The Left Refuses to See Jewish Suffering - The Atlantic - "The people on “my side” are supposed to care about human suffering, whether it’s in the detention camps of Xinjiang or in Darfur. They are supposed to recognize the common humanity of people in need, that a child in distress is first a child in distress regardless of country or background. But I quickly saw that many of those on the left who I thought shared these values with me could see what had happened only through established categories of colonized and colonizer, evil Israeli and righteous Palestinian—templates made of concrete. The break was caused by this enormous disconnect. I was in a world of Jewish suffering that they couldn’t see because Jewish suffering simply didn’t fit anywhere for them. The callousness was expressed in so many ways. There were those tweets that did not hide their disregard for Jewish life... the one that described the rampage as a “glorious thing to wake up to.” There was the statement by more than two dozen Harvard student groups asserting, in those first hours in which we saw children and women and old people massacred, that “the Israeli regime” was “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” And then there were the less explicit posts that nevertheless made clear through pseudo-intellectual word salads that Israel got what it deserved: “a near-century’s pulverized overtures toward ethnic realization, of groping for a medium of existential latitude—these things culminate in drastic actions in need of no apologia.” I hate to extrapolate from social media—it is a place that twists every utterance into a performance for others. But I also felt this callousness in the real world, in a Times Square celebratory protest promoted by the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, at which one speaker talked of supporting Palestinians using “any means necessary” to retake the land “from the river to the sea,” as a number of placards declared. There were silences as well. Institutions that had rushed to condemn the murder of George Floyd or Russia for attacking Ukraine were apparently confounded. I watched my phone to see whether friends would write to find out if my family was okay—and a few did, with genuine and thoughtful concern, but many did not."
Hamas, the Jews, and the Illiberal Left - "For many progressive American Jews, the horror and shock of a massacre of Israeli civilians has been compounded by the response by vocal segments of the far left to either withhold condemnation or cheer the murders outright... They are treating apologias for Hamas as a factually or logically flawed application of left-wing ideals. I believe, to the contrary, that Hamas defenders are applying their own principles correctly. The problem is the principles themselves. It was around 2014 that this kind of illiberal thinking began exploding in various progressive spaces. In 2015, I wrote a story for this magazine about the rise of the illiberal left within the progressive movement. Progressive critics of my argument, while often willing to mock cancellations, firings, or other discrete manifestations of this new ideology, were skeptical that it was an ideological phenomenon. The most common response was that the shift was just college kids going through a phase. That blithe dismissal, most commonly expressed in shorthand with references to “college teens” or “Oberlin sophomores,” has aged badly. Illiberal left-wing norms quickly spread to the media, political activism, publishing, and other cultural high ground where progressives have (or had) enough critical mass to impose them... Liberals believe political rights are universal. Basic principles like democracy, free speech, and human rights apply equally to all people, without regard to the content of their political values... A liberal would abhor the use of political violence or repression, however evil the targets. A variety of left-wing alternatives respond that liberalism ignores power differentials by class, race, or gender. The illiberal left believes treating everybody equally, when the power is so unequal, merely serves to maintain existing structures of power. It follows from their critique that the legitimacy of a tactic can only be assessed with reference to whether it is being used by the oppressor or the oppressed. Is it okay for, say, a mob of protesters to shout down a lecture? Liberals would say no. Illiberal leftists would need to know who was the speaker and who was the mob before they could answer. “Decolonization” is one of those strands of illiberal leftism. It has a model of the world in which conflicts are analyzed as a struggle pitting settler-colonist-Europeans, who are evil, against native/indigenous/BIPOC people. Like other illiberal leftist theories, the decolonization model does not leave room to judge the morality of any methods... the debate over this illiberalism and the social norms it has spawned — demands for deference in the name of allyship, describing opposing ideas as a form of harm, and so on — has tracked an older debate within the left over communism. Communism provided real-world evidence of how an ideology that denies political rights to anybody deemed to be the oppressor laid the theoretical groundwork for repression and murder... The left-wing historian Gabriel Winant has a column in Dissent urging progressives not to mourn dead Israeli civilians because that sentiment will be used to advance the Zionist project. Winant