Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, October 30, 2023

10/30 Links Pt2: Netanyahu calls civilized world to arms against ‘forces of barbarism’; ‘Never Again’ has rarely rung so hollow; Feminists Are Consenting to Hamas’ Rape Culture

From Ian:

Netanyahu calls civilized world to arms against ‘forces of barbarism’

The Jewish state is fighting a war against “the forces of barbarism” for itself and for all decent countries, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told foreign reporters on Monday.

“It is a time for everyone to decide where they stand,” he said.

Netanyahu hopes that the world will back Israel, because “Israel’s fight is your fight,” and should “Hamas and Iran’s axis of evil win, you will be their next target,” he said.

The “horrors of Hamas” show that the 21st century has not moved “beyond the barbaric horrors of the past” towards a brighter future, according to Netanyahu.

“We will not realize the promise of a better future unless we—the civilized world—are willing to fight the barbarians,” he said. “The barbarians are willing to fight us, and their goal is clear: Shatter that promise and future, destroy all that we cherish, and usher in a world of fear and darkness.”

The prime minister noted that Hamas carried out “the most horrific crimes imaginable” on Oct. 7 when it broke through Israel’s security barrier with the Gaza Strip and murdered, tortured and beheaded its way through Israel’s southern communities.

Netanyahu dismissed calls for a ceasefire.

“Just as the United States would not agree to a ceasefire after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, or after the terrorist attack of 9/11, Israel will not agree to a cessation of hostilities with Hamas after the horrific attacks of October 7,” he said.

‘Never Again’ has rarely rung so hollow

It is not an overstatement to say Dagestan is no longer safe for Jewish people. In Nalchik, another Dagestani city, a planned Jewish centre was set on fire on Sunday. And in Khasavyurt, a mob besieged a hotel and searched rooms for Jews. A former chief rabbi of Moscow, Pinchas Goldschmidt, tweeted last night that, ‘We are receiving reports from four different cities in Dagestan… of mobs demanding to kill the Jews’.

It is likely the prompt for Sunday’s anti-Jewish riots was a Telegram post claiming that the passengers on the flight from Tel Aviv were refugees from Israel. Some of the mob were waving placards stating, ‘We are against Jewish refugees’. Goldschmidt blamed the riots ‘on the Russian government’s siding with Hamas in this conflict and the lack of condemnation of the massacre [on 7 October]’.

Whatever the immediate cause, it is clear that anti-Jewish hatred has become truly globalised. The behaviour of the Dagestani mob, itself inspired by Hamas’s videos of its atrocities on 7 October, exposes the raw hatred fuelling 21st-century anti-Semitism.

The Russian government’s pro-Hamas stance will obviously not have helped. But Moscow’s craven position is not the cause of this eruption of anti-Jewish hatred. The Kremlin is, in part, only trying to appease the already existing loathing of Israel among Russia’s Muslim populations.

Indeed, hatred of Israel plays a key, unifying role within the Muslim world. Since the decline of pan-Arabism and Arab nationalism in the 1970s, opposition to Israel has become the one cause that different Muslim sects and nations could agree on. This anti-Israeli consensus had appeared to be unravelling recently, with Gulf states and Saudi Arabia seeking a modus vivendi in Israel. The outbreak of the war on 7 October – which was likely encouraged by Iran – has put paid to any rapprochement between Israel and the Muslim world, at least for now.

The current wave of anti-Israeli sentiment sweeping the Muslim world is being mirrored in Western societies. The rabble waiting for a plane from Tel Aviv to land in Dagestan is merely a less inhibited and less restrained version of the ‘pro-Palestine’ marches on the streets of London or Berlin. They may present their visceral loathing of Jews as anti-Zionism and dress it up in the seemingly civilised discourse of ‘decolonisation’. But beneath the surface, their hatred of Jews is just as strong as it is among the mobs in Dagestan.

Indeed, while walking down a side street in central London on Saturday night, my wife pointed to a poster that had been stuck on a bagel shop. ‘Blood on your hands’, it read. My wife, full of anger, tore down the sign, and we continued on our way, dumbstruck by what we had just seen.

Hillel Fuld: Let me tell you how Jews around the world are feeling today

I know that it is hard to understand with our finite human brains, but that is exactly the point, we are human, and we can only understand other humans.

Looking at the world today, it is clear that this is not being run by humans, because no human mind can come up with the twisted reality in which we find ourselves. Why God does what He does? Again, I have no clue, we have no clue, we do not have the tools to decipher why God does what He does.

Some people view that as a cop out, I view that as the only possible way to look at the world. The only tool that I have in order to try to understand God‘s ways, and perhaps what is coming next, is history, is the Torah.

I look at the different miracles and stories we have learned our entire lives, and I know how this ends. God watched over us in the desert with the clouds of glory. He accompanied us and held our hand until we reached our destination. He watched over Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Moses, Aaron, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, Leah, and all the rest of our forefathers and foremothers.

He chose us, He gave us the Torah, He loves us, He is our father, and that I know beyond any shadow of a doubt. How could a father allow this to happen to His kids? I don’t know. I struggle with this question every day.

I don’t know.

But I do know that, throughout our history, we were the victims of endless persecution, and we always, always came out on top. Why we needed persecution in order to come out victorious? I have no clue.

Anyway, I started off by letting you know how Jews feel around the world, and out of all of the things I said above, to me, what I am seeing is, that Jews are strengthening their faith around the world, coming back to their tradition, remembering their heritage, and so many are understanding that God is in our corner.

You, the world, the anti-Israel world, you will go down in history, along with the Nazi sympathizers, and the people who sided with the Jew haters throughout our history, and were wiped off the map and forgotten forever.

How are Jews feeling today? Devastated. Broken. Depressed. Hopeless.

And at the same time? Unified. Strong. Optimistic. Confident.

“Israelis will never forget October 7th. Jews will never forget what came after.”

I know Hashem is here with His clouds of glory again. I know He is marching alongside us into Gaza to do the impossible work we need to do there. I know that God’s version of today’s clouds of glory is the Iron Dome.

I am endlessly grateful and proud of the IDF. The IDF is God’s vehicle by which we will win this. God has our back. We are marching into a man-made hell on earth but right behind us is God, and if history teaches us anything, God does NOT look favorably on people or nations that mess with His children.

I promise you, this has a good ending. The sadness won’t disappear. The loss won’t ever be forgotten, but we will win this and this will all end with the Jewish people victorious!

Am Yisrael Chai. Now and forever!

New York Times is providing Hamas with intelligence. How is this not a violation of US law against aiding terror organizations?

Every day, the New York Times writes exactly what Israel is doing in this war. Today, for example:

Israel has provided limited details about the invasion, four days into what an Israeli official described as an “extended ground operation.” But imagery verified by The Times indicates large groups of tanks and other armored vehicles making their way deep into Gaza, as Israel’s military has continued to strike nearby buildings from the air.

In northwest Gaza, a satellite image taken on Monday morning by Planet Labs shows large groups of armored vehicles advancing about three miles south of the northern border near the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Groups of vehicles can be seen amassed in open spaces of the densely populated area of Al Karama, northwest of Gaza City, less than two miles north of the crowded Shati refugee camp. Many nearby buildings appear to have been heavily damaged or completely destroyed by airstrikes.

