The One Simple Question That Determines Everything: "Is it acceptable to slaughter, rape, behead and burn people in pursuit of a political aim?" (Part 2) (Andrew Pessin)

(By Andrew Pessin, Continued from  part 1). 

3. How Would You Respond To An Openly Genocidal Terror Group That Doesn’t Care About Its Own Civilians?

So far I’ve argued that every decent human being must answer (Q) with an unqualified, full-stop “no,” and that the “no” answer reveals the true nature of the Palestinian movement as a genocidal Islamist movement seeking to murder all Jews and destroy the West. Once you understand this then everything about the “conflict” looks different including, now, how one might think about Israel’s response to October 7.

If you can’t answer “no” to (Q) then you cannot understand the actual threat that Israel faces, and thus cannot understand (and ought not to criticize) Israel’s response.

It’s common for anti-Israelists to insist that people have the right to “resist” their oppression, adding “by any means necessary” as a sanitized way to answer “yes” to (Q), thus justifying violence against Israel and Israelis. But now if people have the right to “resist” their oppression, people surely have the right to “resist” their extermination, and “by any means necessary.” On this view there would literally be no moral limits to what Israel can do in response to Hamas. The only people who deny that right to the Jews have already dehumanized them to the point where Jews no longer enjoy the “human rights” all other humans have, as we’ll explore below.

That the threat Hamas poses is precisely that of extermination is indisputable. From its founding charter to nearly every action and statement in the 35 years since, as we’ve seen, its goal has been clear. Hamas murdered and wounded many thousands of Israelis throughout the 1990s and 2000s in suicide bombings and other attacks. Israel then withdrew from Gaza in 2005 at great financial and emotional cost to itself partly as a gesture toward peaceful coexistence. In response Hamas took over the enclave by a violent coup in 2007 and immediately began firing rockets at Israel, each one a double war-crime (fired from within a civilian population toward a civilian population). In the past 16 years Hamas has launched tens of thousands of rockets and started five full-fledged wars in addition to many smaller skirmishes, in addition to perpetrating many individual terrorist attacks. Each war ended the same way, as a stalemate, with Hamas still in power—after which Hamas then took the intervening time to rearm and get militarily stronger. October 7 escalated their program to a whole new, barbaric level, and they have promised to do it again and again until every Jew is eliminated.

It is indisputable that Hamas will never accept any peaceful “solution,” beyond the elimination of all Jews. They say that openly and every behavior confirms it. If Israel is to defend itself from this genocidal program, then, it can only be by the elimination of Hamas. And since Hamas gets stronger with each interval, there is no longer any reasonable option but to eliminate Hamas—now, because next time they might even have nuclear weapons, supplied by Iran.

If the State of Israel is to protect its citizens, then, it has the moral obligation of eliminating Hamas.

The question is how.

Well, how would you fight a genocidal enemy that has no concern for its own civilians, and would even be happy to sacrifice them as long as it destroyed you? By conceding to them? Empowering them? Giving them a state?

Or would you fight them “by any means necessary”?

Of course most anti-Israelists condemn any measure that Israel takes to contain Hamas’s genocidal threat, including the non-violent ones. These include the blockade Israel imposed after Hamas took power and began firing rockets, which, in an inversion of reality, anti-Israelists now claim is a justified cause of the violence Hamas perpetrates against Jews rather than its justified effect. These also include many of the policies and actions that anti-Israelists attribute to “the occupation,” such as the separation fence, checkpoints, even some of the settlement activity in Judea and Samaria (which they refer to by the Jordanian colonial name of “West Bank”). When you answer “no” to (Q) and thus recognize the actual threat Israeli Jews are up against, these measures are more accurately seen not as “the mechanism of occupation” but as necessary measures of self-defense.

Still, these non-violent measures obviously don’t test the limits of the phrase “by any means necessary,” so it’s Israel’s military responses that draw their special ire, for example due to the civilian casualties that result. And indeed, in each of the five wars and other skirmishes started by Hamas, Israel’s military responses have caused civilian casualties.

That topic requires its own substantive essay, but here just a couple of brief points.

First, again, those who answer “yes” to (Q) are not in much position to complain of the other side killing civilians. If they endorse civilian casualties when these are the direct target of the attack—as they were in the October 7 slaughter—they can hardly object to civilian casualties as collateral damage from the targeting of military threats. Or if they may resist oppression “by any means necessary” they can hardly object when Israel resists its extermination “by any means necessary.”

