Israel at War—The Lies Continue

Yesterday, 30 student groups at Harvard University issued a communique, virtue signaling their unequivocal support for Hamas and their palestinian supporters. They published a long statement that blamed Israel and Israel alone for the atrocities committed against it. In doing this, these petulant, leftist children demonstrated a profound ignorance of history, a moral vacuity that is astonishing, and a breathtaking disregard for evil. 

But even petulant Ivy League children can (almost) be forgiven for their stupidity and visciousness. They know nothing, have been indoctrinated throughout their lives, and need to feel part of a group of infantile, fantasy thinkers. What cannot be forgiven is the haunting silence of the supposed Ivy league adults who run Harvard. They offered no comment on the pro-Hamas petulance, no counterpoint ... nothing. After all, if you criticize those who wrap themselves in the mantel of "social justice," you just might get canceled—intellectual bravery at its finest.

As I predicted in my first post of the Israel War, the hard-Left and it's trained hamsters in some of the media have already mobilized in an effort to soften the atrocities committed by Hamas, and create a moral equivalence between the repugnant palestinian attacks and Israel's response. They have allowed themselves to be allied with a a group of terrorists who burned people alive, beheaded babies, and raped and executed young women in a crazed Islamist zeal to murder Jews. To say the Leftist groups are despicable in their actions doesn't even begin to cover it.

Bari Weiss comments on the growing pro-Hamas sentiment coming out of the American (and International) Left:

At the end of the Second World War, it took the Allies months, if not years, to uncover the full scale of Germany’s war crimes. That’s because the Nazis tried to hide them. 

In October 2023, Hamas broadcast what they did—what they are doing—in real time.

They took horrific videos to document and share it all. Videos of naked women; of a captured six-year-old-boy; of beheaded soldiers.

This young woman—her name is Mor—learned that her grandmother had been slaughtered because a terrorist took her grandmother’s cell phone, filmed her murder, and then uploaded the video to the grandmother’s own Facebook page, ensuring her family would see it.

Now they are threatening to execute the hostages they have captured on live television.

It’s as if the Cossacks had TikTok.

Weiss goes on to say that you'd think that the slaughter would be enough to turn even the most fervent social justice warrior against what the palestinians (and yes, Hamas was elected twice by the palestinians, is supported by billions in palestinian welfare aid from the West, and has hundreds of thousands of palestinian supporters). Surely, she notes, it should be easy to condemn these atrocities unequivocally. It's a pretty low bar.

She continues:

And yet, across the world, people have sunk below it.

Here you can watch people gathered at the Sydney Opera House cheering “gas the Jews” and “death to the Jews.” People are rejoicing in the slaughter on the streets of Berlin and London and Toronto and New York. (Scroll down to read our Free Press dispatch on the celebrations in Manhattan.)

At our most prestigious universities there is silence from administrations that leapt to speak out on George Floyd’s killing and on the war in Ukraine. Indeed, Meantime, the social justice crowd offers explanations for the massacre—a massacre that, in part, targeted a group of progressive Israelis at a music festival. Terrorists came to that festival on paragliders carrying machine guns to start their slaughter. They raped women there next to the dead bodies of their friends ...

Now we know who would have looked at Jews shoved onto cattle cars and said, “Well, they did undermine the German economy.” Those are the people today saying: “This is a justified response to the provocation of Israel existing.” Now we know whose politics are rooted not in conservatism or liberalism or anything else other than simply hating Jews. Now we can see exactly how people manage to always come up with a reason for why the Jews deserved it. 

The people cheering and waving flags are not celebrating Palestinian liberation. The Hamas attack that began on October 7 won’t lead to a free Palestine. Instead, it will lead—it is already leading—to a horrific escalation, with many more dead on both sides. The people cheering are celebrating death. I’m struck that American intellectuals are reprinting the picture of the paraglider as an image of liberation, like a hip new logo, that visual of death. 

Hamas broadcast the slaughter. I thought it would be enough.

For far too many on the Left, it isn't. And in their fervor to align themselves with the "oppressed," they have let their masks slip. Behind those masks, we see a group that is overtly anti-Israel and covertly anti-Semitic. We see an ideology that allows itself (publicly and joyfully, in some respects) to be aligned with a group of barbaric terrorists, all in the name of a "justice" that is neither moral, nor just, nor rational.

UPDATE-1:

Peter Sevodnik writes:

On Saturday, as the raping and murdering and kidnapping were happening in Israel, Najma Sharif, a writer for Soho House magazine and Teen Vogue, posted on X: “What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers.” 

So far, Sharif’s post has been liked 100,000 times and reposted nearly 23,000 times—by, among others, The Washington Post’s global opinions editor, Karen Attiah. 

The point was: Don’t be squeamish. Never mind the Jewish girl being pulled by her hair with blood streaming between her legs. Never mind the women being raped beside the corpses of their friends at a music festival. Never mind the children and babies snatched from their parents.

If you can’t handle it, if you condemn it without a preamble or equivocation, you’re an apologist for the Zionist colonizers. 

The moral preening of the people who agree with Najma Sharif is sickening. The fact that 100K likes were attached to her despicable post is illuminating. The hypocrisy of those who argued that "words are violence" is astonishing. 

As Quillette editor Claire Lehmann writes: “For the past decade I’ve been told that jokes, words & scholarly debates need to be suppressed because they may cause ‘harm’ to vulnerable minorities. Yet when a global minority is butchered, tortured & maimed, those who suppress words shrug as if war crimes are no big deal.”

The lies and public demonstrations of hatred for Israel and (in many Muslim countries) Jews will grow even greater over the coming days. And my disgust with those who espouse this will grow exponentially. 

UPDATE-2:

Historian Victor Davis Hansen writes:

Is it the mass mutilations, the rapes, the desecrations of corpses, the beheadings, the murdering of women, the elderly, and children, that so excites them all—as if they were gleefully watching sacrificial victims marched up to the top of an Aztec temple in ancient Tenochtitlán?

Or rather is their frenzy due to unspoken terror that Hamas at last has gone too far in its premodern savagery? There are now no more of its patrons with the power to call off the IDF. And so they may finally get the existential war that Hamas always for decades had bragged about and begged for.

It's very likely that this time will be different. This time, extreme violence is the only appropriate response to extreme barbarity. 

And for those who argue that many innocent civilians in Gaza will die due to the extreme violence that's coming, there's this: 

Hamas (who those innocent Gazan civilians elected) use those same innocent civilians as human shields. While Israel tells Gazans to flee, that bombing and violence are coming, Hamas instructs them to stay—after all, their deaths will be fodder for more propaganda. 

While extreme violence will undoubtedly cause civilian deaths, they are collateral to the destruction of Hamas and its infrastructure, not purposeful as part of a war strategy. It is Hamas who puts its headquarters under a hospital; it is Hamas who who launches rockets from elementary school yards; it is Hamas who threatened to behead people it kidnapped; it is a cowardly Hamas who put Gaza in harms way.