Photographs also show a second group of armored vehicles near the city of Beit Hanoun, on the northeast edge of the Gaza Strip. Beit Hanoun had already been significantly damaged by airstrikes in the past several weeks.

Farther south, a video taken by Palestinian media worker Youssef Al Saifi on Monday morning, and verified by The Times, showed an Israeli armored vehicle firing on and destroying a car along Salah al-Din, Gaza’s main north-south road..

This is the New York Times providing intelligence to Hamas, using satellite photos and other information sources Hamas doesn't have access to. Planet Labs, as far as I know, only provides paid services, and it would not be allowed to provide services to Hamas directly, so why can the New York Times buy and publish the same information where Hamas can read it?

If the NYT was also using its contacts in Gaza to provide information about where tunnel entrances, rocket launchers or groups of Hamas armed members were, then one could say it was being even handed, although it would still be problematic. But for weeks, the only information it has been publishing has been Israeli movements, and speculation on Israeli strategy.

The only people it helps are the terrorists.

And now it is publishing information on exactly where in Gaza the Israeli troops are.

I'm no lawyer, but it sounds like a violation of 18 USC 2339B: Providing material support or resources to designated foreign terrorist organizations:

(a) Prohibited Activities.-

(1) Unlawful conduct.-Whoever knowingly provides material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization, or attempts or conspires to do so, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both, and, if the death of any person results, shall be imprisoned for any term of years or for life. To violate this paragraph, a person must have knowledge that the organization is a designated terrorist organization (as defined in subsection (g)(6)), that the organization has engaged or engages in terrorist activity (as defined in section 212(a)(3)(B) of the Immigration and Nationality Act), or that the organization has engaged or engages in terrorism (as defined in section 140(d)(2) of the Foreign Relations Authorization Act, Fiscal Years 1988 and 1989).

Hamas is a designated terrorist organization, and the New York Times knows this. So how can this be legal?

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!

For over 15 years since the Hamas coup, the Palestinian Authority has been trying to regain control over Gaza.

They have tried "unity" agreements. They have tried restricting electricity and fuel and medicines. Nothing has worked.

Now, they are seeing the possibility of Hamas being toppled from power - and suddenly, they have lost all interest.

The Palestinian Authority will not return to governing Gaza after the Israel-Hamas conflict without a comprehensive agreement that includes the West Bank in a Palestinian state, the authority’s prime minister has said.

Israeli civilian and military officials have said their plan for the end of the Gaza war is to have some form of transitional authority rule the territory, perhaps involving Arab states, leading to the restoration of the Palestinian Authority (PA), which was ousted from Gaza in a 2007 Hamas coup.

But Mohammad Shtayyeh, who has been prime minister since 2019, said the PA would not cooperate without a return to a genuine peace process resulting in two sovereign states.

“To have the Palestinian Authority go to Gaza and run the affairs of Gaza without a political solution for the West Bank, as if this Palestinian Authority is going aboard an F-16 or an Israeli tank?” Shtayyeh said. “I don’t accept it. Our president [Mahmoud Abbas] does not accept it. None of us will accept it.”

To the PA, Hamas' attack on innocent Jews is an opportunity to extort concessions from Israel.

In the past, Mahmoud Abbas has threatened, many times, to dissolve the PA and force Israel to re-occupy and take care of day to day affairs, which would be a huge drain. Here he sees a way to do the same without losing anything - forcing Israel to govern Gaza and refusing to do the job they are supposed to be doing under existing agreements.

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!

10/30 Links Pt1: Israeli forces in Gaza free captive IDF soldier; VDH: Our Immoral Monsters; Russians storm airport to attack Israeli passengers

From Ian:

Victor Davis Hanson: Our Immoral Monsters (via Twitter)

Students at UCLA, some of them perhaps on foreign-student visas and others on some sort of taxpayer-funded support, are now marching with a new controversial and disputed chant: “Israel, Israel you cannot hide, we charge you with genocide”.

But how strange that the same crowd that charges Israel with “genocide”, for replying to the mass murdering of its citizens on October 7, has a signature English-rhyming chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”. That jingle is tailor-made for Western-residents eager to parrot the Hamas charter.

Despite the usual denials, that mantra is a euphemism for destroying the state of Israel and those within it. They are then to be replaced by a nation of Palestinian Arabs from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean—in other words, requiring a genocide, or what happened on October 7 expanded to encompass all of Israel.

When professors faced little in the way of consequences for calling for Jews to be separated from their classmates, or advocating that the children of “Zionist propagandists” should be singled out, or claiming Israelis were “pigs” and “excrement,” what do we expect would follow?

Something like what just happened at the Cooper Union campus in New York?

There, some 50 Jews were locked in the library to protect them from raving pro-Hamas protestors pounding on the windows, zombie-like in their hatred, as if they were hired extras for The Walking Dead.

Why was Biden press-secretary Karine Jean-Pierre matter-of-factly denying the anti-Semitism was a problem (50% of hate crimes victims are Jews [2% of the population]), and why appoint Robert Malley to anything—unless the hatred of Israel is deeply engrained among the Left?

It is, after all, the effective goal of the new DEI/Middle East/Jacobin nexus to demand the mass killing of Jews and the extinction of Israel.

That agenda is randomly evident in the BLM glider posters, or the “river to the sea’ chants, or the August 1988 charter of the now idolized Hamas— ″Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam invalidates it, just as it invalidated others before it″ / “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals, and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors.”

Is the current war in Gaza City, thus, the “Jihad” that Hamas had always promised—or did they mean just the one-sided surprise murdering of unarmed women, children, infants, and the elderly?

We are reversing the Nazi sequence of the 1930s. Then cadres of thugs physically attacked Jews in gruesome efforts to shock all Germans into supporting their anti-Semitic agendas.

In today’s America, leftist intellectuals and their useful idiots on campuses are at the forefront as shock troops.

They are seeking to acculturate the nation to widespread, commonplace hatred of Jews in hopes of birthing brownshirt street violence of the sort we are already beginning to see at Cooper Union and elsewhere.

We have not yet reached depths of tabloid Jew-hatred of the Der Stürmer sort. But the New York Times and The Washington Post, along with other major news outlets, as tensions rose, ran with the incendiary Big Lie that the IDF had intentionally bombed a hospital “killing 500 Palestinians”.

That lie was compounded when our addled President weirdly seemed to lament that Islamic Jihad could not shoot straight: “It’s that old thing: Gotta learn how to shoot straight.”

The logical subtext to Biden’s remonstrations is that if Islamic Jihad had just hit their target—civilian Jews in Tel-Aviv—then the ensuring global fury and protests, and his cancelled meetings with Arab leaders (all recipients of massive US aid) would not have occurred.

I suppose as well Biden would not have sent $100 million in fungible money to the Hamas-run Gaza Strip—had the terrorists just learned “how to shoot straight” and not hit their own hospital parking lot.

The war in the Middle East will not end soon.

