On October 7th, Israel was invaded by Gaza. They
raped, tortured, and burned our families alive.
In the north, Hezbollah (who is Iran, not Lebanon where they
are based) began pummeling Israel with missiles. Israeli communities in the
south near Gaza and the north near Hezbollah were evacuated. It was and still
is too dangerous for them to live in their homes.
And then the Houthis from Yemen started shooting missiles at
Israel. They are shooting from far but can reach Eilat where many of the
evacuees are taking refuge.
And then Hamas in Judea, Samaria, and Jerusalem rose up, and
attacked individual Israelis. Attackers came from Jordan and even from Turkey.
Attacking anyone they could get their hands on -soldiers, peace activists and
even children in a school bus. They tortured Benjamin Achimeir the same way
people in Be’eri were tortured.
And then America said DON’T.
Not to the enemies trying to wipe us off the map – they said
it to Israel.
Don’t finish off Hamas. Feed them. Fuel them. Make them
strong.
Don’t protect yourselves. Protect THEM.
Don’t make it safe for Israelis to return to their homes.
Don’t stop the weapons being smuggled into Gaza.
Feed them the invaders. The rapists. Those who took the heads of your boys and
put them in their ice cream coolers. Those who promised to attack you again and
again and again until you no longer exist. Don’t!
Don’t attack Hezbollah.
Never mind that the north is evacuated.
Never mind your people are suffering. Never mind that you are not protecting
them. Never mind that their businesses are ruined and they have no homes to go
back to.
Don’t!
And then Iran attacked Israel directly.
And America smiled and said: “See, you managed not to die. You didn’t allow
them to wipe you off the map. That’s good enough.”
And with a smile America said: “See, we’re helping you. Do what we say and
maybe you will get some of your hostages back. You don’t need weapons to defend
yourself. You don’t need to prove that you meant it when you said NEVER AGAIN.
Do what we say, and everyone will all be happy.”
And what do they say?
Release murderers. Of course, they will murder again but
that’s not the problem now, is it?
Let Hamas survive. They will stay in power. Of course, they will learn that
taking hostages gets them whatever they want but you want the hostages they
already have, don’t you?
Let Hamas join with the Palestinian Authority. They can run Gaza and the
territory they already control in Judea and Samaria. Give them the power of a
State. Never mind that they tried to destroy you when they had less power. Now,
it’s time to give them more. After all they are the chosen leaders of the [so-called]
Palestinians. Yeah, yeah, they both say they want to replace Israel with
Palestine and they have maps in their homes and offices showing what they want:
“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” – of Jews. Yeah, yeah, on
October 7th we all saw how they intend to achieve that. Yeah, yeah,
they promised to do October 7th over and over until the job is
done….
October 7th, that will be a great date for their Independence Day! What
a fabulous idea.
And America smiles and says: “We’re your friends. You should
listen to us. We are helping you”
Somehow the threat of international criminal trials is being
waved in the faces of our government and military leaders. And America says:
“Oh. So sorry. We can’t do anything about that.”
Strange how the politicians and military leaders that
encourage adhering to America’s “friendly” advice aren’t being threatened…
Strange how Israeli opposition politicians and internal
agents of chaos and America are using the same terminology, stating the same
goals, and equating our elected politicians with the terror mastermind of the
October 7th massacre.
Strange how American “help” negotiating a hostage release
deal is keeping Israel from putting any pressure on Hamas that would actually
incentivize their release.
People wonder, if Israel cannot vanquish Hamas, the
weakest of Israel’s enemies, how can Israel handle Hezbollah or Iran itself?
And there is the crux of the issue. Israel CAN vanquish
Hamas. Israel can address attacks from Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Yemen,
Iraq, and Iran all at once.
We never imagined America would wage war against us. THAT is
what we are up against.
Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!
Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.
Among those who voted against it were Marjorie Taylor-Greene on the Right, the entire Squad including Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar on the Left - and Jerry Nadler, the self-described head of the Jewish Democratic caucus in Congress.
Nadler gave a speech describing why he opposed the bill:
Mr. Speaker, I have devoted much of my life to combatting antisemitism, and I am as attuned as anyone to threats and bigotry aimed at Jewish people. I will take lectures from no one about the need for vigorous efforts to fight antisemitism on campus or anywhere else. I am also a deeply committed Zionist who firmly believes in Israel’s right to exist as a homeland for the Jewish people.
But, as someone who is also a longtime champion of protecting freedom of speech, I must oppose this misguided bill.
While there is much in the bill that I agree with, its core provision would put a thumb on the scale in favor of one particular definition of antisemitism—to the exclusion of all others—to be used when the Department of Education assesses claims of antisemitism on campus.
This definition, adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, or IHRA, includes “contemporary examples of antisemitism”. The problem is that these examples may include protected speech, in some contexts, particularly with respect to criticism of the State of Israel.
To be clear, I vehemently disagree with the sentiments towards Israel expressed in those examples—and too often criticism of Israel does, in fact, take the form of virulent antisemitism. Many Jewish students no longer feel safe on campus and some colleges have not done nearly enough to protect them.
But while this definition and its examples may have useful applications in certain contexts, by effectively codifying them into Title VI, this bill threatens to chill constitutionally protected speech. Speech that is critical of Israel—alone—does not constitute unlawful discrimination. By encompassing purely political speech about Israel into Title VI’s ambit, the bill sweeps too broadly.
This is disingenuous garbage.
FIrst of all, the IHRA Working Definition explicitly says that "criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic."
Secondly, the IHRA definition has never meant to be legally binding and its examples are meant to be guidelines, as it says, also explicitly, if Nadler would bother to read it.
Nadler notes that the ACLU opposition to the definition is that it could be misused. The First Amendment can be misused as well; that is not a reason to throw it out. The definition may be flawed but in itself it is no danger to freedom of speech.
Thirdly, the IHRA definition takes great pains to say that even their examples must be seen in context, and none of them are defined as antisemitic without that context. This arguably goes too far, in suggesting that even Holocaust denial may not be antisemitic.