More importantly, if anyone can figure out how to eliminate Hamas without any civilian casualties at all then Israel would be all ears. That is obviously impossible both by all the general norms of warfare—has there ever been a war, in all history, that didn’t involve civilian casualties?—and all the more so by the fact that Hamas embeds itself among civilians, uses them as human shields, blocks their efforts to evacuate, has rockets that misfire and kills them itself, and more. These multiple war crimes in fact make Hamas morally and legal responsible for any civilian casualties that result from strikes targeting Hamas.

Does that then license the unlimited slaughter of civilians, the utter destruction of Gaza?

Of course not, at least to those who answer “no” to (Q).

In fact Israel, unlike Hamas, makes extensive efforts to follow the international “laws of war,” which allow civilian casualties in the relevant proportions and under the relevant conditions. This is not the place to defend that claim, except to note (1) how remarkable is the degree to which Israel conforms to international law in a conflict with an enemy who flouts it entirely—the October 7 massacre of civilians including children being just one example of thousands—at the same time as (2) the international community relentlessly charges Israel with flouting those laws while ignoring Hamas’s actual blatant violations. It actually isn’t difficult to show that Israel takes more care to protect Gazan civilians than does Hamas, the enclave’s ruling authority.

The “no” answer also gives one more important result.

Already in the first days of Israel’s response to October 7 the calls for “de-escalation,” and “ceasefire,” began. Anti-Israelists called for these increasingly vociferously as the days then weeks of the campaign went on, condemning alleged Israeli “genocide” in the form of civilian casualties. But wasn’t Hamas’s mass sadistic slaughter of some 1200 mostly civilians itself an escalation? And part of an explicit campaign of, literally, genocide? How does one come out for “de-escalation” only after the Jew-slaughterers have finished their slaughter, without even acknowledging that slaughter? How does one come out against “genocide” only after the openly genocidal group has finished its round of genocidal activity, and do so without acknowledging that genocidal activity? Think about what that behavior reveals: they have no objection when Jews are attacked, but they condemn Jews when they respond. Or maybe: genocide is dreadful, except when it’s perpetrated against Jews.

Further, to call for ceasefire now simply means that Hamas wins, and can just use the interim once more to increase its military might for the next round of conflict. That’s not a genuine ceasefire; that is in the long term to prolong the fighting with almost surely a much greater civilian toll overall. Empirical experience, after five wars in 16 years, clearly demonstrates that to be true. Nor is such a call respecting the power of the “no” answer to (Q): as Hamas openly declared, that atrocity is exactly what is going to happen again and again, unless Hamas is eliminated.

Moreover, there is a whole other mode of de-escalation, and genocide prevention, that these anti-Israel activists are presumably intentionally ignoring. They could be demanding that Hamas return all the hostages immediately and surrender, and then the war is over, instantly. You don’t get more de-escalating and anti-genocidal than that. It is extraordinarily telling that this is not the mode they are calling for.

Their calls for ceasefire are, then, calls for the victory of Hamas.

If you answer “no” to (Q), and condemn the Hamas slaughter full stop, then you recognize the absolute unacceptability of the continued existence of Hamas, which in turn justifies a massive Israeli response to Hamas even despite tragically significant civilian casualties—which are in any case entirely Hamas’s responsibility.

And if you answer “yes”?

Then by your own reckoning the Jewish people may “resist” their own extermination “by any means necessary,” and you have no standing to object.

4. Delegitimization and Dehumanization

We turn now to the next result from a full stop “no” answer to (Q): we are compelled to examine exactly how it has come to pass that so many on our campuses can find themselves answering “yes” instead.

Let’s begin with this observation from Vassar College professor of Russian history Michaela Pohl from 2016:

The atmosphere at Vassar … is troubled. I am not Jewish, but even I have experienced an increase in hostility and strained silences among students and colleagues … I have been called a “f--king fascist,” “Zionist” and “idiot” for speaking out against Vassar’s BDS resolution and speaking up for Israel and for US policy. I have seen Jewish students profiled and singled out at a BDS meeting. I have felt the icy silence that reigns in some departments … Academics who suggest that Israel is harvesting organs … earn [approving] tweets and clicks—and deal in hate speech … It is speech that angers and mobilizes and that relishes its effects but denies that the effect was ever the intention.

