Almost five weeks have passed since the rolling atrocities carried out by the Islamic movement. Hamas shocked Israel and much of the Western World to its core. The celebration of those atrocities, recorded for posterity on mobile phones, made the slaughter more basic, visceral – the boastful, murderous phone calls intercepted and played to the global media; the naked woman marched through Gaza City to the cheers of thousands. It created an inconvenient, even distasteful reality that the antisemite, eager to belong, might find difficult but possible to dismiss.
What it drove home for me was just how alone we all are, those of Jewish faith. It was the realisation that our society and its ethical compass have become wholly, perhaps irrevocably, broken. For far too many people, the massacre of Jews, rape and torture, the mutilation and murder of both babies and children was no more than an opportunity to celebrate what we all assumed until then was unthinkable. That Jews have no rights and that consequences are strictly unidirectional (us again). Anyone who assumed a repeat of World War 2 is impossible is now proven to be naïve.
The enthusiastic calls to slaughter the Jews (not the Zionists) and the subsequent prevarication by Human Rights organisations, university administrators and of course, both the International Committee of the Red Cross and the United Nations has provided justification for calls to genocide.
It is indicative of total intellectual bankruptcy at every level of society.
The world ignored Nazi and Communist atrocities. But then it did the same when Ottoman Turkey committed genocide against Kurds and Armenians. Pogroms in Russia were their concern alone as was the genocide of Africans by Belgium. Ignoring incitement to global conquest, to racial prejudice and demonisation of minorities resulted in the deaths of between sixty and eighty-five million people during World War 2. In this century, none of what happened on October 7 is new.
We are no longer a particularly civil society – we talk our minds, no matter how insulting we may sound and display indifference to the pain we cause with our words. This has been hugely aggravated by the narcissism of Social Media where the mind fart makes a virtue of notoriety that almost anyone can achieve. Hate and violence is celebrated as if it is not a cancer devouring the body of Western civilisation.
Calls to mass murder alongside the celebration of acts of torture, rape, and infanticide have occurred on multiple occasions since the end of World War 2. They occurred in Rwanda and Cambodia. North Korea has had concentration camps for decades. China has them too. Islamic State did it all as does Al-Shabaab and Boko Haram today. There are literally dozens of Islamist movements worldwide that view such egregious activities as no more than acts of religious devotion and if they have been bad Muslims, then as acts of religious redemption. Rape, mutilation, torture, and slaughter is all part of the playbook of Islamism. It is theologically justified revenge for the failure of the infidel to acquiesce to institutionalised inferiority and our rejection of their style of society, which is the antithesis of ours.
Radicalised politics has created a pyramid of victimhood that places imperialistic, colonialist Islam at the pinnacle of the ‘victimhood’ pyramid while Islam has displaced women, gays, and people of colour. In that context, global demonstrations against Israel and for Gaza cannot have come as a surprise.
In a faith that believes in world domination and whose vision for paradise includes the extermination of all non-believers, again, it should not come as a surprise that demonstrations across the globe protest the War against Hamas while many of those supporters make excuses for the mass slaughter of October 7.
It would be good, if out of all this horror, at least a proportion of those people who so unthinkingly, acted in pursuit of what they refer to as “justice” were to take pause and to consider the nature of the Palestinian cause. Human rights are an absolute, anything else is rationalised bigotry.
But given the preponderance of evidence against Hamas and its crimes against humanity on October 7th the International Criminal Court (ICC) has to date, been silent. There are no indictments against the leadership of Hamas, no demands that Qatar and Turkey hand over the leadership of Hamas for prosecution. The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has likewise been silent. The United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights have talked of equivalence while refraining from referring to Hamas by name.
The reality is that since WW2 the world has done nothing to prevent conflict or war. Politics and prejudice trumps all. Hate is a far more attractive stimulant than love. And it unifies disparate groups around a cause, no matter how prejudiced that cause may be.
Throughout its history the UNHRC (established in 2006 to replace the discredited United Nations Commission on Human Rights) has been strongly criticized for its membership and leadership by countries that have consistently engaged in the most egregious of human rights abuses. It was only recently that the Islamic Republic of Iran was placed in charge of the committee on Women’s Rights even as its ‘morality police’ beats its women to death.
Amnesty International has been silent while Human Rights Watch is keeping an open brief on videos it has received verifying atrocities by Arabs. But its overwhelming criticism is towards Israel - its threats are all focussed on Israeli “crimes.”
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has a history of ignoring Jewish suffering. During WW2 it refused to visit the concentration camps and the death camps, making it complicit in genocide. Intervening on behalf of Jews since WW2 has likewise not been its ‘style’. It only recognised Magen David Adom (founded in 1899) in June 2006 which meant that before then, Israel’s ambulances and medics were not protected from attack (they still aren’t).
