by Melanie Phillips
Through Palestinian propaganda, what was once confined to Nazi Germany has now poisoned much of the free world.
(JNS) It’s been another epic week for Western hypocrisy. And it’s
been another epic week for indifference or worse towards Israel. The two
are, of course, intimately connected.
On Wednesday, 16-year-old
Aryeh Schupak was murdered and over a dozen others injured, at least one
of them critically, when a bomb packed with nails and ball-bearings
exploded at a bus stop in Jerusalem. Another remote-controlled bomb went
off shortly afterwards at another bus stop in the city.
The Biden
administration rushed to condemn the bombings. Secretary of State
Antony Blinken said that America “stands resolutely with Israel in the
face of the terrorist attacks this morning in Jerusalem” and reiterated
that “our commitment to Israel’s security is iron-clad.”
This is
nauseating humbug. These attacks, like the rest of the terrorist wave
against Israelis in recent months, are in large measure the product of
relentless Palestinian Authority incitement in its schools and media, as
well as its “pay for slay” rewards to terrorists and their families.
Nor
are Israeli Jews the only targets of Palestinian Arab terror. On the
same day as the bombings, a 17-year-old Israeli Druze, Tiran Fero, who
was critically injured in a car crash in Jenin, was abducted from
hospital by a mob of Palestinian Arab gunmen, reportedly because they
mistakenly thought he was an Israeli soldier.
According to Fero’s family, the terrorists stormed the hospital, disconnected him from his respirator while he was still alive and threw him into a car. His body was retrieved by Israeli and P.A. security forces and returned to his family the following day.
Given
its role in inciting and financing such terror, the Palestinian
Authority leadership would be treated as pariahs in any civilized
universe. Instead, the Biden administration continues to fund it and
treat it as worthy of a state.
The day before the bombings, it
emerged that the U.S. had upgraded its relations with the Palestinian
Arabs by appointing a Special Representative for Palestinian Affairs.
This
brand-new position will be filled by Hady Amr, currently the State
Department’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for Israeli and Palestinian
Affairs. Amr’s record includes declaring “I was inspired by the
Palestinian intifada”—the terrorist onslaught in which around 1,000
Israelis were murdered or maimed—falsely accusing Israel of “ethnic
cleansing” and calling for a deal with Hamas.
Far from an “iron-clad” commitment to Israel’s security, the Biden administration undermines it at every turn.
This
week, however, Western outrage has not been directed at any of this,
but at the “hypocrisy” of holding the FIFA World Cup in Qatar. This is
because Qatar treats gay people appallingly, and team captains were
prevented from wearing rainbow LGBT motifs on their armbands in protest.
Yet
Qatar is not only a despotic state that denies human rights to
everyone. It is also the principal paymaster of Hamas, the Islamist
group that runs Gaza as a police state, constantly attempts to murder
Israelis and whose charter commits it to annihilate Israel and every Jew
in the world.
Every football team, FIFA official and football fan
who is taking part in the World Cup and contributing to the billions
Qatar is making from hosting the event will have thus made an
inescapable contribution to Hamas’s infernal agenda of murdering
Israelis and oppressing its own people.
It is unthinkable that any
Western football team would wear Israel’s flag on their armbands in
solidarity with the Israeli victims of Palestinian Arab and Muslim
terror. Yet more than 2,200 such attacks have been recorded inside
Israel and the disputed territories this year, killing 30 people.
In March,
there was a series of shootings, stabbings and car-ramming attacks in
Beersheva, Jerusalem, Hadera and Bnei Brak. In April, three civilians
were shot dead in the heart of Tel Aviv.
In May,
three Israelis were killed and four wounded in an axe attack in the
central city of Elad. Last month, an Israeli was shot dead near Kiryat
Arba in Judea. Earlier this month, three Israelis were stabbed to death
near the Judean city of Ariel.
Last week,
there were two shooting attacks in northern Samaria. Last Sunday night,
a mass-casualty attack in the same area was averted when a car bomb
apparently aimed at an Israeli army watchtower exploded prematurely.
None
of these attacks has merited more than a passing reference in Western
media, which can be guaranteed to erupt into volcanic condemnation if
the Israelis start inflicting any Palestinian casualties in their
attempts to prevent further atrocities.
To Western liberals, the
suffering of Israeli victims at the hands of the Palestinian Arabs is
all but invisible. So too is the suffering of Palestinian Arabs under
their own leaders.
Western liberals appear not to see that
Palestinian leaders jail, torture and kill their own people. They don’t
see Palestinian attacks on Christians or Druze. They don’t see Hamas
throwing gays off roofs to their deaths.
Last
month, Ahmad Abu Marhia, a gay 25-year-old Palestinian Arab living
under asylum in Israel in fear for his life at the hands of his family
and residents of his village, was abducted and beheaded in Hebron.The
liberal media was mostly silent. There were no demonstrations on
American campuses. U.S. Ambassador to Israel Thomas Nides tweeted his
horror at the murder but conspicuously failed to say the victim had fled
his Palestinian Authority village for sanctuary in Israel because he
was gay.
Western liberals have fixed in their heads the falsehood
that Palestinian Arabs are the oppressed victims of Israel and therefore
can do no wrong. In parallel, these liberals have blanked Israel out of
their moral universe, so that Israelis don’t have the same right to
exist as Western liberals do themselves.
How can we explain this astounding and shocking mindset?
The
history of the Jewish people tells us that when cultures are beset by
terrifying forces apparently beyond anyone’s control, Jews are
identified as the cause. Pinning the blame on the Jews is how the
simple-minded have tried to make sense of incomprehensible threats for
generations.
But there’s always a catalyst: The people who
actually point the finger at the Jews and incite the mob against them.
In the Middle Ages, it was the Church. In the last century, it was
Hitler. Today, it’s the Palestinian Arabs.
The common factor is their psychotic demonization of the Jewish people. Yet there is an even more devastating connection.
War
was waged against the Nazis to defend the free world, which was duly
saved from invasion, enslavement and tyranny. The war was not waged,
however, to save the Jews. Indeed, the West shut its eyes to the
extermination of the Jews, of which Western leaders were made well aware
at the time.
Much of the West regarded Hitler as a monstrous
aberration who managed to brainwash the Germans into supporting his
psychotic ravings. But in the Middle East, the Palestinian Arabs were
Hitler’s legion. They were led by the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin
al-Husseini, who pledged to exterminate every Jew in the Middle East if
Hitler won the war.
Al-Husseini is Mahmoud Abbas’s lauded role
model and inspiration. Palestinian propaganda accordingly channels Nazi
tropes and images demonizing the Jewish people. Yet none of this demonic
antisemitism is ever acknowledged by the West. The American government
never mentions it. Nor do the British or the Europeans. Instead, the
West has internalized the Palestinian demonization of the Jewish state.
Nazi
Germany was defeated. But the paranoid and exterminatory antisemitism
that fueled it is now coursing through the nations that defeated it.
Through Palestinian Arab propaganda, what was once confined to Germany
has now poisoned much of the West.
That’s why Israel has become a
lightning rod for a phenomenon seen throughout history: Blaming the Jews
for the evils of the world.
This may seem a harsh lesson to learn. But learn it we must.
Melanie Phillips,
a British journalist, broadcaster and author, writes a weekly column
for JNS. Currently a columnist for The Times of London, her personal and
political memoir Guardian Angel has been published by Bombardier, which
also published her first novel, The Legacy. Go to melaniephillips.substack.comto access her work.
Source: https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/363413
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