TERRORISM = JUSTIFIABLE HOMICIDE: UN OFFICIAL

ALBANESE DIFFERENTIATES BETWEEN DEAD JEWS AND DEAD ZIONISTS. AND GETS AWAY WITH IT.

To be clear: She didn’t say dead Zionists are a good thing. Just that dead Jews are a different thing.

Canada has a special visitor this week.

Francesca Albanese is the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territory Occupied since 1967.

In the National Post today, Israeli human rights lawyer Arsen Ostrovsky observes Albanese’s “bottomless CV of unrepentant and unrestrained antisemitism, engagement in Holocaust distortion and whitewashing of terror.” Well, obviously. It’s the CV that got her the job.

Ostrovsky reminds us that, when French President Emmanuel Macron earlier this year honored 42 French-Israelis murdered on October 7, referring to the attacks as “the greatest antisemitic massacre of our century,” Albanese took this as an invitation to weigh in and contradict the French prez.

She tweeted: “The victims of 10/7 were not killed because of their Judaism, but in reaction to Israel’s oppression.”

Oh. that’s OK then. Not terrorism. Justifiable homicide. This from a top UN official.

This is an invitation of a different sort. Albanese’s comments, in which she deracinates Israel from its Jewish roots and, in the same swift move, deracinates anti-Zionism from its antisemitic roots, allows those of us who care about such things to clear up confusion around something that should be obvious.

People who justify the mass murder and other atrocities that day like to couch their rape rationalizations and backing for beheadings as happening in a “context.” October 7 was not a result of 75+ years of inhumane antisemitic incitement in Palestinian society through a despoiled education system, hate-ravaged popular culture, and genocide-inciting news, weather and sports throughout that society, they insist.

No, they say, it was a natural human response to Israeli responses to that violence.

Except they obfuscate even this. They omit the last part. The very idea that Israel is responding is elided from the narrative. They contend that Israel is the aggressor, attacking Palestinians for no reason.

There is a degree of logic here, however flawed. If you do not believe a country has the right to exist, it ipso facto has no right to defend itself. Hey presto, there is no defensive explanation for Israeli military actions.

This inversion allows the Palestinian instigators to come off as the blameless victims. And this fits into a centuries-old narrative.

People like Albanese say the Jews — erm, the “Israelis” — brought the carnage on themselves.

So, a few things:

Antisemitism has always blamed the victims. If Jews didn’t xyz, we wouldn’t have to pogrom them.

But let’s say this is an outlier. Let’s imagine this is not an example of the old saw that Jews deserve whatever they get.

You want context? Here’s the context …

Yes, there is oppression of Palestinians. Why? Because the Palestinian leadership and the broader Arab world, then the entire Muslim world’s leadership, have prevented a resolution to the conflict. They have ensured there is no peace and Palestinian self-determination for three main reasons.

First, this is not about Palestinian self-determination. This is about Jewish self-determination — ending it. If we do not accept this core fact of the conflict, we have zero chance of concluding this conflict. That’s fine for those who started and perpetuated the conflict, because …

Second, perpetuating the Palestinian plight diverts attention from the panoramic atrocities happening across the Arab and Muslim world. Feeling oppressed? Angry? Want to rise up against the tyrants who are oppressing you? Wait! Divert your attention that way … Look! Palestinians are being oppressed … BY JEWS! Ending this conflict would have disastrous repercussions for autocrats across North Africa and Asia. (This is why UNRWA exists. See my last post. UNRWA aims to perpetuate the Palestinian refugee problem, not resolve it.)

Third, the Muslim world, especially Iran of late obviously, fund and supply terrorist armies to attacks Jews in the most inhumane ways. Then, confronted with enemies who respect no rules of engagement and piss on the Geneva Conventions, Israel is forced to defend its civilians in ways no democratic state has ever been forced to do. And, in response, the world wails about the “oppression.”

Meanwhile, Western activists make courteous distinctions between “Jews” and “Zionists.”

This is a fundamental disconnect in the language between East and West. That differentiation simply doesn’t exist in the “context” of the Middle East.

Many Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims cut out the middleman.

As one exultant Palestinian terrorist exclaimed in calling home to his proud parents on 10/7: “I killed 10 Jews with my own hands!”

Perhaps we don’t have access to the video where he calls back to clarify. “Sorry Mom and Dad. I meant ‘Zionists.’ I killed 10 ‘Zionists’ with my own hands! Love you. What’s for dinner?”

The facile slogan that “Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism” a presumed tautology based on nothing but the logical fallacy that saying it makes it so — may be true for some Western activists.

But anti-Zionism was founded on antisemitism. The Arab world and, a little later, the unanimity of Muslim-majority countries at the UN, have always opposed Israel because it is a Jewish state. They don’t oppose Syria, Jordan, Lebanon or Iraq, which were all cut largely out of whole cloth in roughly the same postcolonial era as Israel. The distinction has always been Israel’s Jewishness.

In tomorrow’s post, I’ll go into this in more depth.