Thursday, September 25, 2025
From Ian:
Howard Jacobson: "Kill the Jews!": The Cry Went Out across the World
Howard Jacobson: "Kill the Jews!": The Cry Went Out across the World
Let’s be clear – the anti-Semitism of today is more than hate that doesn’t know what else to do with itself. This is purposive, orchestrated hate, combining Islamic hostility to the very idea of a Jewish state on Arab land; Christian anti-Judaism that goes back two thousand years, and which Hamas has been adroit at mobilising to its cause (see, for example, the staged photographs of Virgin Mary in a hijab cradling an emaciated Palestinian Jesus); Leftist mistrust of bankers and financiers with bulbous features; and professorial obsession with settler-colonialism, a made-up academic discipline that denominates Zionism as an ideology of conquest, no matter that the first Zionists were returning to their historic homeland as refugees from the pogroms of Eastern Europe. Being kicked from pillar to post for hundreds of years is now to be understood as marauding. Behold an intifada well and truly globalised.Anti-Israel activism has produced the next generation of violent far-Left icons
As for the argument that you can hate Zionism and not hate Jews – it being a mere coincidence that the same language is employed for both – that was blown apart in the first weeks of October 2023 when all such distinctions were dropped in the carnival excitement of the butchering and raping of Jews wherever they came from and whatever they believed.
“Kill the Jews!”, the cry went out across the world. Not just Zionists and Israelis, but all Jews. Here was the diabolic genius of the Hamas massacre – it de-parochialised the Palestinian struggle, capitalising on that pity deficiency John Gray described, freeing the world’s conscience from a guilt it had never been truly comfortable feeling. In the outpouring of jubilation that greeted the rapes and killings in such Meccas of feminism and anti-racism as Harvard and Oxford could be heard loud sighs of relief. The spell of Holocaust immunity had been broken.
We have come a long way from those first callow deniers who turned up on the roof of Auschwitz like schoolboys on the first day of term with a new supply of rulers and set squares, determined to prove that six million Jews could never have been gassed in such cramped conditions. Thereafter, denial took more varied and sinister forms.
Hadn’t some Jew handed others over to the Nazis? Hadn’t local Jewish leaders connived in the Holocaust in order that fear would swell the numbers wanting to flee to Israel? Didn’t Romanies and homosexuals suffer as many casualties? And what was so special about this Holocaust anyway? Holocausts were common – a democratisation of the Shoah that led to some Holocaust Remembrance Day events not mentioning Jews at all. After which, Shoah envy began to creep in. Everyone wanted to have one.
Obligingly, Benjamin Netanyahu has gone some way to giving the Palestinians a taste of their own. Some way. Ferocious as Netanyahu’s assault on Gaza has been, it began as a response to a brutal attack on innocent civilians. It met war with war. No such provocation sparked off the Holocaust. The camps were not a response to a Jewish massacre of young Germans. There’d been no jostle for land. No history of territorial dispute. The Third Reich’s hatred for the Jews was not political. It was brewed up in its imagination, stimulated into madness by hundreds of years of Christian anti-Semitism.
The only new prisoner heroes were abroad, in the form of the Palestinian movement. Marxist-Leninist terrorist groups like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine exported the stories of Palestinian "political prisoners" to far Left American audiences.Inventing Genocide in Gaza: The UN's Fertility Clinic Blood Libel
"The US state isn't the only state to hold political prisoners. We would be remiss if we failed to mention that illegitimate state of Israel, its occupation of Palestine, and the thousands of Palestinian freedom fighters who have been locked behind bars for largely the same reasons of those who have fought here in the United States," Domond said in the 2021 PSL lecture.
PFLP terrorist Walid Daqqah has become cited by far Left activists as much as Shakur, with PSL, International League of Peoples' Struggle, and the Workers World Party engaging in calls for his release when he still lived.
Dozens of socialist groups signed a Palestinian Youth Movement petition for his release. Lebanese terrorist and PFLP affiliate Georges Abdallah had also captured the imagination of many socialists, up until his release from a French prison this year.
