The Jew-killers are loose again. No other description of the joint Hamas-Islamic Jihad attack on Israel is adequate to the situation. And no response that denies this truth can claim a shred of decency.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau did condemn the attack. But he reflexively inserted “balanced” language about “the need to protect civilian life” and “Our thoughts are with everyone affected” instead of a forthright “Hamas delenda.”
Sometimes images break through the fog even in our cosseted society. Like jubilant jihadis mutilating the half-naked corpse of a young woman, whose symbolism sworn foes of misogyny in our societies surely find especially hard to ignore. In the West, including Israel, we kill when we must. But going back to ancient Greece, we do not desecrate except when we lose our minds.
Desecrate is the key word. Such conduct wilfully denies that we are all made in the image of God. Instead we give a dignified, if frosty, burial even to an executed mass killer because we regard their body as a sad, disquieting object, a reminder of how far they fell and a warning as to how far we might.
Not these people. They frankly deny the humanity of Jews, and their goal is not a “two-state solution” or even the peaceful expulsion of Jews from their ancient homeland. It is their extermination.
They don’t make any secret of it. Instead they deny there ever was a Temple of Solomon and peddle the “blood libel.” It’s demented, and anyone who stands in solidarity with it is demented.
Some bring up the tired old excuse that the lives of the Palestinians have been pretty miserable for a long time. Which is true. But not because of Israel, or the West. When Israel was founded, there was a mass expulsion of Jews from Arab/Muslim countries, and a mass flight of Arabs from Israel to clear the way for the deliberately genocidal Arab League attack that, to general surprise, failed to finish Hitler’s work. It’s not morally equivalent.
Nor is it morally equivalent that Israel took in the Jewish refugees, while the Palestinians’ Arab “brothers and sisters” left them to fester because it made for good propaganda and an endless supply of terrorists with nothing to live for and hearts filled with hate and rage. Even today, with a vast Arab world containing hundreds of millions of people and much empty space, not one regime is willing to let the Palestinians leave Gaza and the West Bank. And Israel has been trying hard to make peace with its neighbours since 1948, while they have been trying to wipe it off the map and kill all its inhabitants. Including the Palestinian leadership.
Of course, many Western intellectuals in previous generations claimed the high moral ground as apologists for Castro, Brezhnev, and even the mass-murderers Mao and Stalin. To wonder where their decency went is to ask the wrong question. But even so the antisemitism makes it worse.
One of Robson’s Rules of History is that any movement that becomes sufficiently depraved becomes antisemitic, no matter how far from that issue it started. (And virulent antisemitism always drags you into other forms of wickedness.) It is a stark warning that those who hate God’s chosen people hate God.
Remember, the Jews were not “chosen” for the biggest slice of cake or softest couch. They were given the perilous task of bringing of ethical monotheism to a world that didn’t want to hear that God could not be tricked or bribed and his abundant mercy depended on admitting you were wrong. And even Jews who neither believe the Talmud nor keep kosher attract the frenzied fury of the antisemites because the message hovers about them whether they want it to or not.
There is only one decent response to what is happening now in the Middle East and has been since 1948. It is “Hamas delenda.” And those who instead blame Israel have nowhere to hide.