It is not easy to root out the Hamas death squads from their subterranean tunnels and cities and their human-shielded mosques, hospitals, and schools. It will be tricky to deter Iran and Hezbollah from entering the fray.

Meanwhile each day expect the campuses and streets to get a little bolder, a little closer to reifying their “river to the sea” chanting—as all the more Hamas erodes.

After all, there are no consequences to death chants. Even when the protestors incite violence, they correctly understand no college president will call them out.

Even when Rep. Tlaib incites mobs at the Capitol by shouting the lie that IDF leveled a Gazan hospital, she knows she is a protected “victim”—and her lies mere competing narratives.

When will they stop?

Not until the Democratic hierarchy disowns the growing Hamas wing of its own party.

Not until universities become more afraid of the donor class than they are of the DEI/pro-Hamas bunch and their protected hatred.

And not until a sane administration stops inviting to America those who despise their generous host.

None of that will happen soon—if ever.

So for now we Americans are like Diogenes the Cynic, stumbling around in broad daylight with a torch looking for just one honest college president, one truthful US president—all in vain.

The Spirit of ’48

Even in the midst of our searing anguish, we must recognize that this marks a complete departure from our history in the diaspora. No Jewish community anywhere in the world could have displayed such extraordinary heroism, on such a grand scale and with such remarkable capabilities. We paid a terrible price for the professional and conceptual failures of the security and state systems, from the strategic level to the decisions in the field. There is no denying the magnitude of this failure. Nevertheless, the historical analogy is crystal clear. In every Jewish community, over a history spanning hundreds of years, what occurred would have been the first day of a pogrom, leaving the Jews only with a pervasive sense of helplessness, pain and despair. In Israel, just the opposite transpired. The pogrom ended with unwavering counterattacks, followed by a major counteroffensive. And instead of feeling helpless, what we now feel is an entirely different emotion: rage.

This rage is the diametric opposite of the fear, helplessness and despair that characterized the Jews in the diaspora. It is the antithesis of these emotions. This rage is concrete evidence of the profound transformation that has occurred within us. Our anger is directed at our leadership because we understand that the responsibility lies with us, that we are in control of the situation, and that our destiny lies firmly within our grasp. This is the essence of the Zionist revolution.

A warrior nation
So yes, the state faltered. But Zionism has triumphed. On that darkest of dark days, it became evident that the people of Israel is not a fragile “spider’s web,” and is characterized by neither coddling nor weakness. At the moment of truth, the warrior spirit within us stirred in a matter of minutes. Ultimately, in times of war, it is not the air force, cyber capabilities, technological fences, reinforced slurry walls or active protection systems that secure victory. It is the valiant fighters. And on the day of the pogrom, one thing became undeniably clear: Israel is a nation of warriors. We are all warriors and we will not retreat in the face of adversity.

In these circumstances, no enemy can defeat us. Undoubtedly, we have numerous challenges to confront. We have suffered a devastatingly painful blow that will resonate in Jewish history for all eternity. But even at that moment, when the leadership and the state utterly failed, we were not at the mercy of others. We are not consumed with fear; on the contrary, we are filled with extreme heroism. And that is why this people will prevail over its adversaries. Even if our leadership seems akin to the Generation of the Wilderness, this people is forged in the spirit of Caleb and Joshua.

We are reliving the spirit of ’48 in another sense because much remains to be said about the tectonic changes awaiting us at the strategic and operational levels, the new landscape of threats created by our failures, the national and security challenges we face, and the lessons we can already draw from the national mistakes we have made. We stand at a Ben-Gurion-like juncture, marked by the need for dramatic decisions and the reconstruction of our collective consciousness, as well as of our national institutions and strength.

But now we know—it is achievable. Because the spirit of ’48 remains vibrant within us. Because Zionism has emerged—and will continue to emerge—victorious. This truth may have been obscured by affluence and success, by the political conflicts that made us feel that we were in the midst of an irreconcilable social rift. The proliferation of national institutions, flush with budgets and authority, dulled our sense of engagement and personal responsibility. The people of Israel dozed off, but when the day of reckoning arrived, arising from the distress and crisis, it awoke from its slumber, cast off the dust of complacency and behold: It is a lion.

Antisemitism in Arab media has been getting much worse lately.

Cairo24 uses the Gaza war as an excuse to praise Hitler:

What did Hitler say about the Jews? In light of the escalating events by the Zionist occupation towards the Palestinians, especially children, women and the elderly, some are searching for the most prominent things said by Adolf Alois Hitler, the Nazi German politician. He wanted to exterminate them from the face of the earth, so his view was correct. He told them that they were the cause of the devastation that was befalling the world, so he burned them.

They also publish the fake quote that antisemites ascribe to Hitler, "It was in my power to eliminate all the Jews of the world, but I left some of them so that you would know why I was exterminating them." But they also favorably quoted some antisemitism from Mein Kampf.

That is only one article in the past 24 hours.

Algeria's El Khabar has an article that says:

A question that has always been on my mind: Why is the West so keen on the existence of Israel? Why do they support the Jews so endlessly? I found only one answer, which is to get rid of their evils. Anyone who traces the history of the people will find that Stalin, for example, did not promise the Jews the establishment of a national homeland for them in Palestine except to get rid of their disease, and Hitler did not search for a rubbish bin to collect them except to cleanse Germany of their filth. America itself suffers from them, but it is helpless. Because the Zionist lobby is suffocating its breath.

There is no evil that has spread in the world unless these bastards are behind it. The Jew Karl Marx was behind atheistic communism, the other Jew Durkheim was behind the sociology that tampered with the family, the Jew Freud based his psychology on scandalous sex, and the Jew Sater promoted pornography.

Egypt's El Balad publishes a prayer for genocide of Jews. Here is a small part:

Oh God, curse the killers of the prophets, O God, send stones of shale upon them and throw terror and panic into their hearts.
Oh God, destroy the Jews in Palestine, the children of monkeys and pigs, and make their women barren, O God, and may their children be dispersed.

Oh God, send upon them strong winds that will uproot their power.

A columnist in Saudi Arabia's Al Madina writes:

The current events in Gaza have proven the truth of the Holy Qur’an about the Jews, in their many and hideous characteristics, including their constant practice of killing. If they did not kill others, they would kill themselves, meaning they would fight among themselves. And God says: (Then it is you who kill yourselves) in addition to their killing of the prophets, and whoever kills the prophets will not There is no doubt that killing Arabs and Palestinians is easy for them, and the doctrine of Israel’s army, police, and Mossad intelligence is killing, then killing, then more killing!

We all hated what happened and is happening to the people of Gaza, but perhaps it is a good hatred, as it showed us some of the characteristics of the Jews that require us to be wary of them and consider them the most prominent enemy, especially since the lobby pressuring them has recruited the greatest powers, international Freemasonry, and the media with them, in the name of religion and in the name of non-religion, to dominate the world within their ill-fated plan!

But while some articles ue the Quran to justify hating Jews, others claim that Jews are not really the Jews in the Quran to begin with. Dr. Ahmed Rabie , former dean of the Faculty of Islamic Dawa at Al-Azhar University, said that "today’s Jews are not descendants of our Prophet Jacob" and only arabs are the remaining descendants of Abraham.

