Salvation is From the Jews. A review of 'On Democracies and Death Cults' by Douglas Murray.

The problem with the Western church is that it's too rational. It doesn't realize when it's being demonised.

Australian Christians, this post is for you. 

What has upset me most about this whole, horrible war between Israel and Hamas has been your response. You do not recognise spiritual warfare. You claim to be Bible-believing, except when it comes to what the Bible says about Israel. You claim to be godly, but on the topic of Israel you are worldly. Since the invasion of Israel by Hamas on October 7th 2023, a beautiful old friend of mine has assured me that she trusts the ABC to report the conflict, and I fancy that my many Christian friends who lay the blame for Palestinian suffering at Israel's door, do too. 

But the ABC and SBS have proved themselves as effective propaganda machines as the media of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Their narrative from the beginning has been that Israel is always the aggressor and the Palestinians are always the victims and they will neither publish nor give air time to alternate points of view. I've read dozens of war books that tell the same story of carnage as On Democracies and Death Cults by Douglas Murray and he contradicts our Australian media as effectively as light dispels the darkness. It seems to me that he gives a straightforward account of the conflict based on his observations and witness statements. 

I admire his composure. Perhaps it's my Yugoslav genes, no doubt it is the stirring of the Holy Spirit as well, but I cannot remain calm while reading about the violence of Hamas towards their own people. These are people for whom Christ died.

So, Australian Christians, you can discuss who's to blame for the casualties in Gaza or who owns the land until the cows come home but, if you claim to believe the Bible, then you must first address the following points.

Israel is part of God's plan for the salvation of the world. Jesus himself said that salvation is through the Jews (John 4: 22) and their involvement is ongoing. Jesus was born 'to be a light for revelation to the gentiles and glory to [his] people Israel. [He was] destined for the falling and rising of many in Israel ( Luke 2:32 and 34)'. He remains the Lion of Judah (Rev 5:5) and cannot be separated from his Jewish roots. Romans 11, furthermore, reminds Christians that Israel is the root onto which they are grafted and not merely one of the world's three monotheistic religions, as we so often hear. God promised to restore Israel to His land not once (Ezekiel 36) but twice (Isaiah 11:11) and to watch over her like a shepherd (Jeremiah 31:10).

This is why every foreign army that has tried to conquer Israel in modern times has failed, despite overwhelming superiority in numbers and arms. In 1948 'the leaders of the Arab nations publicly declared their intention to annihilate the newborn Jewish state and to sweep the Jews into the sea' (1). The defeat that followed, of 50 million Arabs by just 650,000 Jews, should stand as a warning to Christians to choose carefully which side they are on today, the Australian media's side or God's, the ones that curse Israel or those who bless it (Genesis 12:3).

Despite the clarity of the 1948 Arab warning and despite what Ayaan Hirsi Ali has so succinctly expressed - that, if you believe Mohammed and the Koran, the State of Israel cannot be allowed to exist - Douglas Murray relates how the Western world has come to support a new version of antisemitism churned out by the propaganda moguls of Qatar, Al Jazeera and their fellow jihadists, and the settler colonial theory created by Beirut intellectuals in the 1920's. The Palestine Liberation Organization even became fashionable amongst 'Western celebrities and intellectuals.'

'In 1977 the British-born, Oscar winning actress Vanessa Redgrave even made sure to have herself filmed dancing around a campfire with the PLO, waving a Kalashnikov rifle' (p145).

Thus, the West, purporting to be rational, looks askance at the very mention of Israel and supports instead a fictional Palestine that has never existed. The word Palestine was first used by the Greek historian Herodotus. Its meaning in Greek, 'composed of wrestlers', bears a striking resemblance to the Hebrew meaning of Israel, 'wrestles with God'. Being the bridge between Africa, Europe and Asia, Israel has been invaded countless times, and before the twentieth century was in a very degraded state with a small population of various ethnicities. It would take another article to discuss where much of the present Arab population has come from.

On Democracies and Death Cults has been a best seller. In the six months since it was published there have been 3936 ratings and 466 reviews on Goodreads alone, yet no major newspaper has reviewed it, and we have already established why. Murray's observation about Hamas and not Israel being the tormentor of the Palestinians doesn't fit their narrative.

What does Murray tell Christians about how Hamas, who were elected into government in 2006, cares for its citizens?  

