Watch a Left-Wing Activist's Anti-Israeli Argument Get Wrecked in Less Than Five Minutes
By Matt Vespa
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Why Hamas Atrocities Lead the Left to Hate Israel More
‘Cognitive-dissonance reduction’ requires vilifying the victim to uphold one’s prejudices.
By Shany Mor
You might think that an atrocity like Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre in Israel would lead opponents of the Jewish state to temper their attacks. Instead, from college campuses to mainstream media outlets, elite left-wing circles have responded to the terror group’s barbarism by intensifying their denunciations of Israel. That may seem counterintuitive, but it’s typical. The worst demonization of the Jewish state has typically followed the worst atrocities against it.
Recall the Palestinian suicide-bombing campaign in the early 2000s. Then, as now, many in the West responded to the carnage by criticizing the Jews. International nongovernmental organizations resurrected the Soviet-era claim that Israel is an “apartheid” state. The United Nations joined the chorus and in 2001 met for a global conference “against racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance” in Durban, South Africa. Denunciation of Israel dominated the agenda.
Fast-forward two decades and Jews experienced the deadliest attack since the Holocaust. In response, many in the West have accused Israel of being a genocidal nation. The Washington Post’s Karen Attiah wrote on Oct. 13 that the U.S. “cannot stand by as Israeli officials engage in genocidal language and describe genocidal intent against Palestinians for the actions of Hamas.” England’s Guardian published at least three opinion pieces this week warning the same. Hundreds of international-law scholars from around the world signed a statement reporting that they’d found signs in Israel that “warn of a potential genocide in Gaza.”
One such “sign” is the Oct. 9 statement by Israel’s Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, that Israel is “fighting human animals” Mr. Gallant was speaking about Hamas, not the Palestinian people, and the Israel Defense Forces have deliberately attempted to minimize damage to civilians in Gaza.
In one respect, this response is transparent projection. Hamas’s charter explicitly calls for the destruction of Jews and Israel. By kidnapping, raping and slaughtering innocent civilians, the terrorist group gives every indication that it believes what it says. Yet its sympathizers in the West aren’t merely projecting. Their behavior is an example of cognitive-dissonance reduction, the process by which people reconcile new information that contradicts their firmly held priors. The result is an ostensibly coherent system of thought.
Western activists for Palestinians are dedicated to two nearly theological precepts: that Israel is evil, and that no Palestinian action is ever connected to any Palestinian outcome. Each precept is grounded in longstanding—and borderline racist—conceptions of Jews and Arabs.
This cognitive trap expresses itself in how Israel’s opponents in the West speak about the conflict with the Palestinians. Concern that “time is running out” for reaching a two-state solution never leads to calls for the Palestinians to hurry up and accept a negotiated compromise. They ignore that the Palestinians rejected statehood and peace in 2000, 2001, 2008 and 2014. They ignore that Hamas’s belligerence is the cause of Israel’s blockade of Gaza, a defensive measure by a nation under assault.
Hamas’s gruesome attack poses a threat to this worldview, and the only way to resolve it is by heightening Israel’s imagined malevolence. The terrorist atrocities don’t trigger a recoiling from the cause in whose name they were carried out; they lead to an even greater revulsion at the victim.
This was the playbook 20 years ago when Palestinian terror groups sent young men and women to blow themselves up in Israeli buses, restaurants and cafes—immediately after they rejected offers of an independent Palestinian state, including the Gaza Strip and more than 90% of the West Bank, with East Jerusalem as its capital. The only way to make sense of the violence was to imagine an Israel even worse than what was already believed.
The Oct. 7 pogrom raised the rhetorical stakes. If the only thing that can explain a Palestinian action is Israeli evil, then Israel’s opponents have to imagine a level of Jewish evil commensurate with what Hamas did—shooting children in front of their parents, setting houses on fire with residents inside, raping women, beheading innocent people, mutilating bodies.
When it is forbidden to criticize murderers or the society that created them, all that is left is to defame the victims. The accusation that Israel is committing genocide the week after Hamas’s massacre is entirely predictable. It tells us nothing about Israel and much about its enemies.
