Friday, October 27, 2023
From Ian:
An open letter to the UN secretary-general
Erdan shows UNGA video of Hamas decapitation at ceasefire debate
Melanie Phillips: The West’s monster within
An open letter to the UN secretary-general
To United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres,UNGA calls for Gaza ceasefire, fails to condemn Hamas
I heard your speech on Tuesday in which you expressed understanding for the perpetration of crimes against humanity against innocent Israeli civilians because the Palestinians are under Israeli occupation.
I was horrified by what you said.
There is never justification for murder, rape, burning, beheading, and the killing of a baby in its mother’s stomach. Terrorism can never be rationalized, or put into “context,” and anyone who attempts to do so indirectly supports it.
The events of Saturday, October 7 exposed the brutal truth about Hamas. Gaza is not controlled by Israel, as the UN tries to portray it, but by a murderous terrorist organization, Hamas.
It is true, unfortunately, that over the years, because of the failure to reach a permanent agreement with the Palestinian Authority, which opposed generous offers from previous Israeli governments, Israel has mistakenly nurtured the reality in which Gaza has been ruled independently by a murderous terror organization.
The enlightened world – you – chose to continue calling for a two-state solution even when it was clear that there is no real feasibility for this to happen as long as Hamas is in control of Gaza.
With Gaza independent, unconnected, and hostile to the PA, Hamas has consistently used it as a launching pad for terrorist activities, including the indiscriminate firing of rockets toward Israeli civilian populations, against international law. Blurring the lines to violate the rules of war
Hamas chose to blur the lines between civilians and its fighters. The laws of war establish the principle of distinction between combatants and civilians. After years of controlling the local population, Hamas has succeeded in blurring the distinction both internally and externally, encouraging civilians to support and even take part in terrorist activity.
All of these, you have chosen to ignore. Instead, you continue to preach to Israel, blindly and unilaterally, about using legally its right to self-defense.
Erdan shows UNGA video of Hamas decapitation at ceasefire debate
Melanie Phillips: The West’s monster within
Islamic radicalism, they all claimed, was confined to a tiny fringe element. Ludicrously, they maintained that it had nothing to do with Islam. Clearly, many Western Muslims are genuinely signed up to Western values. But a frighteningly large proportion are not.Why My Generation Hates Jews
This has been ignored, downplayed and denied. Mass immigration of Muslims has continued, as has liberal pressure to admit thousands of people from Muslim countries claiming refugee status.
Anyone who objects is denounced as racist and Islamophobic. Under threat of terrorist attack, the media have routinely censored pictures of Muhammad and any proper discussion of Islam’s theology of holy war.
In both Britain and America, Iran has been steadily disseminating its ideology and increasing its influence in Shia mosques. Nine U.S. House representatives recently sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines warning about Iran’s influence in at least four American mosques and Islamic centers.
Over the past two years, the police and intelligence service in Britain have foiled 15 plots masterminded by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). The Jewish Chronicle has revealed widespread IRGC infiltration of British institutions and universities. Yet successive British governments have refused to ban the IRGC or the Muslim Brotherhood.
In a recent lecture, Robin Simcox, the British government’s independent adviser on extremism, said there had been a “normalization” of both anti-Israel extremism and antisemitism, which he blamed on a “failed policy of mass migration and multiculturalism.”
Multiculturalism remains an untouchable shibboleth, while Muslim antisemitism has been totally ignored. In Britain, the Jewish community leadership has not only been silent on Muslim antisemitism but has denounced as Islamophobic anyone who raises the issue.
Through interfaith initiatives, rabbis have been bending over backwards to reach out to Muslim clerics. Now that those clerics have been attacking Israel rather than Hamas, these naive rabbis feel betrayed.
Britain’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has surprised many by his robust support of Israel’s right to defend itself and his forthright condemnation of the morally debauched reaction to the Hamas pogrom. Many, though, think it is now too late. There are simply too many in the U.K. whose minds have been poisoned.
The terrible paradox of a liberal society is that it refuses to take the illiberal measures that may become unavoidable in defense of liberal values. As a result, liberal society contains the seeds of its own destruction. That is what now stands revealed to a horrified West.
