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Israeli officials use Paris attack to target Hamas

January 8, 2015 at 5:46 pm

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made use of the attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo to call on the West to support the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and to undermine the EU vote on a Palestinian state in the name of the “war on terror”.

Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s foreign minister, has also called on the West not to remain weak before the “Islamic” terror, which he claims Israel is already fighting. Several Israeli writers also used the Paris attack as an opportunity to incite hatred against Palestinians, rather than one to come together in the mutual fight against extremism.

Netanyahu prominently called for the West to intensify its support for Israel in its war against Islamists, mainly the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, which resists the ongoing occupation of Palestine.

“The attacks of radical Islam know no boundaries,” Netanyahu told French President François Hollande over the telephone, “these are international attacks and the response has to be international.”

Netanyahu also expressed the sympathy “that all the citizens of Israel feel for the people of France and for the grieving families,” reminding the world that Israel has experienced similar attacks by Hamas and Hezbollah.

“We know the pain but we also know the resolution with which free societies can defeat terror—however dreadful, however threatening,” he said.

“Israel is with France on this difficult day. The terror of Hamas, Hezbollah, ISIL and Al-Qaeda will not stop unless the West fights it physically, rather than fighting its false arguments. Islamic terror is not mainly targeting Israel, but is even targeting the West and its civilisation,” he added.

Netanyahu told Hollande that, “The key goal of Islamic terror is to destroy our societies and our countries. To uproot our human culture, which is based on freedom and a culture of choice and to impose in its place a fundamentalist dictatorship which will return humanity to years long past.” For that reason, he said: “We do not have to give them a chance to justify terror. We have to fight it.”

Meanwhile, Lieberman said that the “Israel sympathises with France’s pain,” according to a statement by his spokesperson.

“The world must not allow terrorists to intimidate the free world and the West is obligated to stand united and determined against this threat,” he said.

Lieberman stressed that the world has to help Israel in its war against the Palestinian factions that adopt principles common with those who carried out the attack.

Israeli TV Channels described the attack as France’s “9/11” and called the Muslim communities in Europe a “time bomb”.

For his part, the Israeli thinker Amos Biderman said that “the bad guys have won”, and that Islamic terrorists such as ISIS and Al-Qaeda have “beaten us big time in the battle for freedom of expression” considering that many of Western writers and journalists would never publish anything that might invoke the wrath of radical Islamists.