In the mainstream European and American media, the unspeakable October 7, 2023 Hamas massacre in Israel seems largely forgotten. The media rarely describe Hamas as a terrorist organization with genocidal aims. When the word "genocide" is used, even by self-described "human rights organizations," it is to accuse the victim of the attacks, Israel.
Israel forcibly removed every Jew from Gaza in 2005 – long before the October 7, 2023 massacre. Nevertheless, one of Amnesty International's current campaigns, "End Israel's Genocide against Palestinians in Gaza," continues to refer to the "occupied Gaza Strip." Gaza has not been occupied for twenty years; it is not occupied now. Gaza is the theater from where Palestinians are still firing rockets and missiles at civilian targets in Israel.
Apparently Hamas had been planning the Ocotber 7 attacks on Israel years before 2023. October 7, 2023. On that day, Hamas bulldozed Israel's fences to slaughter and torture to death 1,200 Israelis, including roasting an infant to death in an oven, among other savageries. atrocities. The terrorist group then kidnapped another 251 people and brought them to Gaza, where 59 are still being held, only 24 of whom are thought still to be alive. Many of these horrors were triumphantly photographed by the Palestinians on Iphones,
In the Amnesty report, the October 7, massacre is cited only once and in extremely sweetened way as a "Hamas led attack".
The problem, it seems, was that Israel had the check to retaliate and had the check ask for its tortured hostages back. For this lack of courtesy, Amnesty International excoriated it with ferocity:
"Israel's brutal onslaught against Palestinians in Gaza has killed tens of thousands of people, wiped out entire families, flattened residential neighborhoods, destroyed critical infrastructure and forcibly displaced 1.9 million Palestinians, over 90% of the population of the Gaza Strip, causing an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe..."
"Israel committed acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention and did so with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza. These acts include killings, inflicting serious physical or mental harm to members of the protected group and deliberately creating conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza."
In reality, of course, all Hamas needs to do to prevent this destruction is return all the hostages it should not have kidnapped in the first place. Amnesty International has served up a remarkable inversion of facts.
Amnesty's report, which basically reads like incitement to hatred of Israel, appears based on accusations that are breathtakingly unfounded. Israel has never sought the destruction of the Gazans. Several American millionaires in 2005 had even pooled together $14 million to ensure that when the Jews left Gaza, the Palestinians could use their greenhouses. Within days after the Jews withdrew, every greenhouse had been looted and destroyed. Israel, has always done everything possible to avoid killing civilians, and had reportedly been hoping that Hamas would create a Singapore on the Mediterranean. Instead, Hamas, by using its own civilians as human shields, invites civilian deaths –- as many as possible precisely so that organizations such as Amnesty International will falsely accuse Israel of as many deaths as it can. That Hamas tradition, however, Amnesty International does not report.
Another self-described "human rights organization", Human Rights Watch, in December, released another, highly inaccurate, defamatory report on Israel and Gaza: "Extermination and Acts of Genocide". Apart from the word "extermination" – apparently a tip of the hat to Hitler's extermination camps –the report deceptively states that Israel is "deliberately depriving Palestinians in Gaza of water" and adds that "Israeli authorities' actions have deprived the majority of the more than 2 million Palestinians living in Gaza of access even to that bare minimum amount of water, which has contributed to death and widespread disease." Everything written in this libelous "report" is, disappointingly, false.
The pro-Hamas propaganda that flooded American university campuses in the aftermath of October 7, 2023 – and before it -- and which, with staged demonstrations, have continued to flow for months -- often openly pro-Hamas, anti-American and slamming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for not releasing the ho stages, as if he were hiding them in the Knesset, has been particularly repugnant. The American entrepreneur Elon Musk has written that he would like to know who are the "puppet masters" organizing everything. As New York Times, columnist Bret Stephens noted as early as November 2023:
"It [Hamas] could get a real and lasting cease-fire for the people of Gaza — and probably safe passage out of the territory for many of its members — in exchange for releasing all the hostages, surrendering its arms and renouncing its rule in favor of some other Arab power.
