It took anti-Zionists decades to turn the Arab failure to destroy Israel immediately upon its declaration as a state in 1948. Since then, “Nakba” has been branded instead as a tragedy created by Jewish aggression, wrote Seth Mandel. In contrast, he added, the October 7th antisemitic massacre has been turned against the Jews right from the start.
Indeed, no mainstream media outlet has been more guilty of turning Oct. 7th into a story about Israeli villainy, and Palestinian suffering, than the Guardian.
A op-ed at the outlet (“The Black, Jewish and Palestinian liberation struggles are intertwined”, Sept. 10), by Lily Greenberg Call, a former Biden administration official who resigned over the president’s Israel policy, and Henry Hicks IV, a Washington, DC based ‘activst’, is a great illustration of this Oct. 7th inversion.
While confronting the racists and anti-Semites who marched on Charlottesville, and the Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue murderer, they aver, is vital for their desired anti-racist solidarity, the writers seem to believe that neither Hamas’s bloodthirsty pogromists, who murdered, raped, tortured and mutilated Jews, nor their Western apologists, present a challenge to the intersectional struggle for “Jewish liberation”.
In fact, to the degree that Oct. 7th is mentioned or alluded to at all, it’s in the context of Palestinian liberation.
For instance, they write that “since 7 October, Palestinians and Jews across the United States have taken to the streets to mourn together and demand an end to the apartheid norm and continuing siege on Gaza“. Additionally, we’re told that Palestinians have been “facing genocide in Gaza for the last 11 months“, without any mention of what precisely happened 11 months ago.
In fact, in their over 1,000 word op-ed, the co-writers fail to mention Hamas even once. The word is even elided in a paragraph where they mention the Israelis held hostage, and murdered, in Gaza.
The push [to allows a Palestinian to speak at the Democratic Convention] was…even supported by families of Israeli hostages, who were rightly granted a platform to speak and many of whom today are insisting that the IDF’s unrelenting bombardment does not keep their loved ones safe, particularly following the deaths of six hostages, including the Israeli American Hersh Goldberg-Polin.
The six young Israelis, as we know, were murdered by Hamas, having been shot in the head at point blank range after the captors learned that Israeli soldiers were closing in.
Not only are Call and Hicks unwilling to address the threat of Hamas’s antisemitism, but they peddle their own antisemitic trope, when they opine that “the [IDF] do regularly engage in exchanges with American police departments to train officers in anti-dissent tactics – first practiced in the West Bank and subsequently exported to cities like Ferguson and Minneapolis, where we’ve seen the stamping down of anti-racist dissent.”
The the claim that the IDF taught “anti-dissent tactics” to the US police, as well as the suggestion that the murder of George Floyd was somehow connected to that training, is so widely understood as a lie that actress Maxine Peake apologised several years ago after promoting a variation of that libel. Even Channel 4 News’s fact check of that accusation concluded that it was false, as the cooperation between Israel and US law enforcement narrowly focuses on training to better respond to extremist and terrorist violence, and mass casualty attacks.
This fundamentally antisemitic conspiracy theory originated from the anti-Zionist and pro-terror group ‘Jewish Voice for Peace’, and is known as “Deadly Exchange“.
As our colleague Ricki Hollander explained about Deadly Exchange’s insidious effort to tie Israel to racially motivated police violence in the US , “the campaign slanders not only Jews in Israel, but American Jews as well”, by making “liberal use of antisemitic tropes” such as Jewish power and money, “in its condemnation of mainstream US Jewish organizations…for being ‘complicit’ in programs that allegedly endanger [non-Jews]”.
Make no mistake: this op-ed represents a broader effort by progressives, as well as ideologically-aligned NGOs and media outlets, to effectively erase, or turn into a non-event, the worst racist massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
In much of the West, Dara Horn’s aphorism that “people love dead Jews” is only partially correct. Many only love those dead Jews whose murder affirms their pre-existing political orientation, and when the culprit has the ‘correct’ identity. Though American Jews murdered by neo-Nazis fall into that category, Israeli Jews mass murdered by Islamist extremists clearly do not.
