“This is what they get for killing our children” Jihad al-Shamie, the terrorist who attacked the Manchester synagogue reportedly shouted as he tried to break into the building, linking his deadly Yom Kippur attack to Israel’s war against the Hamas terror organization in the Gaza Strip.
With the bloody ramming and stabbing attack which claimed the lives of worshippers Adrian Daulby, 53, and Melvin Cravitz, 66, the sacred day’s usual prayers, fasting and personal introspection tragically gave way Oct. 2 to profound grief, trauma and communal fear.
The violent attack is partly “a product of the way in which Israel’s actions are seen and viewed and portrayed, I’m afraid to say, by Sky News as well as other media outlets as almost uniquely evil and worthy of a level of focus which is simply not afforded to other dire situations across the world, of which unfortunately there are many,” John Woodcock, Lord Walney charged reckless news media reporting with contributing to an open season on British Jews.
While Lord Walney was speaking about Britain, he might as have been addressing the United States. It too recently has suffered its share of both murderous attacks holding Diaspora Jews responsible for alleged atrocities in Gaza amidst abominable reporting fueling such anti-Jewish bigotry.
Indeed, on the scale of unique evil, the Holocaust — the extermination of six million Jews — stands at the harrowing pinnacle. And yet, last week Boston Globe editors found it appropriate to publish — and defend — Holocaust inversion, that is comparing Israel to Nazis (“I live up the road from an atrocity,” Sept. 28, Ideas).
“The people living nearly? Antisemites, heartless — the bad guys” — Tel Aviv wrote resident Noga Malkin about Oświęcim residents living next to the Auschwitz extermination camp during the Holocaust. Then in an odious, unfounded and treacherous comparison of Israeli citizens living in proximity to the Gaza Strip, she charged: “I’ve gained a new understanding for the neighbors of my grandmother’s family. For the ‘bad side,’ the one I never imagined belonging to.”
Erasing any Hamas responsibility for launching the war, for carrying out the most savage attack on Jews since the Holocaust, for condemning its own people to death and misery, for deliberately embedding its terror infrastructure in hospitals, schools, homes and other civilian infrastructure, and for refusing so long to release the hostages and lay down its arms, thereby prolonging the war, she paints Israelis as the new Nazis.
“In Israeli culture, comparisons to the dark past of the Holocaust are forbidden — instantly dismissed as disloyal, even antisemitic,” she whined, citing identification with the unbothered residents of Oświęcim. As if the baseless Holocaust metaphor wasn’t clear enough, she barreled onward: “That recognition cracks the central myth on which I was raised — the promise of ‘never again’ as the justification for our country’s existence.”
It’s not just “Israeli culture” which has labeled comparisons of Israel to the Nazi regime as antisemitic anathema. Dozens of Western countries which have adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism agree that the world’s oldest bigotry includes “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”
So detached from reality is Malkin’s baseless and hateful comparison that in order to make it stick, she grossly invented:
But my government doesn’t allow basic humanitarian protection in Gaza. There are roads. There are multiple ways to bring in the supplies people need. Yet the government blocks even milk supplements for babies and recently — in an act hard to see as anything but a PR stunt — has allowed for limited air drops, a method humanitarian experts have said is inefficient and dangerous in this context. People have been killed by packages falling on them.
The notion that Israel does not permit humanitarian supplies into the Gaza Strip, aside from a few reckless airdrops, is pure fabrication. Nevertheless, using this made-up charge, Malkin alleged “intentional starvation,” thereby posing the toxic and dangerous comparison of Israel’s war against a designated and terror organization to the Nazi Holocaust of Jews.
Malkin’s absurd argument that occasional airdrops are the exception to a supposed ban of humanitarian aid does not hold up to the most cursory scrutiny. According to Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, responsible for coordinating the entry of aid into the Gaza Strip, of the 2,118,539 tons of aid delivered to the territory since Oct. 7, 2023, 2,100,833 (or a whopping 99.16 percent!) have arrived through land crossings, i.e. the very roads which Malkin claimed Israel blocks. The aerial routes, which Malkin falsely portrayed as the only permitted route for aid, have brought in 7,996 tons — i.e. 0.37 percent of the more than two million ton total. (She also ignored the maritime route, which has brought in 9,710 tons of aid.)
In other words, Malkin denied the existence of more than 99.62 percent of the humanitarian aid which has actually reached the Hamas-ruled coastal territory.
As for her specific falsity regarding the milk supplements for babies, the severely compromised U.N.-affiliated Commission of Inquiry (footnote 337) cited the false charge that Israel blocks the entry of baby formula, but its only source is a Hamas Facebook post featuring a visibly overweight Hamas supporter.
In reality, the UN itself has been delivering hundreds of tons of baby food to Gaza in recent months. As of July 12, Israel’s COGAT reported:
Let’s make it clear: contrary to claims, there is NO BAN or any kind of restriction on baby formula or baby food. Recently, over 1,400 tons of baby food and infant formula have been facilitated into Gaza, some of which were specific fomula for infants.
The United Nations’ own information belies the COI’s bogus assertion that Israel blocks milk supplements for babies as a blatant lie.
UNICEF reported Sept. 4:
. . . in the past two weeks alone we provided enough Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food (RUTF) – the main treatment for malnutrition in children – to our partners to administer to more than 3,000 acutely malnourished children over the six-week course of treatment.
“We also provided complementary food to support more than 1,400 infants and High-Energy Biscuits for 4,600 pregnant and breastfeeding women for the next two weeks.”
Furthermore, while Israel most certainly allows in baby formula (and there’s no shortage of photographic evidence), armed terrorists in the Gaza Strip (reportedly Hamas, whom Malkin barely mentioned) have stolen these essential goods, preventing them from reaching the needy infants. As UNICEF reported less than two weeks ago:
“Yesterday, armed individuals approached four trucks outside our compound in Gaza City that were getting ready to transport desperately needed Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food (RUTF) for malnourished children enduring famine.
“The individuals commandeered the drivers at gun point and diverted the RUTF before releasing the drivers and trucks.
“This theft has denied at least 2,700 severely and acutely malnourished children of life-saving RUTF . . .”
Confronted with these facts, The Boston Globe declined to retract the false claims of Israel blocking the entrance of humanitarian aid, including baby formula. Instead, it slightly tweaked the language (“blocks” milk supplements became “has blocked” milk supplements) and added links to outside sources repeating the same falsehoods, as if these meaningless cosmetic changes mend the damage of gross misinformation and Holocaust inversion.
“She was not asserting that Israel has blocked all humanitarian supplies, only that such blocks have occurred,” the Boston Globe disingenuously defended the piece’s citation of “such blocks” to support the claim of a wholesale genocide no less evil than the Holocaust.
Addressing Jihad Al-Shamie’s murderous Yom Kippur attack and the London Metropolitan Police’s October 2023 statement that “the word Jihad can have a number of meanings,” British journalist Jonathan Sacerdoti remarked: “I think it’s time we stopped using all of these apologies and talking around things with these ridiculous explanations.” (It’s not surprising that Jihad’s father was an early adopter of praise for the Oct. 7 massacre.)
For Malkin and her fellow travelers intent on vilifying the Jewish state, “Holocaust” too can have many meanings. And thus Israel’s legitimate war against a terror organization akin to ISIS falls into the category of unique evil known previously known as the genocide of the Jews. The devastating repercussions reach far beyond the realm of semantics, with more dead Jews outside cultural centers and synagogues.
With research assistance from Adam Levick and Myron Kaplan.