"That Hamas has done none of these things isn't shocking: It's a terrorist death cult. What's shocking is that people in the Cease-Fire Now crowd don't appear to have much interest in making any demands of Hamas equivalent to those they make of Israel.
"They want Israel to stop firing. But do you often hear them insisting that Hamas return the favor? They want Israel to provide Gaza with humanitarian relief in the form of electricity, fuel and other goods. But I haven't seen those protesters in the street demanding that Hamas provide Israel with humanitarian relief in the form of immediately freeing all hostages. They claim to want a 'free Palestine' for all its people. But I never hear them criticize Hamas's dictatorship, or its contempt for the civil and human rights of its own people, or its members' avowedly antisemitic boasts of slaughtering Jews......
"Yet that compliment is rarely accompanied with even a gesture of respect for Israel's grief, or the legitimacy of its grievance with Hamas, or its need to keep its citizens safe, or even its right to exist as a sovereign state. Even when Israel's notional right to self-defense is briefly acknowledged, every exercise of it is immediately deemed a war crime, whatever the evidence.
"For Israelis, what 'Cease-Fire Now' means is 'Surrender Now.' No wonder they decline to heed the call....
'Whatever else one thinks of Israel, no country can be expected to sign its own death warrant by indulging those who, if given the chance, would annihilate it."
Students paying a fortune to be at university to learn are, it increasingly appears, get railroaded by not-for-profit organizations with political agendas into supporting the worst anti-Semitic massacre since the 1940s. Slogans were displayed backing some of the worst terrorist organizations of modern times to endorse its intention to wipe out the State of Israel in a massive bloodbath. Clearly a massive dark-money problem obscenely exists within far too many universities and cities both in the US and Europe.
The problem is not limited just to what is taught in these universities. The hatred of Israel by millions of people who know nothing of the country except the racist propaganda demonizing it, quickly became accompanied by a surge in anti-Semitic acts throughout the West.
It is also important to highlight the unabashedly toxic role of the United Nations. While the founding charter of the United Nations states that its initial purpose was to establish an organization reaffirming "faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small," the United Nations quickly became the world's leading organization for, among other unsavory practices (such as here and here), propagating hatred of Israel and a general hatred of Jews.
The estrangement began in the 1960s, spurred on by the former Soviet Union. After the Six-Day War in June 1967, the USSR evidently concluded that Israel -- which both many Israelis and Russians Union had thought of as a socialist state and therefore as a perfect ally -- instead preferred to align with the West, began demonizing Israel as a punishment. The USSR began disseminating the idea that "Zionism = Racism", presumably to strengthen its relations with the oil-rich Arab world. The adoption on November 10, 1975 by the General Assembly of Resolution 3379, which declared Zionism to be "a form of racism and racial discrimination" was the result.
During the same period, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR) transformed itself into an anti-Israel lawfare organization and became filled with an obsessive hatred of Israel that culminated in the organization of the World Conference against Racism (WCAR) in Durban, South Africa, in 2001. Billed as a conference against racism, it has instead been carefully prepared by the United Nations, Secretary Mary Robinson and a massive group of Jew-hating NGOs to demonize Israel. The UNCHR was replaced in 2006 by the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), but the name change was hardly accompanied by a change in policy. If anything, the UNHRC consisted of many of the world's leading abusers of human rights in charge of the "henhouse".
