Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism are Two Terms for Kill all the Jews, Sadly Many Progressives Don’t Get It

How Propaganda Deceived Gullible Progressives

We are being bombarded by an anti-Jewish barrage of propaganda that is little different than that used by the Nazis before and after they took power. Nor is it different than antisemitism in England, France, and much of Eastern Europe in the late 18th Century and much of the 20th Century. Of course before that there were almost two millennia of persecution, pograms, and massacres beginning in the Roman Empire after their conquest and destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. It didn’t end with the Romans. Sadly, Christians blamed the Jews as the “Christ Killers,” a term that many branches of the Christian faith have repeated and been one of the grisly terms used by the antisemites around the world, including in the United States, to blood libel the Jews.

The images of the signs carried by protestors equate Israel with Nazi Germany and accuse the Israelis of committing genocide. Attacks against individual Jews, Jewish synagogues and community centers, cultural centers and Holocaust museums has increased exponentially since Hamas attacked. While attention is focused on Gaza, Jews around the world are endangered by rag-filled antisemitism, or should I say, Jew-hatred?

Despite this, the Jews have been blamed for nearly every malady under the Sun. The Jews and their evil allies of the Illuminati and Freemasons (as opposed to the Expensive Masons) supposedly control the world banking systems, financial systems, governments, as well as the media and entertainment systems. Conspiracy mongers have trumpeted these lies since the 18th Century, if you live in Alabama, the 1700s. That goes on today across the political spectrum in the United States and Europe. Right Wing antisemites, and progressive antisemites frequently resort to them. Typically when we think about virulent antisemitism we think of the Right Wing types, Nazis, Neo-Nazis, Fascists, White Supremacists, Christian Nationalists, and Right Wing Catholic traditionalists. However, those on the political Left are frequently no better, particularly today in Western countries and on the campuses of American colleges and universities.

To be fair. The Palestinian people have long been abandoned by most of the world, including the Arab countries that rejected the Balfour Declaration of the 1930s, gave support to the Nazis, rejected the U.N. establishment of Israel and a Palestinian State in 1948, and then launched multiple failed invasions of Israel that displaced many thousands of Palestinians. Despite the invasions and terrorist attacks, the Israelis gave full citizenship to Arabs living within its borders, and today some twenty percent of Israel’s citizens are Arabs, both Muslim and Christian. As far as those who fled Israel, most live as refugees in Arab countries that frankly don’t want them. The irony is that Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein welcomed them and when he was overthrown by the United States in 2003, they again became refugees.

But Israel’s critics never mention any of this. Nor do they mention that when Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, that Hamas, a terrorist organization with the goal of killing all Jews in Israel, squandered the peace and blew off foreign aid that could have made Gaza a prosperous region, akin to Hong Kong. Instead, they won an election, then killed or banned their political Fatah opponents in Gaza, and started firing rockets at Israel. Since then Hamas, now acting as a de facto government took over some civil functions, most of which were funded by others, and used billions of dollars to build up their offensive military capabilities and to construct hundreds of miles of tunnels, underground headquarters, supply centers, ammunition depots, communications hubs, and barracks, often under hospitals, schools, mosques, churches, apartment complexes, and homes. They also emplaced rocket launchers, as was proven today on playgrounds. I am sure that many more rocket launchers, artillery systems, and mortars will be found in areas prohibited by the laws of war. The fact is that Hamas has placed the entire population of Gaza in danger and, time after time, has dared Israel to attack their forces that are illegally deployed in all of those places. For years, they have used the bodies of dead women and children to convince the world that Israel is to blame, not them.

Sadly, their propaganda has succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Even after they attacked Israel and massacred over 1400 Israelis, and now hold another 240 or so hostage, we see progressives joining the usual Right Wing Jew-Haters in condemning Israel. Now we see supposed progressives, people who protest racism, sexism, and discrimination against LGBTQ people, and support many worthwhile causes join forces with people who want to kill Jews and destroy Isreal for the most spurious reasons and flawed logic. It is obvious that they don't want to protect Palestinians, but destroy Israel and kill the Jews living in its borders.

The phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” chanted at pro-Palestinian, or rather, anti-Israel protests evokes the horror of the Holocaust. These people are using the trope of “Lebensraum” or living space used by the Nazis in their programs of genocide to advocate killing Israeli Jews and driving them out of the only country that they can even think of being safe. The Jews would not be in Israel had they not been persecuted and killed wherever they settled, the climax being the Nazi-orchestrated Holocaust, which was aided and abetted by many European nations, and could have been prevented if the United States and the democracies of Western Europe stood up to Hitler before World War Two.

The Jews who came to what is now Israel in the early 1930s were not colonizers. Most of the early European Jews who settled in the British Palestine were content to live alongside Arabs, as Jews already in the Middle East had done for two millennia. However, Arabs rejected both the Balfour Declaration of the 1930s and the U.N. partition that created two states, and instead attacked the very weak new nation of Israel. The Israelis were not colonizers as many progressives say today, nor are they all white Europeans. Many Israelis are African Blacks, Latin Americans, and others who were also refugees, driven from their homelands because they were Jews.