As for the long-term effects of such an environment, Pohl noted that “students look down at their desks when I say things about Jewish emancipation [in Russia] … [there are] embarrassed silences in class while discussing Jewish history.”

This may be America in 2023, but what we’re seeing is an old story, dressed up fresh for the 21^st century Western world.

Years of lies, fertilizing the soil, all deliberately designed to delegitimize and dehumanize the Jew, to label the Jew as inhuman, demonic, pure evil. Once you are convinced that the Jew represents evil, then persecuting Jews, even killing Jews, becomes not only acceptable but even obligatory. If the Jew is evil, then you in turn must be a very good person in persecuting and killing him. The ancient and medieval Christians did this for centuries, portraying the Jew as the fleshly embodiment of evil for their rejection and crucifixion of Jesus. The Germans and the Nazis did this for decades in racial terms, inspired and justifying their actions by the antisemitic forgery Protocols of the Elders of Zion, even developing a whole academic discipline to demonstrate the evils of the Jews and thus inspiring the book title, as apt today as ever, Hitler’s Professors. After some decades of this program, killing actual living Jews isn’t merely easier but becomes an act of virtue.

The newer lies, now also several decades old, are merely superficial variations on the older lies, aiming to better reflect the specific evils of today. The charges of “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” “settler colonialism,” “apartheid,” and more recently, right out of Goebbels’ playbook, “Jewish supremacy”—not to mention probably every single thing most people believe about Gaza—all of these are lies, in fact easily documentable and demonstrable lies for anyone who takes a few minutes to honestly evaluate them. (Many people for example don’t know that rather unlike most “open air prisons” or “concentration camps” Gaza has four-star hotels and restaurants, luxury cars, ritzy malls, affluent neighborhoods, fancy beach resorts, and an obesity problem, not to mention a massive military infrastructure.) These charges don’t have to be true, they just have to be widely circulated, widely repeated, and widely believed, so that the Jew becomes the embodiment of whatever is considered most evil today.

And this is what the Palestinian movement, along with its many “progressive” allies, has successfully accomplished.

After almost twenty years of the “Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions” (BDS) movement against Israel, orchestrated on campus by the more than 200 chapters of SJP, their short-term goal, that of damaging Israel economically, was a bust; but the long-term goal, the real goal, has succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Whether or not a particular BDS resolution passes or fails on a given campus, the campaign itself soaks the campus in all the lies above for weeks on end, year after year. Most students don’t really follow the details, but come away thinking, man, those Jews with their genocide, apartheid, and supremacy, must really be pretty evil.

And now in 2023 no one blinks when SJP asserts boldly, baldly, as if factually, on their recent social media celebrating the slaughter of 1200 mostly Jews, that every single Israeli Jew is a "settler"—even the ones who live within the internationally recognized borders of the U.N. member State of Israel, even the ones whose lineage in that land might well trace back to Biblical times. In today’s campus vernacular the label “settler” is a slur rivalling in evilness the slur “Nazi” (which they also repeatedly sling against Israelis). If every Israeli Jew is a settler, then every Israeli Jew is evil, and therefore legitimately murdered. That includes the babies, and the grandmothers, and the unarmed dancing teenagers, and by the way it also justifies torturing them and raping them before you murder them.

Nor is an eye blinked when George Washington University’s SJP, for example, goes even further and openly declares that “We reject the distinction between 'civilian' and 'militant' … Every Palestinian is a civilian even if they hold arms. A settler is an aggressor, a soldier, and an occupier even if they are lounging on our occupied beaches.” The assault on language and intelligence here is almost as bad as the physical assault on Jewish civilians that it justifies. It is so shocking that it must be repeated: “Every Palestinian is a civilian even if they hold arms. A settler is an aggressor even if lounging on the beach.” That adorable four-year-old boy, born in that land to parents who were born in that land to parents who were born in that land (and beyond), splashing in the waves as his loving mother looks on: that small boy is an aggressor, a soldier, an occupier, a—settler.

Every Israeli Jew is guilty. And if every Israeli Jew is guilty, is evil, then so is every other Jew who supports them and may even be related to them. Since approximately half the world’s Jews live in Israel and the significant majority of the other half supports Israel, feels connected to it, has relatives and acquaintances who live there, and so on, then the result is clear:

There are no innocent Jews.

