OPINION One month since Hamas’ crime against humanity targeting Israelis: any justification or indifference is nothing but complicity with Islamo-fascists

“First they came for the LGBTQ and I spoke out because love is love.

Then they came for the immigrants and I spoke out because families should be together.

Then they came for the people of color and I spoke out because Black Lives Matter.

Finally, they came for me, and I was alone because I am Jewish.” – is a meme circulating on Facebook.

The text is an adaptation of the famous saying by Lutheran pastor Martin Niemoller (1892 – 1984), an anti-Nazi dissident who was imprisoned for eight years in concentration camps (1937 – 1945), who wrote: “First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out because I was not a communist. Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me, and no one was left to speak for me.”

Exactly one month after the massacre committed by Hamas in which 1,400 Israelis were killed and another 200 taken hostage, these words seem very appropriate. The wave of anti-Semitism that has engulfed all of humanity, and attention!, not just after Israel’s response against Hamas in Gaza but immediately after the massacre shows very clearly one thing: that for many people, who mostly have nothing to do with Jews, a Jew is good as a victim, preferably dead, but by no means one who defends himself when attacked.

And here we arrive at the crux of the problem: for most of those who make Israel their target of antisemitic attacks, antisemitism is the primary motivation. Because, in fact, they are not interested in the fate of the Palestinians. If they were, they would have protested when the dictator Bashar al-Assad’s regime was massacring Palestinians in refugee camps in Syria. According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, 3,196 Palestinians were killed by Syrian regime forces between 2011 and 2020, including 491 due to torture.

No, the conflict between Israel and Hamas (not the Palestinian people, who have been governed for years by a terrorist-Islamist regime in Gaza and another corrupt secular one in the West Bank) is an opportunity for some, mostly ignorant, to express this last form of racism that is de facto accepted: antisemitism. Otherwise, why are Jews being attacked on the streets in countries thousands of kilometers from Israel? Why are synagogues being attacked in Spain, Sweden, and the United States, why are Jewish shops vandalized in the United Kingdom, why are Stars of David painted on the homes of Jews in France?

Why are the lies and propaganda of Hamas believed? Israel was accused of bombing a hospital in Gaza, a blatant misinformation proven to be false, with the actual bombers being Hamas themselves with a failed rocket attack against Israel. Have you heard anything more about this “crime against humanity committed by Israel”? Of course not, because everyone realized it was a blatant lie.

Likewise, except for Israel and Jewish organizations, you rarely hear about the massacre on October 7, the largest pogrom since the Holocaust. There are plenty of fools – in the best-case scenario – or scoundrels – in the worst-case scenario, who deny that this massacre took place. For example, Piers Corbyn, the brother of the former leader of the Labour Party in the UK, the left-wing extremist Jeremy Corbyn, claimed that in fact, Hamas did not kill any Jewish children and that those were actors!!! The same type of denial as in the case of the massacres committed by Russian troops in Ukraine like the one in Bucha in March 2022. Hamas has anyway announced that it will repeat such a massacre two or three times.

The accusation from those who have the minimum decency not to deny the October 7 massacre is that Israel has caused such behavior from the Palestinians (actually Hamas) through the occupation and discrimination committed in the 75 years of the state’s existence. The UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, even said that the October 7 massacre did not arise in a vacuum. In other words, it has a certain justification.

Yes, Israel has numerous flaws, it is currently governed by a government that includes right-wing extremists like Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who are outright fascists (they would expel all Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza if they could, if not also the two million Palestinian Arabs who are citizens of Israel). But let’s not forget that in 1948 when the state was formed following a UN decision, the Arab states refused the partition of Palestine and initiated a war that aimed to destroy the Jewish state and complete Hitler’s intention (widely admired in the Arab world) to annihilate all Jews.

Since then, Israel has lived under the constant threat of annihilation, a country smaller than Belgium, which now has a population of nearly 10 million, surrounded by over 100 million Arabs and Muslims, the majority of whom are extremely hostile. And this country is, despite what hostile propaganda claims, a democracy, in which a fifth of the population are Muslims. How many Jews live in Arab and Muslim states? Communities approaching 10,000 are only in Turkey and Iran, in the rest, most Muslim countries are Judenrein – free of Jews (a Nazi desideratum), where nearly a million Jews lived before 1948, forced to leave, sometimes only with the clothes on their backs and a suitcase, after the founding of the state of Israel.

Israel and, by implication, Jews are an easy target. Would the protesters have the courage to demonstrate against China for the (real) genocides taking place against the Uighurs or Tibetans? Not at all. Have you seen Muslims massively demonstrating in favor of the Muslim minority Rohingya persecuted by the dictatorial regime in Burma? Are they somehow interested in the fact that in Yemen where the conflict by proxy between Saudi Arabia and Iran kills thousands of victims, many of them children? Not at all.

And to return to the Palestinians, are the demonstrators interested in the fact that Hamas uses the civilian population as human shields, for example by placing command centers in the basements of hospitals? How much of the aid sent by the international community reaches the civilian population in Gaza and what part is diverted by these Islamo-fascists? Do supporters of the Palestinian cause, many of them left-wing people, ask how Hamas (which has the declared goal of destroying the state of Israel and openly promotes antisemitism) treats women? Is it possible to be homosexual in Gaza? And such questions can go on indefinitely, with opponents of Israel either denying the evidence or pretending it’s raining.

An undeniable fact remains: on October 7, 2023, Hamas committed a crime against humanity that claimed the lives of 1,400 Israelis, mostly Jews, but also Muslims, Christians, and Druze, and over 200 people, children, women, men, young, old were kidnapped and are being held hostage (those who are still alive). Today, a month after the commission of that atrocity, the thoughts of humanity must turn to them and any justification or indifference to that abominable crime can only constitute complicity with a fascist group.