Hamas, część Bractwa Muzułmańskiego, organizacja zbrojona przez Katar, Turcję i Iran i wspomagana finansowo przez Unię Europejską, Amerykę i ONZ

Długi cień nazistowskiej twierdzy

Andrzej Koraszewski

Znana aktorka, do której mam sentyment i którą darzę dużym szacunkiem, zamieściła na swojej stronie apel o datki organizacji „Lekarzy bez granic”. Apel traktuje o tragicznej sytuacji w Gazie i potrzebie dostarczenia pomocy medycznej. Aktorka prosi o powstrzymanie się od komentarzy politycznych, obawiając się uwag rasistowskich i antysemickich. Tego samego dnia w innym miejscu czytałem sprawozdanie z rozmowy brytyjskiego dziennikarza z lekarzem, który jako członek tej organizacji pracuje w Gazie. Lekarz mówił swojemu rozmówcy, że oczywiście wszyscy lekarze i inny personel jego organizacji doskonale od lat wiedzieli o obecności Hamasu w szpitalach, o wydzielonych i zamkniętych częściach placówek medycznych, o tunelach, o wyrzutniach, o tym, że Gaza jest praktycznie militarną twierdzą. Na pytanie, dlaczego mówi o tym tylko anonimowo, lekarz odpowiada, że ujawnienie jego nazwiska oznaczałoby utratę pracy.

Lawfare around the globe is a threat to democracy

Jonathan S. Tobin

Marine Le Pen, president of Rassemblement National parliamentary group, arrives at a session of questions to the government at the National Assembly, France’s lower house parliament, in Paris on April 1, 2025. Photo by Anne-Christine Poujoulat/AFP via Getty Images

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had enough on his plate leading a country at war, a fractious governing coalition and coping with the distraction of a trial on corruption charges that has been going on for a staggering five years with no end in sight. Now he’s got another problem to deal with.

“Qatargate” is the latest addition to the list of issues facing Netanyahu. The scandal is based on the claim that two people who worked in the prime minister’s office were in “contact with a foreign agent” as well as engaged in “money laundering, bribery, fraud and breach of trust.”

That’s a shocking accusation, especially the part about his advisers allegedly being in cahoots with Qatar, a nation that is allied with Iran and Hamas, as well as a leading funder of Islamist fundamentalist schools and mosques around the world.

But if Netanyahu’s supporters smell a rat, it’s not because they suspect the accused of being traitors. On the contrary, both the prime minister and many of his backers see this as just another dishonest attempt on the part of his opponents to use the legal system to discredit or topple him.

Moreover, they are not alone in thinking this way about the rash of similar efforts to take down the leaders of right-wing and populist political parties among the world’s democracies by non-democratic means.

Qatargate is being analogized to the Russia collusion hoax that plagued President Donald Trump from 2017 to 2019; the attempt to impeach him over his threats to cut off aid to Ukraine; and the efforts to jail and/or bankrupt him during the four years between his first and second terms.

Nor is this phenomenon confined to the United States and Israel.

Lawfare in France

This week, Marine Le Pen, the leader of the right-wing Rassemblement National Party (RN) and the frontrunner in the 2027 French presidential race, was convicted of embezzlement and sentenced to prison. Yet rather than being accused of stealing money for personal gain, the indictment hinged on a technicality and a complicated chain of events concerning whether RN staffers who work for its representatives should have been paid by the European Parliament or by the party in France.

It’s far from clear that the RN’s conduct was very different from what other French parties do or anything that should have been labeled as embezzlement. It was, instead, widely perceived as an attempt by the French political and legal establishment to prevent Le Pen from running for president. The fact that the sentence handed down involved a five-year ban on running for office, coupled with the judge’s insistence that this part of his ruling be immediately enforced rather than only after appeals have been exhausted, made it appear even more partisan.

As far as the RN is concerned, what has happened to Le Pen is no different from the lawfare that was waged against Trump in the United States.

Last year, France’s leading neo-liberal centrist and far-left parties came together to deny RN control of the French parliament, despite the fact that they won the most votes and seats. Those factions have, under various parties, alternated in control over the French Republic for the last 70 years. And they have no intention of letting the upstart RN ascend to power.

The RN was founded by Marine’s antisemitic father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, and had more than a tinge of Vichy France fascism about it. Under his daughter, however, it has undergone a transformation. Following Marine Le Pen’s succeeding her father as its leader in 2011, it shed his racist point of view and expelled the elder Le Pen in 2015 (he died in January of this year).

It is now a vocal opponent of the spirit of antisemitism that is so much a part of contemporary French life. Jew-hatred in France is, as is the case elsewhere in Europe, driven by a red-green alliance of Marxists and Islamists. RN is against the mass immigration from the Middle East and North Africa, especially from former French possessions where Islam is a dominant force, which has enabled that troubling development.

Many French Jews are still reluctant to make common cause with the RN because of its past, as well as the historical association of the French right with antisemitism dating back to the Dreyfus Affair in 1894. But in what can be considered both a historic irony as well as a sign of the changing times, RN has become a crucial defender of the embattled Jewish community. It’s also a stalwart supporter of Israel in a country where the traditional hierarchy is either lukewarm at best or openly hostile to the Jewish state.

But what just happened in France is a theme playing out all across Europe, where a similar reaction to the way mass immigration has enabled what could be called the Islamization of societies and the marginalization of existing national cultures. In some places, like Hungary, the Netherlands and Italy, right-wing populist parties have ascended to government. Elsewhere, their opponents—whether traditional liberals, centrists or leftists—have done their best to anathematize them.

In Germany, that’s been made easier by the right-wing AfD Party’s failure to purge the ranks of their parliamentary candidates of those who evince nostalgia for their country’s Nazi past. But, as U.S. Vice President JD Vance pointed out in a seminal speech to the Munich Security Conference in February, the reason for the AfD’s rise is because they are speaking out in defense of national borders and against the impact of mass immigration enabled by both the traditional left and right.

Vance’s democracy lesson

The same point applies to Romania, where a right-wing party won the country’s national elections. Rather than accept the verdict of democracy, that victory was invalidated by the Central Election Bureau, which then denied its leader, Călin Georgescu, the right to run in the do-over balloting. That body gave no rationale for this anti-democratic decision, but it came two weeks after Georgescu’s political opponents, who were angry about his sympathy for Russia and hostility to Ukraine, had orchestrated his indictment for “incitement to actions against the constitutional order”; the “communication of false information”; and involvement in the establishment of an organization “with a fascist, racist or xenophobic character.”

One needn’t be sympathetic to Georgescu or Le Pen—or any of the other nationalist and populist parties in Europe that have come to the fore because of the impact of mass immigration—to understand two things.

One is that the accusation that the electoral success of contemporary right-wing political parties is a rerun of the Nazi rise to power in the 1920s and ’30s is tone deaf to the realities of the 21st century. Today, it is the left and their Islamist allies that are the primary source of European antisemitism.

The other is that the lawfare being employed in France and Romania is antithetical to democratic norms.

