Steve Apfel is a world authority on anti-Zionism. His published articles and essays number in the hundreds. A second book, “Hitlers at Heart” is with the publishers.
The painful progress of Israel’s war on multiple fronts has bred a peril harder to beat than Iran’s proxy armies. How so?
The world loves and the world hates.
It loves dead Jews, loves it when they suffer, loves to commemorate the Holocaust.
What the world hates is when Jews fight back, hates it when Israel hurts the enemy. When it does the world lines up to handicap and harness it.
When Israel eliminated Hamas leader Ismael Haniyeh it provoked outrage, a concern over “escalation” and a demand for “maximum restraint” – political language for putting Israel’s right to fight back in jeopardy.
Another peril is covert, and more insidious.
Why be caught denying Israel the right to defend itself when you can prevent people from realising that is what you are doing. Certain words pack a heavy punch, political or emotional, and their exhaustive misuse can gum up the ability to think. The word ‘Genocide’ is probably the best known example of such abuse. Coined for the Holocaust, the term has migrated to the Gaza war to be the Israel-hater’s deterrent. Dare to fight back and we’ll accuse Israel of the crime on the statute book, Hitler’s crime. Thus genocide became a blackmail word, a tactic, a smear, a hashtag. Tried and tested.
When the International Court of Justice declared it was plausible to accuse Israel of genocide, Israel’s cabinet felt compelled to submit regular reports to it, detailing the steps taken to prevent the Jews committing Hitler’s crime. It goes to show how readily Jewish leaders get played.
An all-purpose genocide umbrella is what prevents the UN Relief and Works Agency being brought to book. When governments had the temerity to defund UNRWA after it came out that workers on its payroll had moonlighted for Hamas on Oct 7, a cry went up that to defund the agency was to be ‘complicit in Israel’s genocide’. Ludicrous is as ludicrous does. It worked. To fall into line on the side of policy deemed ‘normal’ Britain restored funding. Its Foreign Secretary played his own ludicrous hand: “We are reassured that UNRWA is ensuring it meets the highest standards of neutrality.”
The rape of language, George Orwell demonstrated, is a mind-numbing weapon. Take an even bigger rape victim than genocide; the kindly word, ‘Humanitarian’ has been repurposed for pro-Hamas propaganda, with a scope and import far greater than genocide’s. It is not baloney to claim that human rights ‘non-profit’ bodies can rattle the collection tin mainly because ‘Humanitarian’ is in their mission or values statement.
Nor is it accidental that ‘human rights’ and ‘anti-Israel’ are lifelong soul mates. One can hardly picture the likes of Amnesty, the UN Human Rights Council, International Red Cross, Open Society Foundations or Oxfam sniggering at UNRWA’s apple pie statement on the services it delivers “in accordance with UN humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality and operational independence.” Oh c’mon. Every word is the obverse of reality.
Just how bad is UNRWA? Though Israel has de-banked and expelled the agency it remains half aware how bad it really is.
A Jerusalem Post report on UNRWA terror ties which missed the real bad bit is indicative.
“Israelis were angered by a United Nations announcement that nine members of the UN Relief and Works Agency will be fired for their roles in the October 7 attacks, telling The Press Service of Israel the institution failed to investigate approximately 100 other staffers. UNRWA officials say that those who were revealed to have ties to Hamas were fired or left the agency. However, the issue was not dealt with systematically but rather on a case-by-case basis and in private.”
Let’s do this one step at a time.
- UNRWA members were fired for their roles in the October 7 “attacks.” The word of course is a euphemism, naming something without calling up mental pictures of rape, butchery, burning alive, decapitation and hostage taking.
- Two questions.
- (a) Are such acts a capital crime against humanity or (
- b) Are such acts a matter of improper work practice? Don’t smile.
- UNRWA management effectively answered (b), improper work practices. It fired errant workers for breaking conditions of employment by murdering Jews.
