Some may think that none of what Israel says or does in its defence matters and that therefore there is little or no reason to pursue justice on the international arena.
But what Robert Neufeld called (in a Shurat HaDin newsletter) “the Palestinization of international law” is applied across the worlds’ universities, media outlets and the selective human rights community. I would go further. The colonisation of those global institutions by a radical Left-wing / Progressive / Islamist agenda that aims to invert ethical standards (in order to apply justice to only a chosen and privileged minority) represents a crisis in moral leadership that has infected and is subverting society.
We need to understand that Hamas are 21st Century Crusaders. Their supporters in the Western world and beyond are the willing accomplices to this genocidal religious ideology. The desire by Hamas to torture and murder anyone not like them resulted in some seventy Muslims beings murdered on 10/7. Pleas for mercy were ignored. In historical terms this is wholly consistent with what occurred during the Crusades. When the Crusaders arrived in an area during the first Crusades, Christians would welcome them en masse. Those Christians were inevitably slaughtered. The Crusaders did not differentiate on the basis of religion. Their desire to kill outweighed any rational religious fellowship. We could call it a religious mania, or even a psychosis but that would be unfair to the mentally ill. Their approach to theology is beyond rational psychological comprehension.
Our leaders have failed to address this evil. When we ignore discrimination, we leave our fate in the hands of the thuggish, violent, and vocal mob. The worst that humanity has to offer becomes the exclusive territory of the most passionately committed individual or group. Those people chanting “from the River to the Sea,” the denialists of 10/7 - they are what we all fought against in World War 2. Britian lost 451,000 people to Nazism. The USA lost 419,000 people to Nazism. Australia lost 40,000 people to Nazism. And today, the modern Nazis accuse Israel of genocide while celebrating those, who committed 10/7.
Zionism is a straightforward philosophy. It is the right to self-determination for the Jewish people in their ancestral homeland. In the face of relentless antisemitic propaganda, I would add the following: The essence of Zionism was expressed 2,600 years ago when the prophet Ezekiel, mourning the Jewish community’s loss of sovereignty in Israel and its exile in Babylon stated in a poem “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yay we wept, when we remembered Zion.” And ever since, we as a people have been returning to the Holy Land, whether fleeing persecution or finding sanctuary when a distant sojourn in a foreign land turned into something hostile and barely conditional in its acceptance of our presence. Does any of the above sound familiar to us today?
Zionism is a decolonisation ideology. It is both philosophy and theology. Arabs captured Israel in the 7th Century CE. Their intolerance for those living in the lands they colonized is consistent throughout their history. Israeli history is simply conquest by foreign rulers who always inflicted fear, prejudice, insecurity, and pain upon us. And yet we keep quiet. We don’t call out those ‘political’ scholars for whom the inconvenient truth of Jewish rights to live at peace in their own land sits at extreme variance with their well-paid positions within Western academia.
It means that our universities are full of complacent “scholars” for whom pay, and benefits are of greater importance than the truth. Put another way, incitement to violence and racial hatred are all acceptable if professor X is paid enough money. Qatar has paid almost five billion dollars to universities across the United States since 1986 while the total of barely reported payments from other ideologically antagonistic countries is at least, equal to that. Where money is no object, the truth loses any relevance. Is this situation even new? Academia has never been known for its enthusiastic commitment to justice or truth. It is open to ‘interpretation’ when politics or ideology intervenes. Contemporary university employees just require a greater bribe than previous generations of academics did.
Brandeis University was founded as a safe place for Jews who were subject to quotas, prejudice, and violence at other universities in America. When discussion of where to send students who no longer feel safe attending Americas Ivy league (or other) universities was recently aired in the press, Brandeis was no longer considered an option, although it has now expelled Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) from its campus. It has a former student president who thought the Jews should ‘get over’ their aversion to the Swastika and embrace it. It had an active SJP group. Its Hillel Chapter was infiltrated by anti-Zionists who insisted only they had the right to invite speakers – all of whom were, need I say it, anti-Zionists. Apparently, Jews have no right to safe spaces, or protection from microaggressions, even in a college founded as a safe haven for Jews.