I am 21 years old and Jewish. Apparently, 48 percent of my peers want people like me dead.Michael Oren: A War Against the Jews
As of October 23, 64 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds think what happened on October 7 was a terrorist attack. Seventy-seven percent of us think “it’s true that Hamas terrorists killed 1,200 Israeli civilians by shooting them, raping and beheading people including whole families, kids and babies.” But when asked, “in this conflict do you side more with Israel or Hamas?”
Forty-eight percent said Hamas.
I am not surprised.
In high school, my homeroom had an exercise where we made a T-chart dividing various ethnicities, religions, and other identities into the categories of “oppressor” and “oppressed.” Women: oppressed. Straight people: oppressor. Black people: oppressed. Then we reached the “Jew” category. And we paused. This being a high school in Los Angeles, many of my classmates were Jewish. I recall we skipped it altogether. But the T-chart stayed on the whiteboard.
If there were fewer Jews in that room, I’m confident that “Jews” would’ve gone squarely in the “oppressor” column.
Social justice theory became part of everything. My senior English class was not about great literature, but about readings in critical theory, mostly about race and gender. I had a nonacademic weekly homeroom class in which we learned that every white person is racist, and all men are evil. It took me a long time to shake off a hatred of men. It wasn’t socially acceptable to disagree, and no one really tried.
My high school got a dean of gender studies and feminism. At the time, one of her roles was to help seniors write their college applications. In answer to the question “What is the most significant challenge that society faces today?” I wrote it was identity politics. She gave me a note saying that meant I was rejecting the advances of the civil rights movement. I changed it.
I see the biggest part of growing up to be the acceptance of gray areas. But Gen Z worships these identity categories and the distinction of oppressor/oppressed. I know that’s true—I am submerged in it every day. The oppressor is always wrong, and the oppressed are always right. Since high school, we’ve been trained to identify and slot people based on their identities alone.
That’s intersectionality for you.
The cheering of Hamas among people my age on college campuses in the U.S. might seem shocking to older people. But it doesn’t shock me. For most of my peers, social issues are unanimous. At my college campus, the tiny group of people who publicly celebrated the overturning of Roe v. Wade were mocked mercilessly.
And so, even a terrorist group’s mass murder of innocent Jews—babies, grandmothers, entire families—cannot defeat my generation’s Manichean belief system. Jews are the worst, and October 7 is about justifiable revenge.
It wasn't the chants of "gas the Jews." Nor was it the glorification of Hamas paragliders by the Chicago branch of Black Lives Matter or, in New York and London, the tearing down of posters with the faces of Israeli children held hostage by Hamas. Not even the off-the-charts uptick in antisemitic incidents in Germany (240%), the U.S. (400%), and London (1,353%) convinced me. It was, rather, one of those realizations that so many generations of Jews before me have experienced. This war is not simply between Hamas terrorists and Israelis. It is a war against the Jews.
It wasn't the press' insistence on calling mass murderers "militants" or citing Hamas and its "Health Ministry" as a reliable source. I've long known that the terrorists are "militants" solely because their victims are Jews, and only in a conflict with Israel are terrorists considered credible.
Instead, it was the media's predictable switch from an Israel-empathetic to an Israel-demonizing narrative as the image of Palestinian suffering supplanted that of Israelis beheaded, dismembered, and burnt. It was the gnawing awareness that dead Jews buy us only so much sympathy. 1,400 butchered Jews bought us a little less than two weeks' worth of positive coverage.
Hamas opposed the Oslo process and every subsequent peace initiative. Hamas assassinated not only Jews but also Palestinians who supported the two-state solution. The reason most Israelis now oppose that solution is because they know that Hamas would take over the nascent Palestinian state in a day. I tell this to journalists but they are seldom, if ever, convinced. Much of the press, I've learned, has internalized the ultimate antisemitic myth: that Jews just have it coming.
Incontestably now, anti-Zionism is antisemitism. Hatred of the Jewish nation-state cannot be distinguished from hatred of the Jewish people. The war between Hamas and Israel, involving the largest and cruelest loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust, is a war against Jews everywhere.
