It took yet another Jewish genocide to expose the hollowness and reversal of the normative paradigm in the western intellectual system. Sitting here in India, I’ve been witnessing with stunned disbelief how fancy academic jargon is being employed to make an argument that, at its core, is as monstrous and morally repugnant as the barbaric assault carried out on civilians by Islamist terrorists of Hamas — that the Israelis got what they deserved.
It is based on the false equivalence and onerous “both-siding” that there is no moral distinction between the state of Israel and the Palestinian terrorists, and it reduces Jews from “human beings” to “Zionist settlers” who are not only entitled to violence but also “social justice” against them.
Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian-American lawmaker from the Democratic Party, refused to say anything despite being repeatedly questioned by a Fox News reporter about reports that Hamas beheaded babies during the terrorist attack that claimed the lives of over 1200 Israelis.
Zareena Grewal, a professor of American studies, publicly defended the barbarism and massacre carried out by Hamas members against the Jewish people because, in her words, “settlers are not civilians,” as she wrote in response to a journalist’s quip that “Civilians are civilians are civilians, doesn’t matter where.”
Grewal is “a historical anthropologist and documentary filmmaker whose research focuses on race, gender, religion, nationalism, and transnationalism across a wide spectrum of American Muslim communities,” according to her profile at Yale University, an Ivy League institution.
If one thought that the most obvious thing in the world to condemn would be the brutalization of women and crimes committed against defenceless civilians, such as newborns in cots, old people, young people having a good time, people going about their daily lives, sleeping inside their houses, and safe havens, it seems that this isn’t the case.
How hard is it for the civilised world to acknowledge what really occurred over the past few days as Islamist fanatics carried out horrific acts such as decapitating babies, shooting young people in the head at a music festival, decapitating couples, raping women and displaying them as trophies while blood dripped from between their legs, defiling the corpses, and streaming the murder of a grandmother on social media.
Thousands of young people were dancing to the music of an outdoor music festival early on Saturday morning (7 October) in a large field close to the Gaza border when dozens of Hamas terrorists crossed the border in hang gliders, blocked all exits and started firing randomly at the crowd in a rage of vicious violence, shooting the children and teenagers with their automatic weapons. 260 people were massacred and an undetermined number were held captive out of the 3500 people who had assembled.
The survivors of the terrible incident were interviewed by the Tablet magazine. “Women have been raped at the area of the rave next to their friends bodies, dead bodies,” several claimed.
According to the report, “Several of these rape victims appear to have been later executed. Others were taken to Gaza. In photographs released online… several were paraded through the city’s streets, blood gushing from between their legs.”
A German-Israeli tattoo artist who enjoyed dancing was one of the festival’s young attendees who was murdered, raped, and stripped before being put in the back of a pickup truck and paraded about while the audience yelled “Allahu Akbar” and spat on her.
The Hamas terrorists planned to rape the ladies who were kidnapped in Israel, according to footage supposedly showing an interrogation of a captured Hamas operative.
In a video recording posted by the state of Israel, the father of an eight-year-old daughter named Emily who was killed by Hamas is heard saying, “When we found out that Emily was dead, we went yes and smiled, because that was the best news of the possibilities I knew.”
It is difficult to imagine what horrors young Emily would have experienced or what dreadful set of events her father would have chosen if she had died instead. It explains why Hindu ladies chose self-immolation over disgrace when faced with the savagery of Islamists.
Which moral realm would this be considered “resistance” in? Giving this despicable, violent behaviour the label of a “political movement” dehumanises Jews to the point of comparing them to cockroaches and morally justifies the pogrom carried out by Hamas. If this seems to be beyond the realm of human comprehension, it took place immediately after.
Assault by Hamas at the music festival was described as “as you might have seen, there was some sort of rave or desert party where they were having a great time, until the resistance came in elect,” by one speaker at a “Palestine solidarity” rally held in New York by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a group of lawmakers including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jamaal Bowman, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar.
The disturbing, gory image of a car reduced to cinders and carrying the charred bodies of persons who were burned alive by Hamas terrorists was posted on ‘X’ by Israel’s foreign ministry on Thursday.
An unholy alliance of Leftists, liberals, and Islamofascists around the world claimed that reports of babies being beheaded by terrorists would be taken as lies unless the state of Israel shares concrete proof. According to the official handle of the state of Israel, it was left with no choice but to share the image of a baby murdered in its cot by the Islamist radicals of Hamas.
The morally decrepit group, which included some well-known international media networks, barked, “Images, or it didn’t happen.”
No amount of confirmation—from the office of the Israeli prime minister or US president Joe Biden—could quench their thirst for murder. The only thing that appeared to matter was whether the kids were “beheaded” or just killed, as though Hamas butchering toddlers would be considered acceptable standards of decency. Denying the monstrosity would be on par with the ruthless execution of infants if evilness had a metre. What political imperative allows the gruesome topic of baby decapitation to be debated?
