"When a lie is inaugurated as the world order" - perhaps the insight expressed in Franz Kafka's novel The Trial was never more relevant than last week, when the UN Special Representative for the Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, accused Israel of genocide in her report "Anatomy of a Genocide", writes the In her article published in Jüdische Allgemeine, Maria Ossowski Neokohn .
Albanese joins the ranks of self-proclaimed Middle East experts who are as alien to empiricism as they are to empathy. Albanese's report ignores what happened on October 7, and in doing so, as a puppet of Hamas, he achieved what the terrorist organization had hoped for.
This disturbing erosion of compassion combined with blindness can be observed throughout the Western world. This began immediately after the massacre, when the media and politicians were alarmed, but the majority of Germans fell into collective silence.
Although 20,000 people demonstrated for Israel in Berlin when Russia invaded Ukraine two years earlier, half a million were outside. Instead of compassion, a terribly abstract concept has become widespread: contextualization. According to this, the massacre must be seen in a "historical-political" context, and this, for example, according to the director of a cultural institution in Berlin, is "very difficult".
As if such a thing were needed to explain the killing of fanatical sadists who massacred, raped and mutilated people of all ages!
What an effort to maintain distance to reject the idea of horror! This call for one-sided contextualization is always accompanied by accusations against Israel, which torments all those who have not yet lost their sympathy for Israel in the constant barrage of horror stories from Gaza. As a member of this rare breed, I allowed myself a thought experiment: What if we had no Jewish friends, if we never visited Israel, and if I never wrote about the country?
What if, as a non-Jew, Judaism was completely foreign to me? In Germany, I would definitely belong to the majority, but I would still be a free, independent woman with a heart and soul who loves music and art.
I strongly recommend reading Hamas's 2017 charter. According to this, women are only meant to raise boys to be warriors and girls to be obedient wives. Music? Dance? Art? Such things are considered the work of the devil, according to Hamas, only Islamic culture builds the soul.
Our Western lust for life is of no value to jihadist fighters.
"Death for God is their greatest desire," reads the charter of Hamas, in which the Jews are followed as the main enemies by all those who do not want to submit to the religious delusions of the Islamists.
How different, by contrast, is Israel, a society in which ultra-Orthodox Jews have as much a place as queer partiers, Arab doctors, skeptical intellectuals—or simply anyone who is a " mensch ."
The massacre has severely shaken this Israel, which should serve as a warning to all people in the free world.
Why is the majority in Germany silent about the fact that Hamas has openly declared its intention to destroy a small country and its people in order to establish an Islamist terror regime there? Why does almost no one mention this context in relation to the massacre and the dangers lurking in the Western world? Why does the horrific root cause of the war in Gaza disappear from the eyes of Western societies? Why is it that left-wing intellectuals focus almost obsessively and exclusively on the problems of the settlers and Netanyahu's radical right-wing coalition partners when explaining the massacre?
Of course, this could be argued - but please, not about the reasons for the massacre and the destruction of Hamas, which is essential for Israel's survival. There is only one context for the Hamas massacre, namely the genocidal plan against Israel and the Islamists' - unfortunately working - strategy of framing the Israeli military response as "genocide against the Palestinians".
That's why Kafka says again: "The longer you hesitate in front of the door, the stranger you become."
It's time to finally open the door to the truth and throw the key into the sea!
The opinion articles do not necessarily reflect the position of the Civilek.info editors.
Cover photo: Francesca Albanese, Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in the Palestinian territories, speaks at a press conference presenting her report at the 53rd session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on July 11, 2023. MTI/EPA/Keystone/Salvatore Di Nolfi