The actual Nazis couldn’t have orchestrated it better.

But even this is only part of the story.

To this now two-decade-old propaganda campaign was added, in the past decade or so, another ideological movement. Going by various names—Wokeness, Critical Race Theory (CRT), Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)—this ideology has taken campuses (and many other institutions) by storm, thoroughly exploding after the infamous George Floyd affair in 2020. The antagonism this movement shows not merely toward Israel but towards Jews in general is well documented, but the simple summary is this. Members of Western societies, including America, divide into two basic classes, they say, the oppressor and the oppressed, with one’s membership determined primarily by one’s race. As such, “white supremacy” is understood as the fundamental evil responsible for all sorts of disparities between white people and all people of color. Where there are such disparities (in wealth and income, in health, in education, in admission to Ivy League universities, in police interactions, etc.) these are due to white privilege affording benefits unavailable to people of color. Ideas such as “merit,” “equal opportunity,” and “color-blindness” are derided as either illusions or mechanisms by which to enforce white supremacy.

What does this have to do with the Jews?

Since Jews, on average, “do well”—never mind that many Jews are poor, unhealthy, not prosperous, and have long been disproportionately targeted for discrimination and violence etc.—then Jews are in the class of “white supremacist oppressors of people of color.” (Never mind too that actual white supremacists, going back to the Nazis and earlier, persecuted Jews for not being white, and that many, many Jews are racially indistinguishable from other people of color.) In fact since Jews “do well” on average compared to other “white” groups, Jews are sometimes considered uber-white: the worst of the oppressors. If the SJPers and BDSers label Jews with the defamatory slur of being settlers, the CRTers and DEIers label them with the equally defamatory slur of being uber-white.

Between these two sets of ideologies so dominant on campuses then, Israeli Jews, American Jews, European Jews, Jews simpliciter—are simply evil, full stop, the same full stop that should accompany the “no” answer to (Q).

There are no innocent Jews, not in Israel, not elsewhere.

Those “decent” administrators, faculty members, who say nothing while 1200 Jews are slaughtered—and livestreamed, with the most horrific recordings circulating the globe getting millions of views and shares and likes and celebratory comments—do they remain silent because they too believe these Jews actually—deserve this?

One liberated kibbutz included the bodies of 40 babies.

Babies.

Some beheaded.

Are there no innocent Jews, who don’t deserve this fate?

If you can’t condemn this with a full stop “no” to (Q)—if you remain silent—then you must believe these Jews deserve it. I can draw no other conclusion. Is it possible that my academic colleagues, sophisticated, educated, refined, “experts” in values—for do they not daily proclaim their expertise in values, in their anti-racism, their anti-hate, their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion?—is it possible that the people we work with, share offices with, who teach our children, share the belief and value system of the ancient and medieval Christians, the modern Nazis?

And of Hamas, as we have already discussed?

“We are all Hamas!” the young woman in North Carolina screamed—speaking, perhaps, for all these administrators, faculty members, students who remained silent.

Is there any other identity group about which it would be acceptable to celebrate their mass slaughter, and campaign to bring that slaughter to your campus? What exactly are all those diversity and inclusion administrators paid to do, if not to prevent this?

Or at least condemn it?

But silence is what we got on my campus, and on many campuses—like the silence in Prof. Pohl’s class whenever the topic of Jews come up.

Silence is complicity—and equivalent to a “yes” answer to (Q), at least when the victims are Jews.

 (Part 3/conclusion)

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The One Simple Question That Determines Everything: "Is it acceptable to slaughter, rape, behead and burn people in pursuit of a political aim?" (Part 1) (Andrew Pessin)

(Guest post by Andrew Pessin,  professor of philosophy at Connecticut College.)

The One Simple Question That Determines Everything

Andrew Pessin

apessin@conncoll.edu

1. Yes or No

It’s a simple yes or no question. Much follows from how one answers the question, but we’ll start with just the question.

(Q) “Is it acceptable to slit babies’ throats, rape little girls, chop off of the hands and feet of teenagers, gouge out eyes, murder children in front of their parents, murder parents in front of their children then kidnap the children, bind entire families together then burn them alive, and livestream all the above including posting videos of their murders to the victims’ own social media accounts—and worse—on a mass scale—in the pursuit of some political aim?”

