An Australian Facebook friend (since 2010) with whom I went to school posted a U-tube clip from someone claiming to have family who died at Auschwitz. The UK based U-tuber recorded his libellous screed at a pro-Palestinian demonstration. He explained how Nelson Mandela condemned Israeli Apartheid (Nelson Mandela supported Palestinian independence, but he never cheapened the word by accusing Israel of it). This unidentified man spoke like so many egotists, desperate for a public voice in expressing something they seem to know nothing about.
This was my response to my (now) former fb friend:
Nelson Mandela never said that Israel was an Apartheid State. Archbishop Desmond Tutu was a deeply racist and vile religious bigot who was slapped down for his bigotry very early on in his public anti-Zionist career. He became more careful in later years about to whom he addressed his prejudice. He made sure he was preaching to the choir. Tutu did however continue to lecture da Joos as if we were children in need of stern guidance by superior human beings. South African, Hmm?
Being the son or grandchild of or related to Shoah survivors does not make you better qualified than anyone else to have an opinion on an unrelated subject. Being a survivor will impact your behaviour in life but not make you better or worse than any other human being because we are all of us, JUST THAT, human. We are all complicated, seared by our experiences to react in ways that are not always logical or nice.
Some years ago, a mosque made a national story here in the UK after a Shoah survivor converted to Islam. It was triumphal, scoring points against who (Jews?) Then it was revealed the survivor had spent almost his entire life in a mental institution. The mosque that groomed this Jewish victim was guilty of the heinous crime of having groomed a vulnerable individual inside of their mental home. It should have been that survivors’ safe space. It was an obscene conversion by religious bigots who preyed on a vulnerable soul. As soon as this fact became known the story immediately became a non-story. It disappeared from the public view. There should have been outrage but that would have been perceived as Islamophobia instead of being a human-interest story that would understandably be viewed, rightly so, as scandalous. Who says there is no press discipline? That it is unidirectional is the crime against the nation because it misinforms and then it is silent.
We should always be especially careful when we listen to people who claim a unique dispensation for having an opinion. The U-tube speaker appeared to have zero special knowledge. If he had ever been to Israel, he would know he was speaking nonsense.I grew up in Australia. It’s a wonderful country that at that time was deeply racist and it scarred me for life. My experiences of being the only person of Jewish faith in a school of over 1,000 students was instructive. Have things changed since I left? The capacity to embrace bigotry and to experience no shame in enunciating that bigotry has significantly increased, or so it increasingly appears to be the case.
Social media has empowered the worst of our human character. There is a global trend towards welcoming the toxic caress, the assault on our senses of the demagogue as leader. Instead of competence, we have charisma. The last time there was such a wave of leaders was in the 1930s and as chaos descended, democracy folded.
Recent pronouncements from prominent academics and public personalities show that my former Facebook friend is not alone in being incapable or unwilling to think independently. Worse, if you swim in a pool of excrement, you will not emerge, smelling of roses. Perhaps of greater concern, you will cease to notice the stench that envelops you.
Rape re-defined as resistance is an abomination of the language of human rights.
After World War 2 the political right-wing accepted the fundamental principle that the rights of civilians cannot be ignored in a conflict between competing ideologies. However, both politically and ethically the international left-wing never accepted this concept. Che Gevara, rapist, and sociopathic murderer became an icon of the Left. The Left has frequently used civilians as hostages, subjected them to terror, and excused rape as an instrument of resistance. The stench smothers the capacity to listen.
Hamas are al Qaeda, Islamic State, the al-Nusra Front – the list of Muslim, religiously inspired terrorist groups is baffling in size. We must understand that the accusation of Islamophobia has shackled any meaningful discussion that may create a pause in this global religious war. All are religious fundamentalists who believe NO-ONE not exactly like them has anything other than a conditional right to survive. Not Jews, nor Christians, not even Muslims who are not “with them.” They believe in enslaving the infidel as a means of demonstrating their superiority. Warfare is economic and not just about killing. They are modern day Crusaders. They killed 70 Muslims on 10/7, an event which I noticed my friend had not bothered referring to, even once, since it occurred over 5 months ago.
Hamas have made it their mission to hide amongst civilians. Previous wars had a 10% rocket misfire rate. Theirs, this time round was on occasion, 30%. They have fired at Israel, from Gaza over 9,000 missiles. That means potentially 2,700 missiles fired from Gaza stayed in Gaza – if each killed only one Gazan…. you can do the maths.
When PIJ misfired a rocket that killed up to forty-seven people sheltering in a parking lot outside a hospital, the Hamas health ministry initially said five hundred (a “nice” neat number) were killed by Israel. When it became evident, proven by security experts around the world, that Israel did not fire the rocket, Hamas increased the death toll to 871. That number was added to their daily tally, and dutifully reported by the global press. This same (fascist) press reluctantly admitted, any casualties were ‘probably’ the result of a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket - fired too close to its own civilians. But they still quoted the inflated but significantly increased Hamas “Health Ministry” death-toll.
A fascist press never places a reservation of any intelligible significance on statements and figures presented to us, the public. It is propaganda, not fact. Reporting the news becomes distorting the news. We carefully choose the speaker to portray everyone as bigoted or no-one as bigoted, depending upon the side we choose to elevate or denigrate, defame, or slander. Hamas can never be trusted with the truth, but only Israel's version of events excites journalists to speculation, hearsay, and negative propaganda.
The Western press disguises its sources, it is selective in its presentation of the truth, it exploits existing beliefs and prejudices, and it creates fear while appealing to our outraged sense of injustice. All of this is what classically defines a propaganda war. And that war is being waged in the Western Press against Israel, and by extension, against the diaspora Jewish community.
Hamas have murdered their own people for refusing to be human shields and running away. There have been some spectacular examples. Heeding Israeli instructions, a convoy of seventy people heading out of the Northern Gaza strip early on in the conflict were ordered by Hamas not to leave. They refused to comply and mysteriously, tragically, their convoy was hit by machine gun fire. Of course, Hamas initially blamed this terrible event on Israel even as it became clear that the IDF had no-one operating anywhere nearby. How many more innocent Gazans have Hamas murdered? Their latest atrocities against their own civilians include murdering those civilians who were trying to collect food aid delivered by convoy.
Even one death is a tragedy but when you copy the big lie, be it an article, video, or meme, you become part of the problem and an enemy of all the truth, not just the bits you chose to ignore. When George Orwell wrote ‘1984’ he was referring to despotism and the media controlling what we think. He could just as easily have written this about Palestinians and their allies in the Western World.
The behaviour of demonstrators and opponents of Israel prove that this is an existential war, and we are losing it because we are not fighting it.
Israel suffered a series of mass casualty events on 10/7 but it is now obvious that the diaspora is also part of that war. The rhetoric of de-platforming (essential), discrimination and hate will endow a generation with a wholly negative global, fascist legacy that may be impossible to undo.