Ivy League college presidents think that if something is legal, it is acceptable. It is not that long ago that torture, apartheid practices and public executions were all legal. There are (at least) three world-class universities that believe calls to exterminate ‘the Jews’ is not a problem for society. What those university presidents were selling is a message that ethics is irrelevant, that politics is all and that if it is legal, it is not to be questioned. If the 20th Century was a period of terrible wars, then the 21st Century is one of moral amnesia.
Those university presidents earned top dollar for being intelligent human beings able to think creatively. The nazis were competent administrators who unquestioningly did what they were told. They spoke a word speak that enunciated a ‘one and only’ mandatory worldview. American university presidents are not supposed to be ‘just’ competent administrators. An agency temp could adequately fulfil that function. A fourth university leader (Colombia’s) couldn’t even be bothered to answer the summons to attend a Congressional hearing. And that is disrespecting the Republic. So, the Left and its allies now appear to condone genocide.
Worse still for humanities future, they are instructing the next generation of managers, those who will one day inhabit senior positions throughout industry, commerce, and politics. The lessons they are giving are twofold: the first is how to use intimidation and violence and the second, how to practise contempt for both the rule of law and the constitution. When universities teach that ethical, moral, or legal standards can be selectively applied in order to justify a course of action or behaviour then society is in serious trouble. The excuse that religions are “protected” is a nonsense that serves only to protect the bigot.
The universities are teaching the next generation of leaders and followers to dismiss truth, diversity of opinion, and equality; all in the name of DEI. Diversity, equity, and inclusion is a fine idea corrupted by its intellectual proximity to intersectionality which in its turn creates a hierarchical pyramid of victimhood that is meant to exclude people like those who are ethnically “white” or Jewish. Its intent is thus to create a new and regressive hierarchy of rights. The universities have empowered too many of those people to rewrite history in order to fit a racist, religiously bigoted antizionist narrative.
We live in a world that views ‘stability’ (even when that means steady appeasement and a constant low level of violence) as more important than asking the ‘right’ questions. As instability increases, we cling, desperately, to a life-raft of lethal sameness.
911, the Madrid and Moscow bombings in 2004, and in London in 2005 and the Mumbai massacres in 2008 were the Islamists message that theirs is an inalienable right of conquest, even as the rest of us thought the era of muscular colonialism was extinct. In 2004 Osama bin Laden issued a ‘clarification’ saying that ‘they’ had not forgotten their “ownership” of the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal). To that should be added Sicily and Malta, Cyprus, Greece, and Israel.
Europeans should also remember the unsuccessful Ottoman wars of conquest against Europe. Their failure has never been forgotten or forgiven by Turkey, or its neo-Ottoman leader, President Erdoğan. Terror is the fundamentalists favoured weapon. It is both warning and lesson taught. And Erdogan is a fundamentalist.
Many of us have a feeling of hopelessness and despair. 10/7 was a wake-up call for both Israel and Jews in the Diaspora. It should be permitted to call HAMAS neo-Nazis even when they are theologically inspired. The Palestinian ‘liberation’ movement has always been a religious movement that denied us national liberation, independence, or even conditional freedom. As a movement driven by missionary faith, it is incapable of accepting human equality.
Egregious violence is theologically justified in Islamism because it is an act of religious devotion. For those with a guilty conscience, it is an act of redemption. From attacks against Christians throughout Africa we know that what happened in Israel on 10/7 was not an aberration. It was an opportunity taken.
Jews are this eras victims of the West’s post-colonial Ignorance of history. Since the creation of the State of Israel the revanchists have been assiduously rewriting Jewish history in order to form that history into a straight-jacketed narrative that denies Israelis any rights of self-defence. The United Nations is its greatest supporter, financially, politically, and diplomatically.
Since 10/7 the bigots have escalated their rhetorical deceit to justify mass-rape, torture, infanticide, and the slaughter of unarmed civilians. And it seems that progressives have embraced this narrative. The selective “human rights” community headed by the United Nations justified the actions of Hama. We should stop making excuses for those people seeking to justify or worse, celebrate HAMAS and its genocidal conquest ideology. It is a basic human right to defend oneself. The right to self-defence is inviolable. When senior UN official Francesca Albanese and others within the UN state that Jews (Zionists) have no right to self-defence against an openly genocidal aggressor (Hamas) and when those same UN officials continue to be employed after providing their “expert” opinion then we must work towards the closure of the UN. Human rights are an absolute and anything else is rationalized bigotry.
