It is a testament to our time that so many people have become so desensitized to the horrific sight of the hurled corpses of disgraced civilians, children, women and the elderly, that they are ready to join the chorus that sings: they sought trouble for themselves!
The attack on southern Israel was not just ordinary cruelty. The merciless and systematic slaughter of civilians was equivalent to a XXI. century barbaric pogrom. The gruesome images captured by Hamas men to brag about their deeds served as a horrifying testimony to human evil. They have had enough of the many beheading videos glorifying the inhumanity of the Islamic State and other terrorist organizations. It was bad enough to watch the pogrom organized by Hamas.
Even more disturbing, however, are the complacent voices of various groups living in the West, who claim that Israel is responsible for the atrocities.
Those who define themselves as progressives are proving one after another that they too believe that the evil Zionists brought the trouble upon themselves. It doesn't even make them think that despicable Hamas killers massacred babies.
Former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis said he would never condemn Hamas for its atrocities. As he put it, "the road to ending the tragic loss of innocent lives - Palestinian and Israeli - begins with a fundamental first step: ending the Israeli occupation and apartheid".
But even this is considered a civilized reaction to the fact that a speaker at a pro-Palestinian rally outside the Israeli consulate in New York found the massacre of two hundred and fifty young people at an Israeli music festival excellent material for humorous comments.
Opponents of Israel seem to have taken special pleasure in the sight of the mass killing of young dancers.
Mennah Elwan, a doctor of the British health service, NHS, said on the X (ex-Twitter) microblog: the young people fleeing for their lives were not civilians, because "there are no civilians in Israel."
"If this was your home, you'd stay there and fight!" he mocked the fleeing dancers. The message that he and his fellow pro-Palestinian activists in the West are sending to the world is unmistakable: "this is not the time for pettiness, after all it is about Jewish lives."
That same day, while the pogrom against the Jewish people was being carried out in Israel, Somali-American journalist Najma Sharif wrote on X: “Still, what do you all think decolonization means? Vibration? Theses? Essays? They are losers”.
It says a lot about the approach of his movement that he equates a bloody pogrom with decolonialization (demolishing the colonial system).
Hamas propagandists systematically place the pogrom in the framework of decolonialization. Maggie Chapman, a Green member of the Scottish Parliament and vice-chair of its human rights committee, said: "The oppressed are fighting for their rights... Don't let the Western media fool you into thinking it's terrorism. This is decolonization”.
It is a testament to our time that so many people have become so desensitized to the horrific sight of the hurled corpses of disgraced civilians, children, women and the elderly, that they are ready to join the chorus that sings: they sought trouble for themselves!
In the light of the reactions and debate that followed the massacre, it became obvious that it was not a question of denying a pogrom, but something even more insidious: the emergence of the idea of a forgivable pogrom.
Until recently, this was used to retroactively justify genocide.
For example, in 2014, on the French National Day, anti-Israel protesters stormed a Paris synagogue full of worshippers, shouting slogans such as "Death to the Jews!" or "Hitler was right!"
The casual indifference with which parts of European society chant slogans related to the Holocaust to humiliate Jews represents an important shift in how anti-Semitism works in the 21st century. century.
When you listen to pro-Palestinian protesters chanting "Gas the Jews!" outside the Sydney Opera House, you tend to dismiss them as a small group of extremist ideologues. However, just a few days after the Hamas pogrom, it is hard not to conclude that the classic anti-Semitic version of the dehumanized Jew has returned, albeit in a new form.
This new form was markedly expressed by some fans of the Dutch football club Vitesse, when they chanted: "Hamas, Hamas / Jews to the gas!" (Which also rhymes in Dutch.)
Football fanatics often chant scandalous rhymes, and it is conceivable that these Vitesse fans simply provoked the opposing camp, the fans of Ajax, sometimes considered a Jewish team. But in the case of this rhyme, the point is: he took aim at Israel and the Holocaust at the same time, easily blurring the difference between the Jewish people and Israel.
It is even more important that the gas chambers were also glorified in parallel with the revival of Hamas.
Until now, the attention of many has been tied to the danger posed by Holocaust denial. However, justifying the gassing of even more Jews by saying: "Hitler was right!" is a much bigger problem. – this is practically a veiled demand for a second holocaust. Instead of hiding its genocidal intent, Hamas proudly shoved it in the faces of anyone who wanted to watch its videos.
Even more ominous than the pogrom is the widespread tendency to condone it. Although the idea of a forgivable pogrom is shared by only a relatively small part of Western society, the lack of empathy for the victims is striking. In recent decades, anti-Israel propaganda and the demonization of the Jewish people have reinforced each other.
Meanwhile, the Middle Eastern version of anti-Jewish sentiment merged almost imperceptibly with classical European anti-Semitism.
It then evolved to fit the emerging identity politics. This is why promoters of identity politics can proclaim an anti-Jewish pogrom as a fine example of decolonialization.
The most striking feature of anti-Jewish ideology today is its connection to identity politics. At first sight, it does not make much sense to turn against the Jewish people on this basis. Identity politics is based on the experience of oppression: apart from its name, it is the politics of victimhood. Since Jews were victims of the Holocaust, Jewish identity should be celebrated by various currents of identity politics.
But instead – precisely because of the moral authority with which the unique experience of the Holocaust bestowed the victim status of the Jewish people – the Jews became a source of resentment among competing identitarian groups.
Many of them used the influence of anti-Zionism as a crowbar to undermine the moral authority of Jewish identity. This is why since the 1990s the question of Palestine has been a central issue of the Western left and identitarian groups. The XX. After the end of the 20th century, the Jewish identity lost a good part of its moral authority among the fans of identity politics.
The post-Holocaust victim status of the Jews has been revised: they are now seen as strong, privileged and aggressors. Jews are seen less and less as historical victims of anti-Semitism, and more as oppressors of a valued victim group - the Palestinians.
Jewish identity has become what the sociologist Erving Goffman characterized as a corrupted identity: it evokes a stigma of shame and contempt. Behind the movement to devalue the moral status of the Jewish people lies the pathologizing of Israel. Israel has become a model of Western oppression, and the Jews of the 21st century. into the all-purpose scapegoats of the 20th century.
The coming together of three different branches of anti-Jewish sentiment – Islamist, traditional European, and identity politics – has given anti-Semitism such a new force that even a fervent defender of human rights like Maggie Chapman is indifferent to the loss of Jewish life.
According to this view, human rights belong to people, but not to babies whose throats were cut by Hamas.
The acceptance of a new, hypermodern version of the dehumanized Jew by a large part of the Western left explains why they are ready to forgive a pogrom. However, unlike the Nazi collaborators, who could claim that "we didn't know", today no one can claim to be unaware of the atrocities of Hamas.