I’ve been asking question (Q) of various faculty members at my institution and elsewhere, people whom I previously thought to be quite decent with serious commitments to ideals such as diversity, inclusion, toleration, and anti-racism, in the form of asking them to publicly name the perpetrators of the October 7 massacre and condemn the atrocities, full stop.

They have overwhelmingly refused to respond.

Based on what I have seen, out of some 200+ faculty members at my institution only four are willing to publicly condemn the brutal, sadistic, barbaric slaughter by Hamas of some 1200 mostly Jewish civilians, including many babies, children, teenagers, disabled people, and grandmothers, full stop.

If any other identity group had experienced a mass slaughter like this, or even a far smaller one, or even an abstract harm of some sort, does anyone doubt these faculty members would erupt, loudly and for days? Not a hypothetical, at least here: not only was there much outraged chatter after (for example) the Pulse nightclub massacre in 2016 or the George Floyd matter in 2020, but this past spring our now former President scheduled an event at a venue that had had discriminatory policies fifty years ago, and the faculty here exploded in weeks of outrage, departmental statements of solidarity with harmed students, with cancelled classes and then a cancelled President.

But when it’s Jewish babies and children, raped, tortured, dismembered, decapitated, there is silence.

And these are the decent people.

Many others across many campuses clearly think the answer to (Q) is “yes.” Cornell professor Russell Rickford found the October 7 bloodshed positively “exhilarating”; Columbia professor Joseph Massad was filled with “jubilation and awe,” finding the massacre “astounding.” And Marc Lamont Hill of CUNY answered (Q) more or less explicitly when he wrote, “So many university academics who insist upon doing performative, virtue signaling ‘land acknowledgements’ at every public event are eerily silent as real liberation struggles are happening. Guess decolonization really is a metaphor for some folk…” He clearly derides those who are all talk and no action, so for him, at least, the answer appears to be “yes,” at least in the pursuit of “decolonization.”

Nor are these professors alone in their sentiments. Lamont Hill’s remark also came after ten days of massive campus rallies openly celebrating the “resistance,” the sanitized word for the mass torture and slaughter of Jewish civilians. Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), the leading campus group with some 200 chapters, immediately endorsed and defended the massacre by openly proclaiming that “decolonization is a call to … actions that go beyond … rhetoric,” including “resistance … in all forms,” including “armed struggle,” and illustrated their social media with images of homicidal hang gliders in case we missed the point. Most tellingly, they declared that they “are PART of this movement, not [merely] in solidarity”—the movement, that is, that guns down unarmed dancing teenagers.

So Rickford, Massad, and Lamont Hill have a lot of fellow travelers in the affirmative camp, faculty and students, people for whom all that gore is apparently fine if it’s for “decolonization,” at least when the victims are Jews.

I have many thoughts about how academics (and then their students) become so gripped by ideology that they lose sight of basic moral truths, to the point where they see the mass sadistic murder of children as the moral high ground. The people just above are at least open about who they are so you know who you are dealing with, but, frankly, the “decent” ones, the silent ones, are ultimately no different. October 7 at least brings the benefit of clarity and sharp lines into matters often featuring obscurity and nuance. In my view any academic who cannot simply answer “no” to question (Q) above is literally in the same ideological position as the Nazis, for whom there were no moral limits to their extermination campaign, just possessed of some marginally different ideology, as we’ll see below.

For now maybe a few simple thoughts will do.

Speaking of land acknowledgements: In the lobby of a central building on my campus there is an enormous posterboard proclaiming that “You are on Pequot and Mohegan homeland,” noting that the college “celebrates Indigenous People’s Day.”

By the decolonization rationale above, our local Native Americans would be within their rights to invade our campus and mercilessly slaughter every single one of us. Indeed those who support indigenous rights and decolonization ought to be the first to offer their throats to avoid that vapid virtue signaling that Lamont Hill derides and actually live (and die) by what they believe.

Do our professors really support the Mohegans’ right to come in and gouge our eyes out, cut off our hands and feet, tie us up and burn us alive, and rape us while they are at it?

Or do they only support such when the alleged colonizers are Jews? (One suspects that when they learn that it’s the Jews who are actually the original indigenous inhabitants of the land and the Arabs the colonialist conquerors, they will be less enthusiastic about the slaughter of babies and children. More on this below.)

