RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/09/rewarding_terror_israel_slams_uk_canada_australia_for_recognizing_state_of_palestine.html

The United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia have formally recognized a Palestinian state, declaring the move necessary to revive a two-state solution and curb the bloodshed in Gaza. But to Israel and its supporters, the recognition amounts to nothing less than a reward for terrorism.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a blunt rebuke:

“I have a clear message to those leaders who recognise a Palestinian state after the horrific massacre of October 7: You are giving a huge reward to terrorism.
And I have another message for you: It will not happen. A Palestinian state will not be established west of the Jordan River.”

Israeli officials note that recognizing Palestinian statehood without dismantling Hamas, freeing hostages, and imposing meaningful security guarantees undermines Israel’s survival. One coalition member called it “an absurd prize for terrorism” and urged Israel to “remove the foolish idea of a Palestinian state from the agenda forever.”

Meanwhile, the three leaders presented their decision as a moral imperative. UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer declared:

“Today, to revive the hope of peace for the Palestinians and Israelis, and a two-state solution, the United Kingdom formally recognises the State of Palestine.”

Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney offered a similar justification:

“Canada recognises the State of Palestine and offers our partnership in building the promise of a peaceful future for both the State of Palestine and the State of Israel.”

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/09/21/the-gaza-genocide-a-21st-century-blood-libel/

It was a grim role reversal from the very start. Almost immediately after Hamas’s genocidal massacre of Israeli Jews on 7 October 2023, accusations of genocide were levelled against Israel – long before Israel went into Gaza to defeat Hamas and liberate the hostages it took.

On 13 October, as Israelis were still reeling from the worst atrocity in their nation’s history, Raz Segal, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies, wrote in Jewish Currents that Israel’s initial response – carrying out airstrikes against Hamas while evacuating civilians – was ‘a textbook case of genocide’. Barely a month after the massacre, on 16 November 2023, UN special rapporteurs issued a call to the international community ‘to prevent genocide’. Most absurd of all, South Africa brought a complaint against Israel to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in December 2023 for a supposed violation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. A year later, NGOs Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch both issued reports charging Israel with genocide against Palestinians. Israel has always firmly denied these accusations, asserting that its military operations are lawful self-defence.

These constant accusations of genocide from politicians and NGOs rest on a supposed ‘scholarly consensus’ of genocide experts. In late August this year, it was widely reported that the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) had adopted a resolution categorising the war in Gaza as genocide. Less widely reported was the fact that membership of the IAGS requires no academic credentials – just payment of a $30 membership fee.

In truth, the ‘scholarly consensus’ stems from a coterie of ideologically motivated academics who have promoted an alternative theory of genocide for decades. These academics have long been known for their hostility towards Israel and what they see as an inordinate focus on the Holocaust in the field of genocide studies.

As the genocide libel continues to fuel attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions around the world, it is imperative to critique the use and abuse of this term. To do so, it’s worth looking at the work of the Journal of Genocide Research (JGR) in particular, which launched a forum in January 2024 to discuss the ‘Gaza genocide’. This forum has provided much of the intellectual fuel for the genocide accusation.

The JGR is the official publication of the International Network of Genocide Scholars (INOGS). The INOGS was founded in 1999 by genocide scholars who explicitly sought to refocus the field away from the Holocaust. As Holocaust scholar Israel Charny put it in a 2016 paper, the minimisation of the Shoah has been central to the INOGS project. As Charny records, the JGR has published articles denying that the Nazis explicitly targeted Jews and arguing that the Wannsee conference, where the Nazis formulated the Final Solution, was actually developing German policy towards minorities as a whole.

The current editor of the JGR is Anthony Dirk Moses, a genocide scholar whose work, The Problems of Genocide, initiated a fierce debate in Germany in 2021 over the uniqueness of the Holocaust. As historian Verena Buser explains, Moses proposes removing the intent to destroy a group from a definition of genocide. In Moses’s view, genocide is a function of the effects of violence against civilians: ‘What difference does it make to civilian victims whether the violence against them is carried out with genocidal or military intentions?’ (1) Moses based his theory on the concept of ‘illegitimate permanent security’, in which a state’s pursuit of absolute invulnerability to threats justifies the destruction of its enemies. The idea of ‘permanent security’ is based on the line of arguments advanced by Otto Ohlendorf, SS-Gruppenführer and commander of Einsatzgruppe D, at the Nuremberg trials. Ohlendorf claimed that the Jews threatened Germany, which necessitated their complete elimination. Having murdered adult Jews, Ohlendorf argued that he could hardly have been expected to spare the children, as they would grow up to hate Germany and seek revenge. One can already see how Moses’s framework blurs the line between war, however tragic, and the deliberate destruction of a group. This sets the stage for genocide accusations against Israel.