That was the point Vance made in Munich when he said: “We must do more than talk about democratic values. We must live them.” He went on to note that during the Cold War, it was the forces of an evil Soviet empire that “censored dissidents, that closed churches, that cancelled elections.” Sadly, he accurately noted that in 2025, the winners of the Cold War—the nations that were the self-described members and leaders of the “free world”—were acting in that manner.

That wasn’t something the gathering of foreign- and defense-policy elites from Europe and North America wanted to hear.

Characterizing lawfare against political opponents as a triumph of “the rule of law,” as liberal commentators in Europe and America have done, requires observers to ignore the obviously partisan nature of these cases. At stake here is not the efforts of a “reactionary international,” as French President Emmanuel Macron put it, threatening the independence of the courts. What we are witnessing is a dying establishment seeking to defend its power by any means necessary, even if it means traducing the basic principles of democracy.

Banana republic tactics

It may be, as The New York Times claimed, that the Romanian fiasco was a “propaganda coup” for Russia. But that’s only because what the authorities did there, as well as months later in France, unfortunately validated the claims of Moscow’s authoritarian leader, Vladimir Putin, that those in the West who oppose his tyranny at home and aggression against Ukraine are hypocrites when it comes to their supposed defense of democracy.

As Vance said, if Americans and Europeans want to stand up for democracy, they have to stop behaving like they are running banana republics by engaging in censorship of dissent and trying to jail their political foes, corrupt practices that the Biden administration also engaged in.

As Netanyahu has said, the same problem of a “deep state” that seeks to defeat political forces that oppose the liberal establishment by fair means or foul exists in Israel. He is in power by virtue of winning a clear majority in a democratic election. And despite everything that has happened since his victory in November 2022, including both the paralysis of the Jewish state by opponents of his judicial reform proposals and the catastrophe of Oct. 7, 2023, he has an even chance of extending his already record term of office when the country goes back to the polls, likely sometime in 2026.

And that is the context in which Qatargate must be understood.

The war on Netanyahu

At this stage, with little of the evidence of the alleged misconduct of Netanyahu’s staff being made public, it’s hard to know what to think about these charges. Most people act on the assumption that where there is smoke, there is fire—and that prosecutors and police, as well as the judicial system, can be trusted to get to the truth. Given the seriousness of these accusations, a wait-and-see approach to the issue seems prudent.

Yet even if we are inclined to give the investigators the benefit of the doubt, the notion that Netanyahu’s advisers were actually agents of Qatar seems, on its face, preposterous.

More to the point, there is a sense of déjà vu among many Israelis about all of this.

In 2016, when the investigation of Netanyahu on the charges on which he is still standing trial began, many observers assumed that at least some of the accusations being lodged against the prime minister were legitimate. Or rather, they assumed that they had to be since those making them had jobs in the legal system that normally inspire trust.

But once the investigation unfolded and the nature of the four separate cases that were brought against him was made plain, that assumption proved unfounded. The charges were so flimsy and clearly so partisan in nature that the only people who really treated them as legitimate were those whose hatred for Netanyahu was so great that they’d believe any accusation lodged against him.

There is a long tradition of Israel’s liberal establishment seeking to delegitimize the political right, dating back to the pre-state era. In recent years, that impulse to view the right as beyond the pale has taken on an even more desperate character. That’s a product of the way demography and the implosion of the once-dominant left-wing Labor Party over its catastrophic “land for peace” policies have led to the increasing electoral success of Netanyahu’s Likud Party, and its various religious and right-wing allies.

The Israeli left has used its stranglehold on a self-perpetuating majority on the country’s Supreme Court that seeks to dominate the country’s government, rather than merely act as a check on it as it does in other democracies, to hamstring Netanyahu. The determination of the country’s liberal elites to falsely demonize Netanyahu as a would-be authoritarian because of his efforts to reform the judiciary is not unlike the Democratic Party’s similarly disingenuous approach to Trump.

From Russia collusion to Qatar

This is why Netanyahu’s pushback against Qatargate and the other efforts to take him down should resonate for Americans who saw how the justice system in the United States was weaponized against Trump.

It is theoretically possible that Qatargate will, unlike Russia collusion, prove to be a real scandal as opposed to a partisan conspiracy theory. But the way the corruption cases against Netanyahu have imploded during the endless trial about them and the open animus that the legal establishment has for the prime minister, skepticism about such a scenario is far from unreasonable.

At this point, the claim that these efforts to take down populist or right-wing political leaders are solely about upholding the rule of law is risible. The political left—whether in the United States, Europe and Israel—is not so much interested in debating its opponents as they are in delegitimizing them. Asserting that any other point of view but one’s own is inherently undemocratic is the standard argument of tyrants, not the advocates for political freedom.

Democracy is in peril in 2025. But as Vance rightly argued, the main threat to it now comes from the practitioners of lawfare, who are the loudest in claiming to be its defenders.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of the Jewish News Syndicate, a senior contributor for The Federalist, a columnist for Newsweek and a contributor to many other publications. He covers the American political scene, foreign policy, the U.S.-Israel relationship, Middle East diplomacy, the Jewish world and the arts. He hosts the JNS “Think Twice” podcast, both the weekly video program and the “Jonathan Tobin Daily” program, which are available on all major audio platforms and YouTube. Previously, he was executive editor, then senior online editor and chief political blogger, for Commentary magazine. Before that, he was editor-in-chief of The Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia and editor of the Connecticut Jewish Ledger. He has won more than 60 awards for commentary, art criticism and other writing. He appears regularly on television, commenting on politics and foreign policy. Born in New York City, he studied history at Columbia University.

In Harrowing Account, Israeli Ex-Hostage Describes Abuse, Starvation, Witnessing Execution of Fellow Captive

Debbie Weiss

Israel former hostage Eliya Cohen recounting his experience in Hamas captivity in Gaza. Photo: Screenshot

Israeli former hostage Eliya Cohen, who was abducted by Hamas terrorists at the Nova music festival on Oct. 7, 2023, said in an interview this week that his 505 days in captivity in Gaza were marked by near-starvation and physical and psychological torment.

Among the most traumatic moments for Cohen was witnessing the execution of a fellow captive and being stripped naked on a weekly basis only to be told he “wasn’t thin enough.”

Cohen’s account, relayed to Israel’s Channel 12 news on Tuesday, was one of the most chilling testimonies to date. 

Cohen and his fiancée, Ziv, had fled the Nova festival in southern Israel and taken refuge in a roadside bomb shelter. The shelter, which would later be referred to as the “bunker of death,” was attacked by terrorists who threw grenades inside. Another person hiding in the bunker, Aner Shapira, hurled grenade after grenade back outside. But the eighth exploded, killing Shapira and the others. 

“I jumped on Ziv … and the first thing that came out of my mouth was: ‘Ziv, I love you,’” Cohen recalled. 

Cohen and Ziv survived the blast, but they were soon captured. On the way to Gaza, one of the captives in the truck announced his intention to escape. Cohen said he and the others tried to convince him to change his mind. “We told him not to. But he jumped off the truck, and they stopped driving and shot him dead,” he said.

