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No, Israel Isn't Deliberately Killing Children in Gaza

(Spectator-UK) Brendan O'Neill - Children in Gaza are dying in this ghastly war Hamas started with its pogrom against the Jewish state on Oct. 7, 2023. Yet there's something new and strange in the discussion of child suffering in Gaza. In this war, the agony of the guiltless ones is not seen as the accidental byproduct of the fierce fighting. No, it's seen as intentional, calculated, an actual war aim of the Jewish nation. This is the first war I can remember where there's been such a feverish urge to prove that kids are not just dying but are being murdered. Podcasts bristle with chatter about Israel's bloodlust for innocent life. A high-ranking UNICEF official described Israel's war as a "war on children." Even pre-Oct. 7, Israel was talked about as a nation that positively relishes child death. We need to talk about the unusualness of all this. Even the hippies who chanted "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" - referring to Lyndon B. Johnson's handling of the Vietnam War - did not think the president was sending troops for the express purpose of bumping off Vietnamese kids. But apparently Israel kills kids not in error but by design. What is driving this obsession? What motors this double standard whereby "we" kill kids by mistake but "they" do it on purpose? To my mind, the echoes of past libels against Jews are deafening now. The targeting of the Jewish nation as an infanticidal nation grossly mimics the old blood libel of medieval Christians singling out the Jewish people as a child-sacrificing people. Is it antisemitic to say the Jewish State, unique among the family of nations, hunts kids down so that it might spill their blood and exterminate their kind? It kind of is. Is it antisemitic to feverishly obsess over Israel, to brand it as uniquely murderous, and to judge it by a different standard to every other state? Honestly, yes.
2024-10-18 00:00:00
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