Now it’s two years and a day. That’s how long it’s been since Arab terrorists stormed across the border into Israel, shooting every Jew they could find, raping women, incinerating children, and carrying human beings as if they were trophies back to Gaza to be greeted by cheering crowds.
Appalling aftershocks followed within hours: Harvard student groups blaming Israel for Hamas’ savagery; leftist elites on two continents calling for a “ceasefire” while Israel was still recovering citizens’ bodies from their homes; dubious claims that the IDF was bombing Gaza’s hospitals – stories planted by Palestinian propagandists and repeated uncritically in the media.
The capitulation continues. “Pro-Palestinian” demonstrations took place on Tuesday, of all days, on a host of college campuses and on the streets of cities in the United States and Western Europe.
Is it unkind to point out that the young Germans who chanted for a one-state “solution” – meaning Jews being wiped off the map – were channeling their grandparents’ atrocities? Or that it was the Nazis who made Israel necessary? Until relatively recently, this grim historical fact was understood and acknowledged throughout the civilized world. For reasons that should concern anyone who cares about freedom and human rights, that consensus has disappeared.
Writing in The Free Press, Douglas Murray put it simply: “Two years after October 7, Israel has defeated its enemies. The West is still surrendering to them.”
Perhaps there’s hope. Tony Blair and Donald Trump have fashioned a comprehensive peace plan for Palestine. Talks are taking place in Egypt as I write these words. But three generations of Arabs have been fed a steady diet of lies and loathing. It won’t be an easy cycle to break.
Gaza ‘Genocide’
The current pretext for Jew hatred is the accusation of “genocide” supposedly being effectuated in Gaza. Israel’s method is said to be forcing mass starvation. It’s telling, however, that when Hamas and its lapdogs offer up photographic evidence, they invariably proffer a doctored photo of a child with a previous health condition – or worse.
What do I mean by worse? The prize goes to Swedish wunderkind (a.k.a. uber-moron) Greta Thunberg. Seeking to illustrate hunger in Gaza, the 22-year-old climate change activist-turned-terror-apologist mistakenly posted a photo of one of the Israeli hostages. He looks like he’s in Auschwitz, which is fitting. Just not in the way Thunberg and her handlers intended.
She’s not unique. An army of self-righteous intellectual grifters has spent the entirety of this war doing similar things. In the self-own category, it was difficult to top the social media antics of notorious Israel-hater Norman Finkelstein. A hard-leftist who is the son of Holocaust survivors, Finkelstein has made a career of attacking Israel and its defenders with a combination of partisan scholarship and personal invective.
He may have reached his nadir this week. For the sin of signing on with Bari Weiss at CBS, liberal commentator Van Jones was derided by Finkelstein as an “Uncle Tom” and a “schvartze.” (If you’re unfamiliar with the latter term, in this context it’s as ugly as it sounds.) One caustic riposte came from writer Coleman Hughes.
“Hey Norm!” Hughes tweeted. “Just a reminder from a Black guy: We don’t speak Yiddish. If you want to insult us, you’re gonna have to use the N-word, just like all the other racists.”
Antisemitism, you see, is where right-wing and left-wing crazies meet, howling to the moon in concert. But genocide is a serious matter, and I’ve had friends – decent and thoughtful people – who’ve asked me pointedly about Israel’s conduct.
Food Politics
It began as a pro-Hamas protestors’ chant, mutated into a progressive talking point, and eventually metastasized into the declared national policy of a variety of Israel-hating groups, but the accusation that Israel was committing “genocide” against Palestinians has taken root on U.S. college campuses, at the United Nations, in the capitals of Western Europe, and among an entire generation of Americans. These critics consider it the moral issue of our time. On the other hand, it may be a classic example of “the big lie.”
The concept emerged after World War II. It is often attributed to Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Germany’s twisted propagandist, or sometimes to Adolf Hitler himself. The phrase actually emerged in a description about Hitler written by a Harvard professor named Walter C. Langer. Working with a team of other researchers, under the auspices of the Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner to the CIA), Langer interviewed or examined the writings of people who had known Hitler personally. The result was a psychological profile of the violent psychopath who had plunged the planet into world war. Here is one excerpt from that lengthy study:
“His primary rules were never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.”
A discerning child can see that this is a perfect description of the tactics and strategy of Israel’s antagonists. Those adversaries range from the farcical International Association of Genocide Scholars to the United Nations itself.
First, a brief word about the so-called International Association of Genocide Scholars. This heretofore unknown organization voted on a resolution accusing Israel of committing genocide in its war against Hamas. The legacy media dutifully and uncritically reported on this vote, although “stenography” might be a better description than “reporting.” The Free Press (natch) took a closer look, and it appears that this is a sketchy group – anyone can join for $30 – and the voting procedures were rigged.