When they arrived in Gaza, Cohen was taken to a house where a man claiming to be a medic approached him. “He said he’d remove the bullet from my leg,” Cohen recalled. He denied Cohen’s request for painkillers, instead, shoving a cloth into the hostage’s mouth and warning him not to scream, fearing that the noise might attract attention from civilians outside. The medic then used tweezers to extract the bullet. “It was completely agonizing,” Cohen recalled.

Cohen, who returned home severely malnourished, left behind another captive, Alon Ohel. Ohel’s fate became clear when Cohen, after being told of his own release, was informed that Ohel would not be joining him. “Alon panicked and started crying,” Cohen recalled in an interview. Cohen offered to switch places, but his captors refused. “I truly thought the second stage would come in a matter of days,” Cohen said about the Gaza ceasefire and hostage-release deal. “He’s blind in one eye.”

Cohen’s departure was bittersweet. He recalled their last moment together, saying, “I told him, ‘Don’t forget your family. They’re the most important thing in the world.’” Cohen made a promise to Ohel: “I wouldn’t forget him. Until I see him back home, this isn’t over.” Even after his release, Cohen said he is haunted by Ohel’s absence. 

“Until I see him back home, this isn’t over,” Cohen said.

The conditions in captivity were deplorable, and starvation was a daily reality for Cohen and the others. For most of their imprisonment, food was scarce, rationed to barely enough to survive. Cohen described a daily struggle for sustenance: “We fought for survival. We got one pita a day with two spoonfuls of fava beans, peas, or something similar.” Many times, they were given less food than promised, and the captors showed little remorse, telling the hostages to “share it among yourselves.”

“We fought for survival,” Cohen said. “You’d think twice before going to the bathroom because just standing up made you dizzy.” 

Twice a week, they were ordered to take off all their clothes. Their captors would taunt, “You’re not thin enough, time to cut your food rations.”

Hunger was a constant struggle, he said, and the captors seemed to take pleasure in their suffering. “We’d beg for extra food, and sometimes it worked,” Cohen said. “There’s no way to describe the feeling when we managed to touch their hearts, and they’d give us a small chocolate bar to share between the four of us.”

Cohen and the others were kept in chains for two months at a time, often so tightly that the restraints cut into their skin. “They bound them so tightly they cut into my legs,” Cohen explained. “I felt like a caged animal in some dark, remote place.” At the end of the two months, he was allowed to shower, after which he preferred to rechain himself rather than face the increased discomfort from their captors tightening the chains even further.

Nevertheless, Cohen said that the food deprivation was the worst of it. 

“You can handle being humiliated, you can handle being cursed at, you can handle your legs being in chains,” he said. “But hunger is a daily struggle because, beyond being hungry, you are also fighting for your life. Every night, you go to sleep thinking, ‘What am I going to do tomorrow to get that piece of pita bread?’”

Among those Cohen and Ohel were held with were Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Almog Sarusi, and Ori Danino. Cohen later learned that they were executed by Hamas after a failed rescue attempt by the Israel Defense Forces.

Współczujący Sekretarz Generalny ONZ Antonio Guterres. (Zdjęcie: zrzut z ekranu)

Zawsze przyczyna, nigdy skutek

Pete Malicki
Tłumaczenie: Małgorzata Koraszewska

Pete Malicki jest australijskim dramaturgiem, filmowcem i biznesowym doradcą. Wnuk emigranta z Polski

Part of the Western Left is now a clear and present danger to Jews and the West

Joanna Tokarska Bakir

Professor Joanna Tokarska-Bakir is Chair of Ethnic and National Relations at the Institute for Slavic Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences. She has spent the last academic year working at the Holocaust Museum in Washington. Her article first appeared under the title ‘A dog’s longing for a wolf in the woods’ in the Polish journal Gazeta Wyborcza. It has been translated by Nicholas Hodge.

I spent the morning of 7 October in Bethesda, near Washington, at the home of Polish Jews Basia and Marek, March ’68 émigrés whose parents were Holocaust survivors. Our breakfast was interrupted by the telephone, and a string of updates on the fate of my hosts’ Israeli family and friends. At that time, people were just getting to know the names of the kibbutzim that had been attacked, as well as the faces of the hostages who would later appear repeatedly in the news: Naama Levy, the young woman in bloody pajama bottoms, her hands tied behind their backs, Shani Louk trussed up on the back of a pickup truck like a sacrificial animal, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, whose forearm had been blown off by a grenade, or Eden Yerushalmi, a bartender at the Nova Music Festival, the scene of one of the largest massacres.

As Simon Sebag Montefiore wrote, the Hamas attack was reminiscent of a medieval Mongol raid,[i] with people being murdered or taken captive, only that in this case, the raid was recorded and streamed on social media, in real time. Within the space of a couple of hours, ten per cent of the inhabitants of the kibbutizim had been killed, including at left-wing kibbutizim such as Be’eri, which had striven towards reconciliation with the Palestinians.[ii]

Actions such as abducting dead bodies and removing them to Gaza, cutting off the fingers of old people, the execution of a father or a mother in front of their children,[iii] or showing a murder on camera after the victim had been forced to call relatives,[iv] inventively expanded the catalogue of historical acts of cruelty that people have inflicted on others over the centuries. This cruelty extended to pets too, as evidenced by the shooting of a black labrador that had wagged its tail in a friendly way at the approaching terrorists.[v]

As it turned out though, 8 October proved to be worse than 7 October, because it was then that the campaign of denial began. Western academics, artists and activists, some under the banner of justice and humanitarianism, others devoid of any banner, rushed to explain how the whole attack was simply armed resistance, and not genocide,[vi] even though Palestinian terrorists had killed everyone in their path.

The American writer Najma Sharif tweeted sneeringly: ‘What did y’all think decolonisation meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays? Losers!’[vii] Former minister Yannis Varoufakis, leader of the Greek left, declared that it was not Hamas, but ‘Europeans’, who were the criminals[viii]. Furthermore, in a joint statement, 35 organisations from the University of Harvard placed all the blame for the massacre on one actor – Israel of course.[ix] While attendees of the ill-fated rave party were still hiding in bushes from the terrorists, the New York section of the Democratic Socialists of America and the anti-Zionist organisation the Jewish Voice for Peace held a rally on Times Square in support of ‘Gaza’. [x] Susan Sarandon, the unforgettable star of Thelma and Louise, spoke at the next demo, and expressed satisfaction that Jews were finally ‘getting a taste of what it feels like to be a Muslim in this country’.[xi]

Meanwhile, a photograph went viral of a man paragliding over the Gaza barrier on 7 October so as to take part in the massacre. The image was shared by the Chicago branch of Black Lives Matter and Jodie Dean, a political theorist from Hobart College. The latter viewed the event as ‘exhilarating’.[xii] ‘And what do you stand for? For liberation, or for Zionism and imperialism?’ she asked.[xiii] The creators of the posters that were put up across New York got straight to the point: ‘Zionism = terrorism’.[xiv]

The terrorists themselves seemed somewhat disorientated by the unexpected outpouring of sympathy, and they published contradictory statements. Some claimed that no hostages had been taken, because Muslims do not wage war against civilians.[xv] Others declared that there are no civilians in Israel, because all the Jewish inhabitants were occupiers[xvi].

