But since Hamas invaded Israel three years ago, torturing, raping and imprisoning innocent people of all ages, it’s the victims who have been vilified with Jews all over the world subject to verbal and physical attacks.
The attacks have been minimised and those who took part in the atrocities excused, even supported.
Three years ago today, there was no war raging in Gaza. There was a ceasefire.
Then, in the early hours of 7 Oct, Hamas launched a coordinated invasion of Israel. Thousands of armed men crossed the border & they deliberately went looking for civilians. They went into homes & murdered families. They killed children & elderly. They abducted men, women & children & dragged them back into Gaza as hostages where civilians cheered.
And they attacked the Nova music festival. Hundreds of young people were dancing in the desert when terrorists descended on them. It is grimly familiar to see Islamist terrorists choosing a place of music, dancing, & freedom as a killing ground. Manchester. The Bataclan. Nova.
There are photographs & videos of what happened that day because, extraordinarily, many of the perpetrators filmed it themselves.
There is a plethora of evidence of sexual violence. There is the intercepted call in which a Hamas attacker excitedly told his parents that he had killed 10 Jews “with my own hands”. They raped & burned bodies, hunted people through fields & into bomb shelters, & paraded terrified hostages through Gaza. It was an atrocity.
And something happened in the West almost immediately afterwards that I still struggle to comprehend. Before Israel had even buried its dead, people thousands of kilometres away began finding reasons why the victims had it coming.
Within days, the murderer and the murdered had begun swapping places in the popular imagination.
Three years later, antisemitism has returned with a fervour to Western society with a speed and confidence that should terrify us. . .
In New Zealand, just about as far away from the atrocities as you can get, politicians chant from the river to the sea, and free Palestine.
Rodney Hide points out that we’ve even got a political party registered as Free Palestine:
The Palestine Free from the River to the Sea Party is contesting our general election on 7 November. It’s on your ballot paper as “Free Palestine”.
Yes, our Electoral Commission registered it. It did so on 5 August, despite 207 submissions against. It ruled the name wasn’t “offensive”. It did draw the line at the party’s logo, a Palestinian flag, in case voters got confused. The name was fine. So a flag might mislead you. A party named for a slogan that wipes Israel off the map does not.
Auckland barrister Ian Dunwoodie complained to the Ombudsman. The Chief Ombudsman found the Commission’s decision “not unreasonable”.
And you’re paying. The Commission has allocated the party $82,011 of taxpayers’ money for election advertising on television, radio and online. Its leader, schoolteacher Paul Hopkinson, calls it “government funding of $82,000 to help raise awareness of the Palestinian cause”.
What cause? The party tells us. Its very first founding principle calls for “the dismantling of the Zionist structure of the state of Israel”. It rejects two states. It wants a single state in Israel’s place. It pledges “unconditional and complete solidarity for the Palestinian resistance in all forms”.
The website adds “accordant with International Humanitarian Law”. The party’s launch statement didn’t bother: “Unconditional support for all forms of Palestine resistance.”
The only way to peace, it says, “is to put an end to the apartheid state of Israel”. It signs off: “Resistance Until Victory!”
We saw the resistance on October 7.
So there it is. A party campaigning within New Zealand, in our election, at our expense, for the destruction of Israel. . .
On X, the Auschwitz Museum posts photos of people of all ages who were imprisoned in the concentration camp, most of whom were gassed or died.
Those forgiving the atrocities of October 7th, the ones who vilify the victims and make the aggressors victims, are inviting a repeat of the holocaust.
On October 7th we should be saying never again but in London a pro-Palestine march is taking place.
The day when the victims should be remembered in sorrow, is being used to celebrate a movement that seeks to destroy their country and annihilate their people all over the world.
The victims are being vilified, the aggressors framed as victims and their atrocities are used to encourage more.
It is sick, dangerous and should be universally condemned.
Ele Ludemann is a North Otago farmer and journalist, who blogs HERE - where this article was sourced.
15 comments:
So many can hold two conflicting ideas at the same time. They deride Israel for committing a genocide they are not committing. Then scream support for a group that demand the chance to really commit genocide.
So they must support genocide, they are just picky on who gets to do the killing.
That depends if you believe the “official” story promulgated throughout the media. The most heavily guarded boarder in the world isn’t left unguarded, ever. Real footage looks real and passes through AI detection software. Military black propaganda is a tool of modern warfare. The US congress passed legislation to repeal the act that prevented them from using it on their own population, not that they weren’t doing it before this.
Completely with you Ele. I am utterly bewildered by the stupidity of the human race. Whether or no Israel is a tiny country of the world's most intelligent, creative human beings, Islam is, manifestly, unmitigated evil, as it declares its destiny to subject all the people of the world to the rule of Allah.
>"Islam is, manifestly, unmitigated evil"
This is the kind of statement that is about as useful in a discussion between informed, intelligent beings as an ashtray on a motorbike. 'Unmitigated' - does the writer know what this word means? I'll bet a pound to a peanut she has never undertaken a serious, detached study of one of the world's great religions.
>" [Islam] declares its destiny to subject all the people of the world to the rule of Allah."
Yes, just like Xianity which has historically done so through both conquest and missionisation, just like the Muslims. People in glass houses......
"Those forgiving the atrocities of October 7th, the ones who vilify the victims and make the aggressors victims, are inviting a repeat of the holocaust."
It's when the philosemites come out with ridiculously hysterical statements like this that they lose so many people.
They've milked the Jewish victim narrative around "the holocaust" for all it's worth for the last 80 odd years (and it's not working like it used to), whereas most intelligent observers rightly judge the Jews on what they are doing in 2026, rather than in some long past historical window.