The persecution of Jews, “blaming” that oppression of Jews on Zionism is a lie based on ignorance or on a malevolent form of deceit. Anti-Zionism, the rejection of our return to Israel is based on a foreign, colonizing ideology. It is buttressed by a theology that believes all conquered land to be an Islamic inheritance. Accordingly, to oppose that theology is a blasphemy.
The absolute, irreducible, unavoidable truth is that if the Muslim, Arab world had accepted a seriously truncated Jewish homeland (on less than 20% of Britain’s Palestine Mandate territory) in 1948, there would have been no war and no Palestinian refugees. The only refugees would have been the Jews expelled from Muslim lands. But a theological position that could never accept Jewish equality within a state conquered by Arabs fed into a vast conspiracy to blame the West for an Islamic failure to annihilate an “inferior” race.
Hateful rhetoric is the only way to explain defeat by an infidel army; hate breeds contempt which in turn breeds the kind of genocidal Aktion that Hamas perpetrated on 10/7. Its leadership have told the media, that given the opportunity they will commit those rolling atrocities repeatedly and hundreds of times again. This is not rhetorical, it is aspirational. I do not need to imagine the theoretical mathematical outcome to appreciate that it is not possible to craft a negotiated peace with HAMAS. Seventy-five years of non-peace is the Arab world’s fault, not Israel’s. It is inconceivable that even a single “refugee” from Palestine, Gaza, Judea, and Samaria (what the world renamed “The West Bank” in 1950) would be permitted to settle inside of Israel because all they have been taught is denialism, hate and religious prejudice.
And the Western media encourages it. In an article by British newspaper (the Independent) which ran on the 29th of January 2024 it was stated that 25,700 Gazans had been killed “according to the Hamas-run health ministry.” In most communications that refer to the mounting death-toll “mostly women and children” is what immediately follows the number killed. At issue is the lack of analysis. At least eleven thousand of the dead are Hamas or PIJ terrorists. With some thirty per cent of all projectiles fired from Gaza into Israel misfiring, (that’s over 3,000 missiles) there is every possibility that thousands more of those dead are the result of failed launches by Hamas and its allies. Add to that number the executions carried out by Hamas as policy, to discourage civil ‘disobedience.’ Gazans fleeing after receiving Israeli warnings do not make good human shields, but dead civilians do, particularly as the death toll rises. Analysing the victims of war is inconvenient for the press and would be a concession to Israel on the morality of its conflict with Hamas. So, we are given a single number that it is implied, is almost exclusively, according to the Western press, children. Its ugly, but it makes for excellent propaganda.
A four-page cover advertisement for a daily British newspaper (Metro) distributed for free at all underground and rail stations throughout the UK featured an open letter from Save the Children (.org.uk) claiming that since 7 October more than 11,000 children had been killed. So, few women and no men have died in this war. It is obscene to quibble over deaths – even one death is too many. But Hamas are an enemy that views honesty as being detrimental to its conquest narrative. The big lie is a weapon. And Hamas are a theocratic terrorist movement with an army deployed behind civilian infrastructure.
The western media, by their all-too-eager subservience to a Hamas run campaign of disinformation and propaganda are more than clients of a theocratic terrorist group. They are complicit in Hamas’s war crimes, crimes against humanity and attempted genocide.
What we are fighting is a propaganda war and we are losing it badly. Our enemies understand the nature of the war they are fighting, and they have no morals. They do not care how many civilians die. The more the better. They care only to make the numbers sound as if everyone is a child killed by Zionist (Israeli) or Jewish storm-troopers. That is the reality that the Western media has embraced and that is the war that we have to fight.
Every word counts. Every encounter with an interviewer must be seen as an extension of the war we have been forced into fighting. For the love of Israel, take off the gloves.