But the systematic deceit perpetrated at the UN has not been as easy to ignore – and has been particularly harmful to Israel. It’s a long story, so let’s synthesize: Five years ago, a Canadian-Lebanese academic who teaches at the University of Oregon law school was named to a position called “UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food.” His name is Michael Fakhri, and he had definite opinions about food, capitalism, and, of course, Middle East politics.
“Hunger, famine and death are by design – they are predictable, the product of political choices and particular institutions,” he said in an interview at the time, while choosing an instructive, if idiosyncratic, example:
“In Yemen, the solution to hunger is: stop selling arms, stop playing geopolitics with people’s lives,” Fakhri added. “I think international human rights law and criminal law are not the only answer here. The question is – who is benefiting in terms of power and wealth? Which countries, companies or individuals?”
Nearly two years after the Israel-Hamas war began, Fakhri issued a report on hunger in Gaza. Accompanied by a sophomoric comic book (Israel bad, Gaza good), Fakhri’s report opened with a salvo of simplistic propaganda:
On 9 October 2023, Israel announced its starvation campaign against Gaza. By December, Palestinians in Gaza made up 80 per cent of the people in the world experiencing famine or catastrophic hunger. Never in post-war history had a population been made to go hungry so quickly and so completely as was the case for the 2.3 million Palestinians living in Gaza.
Israel “announced” no such policy, of course. Fakhri’s fig leaf was an emotional statement by Israel’s defense minister just hours after the Hamas atrocity on Oct. 7, 2023. “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip,” said Yoav Gallant. “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.”
Human Rights Watch promptly declared this call for a siege a “war crime,” which it isn’t necessarily, but in any event, it’s not what has ensued. Over the past two years, thousands upon thousands of trucks from Israel have brought some 1.2 million tons of food and necessities aid into Gaza, a show of humanitarian aid unprecedented in the history of warfare.
Israel has facilitated this aid into a territory governed by an organization that has actually vowed to destroy Israel, which itself was forged in response to the Holocaust – an actual genocide. Hypocrisy is too mild a word.
Is all the aid getting where it needs to be? No. Is the suffering of innocents in Gaza real? Yes, but even Palestinian officials on the West Bank have conceded that Hamas is stealing the food from the populace for its own fighters, while starving the Israeli hostages.
The famed French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, writing in the Wall Street Journal, put it this way: “A genocidal army doesn’t take two years to win a war in a territory the size of Las Vegas. A genocidal army doesn’t send SMS warnings before firing or facilitate the passage of those trying to escape the strikes. A genocidal army wouldn’t evacuate, every month, hundreds of Palestinian children suffering from rare diseases or cancer, sending them to hospitals in Abu Dhabi as part of a medical airlift set up right after Oct. 7. To speak of genocide in Gaza is an offense to common sense, a maneuver to demonize Israel, and an insult to the victims of genocides past and present.”
Platforming Hate
In a related matter, remember last year when David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, was bullied by his staff and various Hollywood types into disinviting MAGA bigwig Steve Bannon from its annual festival?
No such pressure has been brought to bear on the magazine’s inclusion at this year’s gathering of Hasan Piker, a leftist provocateur who has compared the Houthis to Holocaust victim Anne Frank, praised Hezbollah, said America “deserved” to be attacked on 9/11, and said that “it doesn’t matter” that Hamas terrorists raped Israeli civilians on Oct. 7.
“The decision to platform Hasan Piker is the latest example of mainstream media normalizing his brand of antisemitism and anti-Zionism,” tweeted the Anti-Defamation League. “Piker’s toxic and extreme rhetoric opposing Zionism and the Jewish state normalizes #antisemitism, reinforces bigotry, and launders terror – and it has no place at a conference devoted to prominent influencers.”
Meanwhile, editors at Wikipedia are equating “Zionism” with ethnic cleansing – and punishing citizen editors who object. This revelation was unearthed by journalist Ashley Rindsberg, who reports that some members of Congress are calling for an investigation into whether this is a foreign opp.
Finally, remember the Palestinian boy who was deliberately gunned down by Israeli Defense Forces? Or so said a disgruntled former U.S. Army officer fired from his job with a Gaza-based NGO. The ex-soldier said he witnessed the kid’s killing. But it turns out that the boy is alive and well. I wish I could say the same about the global community.
Is there any way out of this morass? Peace talks are a good start, and Egypt, the longtime cultural and intellectual hub of the Arab world, is the right venue. Peace is a concept cherished in the holy texts of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. So pray that these negotiators find the wisdom and the courage to break the impasse. The adherents of these three religions are, after all, the children of Abraham.
This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.