Enemies of the People

Identifying the real enemies of America, Israel, and Gaza

Palestine Nazi Party

We continue to learn more of Hamas’s atrocities as the war in Israel rages on—burning a mother and child alive, gang raping a girl in front of her boyfriend and stabbing her in the back each time she struggled before finally shooting her in the head, cutting off an 8-year-old’s arm and leaving her alone in the dark where she bled and wept until finally being found only to die hours later, shooting at weeping children until they stop making any sound at all, putting a baby in a kitchen oven, and on and on.

Yet still some leftists defend this, either out of pure hate for Jewish people or by arguing that burning babies and raping girls is actually decolonial resistance and therefore good.

One example is the Australian journalist Caitlin Johnstone, who sometimes writes for Russian state-run media, refuses to condemn Russia’s atrocities in Ukraine, and occasionally defends China, North Korea, Venezuela, and Syria.

Johnstone belongs to a cohort of journalists—Max Blumenthal, Rania Khalek, Ben Norton, Aaron Maté, Kim Iversen, and Jimmy Dore—who oppose human rights abuses by the United States and its allies and therefore spend their careers producing apologia for the worst human rights abusers on the planet.

When it comes to Hamas, Johnstone finds it incredibly boring to talk about “how the traumatized prisoners of a horrible concentration camp should have conducted themselves once they broke free.”

She assumes severe oppression inescapably leads to sociopathy, that we are products of systemic influences without personal agency, and that this justifies literally anything we do. Like other pro-Hamas activists, Johnstone condones rape and murder so long as it’s being carried out by a U.S. rival that’s at least vaguely socialist, even if only in name.

By the way, the Nazis check both those boxes.

Of course, it is not antisemitic to criticize Israel, as these activists like to remind us. But that doesn’t mean criticism of Israel is never antisemitic. To help us tell the difference, the human rights activist Natan Sharansky devised the Three D framework, or 3D test, in which the three Ds represent delegitimization (saying Israel should not exist), dehumanization (talking about Israel as if it is some evil entity), and double standards (holding Israel to a standard you do not hold other liberal democracies).

So for instance, chanting “from the river to the sea” is antisemitic because it violates the first D, while talking about the proportionality of Israel’s response is potentially antisemitic if and when it violates the third D.

People like to compare Hamas to the Nazis. Fair enough. As I wrote in a previous post, “Hostage to an Ongoing Holocaust,” the Palestinian nationalist movement was in part founded by Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, who sent thousands of Jewish children to their deaths in Nazi extermination camps and later jokingly bragged about it.

But in another sense, Hamas is actually worse than the Nazis. Just imagine if both groups could wave a wand and have everything they wanted. Picture what those worlds would look like. In both of them, Jews would be wiped from existence. There would be no more LGBTQ members. Every lesbian daughter and trans child would be murdered. There would be no members of political or religious opposition. All the world would be ruled by the Nazi Empire or Hamas Caliphate and dissidents or infidels would be gassed or put to the sword. For the most part, these worlds would be equally hellish.

Except for one thing. In the world of Nazi rule, there would be a protected in-group who would enjoy considerable freedom and almost all the luxuries of life. But in the world of Hamas rule, there would be no protected in-group because Hamas targets and brutalizes even its own Arab Muslim people.

After October 7, when Israel told noncombatants to evacuate northern Gaza, Hamas told Gazans to remain in their homes in the north. Hamas shot Gazans and bombed convoys that did head south. Hamas builds military bases under hospitals. It stores rockets in schools. It builds tunnels and hides the entrances by using innocent people, such as by putting the entrance of one tunnel under a child’s bed.

The evil of the Nazis was in not recognizing the humanity of their victims, but even they at least recognized the value of human life amongst themselves, whereas Hamas affords that recognition to no one, not even their own children.

In a recent post, “The Problem of Palestinian Culture,” I explained that Gazans do not actually live in such dire circumstances. Gaza is not particularly dense, its people are not particularly poor, and they live longer than the global average. Here’s another fact that I didn’t mention in that post. There are beach resorts in Gaza.

“One person said it looks like Miami,” said Solomon Hijjy, an aerial photographer who publishes drone footage of Gaza from above. “Palestinians in the diaspora were shocked too. They would contact us and say, are you sure this is Gaza? We want evidence!”

Gazans have consistently received the highest per capita amount of foreign aid in human history, more than the Marshall Plan, but again, this was used not to improve the lives of the people but to build a terrorist tunnel system that is larger than the New York subway system and thousands upon thousands of rockets with which to murder Jewish children.

Here’s another fact. A cross-sectional study published in June 2020 found that 20% of Gazans are obese. That’s a higher obesity rate than most countries in the world.

Finally, in that post I shared polling data to show that support for specific terrorist attacks is at about 80% among Gazans. In other words, the problem is not just Hamas, but the culture itself. Well, more polling data is now out.