But why seek consistency in the details? The main point remains: Jews are evil and must be destroyed.

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!

Online terrorism against Jews at Cornell: an analysis

From JTA:

Police at Cornell University were called to the school’s kosher dining hall, and the campus Hillel warned students to stay away from it, after anonymous antisemitic posts on a Greek life website that included threats to “shoot up” the building and kill and rape Jewish students.

The posts, whose text has circulated widely on social media, were published Saturday and Sunday under pseudonyms including “hamas,” “jew evil,” “jew jenocide,” “hamas warrior” and “kill jews.” The posts have titles such as “jewish people need to be killed,” “eliminate jewish living from cornell campus” and “gonna shoot up 104 west,” the name of the kosher dining hall.

The posts were made on Greekrank, a site that students at the Ivy League school and others use to rate fraternities and sororities. “If i see a pig male jew i will stab you and slit your throat,” read another post by a user called “hamas” that was viewed directly by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “If i see another pig female jew i will drag you away and ràpe you and throw you off a cliff. if i see another pig baby jew i will behead you in front of your parents.”

Looking at the Greekrank site, it is fairly clear that the person posting chose that venue because it allows completely anonymous posting without even the pretense of verification. Anyone from around the world can post literally anything with any Internet handle as often as they want with impunity. As long as they use a service that hides their IP address, it is very difficult to find them, especially if they are posting from an address that is physically overseas.

The specific posts refer to the name of the kosher dining hall, "104West!" - it is not an address - and indicates a familiarity with the campus. The "Allahu Akbar" strikes me as an attempt to misdirect suspicion on Muslims on campus, which seems unlikely as the rest of the messages do not fit a typical Islamist antisemite. In fact,the poster hits on all the themes of left-wing, right-wing and Arab antisemitism which makes me think that while the poster is indeed an antisemite, it is also someone who wanted to push all the buttons he (almost certainly a male) could to not only frighten Jews on campus but also to get lots of attention nationwide.

The only philosophy this person actually has is to feel important and relevant. Blatant antisemitism is a surefire way to achieve that.

Greekrank allows anyone to pretend to be anyone, and the reward is to get the campus police and FBI involved with the additional bonus of making lots of Jews fearful.

This is terrorism. Death threats are crimes, and "criminal acts intended or calculated to provoke a state of terror in the general public, a group of persons or particular persons for political purposes"are terrorist by definition.

This particular brand of terrorism that has the lowest risk/reward ratio possible. It costs nothing, it is nearly impossible to track, and it is just as effective in terrifying the Jewish population as a hand grenade tossed into the dining hall would have been. The (probable) incel who wrote this gets a huge psychic reward for doing something that causes so many people so much fear and prompts national attention and the use of law enforcement resources.

Even though the actual physical threat from this poster is probably nil - this person is almost certainly not the type to actually do anything - it helps normalize and justify antisemitism and it could encourage others to act. Death threats like this cannot and must not be ignored.

The most immediate thing that must be done is to force the Greekrank site administrators (and any other similar site) to add email verification, and since its entire audience is for and by people on campus, it should only allow people with campus email addresses (.edu) to post. It can still allow people to post anonymously but the records as to who they are should be available. This will make it much more difficult for losers to feel important for a day or two by threatening Jews.

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!

On October 11, anti-Israel "Palestinian solidarity groups" at Columbia University issued a statement pretending to care about dead Israelis but blaming their deaths on Israel:

The loss of a human life is a deeply painful and heartbreaking experience for loved ones, regardless of one's affiliation. We extend our heartfelt condolences to the individuals and communities at Columbia University affected by the tragic losses experienced by both Palestinians and Israelis. The sting of tears, the weight on our hearts, and the profound sense of loss are universal emotions that connect us all in grief and unify us by experience. As we mourn the loss of lives, let us come together as a Columbia community and fervently advocate for the universal human right to live in peace and seek justice. We also affirm that there can be no future of safety and freedom for all Israelis and Palestinians without holding the Israeli occupation accountable for its actions and putting an end to the untenable status quo of Israel's apartheid and colonial system.

We cannot view the recent actions of Palestinian fighters in isolation. Gaza is an open-air prison...

The rest of the statement was completely anti-Israel and then even implied that the slaughter, rape and kidnapping of Israelis is legal under international law:

[W]e remind Columbia students that the Palestinian struggle for freedom is rooted in international law, under which occupied peoples have the right to resist the occupation of their land. If every political avenue available to Palestinians is blocked, we should not be surprised when resistance and violence break out.

This is stomach turning stuff. But it was written by groups that are anti-Israel by definition, who lie as easily as they tear down "kidnapped" signs, and who have no concept of reality, history or international law. It is revolting but not surprising from these groups.

However, a large number of Columbia faculty issued an open letter of their own defending this statement - and in some ways, going beyond it:

As scholars who are committed to robust inquiry about the most challenging matters of our time, we feel compelled to respond to those who label our students anti-Semitic if they express empathy for the lives and dignity of Palestinians, and/or if they signed on to a student-written statement that situated the military action begun on October 7th within the larger context of the occupation of Palestine by Israel. ...
The student statement begins with language that should satisfy any measure of decency: “The loss of a human life is a deeply painful and heartbreaking experience for loved ones, regardless of one's affiliation. We extend our heartfelt condolences to the individuals and communities at Columbia University affected by the tragic losses experienced by both Palestinians and Israelis.” ...
In our view, the student statement aims to recontextualize the events of October 7, 2023, pointing out that military operations and state violence did not begin that day, but rather it represented a military response by a people who had endured crushing and unrelenting state violence from an occupying power over many years. One could regard the events of October 7th as just one salvo in an ongoing war between an occupying state and the people it occupies, or as an occupied people exercising a right to resist violent and illegal occupation, something anticipated by international humanitarian law in the Second Geneva Protocol. In either case armed resistance by an occupied people must conform to the laws of war, which include a prohibition against the intentional targeting of civilians. The statement reflects and endorses this legal framework, including a condemnation of the killing of civilians.

Any "recontextualization" of the pogrom is, by definition, an attempt to minimize it. That's what the student statement did and that's what these faculty members are doing. Their calling the deliberate slaughter of civilians, gang rapes of women and burning babies alive a mere "loss of human life" as if it was an auto accident is perverted and, yes, antisemitic. Their refusal to ascribe any responsibility to the Palestinian terrorists for their actions is sick. Their calling these attacks that targeted the elderly, women and children "military action," "military operations" and a "military response" is giving Hamas legitimacy instead of contempt. Calling the worst attack on Jewish civilians since Auschwitz "just one salvo in an ongoing war" is nothing less than a dismissal of the seriousness of the murderous orgy that was planned and executed by Hamas.

Moreover, the original statement did not condemn the killing of Israeli civilians at all as this letter claimed.

The faculty statement was even worse than the statement of the anti-Israel groups. And the fact that this was done by those who are entrusted to teach all students at Columbia shows that Columbia itself is an immoral institution that blames victims for their own deaths.

