Today is the thirtieth Sabbath of the Gaza War. It is also the Sabbath of Passover, the holiday called z’man cherutenu—the time of our freedom—since it celebrates the exodus of the Hebrew slaves from Egypt. This comes from the Haggadah, the service read at the Passover seder, or sacred—and ordered—meal.
The service also contains the words, “In each generation they have stood against us to destroy us.” So many generations. So many different they’s. The Haggadah in some form has existed for at least two thousand years, and I don’t know when these exact words first appeared, but they are the same in my facsimile edition of The Copenhagen Haggadah of 1739, exactly two centuries before the Holocaust. And my friend Dr. Shlomit Finkelstein found the same words in a Haggadah dated to the late 1330s in Catalonia.
Thus, centuries before the Holocaust, before even the Cossack attempted genocide against Jews in 1648, Jews said every Passover, “In each generation they have stood against us to destroy us.” In this generation, the grotesque mass atrocities committed against Jews by Hamas—who soon promised to do the same a thousand times, as their charter pledges them to do—easily serve to confirm the Haggadah’s grim words. (For details of what Hamas did, see my description and this moving film starring Sheryl Sandberg.)
In the past week or two, US college campuses have imploded with demonstrations and encampments in favor of Palestinians and often Hamas, and virulently anti-Israel and often antisemitic. I say imploded rather than exploded because although they have spread throughout the country, they are implosive because they have mainly damaged themselves. Many have crossed the line from free speech to illegal action, inviting local and state police suppression. Ironically, they have risen up just as deaths in Gaza have reached their lowest levels ever. (See chart.)
Deaths in Gaza as counted by Hamas’s Health Ministry and reported by the UN (OCHA).
Today, I will reveal the honorees for First Annual—okay, they might have to be more frequent—Big Lie-Blood Libel Awards, for the individuals or collectives who have done the most recently to promote the Big Lie and the Blood Libel against the Jewish people (see chart for hints).
But first: Just as the holy, peaceful, month of Ramadan—including four sacred Fridays and the feast of Eid-al-Fitr—blessedly passed with none of the predicted Islamic violence on the Temple Mount (the Noble Sanctuary), in the Middle East, and throughout the world, so the martial, belligerent, massive, unprecedented attack on Israel last night passed with virtually no damage. The coalition that completely blocked the attack included the US, the UK, France, and Jordan shooting down Iranian missiles and drones and Saudi Arabia providing logistic support. Imagine the degree of cooperation that such coordinated response must have involved. Now imagine the formidable coalition that will follow the war, annealed by alliance against this attack. My brother likens the attack to an amateur boxer throwing a hundred punches none of which lands, then waiting with tired arms for the professional blow that will pop his lights out. Now we’ll see what punch Israel uses. Its stock market finished higher today.
But back to our Big Lie-Blood Libel Awards, known colloquially as Goebbsies in honor of Joseph Goebbels, the master propagandist who put it to history’s most effective use.
The chart above shows today’s Goebbsie honorees against the timeline of the dramatically declining deaths in Gaza since the war started. These are total deaths in successive two-week periods (the blue line) as provided by the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry and reported by the United Nations. There are many reasons to doubt these numbers, which are almost certainly over-estimates, but I am accepting them for present purposes because I want to focus on the steep decline—by Hamas’s numbers—and the remarkable fact that the lower the number of deaths got, the bigger the Big Lie got and the Bloodier the Blood Libel got as well. Five of the six Big Lies and Blood Libels shown here were smeared on Israel and the Jews when the number of deaths was about one quarter of what it was in the first month of the war—and declining.
Some background. The Blood Libel is the accusation that Jews ritually kill Christian children before Passover and use their blood to make Matzoh. It existed by the 12th century and has occurred ever since, although not every year. It frequently resulted in pogroms and severe persecution of the Jews where the belief spread. It is also a Big Lie, since it was repeated so often that many believed it. It even became part of Nazi propaganda.