All this took place amidst the deafening silence of humanitarian and progressive organisations, who in the wake of the murder of George Floyd or the outbreak of war in Ukraine had issued statements around the clock.[xvii]

Slogans such as ‘Queers for Palestine’ drew comparisons with the little dog from Moominland Midwinter who longs to be with real wolves in the woods.

Go back to Poland

The slogan ‘Go back to Poland’ was tested by Lebanon’s Hezbollah following Hamas’s attack,[xviii] and a couple of months later it spread to the placards of American students protesting against the war in Gaza.[xix] Confronted by the fact that their postulates conformed to the definition of colonialism – dictating a situation overseas at someone else’s expense – the students superciliously shrugged their shoulders.

They had clearly never been exposed to the view that at the time of the creation of Israel, the majority of Jews were refugees, and Palestine was their haven (refugium), established by UN resolution no. 181 in 1947. This concept did not conform to the narrative about settler colonisers, and the same could be said about the traumatised kibbutzniks, peers of Hanna Krall from the orphanage in Otwock such as Lili Szynowłoga, who had miraculously survived the war by hiding in the cemetery in the town of Chęciny.[xx]

In Stanford, the first sit-in was held in mid-October, so before Israel entered Gaza. The young participants were angry and resolute: in their bid to justify the violence of the liberators, they cited Franz Fannon,[xxi] likened Hamas to Nelson Mandela, and compared the massacre of the kibbutzniks to Ukrainian self-defence in the war with Russia. In fact, Hamas and Hezbollah flags were few and far between at the New York demonstrations in early November, but soon the Columbia students announced that ‘We are Hamas’, while also championing such slogans as ‘By any means necessary’, ‘Globalize intifada’, ‘Abolish the settler state’ and ‘Glory to our martyrs’.[xxii] The red, upturned triangle that is used by terrorists to denote their aims started to appear on Jewish institutions (for example the Brooklyn Museum).[xxiii] One day, passengers on the New York subway heard something that Polish Jews remembered from 1968: “Raise your hand if you’re a Zionist. (…) This is your chance to get out.’[xxiv]

At Stanford, students were only let into the building if they recited the words ‘Fuck Israel, free Palestine’.[xxv] There were calls for boycotts of Israel – academic and others; these slogans had been launched by the anti-Israel movement Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, which had been prohibited by Trump, but which now found itself back in action. Recently, it gained official support from the American Anthropological Association, an organisation of specialists that nevertheless had vehemently opposed the movement for many years (i.e. when the serving president was the daughter of one of the survivors of the Jedwabne Pogrom).[xxvi]

The reality I have described thus far might seem like a clumsy imitation of Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America. The next installment is, however, more of a dark satire on universities – factories of the world’s greatest minds – as if straight from the movie The Social Network.

‘We don’t want no two states! We want all of ’48!’ chanted Stanford students, calling for a return to the situation prior to Israel’s 1948 war of independence (which was started, like the wars of 1967 and 1973, by Israel’s Arab neighbours who, rejecting the previously mentioned UN resolution and the creation of Jewish and Palestinian states, attacked the former, but did not win).[xxvii]

‘We are Stanford University! We control things!’ – shouted young Americans in keffiyehs. They covered their faces, so as not to jeopardise their future careers. The creator of the idea of civil disobedience, Henry David Thoreau, believed that the condition for carrying out such defiance was voluntary submission to the resulting penalty, but this notion was considered ridiculously out of date by the protesters.

Worse than Again

I observed all this while in the US, where I spent the last academic year. My vantage point could be called privileged, considering that I was based at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, but that autumn, it was one of the more unfortunate places to be.

Although school groups bustled to and fro outside the museum, which adjoins the National Mall, the building seemed deserted in early October, and its lifts, which had been designed to bring to mind gas chambers, broke down more than usual.

The black cloud that hovered over the institution following the events of 7 October was expressed in a vigil in honour of those who had been killed or abducted by Hamas. A handful of pale, elderly Holocaust survivors took part. For the first time in the history of the museum, only the initials of those who attended the vigil were provided, due to security fears, but the situation gave the impression that the participants were culprits, not victims.

The official optimism that had been part of the museum’s mission for several decades disintegrated when social media started to swarm with unfriendly statements in the aftermath of 7 October. Suddenly, Jews found themselves on the wrong side. Rywka, a relative of Kielce Pogrom-survivor Anszel Pinkusewicz[xxviii], was on duty answering the constantly ringing telephone, but when the situation became completely unbearable, she started to consider handing in her notice. In November, things got even worse, when pictures of Hamas’s hostages were torn down under the cover of night. The fact that the institution was in crisis was plain to see: within just a few hours of the attack taking place, the museum’s main exhibition, with its motto ‘Never Again’, became painfully outdated. When clips from terrorists’ bodycams were uploaded onto the net, old symbols such as cattle trucks transporting Jews to Auschwitz receded far into the distance. Something had begun that Henry Grynberg had described as ‘Worse than Again’,[xxix] and the hallmark of this was the deafening silence in which it took place.

For many, ‘Hamas’s attack was full of echoes of Polish pogroms’ (Anna Zawadzka)[xxx] and the Holocaust,[xxxi] yet almost immediately – apparently because of the abuses of the Israeli government – calls were made to not associate it with the Holocaust.[xxxii] This gave the impression of someone with a not entirely clear conscience (the figures included several distinguished Holocaust historians, such as Michael Rothberg) defending himself against such an overwhelming comparison. With the aid of the verb ‘to evoke’, Nobel Prize-winner Herta Müller[xxxiii] attempted to dismantle this ban, but the memory controllers did not even deign to listen to her.

Proscription forces prescription, so right after the embargo, a rash of recommended metaphors appeared. Israel’s response to the terror? Revenge of the victims and repetition compulsion. The Gaza Strip? The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. A photograph of a Jewish boy with his hands up? It’s a Palestinian child. Meanwhile, the word Gaza was even daubed on the Anne Frank statue in Amsterdam.[xxxiv]

The crowning element of this action was Pankaj Mishra’s essay ‘The Shoah after Gaza’ in the London Review of Books, in which the author claimed that ‘even before Gaza, the Shoah was losing its central place in our imagination’.[xxxv] Monika Bobako’s piece in Krytyka Polityczna was in a similar vein, recommending – with references to moral repercussions – a broadening of Holocaust Studies to include the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.[xxxvi]

It would be a fitting culmination of the decades-long process of erasing Jews from the Holocaust, a situation that was summarised by Sunday Times journalist Hadley Freeman as follows: ‘Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD, known outside Britain as Holocaust Remembrance Day) falls every year on January 27, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau by the Soviets. And yet HMD is no longer about the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust, but “all victims of genocide”, and any Jew foolish enough to query this shift is firmly reprimanded for being exclusionary. (That was the real problem with the Holocaust: not inclusive enough.).’ [xxxvii]

Tectonic shock

Following complaints by frightened Jewish students, Republicans held a hearing of university rectors in Congress.[xxxviii] When Harvard president Claudine Gay was asked whether it was permissible to call for genocide against Jews, she replied that ‘it depends’. Her answer confirmed the existence of double standards – it would be hard to imagine similar hesitancy in the case of African Americans.

