This week the Irish government announced they are to join South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), in which Israel stands accused of genocide - the most heinous of all state crimes.
Good post Dave. It's always the same: the rules are always changed when the Jews are involved. Story as old as time. Not really a surprise that the only country in the world to send official condolences to Nazi Germany on Hitler's death, would be the country to try this stunt.
That's true. And I think Portugal flew its flag at half mast. Mind, how many countries sent condolences to the USSR on the death of Stalin? The USA, for one.
And very likely the only non-western state that offered Iran condolences on the death of its former president, Ibrahim Raisi, known as the "Butcher of Tehran" because of his enthusiasm for pursuing deemed enemies of the Islamic Revolution and executing them.
"The number of deaths and injuries, the scale of physical damage to property and essential services, the shortages of basic goods, all with no end in sight, should trouble everyone..."
What should trouble everyone is
1) the legitimisation of the terror-tactic of embedding in a civilian population to cause maximum damage to one's own civilians as a propaganda exercise
2) the criminalisation of all forms of self-defense for democratic states acting lawfully.
It's not only Israel in the dock. It's every democratic state. What's so horrific is that western states are so full of hate for Israel that they'll even destroy international law and permanently damage themselves in order to do it.
The number of deaths and injuries has not been "immense" by comparison to other wars. It's been quite minimal under the circumstances, according to military experts and ethicists.
And as for "no end in sight", I find that highly questionable given the collapse of Hamas' sponsors and allies and the decimation of Hamas's leadership. If there was a ceasefire now there would be no end in sight; Hamas would just repeat what it's done after every other war it started - all ended by premature ceasefires on spurious grounds of "ending destruction" - and regroup, rearm and attack again harder. The war needs to be won. It needs Israel to win it. That's the only way the death and destruction can end.
And one more thing, let's be real. More than that, let's be blunt:
Oct 7 was genocide. Everything that Hamas/PIJ and co have ever done against Israel and/or jews has been genocidal: destructivon with intent to wipe out an ethnic group. (The same goes for the PA. They're just as genocidal, but less honest about their intent.)
What Israel has done since Oct 7 is attempt to *stop* genocide from continuing.
Where does the responsibility to stop genociders end? How much is too much, people ask?
Well, clearly, it doesn't end until the genociders end - until they give up their malicious intent, not for a brief ceasefire that allows them to re-arm, but forever. If that means killing everyone who refuses to give up on their goal of wiping us out, that is not "too much". It is just enough.
Anyone who tries to protect genociders from the consequences of their crime against humanity is complicit in genocide. That means the UN; the ICJ; the ICC; the NGOs like Amnesty, HRW, UNRWA, and even WCK (that has just fired one in eight of its Gaza stuff due to terror ties, which sheds a whole new light on their claims of IDF firing at their convoys); South Africa, Ireland, and every other country that has sided with the demonisation of Jews and/or Israelis - *all* of them are genocide-enablers.
We don't need to apologise to them. They need to apologise to us.
The Henry Jackson Society has just published a review of the death data that major news broadcasters are relying on - almost exclusively Hamas's version - that is pretty damning. Andrew Fox has just published a Substack newsletter and an article in the Sunday Telegraph about the study's findings. The HJS has also made its report openly available on its website. Unfortunately too few people are interested in hard facts as opposed to dramatic photos and videos, and that includes journalists, NGOs, politicians and academics whose ideological beliefs trump the need to pursue facts.