Another central player in the INOGS is Omer Bartov, an American-Israeli Holocaust scholar. Since November 2023, he has published three articles in the New York Times, claiming that, as a scholar of genocide, ‘I know it when I see it’. While labeling Israeli actions as genocide, Bartov has said the ‘despicable attack by Hamas must be seen as an attempt to draw attention to the plight of the Palestinians’.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21920/israel-good-guy-bad-guy-confusion

The Israel-Hamas-Iran conflict, still dominating world news, remains volatile. Anti-Israel demonstrations — often devolving into violent riots – have taken place in many countries in the past 23 months.

October 7 did not happen because of the lack of a ‘Palestinian state’, but because of the existence of one: Gaza since 2005 has been fully under Palestinian control, and since 2007, fully under Hamas control. There has been no peace.

Since 2005, more than 20,000 rockets and mortars have been fired from Gaza into Israel, a country roughly the size of New Jersey, along with at least 100 suicide bombings. How many rockets, missiles and suicide bombings would France, England, Canada or Australia tolerate?

Proposals to make Israeli citizens defenseless against indiscriminate rocket fire are therefore tantamount to inviting mass murder.

Hamas, on the other hand, has a straightforward policy of targeting Israeli civilians, obliterating Israeli communities and of using its own people as human shields and putting them in harm’s way.

So we seem to have here a serious case of mixing up the “good guy” and the “bad guy”. While in any war there will be mistakes, Israel cannot simply be labeled the “bad guy”. Apart from any country thus attacked having the right to forcefully act in self-defense, nowhere in history has any country gone to such pains as Israel not to harm its adversary’s civilians. Nowhere in history have people under attack brought such amounts of humanitarian aid to the people under a regime trying to destroy them.

The UN has admitted that 90% of what it tried to deliver was intercepted by “armed actors” before reaching its destination. The GHF has been vilified and falsely accused of killing Gazans.

Israel has been accused of “targeting civilians” in Gaza (sadly, civilians were killed, as in any conflict, but Israel never targeted them as such); was “genocidal”… committed “ethnic cleansing”, and so on.

The waves of anti-Jewish hate-mongering, in fact, began even before Israel entered Gaza, and by now have become commonplace. Even large American teachers’ unions, to their shame, have been spouting anti-Semitism. This rampant vilification, already seen at universities such as Harvard and Columbia, has become a serious problem… and urgently needs to be confronted.

Israel is a state well-founded in international law. Its existence cannot seriously be a point of dispute. Israel has always wanted simply to be left alone.

The Abraham Accords, politically stabilizing and economically beneficial both to Israel and several Arab countries, show that real peace can be achieved. It is revealing that no demonstrations criticizing Israel’s campaign against the Iranian regime and its proxies have been seen in Arab countries.

Today, the remaining hostages are being deliberately starved, given — only occasionally — contaminated water, and forced to dig their own graves.

Palestinians, and least of all groups such as Hamas, have not expressed a clear desire to recognize and live in peace with a Jewish state in any borders.

It now turns out, in addition, that the Trump Administration’s “helpful” mediator, Qatar — champion of virtually every Islamic terrorist group – instead of ordering Hamas to release the hostages, has been ordering Hamas not to release them.

That there is no demonstrable will on the Palestinian side yet to accept a Jewish state and live in peace with it is also shown by the still existing “pay-for-slay” “jobs program” of Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority.

A Palestinian state now would not only be a de facto reward for terrorism, it would also inspire other terror movements to intensify their violence. The lesson the terrorists would take home would certainly be, “Terrorism works, so let’s keep on doing it.”

What the recent public demonstrations in the Netherlands and elsewhere show is mostly “selective outrage,” morally and politically lopsided. There appears to be hardly any interest in reconciliation or efforts at dialogue, and more in condoning or stimulating antipathy against Israel.

The Israel-Hamas-Iran conflict, still dominating world news, remains volatile. Anti-Israel demonstrations — often devolving into violent riots – have taken place in many countries in the past 23 months. Some were even held on, or just days after, the Hamas massacres in Israel on October 7, 2023 – in support of the massacres. There have been so many events and social media statements that amount to vilifying Israel and the Jewish people — too many “incidents” to ignore. As a Dutch academic, I plead here for less emotion and more dispassionate factual debate on this tragic conflict and about the need for honest solutions for both sides.