'In the 140 square miles of Gaza, Hamas spent its years in power constructing over 350 miles of tunnels, with around 6000 different tunnel entrances. Many of these were hidden in civilians houses, mosques, hospitals and other non-military buildings...By two months into the war, [the] estimate was that somewhere between every two or three civilian homes in Gaza had military weapons including AK-47's, grenades, and rocket launchers, or tunnel entrances in them.' (pp172/3)

'Hamas official Moussa Abu Marzouk was asked whether ordinary Gazan civilians would be able to shelter in the tunnels. "These tunnels", he explained, "are meant to protect us from the aeroplanes. We are fighting from inside the tunnels. " Besides, he went on, the lives of the people of Gaza were the responsibility of the UN, not Hamas.'  (p229)  

'A month after [the October 7th massacre], in the second week of the Israeli ground operation,' Murray visited Gaza. 'At this point in the conflict, the Israelis had set up a border between the north and south of the Gaza Strip. They had messaged the civilian population of the north...telling them to make their way south... Just a day earlier, video had emerged from up the highway where the road was strewn with the bodies of Gazan civilians shot by Hamas for trying to make their way south.' (p109/10)

'By the start of the 2023 war the international community had made every Hamas leader into a billionaire. By then Ismail Haniyeh, Moussa Abu Marzouk and Khaled Mashal were estimated to have a combined worth of some $11 billion. While claiming that their people were living in a poverty-stricken concentration camp, these leaders lived in luxury hotels and penthouses in Qatar.'  (p169) 

But that's not what upsets me the most, because it is the usual sad circus of power, corruption and war. The most dismay I feel at Hamas is for teaching pre-schoolers to hate and taking children on summer camps to learn how to kill Jews.

'As the historian of antisemitism looks back over the millennia of horrors he has recorded,' writes Edward Flannery in The Anguish of the Jews (2), 'an inescapable conclusion emerges: antisemitism is the longest and deepest hatred of human history.' Yet 'God's plan of peace and blessing for all nations can never come to completion until both Israel and Jerusalem are restored (3).' Therefore, can we ask as Christians, what does the Bible say? The standard answer, with which I agree, is that Satan doesn't want the world to be saved so he persecutes the Jews because they are part of God's plan for salvation. The 12th and 13th chapters of Revelation, where this is found, are either enlightening or horrific, depending on how you look at them. Basically they say that Satan was angry with Israel for birthing the Messiah and that's why he persecutes her. After all, Jesus Christ came to 'destroy the works of the devil' (1 John 3: 8). But Satan has deceived the whole world (12:9), and even conquered Christians (13:7). Douglas Murray writes about the author Gitta Sereny, 'who spent her life studying evil...I remembered something Sereny had said towards the end of her life: she had come to the conclusion that evil is a force that sometimes seems to just descend on the world.' (p 218)

Now you may scoff all you like, but what sense does it make for Christians to ignore the Bible and believe instead a media who have declared from the start that they will only publish a false narrative?

Oh, and Mr Murray, concerning Death Cults, here's a Bible verse for your book, Isaiah 28:17-18, 'I will sweep away the refuge of lies...your covenant with death will be annulled and your agreement with the place of the dead will not stand.'

References

1. Shaping History Through Prayer and Fasting,  Derek Prince 1973 Whitaker House.

2. The Anguish of the Jews, Edward Flannery 1965 Paulist Press.

3. Appointment in Jerusalem, Derek Prince for Lydia Prince. 1975 Whitaker House.

Israel, Palestine and the Australian media. Review of 'My Life as a Jew' by Michael Gawenda.

 

Has anyone read Why the Germans, Why the Jews? by Götz Ali? If you haven’t read it, you need to before reading My Life as a Jew. 

Why the Germans, Why the Jews? charts the normalization of intellectual antisemitism in Germany in the decades before World War 2 which facilitated the Holocaust. A similar normalization has been happening in literary, journalistic, educational and artistic circles across Australia, not forgetting the Labor left and the Greens. It is the hatred of an ethnic minority, a secularized diabolism (1), and one that I feel is gradually building up. 

My Life as a Jew is a fine book, personal and in places deeply harrowing. It is easy to read and I found the Yiddish culture fascinating. I devoured the whole lot in about eight hours from one afternoon to the next morning. 

In the days of my innocence, I used to wonder how the Australian media could justify publishing press releases from the Gaza Ministry of Health, because isn't that rather like reporting on the Battle of Britain by sourcing your information from Nazi Germany? Well, after Chapter One, I don't wonder anymore.