According to Israeli NGO Shurat HaDin "This organization (ICRC) has an obligation, by the Geneva Convention and UN resolutions, to see to the welfare of captives in any armed conflict. That is especially so given that these are civilians, which have been seized in violation of any law in the world.” And again “the only thing we have heard from the Red Cross since October 7 has been 'sorrow and concern for the population of Gaza' - nothing about the massacre (in Israel) or the hostages."
The United Nations as an organisation is supposed to promote human rights, tolerance between people (and nations) and to maintain international peace and security. Over 78 years the United Nations has failed to prevent a single conflict or even a single death. The Secretary General of the UN (Antonio Guterres) as the caretaker for this global security apparatus has justified genocide even as he protested that his words were misrepresented. His excellency Mr Guterres is a man at the pinnacle of global political power. The UN represents the interests of 193 member nations and has lots of sub-committees overlooking the global community’s interests. It is an organization with a three-billion-dollar budget that cost a very small number of its donor nations 56,000,000,000 dollars last year in all of its operations. The Secretary General of the United Nations does not “do” incompetence, ambiguity, or misunderstanding. If he chooses to ignore fact in order to create fiction; if he arbitrarily draws a line in order to support a narrative of fault, then being responsible for strengthening the promotion and protection of human rights around the globe is a lie meant to entrench SELECTIVE human rights as a political goal.
The Palestinian Authority (Palestine) received an allocation of 1.5 billion dollars over three years to wage its eliminationist war against the State of Israel at the United Nations. The UN is a political organisation hiding behind a veneer of principles it only ever selectively maintains.
Each of those 193 nations has its own prejudices, historical grudges, and religious hatreds. Gathering 193 nations together in one place can never bring peace or security to the world or even a small part of this Earth. It is simply all about the money. Who benefits from the entrenchment of prejudice, the debilitation of international peacekeeping or the failure of human rights across the world?
The Selective (that is to say, conditional) Human Rights Community of course. They are the grease that oils the machine of prejudice. The universities provide the intellectual justification for every lie that is to be repurposed as truth and human rights are ‘managed’ for an international audience addicted to a Manichaean fight between good and evil where both are defined by politics instead of morality.
Why are the Jewish people the only issue that the UN and human rights organisations are able to agree upon? Because we are the only people upon which those organisations are able to reach a consensus. Why? Because we are a minuscule ethnic group, just numbering sixteen million people. We are small enough to be insignificant but large enough to be sufficiently visible so that focussing on us as a group satisfies the need to hate the outsider as a threat to the insider. And that, is politics at its most basic.
Antisemitism both animates and facilitates unity in disparate groups whose goals are domination and control. Hate is the most powerful aphrodisiac known to society and it is addictive. Islam is a religion of conquest, of imperialism and colonial expansion. It has cut a bloody swathe across the globe, committing cultural genocide as it spread. ‘Playing’ victim means its ongoing crimes across the world are ignored, drawing attention to the fallacy of victimhood is viewed as Islamophobia. It is a genius tactic that has silenced Western discussion for decades. The canard that Israel is a colonial imposition on the native Palestinians is central to an Islamic theological construct that believes all conquered territory to be an eternal Muslim inheritance and its rejection, a crime against their deity and his prophet.
It is why the United Nations and international human rights organisations ignore or excuse every act of violence committed by Muslim terror groups and too often, they reward the persecutors.
Appeasement did not stop the Madrid massacre of 2001, the London bombings of 2005, or the Mumbai atrocities of 2008.
The money flowing annually into all the Selective Human Rights bodies is measured in the billions of dollars. Their unifying mantra is the global elimination of Jewish rights.
In the USA, the universities received sixty billion dollars in donations last year. None of it taxable. They also received billions of dollars in federal and state grants. They generate colossal amounts of money through donations, tax dollars and student fees and pay huge salaries which only increase with expanding influence based on the ever-increasing number of people they ‘educate.’ They are commercial entities. They do not provide ethical or moral guidance. But they can and do provide a powerful narrative for hating the outsider. They have constructed an edifice of pyramidical victimhood that is based on political influence and not historical grievance. Intersectionality, micro-aggressions, safe spaces, and critical race theory are all tools of political narrative. Their intent is no more than to marginalise some groups in favour of others. They are a powerful vehicle for prejudice but are sold as enablers of human rights. They empower qualified (selective and conditional) human rights and therefore they sell the lie as truth and truth as lie. It isn’t new. The highest uptake of Nazi Party membership in Germany during the Nazi era were university professors. Intelligence was never a marker for ethics or morality.
It is time that we recognised who our true enemies are and fought them as if our lives depended upon their defeat. Because it does. The behaviour of universities, human rights organisations and UN agencies post October 7 has done nothing to invalidate that thesis.