This website is free to access, it is just a hobby started as therapy at a low point in my life almost 12 years ago. You can donate to support its work by hitting the button on the top right hand corner of the website if you wish but if you don’t it matters little, the website remains free to access and over the years almost 3.5 million times someone has read an article here. Its work in recent weeks is largely writing about the aftermath of the biggest mass killing of Jews since World War Two. I earn my living by running Shareprophets.com a website which exposes fraud and other stock market wrongdoing and which charges a very reasonable small subscription. My coverage of the pogrom has seen a raft of folks cancel their subscription at Shareprophets.com and here is an email from one charmer explaining why.
“I have cancelled my direct debit and, reluctantly, wish to end my membership.
I do not support Hamas or terrorism but do not support the indiscriminate killing or oppression of innocents.”
I offered this fellow a free life membership if he could find one article where I suggested that I supported the indiscriminate killing or oppression of innocents. He cannot find that. So his email is a bit of a smear. No it is an outright smear.
What he is doing is equating an act I condemn, that is to say the slaughter of 1400 innocents, the beheading of babies, raping of girls and women, burning of families alive, with the response to that atrocity. Hamas targeted civilians. Israel has responded by targeting combatants, that is to say the monsters who committed these crimes.
Hamas uses the civilian population of Gaza, which elected it in the last election held in the Gaza, as a human shield and inevitably some of them are being killed as Israel targets the terrorists. But Hamas does not care. If it did it would be using its fuel reserves for hospitals rather than for keeping its terror tunnel network going.
Contrary to what this ex-customer implies, I lament the loss of every innocent life. I merely contrast the intentions of those doing the killing. And that matters.
Perhaps he thinks Gaza is occupied by the wicked Israelis. It is not. The last Jew – and that includes ones buried in graves – was removed back to Israel in 2005. The fence that separates Gaza from Israel was put up to keep suicide bombers out. Since its erection, the number of Gaza based suicide bombers blowing themselves up in Israel (so earning a huge bounty, paid with aid donations, by the Gazan government) has dropped from one a week to almost zero. But until three weeks ago 20,000 Gazans a day went through that fence at checkpoints to work in Israel. And Israel supplied food, power and water in vast quantities to Gaza despite the almost daily rocket attacks on Israel launched from Gaza. That is not the act of an oppressor.
I guess there will be other “I don’t like Hamas but I am going to equate its genocide with the legitimate Israeli response as morally equivalent” folks cancelling their subscriptions at ShareProphets. C’est la vie.
If folks think that losing £6.99 a month is going to make me shut up about the worst pogrom for seventy years, they are like the fraudsters who attack our site with DOS attacks or who make death and other threats to me and my family, or who troll me online and who think I will shut up. They are all mistaken. Compared to what happened on 7 October the financial hit I am taking is nothing.
Losing a few dozen customers simply means that my planned retirement to a life of goat farming and apple harvesting is postponed by another couple of months. The goats can wait. I shall just plant more trees at my leisure. I can live with that. Shutting up about what I believe in and what is right is something I cannot live with.