(JNS) Melanie Phillips - Israel's war of defense against a genocidal enemy is an inflection point in the seismic battle between civilization and barbarism. The West is failing that test. This was illustrated at the Oscars, which featured an attempt to transform Israeli suffering into Israeli oppression by Jonathan Glazer, director of a much-lauded Holocaust movie. He implied that Israelis were like Nazis and that their behavior went against Jewish principles. This is how he described a war caused by the worst atrocities against Jews since the Holocaust and Israel's attempt to ensure that a second Holocaust does not happen. The belief that demonizing Israeli Jews somehow represents Jewish values is a pathology. It is being fed by a venomously distorted presentation of Israelis as child-killers in Gaza that's being ruthlessly pumped out by Western media. Why do so many believe these patent untruths propagated by Hamas? For decades, the Palestinians have accused Israelis of being "Nazis" and committing "genocide" to obscure the fact that their own Holocaust denial runs in tandem with their declared intention to kill every Jew. In total contradiction to its foundational ideals, human rights culture has turned into a vehicle for singling out certain human rights for extinction: The right of the Jewish people to live in their own ancestral homeland. In the 1970s, radical idealists alighted upon "human rights" as a universalizing creed promising to bring about utopia. Judaism is in the way of all universalizing creeds; and so Israel, the particularist Jewish state, had to be dumped. Israel is fighting a desperate battle for its survival. Its people are in a state of ever-deepening trauma, grief and anxiety. Some of their families and friends are still hostages in Gaza, meeting unthinkable fates. The death toll among their conscripted children and grandchildren fighting to defend their country is steadily ticking upwards. They understand that genocidal savages intend to continue their attacks until they have destroyed the Jewish homeland and slaughtered every Jew. In this truly desperate situation, what's even worse is that the "civilized" West is accusing Israelis of the crime of which they are the present and intended victims. That is an unspeakable abandonment of the Jewish people and to the West a source of ineradicable shame. The writer is a columnist for The Times of London.
2024-03-18 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive