"Everyone,” U.S. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, “is entitled to their own opinions but not their own facts.” Unfortunately, when it comes to Israel, facts are often in short supply. Recent allegations against the Jewish state display little respect for the truth and are long on innuendo and, in many instances, antisemitism.
Take, for example, The New York Times. On July 15, the newspaper ran an op-ed titled “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know Genocide When I See It,” accusing Israel of genocide in the Gaza Strip. In a lengthy guest essay, Omer Bartov asserts that Israel is guilty of the crime, but he relies on Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist group, for evidence. Mr. Bartov later made his case on National Public Radio.
Like many in the media, Mr. Bartov relies on casualty statistics provided by the Gaza Health Ministry, a Hamas-controlled entity with a clear incentive to inflate numbers and a long history of doing precisely that. Indeed, according to the “Health Ministry,” no “enemy combatants” are being killed in Israel’s war against Iranian proxies in Gaza. Rather, everyone is a civilian. This is at odds with statements from the terrorist group itself and should be self-discrediting.
It’s revealing that many in the media don’t think so.
Of course civilians are tragically dying in Gaza, and this is just as Hamas would have it. As Doug Feith, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a former U.S. undersecretary of defense, pointed out at the war’s start: Hamas is employing a strategy of “human sacrifice.” The terrorist organization intentionally stores its operatives and munitions in public dwellings such as schools, houses, United Nations buildings and hospitals. Indeed, footage shows them doing so and captured terrorists have detailed the tactics in their interrogations.
“Hamas’ strategy,” Mr. Feith notes, “is innovative in the worst way.” It is, he points out, “unprecedented for a party to adopt a war strategy to maximize civilian deaths on its own side.” Hamas counts on naive academics and the legacy media to uncritically parrot its claims. Regrettably, their hopes are often fulfilled. Many of the people who portray themselves as averse to civilian casualties are themselves incentivizing Hamas to continue its horrors.
These weren’t the only problematic sources Mr. Bartov used to buttress his argument. As Gilead Ini, a senior research analyst for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA), pointed out, the author treats Francesca Albanese as credible. On paper, Ms. Albanese is the special U.N. rapporteur on human rights “in the occupied Palestinian territories.”
Yet as has been documented, Ms. Albanese has, among other things, engaged in rape denial, falsely portrayed herself as a lawyer and expressed what the Biden administration called “reprehensible and antisemitic rhetoric.” The U.S. recently sanctioned Ms. Albanese, citing her “unabashed antisemitism, expressed support for terrorism, and open contempt for the United States, Israel, and the West.”
All this should discredit Ms. Albanese, but for some in the press, it seems to serve instead as a recommendation. Indeed, Reuters misleadingly claimed that Ms. Albanese was sanctioned merely for “unfair criticism of Israel.” That’s one way to put it.
Unfortunately, the United Nations, The New York Times and Hamas aren’t the only ones to accuse Israel of “genocide.” The Washington Post’s Shadi Hamid and Karen Attiah have leveled that charge. Ms. Attiah revealingly did so before Israel even fully commenced military operations in Gaza.
All give Hamas a pass. All fail to ask why Hamas has built hundreds of miles of heavily fortified, often elaborate underground tunnels but has never once built a bomb shelter. The reason, of course, is simple: Hamas wants Gaza civilians to die.
The claims of genocide are risible, but they are also revealing.
Lavrentiy Beria, the feared Soviet spy chief, allegedly said: “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.” The “evidence” in this case, laundered Hamas propaganda, is being planted for a reason. It’s not a coincidence that the world’s sole Jewish state is frequently accused of genocide. As the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance noted, blaming Israel for a crime that was infamously perpetrated against the Jewish people is but an attempt to “draw comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” and is intrinsically antisemitic. It is also nothing new.
In a March 4, 1961, press conference, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, a Nazi collaborator and the founding father of Palestinian nationalism, asserted that “what the Jews have done” in Israel “is similar to what the Nazis did to them in Germany.” Al-Husseini worked with the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is an offshoot, to kill Jews en masse. He considered the architect of the Final Solution, Adolf Eichmann, to be the Arabs’ “best friend” and, in a personal face-to-face meeting with Adolf Hitler, sought the fuhrer’s cooperation in killing Jews in the Middle East.
In short: The libel of genocide is, in every sense, an act of projection. It is meant to constrain Jewish self-defense from those who seek their destruction.
Ironically, less than a day after The New York Times essay appeared, Israel carried out strikes in Syria in protest of the persecution of the ethnic Druze minority living there. Alone among Middle Eastern nations, Israel has shown that it is an advocate of and a haven for the many persecuted minorities in the region. Indeed, Israel has a sizable population of Druze serving with distinction and honor in the military and elsewhere. This speaks to a time not too long ago when the Middle East was more diverse, home to many Christians, Jews, Circassians and others.
Less than 100 years ago, more than one-fourth of Baghdad residents were Jewish. These numbers dwindled thanks to systemic persecution and the efforts of Al-Husseini and his followers.
Regrettably, many seek to maintain the status quo of persecution, indulging in false and inflammatory libels in the process.