Mr. Mor is a lecturer at Reichman University in Herzliya, Israel.
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Israel vs. a Death Cult
Here are three critical considerations that must be understood about the current Israel-Hamas conflict. It is a sort of half-war. It consists of a military trying to defeat an organized clique of passive-aggressive, media-obsessed tribal murderers. It is not really a war. This ‘war’ did not begin with a military assault. It is nothing like the Six-Day and Yom Kippur Wars, or indeed most other conflicts. It broke out with a surprise assault by between 1,500 and 2,500 gunmen of the Hamas death squads. During peace and on a holiday, they entered Israel in a long-planned hit operation to murder civilians and take captives, focusing specifically on butchering the most vulnerable—the elderly, women, children, and infants—and in the most grotesque fashion imaginable. Their desire was to be as savagely pre-civilizational as possible—the more macabre the manner of murder, the more fertile their sophistry that they were reduced to such repulsive blood lust by their worse “oppressors”. It would be as though gruesome Mafia hitmen had claimed they were forced to become animal-like due to even worse systemic anti-Italian bias. Even the Mexican cartels do not claim they are led to behead because of the injustice of the Mexican government. By preplanned design, women were raped, and children and infants were burned alive, bound and executed, and (yes) beheaded. The dead were often mutilated. Some 1,400 Israelis were butchered, the vast majority civilians. Some 3,500-4,500 were wounded. Hamas never planned to stage a preemptive war against the Israeli military. Its only agenda was to send killers to unprotected villages to murder the unarmed as they slept—in the manner of Nazi Einsatzgruppen and other mobile death squads on the Eastern Front. Almost immediately they counted on using hostages, human shields, and the media to avoid any accounting from the IDF. To distract from the murder mission, Hamas launched some 5,000 rockets—all intended as terror weapons to strike civilians, in the fashion of the V-1 and V-2 attacks on London. What followed is the most asymmetrical “war” in memory. The IDF is the only military in the world told to be “proportionate” in its use of retaliatory force—not the U.S. after 9/11, and not Ukraine after February 24, 2022. No Arab army or terrorist cadre has ever waged a war under the rules of “proportionality”. Can anyone remember a conflict, other than ones involving the U.S. or Britain, in which the attacked in its response is expected to first phone or drop leaflets warning its target areas? Does Hamas do that when it launches its rockets at Israeli cities? It is not an anti-colonial struggle. Gaza is not anyone’s“colony”. It has been autonomous since 2006-7. No free Israeli Arab Muslim citizen would willingly emigrate there to live under the dictatorship of Hamas. And for good reason. Gaza has been the recipient of aggregate billions in cash from the Gulf monarchies, Europe, the US, the UN. and expatriate remittances. The more money came in, the less Hamas had any intention of using it to serve its people. Most of the gifted funds were used to build the world’s largest subterranean city of death, to buy drones and rockets, and to pay gunmen to kill Jews. Essentially Hamas is an enormous mafia-like, shakedown and hostage-taking operation that threatens the general peace, the moderate Arab nations, the Western democracies, and Israel with terrorist operations and kidnapping unless sufficiently bribed to behave.
Usually, soldiers wear uniforms in battle and their far away civilian overseers do not; Hamas killers in action wear anything, but their distant leaders in safety often prefer uniforms. So, Hamas is primarily neither a government nor even an armed force designed to fight other soldiers, but rather some eerie updated SS or Mexican-like cartel. Was that reality at the time unknown to Gazans who once voted them into power, or to its unhinged supporters on the streets and campuses of the US who celebrated its murder missions and damned Israel—even before Israel responded? Only Hamas is deliberately targeting civilians. Hamas fires its rockets at Israeli civilians from hospitals, schools, UN facilities, and mosques. Again, note the logic: Hamas assumes that Israel fights wars more humanely than Hamas itself does, and so will both try to avoid Hamas’s Palestinian human shields, and of course never itself employ such a barbaric tactic—since, among other humane reasons, Israeli civilians would attract, rather than deflect a Hamas rocket. The Israelis avoid collateral damage; there is not even such a concept for Hamas: all of its attacks are primarily aimed at civilians. Collateral damage for Hamas follows from accidently encountering the IDF. How Orwellian that the world demands that Israel, in its efforts to prevent Hamas rocket launches aimed exclusively at its civilian population, must not hurt a single civilian who is impressed to shield the rocket launchers. Note well: Hamas’s air campaign is specifically designed to kill civilians—Israel’s to avoid them.