sounds eerily like an old communist fellow traveler explaining that the murders of the kulaks or the Hungarian nationalists are the necessary price of defending the revolution. “The impulse, repeatedly called ‘humane’ over the past week, to find peace by acknowledging equally the losses on all sides rests on a fantasy that mourning can be depoliticized,” he argues, calling such soft-minded sentiment “a new Red Scare.” Making the perfect omelette always requires some broken eggs in the form of innocent people who made the historical error of belonging to, or perhaps being born into, an enemy class. But more than three decades have passed since the Soviet Union existed or China’s government was recognizably Marxist. And so the liberal warning about the threat of left-wing illiberalism seemed abstract and bloodless. On October 7, it suddenly became bloody and concrete. It didn’t happen here, of course. The shock of it was that many leftists revealed just how far they would be willing to follow their principles. “People have repeated over and over again over the last few days that you ‘cannot tell Palestinians how to resist,’” notes (without contradicting the sentiment) Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of the left-wing Jewish Currents. Concepts like this, treating the self-appointed representative of any oppressed group as beyond criticism, are banal on the left. Yet for some progressive Jews, it is shocking to see it extended to the slaughter of babies, even though that is its logical endpoint. The radical rhetoric of decolonization, with its glaring absence of any limiting principles, was not just a rhetorical cover to bully some hapless school administrator into changing the curriculum. Phrases like “by any means necessary” were not just figures of speech. Any means included any means, very much including murder. Both Julia Ioffe and Eric Levitz have pointed out that decolonization logic ignores the fact that half of Israel’s Jewish population does not have European origins and came to Israel after suffering the same ethnic cleansing as the Palestinians. This is correct. But what if it weren’t? If every Israeli Jew descended from Ashkenazi stock, would it be okay to shoot their babies?... What the far left revealed about its disposition toward Jews is not just a warning for the Jews but a warning for all progressives who care about democracy and humanity. The pro-Hamas left is not merely indicating an indifference toward Jews. It is revealing the illiberal left’s inherent cruelty, repression, and inhumanity."
Modern liberals long ago left classical liberalism behind
Of course, the author has to bash the right
US among 14 countries to vote against UN resolution on Israel-Hamas ‘truce’ - "The resolution calls for an “immediate, durable and sustained humanitarian truce” between Israeli forces and Hamas militants in Gaza. According to the U.N. it also demands a “continuous, sufficient and unhindered” provision of life-saving supplies to the people stuck inside Gaza. The resolution also condemns all violence against Palestinian and Israeli civilians. Notably, the resolution does not specifically condemn the Oct. 7 surprise attack by Hamas, or mention Hamas at all. There were several amendments that asked for Israel and Hamas to be named in the resolution that failed to get enough support."
Man accused of invading Jewish home yells ‘free Palestine’ and ‘brown people matter’ during arrest - "a man tried to break into a home in Los Angeles' Studio City neighborhood. While being arrested, he yelled "Free Palestine"... One woman who lived at the home told police that they had been locked in a room with four children while the man threatened them."
Amy Alkon on X - "Quotes from the video to clear things up for deluded westerners:
“Israel has never attacked Gaza unprovoked.”
“500,000 Gazans cross to Israel every single day to work.”
“Since Israel left Gaza in 2005, Israel does not owe shit to Gaza. But ‘The electricity! The water!’ “Why isn’t Hamas providing those things to Gaza? Where (are) all the billions of dollars they are being sent constantly?”
We don’t *have* to let Gazans come and work here (in Israel). We don’t *have* to give them food, electricity, and water. We don't *have* to warn them to go out of their houses when we attack Hamas targets. We don’t *have* to do anything, and somehow we are held to the standard that we do?”
“Hamas kills their political opponents.”
All you westerners standing with the terrorists, bleating “free Palestine!” because you’ve lapped up the propaganda and the buzzwords (and it’s so convenient to claim to have an excuse to hate Jews). Gaza needs to be free, yes -- of Hamas. And as she points out, Israel extends itself in ways no other country would -- after the Palestinian kleptocrat leadership turned down land for peace deals FIVE times. Let me assure you: The morality you want your life to depend on is that of Israel, not Hamas. Hamas terrorists will slit your throat faster than you can protest that you marched to cheer dead Israeli babies on your college campus."
Jay Engelmayer on X - "🚨🚨WARNING: DISTURBING CONTENT Palestinians parading around the body of a young Israeli woman. These are the people world leaders want Israel to make peace with. These are the people @JoeBiden and the @un say are good people who deserve every consideration. Pray for Israel."
Wellington on X - "Notice how they had to strip her clothes off. What kind of people would do that?"