Fourthly, the bill as written says "Nothing in this Act shall be construed...to diminish or infringe upon the rights protected under any other provision of law that is in effect as of the date of enactment of this Act." Meaning, it does not affect anything that is protected by US law, and it does not affect freedom of speech one bit. It is only meant to help determine whether otherwise discriminatory behavior - not speech but actual discrimination - may be antisemitic under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
Nadler then goes off the deep end:
Vigorous enforcement of federal civil rights law does not depend on defining terms like “antisemitism” or “racism”. In fact, codifying one definition of antisemitism, to the exclusion of all other possible definitions, could actually undermine federal civil rights law because antisemitism, like other forms of bigotry, evolves over time, and future conduct that comes to be widely understood as antisemitic may no longer meet the statutory definition.
And, pray tell, what do the other definitions consider antisemitic that the IHRA definition does not? If a new form of antisemitism arises - something that happens every century or so - I think Congress will have time to pass another bill, or the IHRA can modify the one they have.
Nadler finally gets to the real reason he opposes it: he hates Republicans and supports the antisemitic Squad more than he loves Jews. He spends ten paragraphs attacking Republicans for their hypocrisy in not condemning other antisemitic speech from their own side and playing politics with the topic.
That is true in some cases. Yet that is exactly what Nadler is doing here as well. He would rather side with the antisemitic "Squad" than with Republicans against antisemitism.
The IHRA definition is the closest thing to a universally accepted definition of antisemitism we have. It has been adopted by dozens of countries and already is part of the Department of Education policy today. Nothing in that definition is controversial except for those who want to single out Israel as uniquely evil. Nothing in that definition limits free speech.
Nadler is the one playing politics here, and this speech shows that he is not qualified to be considered a leader of any Jewish caucus. He cares more about his party than he does about American Jews.
Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!
Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.
Columbia University President Minouche Shafik issued a cringeworthy letter to the university community, effectively apologizing for belatedly and selectively enforcing some university policies:
Dear members of the Columbia community,
Early Tuesday morning, tensions on our campus rose to new heights when a small group of protestors broke into Hamilton Hall, barricaded themselves inside, and occupied it throughout the day. This drastic escalation of many months of protest activity pushed the University to the brink, creating a disruptive environment for everyone and raising safety risks to an intolerable level.
Before the safety risks to Jews were considered "tolerable."
Over the last few months, we have been patient in tolerating unauthorized demonstrations, including the encampment. Our academic leaders spent eight days engaging over long hours in serious dialogue in good faith with protest representatives. ... The University offered to consider new proposals on divestment and shareholder activism, to review access to our dual degree programs and global centers, to reaffirm our commitment to free speech, and to launch educational and health programs in Gaza and the West Bank. Some other universities have achieved agreement on similar proposals. Our efforts to find a solution went into Tuesday evening, but regrettably, we were unable to come to resolution.
... Columbia has a long and proud tradition of protest and activism on many important issues such as the Vietnam War, civil rights, and the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. Today’s protesters are also fighting for an important cause, for the rights of Palestinians and against the humanitarian tragedy in Gaza.
But students and outside activists breaking Hamilton Hall doors, mistreating our Public Safety officers and maintenance staff, and damaging property are acts of destruction, not political speech. Many students have also felt uncomfortable and unwelcome because of the disruption and antisemitic comments made by some individuals, especially in the protests that have persistently mobilized outside our gates.
The entire problem is spelled out in her own words.
Columbia coddled the students who violated university rules on unauthorized gatherings, as well as policies on stifling the free speech of students who disagree with the protesters. Who knows how many policies against microaggressions and disrespect for fellow students were violated as well towards the vast majority of Columbia University's Jewish community.
Columbia, like most universities, has policies that support free speech. Students who want to protest Israel or claim to support Palestinians have a nearly infinite number of ways to do so on campus without violating policy and without shutting down the speech of others. When the anti-Israel protesters violated those policies, Columbia decided to give in to some of their demands and did little to nothing to enforce its policies.
It rewarded terror. Because that is what these encampments were. Terror is using threats against innocents to achieve political goals, and that is exactly what the protesters were doing, The forcibly took and held public areas of the university making them forbidden for people who disagree with them. They insist that Columbia must do what they demand or else the students would refuse to leave indefinitely.
College is where kids are supposed to turn into adults. That means learning to follow the rules, not that the rules can be broken with impunity.
The university should have said, in no uncertain terms, that it will not make a single concession to those who violate school policies. If they change their methods, if they follow the rules for suggesting changes to how Columbia invests or partners with universities abroad, then their ideas would be considered but Columbia will also listen to those who oppose those rule changes.
You know, free speech and a free marketplace of ideas.
But instead, the protesters succeeded in getting Columbia to make concessions in the face of threats.
No wonder the immature protesters decided that they could push the envelope further. If someone gets positive reinforcement for violating rules, that incentivizes them to violate more rules.
There might be some psychology and economics and game theory courses taught at Columbia that teach this. Yet the President of Columbia University apparently doesn't know this.
Instead of treating the protesters like adults who must face consequences for violating the rules, she treated them like spoiled children who are rewarded for their temper tantrums in the supermarket demanding a candy.
Her own letter shows that instead of enforcing her own policies, she decided that it would be better to set them aside because of threats and give in. According to Minouche Shafik, Columbia's policies are really guidelines for some types of violators.
Are these the lessons that college-age students should be learning, that blackmail and terroristic threats work and that policies are only enforced sometimes?
Is this the kind of university people want their kids to attend?
Is this the kind of university president that anyone wants?
Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!
Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.
Although defections and resignations can come in waves, the extent of opposition to President Biden’s policy of favoring Israel over Hamas has yet to kindle much of an exodus from his administration. Mostly we’re subject to a lot of whining from people who continue to accept a paycheck from the man they claim is genociding Palestinians.
That tells you something about how many of the complainers actually believe the rhetoric they’re parroting. It also provides a clue as to the cynical motivations of the few who actually resign.
Josh Paul was the first to do so, back in December, to great media fanfare. Paul, a former Booz Allen Hamilton employee, was in charge of arms transfers. He could abide those weapons going to many governments around the world, but not Israel’s.
At the time, I detailed the distortions in Paul’s explanation for his resignation. These in part had to do with Paul’s refusal to read past the headline of a news story about a sudden lack of donkeys in Gaza. I had hoped that he would devote his newfound free time to reading the rest of the article on the donkeys, but it appears he had other plans. He has resurfaced at DAWN, a nongovernmental organization called Democracy for the Arab World Now. The director of DAWN is none other than Sarah Leah Whitson, the former Human Rights Watch official who was found to have been raising money from Arab governments by complaining about the need to battle pro-Israel (read: Jewish) money in U.S. politics.
Funded by the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Brothers Fund, among others, DAWN is a fierce advocate of boycotting Israel and of pressuring Israel’s fellow democracies to enforce an arms embargo against the Jewish state. It also opposed the Abraham Accords—that is, it is opposed to peace in the Middle East. Josh Paul will fit right in.
Then in March, there was Annelle Sheline, who worked for the State Department for a year before leaving. The State Department has a Dissent Channel through which employees can raise concerns about policy with protection from professional retribution, and Sheline utilized the channel. But she gave up after a year because her bosses wouldn’t change their policies to fit her ideological worldview.
In Sheline’s (very limited) defense, she was used to working for a employers who were more receptive to her anti-Israel activism. Sheline came to the State Department from the Quincy Institute, whose executive vice president is Trita Parsi, founder of the National Iranian American Council. NIAC is a major pro-Iran pressure group with influence in Democratic Party policymaking circles. Also at Quincy are such international-relations luminaries as John Mearsheimer, mostly infamous for his campaign against American Jews’ participation in the democratic process. This includes the book he co-authored with Stephen Walt, The Israel Lobby and American Foreign Policy—a shoddy work of agitprop aimed at raising suspicions against Jewish political activists. Mearsheimer is also a proponent of the “good Jew/bad Jew” worldview, wherein non-Jews decide which Jews can be trusted and which cannot. Judging by Sheline’s hero worship of Aaron Bushnell, the Air Force service member who self-immolated outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., she must have been quite comfortable at Quincy as well.
Two years ago, I published an analysis of a news article by The New York Times bureau chief in Jerusalem for bias, and he promptly complained to my editor. Today, I will tackle the Times’s opinion writer, Thomas Friedman, and his recent column, “Israel has a choice to make: Rafah or Riyadh,” for factual context and even-handedness.
In his latest column, he said the Biden team demands Israel make a choice: go into Rafah, where the last organized brigades of Hamas are, or choose the benefits of normalization with Saudi Arabia.
Friedman paints a binary picture: Israel accepts what the Biden administration wants – no Rafah operation – while creating a path for Palestinian statehood; otherwise, Israel becomes an international pariah with the acquiescence of America, with the US restricting arms shipments as punishment for its choice.
Friedman puts the onus on Israel to abandon its campaign to rid the area of the implacable Hamas army, not mentioning that the Biden administration asks, on the other hand, very little of the Palestinians.
The ultimatum is for Israel to create a “political horizon for a two-state solution with non-Hamas-led Palestinians.” It sounds reasonable to the uninformed, but Friedman doesn’t mention that Israel has offered a state five times over the last 75 years.
In 2008, the Israelis offered 100% of the West Bank and Gaza with land swaps and Jerusalem as their capital, supposedly everything the American negotiators believed the Palestinians wanted. Unfortunately, the current Palestinian Authority head Mahmoud Abbas never responded.
Those who push for a two-state solution at this time seem oblivious and insensitive to the fact that this would represent to everyone the greatest reward possible for the Hamas massacre, especially with hostages still in captivity and their sexual abuse being exposed. Calling for a reformed Palestinian Authority sounds nice but the fact is that free elections would almost certainly bring Hamas to power.
Friedman says Israel’s strategy is “revenge.” Israel’s strategy is to end the presence of terror organizations on its borders that strive tirelessly for the genocide of the Jewish people, with the backing of Iran.
There are no explicit agendas provided of what PA reform means, an essential point if you want them to take over the West Bank and Gaza. Should Israel be forced to begin a path to statehood without America demanding first that the hundreds of millions of dollars a year paid by the PA to convicted terrorists and their families end?
The PA has also said they would pay Hamas terrorists, excuse me, martyrs. There is an American law, the Taylor Force Act, which demands the withholding of US aid to the PA until they end these payments. Mr. Friedman, are you OK beginning your path to Palestinian independence with this hideous practice left in place?
As many of the Yale students I spoke with pointed out, Israelism is so one-sided and so certain of its own virtue and rightness that critique seems almost beside the point. Palestinian activists (Sami Awad, in particular) come across as deeply humane, and their characterizations of Israelis and the conflict are never challenged. An immigrant Jew, for instance, is described by Awad as a foreigner who “just moved here to join the army and play cowboys and Indians.” And the only Jewish settler who appears in the film is callous and unlikeable.
So certain are the filmmakers that the entire history of the conflict can be summed up as one in which the Israelis are simply and only the oppressors that we are informed, “In 1967, the State of Israel managed to complete its control of Palestine by taking over the territory of the West Bank and Gaza.” No mention is made of Egypt, Syria, or Jordan, or the circumstances of the Six-Day War. Similarly, the Second Intifada goes unnamed in the film except as “a battle for Jerusalem.”
In short, what is important to note about Israelism is not its historical distortions or polemical tricks but the myth it constructs of Eitan’s and Simone’s—but especially Simone’s—journey to enlightenment. What did Simone see that the American Jewish establishment—personified in the film as an elderly Foxman rambling on in his elegant glass office high above Manhattan—didn’t want her to see, and how did it change her?
Whether the film is conscious of it or not, the archetype here is Paul, who had been the Pharisee Saul until he had a vision on the road to Damascus, not too far from the one Simone had on the streets of Bethlehem. Paul’s vision transformed him from a self-described persecutor of Christians to Christianity’s first great evangelist. He went from being fierce, ignorant, and sad to happy, articulate, and liberated, as, the film shows us, has Zimmerman. Like Paul, Simone’s conversion moved her from a self-interested cloud of particularism to a vision of spiritual universalism—“There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female,” Paul tells the Galatians.
The appeal of Paul is understandable, especially for those of us who grew up in America. The Pauline tradition brings some of the best of Jewish universalism and offers a shortcut to the theological endgame, skipping over particularism and otherness. It is easier for diaspora liberal Jews today to imagine that the Jewish people can finally achieve our place in the world, and retain our moral character, by subordinating our nationalism rather than trying to compete for a place in a world of nations, and the occupation proves the point.
