So Yahya Sinwar has been killed. The leader of Hamas in Gaza is no more. The man widely believed to have been the architect of the pogrom of 7 October has been eliminated. The worst mass murderer of Jews since the Nazi era has been served the ultimate and most righteous punishment. The fascist is dead. This is a great day not only for Israel and the Jewish diaspora that has been smarting for more than a year from the horrors that Sinwar and his army of anti-Semites visited on southern Israel, but also for all of humanity.
It was during a ground operation in Rafah in southern Gaza that the IDF killed three terrorists. One was Sinwar. Rafah, of course, is the city every virtue-signaller in the West told Israel to leave well alone. ‘All eyes on Rafah’ went the social-media cry a few weeks back. Yet it turns out the man who green-lighted the rape, kidnap and slaughter of more than a thousand Jews was there. Listen, if your campaigning entails putting a moral forcefield around a fascist overlord, if it involves the protection of a Jew-killer from the Jews looking for him, then you might not be as virtuous as you think.
There will doubtlessly be much agonised analysis of Sinwar’s life. I expect we’ll even see the morally lost talking heads of the Western press gab about what a pensive leader he was or how his early life in a rundown refugee camp pushed him towards violent hate for the Jewish State. For now though, before all the unseemly handwringing, the basic facts of his life will suffice. He got involved in terrorism in the early 1980s. He later served as Hamas’s punisher of alleged Palestinian collaborators with Israel, earning him the nickname ‘The Butcher of Khan Younis’. He spent time in jail for the murder of such ‘collaborators’, one of whom he strangled to death with his bare hands, another of whom he suffocated with a keffiyeh. In 2017 he became leader of Hamas in Gaza. And in 2023 he okayed Hamas’s fascistic onslaught against the Jews of southern Israel.
This is a man who deserved to die. His crimes against the Jews were legion. He took the postwar cry of ‘Never Again’ and stomped it into the dirt. ‘Again, again’ was his preferred slogan. His violent disregard for Jewish life was a function of his deep-seated anti-Semitism – you don’t get to be leader of a terror group whose founding covenant committed it to an apocalyptic war on the Jews without being a Jew-hater yourself. Yet he was horrendously cavalier about Palestinian life, too. He let Hamas’s war with Israel drag on because he believed the ‘spiralling civilian death toll in Gaza’ would drum up global hate for Israel and global pity for Hamas. He sacrificed Jews to his racist ideology, and Palestinians to his grotesque vanity.
So Gazans also benefit from the demise of this monster. They are a step closer to liberation from the tyrannical rule of the death-mongers of Hamas. Humankind benefits, too. For Israel’s righteous slaying of Yahya Sinwar is more than justice for 7 October. It is more than a brilliant and targeted strike in a now year-long war on terrorism. It is also a message to the world. It says this: you cannot kill Jews with impunity anymore. It reminds us that those days are gone. It reminds us it isn’t the Middle Ages anymore, when the Church would reward your Jew-hunting, or the 20th century, when pogroms had the blessing of governments. No, there are consequences now to singling out Jews for special opprobrium and wicked violence. Do that today and you might very well die. Do that now and you might get your head caved in, as Sinwar did.
And here’s the chilling thing, the thing that should truly unsettle those of us who live in the West: we needed this message. Our nations needed this reminder. Our young in particular needed to be told that fascist violence is intolerable and killing Jews will be rightfully avenged. For across America and Europe in the aftermath of 7 October, unreason reigned. On our campuses, our streets, in our art world and media world, the sympathies of the privileged went not to the victims of Hamas’s pogrom, but to Hamas. Israel was offered not support but condemnation – and the most shrill, hypocritical and borderline bigoted condemnation you could imagine. ‘You had it coming’ was the subtext of the Israelophobic insanity that swept our cities after the pogrom.
We found ourselves in the horrific situation where many of our fellow citizens were seemingly content to see Jews once again loaded into trucks, burnt to a cinder and killed on account of their ethnicity. This spoke to more than a failure of sense and solidarity. It spoke to how determinedly our societies had turned their backs on the values of the Enlightenment and the virtues of civilisation, and could thus find greater common cause with the anti-Jewish, anti-modernity hysterics of Hamas than with the democratic state of Israel.
So yes, we needed to hear it. We needed to hear that the murder of Jews will be met with the severest of consequences in the 21st century. The killing of Sinwar puts flesh on the bones of the cry of ‘Never Again’ that had come to be so weakened and withered in recent years. Jew-killers everywhere will tremble now, making this not a day of death, but a day of hope.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.