Videos of Hamas attack suggest a chilling evolution of jihadist tactics - "Hamas appears to have combined the tactics of Hezbollah, the Islamic State, and the Taliban by mounting a large-scale attack that included an estimated 2,000 fighters, rocket salvos, mass hostage-taking, rape, beheadings and livestreaming. Hezbollah has amassed a vast arsenal of rockets that it has used against Israeli forces. The Taliban carried out offensives involving thousands of fighters, particularly in the year before regaining power. And ISIS engaged in hostage-taking and posted gruesome videos online. Hamas' Oct. 7th attack, the worst terrorist attack in the country’s 75 year history, employed all of those tactics and killed over 1,000 Israeli civilians. Under international law, the intentional targeting of civilians is a war crime... Edelstein and other officials said that some of the Hamas members had been trained by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps. Iran provides millions of dollars to Hamas annually, according to the U.S. State Department, and has long supported Hezbollah and other proxies across the region. Iran has expressed support for the Hamas attack but denied direct involvement. Israeli Consul General Aviv Ezra said that was false. “Their strategic goal is quite clear,” he said. “Their goal is to surround Israel with terror armies.” Throughout the roughly 45 minutes of footage, the attackers cheered as they killed unarmed people. Hamas members shot dead civilians in their living rooms, lit houses on fire, and hurled a grenade at a father trying to protect his three children, killing the father and one child, and partially blinding another. After civilians were shot dead in the car, Hamas militants pulled their limp bodies from the vehicle, got inside and drove away. The footage showed Hamas members engaged in the type of butchery depicted in ISIS videos. In one scene, a Hamas member asks another fighter to film him as he fires rounds into the head of an Israeli civilian who appears to already be dead. In another, a group of Hamas terrorits argue over who gets to cut off the head of a Thai man who was working in Israel. One of them then struggles to chop off his head with a hoe. The footage includes photographs of two babies that had been shot in the head and two infants who appear to have been burnt to a char... a Hamas fighter calls his parents in Gaza and brags, shouting, “Mom, I killed more than 10 Jews with my own hands,” he said. “Please be proud of me, dad.” After his parents praise him, the terrorist repeatedly urges his family to watch his WhatsApp feed to see what he has done. When his mother urges him to come back to Gaza, the young man replies “victory or martyrdom.”"
Kill, behead, rape: Interrogated Hamas members detail atrocities against civilians - "Israeli security agencies published video footage Monday from the apparent interrogations of seven Hamas terrorists who were captured following the Palestinian terror group’s October 7 onslaught, in which they admitted they had been ordered to carry out atrocities against Israeli civilians. In one video released by the Israel Defense Forces, a person whose face is blurred said that gunmen were given instructions to kill everyone they saw, including beheading victims and cutting off their legs. “The plan was to go from home to home, from room to room, to throw grenades and kill everyone, including women and children,” he said. “Hamas ordered us to crush their heads and cut them off, [and] to cut their legs.” He also said they were given permission to rape the corpse of a girl... “In Gaza, those who bring hostages get a grant — an apartment and $10,000,” said one. One of the men was seen saying Hamas’s orders were to kill young men and to “kidnap the elderly, women and children.”... the government screened for 200 members of the foreign press some 43 minutes of harrowing scenes of murder, torture and decapitation from the onslaught on southern Israel, including raw videos from the terrorists’ bodycams. The government said it had decided to show journalists part of its collected documentation in order to dispel what a spokesperson characterized as “a Holocaust-denial-like phenomenon happening in real-time,” as doubts have been raised around the world about some of the most horrific of Hamas’s atrocities."
