It was tempting to think that anti-Semitism was if not a thing of the past at least in abeyance. That said, most conspiracy theories are at base anti-Semitism: there’s always the “international bankers” “pulling the levers” “controlling the media” nonsense about. All of these harken back to older anti-Semitic ideas via the long route.

Hamas takes the short route, as per its very charter,  eloquently explained in The Atlantic here: Understanding Hamas’s Genocidal Ideology

Hamas represents a common ideology amongst the Palestinian population and one wonders exactly what they could say to convince Western leftists of the genuineness of their genocidal rage.

More astounding than events in Israel last week, however, was the much larger than expected support for the atrocities by the woke left. If my champagne socialist clique of intellectual friends in Manhattan need any reminder the left has run off the rails there is no better object lesson than the past week. The latest idiotic buzzword: Decolonization looks exactly like what we saw last weekend in Israel and nothing less.

“From River to Sea, Palestine must be free” is a neat slogan and Hamas’ intention is just that: a Jew-free, Sharia based Islamic ethno-state ruling the entire area.

Somebody do tell “Queers for Palestine.”

Hamas and much of the Arab street make no apology for this genocidal ideation. They have sacrilized a land their great grandparents mainly abandoned voluntarily, that they’ve never seen and melded it with anti-Semitism, rage and corruption. They’ve sold this story to a well meaning but ignorant or willfully stupid west. You wonder who were Hitler and Stalin’s enthusiastic executioners: what kind of people? They’re downtown in our cities seething with rage to kill Jews right now.

Perhaps it is the language gap or just ignorance but westerners have utterly no idea how genocidal their idealized “Arab Street” is.

It is important to put some historical frame on this: some facts to consider while tut-tutting Israel and engaging in morally bankrupt “both-sideism”.

Gaza is a “prison”. No. Gazans may generally leave Gaza: Israel provides safe passage to Elat Airport for those with documents further afield. Palestine AND ISRAEL issue travel documents for most. Further there is an entire western border crossing with Egypt which many Palestinians, generally with onward documentation, use. Often – like now – the Egyptians won’t let them enter as they are a security risk.

Several decades ago Gaza even had an airport, paid for by us mainly, until Hamas started a mini-war which destroyed it.

“The most densely populated place on earth” is sheer nonsense. Gaza is about twice the size of the District of Columbia with a population of two million – so a bit over twice D.C.’s density, nowhere near touching the crowds of MOST East Asian, South Asian or African cities (Gaza has almost no hinterland being a city state).

Those “shrinking Palestine” maps common online – note the dates – they all denote times of Arab initiated wars from outside Israel or unprovoked violent insurrection against Israeli civilians within the country, usually the former.

The “Nakba” catastrophe myth describes Palestinians “kicked off their lands” when thousands left voluntarily “temporarily”, believing Arab governments’ propaganda that once the Jews were “thrown into the sea” (their words) the entirety of the area would be theirs. Today’s Palestinian “refugees” are the grandchildren or great grandchildren of gamblers who lost.

Those who stayed became Israeli citizens with full rights, more money than nearly all Arabs and more political rights than people in any Arab (and most Muslim) countries. They comprise about 20% of Israeli citizens and live peaceful productive lives. They didn’t play spin the wheel to inherit the dead Jews’ land in 1948.

Palestinians who chose to wait it out until the land was Judenfrei – free of Jews – by leaving for Lebanon, Syria or the rest of the Arab world, and their descendants forever, were never given citizenship in their new, unintended homes and still live a half life as semi-illegal immigrants in Lebanon, Syria, etc. with no rights as I described in an article last year: What “Pro-Palestine” Student Groups Get Wrong.

The biggest oppressors of Palestinians are their fellow Arabs in Arab lands and moreso their fellow Palestinians. The self rule given to them by Israel has been squandered by an utterly corrupt dictatorship who have enriched only themselves. See: Gaza’s Billionaires, How Hamas’ Leaders Got Rich.

Palestinian culture itself, at least since 1967, has been created almost entirely as belligerent opposition to Israel and anti-Semitism. Drop in on a Palestinian “culture” fair at any university and there’ll be almost nothing of Arab cuisine, history, poetry or art: just the murderous Zionist scum who must be smitten. It is an honor culture based around extermination and vengeance.