The Pauline trope helps explain two key dimensions of the film. Its insistence that young American Jews are lied to makes sense once one understands that the Jewish community has placed scales upon their eyes. And once the scales fall away and the truth is revealed—once one sees the horrifying truth that has been hidden—one must become an evangelist and bear the tragic burden of preaching the gospel, even at the cost of alienation from the community one seeks to transform.
To be clear, I am not suggesting, as some advocates of Israel unfortunately have, that Zimmerman and her allies are no longer Jews (or are now “Un-Jews”). Zimmerman and her allies believe that their critique of our community comes from their Jewishness—and they make no claims to be leaving. In fact, by the end of the film, the gauzy sequences of protests by IfNotNow (which Zimmerman cofounded) and others portray a different vision of Jewish particularism: the dissidents proudly wear tallitot and kippot; they sing Jewish songs. But identifying the Pauline trope that underlies the film helps us understand the story that its protagonists and creators want to tell about their journey from ignorance to enlightenment, from obscurantism to moral grandeur. This is not really a political story—one learns almost nothing about the history and politics of the conflict from this film—it is a story of personal spiritual transformation.
Movie poster from the film Israelism. (Courtesy of Tikkun Olam.)
For the enlightened, everything that runs counter to their new narrative must be a lie. This naturally gives rise to conspiracy theories. How else can one explain how the plain truth has been hidden, except through the perfidy of deception? This assumption helps explain the surprising plot turn of the second half of Israelism. The film argues explicitly that the rise of Donald Trump, and therefore the emboldening of the white supremacist antisemitism, is the fault of the pro-Israel community in America. The rationale for this claim is offered by Simone at the film’s midpoint, when she concludes that the Jewish community believes that “the only way we Jews can be safe is if Palestinians are not safe.” Ultimately, the film argues, this belief has led the Jewish establishment to trade our safety in America for the safety of Jews in Israel, because President Trump could be counted on to support the Israeli government’s oppression of the Palestinians.
This argument blames the Jews for their own victimization and begins to make the film, in the words of a friend, “epistemically antisemitic.” Plenty of Jews blame other Jews today for the rise of antisemitism, so the argument here is not novel. The only irony here is that polarization in America has driven the rise of the antisemitism in America on both the right and the left, and the film is only too eager to help that trend along.
As a liberal Zionist, I aspire to be what Michael Walzer has famously called a “connected critic,” and I struggled watching Israelism and its translation of complexity into conspiracy. Entirely missing from the film was the majority of Jewish leaders and educators in America who know and teach about Palestinians and occupation, neither lying to their students nor concluding that Israel’s challenges require them to abandon their loyalties. Where, in Israelism’s world, are the majority of American Jews—and the majority of Israelis—who know the present is untenable but fear the alternatives? Or the parallel majority on the Palestinian side, who know that the path toward mutual safety and security lies in recognizing our inextricability? And what happens to us in this desperate attempt to generate mass appeal for the most populist and partisan version of our impossible story?
Disclaimer: the views expressed here are solely those of the author, weekly Judean Rose columnist Varda Meyers Epstein.
I watched Screams Before Silence* just before the final leg
of the Passover holiday. I didn’t know whether I should. After all, I totally
believe my recent cardiac
arrest was due to the extended anguish of hearing about the atrocities of
this war, and due also to thinking about what is still happening, right now, to
our hostages. It has been unbearable for months, thinking these thoughts, and
then chiding one’s self: ‘You think the thought is unbearable??’
Then you feel guilty for imagining that you suffer at all,
for what is only in your mind, in light of what happened, is happening to them,
still.
I reason with myself: ‘You shouldn’t watch—it’s almost
candle-lighting time. Do you really want to go into the holiday with such
darkness in your mind and heart?’
I knew the answer. That I shouldn’t watch Screams Before
Silence right then, at that time. It would definitely be completely inappropriate
to do so, as one is meant to be happy on a holiday. But I couldn’t help myself—I
felt compelled to watch this documentary. It was a need, but also something to
dread. I knew it would be bad, hard-to-watch bad.
There was time to watch all but maybe the final fourteen
minutes of the documentary, so I reasoned some more: ‘I have an obligation to
know, to bear witness, to internalize what happened—happens still. For me as a
Jew. They are my people, a part of me.’
So I anyway watch what I can before the sun goes down. It is
hard to watch and listen. I cry out, “Oh, God!” several times.
You can’t help it if you’re human.
Did watching Screams Before Silence color my yontif,
my holiday? Of course it did. But I managed. By now these terrors, as well as
expecting to hear of new terrors every day, are a part of life. Holiday
happiness is, at any rate, for the time being, muted.
From time to time, my mind flitted back to what Dr. Cochav
Elyakam-Levy, Head of the Civil Commission on Oct. 7th Crimes by Hamas against
Women and Children, had to say about the sexual violence of October 7:
This is a kind of pattern we’re seeing, that it’s not just
sexual abuse, but it’s sexual abuse in its worst form. It’s like they wanted to
inflict pain, in the cruelest manner possible. I think they have redefined evil
and in ways that we will need to redefine international criminal law.
Then I would think back to somber recitation of the ZAKA
volunteer, of how again and again, they saw the same thing. Hundreds of times.
Perhaps more.
When you see one woman, then another and another,
all with signs of abuse in the groin area, you understand that this wasn't a
random thing. You can't reach that area unless you mean to. It's someone who
has come to do different kinds of things to you.
If he doesn't have time, he'll
just kill you. If he has a little time, he'll slit your throat. If he has more
time, he'll cut off body parts. And if he has even more time, he'll also cause
pain and defile, especially if it's a woman. He'll defile her body, not for
pleasure but for humiliation. And that's what we saw.
ZAKA volunteer, screenshot from Screams Before Silence
After the holiday, and after I did my share of post-Passover
tasks, I watched the last 14 minutes of Screams Before Silence. Then I thanked Sheryl
Sandberg—on youtube, on X—we had all been waiting for this film, we needed this
film, but she went and actually did it. She made the film.
We need this film to make the world understand. We need it
to educate college protesters who don’t even know why they are protesting.
After seeing Screams Before Silence, could these same young women continue to ally
themselves with who yell, “We are Hamas!”?
🚨VIDEO: A REAL interview we had at NYU:
QUESTION: "Why are you protesting?"
PROTESTER #1: "I don't know. I'm pretty sure there's something about Israel [turns to other person] Why are we protesting?"
And yet, it doesn’t help. Films, photos, testimony, proof of
all sorts. None of it matters. They want to believe—choose to believe—whatever
fits the narrative they, the haters, prefer to, want to believe.
Some believe the atrocities happened and are exhilarated by them.
They feel Israel/Zionists/Jews deserve atrocities and
genocide—they can justify it however they like. They can say we are white
Europeans who should go back to Poland or Russia, even though so many of us in
Israel in particular, are dark.
Erasing both history and archaeology, they say we stole land
from people who were here before us. The truth inversion continues when the
liars claim that Jews do to Arabs what Arabs do to Jews, only worse. They will
show you a 15-year-old photo of a dead Syrian child and curse the “criminal”
Zionist soldiers, implying that to love your country is a crime. If you’re a
Jew.
And when you say, “They burned a baby in an oven,” they will
smugly smile and say, “That was disproven.”
You can try saying, “It was NOT disproven. It happened,” but
all they will do is laugh at you.
“Where’s the proof?” they will say, and you can do nothing, can
show them no proof, because that would be wrong.
There are photos, I always tell them, but you can’t see
them. And that’s out of respect for the victims. For goodness sake, what have
they left if not for their privacy? Do they have to forever be imagined in the
world’s collective mind as naked and defiled? Like Shani Louk?
They gave that photo an award. The world lapped it up like a
cat with a bowl of cream. They love it when the Jew gets it. They don’t care
how.
They don’t even care that they contradict themselves. There
are no photos. Give the photo an award. Which of those two statements is true??
Of the widely shared photo of Shani Louk, the antisemites make excuses, because
it suits their narrative. “One rape, pffft.” they will say. “That’s your proof
of systematic mass rape? One rape?? One rape is nothing compared to what Zionist
soldiers do to Palestinian women in Gaza every day.”
They know that’s a lie, a convenient lie. It’s so ridiculous
it makes you shake your head in disbelief. It takes your breath away by its
sheer, evil chutzpah. The lie serves their purpose. It allows them to look the
other way when Arabs rape and deface Jewish women. They twist the truth back on
you and tell you the opposite is true.
It’s not just a boldfaced lie about soldiers (who are moral,
that you care about)—it’s an aggression. They are raising you one—raising the stakes
as if in a game of poker, lying right in your face/computer screen that it is Israel
who is the criminal, while Hamas terrorists and their sympathizers are sweet
angels, having a “justifiable” moment of rage.
Now some of these people—these liars—are truly evil. Others,
we must acknowledge, are merely stupid.
So we needed this movie, and we didn’t need it. Because the
film purposely does not display the really graphic images. “Out of respect for
the victims and their families,” reads the text at the end of the film, in
plain white letters on a stark black background, “we chose not to show explicit
images in this film.”
Instead we see Sheryl Sandberg reacting to such images as they
are shown to her on the phone screens of ZAKA volunteers. We watch her face as
she looks at each photo and hears the volunteers describe she is seeing, what
happened to each woman, all that was done to her. If you’ve got a heart and a
soul, you don’t need more than you are shown in Screams Before Silence to
visualize what happened, and believe it to your core. It is awful. It is the
truth.
The Jew-haters on the other hand, will not be persuaded. They
will keep on saying, “Screenshot or it didn’t happen.”
Those are the haters. But what about the stupid, the sheep
like students caught up in the spirit of the thing, which they confuse with a spirit
of justice? Perhaps they have a chance, the stupid, could be educated, if they
watch this documentary.
Because the documentary rings true. You know it’s true when
the women say they fear
rape more than death, and when a grown man, a man big and burly, says “No
one can see those kinds of things,” and then breaks into sobs.
Sometimes I think that if I could, I would show the ugly-hearted,
Jew-hating campus protesters October 7th footage on a loop. Such
footage, after all, abounds. The terrorists themselves used their go-pros to document
their own horrors. This footage is not hard to find. So I was excited when I
read just this morning that an anonymous someone had done just that.
Played October 7th footage to protesters. In a loop.
On a big, outdoor screen.
An anonymous group has funded and constructed a giant screen with loudspeakers outside the @UCLA Pro-Hamas Encampments showing footage of the October 7 Massacre on loop.
Or is it? If the crowd prefers to jeer over allowing tragedy
to move them, will it even matter—will it matter what you show them? No. They’ll
invert the truth. Laugh at you. Say the footage is “heavily edited” or a photo
is “obviously photoshopped”. Whatever lies they can throw at you, they will. That’s
the game.
But we’re not playing. For us, it’s not a game. We have a
duty to bear witness to the systematic torture of, and sexual violence against
Jewish women by Hamas deviants, and so I remain grateful to Sheryl Sandberg.
Screams Before Silence is a film that helps us to recognize Hamas for what it
is, be firm in our resolve to eradicate this evil, once and for all, from our
world. October 7th was a concerted, premeditated attack against the
Jewish people via its women.
As we watch and listen to protesters deny the obvious truth
of Screams Before Silence, it will become easier and easier to see that they
out themselves, and for us to distinguish between the humans and everyone else.
Humans will care. The evil will not. And should be
eliminated from God’s green earth.
*Elder of Ziyon beat me to the punch with his excellent and concise take on the
subject, Screams
Before Silence, the documentary with select quotes from journalist Brett
Stephens.
Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!
Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.
Like all good social-justice warriors of a certain age, Reich harkens back to the romantic 1960s, recalling the campus protests against segregationist governors George Wallace and Ross Barnett, and against the Vietnam War. Reich writes: ‘If Columbia or any other university now roiled by student protests were doing what it should be doing, it would be a hotbed of debate about the war. Disagreement would be welcome; demonstrations accepted; argument invited; differences examined.’ Ah, those halcyon days of campus kumbaya.
Maybe Reich hasn’t noticed, but today’s protesters have no desire to debate or examine differences. This is not about two-state solutions or how to arrive there. Read the placards or listen to the chants and you will see that this is all about a world without Israel and eradicating the Jews. As Brendan O’Neill pointed out recently on spiked: ‘Their longing for Israel’s erasure was made clear… “We don’t want no two states / We want ’48!” That is, 1948, a time when the modern state of Israel didn’t yet exist.’ I challenge Reich – or indeed anyone – to find one poster in all those photographs of the Columbia protests calling for peace, negotiations or an acknowledgment of Israel’s right to exist. Just one.
