“Suffice it to say that evil walks freely along our mountains and valleys, and across our fruited plains.” —Pete McCardle
What has prompted this article, the third in a series, is the need to reply to and counter as best as a writer can the rise of Jew hatred in the West following the Israeli military response to Hamas’ unspeakably barbarous October 7 attack on the country. One would have thought, after so visible a mass slaughter accompanied by acts of rape and torture and selfie jubilation against a helpless civilian population, that the world would have recoiled in horror and set the record straight, casting Hamas into outer darkness.
The opposite was the case as Israel stood condemned for defending its people against so inhuman a terrorist entity as Hamas. And not only Israel. Jews everywhere were subject to acts of vandalism, threat, venomous hatred, and physical attack by rampaging mobs of creeps and imbeciles to the deafening silence of cowardly politicians and the dormancy of intimidated law enforcement.
Obviously, the pogrom-like atmosphere we have witnessed is exacerbated by the critical number of Muslims we have blindly accepted into our midst. For all too many, their Jew hatred is bred in the womb. In a brilliant and seminal essay, Robert Spencer notes how Joe Biden quickly bowed to the threat issued by Nihad Awad, executive director of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), that if Biden did not declare a ceasefire to the Israeli/Hamas war, there would be “No votes in Michigan, no votes in Arizona, no votes in Georgia, no votes in Nevada, no votes in Wisconsin, no votes in Pennsylvania.”
The Muslim voting bloc was far more important in Biden’s diseased mind than abiding by principle and supporting a loyal ally. Biden accordingly “allowed the UN to demand that Israel essentially surrender since that is what the effect of a ceasefire would be.”
Aside from such raw opportunism, even native Westerners who are not under threat, subject to blackmail or lobbying for votes cannot be excused the prinking superciliousness and moral depravity of gladly indulging their own endemic version of Jew hatred, often disguised as anti-Zionism. A salient instance of this festival of hatred may be found in an interview on South Africa’s Eyewitness News between host Jane Dutton and writer/journalist Douglas Murray. Dutton spent most of the first section of the interview accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza and talking loudly over Murray rather than actually interviewing him.
No wonder! She had no answer to Murray’s pointing out that it is Egypt, not Israel, building a wall to hem in the Gazans; that Israel was the victim of an unprecedented act of butchery — unprecedented since the Holocaust; that there never was an “occupation” when one considers that Israel had no presence in Gaza since 2005, provided well-paid work, medical facilities, water, electricity, and all manner of supplies to the Gazans, a people who nevertheless repeatedly elected Hamas as their governing authority and approved in large measure of its exterminationist agenda.
Dutton’s performance was arrogant and aggressive, marinated in self-righteousness. Murray, who had been on the front dodging Hamas rockets, was clear, informative, knowledgeable, and historically accurate. The difference between fatuous dogmatism and moral intelligence was remarkable. As is the difference between fiction and fact.
There is no acknowledgment, for example, of the fact that Israel’s bona fide attempts to negotiate the return of critical portions of the legitimately conquered areas after the 1967 war — the “West Bank” up to that time had been part of Jordan — were met by the three No’s of the Khartoum Conference: “No peace, No negotiation, No recognition.” As statesman Abba Eban pungently put it, “This is the first war in history which has ended with the victors suing for peace and the vanquished calling for unconditional surrender.”
When it comes to Hamas, we need to see that Hamas is not innocent. Its guilt is steeped in the blood of Israelis. The indisputable fact is that the Hamas government is a terrorist organization, that an overwhelming majority of Gazans voted it into office, and that U.N. Security Council binding Resolution 1373, passed under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter on September 28, 2001, explicitly stipulates that all states must “prevent the movement of terrorists or terrorist groups by effective border controls.” That Hamas has willfully violated the U.N. Resolution is also indisputable, as is the fact that genocidal intentions pertain not to Israel but to Hamas, the core principle of its 1988 Covenant entailing the total obliteration of Israel.
It should also be noted that Hamas enjoys the massive support of Gazans for the carnage it wrought on Israeli civilians, including women and children. According to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), “only seven percent of Gazans blamed Hamas for their suffering. Seventy-one percent of all Palestinians supported Hamas’s decision to attack Israel on October 7…Fifty-nine percent of all Palestinians thought Hamas should rule Gaza, and 70 percent were satisfied with the role Hamas has played during the war.” Similarly, according to AP World News, “A wartime opinion poll among Palestinian…shows a rise in support for Hamas, which appears to have ticked up even in the devastated Gaza Strip.”
The Western insistence that Israel is committing genocide in taking the fight to Hamas is the height of mendacity, especially when it is clear that in an existential war, a nation will often have no choice but to inflict collateral damage among a civilian population, as did the U.S. to hasten the end of World War II. The insistence on “proportionality” in combatting a vicious and remorseless enemy, probably the most absurd and meaningless notion in the entire history of human warfare, is applied exclusively to Israel and to no other nation — another sign of the near-universal hypocrisy of the world’s congenital Jew-haters.
It is really common knowledge (although denied by antisemites and moral degenerates) that Israel does everything in its power to reduce civilian casualties at a cost to the lives of its own soldiers “fighting despicable monsters.” This is a principle known as “purity of arms.” As Colonel Richard Kemp justly writes, based on his extensive experience in theaters of war, Israel fields the world’s most moral army.
The Israeli army “does more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare…Never has an army phoned its enemy and told them where they are going to drop their bombs… Hamas, on the other hand, committed war crimes as official government policy…The leaders of Hamas…take full advantage of Israel’s decency and adherence to the laws of war.”
The fact is, Kemp continues, no army takes such risks “in order to protect civilians as the Israeli army does. I say this as a professional soldier. I say it because it’s true. And people who care about truth should know it.”
Nonetheless, the media, like the foreign affairs ministries of most nations, is nothing but a vast, echoing lying machine. It blithely accepts and publishes Hamas’ grossly inflated civilian casualty figures as gospel. It makes no mention of Egypt’s role in the conflict: as Walter Block writes regarding the newly erected wall, “If Egypt had any decency, it would immediately allow all Arab women and children into its country; they have no decency.”
It denounces Israel as a colonial invader, rather than a small democratic nation fighting for its survival because it suits the anti-Zionist narrative it obscenely promotes. Hamas and its supporters have been placed outside the moral framework and settled in a landscape where lies deputize for truth.
Such is the cultural and ideological condition in which we now find ourselves, inflamed by the ignorance, outright stupidity, bigotry, scheming expedience, and bloodlust of the anti-Zionist and antisemitic mob. It encapsulates the persuasive power of gratifying mendacity opposed only by the dogged commitment to difficult truth, as exemplified respectively by the rather fraught discussion involving the Israel/Hamas dilemma between the two representative figures with which I began this exposition.
In George Eliot’s great novel “Daniel Deronda” (1876), the character Mordecai recognizes that the “heritage of Israel is beating in the pulses of millions; it lives in their veins as a power without understanding.” In condemning Israel, the civilized world assaults its own ethical and cultural foundations and its very spiritual origins.
One recalls Paul’s warning to the gentiles in Romans 11:16-24: “For if the firstfruit be holy, the lump is also holy: and if the root be holy, so are the branches…and thou, being a wild olive tree, wert grafted in among them…Boast not against the branches. But if thou boast, thou bearest not the root, but the root thee.” Millions upon millions of people should be ashamed of themselves, who boast against the branches and the root. And they are not Israelis.