About 63.6% of Gazans and 83.1% of West Bankers support the October 7 massacre, according to a survey by the Arab World for Research and Development.

Pro-Palestiniain activists want us to believe that the October 7 massacre was the result of Israeli occupation. They ignore the fact that Israel unilaterally withdrew in 2005, leaving behind all the infrastructure, homes, greenhouses, and forcibly removing 9,000 Jewish people.

But there’s an easy way to test this assertion. If Gazans violence is the result of their “occupation,” as Johnstone claims, then we would not expect to find such activity in other countries. But we do.

After the Six-Day War in 1967, Palestinian fedayeen fighters moved to the Jordanian town of Karameh to continue attacking Israel from there. Jordan’s King Hussein hesitated to expel them. But soon, the Palestinians began calling for the overthrow of the monarchy and riding around the capital city of Amman, robbing Jordanian families and businesses to help fund their war against Israel. The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) maintained it own military on Jordanian soil, from which it launched rockets into Israel targeting Jewish civilians.

In September 1970, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacked three civilian passenger flights, landed them in Jordan, took the passengers hostage, and blew up the planes in front of international press. Hussein then launched a full-scale war against the PLO and drove the Palestinians out, but not before the PLO assassinated Jordanian prime minister Wasfi Tan in 1971.

During this time, about 400,000 Palestinians moved to Lebanon. They also supported Fatah and the PLO, and the refugee camps became breeding grounds for terrorist activity. These groups allied with local Marxist and socialist groups in an effort to overthrow Lebanon’s government and within a few years of their arrival, Lebanon was embroiled in a civil war that lasted 15 years from 1975 to 1990 and left about 150,000 people dead, making it the fifth bloodiest conflict in Middle Eastern history.

The year after the Lebanese Civil War ended, Kuwait expelled nearly 300,000 Palestinians, or a whopping 18% of its entire population, because the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat had supported Saddam Hussein’s brutal invasion of Kuwait the year before simply because Saddam fired 42 Scud missiles into Israel in January 1991.

Another argument asserts that Palestinians simply want self-determination. But they specifically want their own nation, not for the sake of independence, but for the sake of eradicating Jewish people. We know this to be true because the Palestinians have been offered their own state again and again, and they continue to refuse because what they actually want is to realize the chant, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free.”

They rejected the offer of statehood under the 1937 Peel Commission because they could not tolerate Jews living in the region. They rejected the offer of statehood under the 1947 UN Partition Plan. The 1974 Arab summit on Rabat established the antisemitic PLO, and not Jordan, as the voice of the Palestinian people and did not even consider the question of Palestinian statehood.

When Egyptian president Anwar Sadat signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, the Palestinian Liberation Organization called for Egypt to be boycotted, the Arab states complied, most Arab ambassadors in Egypt were recalled, and Cairo was cut out of the Arab League from 1977 until 1989.

In 2000 at the Camp David summit, Israel prime minister Ehud Barak offered Arafat concessions on borders, land transfers, and more, in exchange for Arafat agreeing to end the conflict. Arafat didn’t even both to make a counteroffer. Instead, he responded with a massive wave of violence, sending suicide bombers to blow Jewish civilians apart on the streets and buses of Israel. In the al-Aqsa Intifada, as it became known, Palestinian terrorists murdered over 1,000 Israelis.

Despite this, in 2005, the Ariel Sharon administration unilaterally withdrew from Gaza and the northern West Bank. They removed about 9,000 Israelis. They left all the infrastructure they had built. Israel even removed Jewish graves from the town of Gush Katif. They have not gone back since, and this is why it is false to speak of an occupation today. But in response, the Palestinians took the infrastructure, and rather than use it to improve their quality of life, they dismantled much of it to construct weapons and kill Jewish families. Hamas was elected into power two years later, and tens of thousands of rockets have been fired into Israel from Gaza since then.

In 2008, Israeli PM Ehud Olmert offered Arafat’s successor as PLO chairman and Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas a sweeping peace deal. Abbas immediately rejected it.

In 2019, Palestinians rejected the Trump peace plan before they even looked at it.

In other words, they want to establish their Palestinian state where Israel currently exists. For some, the genocide and mass refugee crisis that would result is a side effect but not the actual point. For others, that is the actual point, even more than statehood. Either way, however, the outcome would be the same.

Recently, Palestinian journalist Wafa Al-Udaini argued that Israel’s response is disproportionate and therefore immoral. But when TalkTV host Julia Hartley-Brewer repeatedly asked Al-Udaini to describe what a proportionate response would look like, she refused, because if you believe the conditions in Gaza are so bad that they justify terrorism, then you probably believe the only appropriate response to the October 7 massacre is to do nothing but free Gazans.

Of course, when Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad killed Muslim children, gassing them with mustard gas, these activists didn’t care. Nor did they make a sound about Uyghur Muslims. Or Rohingya Muslims. Or anti-balaka militias in the Central African Republic targeting Bangui Muslims and Muslim ethnic groups such as the Fulas. Nor did they care about the 2020 Delhi riots in India, or the Hindu nationalist prime minister Narendra Modi’s anti-Muslim citizenship law.