“The accepted circumstances of the Oct. 31 Jabalia attack and the light shed by the IDF statement on planning for the attack suggest that Israel’s tolerance for civilian casualties is now completely out of step with that employed by the U.S. and its coalition partners in the war against ISIS and other counterterrorism operations in Iraq and Afghanistan over two decades. Further, Israeli attacks in Gaza since Oct. 31 only serve to reinforce that impression. (There may be some debate over whether such conflicts are strictly comparable, but it is notable that Israel itself has sought to promote the analogy in its “Hamas is ISIS” information campaign.) Given that the apparent difference between the Israeli and U.S./U.K. working understanding of “excessive” civilian harm is several orders of magnitude, it is hard to imagine that U.S. or U.K. military lawyers would ever have greenlighted the Jabalia strike had they been in the command center.“
Except that military experts like John Spencer, Colonel Kemp, and the High_Level Military Group say that this assessment is based on false figures and assumptions, and that Israel's tolerance for civilian casualties is substantially *lower* than the US and its coalition partners. They say that, even if the "Gaza ministry of Health" (ie Hamas) figures were correct - and why anyone would believe they were, with al-Ahli as an example of their counting, baffles me - the civilian:combatant ratio is under 1.5:1, ie 1.5 civilian casualties per combatant casualty. That's amazingly low.
(By the way, the UN and NGOs source their figures directly from Gaza MoH; they are not independently produced.)
Furthermore, several studies have debunked the casualty figures. The most recent such study - from the Henry Jackson society - details systemic flaws in the supposed data, including overcounting, adding natural deaths, adding living people, adding people killed by "friendly fire", falsification of age and gender. That's on top of the failure to differentiate civilian from combatant casualties.
So what you should be finding troubling is the complicity of the international community in Hamas' war-crimes.
Hamas figures are always lies. Even when they give a correct total for deaths, it's not broken down correctly into categories of civilian vs soldier, child vs adult, women vs me, and it also includes the people they've killed themselves.
Sadly, the international community not only spreads but amplifies and exaggerates the tolls reported by Hamas and/or by Hamas-supporting or Hamas-infiltrated NGOs (which is pretty much every NGO in Gaza, for instance, UNRWA, which participated in Oct 7; WCK which just fired 1 in 8 staff for terrorist ties; and even ICRC which is headed by former UNRWA head Pierre Krahenbuhl who collaborated with Hamas/PIJ heads while at UNRWA. UNRWA has known about Hamas employees for *decades*. In 2002, the then-head said yes they had Hamas employees, that isn't a problem.)
Often this is done by extrapolation and supposition. The famine reports in March were based on false assumptions. In June they admitted there hadn't been any famine but this didn't stop them from continuing to broadcast expectations of famine, which still haven't come to pass.
And this is typical. The international community automatically and immediately believes the worst about Israel instead of challenging and investigating evidence. The UN and constituent countries still haven't declared Oct 7 a genocide (the UN hasn't even formally condemned it), but has been accusing Israel's response of genocide from the getgo.
I can't read haaretz. Are the stories coming from Breaking the Silence? Their stories don't include details of where, when, who, so they can't be investigated. IDF has asked for details in order to investigate alleged incidents, but BtS refuses.
The IDF follows a "Purity of Arms" ethos that has higher standards of enemy protection than any other army. (This is acknowledged by other western armies, incl US, UK, Australia...) Soldiers aren't allowed to shoot at anyone who's not holding a weapon or shooting first, and every IDF unit includes lawyers to rule on questions of when and where they can shoot.
So while - as in every army, society or group - there will be individual cases of people who break the law and/or army regulations, they are exceptions, not the rule.
Not everyone takes everything Andrew Fox says at face value. I reserve my right to search out many opinions on the current war and the behaviour of each belligerent.
This sounds to me like a first stage in a longer strategy.
On 10/7, the ubiquitous calls of "Death to Israel!" and "Death to the Jews!" on social media told us there is not a crack of light between Israel and Diaspora Jews insofar as the larger world sees us. So any calls that anti-Zionism != antisemitism are bullshit; we in the Diaspora don't live in Israel, we don't pay taxes, and we have no control over what happens there, but we are responsible for everything Israel does. And since Hamas is held responsible for nothing it does, and every atrocity Hamas does is blamed on Israel, then every atrocity Hamas does is also blamed on us. Because the Arab nations are not interested in building their own societies and their only aspiration is the genocide of Jews, because they have lost every war they started against Israel, they know they cannot bring down Israel by themselves. Knowing there is a deep strain of antisemitism and blood libel at the foundation of Western civilization, Hamas's whole strategy was to force Israel to murder as many of its people as possible, in order to generate international outrage, so the West would destroy Israel for them. And Ireland is stepping out to help, right on cue. Of course Hamas is held blameless for the massacre of their own people that they engineered. If Israel can be held responsible for genocide, then it is not a stretch to reason that The Evil Jews Who Killed Christ And Are Responsible For All Evil on the Face of the Earth deserve to suffer their own genocide as recompense.