The chapter describes the presuppositions regarding Israel and Palestine that members of the Australian media are expected to hold and how these had been reinforced just in time for the October 7th 2023 attacks on Israel by Hamas terrorists. Two years earlier, a booklet was commissioned for Monash University Publishing. Written by John Lyons, at the time the ABC senior news executive, it was a rant against the Israel lobby in Australia. Before the booklet was commissioned, 400 Australian media personnel signed a letter relating to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

Gawenda continues: 

What this letter calls for, what it urges editors and executive producers to do, is refuse space and a voice to journalists and others who do not accept the black-and-white position of the signatories to this letter - that Israel is the villain that launches savage and unprovoked attacks on the Palestinian people in Gaza, on the powerless and the helpless victims of Israeli villainy.

What does it mean that journalists and media workers who work for the ABC and SBS signed the letter?

In the more political chapters of the book (and I say this to distinguish them from the personal ones in which a bias is less evident), Michael Gawenda too writes about the Israel and Palestine conflict from a similar starting point to these journalists - that Israel is the tyrant. Yet, there is so much more to be understood if you are a nobody like me and can write whatever you like without having to fend off attacks by an irate literary community. 

As a Christian, I say that antisemitism exists because, in the words of Jesus: ‘Salvation is from the Jews’. This is the reason, no doubt, that the Koran and the Hadith dismantle anything about Judaism and Christianity that relate to God’s plan for the salvation of a troubled world, even to threatening hell fire for a Muslim who believes that the Messiah is the son of Mary. (The many kind and motherly Muslim women I have met are unaware of this, I’m sure.) Edward Flannery (1) insists that the conflict cannot be understood without a knowledge of the Koran and this belief is echoed in the works of Richard Landes, Ayann Hirsi Ali, Narbeel Qureshi and Derek Prince among many others. I have read the relevant verses in the Koran and they are not encouraging. If imams continue to preach what it says about Jews and Muslims, then there will never be peace in the Middle East. 

If you’re an atheist, as I’m told journalists are, then what do you do with the salvation question? How do you explain the infiltration of the Jewish problem into all levels of our society? 

Meanwhile, the catastrophic effects of British colonialism in the Middle East are forgotten or ignored. Churchill splitting Kurdistan between three countries, making the Kurds an ethnic minority in their own land and opening the path to their persecution. British oil exploration and exploitation in the Middle East between 1908 and WW2. The British Mandate of Palestine. The British Mandate of Mesopotamia. Britain creating Iraq. Churchill giving 75% of its Palestine Mandate to create Transjordan to please the Arabs and protect British oil supplies. The UN creating Israel out of the dregs of what remained amidst threats of Arab oil embargoes. Britain abstaining from the vote to partition Palestine in 1947. Britain arming the Arabs in the Jewish war of Independence.

Why obsess over Israel? 

Because religion is at the heart of the matter and this is a stumbling block for atheists who lump all religions into the one basket, toss it in the trash and look for a logical, Western solution to the problem. Not finding any, they blame Israel, and I doubt whether this attitude is actually helping the people of Gaza. To quote Hamza Howidy whose article is listed below, 'If their heart bleeds for Gaza, why are they not outraged at all of the violence that Gazans face—including the violence of Hamas? The sad truth is, when Israelis aren't involved, no one is interested in advocating for the Palestinian rights they claim to care about so deeply.'

Some knowledge of the history of nineteenth and twentieth century Palestine might help Australian journalists. They could discover what Palestine was once like by reading about the famous visit of Mark Twain in 1867 The Innocents Abroad, or research the origin of the term Al Nakba (the catastrophe) in Daniel Szeftel’s A History of the ‘Settler Colonialism’ charge. They could pinpoint who has actually lived in Palestine during the last century, by reading The Smoking Gun: Arab immigration into Palestine, 1922 to 1931 by Fred M. Gottheil. Richard Landes might explain to them how eliminating Israel will restore the honour of Islam that its foundation has shamed in Why the Arab World is lost in an emotional nakba. And how we keep it there. Or they could be really radical and discover how the Palestinians feel themselves in Why Does the Media Ignore Hamas' Crimes Against Palestinians? by Hamza Howidy. 

But back to the book.

The definitions of an anti-Zionist, and even of a Jew, that consumed Gawenda did not consume me, but I was quite rivetted by his observations of what is antisemitism and what it isn't according to the judgements of contemporary society. Fueled by the media, we are directed to the conclusion 'that it is not antisemitic to compare Israelis to Nazis', page 103. 