Feminists Are Consenting to Hamas' Rape Culture - "They particularly relished targeting women—slaughtering them, raping them, cutting babies out of pregnant women’s wombs, torturing mothers and grandmothers in front of their families—and, many fear, sexually enslaving some of the hostages. The world witnessed these perversions because the villains proudly filmed them, then inspired Palestinians and pro-Palestinian progressives to spread them across social media. This secondary, digital, GoPro assault on the victims’ dignity made this orgy of misogyny one of the bloodiest and most publicized attacks on women in history. Nevertheless, more than three weeks later, the feminist community remains silent. In May 2021, within days of Israel counterattacking in self-defense against yet another Hamas bombardment, over 120 gender studies departments denounced the Jewish state. Declaring that “justice is indivisible,” they proclaimed that our work is “committed to an inclusive feminist vision,” as per the National Women’s Studies Association’s 2015 Solidarity Statement, “that contests violations of civil rights and international human rights law.” The call was so popular, the Palestinian Feminist Collective asked for patience. “Please note, due to the overwhelming response we are only uploading names twice a day. Please be patient as we are stretched to capacity.” Now, despite seeing Hamas’ rape cult, not one gender studies department has defended even one victimized woman. Feminists have long taught us to believe the accuser and not blame the victim. For years, progressives insisted, in academic papers, on T-shirts, even on coffee mugs, that when fighting oppression, “silence is consent,” or even that “silence is violence.” On Oct. 7, the violated women shouted, shrieked, cried, begged, rape after rape, cut after cut, fighting off these assaults with their voices and their bare hands as best each could. Some hostages may still be struggling. By contrast, violating every feminist principle I’ve ever read and respected, today’s feminist movement is violently, silently, consenting to this mass crime against women and against the victims from three-dozen different countries. Some even doubt the testimonials—and the staggering, bloody, heartbreaking evidence of stripped women paraded through Gaza’s streets. Robbing someone of their story is a secondary offense—but nevertheless inexcusable. If justice is indivisible, these women deserve justice—and empathy too—whether or not you like Israel or abhor it and its policies. If rape culture is never OK, all civilized people should repudiate so many Palestinians’ and progressives’ delight in spreading these videos and cheering these crimes. In their silence, most leading feminists became complicit, aiding and abetting this mass attempt to dehumanize women just because they’re Jews—or happened to be on the Gaza border that day... Indeed, these crimes echoed the mass murders and sexual assaults the Nazis perpetrated during the Holocaust, that Arabs perpetrated on their Jewish neighbors during the Hebron Massacre of 1929, that Cossacks perpetrated on so many Jews during pogroms—and so many other Jew-haters perpetrated on Jewish women, no matter how young or old over millennia... After three weeks of hearing how this sadistic saturnalia “exhilarated” too many progressives, those justifiably appalled by these enablers of evil are now being told the worst abuses never happened. Once again, the hypocrisy is stunning. Feminists teach that denying sexual assault intensifies the trauma, erasing the victim’s personhood yet again. Nevertheless, some feminists are questioning the stories—perhaps because they don’t want to question their blind support for the Palestinian cause. They want to deny the vile photos and videos, the reports from IDF officials, pathologists and volunteers at the overworked morgues, or testimonies from captured Hamas criminals describing “having sex with dead bodies, meaning the body of a dead young woman,” because the goal was “to dirty them, to rape them.” The horrors of Oct. 7 were so unnerving that the characteristic gallows humor of the Israelis has been muted. The first joke I heard, however, is tragically on point: If gaslighting is denying you said what you said …. Gaza-lighting is denying you did what you did—after broadcasting it broadly to the world... That few feminists, especially gender studies professors, have denounced this familiar yet deplorable evil exposes a darkness deep in their soul. It is part of a broader scandal in higher education some are now, belatedly, starting to recognize. Call it fruits from the poisoned Ivies. For years, America’s most elite universities have been cultivating a generation of grievance junkies—dividing the world into “the oppressed,” who are forever blameless, and “the oppressors,” who are forever guilty. Those deemed “oppressors” are often accused of enjoying “privilege,” although those grade-grubbing radicals dining out on their parents’ Black AmEx card as they pay $70,000 university bills, somehow don’t count themselves as “privileged” either... feminism has long had a Jewish problem. From Betty Friedan to Bella Abzug, Jewish women were among the most visible forces in American feminism—even as feminists often rendered invisible their particular challenges as Jewish women facing sexism and antisemitism. In June 1982, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, a founding editor of Ms. magazine, interviewed 80 Jewish feminists about their experience as Jews in the movement. Her bombshell “Anti-Semitism in the Women’s Movement,” anticipated today’s hypocrisy... why, she asked, would anyone expect Israel “to commit suicide for the sake of Palestinian liberation?”"
Power relations means never having to say you're sorry
Liberals only care about Jews when they can use that to shit on white people
Israeli officer says he found baby beheaded in Hamas attack - "Colonel Golan Vach, head of the military search and rescue service, told AFP he saw the body of a mother protecting a baby while searching debris at the Beeri kibbutz three days after the attacks. "When I pulled it over I saw a decapitated baby. I took it up with my hands and I carried it, and I put it in the body bag. I personally did it," he said while on a media tour of another kibbutz organised by the military."
