israel.