The context of the hearing in Congress was the wider discussion about the limits of freedom of expression, an issue that had flared up in the wake of the Hamas attack. The demand for radical freedom of speech was something of a surprise, given that it was called for by a generation that attached weight to ‘safe spaces’, having grown up with the conviction that even micro aggression was not permissible towards minorities. As Hadley Freeman wrote, clearly the massacre of Jews by Hamas was ‘too micro’,[xxxix] given that the narrative had now taken a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn.

How was all this possible, given that for many years, the country had been experiencing a ‘golden age for American Jews’? [xl] The country of Philip Roth, Robert Oppenheimer, Barbra Streisand, Susan Sontag, Betty Friedan, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Woody Allen and Bob Dylan? Was it all an illusion?

Over the last year, antisemitic attacks in the US increased fourfold (a drop in the ocean compared to Great Britain, where the figure rose by 1350 per cent!)[xli] , due to which many Jews went incognito, removing mezuzahs from their doors and keeping their kippahs well hidden. They were right to do so, considering that young Americans had effectively declared their solidarity not so much with Palestinians, but with Hamas. Dara Horn, author of People Love Dead Jews, clarified the situation as follows: ‘U.S. rally organizers named their efforts “floods” (“Flood Seattle for Palestine,” “Flood Manhattan for Gaza”) after “Operation Al Aqsa Flood,” Hamas’s name for its October 7 butchery.’ [xlii]

How can American youth’s radical change in attitude be explained, given that for decades, their parents fought arm in arm with Jews of all denominations in the battle for civil rights? Antisemitism is an unavoidable answer, but it is insufficient. Looking for further answers, I came across an explanation by Theo Baker, a Stanford student[xliii]. He blames the aggression on students’ deluded sense of agency and – surprise! – their conformity. In his view, elite universities attract a certain type of ambitious youth, who sees the world as a series of multiple-choice questions, with answers that are simply right or wrong. Once a candidate has made it to a given institution, the surest way of staying in the saddle is by taking the side of the majority and condemning Israel – this is the response that they think will be best for them. This is indeed what their progressive teachers and peers expect of them, even if their parents do not share such a point of view. In times past, such behaviour was called other-directedness (David

Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd), today it is rather referred to as adaptation.

The pro-activism mentality, which is hostile to intellectual nuances, prioritises the end over the means, and rejects the lessons of totalitarianism, is destroying universities, which suicidally encourage it. Theo Baker: ‘Today’s students grew up in the Trump era, in which violent rhetoric has become a normal part of political discourse and activism is as easy as reposting an infographic. Many young people have come to feel that being angry is enough to foment change.’

This mentality perfectly suits social media, which provides its mouthpiece. What came first: the chicken or the egg? In spite of their name and the aura in which they appeared, social media outlets are geared towards dividing, rather than connecting people. The greater the outrage and polarisation, the greater the earnings.

And yet it had all been so beautiful: universities had introduced DEI programmes (Diversity, Equality and Inclusion), protecting people against discrimination, not only in relation to skin colour, but also to ethnic and sexual identity. The ‘culture of white supremacy’ had been condemned, along with its preference for the written word, because there are other forms of communication, after all (sport? music? storytelling?).[xliv] Even the use of the wrong pronoun could prompt extra sensitivity classes. So as not to offend anyone, trigger warnings were applied, informing about controversial content. Nevertheless, the DEI preferences concerned every group with the exception of Jews, who simply had to keep quiet if they were offended. [xlv] How had this come about?

In the US, the prevailing view of race as a visible stigma is that only non-white people are affected by it. This would explain Whoopi Goldberg’s unfortunate remark about the Holocaust, which in her view, had nothing to do with race.[xlvi] In spite of visits to the Holocaust Museum and obligatory classes about the Shoah in school, antisemitism is still viewed in the US as a problem that concerns Poles, and perhaps Germans, but certainly not progressive young Americans.

Although the presence of Jewish students at American universities grew strikingly following the abolition of the quota system (which remained in place at Ivy League institutions until, more or less, 1945), today the vast majority of students hail from wealthy families from all over the globe. [xlvii] Under the guise of fighting for equal rights, here the privileged fight to improve their own image, by taking a virtuous stance. Yet as James Baldwin once wrote, virtues are almost always ‘ambiguity itself’. [xlviii] The spread of postcolonial theory, condemnation of capitalism and contempt for liberal restraint have been accompanied at universities by a prolific blindness to their own hypocrisy.

Reminiscence: The Satanic Verses

Hamas’s attack on Israeli kibbutzim, and the polarisation that it prompted, revealed a crisis that had long been growing in the shadows. However, attentive observers had managed to spot its symptoms, as can be seen in an occasionally hilarious essay called ‘Jews Don’t Count’, written by the English comic David Baddiel in 2021. He notes that ‘for a long time, antisemitism has been downgraded as not a real or proper racism by progressives. Now, in the social media frenzy, which demands villains, things must have justice meted out to them immediately, things have moved beyond that. The idea that collective responsibility is racist has got lost in the righteous fury…. As I was writing this, a British-Lebanese blogger told her 11k followers to come and harass me on my stand-up tour, because the proceeds from my book are no doubt going to fund illegal settlements and Israeli Defence Forces killing’.[xlix] The pressure on Jews to publicly distance themselves from Israel or ‘Zionism’ is rooted in just such racism.

Two decades ago, antisemitic resentments revealed themselves in the form of conspiracy theories about the attack on the World Trade Centre on September 11th, 2001. Peculiar interpretations of the attack, such as the unexpected rise in American conversions to Islam, did not make headlines. In later years, few noticed how diverse – to say the least – the international reactions were to Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.

As the aforementioned writer stated in Joseph Anton, the principle of freedom of speech, which he had fought for his whole life, was already in a state of deterioration around 2010: ‘Something new was happening here: the growth of a new intolerance. It was spreading across the surface of the earth, but nobody wanted to know. A new word had been created to help the blind remain blind: Islamophobia (…). One billion believers could not be wrong, therefore the critics must be the ones foaming at the mouth’.[l]

A sign of how far things had come can be found in an article about The Satanic Verses by the deputy editor of The Independent, a centre-left British newspaper, in which the author stated that it was not only ‘a silly, childish book’ which should be banned in the light of hate speech laws, but that he would have nothing against burning it. [li] A complete turnaround had occurred: black had become white.