The Big Lie has always existed, but it was specifically named by Joseph Goebbels and separately by Adolph Hitler in Mein Kampf. Ironically, both used the idea to describe how Jews carry out their conquest of Germany and the world, and they emphasized that if you repeat a lie often enough the masses of people will believe you. However, both Goebbels, who was Hitler’s chief propagandist and one of his closest associates, and Hitler as the voice, purveyed the Big Lie about the Jews—in one iteration, “Die Juden sind unser Unglück” (the Jews are our misfortune)—repeating it in speeches, radio, and film. It soon enough produced the consensus among “the masses” that led to the mass murder of Jews.
All of the honorees on the chart repeated the Big Lie now being leveled against Israel and the Jews, although in one case the grammar in which the Lie was couched was so convoluted as to be almost incomprehensible. The lie was also a Blood Libel, since the killing of innocents, including children, was supposedly deliberate. As far as I know, people are not yet accusing the Jews of using Palestinian children’s blood to make Matzoh, but I don’t use social media very much and with Passover imminent I would not be surprised to see this pop up somewhere.
In order of appearance, here are the nominees:
On January 11, South Africa argued its case in the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Despite having members known to be consistently anti-Israel (one of those was just elevated to be the Court’s President), the Court could not conclude that Israel is or was committing genocide; that requires a years-long process, which has to happen. But the court did not implement this item in the case: “South Africa has requested an Order for the immediate suspension of Israel’s military operations in and against Gaza.” (p. 78) This was the most important practical request from South Africa. Surely, if the Court thought that South Africa’s accusation of genocide was plausible, it would have ordered a ceasefire as requested. Instead, it issued warnings that Israel should act so as to prevent genocide, and that it should submit reports showing that it has done so. Since Israel had always acted as such, the reports write themselves. Incidentally, among democracies, Israel is ranked #30, South Africa #45; among countries ranked least to most corrupt, Israel is #33, South Africa #87. South Africa has extensive and growing ties with Iran.
Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), who I’m ashamed to admit is a Brooklyn Jew like me, told the Senate “The US should be working to end Israel’s genocide in Gaza, not aiding and abetting it,” and voted with 31 Republicans against aid to Israel; 67 Senators, including all Democrats, voted for the bill. Sanders has been anti-Israel in key Senate votes since 1988. His official and deliberate use of the word genocide to describe Israel’s actions makes him well worthy of the Big Lie-Blood Libel Award.
Hollywood movie-maker Jonathan Glazer used his two minutes of fame accepting an Oscar, with 19.5 million movie fans watching, to say: “Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many innocent people.” Huh? Okay, it is possible with effort to parse this sentence, so awkward it’s almost opaque, but it’s not surprising that many thought he was “refuting” his “Jewishness.” What he is “refuting,” also speaking for his colleagues, is his “Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation” that “has led to conflict for so many innocent people.” He places the blame for the conflict squarely on Israel’s “occupation” and “refutes” Israel’s “hijacking the Holocaust.” Because he made a movie about it, he seems to think that the Holocaust belongs to him and that he has a right to decide how the word is used. The movie has been widely praised and won the Oscar, but TheSan Francisco Chronicle called it “a dead film,” the New Yorker “an extreme form of Holokitsch,” and The New York Times “a hollow, self-aggrandizing art-film exercise set in Auschwitz during the Holocaust.”
I’ve discussed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (AOC’s) use of the Big Lie-Blood Libel, following the Goebbels playbook by multiple repetitions. Adding that Israel had “crossed the threshold of intent” in mass starvation of the Gazan people, “half of whom are children,” she joined a long line of blood-libelers, although she stopped short of saying that Jews’ “intent” in killing Palestinian children is to use their blood to make Matzoh. When she issued this Blood Libel the number of deaths in Gaza (as estimated by Hamas) was about a quarter of what it had been early in the war, a change due entirely to the care taken by the IDF to reduce civilian deaths while learning how to fight an enemy hiding behind children.
