Photograph Source: U.S. Embassy Tel Aviv – CC BY 2.0
If the world was a just place Benjamin Netanyahu’s only concern would be how to conceal a cyanide capsule in his navel to cheat getting hanged by the neck until dead.
Netanyahu’s actions in Gaza are genocidal in character because his character has always been genocidal. He is a remorselessly self-absorbed barbarian for whom no mound of civilian corpses (or ill-gotten shekels) can ever rise high enough.
Unfortunately, Joe Biden is and always has been Israel’s willing executioner. He is the same malevolently dead-eyed butcher which 90s C-SPAN video revealed him to be. And he has enabled Netanyahu with a detached depravity that makes Congressman Josh Gottheimer (D. Bergen County-Tel Aviv) look like Saladin by comparison.
Hamas did not invent inhumanity on October 7th by acting with it unforgivably. How little the Congress of the United States even pretends to care about Palestinians was an ongoing obscenity decades before October 6th. And the collective punishment which American bombs and policies are inflicting on innocent women and children has only added to the casual savagery too long permitted to pass for solutions.
Yet if you’re like me, amidst this blood and inhumanity few things are more inhuman than John Fetterman rewarding my yard sign by waving a Flag of Zion from his roof, or Hakeem Hand Gesturing Jeffries methodically telling me how much I stand behind Israel. The truth is I am standing off to the side. Pleading with this self-proclaimed democracy to write a constitution or declare its borders or, at minimum, stop immolating toddlers with my tax money.
But if there is hopeful news amid the carnage it’s that Israel is finally being seen for what it is instead of what it claims to be. On campuses and in newsrooms, from the bowels of the State Department to the passageways of Capitol Hill, Israel apologists are being confronted as never before.
Granted, hedge fund zillionaire Bill Ackman remains ever vigilant lest a Zionist grad student’s whimper at having to walk near a protest in the quad go unheard. But many of us, Jew and gentile alike, are hearing screams. Screams of shrapnel-ravaged children lying in offal soaked corridors of bombed out hospitals as limbs are amputated without anesthesia.
For the Ackmans of the world honest discussion will always be the new antisemitism. However the only sane mindset for this situation is a word unfound in Webster’s: antisemantic adj. 1. the state or quality of refusing to allow terminology to validate gratuitous cruelty 2. self-thinking 3. gibberish averse
And as an antisemantic observer let me suggest that for genuine progress toward peace to occur Israel apologists must be challenged on their most impactful argument. It’s an argument made everywhere from cable news to the International Court Of Justice. And it possesses a singular focus unseen since Shelley Duvall leafed through the pages of Jack Nicholson’s novel in the lobby of the Overlook Hotel:
“Hamas are terrorists and they caused everything bad!
Hamas are terrorists and they caused everything bad!
Hamas are terrorists and they caused everything bad!
Hamas are terrorists and they caused everything bad! Hamas are terrorists and they caused everything bad! Hamas are terrorists and they caused everything bad! Hamas are terrorists and they caused everything bad! Hamas are terrorists and they caused everything bad! Hamas are terrorists and they caused everything bad! Hamas are terrorists and they caused everything bad! Hamas are terrorists and they caused everything bad! Hamas are terrorists and they caused everything bad!”
Who is or isn’t a terrorist? What is or isn’t terrorism? Does history prove that power determines titles? If I were to pitch a film project that might offer a sense of perspective for these times it would be a biopic of the Irgun and the Stern Gang. A psychological character study of the Zionist paramilitary groups who assassinated British Ministers and UN Peace Mediators, blew up the King David Hotel, and massacred women and children in the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin.
Were they animals who needed to be, like Hamas, wiped off the face of the earth? Spoiler Alert: They may have been but they weren’t. In fact two of their leaders, Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, became Prime Ministers. And my guess is the very same motivations and rationales with which they justified their actions can currently be found within a web of Gazan tunnels.
Yet not even a rabidly antisemantic observer could discern a trace of sanity, let alone political justification, in the Democratic Party treating the multitudes calling for an immediate ceasefire as though they were nothing more than voices in the rubble.
Nancy Pelosi, who spent the entirety of her legislative career in the exclusive employ of her stock portfolio, accuses ceasefire advocates of being paid agents of Putin! Only 10 Senate Democrats (TEN!) even care to investigate whether Israel is violating human rights! Is it any wonder National Security Spokesman John Kirby can’t suppress a gleeful smirk while absolving the IDF for their killing fields!?!
Joe Biden has indeed proven his fealty to the vengeful God of the Hebrews by bringing biblical levels of smiting, famine, and pestilence to two million souls. Ironically, in destroying Gaza he has turned his party’s base to rubble. But as he dodders across the land like a desiccated Bob Hope in search of a USO show, boasting of missiles launched and wars widened, more and more voters will literally be standing up to oppose him to his face. And in response party apparatchiks will rise to their feet and bleat “Four More Years”, seeking to obscure the rubble by drowning out the voices.
But voices and rubble are transient things.
When the last of the tens of thousands of bodies are pulled from the Gazan rubble, all that will be left will be loved ones. They will mourn. They will remember. They will pay us back.
And voices will be inaudible.
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