I always liked the Irish. Good to know how much they want us all dead.
Impact-SE, the organization that monitors education materials for antisemitism, having completed its review of Arab countries, has moved onto European countries and completed its review of the materials used to teach Irish schoolchildren and it's quite damning.
Not all Irish people are antisemitic anti-Zionists, but sadly a very large contingent is.
Excellent article. Given Ireland’s neutrality in WWII and what can be perceived as their affinity for Nazi ideology, I can’t help but feel that Ireland sadly remains a country suffused with Catholicism-inspired hatred of Jews.
As to what you said about the goalposts being moved so we can be persecuted.
It's part of the Divine Algorithm.
Lately I've been reading the Nevi'im (Prophets) for the first time, and yesterday I finished it. And I noticed a really interesting pattern. The Covenant dictates that the Jews have a specific job. We have to model justice, love and kindness to the rest of the world. We have to show what humans can be like if they get their act together.
So here is the algorithm: when we stray from this path, when we act like the other nations, when we don't live with enough justice and kindness, when we disrespect or forget G-d, G-d uses the other nations to wipe us out, but leaves a remnant. You cannot say the evil are destroyed and the virtuous are spared because there's a lot of collateral damage, but essentially, G-d treats the Jews as a population to be periodically thinned, like seedlings, for the greater vitality of the whole. You see this pattern starting as early as the Egyptian envy against Joseph and his family, who got too successful and aroused envy, so it starts even before Moses, and it continues like clockwork to this day. In every generation they almost destroy us, but what I picked up from the Nevi'im is that *this is G-d's algorithm to keep his people on the right path*, and it's been there since the get-go. We don't just see this in recent history, we also see this in ancient history. I think this is fascinating.
Throughout most of my life, there was much hand-wringing, especially in the Conservative community, about how there was too much assimilation in the US, how people were falling away, they weren't being Jewish anymore, they weren't teaching it to their kids. And this has happened periodically since the beginning, you see it with Jews getting too Assyrian, too Babylonian, too Hellenic, etc.; every time we become too assimilated, we are attacked by the same people we thought were our friends. We are driven back to each other, we are driven back to scripture, we become Jews again, we become a family again, fewer and chastened, but never wiped out. Because that's also part of the algorithm: G-d needs us, we are supposed to model potential, so we cannot be wiped out.
I recently finished Raphael Shore's excellent _Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Jew_, in which he posits that the reason we are killed, over and over, is exactly that we value justice and compassion, even if sometimes we fail to live up to our values, and that those values make people who would prefer to live by the law of tooth and fang uncomfortable; it was Hitler's reason for trying to eradicate us in an attempt to eradicate that value system.
And in the Nevi'im, once G-d decides the Jews have suffered enough and it's time to forgive them, G-d then destroys the nations that attacked the Jews with too much glee. And we see that happen over and over in history too.
So yes maybe antisemitism is a mental illness but it is also part of how these nations doom themselves. They project all their unresolved issues onto the Jews, which prevents them from even trying to resolve those issues, and they fester. They throw out or persecute or murder their Jews, and suffer a brain drain, and everything that entails. Antisemitism is an early indication that a society is going down. I would feel sorry for Ireland, and Canada, and France, the UK, Iran, and all the other countries that think that genocide of the Jews would bring immediate Peace on Earth, because their antisemitism tells me their clock is ticking, their societies are going to disintegrate, but it's a little too close to home. I don't feel sorry for them but I do wish they would get a clue.
We will be OK, that's how the algorithm works. I may not, you may not, but we as a group will be OK.