This disgusting letter puts Jews at risk. Because if "resistance" is a human right and even praiseworthy, and if slaughtering civilians is merely a "military operation" and a minor "salvo" in a much longer war, then who defines what "resistance" is acceptable? Why shouldn't Palestinians on campus attack Zionist Jews on campus in the name of this "resistance' whose legality and acceptance magically expands to anything Palestinians do, with no apparent limit?

If these are the people teaching students at Columbia, and there is no pushback from the administration or from a much larger number of other faculty, then Columbia is not a university as much as it is an antisemitic hellhole.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

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Socialists admit that "by any means necessary" includes rape, beheading, burning babies alive

In the anti-Israel rally in Brooklyn yesterday, this sign was featured:

It is a slogan we've been seeing for years, and in plain English it means that there is no limit to what may be done in order to destroy Israel - including suicide bombs, raping women, beheading children and burning babies alive.

But do the people who chant these slogans really believe that?

One prominent socialist website says, of course they do.

The Socialist Workers Party of the UK published an article a week after the pogrom in Israel fully justifying everything that was done, insisting that the slogan " by any means necessary" is meant quite literally:

Free Palestine: Why we say by any means necessary
Following the assault on Israelis by the Palestinian resistance, there are those who say a violent fightback is never justified. Isabel Ringrose explains that the oppressed have a right to take up arms against their colonisers

Uprisings against colonial rule are violent because violence is an inherent part of imperialism and colonialism.

That’s why the resistance by Palestinians against the racist Israeli terror state is wholly justified. All the deaths, horrors and destruction—all of them—are rooted in violent Israeli occupation and dispossession. And this is the case not just in Palestine. Wherever imperialism has gone, violence has followed.

So literally anything goes in the name of being anti-imperialist.

It isn't rhetoric: the same logic that justifies raping Jewish women in Israel can justify raping Jewish women in the West because they are "Zionist." If the Tree of Life shooter had been Arab, they would support that as well.

This article was republished in an Australian socialist site as well.

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10/29 Links: How Oct 7 Has Reignited Jewish Peoplehood; Czech DM calls to exit UN for supporting Hamas, warns Holocaust is back

From Ian:

David Suissa: How October 7 Has Reignited Jewish Peoplehood

This existential anxiety has also touched and united the Jews of the Diaspora. We’re seeing the faces of the haters, ripping down posters of hostages and brazenly calling for the end of the Jewish state. We’re seeing the triumphant body language. We’re seeing how these haters and Hamas supporters also smell blood.

It’s not only disgust, then, that is uniting Diaspora Jewry—it’s also an existential dread. It’s a realization that the weakness Israel showed on October 7 has triggered a dangerous, long-dormant dream among our enemies that “maybe now we can get them.”

If this kind of shared menace doesn’t unite Jews, nothing will.

In all the darkness, though, there is an upside to this unity– it is the rekindling of Jewish peoplehood.

Jewish identity has always been multi-faceted. Judaism is a religion, a culture, a nation, a civilization, a people. By bringing Jews of all stripes together, the existential crisis coming out of October 7 has reminded us that we are, above all, a people.

Yes, we seem to always wait for danger to unite us. But so what? We’re only human. This is how humans react.

Perhaps because of the unprecedented horrors of October 7, the solidarity this time may be more sticky. We can only hope that our renewed sense of peoplehood will outlast this most painful of moments in our modern history. It would certainly make us stronger and less vulnerable.

If our enemy treats us as one, who are we to disagree?

Jeff Jacoby: Why they rip down the ‘Kidnapped from Israel’ fliers

A core principle of antisemites in all times and places is that Jews are not fully human and are never innocent. A thousand years ago, Jews were slaughtered by Crusaders for being satanic Christ-killers who consumed the blood of children; a century ago Hitler preached that they were subhumans who polluted the racial purity of Aryan Europe. Today the Jewish state is accused of committing the demonic crimes of genocide and apartheid. The poison never changes, only the vial it comes in.

The “Kidnapped” fliers are intolerable to the haters because they so urgently challenge the antisemitic paradigm. They make it vividly clear that in the war between barbarism and civilization, between oppressor and oppressed, it is Jews who are under attack. That infuriates those whose worldview revolves around the certainty that Israel and its supporters are the victimizers. The outpouring of sympathy for Jews kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists — and the moral force of that sympathy — is anathema to them.

That explains as well why the atrocities committed on Oct. 7 immediately triggered so many vehement public demonstrations in support of the Palestinians. Precisely because the massacre and abductions had been so unspeakably horrific, it was necessary to reinforce the narrative of Jewish villainy. At times, denunciations of Israel gave way to naked antisemitsm. At a pro-Palestinian rally in Sydney, a chorus of voices chanted “Gas the Jews! F*** the Jews!” Others expressed their hatred by rejoicing in the slaughter of Israelis. A professor at Cornell, for example, told a crowd he was “exhilarated” by what Hamas had done.

In the wake of terrible mass shootings like the one that took at least 18 lives and convulsed Lewiston, Maine, on Wednesday, grieving family and friends often display pictures of their loved ones. It is a way of reinforcing the humanity of the victims and of evoking compassion from passersby. Who, seeing such a display, would destroy or vandalize it? Some norms are so ingrained as to be all but inviolable. When someone puts up an image of a missing or murdered child, no decent person rips it down.

But antisemitism has the power to override every norm and decent impulse.

On Reddit last week, a commenter explained that coming across a “Kidnapped” flier made him feel not empathy with the hostage, but “the exact opposite.” It filled him with “white hot rage,” he wrote, and he decided that “ripping it down and tearing it to shreds is the only thing I can do.”

The ripped-up fliers are one more indication of the rising tide of antisemitism in America and the West. A “white hot rage” is building. I, for one, cannot shake the conviction that Jews are at graver risk than they have been in decades, and not only in southern Israel.

Jon Gabriel: On Israel and ‘Root Causes’

According to today’s Hamasophiles, Gaza’s leadership is justified in their terror attacks against Israel because “Zionists stole their land.” Before that, the British “stole their land,” which they seem to forget.

Of course, the Brits stole the land from the Ottoman Empire in the first world war. Well, kind of. The sultan decided the region wasn’t populated enough, so he imported Arab Muslims from other regions, such as Yemen and Syria, creating many of today’s “Palestinians.” In other words, Gaza’s ancestors stole it from the Arabs, Jews, and Christians who already lived in the region.

The Ottomans stole it from the Egyptian Mamluks, who inherited it from Egypt’s Ayyubids, who had stolen it from Frankish Crusaders. Those short-lived Christian rulers had stolen it from Fatimid Caliphate, which was preceded by several other caliphates. Which had stolen it from the Byzantine/Roman Empire.

Before that, Rome stole it from the Jews, who stole it from the Greeks, who stole it from the Jews, who were given it by the Neo-Babylonians, who had stolen it from the Assyrians, who had stolen it from the Jews.

People who rely on root causes always stop the historiography the second they discover a group they don’t like. Funny how that works.

