According to Erasmus, “The most disadvantageous peace is better than the most just war.” Tacitus argued the opposite. We shall see. The year 2014 should be remembered as “The Summer of Hamas’ Terror War.” Hamas’ goals may focus on killing Israelis, but its tactics are global. According to credible reports, Hamas’ reach extends to South East Asia where, with the probable complicity of the Malaysian government, it was training commandos and kamikazis for a massive cross-border tunnel attack for this September’s Jewish High Holy Days to kill or kidnap thousands of Israeli civilians. The purpose was to create havoc in Southern Israel on the model of the extremist Muslim terrorist carnage in India’s Mumbai. Only the action of the Hamas faction that kidnapped and killed three Israeli teenagers and triggered the escalation short circuited Hamas’ plans before its end-game of “another Mumbai” was ready. But in another sense, Hamas’ Summer 2014 War on Israel did not come out of the blue. Some observers attribute it to Hamas’ frustrations that Israel’s and Egypt’s parallel embargoes on arms shipments to “Hamastan”—together with the terrorist regime’s inability to manage the economy or pay its own bureaucrats—drove Hamas to desperation. This may be true to some degree, but responsibility also lies with Hamas’ international network of NGO enablers. In June through August of this year, they revved up an irresponsible, inflammatory anti-Israel campaign that had the inevitable result of giving Hamas a green light to launch rockets and cross-border attacks. Hamas knew that its veritable army of supportive NGOs—with their relentless campaign of anti-Israel defamation and lawfare—would have its back and indeed constitute a second front in Hamas’ war to destroy the Jewish state. Here is a partial survey of the Hamascentric NGOs’ shameful behavior that has made the Gaza tragedy even worse: • Headquartered in Washington, D. C., Human Rights Watch boasts: “Wherever brutality hides, we will find it.” Unfortunately, this summer, HRW has found it in Gaza only of the side of the IsraeliArmy trying to defend its people. In one Report lauded by a pro-Palestinian journalist as documenting “a Wounded-Knee-Style Massacre,” HRW concluded on the basis of negligible evidence that “Israeli forces may have knowingly or recklessly attacked people who were clearly civilians, such as young boys, and civilian structures, including a hospital.” No mention mention of hospital grounds being used as missile launching pads, hospital offices as Hamas command-and-control centers, and hospital entrances being booby-trapped to blow up unsuspecting Israeli soldiers. • OXFam, the international anti-poverty organization, publicized a report by one of its observers. She was well aware of the perilous situation of the Jewish civilians of Sderot, yet chose to play up such harrowing accounts by nearby Palestinian civilians that say “nothing of Hamas, its all about civilians. ‘They are fighting us, civilians. They are angry with us and they want to punish us’. I can’t really argue back, I wasn’t there.” • The UFree Network is “an independent European-wide human rights network, set up to defend the rights of Palestinian political prisoners and detainees.” In a joint report with the Yousef Al-Sedeeq Institute, released July 4, Ufree lambasted Israeli for mass abuse of “Palestinian women prisoners [who] are subjected to psychological torture and ill treatment, including beatings, insults, threats, invasive body searches and sexually explicit harassment.” The culprits, as UFree snidely put it, are “Brave Jewish soldiers leading blindfolded and handcuffed Palestinian ladies away . . .” Their sexist actions constituted, according to UFree, egregious violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention and grounds for making Israel an international pariah. Of course, the only witnesses quoted in the report are Palestinians while Israelis are given no chance to defend themselves. • The Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) is “an independent non-profit organization that provides journalists with quick access to information about Palestine and the Palestinians, as well as expert sources, both in the United States and in the Middle East.” It chimed in this summer with “A Case Study in Complicity: The Israeli Government & Extremist Attacks Against Palestinians” that essentially argued that Israel’s police were behind anti-Arab incidents, much the same way as pogroms by Russia’s “Black Hundreds” were organized by the Czarist Secret Police. • Headquartered in Geneva, The Euro-Mid Observer for Human Rights is “a nonprofit, nongovernmental human rights organization dedicated to exposing human rights violations and defending human rights.” Dismissing the murder of three Israeli teenagers as “alleged kidnapping of three youth from one of its illegal settlements,” Euro-Mid’s Report issued a one-sided, hit piece against Israel’s civil society is entitled: “Israeli Cruelty to Palestinian Children, From Abduction to Prison.” The Reports offers this measured judgment: “Considering how quickly the Jewish police and military can hunt down and capture scary little Gentile Palestinian children, obviously if it wanted to, it could find and apprehend its own violent Jewish criminals. It does not want to, because these vicious attacks represent not only the true face of Jews, but does some ‘dirty’ work for the government, ensuring a level of plausible deniability it then portrays to the civilised world.” • The Middle East Project of the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa piled on with a “Study of Occupation, Colonialism, Apartheid: A Re-Assessment Of Israel’s in the Occupied Palestinian Territories under International Law.” In summary, the pro-Hamas NGOs focus on every conceivable problem—from human rights, water, “Israeli land theft,” IDF “torture” of Palestinians, Jewish “price tag” terrorist attacks, home break-ins and demolitions, to Palestinian unemployment—as part of a shotgun indictment Israeli “crimes against humanity.” They of course set the table for the outrageously UN Human Rights Council that is preparing a kangaroo court trial of Israel for “war crimes” at this very moment. There is indeed a need of a trial—in the conscience of mankind—of the NGOS and their media accomplices for poisoning the well of international opinion against Israel and making the Gaza tragedy worse.