OPINION: When the West enables hate, innocents pay in blood
The responsibility for the DC shootings falls directly onto those authorities who have failed to rein in antisemitism
This week has seen those poisonous calls to “globalise the intifada” yield an abundance of fatally toxic fruit. Over three fateful days the world was to witness two egregious blood libels, a multi-governmental condemnation of the Israeli government, and on Wednesday night in Washington DC, the tragic murder of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, two betrothed staffers from the Israeli Embassy who were shot as they left a Jewish event at the Capital Jewish Museum.
We know that Elias Rodriguez, the suspected terrorist murderer of Lischinsky and Milgrim, shouted “Free Palestine” as a young couple was executed, a call that has long been shown to have more to do with the eradication of the Jewish people than it is with laying any misguided territorial claim to the land that lies between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
However, such slogans do not emerge from a vacuum. Rather, they hail from decades of carefully constructed antisemitism that has been fuelled for years not only by those who hate the Jewish people but, sadly, also by those Jews whose useful idiocy knows no bounds.
Monday saw the governments of the UK, France and Canada gang together (safety in numbers, obviously) to issue a statement that, amongst other things, criticised aspects of the Israeli government’s actions.
That the criticisms were swingeing will come as little surprise to those who have long seen the UK, together with other Western nations, mark Israel out as deserving of particularly contemptuous treatment. That shortly thereafter Hamas, a proscribed terrorist organisation in the UK, was to hail the statement as a “step in the right direction” defines those words from that troika of governments as possibly one of the greatest acts of appeasement since Neville Chamberlain visited Munich in 1938.
Netanyahu’s reaction to the statement was blunt: “When mass murderers, rapists, baby killers and kidnappers thank you, you’re on the wrong side of justice, you’re on the wrong side of humanity and you’re on the wrong side of history.”
Israel has long been a source of valuable and strategic intelligence to its Western allies. As it reflects on this week’s bruising condemnations from those same allied nations, who could blame it for considering to restrict that flow of intelligence?
The phrase goes that “a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes”. So it was on Tuesday when Tom Fletcher, the UN’s under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, claimed on BBC Radio 4’s flagship Today show that “There are 14,000 babies that will die in the next 48 hours unless we can reach them”, a statement that was subsequently debunked in quietly worded retractions by both the BBC and the UN, but not before the damage of those proven lies had been done.
Later, when the UK’s Foreign Secretary David Lammy, speaking in the House of Commons, announced a number of economic sanctions against Israel, the “14,000 babies in 48 hours” was referred to no less than 13 times during his speech. Such eagerly reported falsehoods are an attack on British democracy and the Mother of Parliaments.
The blood libels continued even in Israel, where Yair Golan, the leader of the Democrats, the country’s left-leaning alliance, in pursuit of an ongoing agenda to topple Prime Minister Netanyahu at all costs, accused his country of killing Gazan babies “as a hobby”. Golan knows full well that libellous accusations of Jews as child-killers date back centuries.
No fool (albeit a useful idiot), he will also have known that his words would have been seized upon and welcomed as an unexpected gift by those who wish for the destruction of the Jewish state as a vindication of their vile beliefs.
Words have power. They shape perceptions, beliefs, and behaviours, influencing how we think, feel, and act. The keffiyeh-clad mobs that have sought to dominate Western cities, campuses and agendas for the last 18 months, largely enabled by law enforcement agencies that have been either unwilling or unable (or both) to tackle the illegal aspects of their conduct, have this week claimed two lives.
I spoke off the record with a leading member of the UK’s Jewish community who was frank, telling me that the responsibility for the DC shootings falls directly onto those authorities who have failed to rein in antisemitism. The dehumanisation and destruction of the Jews has been a long-published aim of Hamas, and history tells us that when hatred flourishes, other evils follow.
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