Honestly with Bari Weiss: How Hamas Executed a Massacre, and How One Israeli with Nine Bullets Fought Back

It’s been almost three weeks since Hamas attacked Israel. And there are three questions that, despite having reported on it so much over the last 20 days, many people are still asking. The first is what exactly happened that day, minute by minute, and what were the battles across the south of Israel like? There are so many accounts of civilians waiting in safe-rooms for hours on end for the IDF to arrive—what happened? The second is how did it happen? How did thousands of terrorists cross a border wall that cost more than a billion dollars to carry out the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust? And the third question is what comes next in this already horrific war?

Over the next two episodes of Honestly, we will answer those three questions by talking to three different people. You’ll first hear from Nimrod, a special forces reservist, who fought Hamas at several locations in the south of Israel on the morning of October 7—not because he was called by his unit to go there (he wasn't), but because he knew he needed to go save innocent civilians. His account helps paint a picture of what happened that day in Israel along the Gaza border, from a person who saw it up close and took the brutal fighting into his own hands before the army even arrived.

Then you’ll hear from Avi Issacharoff, a prominent Israeli journalist who’s also one of the creators of the hit TV series Fauda, which is based on his own experience as a member of an elite undercover counterterrorism unit of the IDF. My conversation with Avi helps explain how the most fortified and militarily sophisticated country in the world could have been overtaken in the most horrific way by thousands of Hamas terrorists.

Palestinian civilians are being screwed by their leaders, and being told it is for their own good. Again.

In the early 1950s, when UNRWA was still trying to actually help Palestinian refugees from 1948 to rebuild their lives in the countries they fled to, self-appointed "leaders" of the Palestinians resisted all plans that would help the people. They refused any plans that would give them citizenship, they protested any building of more permanent shelters, they objected to works programs that would help the refugees become self-sufficient.

These "leaders" justified their refusal by saying that they wanted to keep Palestinian identity alive. Left unsaid was that they considered keeping them miserable was an integral part of their plan to maintain this identity.

All of these decisions were made without the refugees themselves having any say in the matter. And the refugees who actually tried to take advantage of these UNRWA initiatives were threatened.

Similarly, when Israel tried to move Gazans out of their camps and into permanent homes in the 1970s, the PLO was against the plan - even though thousands of Gazans eagerly wanted to take advantage of it - and they got two UN resolutions against the voluntary resettlement of Gazans into decent housing.

Palestinian misery was justified as being the best thing for Palestinians, with the decisions being made by people who live in mansions.

Now, the PLO Executive Committee has met and again decided that Palestinian misery is in their own best interest.

In a meeting yesterday, as reported by Wafa, "The Executive Committee also affirmed its firm rejection of the forced displacement of our people, whether in the Gaza Strip or outside it, ....as this displacement that the occupation is trying to promote aims to create a new nakba for our people. Therefore, our people will remain steadfast on their land. They have the right to resist and struggle for their freedom and independence."

That means that the PLO is saying that the Gazans must not leave their homes even if Israel drops leaflets telling them where to go to stay safe. And they are also saying that Gazans must not be allowed to leave Gaza to save their families.

And again, they are justifying endangering the live of their own people as being for their own good.

From their boardroom in Ramallah.

Without asking a single person in Gaza what they would prefer to do.

Notice they are also not demanding that the Gazans be allowed to go to the West Bank, still within the borders of British Mandate Palestine, in areas fully under Palestinian control, to save their lives.

It isn't only Hamas who use Gazans as pawns. The PLO - who claim to be the only true representative of the Palestinian people - are willing to publicly screw them as well.

And the world doesn't even blink.

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Shifa hospital workers just became VOLUNTARY human shields for Hamas. Does that make them legitimate targets?

Israel released evidence this weekend showing that Shifa Hospital in Gaza was a Hamas headquarters.

This was not exactly a secret. Reporters have known this for at least 15 years.

But one thing happened on Saturday which has implications for international law.

Workers at Shifa sang a song saying, "We will not leave."

Meaning, they are saying that even if Israel tells them to leave in order to attack the Hamas targets in the lower levels, they are saying that they would prefer to be human shields for Hamas.

Does this change their civilian status under international law?

One of the giants of international law in war is Yoram Dinstein, and he is quoted in an ICRC monograph by legal scholar Jean-Francois Queguiner as saying "civilians who act as voluntary human shields can be regarded as directly participating in hostilities, with the result that they are deprived of immunity against direct attack and have no effect whatsoever on a commander’s assessment of proportionality."

Israel's' High Court agrees, saying in 1 2006 case that ‘if they do so of their own free will, out of support for the terrorist organization, they should be seen as persons taking direct part in the hostilities.'

Another legal scholar, Michael N. Schmitt, agrees that voluntary human shields are to be regarded as taking direct part in hostilities, and they lose their protection as civilians, but practically speaking they cannot be directly attacked. However, ‘voluntary shields … are excluded in the estimation of incidental injury when assessing proportionality.’

Other scholars say that the voluntary nature of their human shielding can affect the attacker's calculation of proportionality. In other words, the attacker must ensure that the civilian cost is proportional to the military benefit gained by the attack, and to many legal experts, the value, so to speak, of the voluntary human shields is lower than that of involuntary human shields (or what some call "proximate human shields") of wholly innocent civilians who happen to be between the attacker and the target. And according to some, their value is zero - Israel does not need to worry about killing them once they make clear that they are putting their bodies on the line for Hamas.

Meaning that by singing this song, to a small extent, these workers just made the hospital a little more likely to be attacked by Israel because their value as potential civilian casualties may be discounted.

Obviously, this doesn't apply to the involuntary human shields - patients or workers who did not participate in this little song. It doesn't make much of a difference in reality. If Israel decides that the hospital is a hugely important component of Hamas' military operations and sufficiently important Hamas members are under the hospital, it may very well decide to bomb the hospital after repeated warnings.

But these doctors and workers just cheapened their own lives under international law and they made such an attack a little more, not less, likely.

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Since the many protests recently are calling Israel immoral, let's talk about morality.

A nation's highest obligation is to protect the lives of its citizens. That is the contract that every citizen has with his or her nation: pledge allegiance in exchange for protection.

Even though Hamas has made its genocidal intentions clear from its founding, up until this month Israel treated the de facto rulers of Gaza with the assumption that they are also interested to some extent in their own wellbeing and that of those under its rule, and that Hamas could be managed by a combination of carrots and sticks - carrots in loosening up imports, exports, travel and work permits, sticks in the occasional limited military action that was meant to teach Hamas what it could lose if it shot rockets or engaged in terror.

That was a fatal error.

On October 7, Israel - and the world, if it was paying attention - learned that Hamas' highest aspiration was to slaughter Israelis, even at the expense of its own people, whose lives had been steadily improving over the past couple of years by every metric.

Hamas showed that its genocidal charter was not lip service, but the actual core of its existence.

With this knowledge that Israel had badly misestimated Hamas' true nature, there is no higher moral purpose than to eradicate Hamas and its terrorist allies, from the jihadist Islamic Jihad to the socialist PFLP and DFLP, all of whom participated and supported Hamas' bloodbath.

And the goal of destroying Hamas is not just a moral and ethical imperative, but one supported by international law. Utterly defeating a genocidal enemy is fully supported by the Geneva Conventions and every other instrument.

What about civilians?