There will doubtlessly be much agonised analysis of Sinwar’s life. I expect we’ll even see the morally lost talking heads of the Western press gab about what a pensive leader he was or how his early life in a rundown refugee camp pushed him towards violent hate for the Jewish State. For now though, before all the unseemly handwringing, the basic facts of his life will suffice. He got involved in terrorism in the early 1980s. He later served as Hamas’s punisher of alleged Palestinian collaborators with Israel, earning him the nickname ‘The Butcher of Khan Younis’. He spent time in jail for the murder of such ‘collaborators’, one of whom he strangled to death with his bare hands, another of whom he suffocated with a keffiyeh. In 2017 he became leader of Hamas in Gaza. And in 2023 he okayed Hamas’s fascistic onslaught against the Jews of southern Israel.
This is a man who deserved to die. His crimes against the Jews were legion. He took the postwar cry of ‘Never Again’ and stomped it into the dirt. ‘Again, again’ was his preferred slogan. His violent disregard for Jewish life was a function of his deep-seated anti-Semitism – you don’t get to be leader of a terror group whose founding covenant committed it to an apocalyptic war on the Jews without being a Jew-hater yourself. Yet he was horrendously cavalier about Palestinian life, too. He let Hamas’s war with Israel drag on because he believed the ‘spiralling civilian death toll in Gaza’ would drum up global hate for Israel and global pity for Hamas. He sacrificed Jews to his racist ideology, and Palestinians to his grotesque vanity.
So Gazans also benefit from the demise of this monster. They are a step closer to liberation from the tyrannical rule of the death-mongers of Hamas. Humankind benefits, too. For Israel’s righteous slaying of Yahya Sinwar is more than justice for 7 October. It is more than a brilliant and targeted strike in a now year-long war on terrorism. It is also a message to the world. It says this: you cannot kill Jews with impunity anymore. It reminds us that those days are gone. It reminds us it isn’t the Middle Ages anymore, when the Church would reward your Jew-hunting, or the 20th century, when pogroms had the blessing of governments. No, there are consequences now to singling out Jews for special opprobrium and wicked violence. Do that today and you might very well die. Do that now and you might get your head caved in, as Sinwar did.
And here’s the chilling thing, the thing that should truly unsettle those of us who live in the West: we needed this message. Our nations needed this reminder. Our young in particular needed to be told that fascist violence is intolerable and killing Jews will be rightfully avenged. For across America and Europe in the aftermath of 7 October, unreason reigned. On our campuses, our streets, in our art world and media world, the sympathies of the privileged went not to the victims of Hamas’s pogrom, but to Hamas. Israel was offered not support but condemnation – and the most shrill, hypocritical and borderline bigoted condemnation you could imagine. ‘You had it coming’ was the subtext of the Israelophobic insanity that swept our cities after the pogrom.
We found ourselves in the horrific situation where many of our fellow citizens were seemingly content to see Jews once again loaded into trucks, burnt to a cinder and killed on account of their ethnicity. This spoke to more than a failure of sense and solidarity. It spoke to how determinedly our societies had turned their backs on the values of the Enlightenment and the virtues of civilisation, and could thus find greater common cause with the anti-Jewish, anti-modernity hysterics of Hamas than with the democratic state of Israel.
So yes, we needed to hear it. We needed to hear that the murder of Jews will be met with the severest of consequences in the 21st century. The killing of Sinwar puts flesh on the bones of the cry of ‘Never Again’ that had come to be so weakened and withered in recent years. Jew-killers everywhere will tremble now, making this not a day of death, but a day of hope.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.
9 comments:
Just when I thought Brendan O'Neill couldn't get any more hysterically philosemitic in the most over the top way, out he comes with this piece. Forget DNA tests, anyone who writes this sort of content is clearly Jewish (or desperately wishes he was) and has an obviously Jewish axe to grind.
This article drips with such over-the-top hyperbole and is such clear attempt at emotional manipulation that it's as if Brendan asked ChatGPT to produce the most ludicrously pro-Zionist article in history:
He starts out with the Greatest Hits of Jewish propaganda, and doesn't let up until he signs off:
“…progrom”
“…worst mass murderer of Jews since the Nazi era”
“…the horrors that Sinwar and his army of anti-Semites visited on southern Israel, but also for all of humanity.”
“…the rape, kidnap and slaughter of more than a thousand Jews”
“…the morally lost talking heads of the Western press”
“Hamas’s fascistic onslaught against the Jews of southern Israel.”
“…a terror group whose founding covenant committed it to an apocalyptic war on the Jews”
“…drum up global hate for Israel”
“He sacrificed Jews to his racist ideology”
“…Israel’s righteous slaying of Yahya Sinwar “
“It is also a message to the world. It says this: you cannot kill Jews with impunity anymore. It reminds us that those days are gone. “
“…there are consequences now to singling out Jews for special opprobrium and wicked violence. Do that today and you might very well die. Do that now and you might get your head caved in, as Sinwar did.”