The apparent eagerness to accuse Israel of genocide may also be to mask the stated intention of Hamas to destroy Israel and its people “from the river to the sea”. If anyone complies with the international definition it is surely Hamas - perhaps that is why anti-Israel forces want to change the definition?
To me, and to Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, both the October the 7th attacks and many the ensuing attacks on Palestinian citizens since that date are both massacres.
I think it's fine and inevitable that we will discuss at a general public or layman level what Israel is or is not responsible for certain heinous acts, but the reliable conclusions must be reached at a much higher level. The gravity of this situation cannot usefully be discussed in the public court of social media.
This is how the big guns analyse such actions in war and other conflict situations.
There should be no unreasonable widening of the meaning just to suit Ireland. We have the same with people who want to widen the application of the word "terrorist" just to gain support for their attacks on legitimate combatants.
Good post Dave. It's always the same: the rules are always changed when the Jews are involved. Story as old as time. Not really a surprise that the only country in the world to send official condolences to Nazi Germany on Hitler's death, would be the country to try this stunt.
That's true. And I think Portugal flew its flag at half mast. Mind, how many countries sent condolences to the USSR on the death of Stalin? The USA, for one.
And very likely the only non-western state that offered Iran condolences on the death of its former president, Ibrahim Raisi, known as the "Butcher of Tehran" because of his enthusiasm for pursuing deemed enemies of the Islamic Revolution and executing them.
This from a people who sat out WWII while killing fellow Irishmen and women for decades.
Many Irishmen volunteered & fought bravely against the Third Reich.
But they had to join the British Army to do it...
You could argue that Switzerland & Sweden's "neutrality" (is there such a thing in the real world?) were a necessary evil born of geography.
The Republic did not have that excuse.
But let's remember that Britain didn't sit out WWII and killed Irish people for decades.
"The number of deaths and injuries, the scale of physical damage to property and essential services, the shortages of basic goods, all with no end in sight, should trouble everyone..."
What should trouble everyone is
1) the legitimisation of the terror-tactic of embedding in a civilian population to cause maximum damage to one's own civilians as a propaganda exercise
2) the criminalisation of all forms of self-defense for democratic states acting lawfully.
It's not only Israel in the dock. It's every democratic state. What's so horrific is that western states are so full of hate for Israel that they'll even destroy international law and permanently damage themselves in order to do it.
The number of deaths and injuries has not been "immense" by comparison to other wars. It's been quite minimal under the circumstances, according to military experts and ethicists.
And as for "no end in sight", I find that highly questionable given the collapse of Hamas' sponsors and allies and the decimation of Hamas's leadership. If there was a ceasefire now there would be no end in sight; Hamas would just repeat what it's done after every other war it started - all ended by premature ceasefires on spurious grounds of "ending destruction" - and regroup, rearm and attack again harder. The war needs to be won. It needs Israel to win it. That's the only way the death and destruction can end.
And one more thing, let's be real. More than that, let's be blunt:
Oct 7 was genocide. Everything that Hamas/PIJ and co have ever done against Israel and/or jews has been genocidal: destructivon with intent to wipe out an ethnic group. (The same goes for the PA. They're just as genocidal, but less honest about their intent.)
What Israel has done since Oct 7 is attempt to *stop* genocide from continuing.
Where does the responsibility to stop genociders end? How much is too much, people ask?
Well, clearly, it doesn't end until the genociders end - until they give up their malicious intent, not for a brief ceasefire that allows them to re-arm, but forever. If that means killing everyone who refuses to give up on their goal of wiping us out, that is not "too much". It is just enough.
Anyone who tries to protect genociders from the consequences of their crime against humanity is complicit in genocide. That means the UN; the ICJ; the ICC; the NGOs like Amnesty, HRW, UNRWA, and even WCK (that has just fired one in eight of its Gaza stuff due to terror ties, which sheds a whole new light on their claims of IDF firing at their convoys); South Africa, Ireland, and every other country that has sided with the demonisation of Jews and/or Israelis - *all* of them are genocide-enablers.