Small talk on Olympus

I experienced this first hand ten years ago, when I found myself in Princeton at the Institute for Advanced Study, a centre that was created for Albert Einstein. One day during lunch, the small talk moved to my book Legendy o krwi. Antropologia przesądu[lii] [Legends about blood: an anthropology of prejudice], which explores Sandomierz (central Poland) tales about Jews killing children for matzah.

I was rather surprised when the director of the School of Social Sciences, the French anthropologist and physician Didier Fassin, said that the titular ‘prejudice’ was itself a discriminatory, classist construct, and he proceeded to speculate as to whether there might have been a grain of truth in the myth after all. Silence fell, and everyone continued chewing. Only Steven Lukes (a Durkheim specialist), who was sitting next to me, muttered under his breath that something ‘akin’ to truth manifests itself in every statement. Well, well, I thought, to hear the same opinion in Princeton as in Sandomierz is rather perverse.

This impression was strengthened during a lecture by one of my Princeton colleagues, given within the framework of a seminar on equality. The colleague in question, a Muslim theologist, portrayed the ḏimmī system, via which medieval Islam protected ‘infidels’, as superior to John Locke’s conception of tolerance. (The ḏimmī system was based on the levying of a tribute by the caliphate, which, being focused on conquering ‘external aliens’, left ‘internal aliens’ —Jews and Christians—in peace.)

The lecture was attended by a queer/feminist audience, colourful even by American standards. Someone asked how, in this context, does one explain the stoning of adultresses in Islamic culture. The lecturer blamed it all on the Jews: it was the fault of the convert Abd Allah ibn Salam,[liii] who had whispered to the Prophet that this punishment was what the Torah prescribes, and the naive Prophet listened to him. ‘Once, I was in favour of tolerance, now I am rather pro-Empire,’ the speaker declared at the end of the speech, undeterred by the fact that the Islamic State had announced on Twitter that the Caliphate had been reborn.

Shortly afterwards, the delegates of the empire massacred the editors of Charlie Hebdo, shooting to death ‘external aliens’, who had dared to make fun of the Prophet. Princeton was outraged. I remember the grim mood during a meeting in the university’s largest hall, where our anthropologist and physician Didier Fassin explained to those present that rather being outraged, they should simply understand the terrorists.

‘You don’t understand.’

On the back of the print edition of the London Review of Books, one finds letters to the editor that are written in a distinctly English way. Readers elegantly lambast authors they don’t agree with, and the editor coolly prints every last word.

How this looks from the inside I discovered after Hamas’ s attack on Israeli kibbutzim, when the LRB published a piece by Judith Butler titled ‘Compass of Mourning’.[liv] Explaining that the role of intellectuals is to place events in context, the philosopher and gender studies scholar insisted that the historical background of the massacre had to be taken into account, namely the ‘Israeli violence against Palestinians … waged against a people who are subject to apartheid rules, colonial rule’.

Shortly afterwards, I wrote to the LRB (my letter was not published), suggesting that the context could be broadened to include the post-war pogroms that compelled thousands of Jews to leave Poland for the Middle East, or the violence from 1948, the 1950s and the1960s, which affected the mizrahim, the ‘Oriental Jews’. Indeed, the cry of ‘Jews to Palestine!’ was remembered by Henrietta Borensztajn, the protagonist of my book Cursed (2023). Having survived the Kielce Pogrom of 1946, she settled near Tel Aviv, in keeping with the perpetrators’ wishes. How surprised she would be today if she were to hear that Jews are being encouraged to go back in the other direction!

Didier Fassin’s orations at Princeton, like Judith Butler’s article ‘The Compass of Mourning’, continue a tradition of the American left that was initiated by Susan Sontag, who in response to accusations that Bin Laden’s terrorists were cowardly, defended their aggression, calling it the consequence of ‘specific American alliances and actions’.[lv] In Sontag’s eyes, America itself was guilty, just as Israel was, according to Butler, and French journalists in Fassin’s perspective. Until recently, it seemed that there were limits to blaming the victim. This all changed though with the left’s reaction to the rapes committed by Palestinians on 7 October.

The first pointer was a photograph of a dead woman, taken the day after the attack on Route 232, a country road near Gaza. The victim was wearing a black dress and she had a charred face.[lvi] Gal Abdush had attended the Nova Festival, and it turned out that she had been raped and then shot. The last message she sent to her family was ‘You don’t understand.’

A two-month investigation by journalists from the New York Times, making use of GPS data from the mobile phones of over 150 people, as well as interviews with victims, therapists and soldiers, revealed that this was not an isolated rape, but ‘part of a broader pattern’.[lvii] A report released by the UN in March stated that ‘there are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred during the 7 October attacks in multiple locations across Gaza periphery’, against both women and men, ‘including rape and gang rape,’ and that there was ‘clear and convincing information’ concerning ‘rape and sexualised torture’ of hostages.’[lviii]

How did the left react to these findings? More or less like the Catholic Church did to the Kielce Pogrom of 1946: violence was condemned per se, but without going into specifics. Voices that were usually forthright, such as Human Rights Watch, #MeToo and Amnesty International, chose to remain silent, and it took the UN’s organisation for women’s rights eight months to express its concern.[lix] The film Bearing Witness, which was made by Israelis using clips of drastic scenes, as well as Sheryl Sandberg documentary, [lx] was received with incredulity, and one of the more sensitive journalists who watched it claimed that he had been unnecessarily traumatised. A hundred and forty American feminist scholars, including Angela Davis, an iconic figure during the Vietnam War, spoke out against the manipulation of sexual violence (1800 people from other countries signed this letter too[lxi]), and one of them claimed that the descriptions of the rapes were not trustworthy, as they were extremely fetishistic – as if that was not the case with normal rape. The slogans ‘Believe Women’ and ‘Silence is Violence’ had suddenly ceased to be valid.

Judith Butler reacted to the whole situation like a typical 1950s policeman who had been confronted with claims of rape – she demanded proof. This led Israeli sociologist and feminist Eva Illouz to comment: ‘Judith Butler built their career off of challenging notions of objectivity, essence, and reality. Judith Butler was able to circulate a letter supporting someone accused of harassment without evidence [this concerns Avital Ronell, a professor at New York University, who was suspended after a PhD student accused her of harrassment in 2017[lxii]]. But now, they seem (for the time being) to have changed their mind. (…) They declare that were this evidence provided, they would “deplore” these rapes. The indecency of Butler’s words desecrates the blessed memory of those women who were tortured, raped, shot, or stabbed and disqualify them from being considered a feminist.’[lxiii]

Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, a historian from The New School in New York, theorises that the left’s negation of the rapes is connected with the failure of the previously described anti-discrimination programmes in the US: here too the problem hinges on the unacceptable whiteness of the victims.[lxiv] In the past, sexual violence against white women was a tool used by racists to carry out lynchings, yet today’s defenders of Hamas compare the terrorists[lxv] to Emmett Till, a black 14-year-old who was murdered in 1955 in Mississippi because he whistled at a white married woman.[lxvi] However, the problem is that these two events are fundamentally different, and we, weakened by relativism à la Judith Butler, have ever fewer tools to illuminate this difference.