Simply put, these people do not care about Muslims. They do not care about Gazans. If they did, they would have something to say about the way in which Hamas treats Gazans. How did we ever end up believing Hamas was anything but a terrorist group?

As the late Christopher Hitchens wrote an essay in 2006 titled “Suicide Voters: How Hamas Dooms Palestine”:

It’s agonizing to watch the Palestinians choose a leadership that is openly aligned with the moribund and vicious dictatorships in Iran and Syria. The time when the PLO called for a democratic secular state seems a very long while ago.

That same year, former Hamas spokesman Ghazi Hamad gave PBS Newshour an interview in which he said:

We are a moderate organization, really. We are not a radical organization and we are not extremist or fundamentalist. No, we are an open-minded organization. We believe in democracy and freedom and political pluralization. We respect all people. So I think we can create a new society.

Many on the American left believed Hamad. They wanted to believe we should give peace a chance and work with Hamas. But the mask has since come completely off.

On October 24, Hamad went on Lebanese TV and said:

The Al-Aqsa Flood is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth, because we have the determination, the resolve, and the capabilities to fight. Will we have to pay a price? Yes, and we are ready to pay it. We are called a nation of martyrs, and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs.

The news anchor then asked him what he means when he talks about occupation. Is he referring to the occupation of the Gaza Strip?

No, I am talking about all the Palestinian lands.

The news anchor then asks if this means the total annihilation of Israel.

Yes, of course. The existence of Israel is illogical. The existence of Israel is what causes all that pain, blood, and tears. It is Israel, not us. We are the victims of the occupation. Period. Therefore, nobody should blame us for the things we do. On October 7, October 10, October one million. Everything we do is justified.

Hamad and Johnstone are aligned on this point. Everything they do is justified. Everything.

This is the reality that we face. They are openly telling us that they want to commit a genocide, and Western woke progressives are saying that if they do so, it will be morally justified because Israel has taken measures to prevent genocide, and those measures include, for example, building a wall to protect its people.

Sam Harris recently said we’re not fighting terrorism, which is just a tactic, but jihad. I would add that jihad is to Islam what Bolshevism is to communism. That is, the willingness to use violence to achieve one’s religious or political goals—radicalism. But if terrorism is the how, radicalism is the what, not the why.

Part of the why is antisemitism. Part of it is Palestinian culture. Part of it is technology. Specifically, the way in which people are being manipulated by online information when using apps such as TikTok.

I recently interviewed the foreign correspondent and personal friend Geoffrey Cain, who had this to say about TikTok:

Don’t use TikTok. Stay off TikTok. Don’t download TikTok. It might be fun to post those cat videos and twerking and all that. You know, it’s fun to play around with that thing. But if you download TikTok, you are actively supporting a company that must report that data, that must report things about you to the Chinese communist party intelligence officials, if they request it. And if TikTok, or if ByteDance, its parent company, were not to hand that data over, that is a crime in China and people are going to jail in China …

They're using it to train algorithms that can be used against the American nation if a war ever breaks out. TikTok has enormous algorithmic power. And in the future, this is the worry of many of America’s leaders, they will take that data and they’re going to turn it right around on us in the event of a serious conflict. They’re going to use it to manipulate Americans, to send out fake news, to make things look like what they’re not. And TikTok is enormously popular among younger people. It’s been the fastest growing social media app ever. Faster than Facebook in its heyday. It’s taking over the world of social media and it’s the only way that many young people get their news and if China controls that, if the CCP controls that, that’s going to be a disaster because they’re going to use it against us for propaganda operations. Think Cambridge Analytica, which manipulated public sentiment. Now, instead of it being one company, imagine it’s the world's largest police state with one of the world’s largest militaries and a dictator who puts people in concentration camps.

Cain did not have to wait long to be proven right. TikTok influencers are already posting videos in which they say they just read Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America” and are now revising everything they ever knew about the world. They want you to know that bin Laden was right all along. And if you watch the videos closely, you’ll notice that they use the same phrases, telling viewers, “everyone go read the letter right now” and calling it an “existential crisis,” as if they were all given the same CCP script.

The current war will end when Hamas surrenders. But the battle will continue so long as Palenazis are in power and their views are commonly held by the public. We must confront the problem in the culture, and the problem in our own culture among people who think Vladimir Lenin, Adolf Hitler, Hamas, and Osama bin Laden are the good guys. We must call them out and defeat their ideas.

These people are our enemies. Thankfully for us, the truth is their enemy.

As for Hamas, they can be dealt with as the Nazis were and they can stay in Israel forever, six feet under the desert, or have their day in court like the Nazis of the Nuremberg trials. Short of that, if they choose to fight, they do not have a right to complain about the consequences of choosing to fight.