BLOOD LIBEL – NOW NEW AND IMPROVED!

YES, PALESTINIAN KIDS ARE DYING. NO, IT IS NOT DELIBERATE — AND TO SAY SO IS RACIST. HERE’S WHY.

Two things can be true …

Israel is killing children.

This is arguably the most common refrain from hate-Israel activists. And it’s hugely effective.

Everyone’s heart breaks at the news of children being killed.

But in the Israeli-Arab conflict, this allegation has a special resonance due to very particular historical realities.

A few important things to keep in mind …

Innocent people always die in wars. The answer is to end war. Until that moment of heavenly peace, we have an obligation to truth.

This war started and continues because of the Palestinian leaders. The war would end today if Hamas surrendered and released the hostages.

We also need to address the most prevalent libel aside from the “deliberately killing children” fantasia. That is the assertion that there is something disproportionate about the number of dead civilians, including children, in this war compared with other wars. All legitimate evidence says this is an insupportable lie.

Israel minimizes civilian casualties in ways almost no other military in history has done. Conversely, their enemies maximize civilian deaths by employing human shields and embedding terror infrastructure in civilian areas, including schools, mosques and hospitals.

​Colonel Richard Kemp, former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, has become an outspoken voice contesting the misrepresentations around what is happening in Gaza. (Watch here and read here.)

The civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio in Gaza, Kemp notes, is lower than in other modern conflicts. Although stats are notoriously unreliable, thanks to the fact that the “Gaza Ministry of Health” is a branch of a terror regime, this conflict has seen approximately 0.8 civilian casualties per combatant killed. By contrast, the Iraq War resulted in approximately 3 civilian deaths per combatant death. The Afghanistan War was even worse, with approximately 5 civilians per combatant.

Kemp notes that the Israel Defence Forces employ extensive efforts to minimize civilian harm, including early warnings to civilian populations, like text messages and “roof-knocking” techniques to prompt evacuations before military actions.​

Kemp describes Gaza as “the most complex battlefield that any army has ever had to fight in,” due to a combination of phenomena including Hamas’s extensive network of tunnels and fortified positions, and their coldblooded storage of arms in family homes and other civilian infrastructure.

In other words, the narrative of indiscriminate or deliberate killing of civilians generally, or of children in particular, is a direct inversion of reality. So why is it so widely accepted?

Because it tracks. Because, for 1,000 years, give or take, Western civilization has alleged that Jews revel in killing non-Jewish children.

In the near future, I’ll be writing about two related themes: The mania of many non-Jews for blood imagery (Jews allegedly eating blood, spilling blood, blood-dripping fangs, “polluting” bloodlines, etc. etc.); and the phenomenon of condemning Jews exclusively or disproportionately for “sins” of which other or all humans are similarly guilty.

For now, let’s be clear: When Palestinian children are killed, it is because of a war that has tragically taken the lives of far too many people — and, not incidentally, a war begun and perpetrated by their own leaders.

By contrast, when Israeli children are killed, it is overwhelmingly because they were targeted both because they are Jews and because they are children. The murder and kidnappings of babies and children on October 7 was a deliberate, premeditated part of the operation.

Since the early days of Palestinian terror, targeting children has been a core M.O. of the “resistance.”

The Ma’alot Massacre, in 1974, saw jihadists infiltrate Israel from Lebanon, take over a school and hold more than 100 students and teachers hostage. In the end, 25 hostages were murdered, 22 of them children.

The Dolphinarium Discotheque Bombing, in 2001, killed 21 people, mostly teenage girls, and injured more than 100 others.

The Sbarro Pizzeria Bombing, also in 2001, involved a suicide bomber detonating in a Jerusalem pizza restaurant packed with families and children. Fifteen civilians were killed, including 7 children, and 130 were injured.

In 2011, two teenagers (what world media would call “Palestinian children”) murdered five members of the Fogel family, stabbing the parents, a 4-year-old and an 11-year-old to death, then slitting the throat of a three-month-old baby.