UC Davis condemns professor threatening 'zionist journalists' on X - Los Angeles Times - "The chancellor of UC Davis condemned a controversial online post apparently made by a faculty member, which threatened “zionist journalists” in the days after the attacks in Israel by Hamas. The post was made Oct. 10 by Jemma Decristo, an assistant professor of American studies and an undergraduate faculty advisor... Decristo posted under her account @jemmaisOKeh that “zionist journalists who spread propaganda & misinformation” were a group that was easily accessible to the public. She said in the post that “they have houses w adddresses, kids in school,” and “they can fear their bosses, but they should fear us more.” The post ends with a knife emoji, followed by a hatchet emoji and three drops of blood emojis... Her faculty page, which has been temporarily removed from public view, said she received her PhD in the history of consciousness program at UC Santa Cruz. Her work in the humanities focuses on music, race and gender, particularly regarding Black musical traditions and artists."
Weird. We're told that only fascists threaten the media
Israel-Hamas war: Cafe Landwer protest in Toronto - "Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow condemned a protest outside of a Jewish-owned business in Toronto over the weekend, alongside public officials who called it an “appalling” and “reprehensible” act of antisemitism. Videos posted online Saturday show hundreds of protesters waving Palestinian flags outside of Cafe Landwer at University Avenue and Adelaide Street while chanting “boycott.”... One of the videos posted to Instagram was paired with the caption “zionist cafe boycott” and showed one participant waving a flag in the window of the restaurant as patrons sit at a booth eating a meal. “I urge everyone in our city, through all the pain and anger so many are feeling right now, not to lose sight of our common humanity,” Chow said, pointing to the city’s recent increase in hate incidents. Since the war began with Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel on Oct. 7, the daily average of hate-related police calls in Toronto has increased by 132 per cent, Toronto's police chief said last week... The restaurant targeted, Cafe Landwer, was “singled-out” for the fact that it is Jewish-owned, MP Kevin Vuong told CP24."
Why Jewish lives don’t matter to BLM - "Following Hamas’s pogrom of Jewish people in Israel on 7 October, numerous Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists made clear where their sympathies lie. Within days, BLM’s chapter in Chicago posted a graphic that celebrated the slaughter. It showed a paraglider of the kind used by Hamas terrorists to enter Israel from Gaza and murder over 200 young people at a music festival. Below the picture, the caption read: ‘I stand with Palestine.’ After the tweet was viewed millions of times, BLM Chicago deleted it and gave a semi-apology. ‘Yesterday we sent out [a post] that we aren’t proud of’, it said, before re-asserting: ‘We stand with Palestine and the people who will do what they must to live free.’ That vague ‘will do what they must’ presumably does not rule out violence. Even after the climbdown over the paraglider post, BLM activists in Chicago disrupted a city-council meeting as councillors discussed a resolution to stand in solidarity with Israel after the Hamas attack. The crowd rained down boos and chants, forcing mayor Brandon Johnson to clear the room. The resolution eventually passed, but only after BLM-allied council members left the meeting in protest. Pro-Hamas statements from BLM were not limited to Chicago. Black Lives Matter Grassroots, a splinter group that represents about two dozen BLM chapters, rationalised Hamas’s terror as a ‘desperate act of self-defence’. BLM at School, an offshoot of BLM that organises teachers in schools, blamed the Israelis for Hamas’s atrocities. The ‘unfolding loss of Palestinian and Israeli lives is the direct result of decades of Israeli settler-colonialism, land dispossession, occupation, blockade, apartheid and attempted genocide of millions of Palestinians’, it said. This outright support for Hamas, and the blaming of Israeli victims for Hamas’s butchery, came as a surprise to some liberals. They had viewed BLM as a worthy cause and saw themselves as allies of the movement. In the aftermath of George Floyd’s death in 2020, BLM skyrocketed in prominence and gained new-found respectability among the great and good... But now, witnessing BLM’s unholy alliance with Hamas, many establishment liberals are waking up to what BLM really thinks. Jewish organisations, in particular, feel betrayed after years of giving support to BLM... As it happens, if these establishment allies of BLM had happened to take a few minutes to examine its history and political positions before sending millions of dollars to its bank accounts, they might not have been so surprised that it rushed to the defence of Hamas. In 2015, BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors led a mission to Israel, which she termed an ‘apartheid state’. That same year, while speaking on a panel at Harvard Law School, she adopted eliminationist rhetoric, calling ‘to end the imperialist project called Israel’. Like most of the pseudo-progressive left, BLM’s long-standing support for Palestine has included the belief that Hamas