“… many of our fellow citizens were seemingly content to see Jews once again loaded into trucks, burnt to a cinder and killed on account of their ethnicity.”
“We needed to hear that the murder of Jews will be met with the severest of consequences in the 21st century.”
This writer (like so many) uses the terms 'fascism'/'fascist' as severe put-downs for people and paradigms that he doesn't like. The Cambridge Online Dictionary defines fascism as "a political system based on a very powerful leader, state control, and being extremely proud of country and race, and in which political opposition is not allowed". Interestingly, the Google dictionary continues to link fascism to 'far right' although it must seem obvious to any informed person that totalitarianism arises at both ends of the political spectrum. Hence my personal use of the term 'marxofascist'.
Sorry Madam B, but I found O'Neill pretty much on target with his comments. It is also refreshing to hear an alternative perspective to that of the antisemitic MSM.
Frankly Barend, the label we choose to stick on Yahya Sinwar is irrelevant. He is an evil person whose actions show he more than deserves to die, whichever ..ism he represents. The one label that sticks is however, Muslim. Islam enables and encourages the behaviour indulged in by Sinwar. Behaviour graphically depicted by O'Neill, who does not shrink from telling us the way it is. And all the hand-wringing
by fellow-travelers like Madame Blavatsky cannot erase that simple truth.
Hey, hang on a minute Madame. I'm not Jewish, and have no desire to be one.
I kinda agree with Brendon. Hammas poked the Bear, knowing full well the consequences. Mass loss of Palestinian lives sits comfortably with them.
There God has ordered it.
Remember. From the river to the sea.
Extermination works. At first. This is the terrible lesson of history.
Genocide is done by attrition. Once a targeted group is stripped of its rights the next steps are the displacement of the population, destruction of the infrastructure and the wholesale killing of civilians.
Israel is also attacking and killing international monitors, human rights organizations, aid workers and United Nations staff, a feature of most genocides. Foreign journalists are being arrested and accused of “aiding the enemy,” while Palestinian journalists are being assassinated and their families wiped out. Israel carries out continuous assaults in Gaza on the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), where two-thirds of its facilities have been damaged or destroyed, and 223 of its staff have been killed. It has attacked the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), where peacekeepers have been fired upon, tear gassed and wounded.
Zionist are true believers in the doctrine that violence can mold the world to fit their demented vision. That this doctrine has been a spectacular failure in Israel’s occupied territories, and did not work in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, and a generation earlier in Vietnam, does not deter them. This time, they assure us, it will succeed.
In the short term they are right. The Zionists will continue to use their arsenal of industrial weapons to kill huge numbers of people and turn cities into rubble. But in the long term, this indiscriminate violence sow’s dragon’s teeth. It creates adversaries that, sometimes a generation later, outdo in savagery what was done to those slain in the previous generation.
It's bizarre and worrying that people like Anonymous 4.26 could have such a one-dimensional view of the world. HAMAS provoked the war by their brutal actions on 6 October. No sovereign state would tolerate such behaviour, and Israel reacted entirely predictably. Every single casualty in Gaza can therefore be attributed directly to the HAMAS terrorists own actions. HAMAS only has to return the hostages and confirm Israel's right to exist for the war to stop. But that would not suit HAMAS' paymasters in Iran, so the war will go on, HAMAS operatives will continue to shelter behind civilians, and Gazans will continue to die. So the faster the terrorists are hunted down, the safer the Gazan people will be. But, if the terrorists prevail, the Jews will die for no better reason than being Jewish. And that, as the Holocaust teaches us, is the real "terrible lesson of history".
Every leader of Hamas since the 1990s bar one has been killed by Israel, but as Israeli's celebrate the killing Sinwar, Hamas still has its hostages and is still fighting. Hamas will always come back because of what is being done by Israeli's to the Palestinian people. Hate inspires hate - always.
Anonymous 12.07 is quite right and illustrates exactly why Israel will continue to pursue its objective of eliminating the cancer that is HAMAS. But HAMAS' willingness to keep on fighting has nothing to do with what Israel is doing to the Palestinian people who are just pawns in a much bigger game. HAMAS is a Muslim organisation and Muslims are world beaters at practicing hatred particularly aginst Jews. They can't avoid it because it's embedded in their religion and baked into their psyche from birth. Who can blame Israel from pushing back now they are able to? Israel only wants to be left in peace like every other civilised nation on earth. As Anonymous 12.07 wisely states "Hate inspires hate". He just chooses to ignore who provided the inspiration.
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