Animated by a hateful anti-Israel obsession, the UNHCR, since its birth, has been drenched in anti-Semitism. The recent report by the "Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and in Israel", is only the most recent example of what discharges from this corrupt institution. "Israel," states the report, "has increasingly employed sexual, reproductive, and other forms of gender-based violence against Palestinians as part of a broader effort to undermine their right to self-determination and carried out genocidal acts." Writing that after the atrocities committed by Hamas in October 2023 constitutes a monstrous inversion of reality. Israelis are being accused of crimes without the slightest basis.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin declared that the UNHRC had "once again chosen to attack the State of Israel with false accusations, including baseless charges of sexual violence" and described the UNHCR as "an anti-Semitic, corrupt, terrorist-supporting, and irrelevant body." Earlier instances of defamatory charges from the UN include the infamous Goldstone Report which unjustly vilified Israel and Goldstone was eventually forced to withdraw. More recently, in 2022, unlimited funding was allocated for a seemingly eternal "Commission of Inquiry" of Israel. According to Anne Bayefsky, a Canadian law professor and a member of the International Law Association Committee on International Human Rights Law and Practice, the UN "hit a new low":
"Two and a half hours ago the UN General Assembly's budget committee (a committee of the whole, i.e. composed of all 193 member states) decided to fund a new 'Commission of Inquiry' established by the UN Human Rights Council that is intended to emasculate the state of Israel.
Without exaggeration, it is the most hostile and dangerous anti-Israel body the UN has ever created. It will decide Israel is guilty of apartheid, validate and unleash criminal prosecutions of Israelis, significantly magnify pressure on 'third states"' and 'business enterprises' to engage in BDS, and insist on an arms embargo against Israel.
"It is permanent in duration. It will have 18 permanent UN staff funded by the regular budget – which means 22% of it will come from American taxpayers, creating an in-house legal bureau to seek criminal charges against members of the IDF and the highest echelons of the Israeli government ('command responsibility'). The three members of the 'Inquiry' have been appointed – and all have public records of extreme anti-Israel hostility."
UNESCO is arguably as bad or worse. Its initial goal was to promote "world peace and security through international cooperation in education, arts, sciences, and culture." Its goal, since the State of Palestine, which does not exist, supposedly became a "member" on October 31, 2011, has appeared to pile on through "lawfare" a negationist erasure of Jewish history. The holiest sites in Judaism are now referred to by UNESCO as "Palestinian sites." Rachel's Tomb became the Bilal ibn Rabah Mosque for UNESCO, the Tomb of the Patriarchs became the Ibrahimi Mosque, the Western Wall Plaza became the Buraq Plaza, and the Temple Mount became the Haram al-Sharif. In October 2017, because of its anti-Israel bias, both the United States and Israel withdrew from UNESCO.
The non-existent "State of Palestine" also managed to become a "member" of the International Criminal Court (ICC) on April 1, 2015. Since then, the ICC has become a tool to demonize Israel. On November 21, 2024, international arrest warrants were issued for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Baseless allegations falsely accused of Israel of "the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts."
The Palestinian Authority is a political group that finances and supports anti-Israeli terrorism, and backed the October 7, 2023, massacre, yet this totally fictitious entity is recognized as the "State of Palestine" by 146 of the 193 member states of the United Nations, including thirteen European countries. The Palestinian Authority to this day pays its citizens to murder Jews –- the more Jews, the larger the payments. The Palestinian Authority is the only group of terrorists in history to have been granted statehood by so many states around the world, including by several European democracies.
There was a time when hatred of Israel was almost non-existent in the United States, and support for Israel was shared by both the Democratic and Republican parties. That time is long over. The Democratic Party now includes boastful anti-Israel and anti-Semitic representatives in its ranks. Surveys show that while most Republican voters clearly support Israel, the percentage of Democratic voters who support Israel is in decline. A recent poll shows that 83% of Republican voters support Israel, compared to only 33% of Democratic voters.
What has changed in the United States and Europe is the penetration of Soviet-inspired Palestinian propaganda into left-wing movements, where it is now widespread. Far-left movements, long hostile to what they call
American imperialism," have become resolutely hostile to Israel, which they incorrectly define as an "imperialist state". Israel in fact, is anti-colonialist: countless Jewish lives were lost fighting for independence from the British.