In fact in the very same tract declaring themselves “part of” the “armed struggle” movement for decolonization, SJP acknowledges that their chapters are on “occupied Turtle Island,” and further admit that they are themselves Palestinians “in exile,” i.e. not indigenous here. So by their own logic they should be the first to offer their throats to their local Native Americans; or since they’re keen to be a “part of” the violent decolonization movement, they probably should just eliminate themselves.

Note too that these same folk see themselves in “exile” and demand the “right of return” to their homeland in literally the same breath as they reject the Jews’ right to return from their own exile to their own homeland. And when Jews in fact did just that, these people endorse slaughtering them en masse; so again by parity of reasoning they should be offering their throats to the local Native Americans in the name of “decolonization”—not to mention slaughtering all non-indigenous people everywhere, which would include all immigrants and refugees in every country around the world.

Of course all this is absurd, outrageously so.

There’s actually a word for violence targeting civilians for political aims: it’s terrorism. And anyone incapable of identifying and condemning October 7 as such is pro-terror, pure and simple, no matter what the alleged grievances are that allegedly led to the violence. If you can’t answer “no” to (Q) above, full stop, then you are pro-terror, period.

This actually isn’t difficult. You don’t need to know anything about the conflict to know that that mass terror attack was abominable. Who watches babies having their throats slit and little girls raped and then dismembered alive (yes) and says, “Well, I need to learn more before making a judgment”? Who watches a mother and a father and their three small children tied up together and then burned alive (yes) and says, “Well I need to hear the other side before I make up my mind”? It simply doesn’t matter what preceded these events. By my lights, all decent people everywhere should recognize that there are moral limits to what people can do even in response to their alleged “oppression,” and that it is never, under any circumstances, acceptable to target civilians, particularly in that sadistic, barbaric, inhuman way—even if they are Jews.

This is not about politics. It doesn’t require you to be “pro-Israel.”

This is about humanity.

It’s either yes or an unqualified, full-stop “no”—because the second you add a “but” or “it’s complicated” or “look at the context,” you are turning your alleged “no” into a “yes.”

If your ideology endorses the mass extermination of a people, it’s time to rethink your ideology.

And, perhaps, to be removed from campus.

 

2. The True Nature Of Palestinianism

Let’s now see what follows from the “no” answer—from acknowledging that October 7 was a mass terror attack.

First and foremost, the “no” answer reveals something that was actually never hidden, except to those who have long chosen not to see it. Since such atrocities are never justifiable by any recognizable moral norms, the “no” answer reveals that the people perpetrating them do not respect those norms. And that in turn means that the movement in question is not what its Western progressive allies like to pretend it is.

The Islamic Resistance Movement, known by its acronym Hamas, has never made any secret of its views. From its 1988 founding charter—which literally endorses the murder of every Jew on earth, and quotes repeatedly, and “factually,” from the antisemitic Nazi-worshipped forgery Protocols of the Elders of Zion in order to support its genocidal program—to nearly every action and every statement in the 35 years since, it has been telling us exactly what it thinks. A week after the massacre their leaders did so again, calling on every Muslim on earth to bring the Jihad against Jews to everywhere on earth. Another week after that they declared their intention to repeat the October 7 massacre time and again, until all the Jews are gone.

Hamas, in other words, is not a liberation movement, not a decolonization movement, not about peace, negotiation, Palestinian self-determination much less “two states,” not concerned about “justice” as Westerners understand it nor even about the welfare, well-being, or betterment of the lives of its Palestinian civilians or subjects, all the things that should rightly matter to genuine campus progressives. It is not responding or objecting to any particular Israeli policy or practice, or alleged offense, such as an “occupation.”

It is the very existence of a Jewish state to which Hamas objects—because Hamas is an openly anti-Jewish genocidal movement that aims to establish its version of Islam over the entire globe, including murdering every single Jew on earth, starting with those in Israel. (They also are interested in destroying the United States and global Christianity, but the Jews are the first priority.)

