by Thomas R. Eddlem
The war between Israel and Palestine is clearly a war between good and pure evil.
After all, the self-described “kill-team” of Hamas’ elite storm troopers, the Madinah-Ussah (Holy city god-warriors), were recently found having collected the pinky fingers off the dead children they had killed, and some were captured wearing those fingers as mementos around a necklace.
Violence goes all the way back to Hamas’ founding, back in 1988, when Hamas was responsible for shooting down a passenger airline with 290 people on it, including 66 children. All of the people on the flight were killed. And when asked if he would apologize for the airline downing, the Chairman of Hamas Ismail Haniyeh callously replied: “I will never apologize for Palestine. I don’t even care what the facts are.”
And just this week, various Hamas group leaders said in local Arabic press of all Jewish Israelis that the task of Hamas was to “finish them” in what they called a “religious war.”
Is this not the very definition of pure evil?
Oh, wait…. Never mind.
Hamas didn’t do any of those things described above. All those atrocities were actually the work of the United States government and its officials.
It was US soldiers in Afghanistan that had created a “kill team” which kept the fingers of children they had killed. Madinah-Ussah is my way of saying “Made-in-USA.” And it was US President George H. W. Bush who said “I’ll never apologize for the United States of America. I don’t even care what the facts are,” when asked about the USS Vincennes shooting down an Iranian passenger jet in 1988 with 290 innocent souls on board, including 66 children. And it was Republican Presidential candidate Nikki Haley who said “finish them” to the Israelis about the two million Palestinians in Gaza, more than half of which are children, and Republican Senator Lindsay Graham who called it a “religious war”―both in the last week.
But―especially if you didn’t guess that the atrocities I attributed to Hamas above were false―it should make you think more deeply about only getting one side of an argument, particularly in a war. It’s so easy to spin a very few facts (let alone if they are fakes) into a misleading narrative.
The Roman philosopher Seneca once sagely quipped “A man who makes a decision without listening to both sides is unjust, even if his ruling is a fair one.”
Make no mistake about it; Americans are only getting one side of the Gaza war. Try Google to get Hamas’ website. Google steadfastly refuses to give it to you. You literally can’t get Hamas’ side of the story from any of the Captive Media. The Hamas website by Thursday evening was under an electronic attack, probably by Western (Israeli or US) intelligence agencies, so most people can’t reach it even if they can guess the proper web address.
You won’t even find Hamas’ perspective on Al Jazeera, which is now part of the global Captive Media conglomerate.
The point of this exercise is not to say that the media has been lying to you about the alleged virtue of Israel and the vice of Hamas, and that the reverse is true. That may be the case. Or it’s quite possible that Hamas is a villain, and Israel is the victim. The point is that the American people have no way of knowing without undertaking an extraordinary and time-consuming effort―because of the government-led censorship.
I was able to reach the Hamas web page Wednesday night (Oct. 11), and found that they do deny committing atrocities against civilians in Israel. They may be lying, and it’s likely their soldiers committed some kind of atrocities (with or without leadership sanction) in the war. But they’re not loudly proclaiming the death of all Jews and “infidels,” like some of the worst propagandists in Western media claim.
Moreover, it’s more than clear the Israelis have committed some atrocities in their prosecution of the war.
Wars tend to do that. Every single war.
It’s clear that the interest of Israel is to paint Hamas as the epitome of evil, a small radical group that struck innocents without a legitimate complaint. At least part of that narrative is clearly far from reality. Hamas is the majority political party of Palestinians in Gaza and on the West Bank, according to the most recent national and local elections. It’s not a small group. They have―or at least until recently had―broad support among Palestinians. Perhaps more revealingly, Israeli President Netanyahu was campaigning for more funding for Hamas as recently as 2019, just four years ago. And Israel’s policy for nearly two decades was to fund Hamas directly. According to the Times of Israel:
“According to various reports, Netanyahu made a similar point at a Likud faction meeting in early 2019, when he was quoted as saying that those who oppose a Palestinian state should support the transfer of funds to Gaza, because maintaining the separation between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza would prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.”
In fact, Hamas was a creation of the Israeli security state, as a religious counterweight against the secular then-majority political party Fatah that sought an independent Palestinian state. Hamas got its start as a political party, not an organ of terror, in protest against an Israeli government that wouldn’t grant Palestinians self-rule. One might ask:
If Hamas is by definition a terrorist organization, and the Israeli state funded Hamas for decades and as recently as four years ago, can you name one major funder of terrorism in the world?
The point here is not to villainize Israel (nor Hamas), as both will have committed war crimes by the time this war is over.
This column is about censorship, and also, how anti-Semitism spreads. The US political establishment, leaning heavily on BigTech and the legacy Captive Media, has censored one side of the debate in the war under the guise of fighting anti-Jewish sentiment and terrorism.
But the question must be asked, even independent of the fact that this is clearly contrary to the First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech and press: Is it actually fighting anti-Semitism?
Neo-Nazis heavily recruit using a fake quote attributed to the French philosopher Voltaire (written by Neo-Nazis): “To determine the true rulers of any society, all you must do is ask yourself this question: Who is it that I am not permitted to criticize?”
Can we really dispel the idea that the Jews don’t run the world when all criticism―even an impurely positive commentary on the self-described “Jewish state”―is scrubbed from the Internet? Isn’t that censorship just playing directly into the well-established narrative of the real anti-Semites?
Moreover, if alleged “anti-Semites” are censored on social media, fired from their jobs and denied the means of feeding their families (as some Harvard students have recently been threatened with for circulating an imperfect but emphatically not anti-Semitic petition), will this turn their hearts toward the light? Or will it vindicate and nurture their worst and most anti-Semitic thoughts? Wouldn’t it drive them further, and ever-deeper, into an anti-Semitic echo chamber?
My experience over several decades of observation is that the historical record is entirely bereft of even a single anecdotal conversion from anti-Semitism toward a sort of cosmopolitan liberalism (of the classical kind, for those Republicans reading this blog post).
Certainly the rhetoric of those entities (both government and nominally private) engaging in and cheerleading censorship is not one of trumpeting their massive success in changing people’s hearts. Rather, their public pronouncements have been limited to empty virtue signaling, finger-wagging, and punishing the “sinner” for his or her alleged crimes of hating Jews or the “Jewish state” (or racism, homophobia, etc.).
By way of contrast, Daryl Davis―a mere musician―has gotten more than 200 Ku Klux Klansmen to retire their robes by engaging with them and genuinely befriending them. Can the paid professionals from the Anti-Defamation League claim such success in the last three decades? The Southern Poverty Law Center?
Again, there appears to be zero success in that regard from these organizations, or at the very least no success in conversions by means of social ostracism. And both document ever-larger numbers of anti-Semitic incidents in their reports nationally as engagement becomes less socially practical.
To me, it seems that this “cancel culture” tactic seems to be the most efficient means of spreading anti-Semitism.
By this measure, Google and the rest of BigTech may have created the world’s largest perpetual anti-Semitism factory.
From the point of view of the American Deep State, that may be part of the plan, or at least a known but acceptable side effect of its most highly desired result. Like Netanyahu’s plan to split Palestinians between the Fatah leader over at the West Bank and the Hamas masses, it certainly distracts people from criticism of government overreach by pitting Americans against each other over foreign events that have no direct impact on direct relations among American citizens. Solidarity against censorship and surveillance by the American people can now be disassembled on the basis of their position on a foreign war that has no relationship to American national security.
Even if the perpetual anti-Semitism factory is not something that has been planned, how would it look differently if it had been planned?