After three more weeks of declines in Gazan deaths, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts), rival of Bernie Sanders for chief moralizer and most self-righteous advocate of all left-wing causes, followed AOC in the Big Lie-Blood Libel disinformation frenzy against the Jewish state. In an appearance at the Islamic Center of Boston, and referring to the ICJ, this supposed champion of truth and justice said, “If you want to do it as an application of law, I believe that they’ll find that it is genocide, and they have ample evidence to do so.” Three months earlier, the ICJ did not find sufficient evidence even to call for a cease-fire.
Last but not least, Nicaragua, that lovely vacation spot—see State Department warnings— brought a case in the ICJ not against Israel but against Germany, for aiding Israel’s “genocide.” Clever of the corrupt, autocratic, violent, and refugee-hemorrhaging Central American country to level this charge against Germany, which—knowing full well what “genocide” means—has done more to preserve the memory of the Holocaust and the dignity of its victims than almost any other country. Again, among democracies, Israel is ranked #30, Nicaragua #143; among countries ranked least to most corrupt, Israel is #33, Nicaragua #172. Nicaragua and Iran have growing military cooperation.
And the Goebsie goes too…
Sorry, the committee (namely me) has found all six of these nominees so accomplished in the Big Lie-Blood Libel, it’s impossible to choose one. We will therefore take the unprecedented step of dividing the Goebbsie—a polished-lead non-working microphone—among them. They can take turns using it to try to spread their bloody, libelous lies.
Meanwhile, today alone, the US, the UK, Germany, many other Western nations, several Arab ones, and even UN Secretary General António Guterres have condemned Iran’s attack on and declared solidarity with Israel in this moment of crisis. Perhaps it is dawning on them that Iran, not Hamas, is the real threat, and that the world, not Israel, is the target.
(Blogging on the Gaza War since January 14th. Please link them on to others.)
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then I shouldn’t have much more work to do this week. I started with the very good public website of Kevin Drum, who presented the first graph in the top half of the picture (panel a). Based on data from the (Hamas-run) Gaza Health Ministry via the UN, it displays the daily deaths (red dots) of Gazans from October 7 to February 19, with a linear function (dotted black line) fitted to the daily data. This function declines from between 300-400 in October to 100 in February.
The lower part of the figure (panel b, my responsibility alone) is my attempt to extend Drum’s excellent graph from February to today. The daily deaths (also from the Gaza Health Ministry via the UN) are shown as blue dots, with the red line representing the 7-day moving average. Please note that the two graphs are on very different scales. Continue reading →
(Scroll down to see earlier posts starting January 14th.)
Given certain remarks in the news lately, I thought it might be silly season, but not everybody is silly. Upon careful investigation I learned about Silly Sauce. Like beluga caviar, it is only for a select few—but not the rich. Only political leaders who can’t resist sipping it and don’t mind brain fog.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) first alerted me. He must have sipped some from his hip flask before going down to the Senate floor on March 14th. It was an interesting speech, touching to me in many ways. He said he was speaking for “a silent majority” of “mainstream Jewish Americans” in his “nuanced” view of the Gaza War. He’s a landsman of mine; I went to the next high school over from his a few years earlier. We grew up in the same culture of Brooklyn-Jewish love for Israel in the time when its survival was unlikely. “We love Israel in our bones.”
But, “What horrifies so many Jews especially…is that Israel is falling short” of “distinctive Jewish values.” What exactly are those? He recounts the history of the conflict and the “perfidy” of Hamas in a way that most Jews, including Israelis, can accept. He blasts the right-wing thugs in the Israeli cabinet and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas as “obstacles to peace.”
Fine. But he gives Bibi Netanyahu special attention. Almost all he says about Bibi would be endorsed by the great majority of Israelis. Eighty-five percent disapprove of Bibi, and a growing number support early elections—which Schumer crossed a line to call for.
