For John, BLUF: I find much of the news and many of the demonstrators are showing a lack of in depth understanding of the issues involved in this Hamas/Israel conflict. Nothing to see here; just move along.
Here is the sub-headline:
How the Oct. 7 massacres in Israel gave birth to a global pogrom
From The Tablet, by Mr Marc Weitzmann, 30 October 2023.
Here is the lede plus four:
I was staring at my phone in blank incomprehension watching the worldwide demonstrations of enthusiasm that followed the bloodiest pogrom since World War II—the “gas the Jews!” of the pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Sydney, the “fuck the Jews!” in London, the Nazi salutes in Paris, the Nazi flags in New York. I was scrolling through footage from some of the most prestigious universities in America sinking further every day into their own shit—the Washington University pro-Hamas students yelling “fuck Israel!” and “you guys are all fucking gays!”; Columbia students gathering to celebrate the massacre in Israel one day after a Jewish student was beaten with a stick outside the main library; the Cherry Hill East high school student who screamed his hatred to his Jewish fellow classmates in the hall; the antisemitic demonstrations at UCLA. There was the Stanford professor who forced his Jewish students to identify themselves before grouping them in a corner so that they could feel “what the Palestinians feel,” the UC Davis associate professor who warned the “Zionists journalists” that they should “fear us” (whoever that “us” is) because “we can find their addresses and their children’s schools,” and who ended her post with hatchets and blood-drip emojis. I was seeing “keep the world clean” signs decorated with a Star of David pushed into a garbage can, exhibited by pro-Palestinian supporters in Washington Square Park and Warsaw. And, of course, I saw video of passersby everywhere tearing down posters of Jewish kids kidnapped by Hamas in the hope of making the victims disappear, even while their murderers were being publicly celebrated in the streets. I was watching all of this from the viewpoint of a French Jew who for years has lived with the absolute conviction that if the shit really hit the fan in his own country, there would always be the U.S. It made no sense.
Then I came upon a video taken right after Oct. 7 that I had previously missed. It showed a professor at Cornell university named Russell Rickford, a Black Lives Matter supporter. Standing under the rain, among the signs, in front of the demonstrators, Rickford was screaming into his microphone: “It was exhilarating! It was exhilarating! It was energizing! I was exhilarated!” The “it” was the pogrom. Mentally, I immediately thanked Rickford for his unabashed honesty. I knew exactly where I was now.
The whole planet had become France, and Mohamed Merah had returned.
Merah was the 23-year-old killer of Algerian descent raised and born in the city of Toulouse, France, who on March 19, 2012, entered the local Ozar Hatorah school with a Parabellum 9-millimeter and a .45 ACP and shot at close range one of the rabbis in the school along with his two sons, Gabriel, 3, and Aryeh, 6. He then chased little Myriam, age 9, across the courtyard, grabbed her by her hair, put his weapon’s barrel against her head and pulled the trigger, before walking back quietly toward his scooter. Like the Hamas pogromists of Oct. 7 he had equipped himself with a GoPro camera so the slaughter could be filmed and widely seen. Since social media was still relatively new, he sent his videos to the offices of Al Jazeera, where—Qatar being Qatar—the journalists waited for the emir’s orders to know whether they should air the images or not. Under pressure from the French government, the videos were not aired.
Merah’s murders changed everything in France—for the worse. It also provided a sickening preview of how the massacre of Oct. 7 is likely to change the lives of Jews in other Western countries.
People in France rejected as outliers those who warned about the lack of assimilation by immigrants from Afroca (and in particulsr, the Africsn Mediteranian Litoral). See for example the reaction to the Jean Raspail novel Camp of the Saints. But, France has seen a number of events in which people have been murdered in the name of Islam.
That said, Muslims have settled peacefully into our nation and peacefully entered into our political life. This is as it should be. However, the plight of Palistinins has created sympathy here in the United States. Sympathy without understanding or any long term solutions. This is unhelpful. It results in scape-goating Israel and Jews. That is not only not helpful, but it is wrong.
The demands from Hamas are fairly unlimited. See, for example. this interview with Hamas Spokesman Ghazi Hamad: "We Will Repeat The October 7 Attack, Time And Again, Until Israel Is Annihilated; We Are Victims – Everything We Do Is Justified." The source is MEMRI.
I realize I come to this issue from a specific position. but from this position I am appalled by the lack of insight regarding the issue, the lack of people thinking through the end state, and the rabid anti-Semtism.
Hat tip to the InstaPundit.
Regards — Cliff
