Lies of Hamas and antisemites bear fruit at UN
Like a house of cards, the artifice of lies built by Hamas and its supporters has begun to crumble.Western Guilt
A few weeks ago, statistician Abraham Wyner published a report in Tablet Magazine conclusively proving that Hamas is lying about the casualty figures in Gaza. The deaths reported by the Hamas-controlled Health Ministry rose in a ridiculously linear fashion on a day-by-day basis that is virtually impossible in a real war. In addition, given Hamas’s acknowledgment that at least 6,000 of its fighters have been killed, its claim that 70% of the casualties in Gaza have been women and children is impossible unless male civilians are being miraculously spared. The extent of this lie is apparent when the true casualty numbers for terrorists and combatants killed in Gaza are taken into account, over 13,000.
Yesterday, former Al Jazeera director Yasser Abu Hilala admitted that the accusations that IDF soldiers raped women during the recent operation at the al-Shifa Hospital were fabricated.
"It was revealed through Hamas investigations that the story of the rape of women in Shifa Hospital was fabricated," Hilala wrote, adding that "The woman who spoke about rape justified her exaggeration and incorrect talk by saying that the goal was to arouse the nation’s fervor and brotherhood!"
Anti-Israel forces have made up rape allegations against Israel whole-cloth in order to distract from and excuse the well-documented mass rapes committed by Hamas terrorists on October 7 and the reports that the hostages still held in Gaza face constant sexual assaults and abuse from their captors.
However, the same day that the rape allegations against Israel collapsed, the constant stream of lies against Israel bore fruit as the Biden Administration caved to the pressure from those who spread these lies and refused to use its veto power against a UN Security Council resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire during the month of Ramadan.
This resolution is merely declarative and creates no legal obligations, but it will still make everything worse. Hamas will be further convinced that its strategy of intentionally causing the deaths of its own people and constantly lying to inflate the number of civilian deaths is working and should continue, and it will be encouraged to dig in its heels and refuse any deal to see the hostages released in exchange for a temporary ceasefire. It will be seen as further evidence of Israel’s wrongdoing by those around the world who support Hamas’s genocidal goals, giving a tailwind to the antisemites making life more dangerous for Jews everywhere.
Ironically, hours after this shameful betrayal at the UN, the American government stated that it knows the accusations of Israeli war crimes are lies. Addressing Israel’s compliance with an executive order signed by President Biden last month mandating that recipients of US military aid demonstrate that they are complying with international law, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said that “We have not found them (the Israelis) to be in violation, either when it comes to the conduct of the war or the provision of humanitarian assistance.”
The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz,” runs a bizarre quip ascribed to the Israeli psychiatrist Zvi Rex. To deconstruct it, consult Dr. Freud. “A convenient way to dispatch guilt,” he might expound, “is to project it onto your victim” — like a schoolyard bully who huffs that the fight started when the other guy hit back.Far Right and Far Left Converge — Against the Jews
Guilt-swapping is precisely what Hamas’s cheerleaders around the world did even before Israel struck back after October 7. Hamas had tortured, raped, and murdered 1,200 Israelis. Instead of condolences, Israel reaped a global orgy of antisemitism, be it masked or overt, that also engulfed Jews everywhere, especially university students (demonstrating that higher education is no antidote for frenzy). It was a perfect reversal of cause and effect.
To plumb the Freudian mechanism, go back to postwar Germany, whose Nazi precursor had committed the crime of all crimes. After total defeat and “reeducation,” antisemitism was out. Democracy established strong roots, and philosemitism became the creed of the land. The government paid billions in restitution to the survivors of the Holocaust and the young state of Israel. At Yad Vashem, German officials from the president down would bow their head to the 6 million dead. The arms trade flourished; German-made U-boats are now one leg of Israel’s nuclear triad.
Yet the moral burden stuck, and so Schuldabwehr — “repelling guilt” — crept into contrition and atonement. By the first intifada, in 1987, Germans were telling themselves: “Israel is doing to the Palestinians what we did to the Jews.” “They are conducting a Vernichtungskrieg” — Nazispeak for a war of annihilation. “Gaza is like the Warsaw Ghetto.” “Haven’t the Jews learned from the past?” Auschwitz, then, was a kind of reform school.