According to Workers World, PFLP proxy Samidoun NY/NJ coordinator Laila Boutros quoted imprisoned PFLP leader Ahmad Saadat at a 2021 Philadelphia rally calling for the release of Abu-Jamal, stating “Whether the name is Mumia Abu-Jamal, Walid Daqqah or Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, political prisoners behind bars can and must be a priority for our movements."
"These names illustrate the continuity of struggle against our collective enemy - their legacies of organizing that reach back to the anti-colonial liberation movements of the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, to today," Bourtros continued. "Political prisoners are not simply individuals; they are leaders of struggle and organizing.”
Framing of Gaza Strip as 'open-air prison'
The Palestinian cause has been important to radical socialist activists, but with the October 7 Massacre, the cause seems to resonate even further. Socialists embraced the framing of Gaza as an "open-air prison."
Revolutionary Communist International called the Hamas-ruled territory as such on October 11, and an October 9 Socialist Worker article framed Palestinians as tearing "down the fences that imprison them."
Other far Left activists saw the October 7 Massacre as a bid to free "Palestinian political prisoners" from Israeli prisons. Communist social media influencer Black Red Guard said in November 2023 that Palestinian terrorists released in a ransom for hostages captured by Hamas was the "fruit of the armed struggle."
An X user claiming to be associated with the Democratic Socialists of America said a month later that October 7 "was designed to embarrass the IDF and capture hostages for prisoner exchange."
The resonance of October 7 and the ensuing war seemed to rally the dormant Marxist martyr-complex. Since 2023, there has been a surge in anti-Israel domestic terrorism, and with this, a new generation of martyrs for the anti-American revolutionary cause have arisen.
None of these claims are even minimally substantiated. The UN report rests entirely on an April 2024 ABC News article, published more than four months after the alleged December 2023 strike. It quotes the clinic’s director—who was not present, could not identify the date, and merely asserted without evidence that an IDF shell was responsible. The article never asks how a clinic director could independently determine the ordnance used. Israel stated it was unaware of any strike at the site. No forensic analysis was undertaken, no fragments recovered or examined, no trajectory studies performed, no experts dispatched, and no effort made to reconstruct the events of that day. Even the UN report concedes it is not actually certain how the clinic was damaged, stating it was “most probably” an Israeli shell.
Photographs also contradict the UN’s case. ABC News images show the clinic still standing (see Figure 1), with limited interior damage, while a Reuters photo (see Figure 2) omitted from the UN report depicts an adjacent multi-story tower with a gaping hole at its center, far more consistent with being the real target of IDF fire. The claim that the clinic suffered the most damage is plainly false. The photos reveal active combat in the area and evidence of a possible threat from the adjacent building. There is no proof the clinic was struck by Israeli fire; it could just as easily have been hit by a Hamas RPG or misfired rocket. Even if it was an IDF shell, nothing shows the clinic was the target. Furthermore, the idea of a “precision strike” on nitrogen tanks inside a largely intact structure is implausible.
This fog of uncertainty would matter less if the Al-Basma case were incidental. But it is central to the genocide charge, the key example offered in the UN report to show Israel imposed on Gazans “measures to prevent births,” a particularly depraved act if true. By exposing this claim as baseless, the report is revealed for what it is: a political document built on omissions and deliberate distortions intended to demonize Israel.
This is why Al-Basma matters. If the UN can manufacture a genocide charge out of limited damage at a clinic based on an unverified media report four months after the fact, admit that they were not certain whether it was an Israeli shell, and suppress evidence of greater destruction in the adjacent building that was more likely the target, the entire exercise becomes propaganda rather than fact-finding.
The charge of genocide carries unique gravity and demands the highest standard of proof. To invoke it without verified evidence is reckless and malicious. The truth about the Al-Basma IVF clinic is far less dramatic than the UN’s narrative. Only two facts are known: the clinic was damaged in combat, and embryos were tragically lost. Beyond that, everything else is unknown and speculative. There is no verified date, no confirmed ordnance, no known witnesses, and no evidence of intent. To turn this into proof of a genocidal campaign to harm the very future of the Palestinian people is a distortion so severe it exposes the fabrication of the UN report. Shame on the politicians and others who repeat these falsehoods.
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