That the animus is not restricted to Israeli Jews is also clear by the global reaction. Mass rallies in major cities around the globe celebrated the October 7 slaughter, called to “Globalize the Intifada!,”  and attacked local Jews and Jewish institutions. Within days of October 7 antisemitic incidents had skyrocketed across the world, and by early November there had been hundreds of incidents of harassment of Jews including many incidents of physical assaults, including at least one murder in Los Angeles and possibly another in Detroit, and with uncountable incidents of vandalism against synagogues, Hillel and Chabad Houses, Jewish stores and the like. And on our campuses: as noted above, SJP openly declared its support for Hamas with social media celebrating the mass slaughter of Jews (which they call “resistance”), then launched a campaign to “bring the resistance” to every campus in order to “dismantle” Zionism everywhere. Lovely words—except when “resistance” openly means “slaughter Jews,” when “dismantling Zionism” means removing, “by any means necessary,” anyone on campus who believes that Jews have human rights too, and when they illustrate their campaign with a celebratory image of the homicidal hang glider about to gun down every unarmed dancing teenager in his sight.

This is open endorsement of, and incitement to, mass homicidal violence—occurring on, and directed towards, not only Israel and Israelis but every Jew everywhere, including on our campuses.

“We are all Hamas!” one excited young woman at the University of North Carolina screamed exuberantly, part of a massive crowd of evidently like-minded individuals.

Nor are Hamas and its campus supporters alone in this platform. Hamas’s main internal rival, the Palestinian Authority, led by “moderate” dictator Mahmoud Abbas, is entirely on the same page, as seen from its long-running “pay-to-slay” policy incentivizing murdering Israeli Jews to its recent proclamation requiring all its mosques to preach that exterminating Jews is a Muslim imperative, to openly just announcing that its main party, Fatah, actually took part in the massacre. The mosque sermons weren’t about “Israeli” Jews, mind you, but “Jews,” full stop—like the full stop that should accompany the “no” answer to question (Q) above.

And it’s not just the Palestinians. Hezbollah in Lebanon has been actively involved in firing on Israel from the start, as have the Houthis in Yemen, as have some Syrian groups, all of whom are backed and directed by Iran. The Algerian parliament declared war on Israel. The most prestigious Islamic university in the world issued a fatwa declaring that no Israeli Jews are civilians, including babies and grandmothers, thus legitimizing violence against them. (This is the same university that previously issued special fatwas sanctioning suicide bombing against Jews, despite the general Islamic prohibition on suicide.) Another Muslim body issued a fatwa calling on all Arab states to join the war against Israel. Both Al-Qaeda and ISIS have called on their followers to strike Israeli, U.S., and Jewish targets around the world. Based on the massive rallies in Arab and Muslim countries around the globe celebrating October 7, it appears that what we are seeing is, in fact, a global Islamist war against the Jews.

This is what the “no” answer to (Q) reveals to us.

What Israel, and world Jewry, have been dealing with for years is in fact a war of global Islam against every Jew on the planet (and ultimately against Christianity and the West too). Those piles of mutilated Jewish bodies strewn all over the ground and the internet—that is the Palestinian movement, now understood as merely the leading front in the Islamist war against the Jews and the West.

That is what is being celebrated and supported around the world, including on our campuses.

Once you understand this then nearly everything about the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” looks different. First, that name is oversimplified and misleading: it should be called at least the Israeli-Palestinian-Jewish-Arab-Muslim-Iran Conflict. More importantly, it’s not in fact about Israelis allegedly oppressing disenfranchised Palestinians but about Jews defending their lives from a global genocidal Islamist movement. So understood, you’ll need to reorient yourself about who, exactly, is the oppressor, and who is the underdog. Opponents of Israel like to show maps of “big” strong Israel dominating little, fractured, vulnerable “Palestine.” But a more accurate perspective is given by something like this map, with that tiny sliver of Israel, 32 of which would fit inside the state of Texas, dwarfed by the surrounding Arab and Muslim nations who openly seek to destroy it. Look at that map and sincerely ask yourself: who exactly is the oppressor and who is the oppressed here? Who in fact is the colonialist, the imperialist, and who is the one resisting that colonial imperialism? Ask yourself seriously, which party actually seeks coexistence and which one seeks the extermination of the other?

The answer to that last one might be given by answering another question: Where in the Middle East and North Africa do Jews and Arabs in fact coexist, and where in that same region are there essentially no Jews?

October 7 reveals the true nature of the Palestinian movement, now impossible not to see even for those who have long chosen not to see it. (Q) is a yes or no question; and if “progressives” truly are opposed to oppression, on the side of the oppressed, against colonialism, and for coexistence and peace, then the “no” answer to (Q) dictates which side they should be on here.

Part 2

Part 3

 

 

 

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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