Perhaps the intention was to paint Israelis as “liars,” which would allow supporters of terrorism to characterise Hamas’ atrocities as “exaggerated” in order to support their “resistance” narrative.
In posting the images of slain children, the state of Israel said, “This is the most difficult image we’ve ever posted. As we are writing this we are shaking. We went back and forth about posting this, but we need each and every one of you to know.”
Why the Israelis are forced to endure this humiliation on top of the tragedy that goes against the grain of human civilization is not difficult to comprehend. They realise that despite being the target of the most murderous assault since the Holocaust, they lack the moral right to claim the title of “victims.” Even while they are being raped, massacred, and burned alive, the Jewish people are the aggressors in the warped world of Leftist identity politics.
It seems hardly conceivable that the western world and the Anglosphere will surpass even the Nazis who murdered Jews during the Holocaust in anti-Semitism and human depravity. Unimaginable war crimes were committed by Hitler’s sick warriors.
However, as Bari Weiss notes, “it took the Allies months, if not years, to unearth the entire scope of Germany’s war crimes at the close of the Second World War. The Nazis attempted to conceal them, which is why. Hamas broadcast what they did and are doing in real time in October 2023.
The unsettling thing is that, even as Hamas publicly declared its intention to carry out genocide and appeared utterly proud of it, western societies, academia, the media, Leftists and so-called progressives, a not insignificant group with significant discourse power, along with Muslim advocacy groups sought to downplay the monstrosity of Hamas’s twisted, fanatic acts in two ways: by drawing moral parallels between the “occupation and apartheid” of Israel and by dehumanising Jews, suggesting that some exterminations are acceptable.
According to video released by the Australian Jewish Association, the ethno-radicalism in American higher education institutions fosters the paradigm where it is acceptable to call for “gassing the Jews” and “fu**ing the Jews,” as thousands of “protestors” did on Monday outside Sydney’s famous “Opera House,” along with chants of “Allahu Akbar.”
While Hamas terrorists were shooting at residents of a peaceful kibbutz in southern Israel, up to 33 student organisations from Harvard University in the United States signed a letter written by the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee that claimed that “Israeli regime is entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” Numerous people passed away while resting in bed. Some were burned to death.
However, Harvard student organisations claim that it is all the fault of the victims, some of whose crooked moral compasses appear to have been shocked back into alignment after receiving threats from corporate leaders that these students won’t be taken into consideration for employment.
The fetishization of identity politics by the educational institutions of the West is the cause of this moral cowardice. Microaggressions, “words are violence,” and “silence is violence” can result in tenured professors being fired, while actual violence, as that committed by Hamas, will only be met with quiet, denial, ambiguity, and even victim-blaming.
The devious claim that there is no moral distinction between Israel and her foes is at the heart of this ideological perversion. Simply stating that all forms of terrorism are condemned is insufficient. We must temper this argument made in ill faith. Palestinians who are not affiliated with Hamas should revolt against the organization’s leadership and refuse to act as human shields if they do not deserve to be wiped out in retaliation attacks by Israel.
Instead of hiding in Qatar, the leadership of Hamas should simply return the hostages, hand over the operatives to Israel, and stop endangering the lives of young children in Gaza if it truly cares about the people of Gaza who chose the terrorist group to rule that country. The Jewish people cannot be expected to just turn the other cheek after experiencing the worst atrocities since the Holocaust.
All of this wouldn’t occur. And therein lays the flaw in this flawed justification. An organisation whose express goal is to exterminate Jews as stated in its charter was elected by the residents of Gaza. The original Hamas charter, which was adopted in 1988, begins: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.”
Can the state of Israel, which has made significant scientific and technological advancements and aspires to become a superpower in robotics and artificial intelligence even as it battles for survival in a hostile neighbourhood, be fairly compared to Palestinians who have elected a leadership that declares “The Day of Judgement will not come about… until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”
Does Hamas’ claim that Israelis are oppressors—even if we agree it—imply that it lacks moral freedom to do anything other than rape Jewish women and slit the throats of infants in cribs? What does this complicated reasoning say about the ethically cretinous Western academia?
As Sam Harris argued in a 2014 podcast, “One of the most galling things for outside observers about the current war in Gaza is the disproportionate loss of life on the Palestinian side. This doesn’t make a lot of moral sense. Israel built bomb shelters to protect its citizens. The Palestinians built tunnels through which they could carry out terror attacks and kidnap Israelis. Should Israel be blamed for successfully protecting its population in a defensive war? Israel is using its soldiers and weapons to rescue and save civilians. Hamas is using civilians to protect its weapons and terrorists.”
Here, there is no room for burdensome moral ambiguity. The West should learn from India, which has publicly denounced Hamas terrorism and supported Israel in its hour of need while exemplifying moral rectitude. We are able to do this because, like Israel, we have experienced Islamist terror firsthand, suffered from it, and endured the hollow moral discourse of the West.