Much of what Reich writes is fantastical. ‘The atrocities committed by both sides’, he writes, ‘illustrate the capacities of human beings for inhumanity and show the vile consequences of hate. For these reasons, it presents an opportunity for students to re-examine their preconceptions and learn from one another.’ Yes, perhaps a morning teach-in on the campus green, where everyone can share their thoughts on anti-Semitism. After lunch, calls for the extermination of the Jews.
To be fair to Reich, he is merely a conspicuous representative of America’s elite academic class. There are plenty out there who are as clueless as he is. Some are active participants in the hate. Others are fellow travellers in the Palestine cause who do nothing to speak against the anti-Semitism in their movement. For decades, they have been marinating in the social-justice language of the left: whiteness, colonialism, systemic racism and so on. And now, they are so thoroughly immersed in so-called progressive ideology that they are oblivious to their surroundings. Like the honchos at National Public Radio, who deny their woke bias even when their employees point out obvious examples, these leftists and liberals have become disconnected from the reality around them.
Protesters at Columbia have been chanting: ‘Remember 7 October? That will happen not one more time, not five more times… but 10,000 more times.’ Yet still Reich claims that this does not express anti-Semitism. You couldn’t find a better illustration of George Orwell’s observation on the ignorance of intellectuals: ‘One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.’
As the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) points out, civil disobedience is not the same as expressing an opinion or engaging in peaceful protest. The whole point of it is to break the rules. Indeed, it ‘derives expressive power from the willingness of participants to accept the consequences of breaking the rules’. That these students and junior academics are shocked to be handcuffed for breaking the law reveals a profound sense of entitlement among young ‘radicals’.
We shouldn’t be surprised. FIRE president Greg Lukianoff has pointed to two dispiriting, parallel trends in American universities: a willingness to curtail free speech, all while giving a green light to violent, intolerant protests. At the University of California, Berkeley, where students rioted in 2017 because that tiresome weirdo Milo Yiannopoulous was speaking, the university ‘showed cowardice in its unwillingness to punish the rioters’, writes Lukianoff and Angel Eduardo in a recent op-ed. We saw a similarly rank capitulation at Evergreen State that same year, where marauding students were effectively allowed to chase professors Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying off of campus. Since then, ‘shutdowns and shout-downs have become commonplace’, they write.
Some critics of campus cancel culture have been caught off guard by the pro-Hamas protests. Almost a decade ago, they observe, we were all gawping at the ‘Yale Snowflakes’, those absurd Ivy Leaguers who went into open, teary-eyed revolt because academic Erika Christakis sent them an email saying they should chill out about offensive Halloween costumes. How did babyish offence-taking give way to open support for anti-Semitic terrorists?
But it all makes a perverse kind of sense. Students taught that freedom of speech is a form of violence have begun to see violence as a form of free speech. Young radicals reared on a crude, conspiratorial racial identity politics have begun to apply it to geopolitics, with predictably anti-Semitic results. A new generation of elite youth, overprotected and indulged in equal measure, have come to think they can do no wrong.
So let’s retire the Sixties comparisons. In 1964, when Mario Savio – civil-rights activist and student leader of the Free Speech Movement – was leading a campaign of civil disobedience, aimed at liberating Berkeley students from censorship, his cause was just and he was happy to suffer the consequences of his methods. ‘There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious’, he famously said, ‘you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels… you’ve got to make it stop!’. Meal plans did not get a mention.
At the same time, let’s not pretend that today’s revolting students just appeared, fully formed, from the womb. They are the products of an academic and upper-class culture that has kindled their prejudices and inflamed their intolerance. They aren’t revolutionaries. They’re bigoted brats. And they’ve been pandered to for far too long.
A New York rabbi is reiterating his call for his music not to be sung by anti-Israel demonstrators, after students at Yale University used his song during protests there.
Rabbi Menachem Creditor said he was “distraught” to learn that “Olam Chesed Yibaneh,” a song he wrote after 9/11 that has become a mainstay of progressive Jewish activists, was sung at the conclusion of a seder held by the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace on Yale’s campus. Yale is one of dozens of schools where anti-Israel protest encampments have sprung up in recent weeks.
“Let me be clear: I vehemently object to the song being used in any context that is against Israel or the Jewish people,” Creditor said in a statement. “Those who are using the song in these protests are misappropriating its message of love and support for Israel. I cannot accept its use by the protesters, whose beliefs could not be further from my own.”
Creditor, the rabbi in residence at UJA-Federation of New York, first called for his song not to be sung at pro-Palestinian protests in November, a month after the start of Israel’s war with the Hamas terror group in Gaza, which began after thousands of invading terrorists slaughtered some 1,200 people in southern Israel on October 7, and seized 253 hostages, most of them civilians.
At the time, a member of the anti-Zionist group IfNotNow said the group would stop including “Olam Chesed Yibaneh” and a song written by another Jewish musician who objected to its use in national actions calling for a ceasefire, though a national spokesperson declined to answer questions about the songs’ use.
In the wake of Hamas' October 7 pogrom in Israel, Israelis for the most part (but not completely) shut Palestinians out of jobs they had in Israel and the settlements. Very few want to risk the having West Bank Palestinians, who overwhelmingly expressed support for the murder and rape spree, be allowed in their communities.
According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, the number of unemployed people in the West Bank increased from 129,000 in the third quarter of 2023 to 317,000 in the fourth quarter. The unemployment rate in the West Bank increased from 13% to 32% in the same time period.
The number of Palestinians employed in Israel dropped from 147,000 to 17,000, and the number employed in Judea and Samaria went down from 25,000 to 7,000.
The hit to the Palestinian economy went beyond jobs in Israel. The number of people employed in the West Bank itself went down by about 57,000, showing how important the Israeli jobs are the the Palestinian economy. Not to mention that the jobs in Israel pay more than double the pay of jobs in the West Bank, where the average salary is about $38 a day (NIS 127.)
Even though about 18% of Palestinian workers were employed in Israel before October 7, they were responsible for over 32^ of the income brought home by Palestinian workers.
So Hamas didn't only unilaterally decide to put Gaza Palestinians in misery - their decision that killing Jews is their highest priority also affected millions of Palestinians not even under Hamas rule, but who nonetheless support and celebrate Hamas murders of Jews.