Those of us who are old enough to remember Yasser Arafat might find page 201 as strange as I did. I thought Gawenda was harsh to blame Israel for 'some of' the suffering of the Palestinians without mention of either Arafat or Hamas. In 2004 as Arafat lay dying, Ed O'Loughlin of the Sydney Morning Herald wrote about 'the corrupt and self-serving political elite which has prospered from the donor-funded Palestinian Authority while the common people suffer economic and political strangulation under occupation.' (I have the clipping.) It should be remembered that Gaza and the West Bank are not modern welfare states, and that the governments who profess to lead them can best be compared to the House of Lords at the time of the First Fleet. 

I was moved by the unfortunate employee of the Anne Frank Museum who was asked to replace his kippeh with a baseball cap. Gawenda pours vitriol on those who would de-Jewify the Holocaust, as this example illustrates, transforming 'it into a universal metaphor for the capacity of human beings to do terrible things to other human beings', page 94. He criticizes Hollywood and popular Auschwitz literature, rightly so as the child of Holocaust survivors, born in a Displaced Persons camp in Austria. (I must add, Mr Gawenda, that I have read Exodus by Leon Uris twice, but I have never seen the movie.) 

As I left the supermarket yesterday morning with a loaded bag and my library copy of My Life as a Jew sitting under the bananas, a woman handed me a pro-Palestinian flyer. ‘No, thank you,’ I said. ‘I pray for Israel, and also for the people of Gaza and an end to the hostilities.’ She just stared at me as if she couldn’t understand my attitude.

1 The Anguish of the Jews, Flannery E.   Cambridge University Press 1985.

Margaret Walker - War in the Balkans: The Anguish of the Jews -- book review and reflections

 

The Anguish of the Jews -- book review and reflections

‘The charge is pressed that the Zionist enemy has stolen Arab land, that they are duplicates of the Nazis and that their intent against Arabs is genocidal…A ubiquitous myth has taken root: an alien people (the Jews) have expelled an indigenous people (the Arabs) from their homes, forcing them to fester in poverty on the borders of their own homeland. The myth, incredibly, has been swallowed whole by many otherwise intelligent and fair-minded people without the least effort to verify any part of it…There are many who attribute Arab antisemitism exclusively to the present Arab-Israeli conflict. Actually, its roots run much deeper, going back through Arab and Islamic history to the Koran itself from which a twofold principle can be distilled: that the dhimmis (Jews and Christians) are not to dominate Muslims but be dominated by them, and that they are to be kept in a degraded state.’

Edward Flannery, the Anguish of the Jews, 1965.

If I said that this work was a resource to every expression of antisemitism in history, I would not be far from the truth. Its research is exhaustive and gives some understanding of why antisemitism seems to be the default setting of every age. I have added it to my blog War in the Balkans because of the Holocaust of the Jews in Croatia and Serbia during World War 2, and I will ask the question: to what extent can antisemitism be held accountable for the world’s response to the present Israeli Hamas conflict?

Edward Flannery was an American Catholic priest who published the work in 1965. On the subject of antisemitism, he doesn’t mince words. ‘The vast majority of Christians…are all but totally ignorant of…the immense suffering of Jews throughout the Christian era... because the antisemitic record does not appear in history books.’

I am a Christian and it grieves me to read that antisemitism, although present in ancient Rome and Ptolemaic Egypt (Maccabees 1 and 2), was cemented throughout the fourth century of the Christian era and into the early fifth century. It stemmed from ‘the full flowering of that theology which laid Jewish miseries to divine punishment to Christ’s crucifixion’. Neglecting St Paul’s exposition on God’s election and salvation of Israel in Romans 9 -11, the church fathers ‘turned upon the synagogue with the greatest vigour’. Indeed, the language of St John Chrysostom against the Jews reminds one of Hitler. Only St Augustine was faithful to St Paul. ‘Christians,’ he wrote, ‘have a duty to love Jews and to lead them to Christ,’ but ‘he is at the same time at a loss to understand their unbelief, this animosity towards Christians, and their unending misfortunes.’

During this same century, the centre of the Talmud was established in Babylonia and ‘It was forgotten or ignored that the Jewish dispersion began many centuries before Christ and that Palestine was never completely emptied of Jews.’

At this time, violence was perpetrated by both sides and some countries showed less tolerance than others. In Rome Pope Gregory the Great (540-604) respected the legal rights of Jews and ‘the Pauline teaching of special affection for Israel’. Under the Emperor Justinian (483-565), however, who reigned from Constantinople, rules restricting Jewish life were passed with liberality: what Jews could own, where they could be seen, the professions from which they were barred, where synagogues could be open or closed and where Judaism was outlawed.