But here’s the silly part: Schumer calls Bibi too an obstacle to peace, which implies that without him the war would be different. It would not. If 85 percent of Israelis dislike Bibi, about the same percentage approve of how the war is being conducted. Replace Bibi with Gantz or Gallant, and you will get the same war, the same operation in Rafa, the same checking of aid trucks for weapons. The vast majority of Israelis want the war to continue until Hamas is completely disabled.
Apparently Chuck then passed the Silly Sauce on to Vice President Kamala Harris, Continue reading →
(Scroll down to see earlier posts in this series, beginning January 14th.)
Fair Harvard, thy sons to thy jubilee throng,
And in faith with thy glorious past,
By these odious rites now surrender thee o’er
To the murders and rapes of Hamas.*
This rewrite of the first stanza of Harvard’s alma mater—find the original wording and the history here—is impolite but not unfair, given the recent outpouring of hatred of Israel and, to a lesser extent, of Jews, on this nearly 400-year-old American campus. Most pointedly, Harvard’s students and faculty have supported a terror group whose grotesque atrocities against Jews and others in Israel are unprecedented in modern times. Can Harvard students and faculty be useful idiots, shills for Hamas mass murderers?
Don’t get me wrong. I have no desire to limit the free speech of deluded or even malicious faculty and students. Only a few have gone so far as to merit a legal crackdown against them. I’m not saying it’s fine to spew hatred of Israel, Zionism, and Jews, merely that I have to weigh these wrongs against the wrong of muzzling them, and given the first amendment’s protections, letting them puke up their lies is the lesser of two evils. But that doesn’t mean there are no remedies.
Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wisely said that the remedy for noxious speech is more speech, and Jewish students on these campuses can avail themselves of that opportunity—although at a risk of harm if they do or even if they let it be known that they are Jewish. They of course cannot have anything like the kind of college experience they signed up and paid for, just to stay in their rooms and go warily to class in groups and in daylight hours. That is the price they must pay for the first amendment protections of others, and ultimately their own, if they go to those schools.
I was born in August 1946; the first UN meetings were held in London in January that year. So the UN and I are the same age—you might say, nonidentical twins. I have followed it from an early age, and I am glad to report that—despite the small scale and limitations of my lifetime efforts—I have done better with my challenges than my twin has in its equal lifetime.
Per the UN itself, the genocides in Rwanda and the Balkans in the 1990s proved “in the worst possible way” that the UN repeatedly failed to prevent this horror, despite being able to do so. It failed to stop and even to recognize earlier genocides in Indonesia (1960s) and Cambodia (1970s) and much more recent ones in Darfur, Iraq and Syria (against the Yazidis), and Myanmar (the Rohingya). The UN rights council refused to discuss China’s ongoing genocide of Uighur Muslims.
The UN’s failure to prevent small wars—more than 200 in its lifetime and mine—speaks for itself; advocates argue that it has prevented World War III, but that is conjectural. Russia vetoed a Security Council resolution condemning its Ukraine invasion, although the General Assembly passed it overwhelmingly. The UN has done good work against hunger and slavery and promoting sustainable development, but has consistently fallen short of its own stated goals. More than 780 million people (and rising) face hunger, and there are more slaves in the world today than ever before in human history.
From the moment it moved its first aircraft carrier into the eastern Mediterranean, the US has adamantly said and said again that it wants to avoid a regional war. Despite that reluctance, regional war is here.
In a sense it has been from the start, since Iran (a non-Arab, often anti-Arab country) is on the east of the region, but its empire of vassals and proxies control Lebanon, Gaza, and Yemen as well as infiltrating Iraq and Syria with its own soldiers (the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, IRGC) and arming Hamas in the occupied West Bank.
After the US accepted more than 160 attacks on its limited forces and facilities in Iraq and Syria, three US soldiers (two women and a man) were killed about two weeks ago, and the US vowed retaliation. Heavy strikes directed at key targets in Syria and Iraq occurred last Friday night, with more to come.