reflects the interests of the Palestinian people, and its violence must therefore be excused... certainly most black Americans do not see their interests as bound up with Palestinians living thousands of miles away in the Middle East, and especially not with a terror group like Hamas. Indeed, BLM’s endorsement of Hamas shows how it is not an organic outgrowth of the experiences of the black masses in the US. Instead, BLM is simply another organ of the identitarian left. It reflects the outlook of activists, academics and other upper-middle-class professionals, not ordinary black people. BLM may claim to speak on behalf of black Americans, but it pushes policies – like defunding the police – that hurt middle-class and poorer black people disproportionately. BLM activists are more likely to be found on college campuses – where they rub shoulders with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which seeks to delegitimise and isolate Israel – than in black neighbourhoods... despite BLM being a disparate movement, its activists share a common language. BLMers of different stripes will unite in their oft-stated aim of ‘decolonising’ the US and other countries. This is a jargon that you will not hear among ordinary black Americans. Up to now, ‘decolonisation’ could have been dismissed as over-the-top rhetoric, an embellishment. It has often meant little more than a demand for changes to reading lists at universities or schools. But, following the Hamas attacks, that term should be taken as a warning of something more ominous. As BLM at School wrote 10 days after Hamas’s barbaric violence, ‘Palestinians are reminding us that decolonisation is not a metaphor or abstraction, but requires real, daily struggle’. By this logic, the ‘decolonisation’ of the US would justify similar violence as well. Essentially, BLMers have not endorsed Hamas’s attacks because of any real alignment between the struggles of black Americans and Palestinians or Hamas, nor of anything related to ‘black lives’ at all. No, they have excused Hamas and flirted with anti-Semitism because the BLM ideology embraces the mind-numbing oppressor / oppressed categories that all identitarian left organisations today deploy. Under the twisted logic of this mindset, Jews are the oppressors who are always to blame, while Hamas represent the oppressed who can do no wrong. It leads to a sick morality where Hamas’s killings, torturing and kidnapping of babies and grandmothers come to be seen as acceptable – as blows for the oppressed against the oppressors. It is good that BLM is finally being exposed for the morally degenerate movement it has become. But it still has much influence in the US and internationally, and can still do much harm. Not least when BLM activists serve as useful idiots for Hamas. Indeed, Hamas welcomes comparisons with BLM. In a 2021 interview, Yahya Sinwar, a Hamas leader in Gaza, made an explicit link, arguing that ‘the same type of racism that killed George Floyd is being used by [Israel] against the Palestinians’."
Addendum: BLM Chicago Flyer
'Never Again' has rarely rung so hollow - "Watching footage of a lynch mob storming an airport in Dagestan in the Russian Federation, in search of Jewish passengers disembarking a flight from Tel Aviv, I had a terrible sense of foreboding. We have seen this too many times before. A blood-thirsty rabble once again hunting for Jews to kill. If those involved had had their way, Makhachkala airport would have been the site of another pogrom. Suddenly it feels as if a very dark history has returned with a vengeance. One video from Makhachkala airport featured angry civilians surrounding one of the Tel Aviv flight’s passengers. It could have come straight from a 1930s newsreel. The passenger protests that he is Uzbek and not Jewish. But the mob refuses to let go of its prey. Those harassing him insist on looking at his passport and his telephone. At this point, he is literally fighting for his life. The desire of these people to kill more Jews is palpable. It is not an overstatement to say Dagestan is no longer safe for Jewish people. In Nalchik, another Dagestani city, a planned Jewish centre was set on fire on Sunday. And in Khasavyurt, a mob besieged a hotel and searched rooms for Jews. A former chief rabbi of Moscow, Pinchas Goldschmidt, tweeted last night that, ‘We are receiving reports from four different cities in Dagestan… of mobs demanding to kill the Jews’... The Russian government’s pro-Hamas stance will obviously not have helped. But Moscow’s craven position is not the cause of this eruption of anti-Jewish hatred. The Kremlin is, in part, only trying to appease the already existing loathing of Israel among Russia’s Muslim populations. Indeed, hatred of Israel plays a key, unifying role within the Muslim world. Since the decline of pan-Arabism and Arab nationalism in the 1970s, opposition to Israel has become the one cause that different Muslim sects and nations could agree on. This anti-Israeli consensus had appeared to be unravelling recently, with Gulf states and Saudi Arabia seeking a modus vivendi in Israel. The outbreak of the war on 7 October – which was likely encouraged by Iran – has put paid to any rapprochement between Israel and the Muslim world, at least for now. The current wave of anti-Israeli sentiment sweeping the Muslim world is being mirrored in Western societies."
