LIES, LIES, LIES

WHEN A STRATEGY WORKS WONDERS, WHY CHANGE COURSE? THE THING IS, THIS STRATEGY HAS ALWAYS WORKED AGAINST ONE PARTICULAR GROUP: JEWS.

A voice in the wilderness you should be listening to.

There is a self-fulfilling aspect to anti-Zionism.

Anti-Zionism believes itself to be true because the world — the United Nations, NGOs, commentators, activists, vast segments of civil societies and pretty much the entire Arab and Muslim worlds — subscribe to some variation of a “pro-Palestinian”/anti-Israel narrative.

Therefore, because everyone agrees, they must be right.

The world right now is aflame in hysteria alleging that Israel is perpetrating the worst crime ever committed — ever imagined, in fact — genocide.

It’s not, of course.

I’ve hammered home this message ever since I started rattling my keyboard for this Substack more than a year ago. A brilliant report recently did a great job itemizing and debunking each and every assertion underpinning the silly idea that a genocide is happening in Gaza. These experts did it in the most comprehensive, thoughtful way possible.

I’ll do it again in the flippant, contemptuous way I approach this and a lot of other stuff: If Israel wanted to commit genocide, this conflict would have been over 23 months ago. My synopsis is not quite as scientifically or statistically detailed as the researchers who did the study above, but it hits the nail on the head.

As the Begin-Sadat report above points out, Israel takes precautions to preserve human life that almost no other military in history has done. And yet, they are accused of the most heinous, indiscriminate crimes against humanity.

It is moral vandalism. And it fuels a global conflagration of hate-Israel activism, vilification and violence.

And almost no one seems to care. Not only do they not care, not only do they not come to the defense of the Jewish state, they jump on the dogpiling.

Civilian-to-combatant death ratios in the Gaza war are a fraction of the tragic numbers in other contemporary wars.

Colonel Richard Kemp, who knows a lot more about these things than the purple-haired girl blowing veins screaming genocide at Jews on a campus near you, estimates the combatant-to-civilian death ratio in Gaza is about 1:1.5. That compares with about 9 civilians to every combatant death in other global conflicts. In other words, Israel is engaging in one of the most humanitarian, pinpointed, meticulous operations that safeguards innocent lives.

And in return they are accused of shooting fish in a barrel.

Kemp notes that the IDF takes extraordinary precautions to minimize civilian harm in Gaza (warnings, evacuations, so-called “roof-knock” tactics, surgical targeting) and that Gaza is an unusually complex battlefield precisely because Hamas embeds fighters and infrastructure among civilians.

In other words, Hamas deliberately tries to maximize dead on their own side while Israel — almost miraculously and at great danger to their own soldiers — acts in the most ethical manner possible in a dystopic scenario against an enemy that respects no rules of engagement.

Kemp’s numbers are contested by those who have axes to grind. A Guardian newspaper / +972 / Local Call joint analysis of Israeli military data (eg., a “study” funded and undertaken by some of the most anti-Israel propagandists in the world today) unsurprisingly finds a much higher civilian share of Gaza fatalities. They reported a civilian share around ~80% in one published analysis and dispute the lower civilian ratios Kemp cites.

Now why might that be?

Well, aside from “studies” that want to find what they want to find, Gaza is a unique case — and not only because their enemy is among the most ethnical militaries in the world.

The “civilians” this report cites as victims of allegedly wanton Israeli killing do not wear uniforms. But that does not make them innocents. By definition, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle costumes of Hamas notwithstanding, Palestinian terrorists are not combatants in the conventional sense. That’s why we call them “terrorists,” not “soldiers.” Not only are these child combatants, human shields and “ordinary” people like the ones who followed the terrorists into Israel on October 7 to join in the rapefest, murder mayhem and looting, they are civilian-garbed combatants in all but uniform and name.

Far worse, they even dress themselves up in press vests and Red Cross outfits, making their deaths an even more powerful PR victory for the mass murderers of Hamas and their overseas cheering sections.

George Orwell said: “One of the marks of antisemitism is an ability to believe stories that could not possibly be true.”

That’s what’s happening here.

Every scrap of evidence proves nothing remotely akin to a genocide is happening in Gaza — in scope or intent.

And yet the world rails and jabbers that it is.

Meanwhile, actual genocides go completely ignored because the world has decided to pretend there is a genocide in Gaza (where there is none) while ignoring millions dying elsewhere (in actual genocides no one gives a damn about).

Why?

Why do you think?

This is more than people believing stories that could not possibly be true.

This is a civilization gone completely off the rails.

We must acknowledge, first and foremost, that the whole world can be wrong.

The world can be wrong about all sorts of things, including the nature of the world itself — remember that it was once heresy to assert that the earth moved around the sun or that the world was not flat.

But the world is not flat.

And the truth remains the truth no matter how many people subscribe to the surety that it is not, or how fanatically they do so.

Moreover — and far more to the point — believing the most outlandish things about Jews in particular has a history in our civilization that we are not free to disregard. At least, not if we insist on calling ourselves culturally sensitive, inclusive people.

We may content ourselves that Israel is wrong and the Palestinian narrative right because everyone we know says so. But this is to deny the fact that, century after century, people have concluded, often almost unanimously, that Jews are guilty of the most heinous crimes, embody the worst human traits or are the quintessence of evil. None of these certainties, in any era, have actually been true. To discount this history is to invite its repetition. This is what is happening now. And the fact that mobs say otherwise is to deny the long history Jews have with mobs.

But everyone says it, so it must be true.

We have seen this scenario play out before. And nowhere does it tend to play out more than in the world’s approach to Jews.

So, as I’ve written far too many times, when you hear the puerile alleged tautology “Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism,” treat this with the disdain it deserves.

Anti-Zionism does not always manifest as people declaring “I hate Jews, so I hate Israel.”

It shows up in the phenomenon of credulous people believing shit about Jews that they would never believe about anyone else, regardless of how much evidence piles upon itself.

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