This was the way the world looked at Jews - as a sly, untrustworthy people.
And that is what we have been seeing in the months since October 7.
As we've mentioned, the UN report on sexual abuse by Hamas included extensive verification of accusations, and even a false debunking of others.
It mentions the challenges of figuring out the truth:
The mission team also faced specific challenges in the gathering and verification of incidents of sexual violence included: limited professionally-gathered forensic material; inaccurate and unreliable forensic interpretations by non-professionals; the extremely limited availability of victims/survivors and witnesses of sexual violence due inter alia to the internal displacement of affected communities....But when it went to interview Palestinians for their accusations of IDF soldiers sexually abusing Arabs, none of these standards were used.
The mission team also visited Ramallah in the occupied West Bank to hear the views and concerns of Palestinian officials and civil society representatives in response to allegations of conflict-related sexual violence received by the mandate in the aftermath of the 7 October attacks, allegedly implicating Israeli security forces and settlers. Interlocutors raised concerns about cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of Palestinians in detention, including various forms of sexual violence in the form of invasive body searches, threats of rape, and prolonged forced nudity, as well as sexual harassment and threats of rape, during house raids and at checkpoints. This information will complement information already verified by other UN entities on allegations of CRSV in Gaza and the occupied West Bank for potential inclusion in the annual Report of the Secretary-General on Conflict-Related Sexual Violence.The Jews who witnessed the attacks are cross-checked with forensic evidence and photos and videos, verified with other witnesses, and anything that doesn't pass their supposedly professional standards is not even mentioned. But the Palestinian accusations are published in detail, with absolutely zero corroborating evidence. Their use of the word "allegations" does not water down the next sentence where the "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of Palestinians in detention" is published as fact.
This is double bigotry: any accusations against Jews are accepted by default, but any accusations by Jews are rejected by default until they can be verified. Sometimes the rejection is done by creating standards for Jews that no one else has ever been subject to.
October 7 was a "success" from the Arab perspective because of deception. Hamas had fooled the world into thinking that it cared about the welfare of its people, that is was a pragmatic political player and not an ISIS-type group that was eager to sacrifice those people for the opportunity to kill a lot of Jews. Gaza's economy was the best it had been since Hamas took over, more people had jobs since the time Hamas took over, Gaza had more imports and exports since Hamas took over. Their entire war strategy is based on deception: militarily on October 7, and politically every day since then.
That is the way the entire war has been reported. Hamas lies, about the Al Ahli Hospital and Salah-al-Deen road explosions and the stampede this past week, are assumed to be accurate from the outset while Israeli denials are worthless without a serious amount of externally-verified evidence. Hamas has a track record of lying, and Israel has a track record of their statements being proven by the facts, yet the world interprets things to reward the liars who control all the information and penalize the side that has an open society where lying would be punished by the voters.
Israeli accusations about UNRWA workers being terrorists are taken seriously for a day or so but then the "fact checkers" claim that there is no evidence and the media and politicians gladly accept their verdict, even as Israel keeps on publishing more and more proof every week afterwards.
The Jews cannot be trusted. And the architects of October 7 are trusted - as long as they are accusing Jews of crimes. (Otherwise, their lies are simply ignored.)
It is even worse than what I am saying. Because not only do the media and "human rights organizations" and lawmakers assume Jews are liars, they believe that the lies are a conspiracy. After all, when the IDF is accused of a war crime, this means that an entire chain of command and many soldiers are part of the conspiracy, all lying in concert with each other.
It is even worse than what I am saying. Because not only do the media and "human rights organizations" and lawmakers assume Jews are liars, they believe that the lies are a conspiracy. After all, when the IDF is accused of a war crime, this means that an entire chain of command and many soldiers are part of the conspiracy, all lying in concert with each other.
The antisemitic trope of the untrustworthy Jew is combined with the antisemitic trope of the insular, clannish Jews conspiring to fool the world.
It is happening every day, in many newspapers and TV reports in formerly respected media.
None of this makes sense without looking at it through the prism of deep-seated, subconscious bigotry against Jews that is entirely in line with historic antisemitic tropes.
The real irony is that it is that often the people who claim and believe that there is structural, endemic racism in Western society are the very people who exhibit - and strenuously deny - this structural bigotry against Jews.
