I am not a Jew and I’m not a citizen of Israel. I haven’t even visited Israel. I don’t trace my religion back to a holy site in Jerusalem and I don’t have a problem with Arabs or Muslims or Christians. I’ve read about Abraham, Moses, David and Solomon; the Umayyads, the Abbasids and the Ottomans; I know about the British, the Balfour declaration, Ben Gurion and Golda Meir. I know a bit about the Six-Day War and the Intifada. I might not have any personal stake in the Holy Land, but humanity certainly does - and I’m a human being.
The women, men, children, elderly people and soldiers who were kidnapped, tortured, raped, humiliated and murdered on Saturday by Hamas in sovereign Israel were human beings too.
Those who did it to them are not.
Imagine what kind of rational and ethical gymnastics you have to do to justify the cold-blooded murder of teenagers at a music festival; or watching a child, perhaps 5 years old, being prodded with a stick and made to cry for his mother in Hebrew while children of a similar age laugh and mock him? We don’t know that child’s fate and for all we know what followed may have been much worse. It’s depraved. To even enter a conversation about these disgraceful facts with a rehearsed retort about territory or Gaza being an “open-air prison” reeks of moral bankruptcy.
If you wail and scream about your land, dignity, rights, oppression and poverty but are willing to murder, rape, kidnap, torture or humiliate children; then I don’t have to listen to your reasons. When the video footage, photographs and stories of Saturday’s carnage come not from "Israeli propaganda” but from the Hamas terrorists themselves, then how am I to read anything else into it but that you want credit for these atrocities? You want me to know you did it. You want me to know you are proud of it. You want me to see you for who you are. Well, I do.
So, if you swarmed the Israeli Embassy in London, waving Palestinian flags and calling for genocide; if you went down to Times Square to celebrate a victory for decolonisation against “apartheid Israel”; if you sang along to “gas the Jews” chants at the Sydney Opera House or hung a “one settler, one bullet” Palestinian flag over Grayston bridge in Johannesburg then you’re telling me who you are. Well, I see you - and you’re my enemy.
I’m one of those people who believe civilisation is a real thing, and I’ve resisted the poison of moral relativists in the humanities departments of universities across the west who think that being nuanced about the idea of civilisation versus barbarism is a signal of intellectual prowess or critical self-reflection. Upon even a cursory investigation of these people or their positions, you will find every sign of pedestrian intelligence and self-absorbed navel-gazing, combined with a fetishisation of victimhood and always concomitant humourlessness. They too, are my enemies.
It is always interesting to note that only western liberal democracies tolerate and give succour to the most heinous arguments and positions in public protests. You couldn’t picket on the side of quite laudable things like education for girls in Taliban Afghanistan, gay rights in Syria, or against the death penalty in Saudi Arabia. The Ayatollahs of Iran wouldn’t allow women to protest the hijab there under threats of violence. But London, New York, Sydney and even Johannesburg will embrace marches where people actively call for genocide. This is not how allies behave.
Perhaps when the dust has settled we can examine the insidious links between Anglo-American leftism and antisemitism, between Europe never reckoning with what happened in the holocaust and their growing Muslim populations, and between ignorant regimes like mine in South Africa and their determination to stand alongside the worst human-rights abusers in the Middle East.
For now, it’s no big mystery that this has nothing to do with the existence of the State of Israel and everything to do with Jew-hatred - that great, festering wound in the side of humanity from which all prejudice flows. It has been there for thousands of years and every time we think it has healed, some monstrous collective claws it open again.
Hamas aren’t hiding the ball. Their leader, Ismail Haniyeh, safely skulking in Qatar, made this clear. He celebrated dead Jews, not territory won, nor Gazan lives saved.
I’m afraid there are only two sides in a war - your allies and your enemies. On September 11th, 2001, I knew whose side I was on. I feel the same today.
Gareth
by Brendan O'Neill
There was actually something worse than moral indifference following the release of these cadaverous men – there was moral deflection. Anti-Israel activists clogged up social media with images of released Palestinian prisoners. None looked anywhere near as sickly as the three Israelis, yet the message was as clear as it was sinister: ‘Never mind those Jews, look at these Palestinians.’ Like 21st-century Lord Haw-Haws, they endeavour to distract the world’s attention from the crimes of a fascistic army.