I could go on and on and on with incidents where Palestinian terrorists did not incidentally kill Jewish kids, but did so as part of a deliberate strategy. But we do not see street rallies across the West declaring “Palestinians kill babies.”

Why?

Partly because there is not a millennia-old history of such accusations baked into our civilizational DNA.

When it comes to Jews, there is. It’s called a “blood libel.”

A “blood libel” is a false (do I really need to say it?) and dangerous antisemitic accusation that Jews murder non-Jews — typically Christian children — to use their blood in religious rituals. The lie has fueled centuries of persecution, massacres, and systemic violence against Jews.

Take a walk down memory lane almost 900 years to Norwich, England, for the first known case of blood libel. From there, the allegation took on wildly popular proportions and lasts to this day.

The idea that Jews wantonly kill children has a resonance in our society that most people accusing Israel of child-killing do not even know they carry in their psyches. This is where antisemitism meets anti-Zionism. The refusal of activists to look inward (a refusal they would condemn in every other person regarding every other prejudice) and to instead chant “Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism” does not acknowledge subliminal prejudices like the ancient racist associations of Jews with infanticide and cannibalism. Western activists cannot believe they carry such ideas in the recesses of their minds.

But they do. And it comes out in signs like this …

And this …

And this one …

Of course, children are dying in this war. That’s what makes the allegation stick. No one can deny that there are dead kids in Gaza — we see it on the news every night.

But, as callous and horrifying as it is to put it so bluntly, children die in every war. It is precisely the callousness of contesting the allegation with this undeniable truth that makes today’s blood libel so difficult to challenge (and I can already hear the wails that I myself am a baby-killer and a genocide apologist and blah blah blah).

In that respect, “Winston Churchill kills babies” could have been a legit poster for midcentury nutjobs to scrawl and wave in Piccadilly. But they didn’t. Nor do the same suspects make such accusations about the worst violent offenders in the world. It is only Jews — Israelis — who are uniquely accused of deliberately targeting children.

The allegation that Israel “indiscriminately” kills children would be horrific if it were true. But the irrefutable facts are that it is Palestinian “resistance fighters” who discriminately kill children and youth. And yet the outrage — and the accusation of “child-killing” — is reserved for Israelis alone.

Why?

A) Because it tracks with centuries of antisemitic indoctrination and subtle brainwashing;

B) Because it serves the purposes of Israel-haters, even if it undermines their every claim to antiracism; and

C) Because people just love blaming Jews for humanity’s worst crimes (see: “genocide,” “apartheid”). It’s a hobby, unlike Rubik’s cubes, hula hoops and pet rocks, that never goes out of style.

The defence might be something along the lines of “How can I be perpetuating a blood libel when I didn’t even know there was such a trope?” Well, that is the very definition of prejudice, isn’t it? It is the manifestation of sublimated beliefs about a group that the perpetrator often does not even recognize they carry.

But here is the larger point: If the world wanted to end the deaths of innocent children, then activists, the UN, the Red Cross and the assembled anti-Israel mobs would place blame where it rightfully lies and demand that the terrorists end this war. The old chestnut has never been more true: If the Palestinians laid down their arms, there would be no war. If the Israelis laid down their arms, there would be no Israel.

Of course, as tidy as this parallelism may be, it assumes that the latter is not precisely the goal. Much of the world doesn’t want the former because they (overtly or covertly) want the latter.

Incendiary allegations like “baby-killer” (along with the litany of lies like settler-colonialism, ethnic cleansing, apartheid and genocide) do nothing to free Palestinians or save their lives. These slanders polarize us into our corners, destroying the already-remote chance for a negotiated resolution and lasting peace.

Those who employ this jargon don’t care about dead kids. Certainly they demonstrate no grief over dead Jewish children — or for that matter dead kids in Syria, Sudan, Myanmar or anywhere else where Israelis can’t be blamed.

They just like accusing Jews of killing babies.

And that’s not a coincidence. It has echoes of a dark history.