While civilians must be protected as much as possible, if there is no way to get them out of the way, their being on the battlefield does not stop Israel (or any combatant) from attacking the enemy. This is also both moral and international law. It has to be this way; otherwise the enemy can simply use the civilians to act with impunity - to shoot rockets from behind them, to build their weapons caches underneath them, to convert mosques and hospitals into military headquarters.

Which, as we know, Hamas does routinely.

If Israel can attack the target effectively while warning the civilians - and the terrorists - to get out of the way, ut must do that. If the terrorists themselves are the target, then it cannot give warnings, because that would give Hamas a "military advantage" that Israel is under no obligation to give in wartime.

Of course Israel must try to minimize civilian casualties. But every single one is Hamas' fault. Every person Hamas tells not to move, everyone scared off by Hamas (yes, Hamas) bombing the exit routes to go to the South, all of their deaths are Hamas' responsibility both morally and under international law.

To put it bluntly, if (God forbid) Israel's destruction of Hamas means killing every single Gazan because of Hamas' policies of using them as pawns and human shields, it does not detract from Israel's obligation to destroy Hamas one bit.

In the final analysis, Israel has every right to do whatever it takes to destroy Hamas. Even though Hamas is said to have four months of supplies underground, Israel is allowed to block all aid (if iit chooses) to starve out Hamas, even if it also starves the Gaza civilians, if there is a likelihood that Hamas will steal the aid supplies and use it for war rather than for its civilians. (Even the US Army laws of war manual says this, explicitly.) It sounds unbelievably harsh - and this is why Israel is trying to divide Gaza to allow civilians to flee to the South and allow aid only there, at least for the first stages of the war - but the overriding imperative to destroy Hamas means that any Gazans who starve because Hamas steals their food and fuel is the responsibility of Hamas, not Israel.

Moreover, Egypt's decision not to allow any Gazans to flee to the relative safety of their neighbor is its own responsibility. I am unaware of any nation ever hermetically sealing its border from neighboring civilians taking refuge during war. Egypt has allowed hundreds of thousands of other refugees into its borders over the years. It is astounding that no Western nation is condemning Egypt for blocking the most likely path to safety for Gazans in mortal danger.

Where are all those who scream for the rights of refugees to flee war zones and find safety elsewhere?

Of course, Gazans who don't want to flee can choose to stay. Israel doesn't want to annex Gaza and it is not trying to "repeat the nakba" as those pretending to defend Egypt's immoral decision say. At any rate, let Gazans make their own decisions as to what is best for them; it is not for Egypt or Jordan to tell them that their being stuck in Gaza is for their own good.

Israel doesn't have an option. It has the moral obligation to destroy an entity whose only goal is the destroy Israel. All of this is backed by international law. And the responsibility for the civilians is solely Hamas's, as well as the Arab countries that refuse to save the lives of any Palestinians while blaming Israel for doing what it must.

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10/28 Links: 'Never again is now' says Netanyahu as war on Hamas escalates; Why is the West confused about backing Israel?; I See the Hostages in My Children’s Faces

From Ian:

Why is the West confused about backing Israel?

There is a bitter irony to all of this. The progressive left claims to be fighting colonialism. And yet it is so uninterested in the reality of non-western countries that it winds up blindly imposing conceptual categories that were forged in the context of American history and society on the rest of the world. The identity synthesis may be dressed up in postcolonial clothes; but it is itself a neo-colonial enterprise.

There is one final factor in how these moral errors could come to be so influential: the concept of intersectionality. Ori`ginally coined by the academic and campaigner Kimberlé Crenshaw, the idea of “intersectionality” says that various forms of disadvantage can reinforce each other: that, for instance, the discrimination suffered by black women can, in some contexts, be more than the arithmetic sum of the discrimination suffered by white women on the one hand, and black men on the other.

That is true so far as it goes. But Crenshaw’s theory quickly took on a life of its own. If people can face disadvantage based on belonging to more than one identity group, activists claimed, then the only way to liberate them would be to fight against all those forms of disadvantage at the same time. These activists came to see every type of oppression as linked — and to demand that anyone who cares about one kind of injustice must simultaneously fight against all other kinds.

Many people have, in the past weeks, been surprised by how many protests held banners like “Queers for Palestine.” After all, Israel has an excellent record at respecting gay rights, while the authorities in Gaza heavily penalize homosexuality. But the logic of intersectionality helps to explain why, at a sufficiently high level of abstraction, these causes can appear to be at one with each other. Since they see both sexual minorities and Palestinians as oppressed, intersectional activists posit that the fates of both groups must be inextricably linked.

As a broader and bloodier conflict looms on the horizon in the Middle East, it is time for a simple willingness to recognize the messiness of the real world. The idea that all supposed victims of oppression do, or should, see each other as allies is fanciful. Neither Israelis or Palestinians have a monopoly on moral virtue. It is not possible to press them into a simple schema of white or black, colonizer or colonized, good or evil. The murder of 1,400 innocents in Israel has already provoked a broader conflict in which a lot more innocents are likely to perish.

It is not possible, either, to expect any state to tolerate the cold-blooded murder of so many citizens without doing what it takes to re-establish its security. Nor would any other state accept talk of a ceasefire while hundreds of its people remain in the clutches of a brutal terrorist group. But that does not mean that it would be wise for Israel to stumble into a wider regional war — nor does it absolve the country from its moral responsibility to do what it can to protect the lives of civilians on the “other” side. How to balance these imperatives without abandoning any of them is a fiendishly difficult task. While the future of the conflict remains unclear, its first weeks do already offer one clear lesson. Nobody, neither Israeli or Palestinian, forfeits their humanity by virtue of the group into which they are born. And an ideology that is incapable of recognizing that basic fact loses any claim to moral superiority.

PodCast: The IDF Approach to Protecting Civilians in Urban Warfare - Modern War Institute

Almost immediately after Hamas launched its brutal set of terrorist attacks in Israel on October 7, it became clear that the Israel Defense Forces would respond militarily. Initially that response came in the form of airstrikes, but it appears likely that a ground campaign will follow. In either case, however, the heavily urban terrain poses major challenges for the Israel Defense Forces. In such areas, compliance with the law of armed conflict and international humanitarian law is paramount.

To understand both those challenges and the specific measures Israeli forces have adopted to ensure their operations maximize protection of civilian populations, John Spencer is joined on this episode of the Urban Warfare Project Podcast by Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Conricus. A spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces, he describes these measures—including steps unique to the Israeli military—and the broader effort to minimize incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, and damage to civilian property in urban warfare.

Niall Ferguson: What irony! The deranged defence of Hamas on campuses across the West is fuelling a counter-revolution that could finally loosen the stranglehold of wokeism

If that strikes you as outrageous, you have clearly missed the fact that such thinking is rife throughout the Anglosphere academy.

'Wokeism' covers a multitude of sins. The academic Left is a much more complex coalition nowadays than it was back in the 1930s, when Cambridge had its covert cadre of card-carrying Communists, or the 1980s, when Oxford snubbed Margaret Thatcher by refusing her an honorary degree.