The dehumanisation of an antisemite

Will left-wing antisemitism become a new fashion, which will ultimately enable the progressive elite to fraternise with the masses? It cannot be ruled out, all the more so given that it is supported by a historical mechanism that has led us by the nose for a couple of thousand years. In keeping with the best definition of antisemitism that I know, proposed by David Nirenberg in his book Anti-Judaism (2015), antisemitism does not depend on one or other way of thinking about Jews, but on thinking ‘by means of Jews.’

Since ancient times, various cultures, including religions such as Christianity and Islam, have defined themselves via opposition to how they viewed Judaism. This had nothing to do with what Judaism was, and everything to do with wanting to avoid the evil which it was perceived to be.

In the age of piety, Israel was a blasphemer and an unbeliever. When secularism became fashionable, Jews were loathed as ‘dark reactionaries’. Under capitalism, they were persecuted as communists, and under communism, as capitalist exploiters. Nationalist movements were not indifferent to them either, labelling them cosmopolitans, whereas ebbing nationalism allows Jews to be stigmatised as crazed chauvinists.

We can also observe the functioning of these principles in today’s world. In a time when human rights are so highly valued, Israel has once again been cast as the villain, and we unstintingly strive to convince ourselves that we are on the right side.

Day after day, progressive newspapers – The New York Times, Gazeta Wyborcza or Oko Press – exacerbate the crisis in the Middle East, by contrasting omnipotent Israel with Palestinians who are deprived of agency. Hamas and Hezbollah are not dehumanised by Jews, who, even if they hate them, have to deal with the everyday, life-and-death consequences of their actions – but by those who treat them like non-human factors, like an element, or a natural disaster, things which cannot be asked to take responsibility for themselves.

For left-wing politics today, support for the Palestinian cause has become as important as anti-capitalism, vegetarianism, opposition to coal mining and support for the right to abortion. The left craves a simple way of looking at the world, and it needs some groups which it can hate with impunity, and others which it can bombard with love.

Jews do not need the left, for in spite of what antisemites say about them, they are a collective of anti-victims: following the greatest catastrophe in history, they took advantage of a historical opportunity to build a collective life. That is why we will never forgive them for what we did to them.