What has also changed is the increased presence of Muslims – who vote in the US and Europe -- and of Islam. For many Muslims and Jew-haters worldwide, the "Palestinian cause" has become a rallying cry. The message is often accompanied by the idea that Israel, Jews and all "infidels" must be destroyed, and that murdering Jews and Christians is a legitimate. even necessary, undertaking.
Far-left movements and Islamists share, in addition to hating Israel, a rejection of Western civilization. In the last decade, or so, an unhealthy, harmful synergy has been created between them that has become extremely dangerous – not only for Israel, but also for the West. Islamists not only regard Israel as illegitimate, bit also the West as illegitimate it was created by mankind, not by Allah. Many on the left, often Marxists, appear eager to destroy Israel as part of the West. They openly declare that they want tear down the West, capitalism, whiteness, historical figures, and restart "civilization" with -- themselves!
The "left" in Israel also seems to have become more extreme in recent years, and not fully to understand what is at stake. Since Netanyahu formed his government in December 2022, Former Prime Minister Yair Lapid consistently voiced vehement criticism against it. "The government being formed here, he stated in December 19, 2022, "is dangerous, extremist, irresponsible. This will end badly". Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak urged Israelis to engage in "civil disobedience". From December 2022 until the massacres of October 7, 2023, demonstrations, sometimes turning into riots, ostensibly denouncing the threat to democracy posed by the Netanyahu government, took place in Israel each week.
In reality, Netanyahu's government has never threatened Israeli democracy; it has actually tried to restore it. All the same, reservist soldiers, including Air Force pilots, threatened to boycott their duty as reservists, unfortunately weakening the perception by Israel's enemies of the strength of Israel's commitment to defending the state. This view most likely reinforced the belief by Hamas's leaders that the time had come to attack. The statements of Lapid and Barak, protesters, rioters, and reservists and a generally hostile media were widely quoted by anti-Israel activists around the world and contributed to a worldwide orgy of Israel-bashing.
In the United States, organizations that support Israel and fight anti-Semitism cling to political correctness. They do not seem to understand what is at stake, either. The Anti-Defamation League, which claims to combat anti-Semitism, refuses to identify what has been the main source of anti-Semitic protests in the US , especially after October 7: paid agents, leftists and radical Islamists. Instead, the ADL refers to "extremism," "white supremacists" and "far-right influencers" rather than supporters of Hamas.
In Europe, organizations that fight anti-Semitism do seem to understand what is at stake. Often left-wing, they primarily denounce far-right anti-Semitism, but never far-left anti-Semitism, and never ever Islamic anti-Semitism -- currently the only form of anti-Semitism in Europe that attacks and kills Jews. Most Jewish organizations in Europe support Israel, but more often than not advocate for dialogue between Israel and the Palestinians and still support the mirage of a "two-state solution."
The vast majority of Israelis seem finally to have understood that the goal of Palestinian organizations is not to create a state living in peace alongside Israel, but to destroy Israel.
Most right-wing political movements defending Western civilization in Europe manage to denounce Islamic antisemitism and support Israel, but the media keep them at arm's length.
Although the Israeli army profoundly damaged Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran's defense systems, Israel is not out of danger. Iran does not look even slightly eager to give up its nuclear weapons and missile programs. US President Donald J. Trump, to his great credit, has issued unambiguous warnings to the regime, which they appear convinced he will never enact. Perhaps they assume that they can negotiate long enough to outlast his term.
The fight must not stop. Israel is still in danger, but far more is in danger than just Israel. Douglas Murray recently wrote:
"We now know that on the day of October 7, pro-terror groups in the US were organizing to attack Israel — to demonize it and to lie about it.... on October 8, some of these terrorist supporters gathered in Times Square — to support the massacres as they were still going on.... This group declares in its own mission statements that it is 'fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization.'"
The West, wrote the columnist Melanie Phillips, needs "to take off its blinders, join up the dots and fight like Israel to survive."
Dr. Guy Millière, a professor at the University of Paris, is the author of 27 books on France and Europe.
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