Although Marxist socialism is still part of the package, class warfare and anti-imperialism co-exist (at times uneasily) with a variety of other ideologies based on alternative forms of identity, such as race ('critical race theory' or 'anti-racism') and gender (the ever-growing abbreviation LGBTQIA+ now stands for 'lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual, and others').

'Woke' originated as African-American slang, but is now defined in the dictionaries as 'aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)'.

Like all cults and sects, the woke have their own idiosyncratic language and rituals. These include stating one's 'preferred pronouns' at every opportunity and acknowledging whenever possible that one is meeting on land expropriated from indigenous peoples.

In marked contrast to conventional scientific understanding, race is an essential, unalterable attribute (you're either BIPOC — black, indigenous, and other people of colour — or you're incurably white), but gender is almost infinitely fluid. In each case, there is a hierarchy, determined mainly by the extent to which your assigned minority were 'victimised' and 'marginalised' by the white, cisgender colonisers.

This 'intersectionality' produces some very strange bedfellows. 'Free Palestine is a Feminist Issue', according to a meme I saw last week; 'it's a Reprodutive [sic] Rights Issue, it's an Indigenous Rights Issue, it's a Climate Justice Issue, it's a Queer Rights Issue, it's an Abolitionist issue'. Quite how queer rights activists would fare if they travelled to Gaza to join in the fight for freedom is unclear, given Hamas's implacable commitment to sharia law.

But the woke have never worried much about the difficulty of aligning themselves with Islamists. After all, words and silence can both be violence in their world, but terrorism is just 'what oppressed fighting the oppressor looks like' — and the constraints of logic must be just another manifestation of white supremacy.

There are four reasons this confused ideology has established itself in so many universities.

First, an older generation of soggy liberal professors could not resist appointing and promoting younger radicals, naively equating their illiberal outlook with their own youthful idealism.

Second, various policies of affirmative action — designed to increase the proportion of female and non-white students and teachers in universities — had the unintended consequence of reducing intellectual diversity.

Third, as universities institutionalised policies such as the promotion of equity, diversity and inclusion and the decolonisation of this or that curriculum, bureaucracies sprang up that were swiftly staffed by woke believers.

Finally, a coalition formed between woke students, professors and administrators, who discovered there were almost no limits on the methods they could use to attack the surviving conservatives in their institutions.

Anonymous letters of denunciation, cancellation campaigns on social media, the bearing of false witness, public mobbings, and extra-legal investigations — I have seen all of these used against professors who dared to resist the woke cultural revolution.

Simon Sebag Montefiore: The Decolonization Narrative Is Dangerous and False

Hamas is a diabolical killing sect that hides among civilians, whom it sacrifices on the altar of resistance—as moderate Arab voices have openly stated in recent days, and much more harshly than Hamas’s apologists in the West. “I categorically condemn Hamas’s targeting of civilians,” the Saudi veteran statesman Prince Turki bin Faisal movingly declared last week. “I also condemn Hamas for giving the higher moral ground to an Israeli government that is universally shunned even by half of the Israeli public … I condemn Hamas for sabotaging the attempt of Saudi Arabia to reach a peaceful resolution to the plight of the Palestinian people.” In an interview with Khaled Meshaal, a member of the Hamas politburo, the Arab journalist Rasha Nabil highlighted Hamas’s sacrifice of its own people for its political interests. Meshaal argued that this was just the cost of resistance: “Thirty million Russians died to defeat Germany,” he said.

Nabil stands as an example to Western journalists who scarcely dare challenge Hamas and its massacres. Nothing is more patronizing and even Orientalist than the romanticization of Hamas’s butchers, whom many Arabs despise. The denial of their atrocities by so many in the West is an attempt to fashion acceptable heroes out of an organization that dismembers babies and defiles the bodies of murdered girls. This is an attempt to save Hamas from itself. Perhaps the West’s Hamas apologists should listen to moderate Arab voices instead of a fundamentalist terror sect.

Hamas’s atrocities place it, like the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, as an abomination beyond tolerance. Israel, like any state, has the right to defend itself, but it must do so with great care and minimal civilian loss, and it will be hard even with a full military incursion to destroy Hamas. Meanwhile, Israel must curb its injustices in the West Bank—or risk destroying itself—because ultimately it must negotiate with moderate Palestinians.

So the war unfolds tragically. As I write this, the pounding of Gaza is killing Palestinian children every day, and that is unbearable. As Israel still grieves its losses and buries its children, we deplore the killing of Israeli civilians just as we deplore the killing of Palestinian civilians. We reject Hamas, evil and unfit to govern, but we do not mistake Hamas for the Palestinian people, whose losses we mourn as we mourn the death of all innocents.

In the wider span of history, sometimes terrible events can shake fortified positions: Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin made peace after the Yom Kippur War; Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat made peace after the Intifada. The diabolical crimes of October 7 will never be forgotten, but perhaps, in the years to come, after the scattering of Hamas, after Netanyahuism is just a catastrophic memory, Israelis and Palestinians will draw the borders of their states, tempered by 75 years of killing and stunned by one weekend’s Hamas butchery, into mutual recognition. There is no other way.

The dangers of ‘decolonisation’

The roots of decolonisation as a theory lie in the tumultuous world of French philosophy during the 1960s and 1970s. The work of philosopher Michel Foucault was particularly influential on what would become decolonisation theory, complete with its perverse romanticisation of an anti-modern, reactionary politics. Although openly homosexual, Foucault eulogised the less than gay-friendly Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979. He saw it as a radical challenge to Western forms of rationality and modernity. Even the Ayatollah Khomeini’s systematic liquidation of the revolution’s former left-wing allies did not stop Foucault from penning articles in support of Iran’s theocratic regime. He saw the Islamic Republic of Iran as an attempt to liberate humanity from the grip of materialism and capitalism.

Frantz Fanon also played a central role in the development of decolonisation theory. The Wretched of the Earth, first published in 1961, was one of the first significant works to draw out the intersection between an anti-colonial politics antithetical to the West and an emergent identity politics. For Fanon, the Third World anti-colonial movements of the postwar era were challenging both imperialism and racism. He presented violence against Europeans as the self-realisation of the nations of the global South. To ‘shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone’, wrote Jean Paul-Sartre in his foreword to The Wretched of the Earth. It makes it possible to ‘destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses simultaneously: there remain a dead man and a free man’.

In their very different ways, both Foucault and Fanon romanticised the anti-colonial movements of the mid-to-late 20th century, projecting their anti-Western, anti-modern visions on to the likes of Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution. In the decades since, purportedly liberal institutions across the Anglophone world have become increasingly sympathetic to Fanon and Foucault’s anti-Western, anti-capitalist worldview. Indeed, many have given this worldview, expressed in the caricatured form of decolonisation theory, their seal of approval. Nowhere has this been more apparent than within British universities, especially since the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. As part of a post-BLM ‘liberatory agenda’, decolonisation has become a new orthodoxy.

On campus, decolonisation has largely been pursued culturally. Its advocates have sought to ‘free’ their higher-education institutions from the putative effects of ‘colonisation’, usually by purging reading lists of too many dead white Europeans. In doing so, decolonisation activists, like good Foucault scholars, have tended to reject notions of reason, civilisation and modernity as Western impositions.