There are some excuses that just don’t wash. Most of them centre around the simple word, “but”. The infamous, “I’m not a racist, but…”, for example. For years, the “I’m not anti-Semitic, but…” excuse has become just as threadbare. Especially in the context of supporting the odious BDS movement.
BDS — “Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions” — is a campaign targeting the state of Israel which is more-or-less de rigeur on the modern left. Its proponents claim that it’s not anti-Jewish, but anti-Israel. Which is about as nonsensical as claiming to be anti-France, but not anti-French.
Nobody with half a brain is buying it, any more.
Especially not when you spend more than a microsecond’s thought on the BDS movement’s very own Horst Wessel Lied, the revolting, From the River to the Sea. Do any of the fatuous ninnies prattling this phrase know what it means? Worse still, perhaps they do. Because, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea explicitly encompasses the entirety of Israel.
It’s a literal call to erase the Jewish state.
Which is, in fact, not only the stated cause of the BDS movement, but of the monsters who carried out the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, Hamas.
Which brings us to the latest transparent lie, “I don’t support Hamas, but…”
Liars.
If you demand that Israel immediately cease fire, you’re supporting Hamas. If you condemn Israel for its military effort to wipe out Hamas, you’re supporting Hamas. If you happily march alongside people brandishing swastikas and chanting, “Gas the Jews”, you’re supporting Hamas.
And when you support Hamas, however tacitly, this is what you support.
With iPhones rolling, ISIS fighters beheaded their enemies, hurled gay men from buildings, drowned hostages in cages or immolated them in front of cheering mobs. Thousands of Yazidi women were sold into sexual slavery.
But, but… that’s ISIS, not Hamas!
There’s little practical difference. Hamas, like ISIS, is just another violent, barbaric excrescence of what Christopher Hitchens dubbed “Islamofascism” (in a telling parallel to scenes at “pro-Palestine” marches this week, Hitchens noted the fondness for swastika iconography among Islamic extremists; hardly surprising, perhaps, given the Mufti of Palestine’s allegiance to Hitler).
I defy anyone who has seen the bloody horrors perpetrated in Israel by Hamas — like ISIS, often proudly recorded and posted by the butchers for all the world to see — and say that Hamas is not cut from the same bloodstained cloth. The presence of an ISIS flag on the body of at least one Hamas murderer gives the game away.
The Hamas terrorist attacks have taught the world something Israelis have known for a while: that in its methods and its aims Hamas now bears a closer resemblance to ISIS than it does to its forebears in the Palestinian nationalist movement.
Hamas always has done a remarkable job of hiding its true self […]
But whatever claim Hamas once might have made to being the true representative of Palestinian statehood vanished when its fighters slaughtered 250 kids at a music festival. It is at its core an Islamist terror group, not much different from the psychopaths who flocked to Syria to fight under the black banner of ISIS.
Which, by the way, doesn’t mean that it’s not the true representative of Palestinian statehood. Hamas, in fact, showed us in bloodily certain terms what a “Palestinian state” would be like.
It’s a bullshit sophistry to claim that Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people. They voted for Hamas, after all. Nearly a decade later (Hamas having suspended further elections), Palestinians’ favourability toward Hamas only hardened. 2021 polling found that, “Palestinian attitudes have undergone a ‘paradigm shift’ in favour of Hamas”. The majority believed that “Hamas is most deserving of representing and leading the Palestinian people”. Tellingly, in an interview this week, Australia Palestine Advocacy Network President Nasser Mashni refused to condemn Hamas.
Other surveys have found near-universal support for Sharia law among Palestinians, strong support for suicide bombing, overwhelming condemnation of homosexuality, and so on. Less than a third support a two-state solution: meaning that a two-thirds majority favour the wholesale destruction of Israel.
So it is nonsense to argue that Hamas’ interests don’t align with the majority of Palestinians. It’s willfully foolish at best, a gross mendacity at worst, to claim that you support the Palestinian cause but not Hamas.
In the days after the attack on Israel, some in the media were talking openly about getting Hamas spokesmen (you can bet they’ll be men) to explain their actions. In the chaos immediately after the attacks off October 7 this was perhaps understandable.
But as the depth of Hamas’s depravity sinks in – babies murdered, the elderly machinegunned in their homes, teenage girls abducted like some medieval raiding party – this calculus no longer applies […]
After all, if the question journalists wish to ask Hamas is “what do you want?” – all they need do is look to the bloodied streets of Sderot or Be’eri for their answer.
The Australian
But anyone who argues that this is not what the majority of Palestinians want is kidding themselves or trying to pull a fast one on us.
We only had to see the cheering, jeering crowds in Gaza, spitting on the naked body of a dead woman, mutilating the body of an Israeli soldier, or gleefully watching teenage girls burned alive, to see through that polite fiction.
To borrow an old union song: Which Side Are You On?
Too many people on the left have made which side they’re on abundantly clear.