Israel is not obligated to provide jobs to Palestinians. They do it when it makes economic and security sense. The Palestinians changed the equation, and Israel reacted in a quite predictable way. It will take years, if ever, for things to get back to how they were.
But it also brings up the question of what a Palestinian state would look like if the goal shared by both Hamas and Fatah as well as many US college students, to eventually destroy the Jewish state, would come true.
All those high paying jobs would not exist to begin with.
Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!
Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.
If you haven't seen this documentary about the rape and mutilation of Israeli women on October 7, made by former Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, you owe it to yourself to watch it.
To watch “Screams Before Silence” is to be disabused of any lingering doubts about what Hamas did. The personal testimonies of victims, survivors and witnesses are clear and overpowering, as is the photographic evidence Sandberg was shown of mutilated corpses. And some of them have scarcely been heard about outside Israel.
There is Tali Binner, a partygoer at the Nova music festival who hid in a small camper as other women were raped outside: “I heard a girl that started to yell for a long time. It was like, ‘Please don’t. No, no, stop. Stop. Stop. Stop. No. No. No’. It was like, she was asking someone to stop. What can they stop? Someone is abusing her. Someone touching her. Someone is doing something.”
There is Raz Cohen, who witnessed a rape as he hid with a friend in the brush: “Shoham, who was next to me, said, ‘He’s stabbing her. He’s slaughtering her,’ or something like that, and I didn’t want to look.” Cohen added, in Hebrew: “When I looked again, she was already dead, and he was still at it. He was still raping her after he had slaughtered her.”
There is Rami Davidian, an emergency medical worker at the Nova site: “I saw girls tied up with their hands behind them to every tree here. Someone murdered them, raped them and abused them, here on these trees. Their legs were spread. Everyone who sees this knows right away that the girls were abused. Someone stripped them. Someone raped them. They inserted all kinds of things into their intimate organs, like wooden boards, iron rods. Over 30 girls were murdered and raped here.”
There is Amit Soussana, who was kidnapped to Gaza for 55 days and raped by her captor when she was trying to bathe: “He came toward me and just pointed a gun really hard at my forehead, screaming at me, ‘Take it off. Take it off,’ and punching me until I could not hold the towel anymore. And he started touching me, and I resisted, and then he dragged me to the bedroom. And then he forced me to commit a sexual act on him.”
The denials by the anti-Israel crowd on the Left that these attacks even occurred are as heinous as Holocaust denial is from the Right.
Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!
Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.
An initial investigation by the Israel Defense Forces into the deaths of two reservists in the central Gaza Strip on Sunday found that the pair were killed by so-called friendly fire.
Master Sgt. (res.) Ido Aviv, 28, of the Yiftah Brigade’s 9232nd Battalion, and Master Sgt. (res.) Kalkidan Meharim, 37, of the Carmeli Brigade’s 223rd Battalion, were hit by shelling from a tank that had opened fire outside of its designated boundaries, according to the probe that was released Tuesday.
The investigation found that the incident began as an IDF tank was hit by a roadside bomb near the Turkish Hospital in central Gaza’s Netzarim Corridor. Shortly after the blast, mortars and anti-tank missiles were launched by Hamas operatives toward troops in the corridor area.
Amid an exchange of fire with the Hamas operatives, a tank of the Yiftah Brigade left an encampment and shelled a building in the area.
The building had been outside of the tank force’s designated boundaries, according to the probe, meaning the soldiers were not supposed to open fire toward that area.
Several troops, including the two reservists, were in the building when it was hit. Aviv and Meharim were declared dead, and two soldiers were wounded, including one seriously, according to the IDF.
The mine was real. It is possible that the mine was built with explosives from an unexploded bomb; this is something Hamas has done for years. Everything else Hamas claims - including a faked picture of an overturned tank - is a lie.
And media worldwide still repeat Hamas lies without caveats.
Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!
Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.
The book was completed right before October 7, and while in some ways it has been overtaken by events, it is invaluable in its analysis of the intersection of academic freedom and limiting antisemitism on campus.
Cary Nelson is an expert on both. He was the president of the American Association of University Professors from 2006 to 2012 and he helped write policies on academic freedom in higher education. He is critical of decisions the AAUP has made since his tenure there.
When it comes to academic freedom, Nelson is as close to an absolutist as one can be. While he emphasizes that university can reject candidates for positions for any valid reason including antisemitic statements, once they are hired their application for tenure is pretty much the only time to review their records and decide whether they deserve to achieve that level.
His problem with antisemitism is not so much with the speech of professors who may spout bigoted opinions of Jews - but the effect that they have on the academic freedom of Jewish students who must navigate a university environment where their own expression of their Jewishness, which often is tightly tied to Israel, is severely limited.
Nelson points out, that when the National Women's Studies Association or various ethnic studies associations issue anti-Zionist statements, they effectively exclude any Zionists in that field of study. A department-level statement against Israel does not foster academic freedom but inhibits it.
The most egregious example he brings, to my mind, is the statement of the University of California Press (apparently since taken down) that said
We want to recognize the powerful expansion of international solidarity with Palestinians in their fight for liberation and stand with them. We support scholarship that confronts all forms of settler colonialism, US racial formations including Islamophobia, and prioritize pedagogies that reflect intersectional, anti-colonial, anti-racist action. As a university press, it is our responsibility to disseminate scholarship that challenges dominant narratives and makes understanding these injustices possible.
This means that an academic press will be highly unlikely to ever publish any Zionist opinions, an astonishing statement of choosing a political side and silencing any opposing viewpoints under the aegis of the University of California.
Individual academics and students have great latitude in saying their opinions, but not departments with the imprimatur of the university itself on the letterhead of their statements. When entire fields have been co-opted by political positions like anti-Zionism, in Nelson's words, "the line between advancement of knowledge and promotion of political convictions...has been obliterated."
Nelson also tackles topics such as whether a prospective academic hire or tenure candidate's social media posts should be considered when making decisions about their positions in the academy. The AAUP says no, Nelson says that is absurd, certainly when the posts fall within the candidate's field of expertise. Social media has a much bigger reach and more influence than most academic papers do.
Other topics covered include professors instituting "micro-boycotts," penalizing students for their Zionist opinions, most infamously the case of John Cheyney-Lippold who refused to write a recommendation letter for a student who wanted to go to Tel Aviv University for a year, even after he told her he would (and ruined her chances for finding an alternate source for a letter.)