Freud might muse: “Such parallels betray projection. Culpability continued to chafe, and, eventually, Germans sought relief by shifting it onto the victims.” Steeped in the Torah, Freud would add: “Three thousand years before I set up my couch, the Jews invented the scapegoat in Leviticus who ‘shall bear all their iniquities to a barren region; and the goat shall be set free in the wilderness.’” But he would explain: “Such displacement, as I call it, spelled vast moral progress — no more human sacrifice to appease the Gods.”
There is no such advance in our days as we run through the third iteration of Jew-hatred.
The first chapter was written by Christianity. Jews were charged with killing God’s son, desecrating the Host, and committing ritual murder. A bitter Jewish joke makes the point. When a little girl was killed just before Passover, the shtetl’s Jews cowered in the shul awaiting an imminent massacre. Suddenly, the rabbi barges in, jubilating, “I have wonderful news. The girl was not Christian, but Jewish.”
The second chapter was authored by Hitler, who went from faith to race, fingering Jews as cosmic enemies of Germany and the world. Once, Jews poisoned the wells; now it is the bloodstream of the Aryans. They had to be quashed like super-deadly bugs.
Chapter 3 unfolds as we speak. “From the river to the sea,” a classic Palestinian refrain, sounds like a geographic reference, but its thrust is ethnic cleansing and extinction. Chanting this mantra, the crowds on Western campuses and squares haven’t read the 1988 charter of its leading exponent, Hamas, which in the name of Allah orders Muslims to kill Jews wherever they hide. Nor do the infuriated know the venom continually oozing from the language of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Tehran. “Israel remains a foreign body,” thundered Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah years ago, as if cribbing from Mein Kampf. Before the International Criminal Court, Israel stands accused of Nazi-like “genocide.” Hamas official Ghazi Hamad: “We must remove that country, because it constitutes a . . . catastrophe for the Arab and Islamic nation.” As for the October 7 massacre, we will do it “again and again.” And “everything is justified.”
An extremist distributes a flier about “Zionists infiltrating the media.” A political activist tweets, “Nothing is creepier than Zionism.” A pundit writes about “the dirty tactics of Zionist censorship.”
Can you tell which of these haters is coming from the political right, and which from the political left? The world of antisemitism has become so muddled that it’s almost impossible to tell one from the other.
Consider: One of these three haters was recently arrested for painting the slogan “White Power” on synagogues. One co-chaired the Women’s March on Washington. One is a former New York Times correspondent and speechwriter for Ralph Nader. Can you tell which one is which?
One of the three is a Presbyterian minister. One is a devout Muslim. One owns a Ku Klux Klan robe. Still can’t tell who’s who?
Although these three bigots come from very different places on the political and religious spectrums, they have managed to find something in common: hatred of Jews, thinly disguised as hatred of “Zionists.”
Among the most troubling phenomena of our time is the extent to which antisemitism has become interchangeable among individuals who hold starkly differing views on other issues, from abortion to immigration to civil rights. Yet they all hate Jews.
There is no simple explanation for this because there is no simple explanation for antisemitism. Some bigots hate Jews for religious reasons, some for political reasons. Some focus their ire on Jewish philanthropists, some focus on Jews in the media, some focus on the Jewish state.
And sometimes they focus their hate on each other. In the 1930s, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union both violently persecuted their Jewish citizens, even as the two regimes went back and forth between being enemies and being allies. The Germans oppressed Jews and Judaism in the name of Aryan racial purity, the Soviets oppressed them in the name of working-class solidarity. Even when Hitler and Stalin hated each other, they never stopped hating Jews.
Leafing through the American Communist press in the 1930s is a ride on an intellectual roller-coaster. U.S. Communists dutifully followed the Soviet line, regularly and passionately denouncing Nazi Germany—until the Soviets signed a nonaggression pact with the Nazis in August 1939, at which point the American far left suddenly declared that the British, the French, and “the capitalist press” were the real enemy, to cite an editorial which appeared in that month’s issue of Young Communist Review. Two years later, Hitler tore up the pact and America’s Communists returned to being anti-Nazi. All the while, Jews and Judaism remained in the crosshairs of both Marxism and Nazism.