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Anglican Church of Ireland Canon David Oxley has claimed that Israelis see Jews as a “master race”: “Irish Catholic Archbishop: Israeli response to Hamas ‘merciless and disproportionate,’” by Michael Starr, Jerusalem Post, January 2, 2025:

Martin is the latest Irish religious leader to issue harsh criticism of Israel’s conduct during the Israel-Hamas War, with Anglican Church of Ireland Canon David Oxley claiming on Remembrance Sunday that the IDF had a cruel policy of targeting schools, hospitals, and mosques, and that Israelis saw Jews as a “master race” – a term usually associated with Nazi ideology.

“This takes different forms in different times and places, but it is the same horrible idea, that one group of people is intrinsically more valuable than any other. Once that is accepted, then the elimination of others follows as a matter of course – because they don’t count,” Oxley said at the Dublin Saint Patrick’s Cathedral on November 10….

The charge is preposterous. No Israeli Jews are taught that they are “intrinsically more valuable than any other.” For god’s sake, all the Israelis want from the Arabs is that they stop trying to murder them. It’s a simple wish. No “master race” ideology is involved. It is the Arabs of Hamas who want to eliminate the Jews. They say so in their charter. Jews have no desire to “eliminate” the Arabs of Gaza; millions of leaflets, text messages, and robocalls meant to spare the lives of Gazan civilians are conclusive evidence of that.

“We have seen this, for example, in the aggression of Netanyahu’s government towards the Secretary of the United Nations; in the contempt shown to the international courts, as if they should dare to hold Israel to account; and in the attacks on the UNIFIL forces in Lebanon,” said Oxley, taking pride that the Irish government had drawn Israeli fire for its position on the conflict.

The UN has become for Israel a constant scold, its staff members making wild accusations, while the General Assembly has passed more resolutions condemning the Jewish state than the number passed about all the other 192 states put together. Francesca Albanese, the Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, is an unrepentant antisemite, and so, it has become clear, is the Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, whose anti-Israel animus, expressed in his charges of “genocide,” he no longer bothers to hide.

Oxley said that while the soldiers of the two world wars also did cruelties, out of the conflict came a better world, this was not the case with Israel’s multi-front war against Hamas and Iranian proxies.

Destroying a terror group such as Hamas will not bring about a “better world”? So getting rid of a group that glories in rape, torture, and murder won’t make the world better? It will certainly make the world better for Israelis, and for Arabs in Gaza who have endured Hamas’ corrupt despotism since 2007. It will make the world safer for all those who know that they too can be, and many have been, victims of Muslim terrorism, in the United States and all over Europe. Defeating Hamas is no different from defeating Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. Oxley, maddened by antisemitism, cannot allow himself to recognize that.

“Whatever peace and security the Israeli regime hopes to achieve by the considerable damage done to the leadership and resources of Hamas and Hezbollah, what is most obvious to the rest of the world is the desolation and destruction wrought in Gaza, in Lebanon, and in the West Bank. Shalom, it is not,” said Oxley. “The policy of targeting schools and hospitals and mosques; the starvation and the constant need to move elsewhere; going back again and again to bomb people who have already been deprived of home and happiness and everything else – is such cruelty necessary? Does it not tend to dehumanize the aggressor as well as the victim? And what of the constant refusal to take responsibility? The unending mantra of the IDF: This is the fault of Hamas. But it is your hands that have pulled the trigger, that have dropped the bomb that took that child’s legs, that woman’s life, that family’s home.”…

One more time: any harm caused to civilians in Gaza — and in every war there are civilian deaths — is a direct result of Hamas’ embedding its fighters and hiding its weapons among civilians. Oxley mentions the “desolation and destruction” in Gaza, but not the efforts of the IDF to minimize both. The IDF does not “target schools and hospitals and mosques” that are being used as schools and hospitals and mosques. It targets these “schools” and “mosques” and “hospitals” when they are being used by Hamas as weapons warehouses, as fighters’ hideouts, as command-and-control centers. When the IDF recently evacuated the Kamal Adwan Hospital of its patients and medical personnel, it discovered that 240 Hamas fighters had been hiding in the “hospital.” Should that building be free from attack because it was once just a hospital, but for a long time has been an outpost for Hamas?

In Nostra Aetate, Pope Paul VI and the Second Vatican Council changed the Church’s view of Jews and Judaism for the better. Section Four of that document repudiates the centuries-old “deicide” charge against all Jews, stresses the religious bond shared by Jews and Catholics, reaffirms the eternal covenant between God and the People of Israel, and dismisses church interest in trying to baptize Jews. In the outrageous charges they have flung at Israel, Archbishop Martin and Pope Francis are undoing that good work of Paul VI. As for the Anglican Oxley, and his incredible remark about the Jews believing themselves to be the “master race,” I would like to borrow a line that the Austrian writer Karl Kraus made in 1933 about Adolf Hitler: “About Hitler I have nothing to say.” About Oxley I have nothing to say.