Brendan O'Neill: Making it a crime for the Jews to defend themselves

The ICC’s issuing of arrest warrants for Israeli leaders is a vile act of moral inversion.

Let’s speak plainly about what happened yesterday. Four hundred and eleven days after the Jews were subjected to the worst act of anti-Semitic barbarism since the Holocaust, arrest warrants were issued for the Jews who fought back. Thirteen months after Israel was invaded by the racist killers of Hamas, indictments were made against the men who pursued those racist killers. A little over a year since a species of fascism was visited on the world’s only Jewish nation, the Jewish nation’s own leaders found themselves turned into fugitives for the ‘crime’ of fighting that fascism.

Brendan O'Neill: Death of a fascist

The elimination of Yahya Sinwar is a great moment for Israelis and Palestinians alike.

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.

Brendan O'Neill: Why Western ‘solidarity’ is a death sentence for Palestinians

The Battle of Northern Gaza confirms that Hamas and its woke apologists are the greatest threat to Palestinians.

Many grim things are happening in northern Gaza right now, as Israel puts the screws on Hamas. But there’s one thing in particular that leapt out at me from this bloody showdown between the Israel Defence Forces and the army of anti-Semites that started this infernal war with its pogrom of a year ago. It’s a thing that isn’t being widely reported. A fact you will need to dig deep to find. You certainly won’t spy any mention of it in the toilet of Israelophobia known as social media. It’s this: the IDF is pleading with Palestinian civilians to leave northern Gaza, while Hamas is instructing them to stay.

Ele Ludemann: It really did happen

To disagree is normal, to base the disagreement on denial of facts is either stupidity, or a means to a very dangerous end.

At least some of the people who deny the holocaust weren’t born when it happened or in the immediate aftermath but that is no excuse.

There are first hand accounts and proven historical records from its victims and survivors, from the soldiers who liberated the concentration camps; and from the Nuremberg Trials, including confessions from those guilty of the crimes committed.

Guest Post: Will John Minto condemn Hamas for refusing to free the hostages?

A guest post by Lucy Rogers on Kiwiblog

I woke up this morning to initial elation at the news that Israel and Hamas are apparently close to a ceasefire deal. The proposal involves the return of 33 hostages and Hamas’ removal from power, in exchange for the release of several hundred Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, Israel’s withdrawal from eastern Gaza and a ceasefire in stages.

Brendan O'Neill: The racism of never blaming Hamas for anything

Following the rescue of four Israeli hostages, it is time the Western left gave Hamas some credit for its evil.

So rescuing hostages is a war crime now. A ‘grave, grave war crime’, in fact. That’s according to the Guardian’s Owen Jones who is outraged that IDF troops used a humanitarian truck to sneak into the town of Nuseirat where they rescued four of their hostages from the clutches of Hamas and its local heavies. Kenneth Roth, formerly of Human Rights Watch, is also fuming over the IDF’s Trojan Horse antics, reminding Israel that it has a legal duty ‘not to disguise soldiers as civilians’. These people are nuts. What do they expect the IDF to do? Knock on the doors of the fascists holding their compatriots and say: ‘Can we have our Jews back, please?’

Brendan O'Neill: The Lord Haw-Haws of Hamas

Why are so many supposed leftists spreading propaganda for religious fascists?

Imagine going back in time, a decade or so, and telling anti-fascists that one day they’ll be doing the bidding of fascists. Imagine telling anti-racists that they would soon become propagandists for racists. Imagine telling those woke campus feminists, the sort who thought that being propositioned at the student bar was ‘rape culture’, that in the not-too-distant future they’d be making excuses for literal rape. They’d have thought you mad. And yet it’s happened. Many of yesteryear’s self-righteous haters of bigotry have morphed into the Lord Haw-Haws of Hamas – one of the most bigoted movements on Earth.

Brendan O'Neill: The rise and rise of Holocaust envy

A new generation drunk on victim politics is desperate for a piece of the Holocaust action.

Britain’s Socialist Workers Party (SWP) is not famed for its astuteness. These omnipresent public-school leftists, who rock up to every radical demo to holler facile chants in fake accents they learnt from EastEnders, are about as far from scholarly as you can get. Yet a few years ago they did something that was world-beatingly dumb, even by their famed low standards. They handed out a leaflet about the Holocaust that described it as an unspeakable tragedy in which ‘thousands of LGBT people, trade unionists and disabled people were slaughtered’. Spot the omission?

Dane Giraud: The horror that awaits the 16 year old voter

A few nights ago, I walked in on my 14-year-old son to find him watching a YouTube documentary on the formation of modern Israel.