Similarly: their political demonstrations. Compare them with, say, French demos: French people hot headed about French policies, or Australian demonstrators all bent out of shape about Australian policies. But only Palestinian demonstrations call for the annihilation of an entire country. They don’t? Listen to them. Go. Listen.

The Israelis have offered various two state solutions: in 1937 (rejected by the Arabs), 1948 (rejected, met by a war of intended annihilation), and in 1996 which Yassir Arafat walked away from. And the two state “Camp David” accords, 2000, rejected. Five times since the 1930s.

Every olive branch has been spurned by the Palestinians and their own oppressor class of gangsters, followed up with more terrorism and more rockets. Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah aren’t in the business of helping their citizens they are in the business of stealing from their people and trying to genocide the Jews. This is a history you’ll rarely read in the liberal press, it is unknown to the scary, (large!) woke mobs yelling “Death to the Jews” (in Sydney, last week). Stalin called these Western apologists “useful idiots” in his day, today with our technology they are “willful idiots”. Which is worse.

Back to Gaza: In 2005 the Israelis left Gaza completely, 5,000 Israelis from a dozen settlements  (subsequently destroyed by Gazans) and went back to Israel for peace and were rewarded by periodic, frequent rocket attacks and then last weekend’s horror.

None of Gaza has been “occupied” for nearly two decades. The locals turned it into a terrorist factory and seeded residential districts and hospitals with military supplies leaving no “civilians” for Israel to avoid. The “poor people” being wept over by BBC and PBS news crews are part of a grand project of utter genocide. Under those hospitals are missiles, it is an open secret there. All are complicit.

Israel assiduously avoids civilians where-ever possible, those blasted buildings in Gaza you see on CNN are forewarned of strikes.

As a democracy, Israeli soldiers and politicians are answerable to an electorate who punish war crimes (See Sabra/Chatilla massacres, by Lebanese Christians in Beirut during Israeli occupation, 1982, which brought down the Israeli government).

Framing this, wrongly, as an oppositional fight between two morally equal parties, it is helpful to observe the holistic, to-the-core militantism which is (even early childhood) education throughout all of Palestinian society, in the Middle East and abroad where Jewish annihilation is a stated national goal.

The “kill the pigs and monkeys” (Jews and Christians) propaganda can be found in any Palestinian run primary and secondary school, and in much of the Arab world. It is taken directly from the Koran and Hadith. Until recently Saudi Arabia (who supplied the textbooks for ISIS schools, by the way), funder of Islamic education worldwide, enthusiastically pushed this ideology.

There’s no moral equivalency between any free, democracy and a terrorist organization. Dictatorships and terrorists work on an entirely separate moral framework from democracies.

Memri.org (Middle East Media Research Institute in D.C.)  catalogue a constant stream of casual but startling anti-Semitism throughout the Arab press and TV. It is translated, thankfully, unlike the Gaza victim porn on twitter which is usually reposted clips of the Syrian civil war – Assad’s handiwork. Twitter Community Notes don’t seem to work in Arabic.

Nobody devoted enough to take a position on this issue should miss spending some time watching memri.org, it is quite a trip.

Twenty two years ago I worked as a proprietary equities trader in the World Trade Center, leaving that company six months before 9/11 but I’ve lived in NYC then and since. I don’t remember hearing many Americans calling for “restraint” or “measured response” towards Al Qaida. No “two sides”. Damn – we invaded Afghanistan despite the fact ordinary Afghans had almost nothing to do with Al Qaida and then we invaded Iraq which had nothing to do with… well.. anything.

Neither country was shot through, deep within their societal web, with an obsession for the utter destruction of the Israeli state as much as Palestine and Hamas unashamedly are. And Al Qaida nor Iraq were ever even close to being the existential threats to America that Palestinians and their Arab brothers have been to Jews in that area for nearly a century.

Ideologically Al Qaida, ISIS and Hamas are indistinguishable: their common end goal is a caliphate built by jihad on the bones of all the unbelievers: you included probably. How much “compassion” do you feel for them?