references
[i] https://www.theatlantic.com/author/simon-sebag-montefiore/
[ii] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/12/22/world/europe/beeri-massacre.html
[iii] https://www.timesofisrael.com/adi-vital-kaploun-33-amazing-mother-killed-in-front-of-her-children/#:~:text=Dual%20Israeli%2DCanadian%20citizen%20was,and%204%2Dmonth%2Dold%20Eshel&text=Adi%20Vital%2DKaploun%2C%2033%2C,her%20children%2C%20husband%20and%20father.
[iv] https://unherd.com/2023/10/i-watched-hamas-unleash-hell/
[v] https://wyborcza.pl/magazyn/7,124059,30449519,wiekszosc-ludzi-nigdy-nie-zobaczy-filmikow-hamasu-ktore-obejrzalem.html#S.TD-K.C-B.8-L.3.maly
[vi] ‘Hamas’s Genocidal Intentions Were Never a Secret’, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2023/10/hamas-covenant-israel-attack-war-genocide/675602/
[vii] https://x.com/najmamsharif/status/1710689657757769783
[viii] Etan Nechin, How Can Left-wingers Hail Hamas Atrocities Against Israelis as ‘Palestinian Resistance?’, https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2023-10-11/ty-article-opinion/.premium/how-can-left-wingers-hail-hamas-atrocities-against-israelis-as-palestinian-resistance/0000018b-1e0b-df31-a99f-7fcb56df0000
[ix] Hadley Freeman , ‘Blindness’: ‘hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all the unfolding violence’, see also: https://x.com/yaelbt/status/1710875529249792487
[x] https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2023-10-11/ty-article-opinion/.premium/how-can-left-wingers-hail-hamas-atrocities-against-israelis-as-palestinian-resistance/0000018b-1e0b-df31-a99f-7fcb56df0000
[xi] The progressive left hates the Jews | Hadley Freeman | The Blogs.pdf; https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/author/hadley-freeman/
[xii] ‘The images from October 7 of paragliders evading Israeli air defenses were for many of us exhilarating,’ https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/palestine-speaks-for-everyone
[xiii] Why America’s Leftist Literati Loves to Fetishize Hamas Brutality – Opinion – Haaretz.com.pdf
[xiv] Franklin Foer/ ‘Everyday Jewish Life in the U.S. Will Be Punctuated by Antisemitism’ – Podcasts – Ha.pdf
[xv] https://news.sky.com/video/israel-hamas-war-we-have-not-killed-any-civilians-hamas-official-tells-sky-news-12981219?ref=quillette.com
[xvi] https://fathomjournal.org/fathom-long-read-a-progressive-pogrom-of-shani-louk-jean-amery-and-the-anti-zionist-left/
[xvii] Gal Beckerman, ‘The Left Abandoned Me’, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/10/left-jewish-suffering-israel-hamas/675621/
[xviii] https://wyborcza.pl/7,179012,30296709,hezbollah-ma-swoja-strategie-zydzi-musza-wrocic-tam-skad.html
[xix] Go back to Poland, Columbia, 22/4/24.jpeg (on platform X); Go to Poland and bomb Tel Aviv_Columbia Calls Off In-person Classes as pro-Palestinian Protests Escalate – U.S. News – Haaretz.com.pdf
[xx] I described these events in ‘Barabasz i Żydzi’ chapter in my book Pogrom Cries (2017).
[xxi] https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2024/03/frantz-fanon-adam-shatz-the-rebels-clinic/677904/
[xxii] Edytorial redakcji ‘The Wall Street Journal’, pt. Celebrating the Nova Massacre in New York City,
https://www.wsj.com/articles/nova-massacre-remembrance-new-york-city-protesters-hamas-antisemitism-0d7f4eb0
[xxiii] https://www.wsj.com/articles/nova-massacre-remembrance-new-york-city-protesters-hamas-antisemitism-0d7f4eb0
[xxiv] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/10/october-7-anti-semitism-united-states/680176/
[xxv] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/stanford-israel-gaza-hamas/677864/
[xxvi] See Alisse Waterson, My Father’s Wars: Migration, Memory, and the Violence of a Century (2013)
[xxvii] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/stanford-israel-gaza-hamas/677864/
[xxviii] Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, Cursed. A Social Portrait of the Kielce Pogrom, transl. by Ewa Wampuszyc (Ithaca: Cornell 2023), 3.
[xxix] Henryk Grynberg, Worse than Again, https://doi.org/10.1080/23739770.2024.2365025
[xxx] Tomasz Żukowski’s interview with Anna Zawadzka, https://wyborcza.pl/magazyn/7,124059,30913876,atak-hamasu-z-7-pazdziernika-byl-pelen-cytatow-z-polskich-pogromow.html?_gl=1*168um8c*_gcl_au*MTkyODQ4NjY4NS4xNzIwMjY2NTYx*_ga*OTIxMDQ1OTcyLjE3MjUzNjI4MDY.*_ga_6R71ZMJ3KN*MTcyNjUwNDg5NC4xNjEuMC4xNzI2NTA0ODk0LjAuMC4w&_ga=2.224908179.845884764.1725960372-921045972.1725362806
[xxxi] Gal Beckerman, ‘The Left Abandoned Me’, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/10/left-jewish-suffering-israel-hamas/675621/
[xxxii] ‘An Open Letter on the Misuse of Holocaust Memory’ | Omer Bartov, et al. | The New York Review of Book.pdf
[xxxiii] https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-06-08/ty-article-magazine/.highlight/hamas-wanted-to-evoke-the-shoah-an-interview-with-nobel-winning-author-herta-muller/0000018f-edf4-d3f3-a7ff-fff482590000
[xxxiv] ‘What Has Anne Frank Got to Do With the Gaza War?’ https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2024-07-12/ty-article-opinion/.premium/what-has-anne-frank-got-to-do-with-the-gaza-war/00000190-a32b-d03e-a5fd-bbbba9d90000
[xxxv] Pankaj Mishra · ‘The Shoah after Gaza’, Vol. 46 No. 5 · 7 March 2024, https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n06/pankaj-mishra/the-shoah-after-gaza
[xxxvi] https://krytykapolityczna.pl/swiat/instrumentalizacja-zaglady-i-antypalestynski-rasizm/
[xxxvii] Hadley Freeman, ‘Blindness: October 7 and the Left’, The Jewish Quarterly, 256.
[xxxviii] Bret Stephens, ‘Double Standards’, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/08/opinion/antisemitism-college-free-speech.html?searchResultPosition=1
[xxxix] Hadley Freeman, ‘Blindness: October 7 and the Left’, Jewish Quarterly 256
[xl] https://www.theatlantic.com/author/franklin-foer/
[xli] From Hadley Freeman, Blindness…: ‘In the weeks after October 7, antisemitic hate crimes in London – such as attacks on Jewish schools and shops – exploded by 1350 per cent compared with the same period the year before; Islamophobic hate crimes also increased by 140 per cent in that time – an appalling increase, but a tenth of what Jews were experiencing. In the United States, anti-Jewish attacks increased by 400 per cent; in Germany, 240 per cent; in France, almost 100 per cent.’ ADL’s statistics are considerably higher: https://www.adl.org/resources/report/audit-antisemitic-incidents-2023
[xlii] Dara Horn, ‘Why The Most Educated People In America Fall For Anti-Semitic Lies’, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/jewish-anti-semitism-harvard-claudine-gay-zionism/677454/
[xliii] Theo Baker, The War At Stanford, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/stanford-israel-gaza-hamas/677864/
[xliv] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/09/campus-antisemitism-response-proposals/679669/
[xlv] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/09/campus-antisemitism-response-proposals/679669/
[xlvi] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/abc-suspends-whoopi-goldberg-for-comments-on-jews-race-and-the-holocaust
[xlvii] https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-vanishing
[xlviii] Michael Wood, ‘White Man’s Heaven’: ‘Baldwin admires virtue, but as he says elsewhere, ‘most virtues’ are ‘ambiguity itself’’, https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v13/n03/michael-wood/white-man-s-heaven
[xlix] David Baddiel, ‘Jews Don’t Count. How Identity Politics Failed One Particular Identity’, TSL, 2021, p.98-99: ‘For a long time, antisemitism has been downgraded as not a real or proper racism by progressives. Now, in the social media frenzy, which demands villains, things must have justice meted out to them immediately, things moved beyond that. The idea that collective responsability is racist has got lost in the righteous fury. Any Jew is fair game. As I was writing this, a British-Lebanese blogger told her 11k followers to come and harass me on my stand-up tour, because the proceeds from my book are no doubt going to fund illegal settlements and Israeli Defence Forces killing’.
[l] Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir, 2012, p. 385: ‘It was Islam that had changed, not people like himself. It was Islam that become phobic of a very wide range of ideas, behaviours and things. In those years and in the years that followed, Islamic voices in this or that part of the world – Algeria, Pakistan, Afganistan – anathematised theatre, film and music, and musicians and performers were mutilated and killed. Representational art was evil, and so the ancient Buddhist statues and Bamiyan were destroyed by the Taliban. There were Islamic attacks on socialists and unionists, cartoonists and journalists, prostitutes and homosexuals, women in skirts and beardless men, and also, surreally, on such evils as frozen chickens and samosas’.
[li] Sean O’Grady: ‘Rushdie’s silly, childish book should be banned under today’s anti-hate legislation. It’s no better than racist graffiti on a bus stop. I wouldn’t have it in my house, out of respect to Muslim people and contempt for Rushdie, and because it sounds quite boring. I’d be quite inclined to burn it, in fact. It’s a free country, after all.’, https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/reviews/satanic-verses-salman-rushdie-review-fatwa-muslim-iran-heresy-a8799771.html
[lii] J.Tokarska-Bakir, Legendy o krwi. Antropologia przesądu (2008), French edition: Légendes du sang, Albin Michel 2015, trans. by Małgorzata Maliszewska.
[liii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abd_Allah_ibn_Salam
[liv] Judith Butler, ‘Compass of Mourning’, LRB, https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n20/judith-butler/the-compass-of-mourning
[lv] ‘Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a ‘cowardly’ attack on ‘civilization’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘humanity’ or ‘the free world’ but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?’, from: Beckerman, https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2024/09/homeland-war-terror-richard-beck-book/679764/
[lvi] ‘Screams Without Words: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7’, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/28/world/middleeast/oct-7-attacks-hamas-israel-sexual-violence.html
[lvii] ‘Screams Without Words: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7’, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/28/world/middleeast/oct-7-attacks-hamas-israel-sexual-violence.html
[lviii] https://www.un.org/sexualviolenceinconflict/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/report/mission-report-official-visit-of-the-office-of-the-srsg-svc-to-israel-and-the-occupied-west-bank-29-january-14-february-2024/20240304-Israel-oWB-CRSV-report.pdf
[lix] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/05/opinion/silence-rape-israel-jews.html
[lx] https://cddrl.fsi.stanford.edu/news/sheryl-sandberg-screens-discusses-documentary-oct-7-sexual-violence
[lxi] https://stopmanipulatingsexualassault.org/#signers; https://truthout.org/articles/over-140-prominent-feminist-scholars-demand-ceasefire-end-to-occupation-in-gaza/
[lxii] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/13/nyregion/sexual-harassment-nyu-female-professor.html
[lxiii] ‘The Global Left Needs to Renounce Judith Butler’ – Opinion – Haaretz.com.pdf, https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2024-02-03/ty-article-opinion/.highlight/how-the-left-became-a-politics-of-hatred-against-jews/0000018d-6562-d7f7-adcf-6def4fe50000
[lxiv] Michael A.Cohen, ‘The Rape Denialists’, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/04/october-7-hamas-sexual-assault/678091/
[lxv] https://x.com/islamocommunism/status/1732039775698481241?s=20
[lxvi] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Till