We don't need to apologise to them. They need to apologise to us.
The Henry Jackson Society has just published a review of the death data that major news broadcasters are relying on - almost exclusively Hamas's version - that is pretty damning. Andrew Fox has just published a Substack newsletter and an article in the Sunday Telegraph about the study's findings. The HJS has also made its report openly available on its website. Unfortunately too few people are interested in hard facts as opposed to dramatic photos and videos, and that includes journalists, NGOs, politicians and academics whose ideological beliefs trump the need to pursue facts.
This troubles me
“The accepted circumstances of the Oct. 31 Jabalia attack and the light shed by the IDF statement on planning for the attack suggest that Israel’s tolerance for civilian casualties is now completely out of step with that employed by the U.S. and its coalition partners in the war against ISIS and other counterterrorism operations in Iraq and Afghanistan over two decades. Further, Israeli attacks in Gaza since Oct. 31 only serve to reinforce that impression. (There may be some debate over whether such conflicts are strictly comparable, but it is notable that Israel itself has sought to promote the analogy in its “Hamas is ISIS” information campaign.) Given that the apparent difference between the Israeli and U.S./U.K. working understanding of “excessive” civilian harm is several orders of magnitude, it is hard to imagine that U.S. or U.K. military lawyers would ever have greenlighted the Jabalia strike had they been in the command center.“
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/assessing-israel-s-approach-to-proportionality-in-the-conduct-of-hostilities-in-gaza
Except that military experts like John Spencer, Colonel Kemp, and the High_Level Military Group say that this assessment is based on false figures and assumptions, and that Israel's tolerance for civilian casualties is substantially *lower* than the US and its coalition partners. They say that, even if the "Gaza ministry of Health" (ie Hamas) figures were correct - and why anyone would believe they were, with al-Ahli as an example of their counting, baffles me - the civilian:combatant ratio is under 1.5:1, ie 1.5 civilian casualties per combatant casualty. That's amazingly low.
(By the way, the UN and NGOs source their figures directly from Gaza MoH; they are not independently produced.)
Furthermore, several studies have debunked the casualty figures. The most recent such study - from the Henry Jackson society - details systemic flaws in the supposed data, including overcounting, adding natural deaths, adding living people, adding people killed by "friendly fire", falsification of age and gender. That's on top of the failure to differentiate civilian from combatant casualties.
So what you should be finding troubling is the complicity of the international community in Hamas' war-crimes.
I'm guessing the report is not getting through to some people.
https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/2024-12-16/ty-article/.premium/gaza-death-toll-passes-45-000-since-wars-start-hamas-run-health-ministry-says/00000193-d05d-d3fc-a3b7-db7f90780000
Some analyst of civilian casualties will go to any lengths to push out the competition. 😆
https://haaretz.us18.list-manage.com/track/click?u=d3bceadb340d6af4daf1de00d&id=9cf9ec1334&e=299e7c5245
Hamas figures are always lies. Even when they give a correct total for deaths, it's not broken down correctly into categories of civilian vs soldier, child vs adult, women vs me, and it also includes the people they've killed themselves.
Sadly, the international community not only spreads but amplifies and exaggerates the tolls reported by Hamas and/or by Hamas-supporting or Hamas-infiltrated NGOs (which is pretty much every NGO in Gaza, for instance, UNRWA, which participated in Oct 7; WCK which just fired 1 in 8 staff for terrorist ties; and even ICRC which is headed by former UNRWA head Pierre Krahenbuhl who collaborated with Hamas/PIJ heads while at UNRWA. UNRWA has known about Hamas employees for *decades*. In 2002, the then-head said yes they had Hamas employees, that isn't a problem.)
Often this is done by extrapolation and supposition. The famine reports in March were based on false assumptions. In June they admitted there hadn't been any famine but this didn't stop them from continuing to broadcast expectations of famine, which still haven't come to pass.