From 1096, matters deteriorated in Germany, France, Austria and England, as the first Crusaders, eager to free the Holy Land from the Muslims, turned first upon European Jews. In what the author refers to as the ‘the superstitious zealotry of the mob’, Jews were offered baptism or death, and thus many were slaughtered. ‘From January to July of 1096 it is estimated that up to 10,000 died, probably one fourth to one third of the Jewish population of Germany and Northern France at that time.’ Once the Crusaders arrived in the Holy Land, the slaughter continued. ‘In 1099 at journey’s end in Jerusalem the soldiers of Godfrey de Bouillon found the Jews assembled in a synagogue and set it ablaze.’

With the onslaught of the Second Crusade in 1147, St Bernard was forced to condemn further antisemitism in Europe by again recalling St Paul. “Who is this man that he should make out [St Paul] to be a liar and render void the treasure of Christ’s love and pity?” In 1272 following incidences in the Rhineland and Bavaria, Pope Gregory X forbade forced baptisms and violence. Many Jews migrated to Palestine and, of those who remained, 100,000 throughout Germany and Austria were killed by mobs stirred up by noblemen.

The development of the Jews as usurers and money lenders was an outcome of the laws restricting their lives, and brought its own resentment from Christians. ‘By the end of the thirteenth century, Jews were expelled from France, England and most of Germany. In almost all cases, the expulsions found the origin in the business of usury.’ Yet the list of things they were accused of is a tribute to the Mediaeval imagination and the zealous peasant jumped at any excuse for murder and for the widespread burning of the Talmud. Jews were even blamed for the Black Death (1347-50). ‘Apparently, no enormity was too great to lay at the door of the Jews.’ In a chilling foretaste of the twentieth century, ‘the massacres were greatest in Germany’ and ‘by the end of the fifteenth century no more than three or four German cities still harboured a Jewish population… Most left Germany for Poland or Lithuania.’ Upon their failure to accept his teaching, Martin Luther also turned his fury against the Jews the following century.

Popes and Christian leaders condemned the atrocities. In 1418 Martin V ‘issued a decree which guaranteed protection [for the Jews] of their lives, rites, privileges and festivals [and] forbade forced baptism.’ St Bernadinus of Sienna (1380-1444) wrote, “As to the Jews, I say here what I say elsewhere: no one who has concern for his soul can injure the Jews, whether it be their persons or their faculties, or in any other way, for even to Jews, Christian piety and love must be shown since they possess a human nature.”

Only in Rome were the Jews never persecuted from the fall of the Western Empire until the close of the sixteenth century. ‘Jewish-Christian relations were intimate’ even to permitting intermarriage. Northern Italy had ample wealth and plenty of Christian usurers without them and they mostly benefitted from the friendliness of the Popes.

Until the end of the fourteenth century Jews also flourished in Spain, when the power and wealth attained by a few and their relationships with the royal family eventually provoked a downward spiral of resentment and persecution. 50,000 perished in a single massacre and worse was to come. In the wake of the Reconquista came an intense desire to strengthen the Christian state, and a conversion campaign was aimed at the Jews. Antisemitism against both Jews and converted Jews increased over the course of the fifteenth century and contained a strong racist element. However, the biggest problem was the ‘compromisers’, those Jews who by nominally accepting Christianity grew to power and wealth by having, as it is said, a foot in both camps.

Enter the Spanish Inquisition.

‘In 1479…Ferdinand and Isabella untied the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon’ and in 1483 the ‘fanatical Torquemada was appointed Inquisitor General.’ He was the most brutal and the most feared inquisitor and his job was to ‘ferret out’ Jews. Beginning with the dodgy converts, he continued to all the other Jews in Spain. ‘In 1492 the monarchs issued the fatal decree. All Jews must leave the realm by July 30th under penalty of death’. 300,00 departed.

Writing in the twelfth century, Peter Abelard nevertheless sums up the entire Middle Ages. ‘To believe that the fortitude of the Jews in suffering would be unrewarded was to declare that God was cruel. No nation has ever suffered so much for God.’

The Age of the Jewish Ghetto in Europe commenced in the seventeenth century and many Jews moved east to Palestine, the Balkans, Turkey or Poland where life was safer. However, a series of attacks upon Polish Jews by Russians, Cossaks and Swedes during one decade in the second half of the seventeenth century killed between 100,000 and 500,000 Jews and destroyed 700 Jewish communities. ‘With the exception of the Nazi period…the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries constituted the [lowest point] of post-Biblical Jewish history.’

