by Kenneth Levin
The Unholy Alliance in action.
Hamas is explicit in wanting to kill not only all Israelis but all
Jews. The organization states as much in its charter and declares that
goal a religious duty. Hamas has sought to translate the genocidal
intent into action, including through innumerable missile attacks
targeting Israel’s civilian population since the terror group gained
control of Gaza in 2007.
Yet Hamas has a coterie of apologists, supporters, cheerleaders and
other enablers in Congress, including those who criticize Israel and are
silent about Hamas’s actions and objective.
Hamas missile barrages doubly fit the internationally recognized
definitions of war crimes, by virtue of their objective of killing
civilians and by virtue of their use of Gazan civilian areas as
launching sites for their attacks, thus endangering Palestinians in
Gaza. Yet this too has not dissuaded Hamas’s Congressional enablers.
In initiating its latest missile war against Israel, Hamas justified
doing so by claiming Israel was seeking to expel Palestinians from the
Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of eastern Jerusalem and also that Israel was
attacking the Al Aqsa Mosque and other Muslim sites on the Temple
Mount.
The Sheikh Jarrah issue relates to some of the Jewish property that
was seized and held as “enemy property” by Trans-Jordan after it
conquered the eastern part of Jerusalem in 1948 and killed or expelled
all Jews living there. Following the 1967 war, Israeli courts confirmed
Jewish ownership of the property but granted Arabs residing there the
status of protected tenants, able to remain and even pass the right of
residence on to their heirs as long as they paid rent. But the tenants
have refused to pay and it is in response to this that the courts have
for some years ordered the vacating of the property. This is one of
Hamas’ justifications for firing over 4,000 missiles at Israeli
civilians, a justification parroted by members of Congress.
The other justification, that Israel was threatening Al Aqsa, has
been a rallying cry for virtually a century by Palestinian leaders
seeking to instigate murderous attacks on Jews. In 1929, the grand mufti
of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al-Husseini, then the most prominent figure
among Palestinian Arabs, used the claim to choreograph assaults on Jews
that took some 130 lives. According to reports at the time, such as
those by Dutch-Canadian journalist Pierre van Paassen, Husseini also
produced and distributed bogus photographs of a supposedly demolished
Jerusalem mosque in hopes of instigating the murder of Jews in the
Mandate territory and beyond.
Dismissed from his position by the British in 1936 after fomenting
anti-British riots, al-Husseini made his way to Iraq, where he supported
a pro-Nazi revolt, and subsequently to Berlin, where he remained
through much of the war as Hitler’s guest - the original
intersectionality - recruiting southern European Muslims for the SS and
broadcasting calls to the Arab world to support the Nazis and kill Jews.
He also planned with Nazi officials arrangements for the extermination
of the Jews of the Mandate after what was anticipated to be Rommel’s
Afrika Korps’ conquest of Egypt and advancement eastward. Al Husseini
remains a revered and inspiring figure for Palestinian leaders and their
followers.
Since Israel regained control of the Temple Mount, the holiest site
in Judaism, in 1967, it has allowed Muslim authorities to administer the
area and has prevented Jews from worshipping on the Mount. Yet claims
that the Jews are destroying Al Aqsa have continued in efforts to spur
anti-Jewish violence.
The events on the Temple Mount that preceded Hamas’s war-triggering
missile attack on Jerusalem entailed the storing of rocks and explosives
in Muslim religious sites to be used for attacking Jews in the area,
including Jews praying at the Western Wall at the base of the Mount, and
subsequent clashes between assailants and Israeli police. This is
Hamas’s other excuse for unleashing its 4,000 plus missiles and this
justification is likewise parroted by members of Congress.
Ilhan Omar, much given to anti-Semitic tropes, used the current
hostilities to call essentially for Israel’s destruction. Rashida Tlaib
characterized the Sheikh Jarrah issue as an “...attack on Palestinian
families being ripped from their homes right now”; and the events on the
Temple Mount as a “... a sustained campaign of harassment and terror by
Israeli police against worshippers kneeling down and praying...” Omar’s
blood-thirstiness and Tlaib’s lies left no room, of course, for any
mention of Hamas’s missile onslaught beyond the Congresswomen’s implicit
endorsement of the onslaught in their embracing of Hamas’s
justifications.
Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal explicitly sought to blame Israel for
Hamas’s rocket attacks, claiming they were provoked by “legal fights
over evictions.”
Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortes suggested that Israel’s response to the
Hamas missile attacks was somehow an attack on Palestinians’ “right to
survive” and that Hamas’s missiles were defending that right.
Congresswoman Rep. Ayanna Pressley opined: “Palestinians are being
told the same thing as black folks in America: there is no acceptable
form of resistance.” It’s not clear if she meant the rocks and
explosives stored on the Temple Mount for attacking Jews, or Hamas
missiles, or both, should be recognized as acceptable forms of
resistance. Congresswoman Cori Bush likewise drew an analogy between
Blacks in America and the Palestinians and seemed to justify Hamas’s
missile barrages as part of “the fight for Palestinian liberation,”
which she saw as “interconnected” with the struggles of
African-Americans. Congressman Jamaal Bowman also took up this supposed
interconnection: “Enough of Black and brown bodies being brutalized and
murdered...” He characterized the events in Sheikh Jarrah and on the
Temple Mount as “violently evicting families from their homes...” and “A
show of strong force during prayer... Destroying holy sites...,” once
more echoing Hamas lies.
These and other Congressmen and women’s racial rhetoric draws much
of its inspiration from the Black Lives Matter organization. BLM leaders
have also condemned Israel in the context of the current fighting and
declared the organization’s “solidarity with Palestine.” For some years
they have embraced the Hamas-led Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement
against Israel aimed at the nation’s destruction, and in the last year
Black Lives Matter “demonstrators” have attacked synagogues and Jewish
businesses in Los Angeles and elsewhere. They have done all this while
playing up the “intersectionality” between African Americans and
Palestinians. The organization’s justification for the linkage and for
supporting Hamas in its genocidal anti-Semitism is grounded in its
perceiving Palestinians as people of color and Israelis as white.
Ironically, the intersectionality earlier cultivated by Palestinian
leaders was with a partner, the Nazis, who insisted Jews are not white
and therefore are fit for extermination. (The Nazis reserved the term
“White Jews” for non-Jewish Germans and others in Europe who sympathized
with and helped the Jews.) But, of course, such ironies always abound
in promotions of genocidal bigotry and hatred, which are always
irrational and ultimately incoherent.
Twenty-five members of Congress signed a letter to Secretary of
State Blinken decrying what one of the letter’s two sponsors, Marie
Newman, characterized as “these heinous actions by the Israeli
government against Palestinian families in East Jerusalem.” The letter
cites among the heinous actions the issue of the Sheikh Jarrah property
as well as various spurious anti-Israel assertions. There is no mention
of the war crimes being carried out by Hamas at the time of the letter’s
submission.
Some days later, as the war still raged, Congressional Democrats
blocked passage of the “Palestinian International Terrorism Support
Prevention Act.” The act would have placed sanctions on foreign parties
engaged in providing financial support to Hamas.
Additionally, throughout the war, members of Congress cited, and
blamed Israel for, civilian casualty numbers taken from Hamas or its
agents. They did so even though, in the three previous wars triggered by
Hamas missile assaults against Israeli civilians, it had been shown
that Hamas had inflated numbers of civilian casualties, and even though
in the present conflict some fifteen percent of Hamas missiles had
fallen on Gaza and caused a number of the civilian casualties that the
group then blamed on Israel. Also, of course, Hamas intentionally places
its missile launchers and other military sites close to civilian homes
as well as schools, mosques and hospitals, knowing that doing so will
either inhibit Israeli targeting of those sites or will cause civilian
casualties that supporters such as those in Congress will ascribe
exclusively to Israel.
The current Administration in Washington has stated as one of its
essential goals the reassertion of American moral authority in the
world. The world has witnessed for some time now a dramatic increase in
anti-Semitism in America, much of it coming not from marginalized groups
but from academia, cultural elites, media elites and political elites.
The further, ugly phenomenon of a sizable segment of the Congressional
delegation of a major American political party serving as supporters of
or apologists for the criminal actions of a genocidal anti-Semitic
terrorist group - a group recognized as such by much of the world,
including much of the Arab world - is hardly likely to be seen as an
expression of moral authority but rather as a demonstration of moral
bankruptcy.
Kenneth Levin is a psychiatrist and historian and is author of The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People under Siege.
Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/congressional-enablers-genocidal-anti-semitism-kenneth-levin/
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