- Hold your anger: Israel concurs. Go back to the report. Its gripe was that UNRWA did not deal with the problem, “systematically but rather on a case-by-case basis and in private.”
- What exactly does this mean? It means being unhappy with UNRWA for not going far enough in that 100 other staffers had been participants on Oct 7. They too should have been axed, Israel complained.
So what’s the big deal? UNRWA did not have the “bad apples” arrested for crimes against humanity. It simply axed some and let others vanish into the tunnel system. That is a very big deal. Israel did not cotton on to this complicity of the head honcho, Philippe Lazzarini. It failed to confront the boss: ‘You paid your nine bad apples a monthly salary. They were indulged in rape, butchery, burning and kidnapping. Why did you let them walk away scot free?
Why did you not have your part time terrorists arrested for rape and murder’?
Truly, ‘humanitarian’ is a blinder of a word. It plugs our thought process. It allows people to get away with murder. It emasculates a word connected with all that is good in order to stoke the hatred underpinning the Holocaust.
UNRWA though is not the sum of this evil. It couldn’t do half of what it does without comporting with sibling proxies of the humanitarian snakehead. UN agencies and NGOs in the human rights industry all engage in covert operations against the “Israeli state”. If Phillip Luther, Amnesty’s concoctor of the ‘Apartheid report’ cannot give Israel a sinister name who can? An 8th war front if you like. Their role is to soften up Israel with barrage after barrage of hyped-up human catastrophes.
The World Food Program, World Health Organisation, UNICEF and UNGA had hysterics that famine would eviscerate Gaza. Bringing up the rear UNRWA let rip that, “Across Gaza a man-made famine is tightening its grip, Infants and young children have begun to die of malnutrition and dehydration.” The rat-tat-tat libel, Israel starving the innocent of Gaza to death, died down when photos of markets with food enough to feed a few million Gazas made the tactic look...like a tactic.
Though after all is said and done starvation was and is being inflicted. Not on Gaza but under the ground, in the tunnel maze. Calls on the International Red Cross to ensure that Israeli hostages were being fed and treated humanely fell on deaf ears.
“The restriction of essential supplies, lack of supervision, preventing humanitarian visits by the Red Cross, and restricting access to food over a long period of time as mentioned above, not only constitutes ongoing torture but also poses a real-life threat to defenceless and innocent individuals, which is reprehensible by all humanitarian standards!”
Give the Red Cross a break. It has a long anti-Israel record and since UNRWA head hunted Phillip Lazzarini from it, deaf ears and noncommittal shrugs were par for the course. What we see is a coordinated pincer movement by an undeclared enemy sick with anguish to stop the juggernaut Jews winning wars they have to win to exist.
Fake humanitarianism is readily exposed. If the practitioners of it really cared about Palestinian suffering:
1. They’d oppose the wall Egypt made to encircle Gaza and trap civilians
2 They’d facilitate immigration of Gaza people to America or Britain where they’d be put up in Holiday Inns.
3. They’d pressure Hamas to give up the hostages in order to give Palestinian Arabs a breather.
4. They’d pick out Hamas for high-jacking truckloads of aid, reselling it at top price to desperate people. (A single cigarette sells for a few dollars.)
5. They’d tell Hamas to stop using hospitals and schools for armouries, rocket launching and command posts.
6. They’d demand that Hamas permits civilians to take cover in the tunnels. Abu Marzuk, a high-ranking member of Hamas, admitted the tunnels were built to protect its army. As for civilians, they were the responsibility of the United Nations.
But no – humanitarian disasters on CNN are meat and drink to Hamas. They can be more effective in asymmetric warfare than missiles and drones. ‘Humanitarian’ is more than a blinder of a word, it is the root of the laws of war. International Humanitarian Law (IHL) gives terrorists the moral and media high ground.
At the end of the day Israel’s reputational damage has more value to Hamas than a thousand shot down rockets.