The Houthis, the terrorist group controlling Yemen, has for months attacked merchant ships in the Red Sea, impeding twenty percent of world commerce and decimating Suez Canal traffic. The group also attacks US naval vessels. Continue reading →
Last Tuesday I was privileged—or voluntarily burdened, by invitation of the Israel Consul—with the chance to view one of the restricted IDF videos documenting the atrocities of October 7th. This is a compilation of video recordings from bodycams, phone, and dashboard cameras belonging to attackers, victims, and rescuers as well as CCTV from the locations attacked.
As hard as this was to watch, it did not go as far as I expected based on reports by people who saw even worse video, surviving witnesses, and the unfortunately limited postmortem evidence. I will return to some of those. But first I want to describe this video. If you are squeamish, read no further than the next paragraph; even if you are not, you will probably be disturbed.
This is the paragraph anyone can read. What made the greatest impression on me in the video was the joy on the faces of the Hamas attackers as and after they did their atrocities. Because of the way the human brain is wired, the difference between video and verbal description is not as great for atrocities as it is for facial expressions. I had heard many descriptions of atrocities, and seeing them was important, but those facial expressions are seared into my mind—when these young men turned back toward their colleagues’ phones with faces bursting with smiles. Nothing diabolical here. The smiles were big, warm, and bright, conveying the most spontaneous joy—pride, satisfaction, and triumph, yes—but most vividly, joy. Continue reading →
Please see below (“Concerning the War in Gaza”, January 14) for my overview of the war, and the disclaimer introducing it, also applicable here. So is this: Every death is a terrible loss, and every civilian death more so.
In 1944, General Curtis Lemay was appointed to command the Army Air Corps (later the Air Force) in the Pacific Theater, his predecessor having been fired for a reluctance to bomb civilians. Lemay soon ordered the fire-bombing of Tokyo with napalm, killing as many as 100,000 people in six hours. He repeated this in other Japanese cities, with the estimated total deaths ranging from 241,000 to 900,000. This was before the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed another 129,000 to 226,000. These mass bombings were not directed at military targets (few were involved) but were carpet bombings of civilians. To many, Lemay is a hero.
Similar incendiary bombings, also creating firestorms, were carried out by the British and Americans in the German cities of Hamburg and Dresden, killing at least scores of thousands. Civilian populations being what they are, most of the victims in all these cases were women and children. Causing terror was their explicit goal, in the service of ending the war. Some considered these war crimes, but they were never tried or punished as such. German mass murder of civilians, using different methods, was of much greater magnitude, and was punished.
In part in reaction to the destructiveness of that war, the 1949 Geneva Conventions greatly strengthened the laws defining and prohibiting war crimes and crimes against humanity, including genocide, a term coined to describe what the Germans did to the Jews, but subsequently applied—in a few cases I think legitimately—to other mass killings. It has more often been misapplied. Continue reading →
After focusing on the Gaza war since 7:30 am on October 7th, I’ve finally decided to begin writing about it. People ask for my opinion and I will now refer them here. If you read on, that is what you will get. I will not keep saying, “In my opinion” again and again, so please assume it. Today I will give my overview, which may be followed by other, future entries.
*****
Israel is at war with the empire of Iran, which includes the failed state of Lebanon, the territory of Gaza, and the faltering state of Yemen. Iran rules these entities through the terror groups Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis respectively. Like Iran, they are sworn to eliminate Israel. Through these and other proxies, Iran also controls parts of Syria and Iraq and has significantly infiltrated the West Bank. Since Iran is not an Arab country, this is larger than the Arab-Israeli conflict.
The question of whether Iran gives directives to these proxies on a day to day basis is irrelevant. It nurtures, trains, arms, consults, and plans with them and has done so for many years. They don’t do anything without Iran’s approval before and after the fact. Meanwhile Iran progresses steadily toward a nuclear arsenal (which Israel already has). Continue reading →