I'm surprised a commentator as erudite as Mr B should find the need to stoop to whataboutism. Christianity has certainly engaged in dodgy practices by modern standards of behaviour, but was pretty much in alignment with what everybody in power was getting up to at the time. Now however it is a spent force (with the possible exception of some American evangelists) and we haven't had a decent burning at the stake for some tme. But unfortunately we still have to live with the medieval practices of Islam. And I don't just mean their tendency to decapitate dissenters and generally murder passers-by in the name of Allah. It's the unchanged bog-standard nastiness that comprises Islamic business-as-usual that folk like Ludemann find repulsive.
Of course I know what unmitigated means you patronising prat! And while Christianity undoubtedly proselytises (and many Christians have done so violently) Jesus himself(unlike Muhammad) preached by reason rather than beheading. I am far from deeply learned in religion, but brought up Christian and quite well-read about Islam - and certainly the appalling incidents of jihad which have been visited on the "Christian' world since 9/11. Enough!
Barend. No amount of “whataboutism” can justify the October 7 atrocities. The only people in the Middle East attempting genocide are the Arab states who, by direct warfare, have tried, and failed, six times since 1948, to whipe Israel and its Jewish population off the map.
The roots of current waves of anti-semitism are easily identified. Having failed by military action to expunge Israel, a group of Arab states, most notably Qatar, ( where Hamas and other Terrorist organisations maintain offices and hide the monies stolen from their populations) have channelled billions of dollars into USA universities to fund departments of Islamic and Arab studies.
These departments by definition are not well inclined towards Israel and the Jews and so anti semitism washes out from them across the student bodies, gradually infecting the whole campus, ‘youth opinion’ across America and from there to the whole western world.
Add to that the support of Russia and China of anything that they feel will destabilise the west and here we are with today’s sorry state of affairs they the ‘useful idiots’ like The Greens are into it boots and all.
People like Ellen and Anon234 speak as though Islam were a very recent phenomenon and is represented by the likes of ISIS and Hamas. This latter tendency would be like me using David Koresh/Branch Dravidian and the Lord's Resistance Army in Africa as representative of Xianity as a whole.
Islamic history starts rather a long time before that and includes the Golden Age of Islamic civilisation when it was streets ahead of Europe.
The Cambridge dictionary defines "unmitigated" as "complete, often describing something bad or unsuccessful that has no good or positive points." Islam over the past 14 centuries has a great many positive points to its credit that anyone acquainted with the faith past and present will have no difficulty listing.
Straw man alert: I never said a word about October 7 or 'genocide'.
Interesting conspiracy theory about Qatar spreading antisemitism through US universities but most of those funds have been spent on US university outposts in the Middle East. Moreover, the big picture including Europe suggests that Israel is running low in the good will stakes as sympathy for the Palestinians has increased (rightly or wrongly).
You may be right, Barend. But AI that I queried about this recently suggests that there is more to it than just some funding for “US university out-posts in the Middle East”.
It provided the following estimates (apparently for the period 2020-25) and comments in response to my query.
| University | Estimated Qatari Funding (Cumulative) |
| Cornell University | ~$2.3 Billion |
| Georgetown University | ~$1.02 Billion |
| Carnegie Mellon | ~$1.05 Billion |
| Harvard University | ~$258 Million – $894 Million |
> Note on Transparency: In 2025, the U.S. Department of Education launched new investigations into …. several other universities regarding the potential underreporting of foreign funds, meaning these totals may be revised upward as more disclosures are made public.
Who would know…?
I did use the word "most" so there has to be "more to it".
However, the assertion made by Anon 234 that lots of moolah have been sunk into mainland US university depts of Arab/Muslim Studies with the express purpose of spreading antisemitic sentiment is drawing a very long bow.
The origin of this conspiracy theory appears to stem from the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy the ideological drivers of which are amply suggested by its name.
It was an act of pure barbarism on Oct 7. The resultant very high casualty numbers in Gaza, were because Hamas had a labyrinth of tunnels under the region and placed munitions under schools ,hospitals and mosques. Israel's aim was to prevent anything such thing as Oct.7 happening ever again. Hamas are a death cult with their cause to annihilate Israel greater than concern for the Gazan population. They have had an indoctrination programme in schools for decades to have Gazan youth believe killing Jews was the most honourable thing they could do. The Quran commends killing Jews and other non-believers as well .
How on earth do you live next door to such entrenched hatred with 'sacred' texts that promote your destruction?
There are many lovely Muslims , but Houthis , Hamas and Hezbollah sponsored by Iran have a single minded aim in destroying Israel.
>"The Quran commends killing Jews and other non-believers as well "
At the same time, the Qu'ran describes Jews and Christians as "people of the book" and stipulates that they should be free to worship - Islam, unlike many of its detractors, recognises the integrity of monotheistic family of religions.
The Palestinian issue has brought out the worst in many people - Jewish terrorist gangs operating from those illegal settlements, Muslim organisations such as Hamas, and Western groups who explicitly condone the actions of either of these.
Maybe I'm an incurable optimist but I like to think that sanity must prevail at some point. Several Arab nations including Egypt, Jordan and the UAE have officially recognised the State of Israel, and several more say that they will do so once the Palestinian issue has been equitably resolved. The door to a resolution is open a crack. A "softly, softly" but determined approach is what we need now.
You keep insisting the Settlements are illegal. That is your opinion Barend , T think they are legitimate for a variety of historical reasons .For me that means there is little chance of resolution .
>"That is your opinion Barend"
It's also the opinion of the International Court of Justice, the highest international law court on the planet.
It would pay to check my claims out before making such silly statements. Some of us DO do our homework.
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