The United Nations General Assembly, under the leadership of the United States, “enshrine[d] the ‘lessons’ of the Holocaust” in the 1948 Genocide Convention, banning genocide as a crime under international law.  The Convention provides that the Contracting Parties (now numbering 153 nations) must “undertake to prevent and to punish” genocide whenever it’s committed.

After Hamas’s undeniably genocidal massacre in Israel on October 7, it’s obvious that the Convention members have no intention of punishing Hamas’s atrocities, or of undertaking to prevent Hamas, or the horde of other Islamist entities, from fulfilling their promises to “obliterate” Israel.  Instead, the consensus of the world’s leaders is the exact opposite, and it’s Israel in the dock for war crimes.  Since mobilizing to eliminate Hamas, Israel, maligned as “blinded by rage” (quoting Joe Biden), is being unjustly blamed for indiscriminate “retaliatory” attacks on civilian targets — for no better reason than that “some people did something.”

So much for the post-war assurance of “never again.”

Across the Western, non-Muslim world, antisemitic attacks are soaring, and large cities are witnessing huge rallies demanding a “Free Palestine” — with one Sydney mob screaming, “Gas the Jews!”  Democratic representative Rashida Tlaib led a rowdy takeover of the U.S. Capitol, demanding the “dismantling [of] the apartheid system that creates the suffocating, dehumanizing conditions that can lead to resistance.”  In short, Tlaib wants Israel gone.

On Monday night, a New York art critic named Eli Klein posted on X: “Just came home to hundreds of people outside of my apartment here in NYC calling for Intifada, which given recent events, may well be considered a call for the mass murder of Jews.”  The posted video depicts a mob chanting, “There is only one solution, intifada revolution!”  Added Klein, “Never did I expect to see this kind of open antisemitism so close to home.”

Are we now faced with something more dangerous than Nazism?  Because just as evil but far more accepted?   Hitler managed to murder six million of Europe’s Jews while at war with a world so united to destroy him that even ideological enemies, the U.S. and the USSR, became allies to defeat him.

The point is that the Third Reich never had the benefit of millions of supporters — spread throughout the universities, news organizations, and legislatures of every Allied nation — loudly endorsing the Nazis’ racialist case for a Judenfrei Europe.  And New York Times headlines weren’t blaring the humanitarian devastation our B-17s were causing for the German volk.

But Hamas, Iran, and the global “pro-Palestinian” lobby have all that.

Nazi murderers couldn’t sear their consciences enough to hide the evil they were committing.  “The Nazis tried to hide their war crimes,” noted  journalist Bari Weiss, while “Hamas is livestreaming” its own.  “The atrocities committed by Hamas mirror those of the Nazis in shape and substance,” writes Scott Johnson at Powerline, but by publicizing them “in real time,” Hamas’s crimes “exceed them in shameless display of evil.”

Since the day of the attack, with the irrational Biden administration out front, nearly every Western government has demanded that Israel “refrain from violence and retaliation” — no matter that Israel must eliminate Hamas from Gaza completely for her self-defense.

The impossible alternative guarantees Israel the status quo that enabled the enormity of October 7.

Israel wisely ignores these demands.  The problem is our largely progressive foreign policy “experts” want to treat this conflict as a geopolitical dispute, as if Hamas really cared about an independent Palestinian state and, therefore, “a negotiated settlement could still bring peace.” 

Unfortunately, as the Federalist’s Nathanael Blake explains, they ignore this glaring Hamas non-negotiable: “They genuinely believe God wants them to exterminate the Jews and wipe Israel off the map.  They indoctrinate their children with these genocidal beliefs, assuring them that carrying them out leads to paradise.”

Diplomats’ desperation for a geopolitical explanation, Blake says, is because “[t]he alternative may be too terrible for them to consider, for there is no easy way to deal with a genocidal, baby-murdering death cult that has gained control over millions of people.”

Intolerance for the existence of a Jewish state is a commonplace among hundreds of millions of illiterate Muslims in the Middle East.  But in the version we know in the West, which incites an increasingly strident movement on behalf of the tragic victims of Palestine, it finds its home among the educated elites — i.e., the journalists, university professors, and students — who see Palestinians resisting fascist Israel through the same Manichean moral filter through which they see everything else.  But leftists wouldn’t have taken up the cudgel of “Free Palestine” if Islamist scholars hadn’t fed it to them first.  

Explains Juliana Geran Pilon, writing at City Journal, “For decades, Islamists, trained first by the Nazis and later by the KGB, learned how to manipulate the instruments of political warfare.  By coopting naïve Western elites to embrace anti-Western, anti-Israeli, anti-Zionist, and anti-Semitic memes, they’ve gradually succeeded beyond their wildest initial expectations.” 

Using buzzwords like “apartheid,” “de-colonize,” and “fascist” for bait, Islamists caught an army of useful idiots to spread the legend of the lost Palestinian homeland.  

The result, Pilon says, is that now “[a]n antiseptic moral equivalence infuses mainstream media coverage in the West.”  It’s why

[w]hat the [New York] Times and [Israel’s] Haaretz have come to share is a narrative according to which America’s divisions mirror Israel’s: the racist Right vs. the anti-racist Left, the pro-military xenophobes vs. the compassionate pro-peace victims. If Palestinians are seen as oppressed by white supremacist Zionists, whoever claims to fight on the former’s behalf is on the right side of history.       

A commentary by David Warren notes, “In order to believe the unchecked and improbable first report, however, [i.e. the libel of an Israeli bomb destroying a Gaza hospital, killing 500 people], journalists had to be, themselves, infected with Leftist and Islamist fanaticism and ‘phobias.’  They were now sustaining their mistake, with knowing lies.”

Piron again:

[T]he most alarming consequence of this metastasized ideological cancer lies far beyond the Middle East: the warped narrative framing of the conflict has spread to the minds of America’s best and brightest. Even while the massacres were ongoing, more than 30 Harvard student organizations declared that Israel was “entirely responsible” for the violence occurring in its war against Gaza. A student group at Columbia University went further, celebrating Hamas’s “historic” massacre of Israeli civilians, calling it a long-overdue “counteroffensive” against Israel’s purported apartheid regime. This is no longer a mere matter of moral equivalence but proof that the West is at war with itself.   

It also means that the mainstream left’s effort “to save its approach to Israel from the pro-Hamas fringe” can’t possibly succeed.  “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free,” the popular “resistance” slogan, aspires to the destruction of the Jewish state.  The shouting mob in New York — “there is only one solution, intifada revolution!” — amounts to the same thing, with an added nod to the Nazi Final Solution.

As Hamas’s charter declares, “there is no solution for the Palestinian question except through jihad.”

You can’t invoke “Free Palestine” without invoking Hamas’s war on Jews — including its unspeakable methods. 

The hard moral reality is, “Free Palestine” is nothing less than the 21st-century Sieg Heil. 

T.R. Clancy looks at the world from Dearborn, Michigan.  You can email him at trclancy@yahoo.com.

Image: paul_houle via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0 (cropped).