And this is typical. The international community automatically and immediately believes the worst about Israel instead of challenging and investigating evidence. The UN and constituent countries still haven't declared Oct 7 a genocide (the UN hasn't even formally condemned it), but has been accusing Israel's response of genocide from the getgo.
Let's see what the courts decide when all the evidence is collected.
I'm quite sceptical about some things coming from the Henry Jackson society.
You can read their full report to see the evidence for yourself. But you won't, will you?
Will Andrew Fox research these stories?
https://substack.com/@antiimperialistnews/note/c-82207665?r=2t6309
I can't read haaretz. Are the stories coming from Breaking the Silence? Their stories don't include details of where, when, who, so they can't be investigated. IDF has asked for details in order to investigate alleged incidents, but BtS refuses.
The IDF follows a "Purity of Arms" ethos that has higher standards of enemy protection than any other army. (This is acknowledged by other western armies, incl US, UK, Australia...) Soldiers aren't allowed to shoot at anyone who's not holding a weapon or shooting first, and every IDF unit includes lawyers to rule on questions of when and where they can shoot.
So while - as in every army, society or group - there will be individual cases of people who break the law and/or army regulations, they are exceptions, not the rule.
Not everyone takes everything Andrew Fox says at face value. I reserve my right to search out many opinions on the current war and the behaviour of each belligerent.
I have read it twice. Even got it saved in pdf form and catalogued under competing analyses.
Future Headline: Irish Government Condems Sudanese Islamists, Boko Haram, HTS,
Sorry just joking, They would never do that.
That's a great piece Dave. In every conflict Israel's enemies have accused its conduct as being genocide. It's only new to today's accusers.
This sounds to me like a first stage in a longer strategy.
On 10/7, the ubiquitous calls of "Death to Israel!" and "Death to the Jews!" on social media told us there is not a crack of light between Israel and Diaspora Jews insofar as the larger world sees us. So any calls that anti-Zionism != antisemitism are bullshit; we in the Diaspora don't live in Israel, we don't pay taxes, and we have no control over what happens there, but we are responsible for everything Israel does. And since Hamas is held responsible for nothing it does, and every atrocity Hamas does is blamed on Israel, then every atrocity Hamas does is also blamed on us. Because the Arab nations are not interested in building their own societies and their only aspiration is the genocide of Jews, because they have lost every war they started against Israel, they know they cannot bring down Israel by themselves. Knowing there is a deep strain of antisemitism and blood libel at the foundation of Western civilization, Hamas's whole strategy was to force Israel to murder as many of its people as possible, in order to generate international outrage, so the West would destroy Israel for them. And Ireland is stepping out to help, right on cue. Of course Hamas is held blameless for the massacre of their own people that they engineered. If Israel can be held responsible for genocide, then it is not a stretch to reason that The Evil Jews Who Killed Christ And Are Responsible For All Evil on the Face of the Earth deserve to suffer their own genocide as recompense.
I always liked the Irish. Good to know how much they want us all dead.
Impact-SE, the organization that monitors education materials for antisemitism, having completed its review of Arab countries, has moved onto European countries and completed its review of the materials used to teach Irish schoolchildren and it's quite damning.
Not all Irish people are antisemitic anti-Zionists, but sadly a very large contingent is.
Dear Shelah
Its a type of brain cancer, the world has it, and without intervention the patient will die
Not all of us.
The old line "Europeans have never forgiven the Jews for the Holocaust" is hardly a joke. It is as if this is their retribution.
This Irish woman is embarrassed
My 23&Me DNA profile totally Irish
Me Totally Embarrassed
Excellent article. Given Ireland’s neutrality in WWII and what can be perceived as their affinity for Nazi ideology, I can’t help but feel that Ireland sadly remains a country suffused with Catholicism-inspired hatred of Jews.
As to what you said about the goalposts being moved so we can be persecuted.
It's part of the Divine Algorithm.
Lately I've been reading the Nevi'im (Prophets) for the first time, and yesterday I finished it. And I noticed a really interesting pattern. The Covenant dictates that the Jews have a specific job. We have to model justice, love and kindness to the rest of the world. We have to show what humans can be like if they get their act together.