Nelson is a true academic. When he sees a claim he checks it out and does his own research, something that he notes does not happen as often as it should in academia. So, for example, he dedicates a chapter to the "Word Crimes" issue of the journal Israel Studies, where specific terms that have been hijacked by the anti-Israel crowd like "Apartheid" or "Colonialism" are examined as to what they really mean. The issue was mercilessly attacked yet most of the critics hadn't even read the journal. Nelson read it and critiques it, not agreeing with every article but proving that it has scholarly value and that many critics were not acting in good faith. I respect Nelson's desire to take every charge seriously (speaking as someone who spent too much time researching "fart spray" when Israelis at Columbia were accused of a chemical weapons attack on campus.)
Nelson is a strong proponent of the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism, and examines that definition along with the "Jerusalem Declaration" as well as a reference to my own, which I appreciate.
One other theme that carries over many of the book's chapters is that the accusations that Zionists are silencing opponents have no merit. Nelson looks at the specific examples and finds than none of them hold water - in practically every case, the supposed silencing never happened and the planned anti-Zionist event or speaker was not blocked by the institution. Too many anti-Israel academics cannot distinguish between criticism and censorship, perhaps because they know they often cannot answer real criticism coherently.
As with Nelson's earlier book Israel Denial, he makes clear that he does not support settlements and has derision for Israel's right wing government. In this case, it makes his arguments stronger, since Nelson cannot be dismissed as a right-wing fanatic; he is a liberal in every sense.
It is a shame that the hardcopy of the book is so expensive (the $45 paperback is not yet available from Amazon, the hardcover is $145.and the Kindle edition is $34.) Hate Speech and Academic Freedom deserves a larger audience than just the academics it appears to be aimed at.
Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!
Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken is barnstorming the Middle East to develop plans for a ceasefire and for postwar reconstruction in Gaza. American national interests demand that the U.S. resist Iran's drive to disrupt what is left of the post-Cold War order in the Middle East. Failure to stabilize the region could lead in the short term to inflationary gasoline price spikes, and in the longer term could seriously weaken Washington's position in the contest with the revisionist powers seeking to overturn the American order worldwide.
Many of Hamas' most passionate campus supporters believe that the organization wants to establish a secular Palestinian state. They also believe that Israeli Jews are European immigrants displacing an indigenous population - white settlers who should go home to Poland. They think that Israel survives only because America supports it and that an American president who "gets serious" with Israel can make it do almost anything he wants.
They see Hamas as part of a global coalition of "progressive" movements advancing causes such as climate change, democracy and LGBTQ rights against global capitalism. But the wisest heads in the world all working together couldn't craft a feasible diplomatic strategy based on such an incoherent and unrealistic view of the world.
Now that the soil of both Iran and Israel is no longer sacred and immune from attack, the mystique of the Iranian nuclear threat has dissipated.
It should be harder for the theocracy to shake down Western governments for hostage bribes, sanctions relief and Iran-deal giveaways on the implied threat of Iran successfully nuking the Jewish state.
The new reality is that Iran has goaded an Israel that has numerous nuclear weapons and dozens of nuclear-tipped missiles in hardened silos and on submarines.
Tehran has zero ability to stop any of these missiles or sophisticated fifth-generation Israeli aircraft armed with nuclear bombs and missiles.
Iran must now fear that if it launched two or three nuclear missiles, there would be overwhelming odds that they would either fail at launch, go awry in the air, implode inside Iran, be taken down over Arab territory by Israel’s allies or be knocked down by the tripartite Israel anti-missile defense system.
Add it all up, and the Iranian attack on Israel seems a historic blunder.
It showed the world the impotence of an Iranian aerial assault at the very time it threatens to go nuclear.
It revealed that an incompetent Iran may be as much a threat to itself as to its enemies.
It opened up a new chapter in which its own soil, thanks to its attack on Israel, is no longer off limits to any Western power.
Its failure to stop a much smaller Israel response, coupled with the overwhelming success of Israel and its allies in stopping a much larger Iranian attack, reminds the Iranian autocracy that its shrill rhetoric is designed to mask its impotence and to hide its own vulnerabilities from its enemies.
And the long-suffering Iranian people?
The truth will come out that its own theocracy hit the Israeli homeland with negligible results and earned a successful, though merely demonstrative, Israeli response in return.
As I write, students in universities across the U.S. are occupying their campuses in protest at what they consider to be Israel’s genocide against the Gazan people. Unlike the Met Police who freeze at the prospect of arresting pro-Palestine demonstrators guilty of breaching the peace, the American police have no such hang ups and are arresting protestors in large numbers for their illegal encampments. So far, around 120 students have been arrested at Columbia University alone.
What makes these illegal occupations particularly contemptible is the antisemitism of some of those taking part. Jewish students and university staff have been harassed with taunts of “Go back to Poland” and “October 7th is about to be every day for you”.
These barbs are not only revolting, they also display the monumental moral stupidity of those conducting this harassment. How can a person demonstrate against what they think is a genocide in Gaza whilst calling for the genocide of Jews? But what did we expect – irrationality is integral to extremism.
But there is also the empirical question of whether Israel’s actions in Gaza actually are a genocide. It is time to listen to an expert rather than students who mentally and emotionally are still in nappies. Enter John Spencer, the Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute (MWI) at West Point and a former infantry soldier of 25 years’ service.
In an article for Newsweek, Spencer, who studies and advises the American military on the kind of warfare in which Israel is currently engaged, namely urban warfare, argues that no other nation in history has shown as much concern to protect civilians as the Israeli Defence Force has done in Gaza. If the IDF were carrying out a genocide, civilians would be targeted too, but they are not. Yet still the international community does not acknowledge Israel’s concern for non-combatants and continues to scold it for failing to protect them. So exemplary has the IDF been in minimising civilian casualties, it is Spencer’s opinion that the U.S. ought to learn the IDF’s methods.
What is more remarkable according to Spencer is that Israel’s concern for Gazan civilians defies military orthodoxy regarding offensives. According to the theory and praxis of manoeuvre warfare, the attacker must smash an enemy morally and physically with surprise, overwhelming force and speed, and destroy political and military centres. Warning civilians to evacuate is forbidden as enemy forces would learn of the coming attack.
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Elder of Ziyon