In Israel rockets are used to shield civilians; in Gaza civilians are used to shield rockets. Hamas seeks to force the Israeli military to violate the rules of war; Israel accepts that there are no rules that Hamas gunman would ever follow. The odd result is that a sick world is more accepting of deliberate mass murdering by Hamas than occasional accidental collateral damage by Israel.
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Funding two new wars
By Charles Hurt
Four years of world peace drove Joe Biden insane. When Democrats promised a “return to normalcy” during the 2020 campaign, they did not tell us it was another one of their crazy euphemisms — this one meaning a return to unending war and bloodshed around the world. Of course, President Biden and Democrats in Washington would dispute this characterization because, after all, their jobs literally depend upon it. So they will lie. Heck, some of them might even believe their own lies.
But one argument Democrats don’t even try to make is that Mr. Biden’s two new wars — one in Ukraine and the other in Israel — are in some way the result of instability created by his immediate predecessor. That claim would be too big a lie — too unbelievably absurd — even for them.
Such a claim would only remind Americans that former President Donald Trump’s America First agenda — prosperity at home, power abroad — enabled Mr. Trump to remain the only president of the 21st century not to start a single war on his watch. The combination of American economic strength at home and clearly defined, self-interested power around the world kept our enemies at bay.
The day Mr. Biden took office, he began weakening America with his assault on American energy production. In addition to making you poorer, those same Biden policies enriched our enemies by driving up the price of oil.
Under Mr. Trump, Russia and Iran did not have a pot to spit in. As Mr. Biden’s policies drove up the price of oil, Russia and Iran became massively wealthy. And as if that were not destructive enough, Mr. Biden also waived sanctions against Russia and Iran, thereby turbocharging their oil economies.
In very real terms, Mr. Biden is responsible for funding the economic rise of these two malignant countries. He is personally responsible for funding the wars they have launched — one against Ukraine and now another against Israel.
Now comes Mr. Biden asking taxpayers to pony up $100 billion more to fund the fighting on behalf of our allies Ukraine and Israel.
As insane as it sounds, Mr. Biden is funding both sides of two new wars launched under his watch as a direct result of his policies. Truly, this is what passes as a “foreign policy expert” in Washington.
And as if that were not bad enough, Mr. Biden has also openly violated Supreme Court rulings to illegally force taxpayers to pay the student loans of pro-Hamas students demonstrating on behalf of terrorists at universities around the country.
Quite a game of three-card monte Mr. Biden is playing here with your money.
Possibly the most hideous thing Mr. Biden has done to empower terrorists was his decision — diabolically revealed on 9/11 this year — to pay Iran $6 billion in exchange for American hostages. By doing so, Mr. Biden created a global market for hostages.
Less than a month later, Hamas terrorists funded by Iran snatched up over 200 hostages and are using those hostages in Mr. Biden’s newest war in Israel. As Mr. Trump observed, the president is a dangerous combination of “incompetence, radicalism and weakness.”
But the hostages held by Hamas are not the only hostages in Mr. Biden’s two new wars.
In his incoherent Oval Office address Thursday night, Mr. Biden announced that he would ask Congress for an added $100 billion to help pay for his two new wars. Though he does not “seek” to send American troops to fight in these wars, he warned that this could change.
Giving him a $100 billion check, he said, will “help us keep American troops out of harm’s way.”
So, you know, if you know what’s best for your son or daughter in uniform, you really should pay up. Would hate to see something bad happen to one of your kids.
(Editor’s note: My wife made me remove the last line of this column because she said it would get me kicked out of our church, sent to hell and probably get me arrested by Mr. Biden’s Department of Justice.)
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