In the past couple of weeks, as it is whenever Israel defends itself against those who would annihilate it, the world is afflicted by two groups of rabble-rousers. The first group consists of the virulent Islamists and their anti-Semitic comrades-in-arms that have occupied the streets of Europe and the U.S., as well as the halls of American academia, where Muslim Student Associations exist for little more than ginning up hatred against the Jewish State. The second group are those so addled by a combination of historical ignorance and moral bankruptcy, they manage the impossible: they seemingly defend Israel’s right to exist, even as they “sympathetically” align themselves with a terror group dedicated to its destruction. The former group is honest, albeit savagely so. The latter group is despicable, and has a far more familiar name: liberal Democrats.

That’s right, liberal Democrats. The same ones who showed their true colors during the 2012 Democratic Convention, when Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa had the unenviable task of providing cover for them. In 2008, the Democratic party had dropped the statement “Jerusalem is and will remain the capital of Israel,” from its plank. At the 2012 convention Villaraigosa asked – three times – for the necessary two-thirds show of support from the delegates on the convention floor. He was forced to ask three times when it became embarrassingly evident the “nos” far outnumbered the “yeas.” In one of the more Owellian moments in American politics, Villaraigosa did what Democrats do best: he ignored the evidence and simply declared the motion had passed.

A cavalcade of boos ensued.

Nothing has changed, and a Pew survey attests to that perilous reality. In response to the question, “In the dispute between Israel and the Palestinians, who do you sympathize with more?” only 48 percent of moderate Democrats sided with Israel. Liberal Democrats were even more pathetic, coming in at 39 percent.

And make no mistake: pathetic is precisely the right term. Even if one were to dismiss the anti-Semitic undertones, the historical ignorance is breathtaking. First, Hamas is a designated terrorist organization whose founding charter is dedicated to the destruction of Israel. The organization was founded in 1987, by members of the Muslim Brotherhood and factions of the PLO who shared that vision. The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna, a 22-year old Muslim with a profound admiration for Adolf Hitler. He wrote to the Führer on a regular basis, expressing his support, as well as his desire to collaborate with the Nazi Party.

During WWII, his wish came true. The Muslim Brotherhood spied for the Nazis and fought for them in two specially formed Muslim Waffen-SS Handschar Divisions. Al-Banna was also closely allied with Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who was a VIP guest of Hitler in Berlin from 1941 to 1945, prior to joining al-Banna in Egypt in 1946. Even today, Hitler’s “Mein Kamfp,” retitled “My Jihad,” and translated into Arabic by the Muslim Brotherhood, remains a best-seller in the Muslim world.

Now there is little doubt that many liberal Democrats – especially the more addled subset of liberal Jewish Americans who despise their own heritage – might bristle at being labeled Nazi sympathizers. Too bad. History is what it is, and those who deny it, or maintain an obdurate ignorance about it, may very well be doomed to repeat it.

Which brings us to the even more odious moral bankruptcy that allows for such misplaced sympathy. There are two aspects. The first one, moral relativism, is a pillar of liberal Democratic philosophy. In this particular case it is the notion that once the fighting starts, no real distinction can be made between Israel and Hamas, because they are both using war to advance their agenda. Thus it’s irrelevant that Hamas has shot more than 11,000 missiles into Israel since 2005, or that they were capable of doing so because Israel unilaterally ceded control of the Gaza strip to the Palestinians, uprooting more than 8,600 Jewish settlers of Gush Katif, razing their houses and synagogues in the process.

It doesn’t matter that Israel takes unprecedented measures to avoid civilian casualties, using phone calls, text messages, and small unarmed projectiles hitting buildings to warn Palestinians of an imminent strike. By contrast Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri appears on Al-Aqsa TV encouraging those same civilians to act as human shields – even as Hamas leadership takes to underground bomb shelters. It doesn’t matter that Hamas locates its weaponry in houses, schools and mosques to intentionally generate civilian casualties for the propaganda value that has apparently beguiled the moral myopes.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu deftly illuminated the moral chasm between the Jewish state and Hamas, along with Hamas’s equally contemptible supporters. “We develop anti-missile systems to protect…our civilians,” he explained. “They use their civilians to protect their missiles. That’s the difference.”

In a better world, those incapable or unwilling to see that difference would be ashamed of themselves. Unfortunately, shame was the first casualty of moral relativism.

The second, and equally despicable aspect of moral bankruptcy would be the concept of “disproportionalism.” This is the notion that Palestinians in Gaza – who freely elected a terrorist organization to represent them and support with equal fervor that organization’s desire to eliminate Israel – shouldn’t be enduring a higher rate of casualties than the Jewish State. For the moral midgets, such disproportionalism is literally unfair. One is left to wonder whether they would prefer a lesser number of Palestinian casualties, or a great number of Israeli casualties to “even things out.” Common sense and decency suggests the former choice. Yet the aforementioned booing at the Democratic Convention, as well as the myriad number of demonstrations against Israel, some of which even the morally-challenged New York Times was forced to admit "took on a distinctly anti-Semitic tinge,“ make it hard to say with any certainty.

What can be said with absolute certainty is that much of Palestinian society remains disturbingly dysfunctional. How else can one explain these photos of Palestinians, including the small children the equivocators claim to care so much about, celebrating the kidnapping of the three Israeli teens who were subsequently murdered? How else can one explain society that has built a network of tunnels – built by Palestinian children, costing 160 of them their lives – with exits located in Israel specifically designed to facilitate terror raids to kill and kidnap Jews? A network of tunnels so extensive the cement used to build just the 18 discovered by the Israelis so far consumed enough concrete – supplied by the Israelis – to build seven buildings the size of Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest skyscraper. With the leftover concrete they could have built two bomb shelters each as big as Giants Stadium for the same citizens Western apologists bemoan have nowhere to go to escape the Israeli onslaught.

And that’s just the cement used for the 18 tunnels discovered by the Israelis. The Egyptian military claims they destroyed 1370 Gaza smuggling tunnels on its own border with the terrorist enclave.

Perhaps it never occurs to the terror apologists that the same ingenuity and effort could have been employed to build a genuine society. An infrastructure of schools, mosques, offices and the host of other buildings that functional societies construct to raise the standard of living for their own people. Instead, Hamas’s unrelenting hate for Israel, and the Gazan majority’s support for it, has animated a network of "terror tunnels” that Israel must now destroy, lest its national security be threatened.

Disproportionally threatened.

And while the terminally clueless and the terminally evil continue their Israeli bash-fest, it is reported that Hamas is seeking to negotiate a new arms deal with North Korea to re-stock its missile supply and continue the bombarding Jewish State. More sophisticated and deadlier missiles, courtesy of the same North Korea that Israeli military experts believe helped Hamas build the tunnel network. The same North Korea with a track record so brutal and deadl,y a UN report characterized the nation as “a state that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world.”

Thus it would seem it’s only a matter of time before the threat to Israel becomes existential, buoyed by a feckless Obama administration that refuses to see the utter futility of a two-state solution when one side continually yearns for a reprise of the Final Solution engendered by their ideological soul-mates. One thing is certain: Israel will not go quietly. But if the unthinkable should come to pass, one other thing is equally certain: the appetite for Jewish blood will not be satiated, nor will that appetite be confined to the deserts of the Middle East.

For those who refuse to comprehend the breadth of the threat, it is worth remembering that Islamists refer to Israel as the Little Satan. America is the Great Satan. “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last,” Winston Churchill once remarked during another existential crisis. One is left to wonder what Churchill might have thought of morally bankrupt equivocators who would stand in solidarity with the crocodiles.

© 2014 The Patriot Post.