{"id":8284,"date":"2023-11-22T12:41:23","date_gmt":"2023-11-21T23:41:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/israelinstitute.nz\/?p=8284"},"modified":"2023-11-23T14:44:04","modified_gmt":"2023-11-23T01:44:04","slug":"daphna-whitmore-responds-to-iranian-kiwi-columnist-donna-miles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/israelinstitute.nz\/2023\/11\/daphna-whitmore-responds-to-iranian-kiwi-columnist-donna-miles\/","title":{"rendered":"Daphna Whitmore responds to Iranian-Kiwi columnist Donna Miles"},"content":{"rendered":"
Israeli-Kiwi Daphna Whitmore responds to Donna Miles, an Iranian-Kiwi columnist and writer based in Christchurch, who published an opinion piece in the Press on the 19th of November 2023.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n First published on Plainsight<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n Donna Miles: <\/strong>Something in me has shifted. With no end to the killing of children and babies in Gaza, my trust in the international rules-based order and the political morality of the West has been shattered beyond repair.<\/p>\n The deaths of children and babies is horrific. War is a nightmare and it is the nightmare that Hamas sought. They say so. Hamas not only seized, attacked and murdered Israeli children and babies, it put its own population in the firing line as a military tactic. This is widely documented.\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n DM implies it is the aim of the Israeli army to target infants. She gives no context, and no acknowledgment that for weeks the\u00a0 IDF told civilians to leave. The IDF has made over 20,000 phone calls, dropped 1.5 million leaflets, sent 4.4 million texts, and 6 million voice messages urging civilians to leave. They opened up corridors and put their soldiers at risk to guard people from Hamas who shot at the civilians as they left. Hamas wanted civilians to stay as human shields.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Donna Miles:<\/strong> I grew up in Iran and experienced first-hand the scary lawlessness of those early post-revolutionary years where vengeance trumped justice and righteousness became a cover for horror.<\/p>\n Soon after the revolution, came the Iran-Iraq war and the misery of death and destruction.<\/p>\n I lived through most of the war and know something about how the children of Gaza are feeling right now as bombs explode all around them.<\/p>\n Not a word from DM about the many tens of thousands of rockets Hamas has fired at Israel\u2019s civilians over the past two decades. <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Children in southern Israel have grown up to the roar of sirens and rushing to safe rooms and shelters. No country would tolerate this. Hamas brought misery and destruction to Gaza when it came to power and threw their Palestinian political rivals off the rooftops of buildings and slaughtered them and ran them out of Gaza. They showed they don\u2019t care for Arab Israelis or migrant workers in Israel who were also taken hostage and slaughtered on October 7.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Donna Miles:<\/strong> Most of you reading this could never truly understand what it\u2019s like to live with the violence of war and to suffer food and fuel scarcity. Nothing you watch or read can ever bring home to you what it is like when children are forced to play hide and seek with death on a daily basis.<\/p>\n War is the most evil of all evils. My family and I were privileged enough not to suffer the worst of the Iran-Iraq war, mainly because we lived in the capital city of Tehran, away from the border with Iraq.<\/p>\n When I left the war-torn, revolutionary Iran to start a new life in my birth country of the UK, I felt relieved that I no longer had to fear the state and its disregard for the sanctity of human life<\/p>\n Those who leave their country know full well that their country never leaves them. And so it was that, after the war, I traveled back to Iran on many occasions to visit my family and assuage my homesickness.<\/p>\n Every visit left me disheartened and thinking that I could never have a place in a country whose leaders did not represent my values.<\/p>\n Decades after leaving Iran, I am once again filled with the same dread, realising that the leaders of my adopted countries of the UK and New Zealand do not fully represent my values either \u2013 and, more importantly, their commitment to the universal declaration of human rights is nothing but a sham.<\/p>\n Why else would they tolerate the slaughter of helpless children by the thousands? Why else would they not call for a ceasefire and force Israel to end what amounts to the deliberate starvation of besieged civilians<\/a>? And why else would they allow Israel to bomb schools, mosques, churches, bakeries, even, according to news reporting, at least one hospital?<\/a><\/p>\n Again left out of the story is Hamas\u2019 use of all those sites to store weapons and wage war. <\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n It is deliberate deception to omit this when there is a mountain of evidence showing they were used in this way. Still, the IDF kept insisting civilians leave areas where Hamas was conducting its war from. Why does DM say nothing about the hospitals hit in Israel by Hamas missiles? In contrast, those Israeli hospitals were not military sites. Israel doesn\u2019t put rockets in hospitals, synagogues, mosques, churches or schools.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n