Everything Hamas has done since they took power in Gaza against Israel and their own people is justly called a War Crime or Crime Against Humanity. Hamas has held the people of Gaza hostage and used them as human shields in their unrelenting campaign to destroy Israel. However, Israel is always the primary target of such accusations. To be sure, the Israeli government under Benjamin Netanyahu has not helped matters. Many of its actions, especially to Palestinians in the West Bank are criminal. However, the military responses to Hamas’s attacks from Gaza over the years, particularly the one that ended a cease fire and began this war on October, 7th is entirely legal under international law and the laws of war. I refer you to the article written by the leading expert on the laws or war and military ethics, Michael Walzer in today’s Atlantic. https://apple.news/AOJeH3-DhSmK4_Bs45TfkcQ and this interview https://merip.org/2023/11/israel-and-the-laws-of-war-a-conversation-with-neve-gordon/

In every case where a nation that has been attacked launched attacks on cities where those who attacked them have weapons production facilities, military bases, and headquarters are commingled with civilian targets, the law of war says that those are legal targets.

The ruins of Hamburg 1943 (above) and Dresden 1945 (below)

Likewise, let us make a comparison between the amount of ordnance that Israel is estimated to have used against targets in Gaza and those of the British and Americans against Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. Since Hamas attacked Israel the Israelites have dropped about 10,000 bombs and missiles on Gaza that delivered somewhere between 18,000 and 24,000 tons of explosives, killing over 10,000 people in roughly one month of conflict. How many of these are military versus civilians is unclear, but most are undoubtedly civilians, including many children. Let us compare that to the bombing of Hamburg, Germany in 1943. The attacks by the British Royal Air Force and American 8th Air Force dropped 9,000 tons of bombs in a week of bombing. Most of those bombs were far smaller than those used by Israel in the past month. The allied bombing of Hamburg killed an estimated 37,000 people. Unlike Gaza, Hamburg was heavily defended by fighter squadrons and anti-aircraft batteries. In February, 1945 the Allies bombed Dresden over a prior of four days dropping nearly 4,000 tons of bombs on the city killing an estimated 25,000 people. In both cases the casualties inflicted by the Allies in far less time with far less powerful or accurate weapons was far less than those killed over the past month in Gaza. I think that this is because as severe as the Palestinian casualties, that the Israelis have tried to minimize casualties. Had Israel’s intent been to kill as many Palestinians as possible, the number killed would be far higher.

We have to look at another fact. The Israelis killed by Hamas were brutally killed up close and personal by men who enjoyed what they were doing. There is a profound moral, ethical, and legal difference between what Hamas did to innocent civilians in their ruthless attack and the Israeli military actions against them in Gaza. Please know, I am not downplaying the terrible loss of life and suffering of the people in Gaza, just trying to bring them into proper historical and legal perspective. What Hamas did was not done to help the people of Gaza, but to kill as many Israeli civilians as possible and bring about a war. What Hamas did was a war crime. As tragic as the loss of civilian life in Gaza, especially the children, Israel’s actions are fully legal under international law, as the aggrieved party whose citizens were massacred in such a bloodthirsty manner.

Protestors deface poster of Israeli hostage.

Unfortunately, the many so-called “progressives” of today protesting for the destruction of Israel, have no historical or moral perspective. To them the Israelis are Western colonizers and oppressors who deserve death. They have embraced a perverse form of moral equivalence. Most are pro-human and civil rights, pro-equality and supporters of women’s rights, LTBTQ+ people, and measures to protect the environment. However, they have no empathy for the Jews in Israel, and little for Jews elsewhere. Sadly, these people are so ignorant of Hamas that they don’t understand that Hamas hates everything that they care about.

The Israeli version of Saturday Night Live did a satirical sketch of Columbia University of the weekend which absolutely nails what I am discussing here, it is well worth watching.

The Israeli army is now advancing into the heart of Gaza City and engaged in fierce battles with Hamas militants. They have opened corridors to allow civilians to leave the city. For the Palestinians this is not ideal, but when Hamas has not stopped attacking Israel, refused to release hostages, and places their fighters and rockers in places prohibited by the laws of war, what else can Israel do? After all, Hamas would use a “cease fire” of any duration to improve their defenses while doing nothing to help Gaza civilians or to free the 240 hostages that they are holding. The protesters in the United States and Western Europe who harbor the illusion that a unilateral cease-fire by Israel will alleviate the suffering of the people of Gaza are as deluded as the people and leaders who believed without evidence that Hitler and Stalin were humanitarians. They are fools.

The danger of this war spreading is very real and if that happens the situation of it escalating into a regional war with worldwide effects is frightening to think about. However, that is for another article.

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