So here is the algorithm: when we stray from this path, when we act like the other nations, when we don't live with enough justice and kindness, when we disrespect or forget G-d, G-d uses the other nations to wipe us out, but leaves a remnant. You cannot say the evil are destroyed and the virtuous are spared because there's a lot of collateral damage, but essentially, G-d treats the Jews as a population to be periodically thinned, like seedlings, for the greater vitality of the whole. You see this pattern starting as early as the Egyptian envy against Joseph and his family, who got too successful and aroused envy, so it starts even before Moses, and it continues like clockwork to this day. In every generation they almost destroy us, but what I picked up from the Nevi'im is that *this is G-d's algorithm to keep his people on the right path*, and it's been there since the get-go. We don't just see this in recent history, we also see this in ancient history. I think this is fascinating.
Throughout most of my life, there was much hand-wringing, especially in the Conservative community, about how there was too much assimilation in the US, how people were falling away, they weren't being Jewish anymore, they weren't teaching it to their kids. And this has happened periodically since the beginning, you see it with Jews getting too Assyrian, too Babylonian, too Hellenic, etc.; every time we become too assimilated, we are attacked by the same people we thought were our friends. We are driven back to each other, we are driven back to scripture, we become Jews again, we become a family again, fewer and chastened, but never wiped out. Because that's also part of the algorithm: G-d needs us, we are supposed to model potential, so we cannot be wiped out.
I recently finished Raphael Shore's excellent _Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Jew_, in which he posits that the reason we are killed, over and over, is exactly that we value justice and compassion, even if sometimes we fail to live up to our values, and that those values make people who would prefer to live by the law of tooth and fang uncomfortable; it was Hitler's reason for trying to eradicate us in an attempt to eradicate that value system.
And in the Nevi'im, once G-d decides the Jews have suffered enough and it's time to forgive them, G-d then destroys the nations that attacked the Jews with too much glee. And we see that happen over and over in history too.
So yes maybe antisemitism is a mental illness but it is also part of how these nations doom themselves. They project all their unresolved issues onto the Jews, which prevents them from even trying to resolve those issues, and they fester. They throw out or persecute or murder their Jews, and suffer a brain drain, and everything that entails. Antisemitism is an early indication that a society is going down. I would feel sorry for Ireland, and Canada, and France, the UK, Iran, and all the other countries that think that genocide of the Jews would bring immediate Peace on Earth, because their antisemitism tells me their clock is ticking, their societies are going to disintegrate, but it's a little too close to home. I don't feel sorry for them but I do wish they would get a clue.
We will be OK, that's how the algorithm works. I may not, you may not, but we as a group will be OK.
Next they’ll be changing the definition of alcoholism.
The apparent eagerness to accuse Israel of genocide may also be to mask the stated intention of Hamas to destroy Israel and its people “from the river to the sea”. If anyone complies with the international definition it is surely Hamas - perhaps that is why anti-Israel forces want to change the definition?
https://savageminds.substack.com/p/israelis-must-recognize-the-massacre?utm_medium=android&fbclid=IwY2xjawHM6nVleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHUVimj5ux-FqqIUP6cKa9iN5xIZQpOiQZOp-0MBehOw_bdZejRH7i6Q3tg_aem_Uq5Ka98qXmi4_IkExy9F_g
To me, and to Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, both the October the 7th attacks and many the ensuing attacks on Palestinian citizens since that date are both massacres.
I think it's fine and inevitable that we will discuss at a general public or layman level what Israel is or is not responsible for certain heinous acts, but the reliable conclusions must be reached at a much higher level. The gravity of this situation cannot usefully be discussed in the public court of social media.
This is how the big guns analyse such actions in war and other conflict situations.
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/assessing-israel-s-approach-to-proportionality-in-the-conduct-of-hostilities-in-gaza
There should be no unreasonable widening of the meaning just to suit Ireland. We have the same with people who want to widen the application of the word "terrorist" just to gain support for their attacks on legitimate combatants.