Steve Apfel is an economist and former director of the School of Management Accounting. He is a prolific author of non-fiction published in many journals and sites. His books include: ‘The Paymaster’ (Fiction); Hadrian’s Echo: The whys and wherefores of Israel’s critics (non-fiction); ‘War by other means’ (contributor); and ‘‘Hitlers at heart’ (non-fiction) at publishers.
So, after forensics revealed that the ‘barbarians at the gates’ had throttled toddlers with their bare hands, who supports Hamas out loud? One can’t think why anyone would. They might as well make an excuse that they mistook ‘resistance’ to refer to a land swap proposal. It explains the loud silence that met horrific findings about tiny corpses dismembered to support a dingbat claim that Kfir and Ariel Bibas were killed by an Israeli airstrike.
Every once in a while reaction to the darkest of dark events opens an exhibit of personality sickness. Reaction to the ‘black Sabbath’ on 7/10 displayed the personality disorder that had got away with pouring out complaints about Israel’s treatment of Palestinian Arabs. The savagery of that day somehow blew a gasket in the West. Super-heated steam roiled out as though from infernal regions. All hell broke loose while Israelis were still reeling from the trauma. Hell is not hyperbole to describe how America and Europe erupted. To paraphrase Milton’s poetic epic Paradise Lost: “Infernal Thunder and Lightning and Black fire shot with equal rage.”
The usual suspects flew their colours. The BBC gave drug-deranged rapists, mutilators and decapitators the honorary title, ‘Militants’. Nobler still, Amnesty called Oct 7 an “operation by fighters into Southern Israel”. Fellow humanistic charities looked at 1,200 peaceniks put to death as “military offensives” (Oxfam) or as an “escalation in violence” (Save the Children). Versions of “beautiful and inspiring” rang from campuses and piazzas. Ivy League presidents protected calls for Israel to be eliminated. Groups with ‘peace’ in their name bellowed for a fatwa against the Jews.
Rallies dubbed ‘pro-Palestinian’ made no demands on Hamas to let Palestinian Arab schools and hospitals and tenements alone and not use them for bunkers and armouries and hostage hideouts. Reuters and AP journalists took rides with the invaders to encourage and record frenzied slaughter. The UN Secretary General sighed that the atrocity did “not happen in a vacuum,” meaning that Hamas had a reason to emulate the Holocaust. The lawyer at the Human Rights Council interpreted humanitarian law to mean that Jew-occupiers could not claim the right to self defence.
Which of these were anti-Zionists who don’t hate Jews? And which were pro-Palestinian Arabs who don’t support Hamas? None of them. All of them self-evidently disclosed hatred for Jews and support for Hamas.
Plain common sense convinces like nothing else can do. To be pro-Palestinian rather than pro-Hamas, involves putting the interests of the former ahead of the latter. This column in the Daily Maverick lacked even the ghost of a statement making the Palestinian Arabs the # 1 concern. It does not take much to come up with an idea or three for putting a quick end to their dreadful plight, caught as they were between warring armies.
-The author could have put the onus on Egypt to open the border it had closed, deliberately to stop Palestinian Arabs escaping the hell of Gaza.
-He could have demanded that Hamas return the hostages, conditional on both armies declaring a humanitarian truce.
-He could have picked out Hamas for hijacking convoys of aid trucks entering Gaza, laden with food, medicine, tents, even cigarettes, and shooting its own people when they tried to help themselves.
-He could have excoriated Hamas for turning hospitals, tenements and schools into bunkers, rocket launching sites and command centres.
Such would be hand-wringing signs of paranoia over the plight of Palestinian Arabs. Blame Israel if you must, but attend to the Palestinian Arabs in dire straits. Hating Israel won’t save one Gaza resident. Did we ever see a Pro-Palestinian rally appeal to Hamas to alleviate the plight of their non-combatant favourites? Of course not.
There simply is no daylight between being pro-Palestinian and being pro-Hamas.
And so to the shocking but inescapable denouement: If you are pro-Palestinian you are pro-Hamas. And if you are pro-Hamas you support what it did to Jewish babes-in-arms.
A Holocaust-era ‘behavioural scientist already came to that scary conclusion. He was a French playwright, and an American columnist at the Washington Post unknowingly backed up the playwright with arguments of his own.