I was delighted to see his interest in history – unforced by me, no less – but I quickly noticed that something else was going on: there was a row of boxes at the bottom of his screen, each labeled with a name. My son had taken it upon himself to mount a seminar of sorts for school friends on the Israeli narrative regarding Israel and Gaza.

Aris Roussinos: The world should fear 2024

When asked in 2020 to envisage the world after Covid, Michel Houellebecq proclaimed, accurately enough, that “it will be the same, just a bit worse”. It does not take a soothsayer to foresee that the same will hold true for this coming year. The year 2023 saw the greatest global resurgence of armed conflict since 1945: 2024 will be worse. 

We are living, if not through a World War, then a world at war, the great post-globalisation jostling to divide up the spoils of what was once America’s unipolar imperium. This will be as epoch-defining a period as the late Forties were for Britain, or 1991 for Russia.

Heather du Plessis-Allan: I know we're at a global tipping point with Israel

Look, I feel like we are now at a global tipping point with Israel and I think tolerance is running very short- and probably about to run out completely for their bombardment of Gaza.

A lot has happened in just the last few days, even just today, to indicate that this is on the cards now.

We've had New Zealand, Australia and Canada putting out a joint statement this morning calling for a sustainable ceasefire, saying that they are alarmed at what's happening to the civilians in Gaza.

Penn Raine: Follow the money: our institutions for sale

Winston Peter’s media bribe jibe may have hit a nerve as last week one of our prominent dailies printed a piece by the Jewish Council’s, Juliet Moses, Unasked questions over Gaza ceasefire calls in Hamas/Israel war. 

We note this  novelty with interest because until now MSM has been notably coy in presenting the conflict in any terms other than promoting the pro-Palestinian narrative and, who knows, it may yet foreshadow the placing of slightly more centrist reporting in order to prove Peters a fibber.

Brendan O'Neill: The moral cowardice of the managerial elites

Why Leo Varadkar failed to make a full-throated condemnation of the monsters of Hamas.

Is it just me or does the Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar seem to fear his own citizens more than he does the murderous theocrats of Hamas? Compare the comment he made when hundreds of louts rioted on O’Connell Street last week with the weird tweet he put out when Emily Hand, the nine-year-old Irish-Israeli girl, was finally freed from Hamas’s racist clutches. He damned the Dublin looters as a mob ‘filled with hate’, people who ‘love violence’. And Hamas? What did he say about this medieval terror group that violently abducted an Irish girl from her loving family? Well, nothing.

Michael John Schmidt: Middle East Realpolitik

We all have a responsibility to inform ourselves as far as practical and, especially if we are politicians, to verse ourselves in “Realpolitik”.

• Realpolitik refers to a pragmatic approach to politics, focusing on practical and realistic considerations rather than on ideological or moral principles.

Regarding being ideologically driven and ill-informed, we have Chlöe Swarbrick, providing advice (20 November 2023) on international affairs, i.e. the current conflict in Israel/Gaza. She said, “… it is incumbent on all political leaders in this country to stand-up to the plate (maybe she meant “step up”) and to say they call for a ceasefire and a return of the hostages and I would say for the incoming government to recognize the statehood of Palestinians…”

Daphna Whitmore: Responds to Iranian-Kiwi columnist Donna Miles

Israeli-Kiwi Daphna Whitmore responds to Donna Miles, an Iranian-Kiwi columnist and writer based in Christchurch, who published an opinion piece in the Press on the 19th of November 2023.

A.E. Thompson: Taxpayer Funded RNZ Serves The Left

RNZ's broadcast with the title 'Officials working overtime to get last 9 kiwis out of Gaza' on Checkpoint on 13/11/2023 included an interview by Susana Lei'ataua of Simon Eccleshall from Doctors Without Borders. That interview was not relevant to the title of the broadcast; why might that be? Ms Lei'ataua gave Mr Eccleshall a free platform to bemoan attacks on hospitals in the Gaza Strip. Fair enough to allow the public to be informed about that. Although no specific blame was leveled it was clear from Mr Eccleshall's narrative that he was referring to Israeli military as responsible for the violence around hospitals and other medical services. That may have been fair enough although it wasn't actually ascertained to be accurate and no question from Ms Lei'ataua arose to clarify this. The Israel-blaming implication was allowed to go unchallenged. Mr Eccleshall made a number of strident, absolutist statements asserting that attacks on hospitals are never acceptable and he referred at one point to the need for investigation of war crimes. 

Chris Trotter: Three Angels.

“Tell where you have been”, cried the Angel of Justice. “I have been seated here for hours, watching the ripple of explosions lighting up the length of Gaza, tracing the rockets’ fiery arcs across the skies of Israel, of Palestine. It is my fate to weigh the guilt of men, but in this land that is no easy task. And now you interrupt my thoughts, your raiment torn, your wings all blood be-spattered, a wild light in your eyes.”