The BBC couldn’t resist implying a moral equivalence between Hamas and Israel. Following the release of the three Israelis, it said there are ‘concerns about the condition of hostages on both sides’. Hostages? It is a scandal that our public broadcaster is referring to Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, some of whom are guilty of acts of extreme violence, as ‘hostages’. It later walked back its comments, issuing an on-air correction. CNN, too, seemed incapable of focussing on the shocking condition of the three Israelis. Released Palestinians have also looked ‘emaciated’ and ‘weak’, it rushed to say. You can almost hear the thought process: ‘People are sympathising too much with Israel – quick, dig out an image of Palestinian pain.’
It’s like our opinion-forming classes have an instinctual aversion to empathy for Israelis. It makes them nervous. It threatens to unravel their morally infantile narrative about Israel being the most beastly of states and the Palestinians being the most oppressed of peoples. So they fiercely police public compassion, ensuring that even the dystopic image of Jews starved by sworn Jew-haters is countered by a reminder that Palestinians have a hard time, too. There is a ‘strange reluctance to see Jews as victims’, in the words of Hadley Freeman. Jews, alone among minority groups, are ruthlessly deprived of victim status, in this case to sustain the cultural elites’ self-flattering narrative about problematic Israel and benighted Palestine.
The sick reality is that there are people out there who will have seen those three stricken Jews not as brutalised human beings deserving of our solidarity, but as an unwelcome intrusion into the childish morality tale about Israel-Palestine. As a vexing reminder that things are more complicated than we are told. As stark, gaunt proof of the crimes against humanity committed by Hamas, which were the source of this war that our cultural elites shamelessly blame on Israel. This is how intense Israelophobia has become in influential circles – they are now willing to sacrifice Jews to ideology, to discourage solidarity with wronged, ravaged Israelis in order that their moral narrative might be protected against the impertinence of nuance. In the past, people looked the other way when Jews were dehumanised because they wanted to save their skins – now they do it to save their fake virtue.
Be This Guy!
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by Rod Liddle
If only our TV news programmes and politicians could bring themselves to call it all ‘Far-Right Terrorism’, then something might get done – because we all know that Far-Right Terrorism is the biggest threat to our democracy. But they don’t. Even though it is, of course, far-right terrorism, lower case – the real far-right terrorism which our politicians do not want to think about and indeed lock people up when they complain a little vociferously about it.
A week or so back the Dutch football club Ajax of Amsterdam played a cup tie against the Israeli side Maccabi Tel Aviv and as a consequence what the media carefully call ‘pro-Palestinian’ thugs attacked the visiting Jewish supporters, with five hospitalised and 20 to 30 more injured. Many of the attacks were carried out by young men on mopeds – according to one Dutch politician, Moroccan young men on mopeds, which is about as close to actually identifying who these perpetrators might have been as you will get. The Israeli government reacted with shock, booking two planes to bring the football fans home from the fetid ghetto that parts of the decent, liberal Netherlands has become. Dutch politicians lined up to do the platitude stuff. The reliably witless Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, was among the first out of the blocks: ‘I strongly condemn these unacceptable acts. Anti-Semitism has absolutely no place in Europe. And we are determined to fight all forms of hatred.’
Just read that vacuous bilge again – the bloodless and vague ‘unacceptable acts’ and ending with a commitment she does not remotely mean to keep. Oh, and anti-Semitism has absolutely no place in Europe? Au contraire, Ursula. It has many, many places, largely as a consequence of policies enacted by people like you. So, in that crescent (fittingly) of Europe from north-west France, through Belgium to Rotterdam and the Hague – and now arcing further north, to Malmo – these are the places where a large diaspora of Muslims from the Maghreb and the Levant have settled. Hey, it’s just occurred to me – gee, could there perhaps be some connection? If there is you can bank on the mainstream politicians and the mainstream media not to make it.
Attached here is a recording of Aljazeera's live broadcast today against the background of Gaza.
Pay attention to the broadcast time on the right. 18:59 - In the background we can see a failed launch that crashes inside the Gaza strip - exactly at the time when the red alert warning was activated across Israel.
The line of reports running at the bottom of the page talks about the elimination of Iman Nofal so that the broadcast is certainly from today.
Do you remember that I wrote to you that the incident was first reported around 19:10 (I will immediately provide proof)?
That is, a reasonable period of time of about ten minutes from the moment of the impact to the Gaza news channels.
Here is live proof courtesy of Aljazeera - a launch from Gaza is responsible for the impact inside the Gaza Strip
Thanks to the “Hot News” Telegram channel for the video!
Outer space, Planet Earth, and the International Space Station (ISS) photographed on 4 October 2018 “by Expedition 56 crew members from a Soyuz spacecraft after undocking” from the ISS. Photo credit: NASA and Roscosmos [6048 x 4032]