Guardian gives middle finger to Jews mourning Oct. 7th

In April, Guardian columnist Naomi Klein effectively accused most of the world’s Jews of being in thrall to a ‘genocidal ideology.  We thought at the time it was unlikely she could write anything more morally reprehensible.

Two days ago, we learned that we were wrong.

Her nearly 6,500 word “Featured” Guardian essay (“How Israel has made trauma a weapon of war”, Oct. 5) is as vile as the headline suggests, and reminds us of Dave Rich’s observation  that “the basic idea behind most modern antisemitism is that Jews must be up to something. Whatever Jews say and do can’t be taken at face value: they must have some ulterior motive or hidden agenda that needs to be uncovered.”

So, what are the true motives behind Israeli and diaspora Jewish efforts to memorialise the Oct. 7th massacre, according to Klein?  The commemoration of the mass murder, rape, torture, mutilation and hostage taking provides Zionists, she argues, “the rationale and cover story for the shattering violence and colonial land annexation“. It’s also designed, Klein says, for “reducing sympathy for Palestinians and generating support for Israel’s rapidly expanding wars“.

Klein chided the various creators of exhibits, memorials and films about the Oct. 7th massacre for not taking proper caution to avoid “evoking dangerous emotions, like hate and revenge“.

Later, the Guardian columnist condemns the various curators responsible for “the deluge of immersive art being produced to commemorate 7 October” for not mentioning “Gaza” and for failing to contextualise the attacks by describing “the decades of strangled conditions of life on the other side of the wall that led up to the attacks – and…the tens of thousands of Palestinian people, including wrenching numbers of infants and children, whom Israel has killed and maimed since 7 October”.

Klein further suggests that many Jews who see the memorialisation of Oct. 7th as form of ‘bearing witness’ are complicit in “a form of denial, marshalled by savvy states to form the justification for other, far greater atrocities”. “This witnessing“, she adds, “can provide rationalizations for genocide“, words which evoke the accusation promoted by the Guardian in October that Israel ‘weaponises’ the Holocaust to justify the perpetration of mass atrocities against Palestinians.

Klein also complains that “the wound at the heart of Israel’s founding is that Palestinians have been forced to pay for Europe’s crimes“, suggesting that the very presence of Jews in their historic homeland, within any borders, is a crime against Palestinians. She evokes this ‘Palestinian wound’ caused by the Jewish state’s rebirth to decry Israelis and Jews who memorialise Oct. 7th by drawing moral comparisons between the antisemitic sadism of the Nazis and that of Hamas – completely unmoved by how the barbaric violence meted out to defenseless Jews on that dark Shabbat day elicited indescribable collective Jewish pain and existential fears born of Holocaust memory.

🧵Thread: This will not be easy to read or view, but it’s essential as we approach the first anniversary of the horrific October 7th massacre. We must remember what the Palestinians who entered Israel that day did to men, women, the elderly, children, and babies.

These are just…

— AP (@AP_from_NY) October 6, 2024

Klein would have readers believe that it’s not genuine pain that Jews experience when commemorating Oct. 7th, but, rather, a ruse designed to make it safe to, as she put it, “finally finish the job of the Nakba“.

However, arguably the most grotesque libel, the final middle finger to Israelis and Jews across the world by Klein and her Guardian editors, takes the form of the argument of a pro-Hamas Lebanese Australian anthropologist named Ghassan Hage who she approvingly quotes, framing Oct. 7 commemoration as “supremacist mourning”.  Since, Hage added, “unlike Palestinians who are murdered all the time, the murdered Israelis were special. They were superior dead people who needed to be revenged in a way that reminds everyone, but particularly the killers, of how superior they were.”

Even in death and mourning, the Guardian found a way to spit on the Jews.