In France, the Enlightenment and the change in ideas swept in by the French Revolution brought some measure of emancipation at the end of the eighteenth century, but the racist antisemitism present in Prussia is considered to be the beginnings of Nazi antisemitism. (Note the difference between religious antisemitism and racist antisemitism.) ‘From this point Germany became the undisputed cultural centre of antisemitism and the source of an endless stream of antisemitic books and pamphlets.’ The German-born Karl Marx is an example of a Jewish antisemite.

As religious faith [in Europe] declined… and the spirit of rationalism and scepticism rose, the need to justify the segregation [of the Jews] in purely secular terms grew…If the plight of the Jews did not stem from the crucifixion, it came from themselves, their ethnic make up; Jews, in a word, were innately perverse.’

Here begins a section marked ‘rationalistic antisemitism’ in which the French writer Voltaire stresses the rationalist grounds of his ‘utter contempt’ for the Jews and Judaism. ‘Jews are… “the most imbecile people on the face of the earth, enemies of mankind, a people most obtuse, cruel and absurd, whose history is disgusting and abominable.”’ His ideas were echoed by the German philosophers Fichte, Hegel, Herder, Schleiermacher and Harnack, and studied later by Hitler.

Under the final two Czars, government-approved pogroms against Russian Jews shocked the world and led to the immigration of over a million. Not content with this, Russia published The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a piece of badly-written nonsense blaming the Jews for every crime in the universe. Nevertheless, it was well-received and translated into the major European languages and Arabic. ‘When otherwise brilliant minds are so deceived and…even after irrefragable disproof, persist in believing, we are at grips with a collective psychosis, with a will to hate and destroy well beyond the pale of human rationality…a secularized diabolism.’

Thus ended the nineteenth century and we all know what happened in the twentieth.

 

A REFLECTION ON THE OCTOBER 7th ATTACKS ON ISRAEL AND THE PRESENT CONFLICT IN GAZA

In the middle of January 2024, I witnessed Marxist groups outside Newtown railway station in Sydney ardently collecting pro-Palestinian signatures. As there has always a Jewish presence in Palestine, why not collect pro-Israeli signatures, I wondered. It is antisemitism that governs the choice. Why do the Federal Greens refuse to condemn the Hamas attacks of October 7th? Why is the NSW Teachers Federation openly pro-Palestinian? Why does Sydney’s art and literary scene consider it appropriate to simplify the present complex situation in Palestine to Israeli attacks on Gazan children? Why are the two sides unequally reported in the media?

Because ‘hatred of Jews [is] a serious social and ethical problem,’ concludes Edward Flannery, and the Australians referred to above are following the tradition of mob mentality outlined in his book. History has established a culture in which it is acceptable to disbelieve Jews.

As an example, regarding the brutal Hamas rapes of Israeli women on October 7th 2023, ‘bone-chilling horrors – such as repeated gang rapes that were so brutal they left women and girls with broken pelvises and mutilated genitals’, I quote from Human rights groups’ hypocrisy on Hamas rape - opinion - The Jerusalem Post (jpost.com) 25th December 2023.

‘Amnesty International so far has issued 29 press releases entirely or mostly about Gaza since October 7. They, too, have been filled with baseless allegations about Israeli murders, “apartheid,” and the like. To this day, Amnesty still has not issued any statement about the Hamas rapes.’

And another article from Microsoft Why are feminists silent on Hamas's use of rape as a weapon of war? (msn.com) 20th January 2024.

‘The denial of widespread, preplanned mass rape and sexual violence on October 7 must therefore be treated with the same revulsion as Holocaust denial. Hamas has denied that the rapes occurred, despite overwhelming evidence. Speak up, an Egypt-based feminist initiative, inconceivably has launched a campaign to discredit Israeli victims, with coalition groups joining across the Middle East and a letter condemning The New York Times investigation into sexual violence by Hamas. Speak up boasts over 68,000 followers on X (formerly Twitter), and 250,000 Facebook members. Turkish public broadcasting has published an article claiming to debunk “outlandish Israeli claims of rape.” Unbelievably, their efforts have found sympathetic ears in Western academia…Ingrained antisemitism on the extreme Left leads to this moral failure.’

How else can we explain it?

Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994. ‘He and the Israeli leaders Peres and Rabin received the Peace Prize for having opted for the olive branch by signing the so-called Oslo Accords in Washington. The agreement was aimed at reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians.’ Yasser Arafat – Facts - NobelPrize.org

How quickly we forget.