Far removed from the yelling yobos and baying baboons on Columbian lawns, Jean-Paul Sartre treated us to the personality of Jew-hatred.
“The anti-Semite has murderous instincts, but has found a means of sating them.. His thunderous diatribes at the ‘Yids’ are really capital executions.. He is a murderer who represses and censures his tendency to murder without being able to hold it back, yet dares to kill only in effigy.”
The all-too common instinct makes commonality between a professor in faculty gown and a jihadist in a black balaclava. The one is a closet Jew killer, the other a physical killer.
Now to the American columnist if the French playwright seemed a little over the top. The late Charles Krauthammer wrote about that infamous escapade, the ‘Free Gaza Flotilla’:
“But if none of these (Israeli tactics) is permissible, what's left? Ah, but that's the point… What's left? Nothing. The whole point …is to deprive Israel of any legitimate form of self-defense. ..The world is tired of these troublesome Jews, six million - that number again - hard by the Mediterranean, refusing every invitation to national suicide. For which they are relentlessly demonized, ghettoized and constrained from defending themselves, even as the more committed anti-Zionists - Iranian in particular - openly prepare a more final solution.”
We don’t have to be thought police to read the mind of the generic anti-Zionist /pro-Palestinian / pro-Hamas movement. Its demands on Israel give away what goes on in its aberrant little mind.
-Cease fire (without Hamas setting hostages free);
-stop ‘disproportionate attacks (no such objective thing);
-exit Gaza (while Hamas rebuilds).
The commonality of such demands? Guaranteed to turn living Jews into dead Jews.
So much the worse for Israel’s military and political leadership succumbing to moral blackmail. Jews feel compelled to be the epitome of what it means to wage war with compassion. With what result? To be kind to the cruel and end up being cruel to the kind.
Then came February 21, the day we learnt what Hamas did to babes in arms. A new exhibit opened its doors. It put a new sickness on public display.
A baying, applauding, dancing audience met the handover ‘ceremony’ of black coffins holding the sacred remains of the Bibas babes. How did the ‘Pro-Palestinian’ world react?
Not a peep from the dying Pope. A pall of quiet fell over the campus, the street, the media. The Guardian in puerile denial: “Statement from IDF spokesman contradicts Hamas claim the family was killed in an airstrike” The predicament of these and like-minded wishful Jew-killers was acute. The baby-death celebrants brought on their imminent demise.
The degree of such hatred goes against the laws of nature. Certainly of normal racism.
If anti-Semitism is a variety of racism” wrote Paul Johnson the great historian, “it is a most peculiar variety, with many unique characteristics. It is so peculiar that it deserves to be placed in a quite different category. I would call it a disease of the mind, extremely infectious and massively destructive. It is a disease to which both human individuals and entire human societies are prone.”
How prescient. “It wasn’t images of dead Palestinians that sparked the outburst of Jew-hatred,” Dave Rich noted, “it was images of dead Jews.”
Certainly the pro-Palestinian brand of hate does not stop at the killing of Jews. It adores their dead. It dances over their coffins.
Gilad Erdan a former Israeli ambassador to the UN and America, compared this behaviour to that of the Nazis: “Even in Nazi Germany there were Germans who saved Jews. Not a single Gazan saved a single hostage.”
Is there really no such thing as a moderate anti-Semite? I mean it is clear what Anti-Israel protesters outside a Queens synagogue, waving Hezbollah flags and yelling for intifada, are up to. But in what hole to fit the likes of Peter Beinart the New York Times columnist and author whose one claim to fame is combining a religious Jew with anti-Zionist.
Sure, when he supported the two-state solution, Beinart’s claim to be of sane mind was credible. Now that he advocates a ‘bi-national state’, euphemism for replacing Israel with a country where Jews live at the sufferance of a Muslim majority, Beinart has made his bed and must lie on it. He drops down the pecking order from anti-Zionist to Jew-hater. Beinart can hardly complain. “Actions taken to fight antisemitism did not do much to protect Jews,” he said, “but did do much to victimize Palestinians.” What got his goat was the official adoption of a definition developed by (mouthful of name) the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. It says that antisemitism, “may consist of contemporary examples denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination.” Of course Beinart will grimace; it made him a card-carrying ‘one of those.’
Closet Jew-killers in their tissue paper getups will never recover their standing, not after February 21 and the Bibas babes.