Friday, December 12, 2025
From Ian:
Melanie Phillips: The humanitarian front against Israel
Melanie Phillips: The humanitarian front against Israel
So why has Amnesty, which has done so much to poison the West against Israel with a sustained and malevolent campaign of lies designed to destroy it, suddenly lurched toward at least some acknowledgment of the truth?‘Expelled From the Community of Which We Were a Part Only Yesterday’ Jean Améry on the Dilemma for Left-Wing Jewish Intellectuals, Sartre’s Freedom of Choice and the Commitment to Israel
Perhaps it feels the hot breath on its neck of the Trump administration, which is now threatening to take condign action against those who have assisted the Palestinian Arab terrorist armies in their war of extermination against Israel.
Officials in the administration have reportedly held advanced discussions on hitting the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine “Refugees” (UNWRA) with terrorism-related sanctions. Both Israel and the Trump administration have accused UNWRA of links with Hamas, allegations the agency has vigorously disputed.
Washington halted funding in January 2024 after Israel accused about a dozen UNRWA staff of taking part in the Oct. 7 attack. Israel has also accused UNRWA of taking and guarding hostages, as well as consistently glorifying terrorism in its schools, and teaching its children to hate and murder Jews.
However, the use of humanitarian institutions to launder the war of extermination against Israel goes much further. An NGO Monitor report that was recently released has revealed—from scores of internal Hamas documents—the astonishing extent of the terrorist group’s infiltration and exploitation of international NGOs’ operations in Gaza.
The organizations involved include Catholic Relief Services, funded by Ireland, the United States and the United Nations; the International Medical Corps funded by the European Union, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States and the United Nations; and Medical Aid for Palestinians, whose funders include UNICEF, the World Health Organization and the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
According to the report, the evidence confirms that these NGOs in Gaza do not operate independently or neutrally. They are instead embedded in an institutionalized framework of coercion, intimidation and surveillance that serves Hamas’s terror objectives.
All NGOs operating in Gaza, it says, are required to adhere to strict Hamas security protocols, which include regular engagement with the terror group’s Ministry of Interior and National Security and other ministries.
Local Gazan “guarantors,” approved by Hamas, serve as the point of contact between Hamas and the NGOs. At least 10 such “guarantors” were Hamas members or supporters, or employed by Hamas-affiliated authorities.
What happened on 7 October 2023, and what has been happening since then, have surpassed the Jew-hatred of the 1960s and 70s. Hamas and their supporters invaded Israeli territory, raped, mutilated and slaughtered Israelis and proudly filmed themselves doing so. 1,200 people were murdered in a bestial manner, almost 5,000 were injured in one day alone, and 251 people, mostly Israelis but also foreign nationals whose only ‘crime’ was to be in the Jewish state, were taken hostage into Gaza.The Fake “Johns Hopkins Genetic Study” Meme
Immediately afterwards, leftist groups throughout the Western world gathered in solidarity not with the victims but with the murderers.[38] Feminist activists either ignored the rapes or treated them as ‘resistance.’[39] The tendency among prominent Holocaust, genocide, and memory scholars to delegitimise Israel by drawing unfounded parallels between the extermination of European Jewry and Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians – already apparent well before 7 October – has intensified over the past two years.[40]
The accusation that Israel is committing genocide is an old classic in the repertoire of anti-Israel protesters. Since 2023, however, this blood libel has made its way into mainstream arts, academia, and politics across the West. It has nothing to do with the facts on the ground, but rather with the own psychological needs of anti-Zionists – we might recall Sartre, Adorno, and Horkheimer. In Germany, the popular chant ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ was supplemented by the rallying call, ‘Palestine will set us free.’ The redemptive dimension of today’s anti-Israel activism could not be sounded more clearly. ‘Palestine’ has become the new saviour or – in leftist terms – the new revolutionary subject after the proletariat and the Third World failed to deliver on the hopes invested in them.
A truly humane future, once the aspiration of the left – certainly the left Améry considered himself a part of – appears to have been abandoned long ago. The future that today’s leftist activists on the barricades are striving for as ‘liberation’ will not bring about actual redemption of mankind, but a whole different kind of suffering compared to today – suffering reminiscent of the worst horrors humanity had descended into in the 20th century.
When the Germans and their auxiliaries sought to purify the world from misery, the logic of self-preservation, the basis of all rational thought, turned into the logic of extermination: murder for the sake of murder. As a result of its enactment, the Holocaust remains unprecedented to this day. And yet, another descent into barbarism is not banished in the future as long as the conditions that enabled it prevail.
The only practical objection to the world after Auschwitz and the possible repetition of antisemitic extermination today is the Jewish state. Not international law, not human rights declarations, and not – as in present-day Germany’s case – a questionable raison d’état. The fact that antisemitism is intertwined with society at large, or in Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s words ‘anti-semitism and totality have always been profoundly connected,’[41] removes everyone, Jews and non-Jews, from freedom of choice when it comes to the necessity of Israel.
However, Jews feel the ‘crushing pressure’[42] already today. When some side with antisemites and rationalise antisemitic attacks, this phenomenon is often described as ‘Jewish self-hate.’ But such a perception falls short. Because it is based on a displacement: It suggests that the reason for this behaviour lies within the Jew, when in fact it originates outside, in the pressure of antisemitic society.[43] Jews who turn against Jewish self-determination embody, paradoxically, both resistance against and identification with their persecutor. Resistance, because they try to avert the hate against them, identification because they take on their enemies’ gaze. In the attempt to gain self-empowerment, they overlook that antisemitism is not related to what its objects actually do or not do. The security promised by this identification is in fact no security at all. Non-Jews do not experience this pressure. They make their decision – and this crucial difference is all too easily missed – without duress.
Améry’s disconcerting insight is that ultimately no one who cares about a future in which freedom of choice is possible has any true choice today. This is the uncomfortable imposition which cannot be dispelled by omitting Améry’s essay from posthumously published books.
The meme is a fabrication, loosely based on a 2012 study by Dr. Eran Elhaik. In this study, he suggests that a significant number of Ashkenazi Jews are descended from the Khazars—a diverse group of Turkic peoples from the Caucasus region who allegedly converted to Judaism.
This theory is known as the Khazarian Hypothesis and has been discredited as junk science by the academic community.
Elhaik’s study was methodologically flawed from the beginning. There is no Khazar DNA to compare with Ashkenazi Jews, as the Khazars have no living descendants. Elhaik’s use of modern Georgian and Armenian populations as proxies for ancient Khazars has been rejected by leading scientists, who have published indisputable evidence in numerous journals, including the prestigious journal Science.
In addition to the lack of genetic links to the Khazars, the theory is further weakened by the absence of linguistic connections. If Ashkenazi Jews were truly descendants of the Khazars, they would have spoken a Turkic language, not Yiddish, which is a Judeo-Germanic language.
The meme takes the erroneous results of Elhaik’s study even further. The paper was published in the Genome Biology and Evolution journal, not at Johns Hopkins, and it only focused on the DNA of European Jews, not Israelis, as confirmed by the author. Additionally, the figure of 97% does not appear anywhere in Elhaik’s research. Numerous studies on Ashkenazi DNA have been conducted, and while none have proven a link to the Khazars, the overwhelming majority of genetic studies have confirmed that Ashkenazi Jews are genetically linked to the Levant.
Buy 
.png)
.jpg)
.jpeg)
