By Hugh Fitzgerald, JIHAD WATCH 13 June 2024
Brendan O’Neill, who started his political life as a convinced Communist but has traveled very far since then, is one of the few British journalists who is clear-eyed about Hamas, which he detests, and about Israel, which he admires. He’s been horrified at the way, during this Gaza War, so many people are giving the terror group a pass. He’s not having any of it. More on his response can be found here: “The racism of never blaming Hamas for anything,” by Brendan O’Neill, Spiked, June 10, 2024:
“We really are living in an era of moral inversion. Every day there is a sinister twisting of the truth to suit the ideological prejudices of those who loathe Israel. Hamas hides the hostages it seized from the Nova music festival in a densely populated civilian area, and yet it’s Israel that is accused of being ‘perfidious’. Hamas purposely puts its Jewish victims among the women and children of a crowded refugee camp, and yet it’s Israel that is accused of wearing a ‘humanitarian camouflage’. Hamas was founded with the express intention of murdering Jews, an intention it gave brute force to on 7 October with its slaughter of a thousand Israelis, and yet it’s Israel that is damned as ‘genocidal’. The racist hostage-takers are reimagined as victims, the liberators of the hostages as criminals. It is one Kafkaesque lie after another.”
Critics of the rescue raid describe Israel as “perfidious” because some of its troops taking part in the rescue operation in Gaza spoke perfect Arabic, were dressed in civilian clothes, and managed to pass themselves off as Palestinians. How dare the Israelis use such trickery to deceive the too-trusting Hamas operatives? How unfair, But wasn’t it Muhammad himself who said in a famous hadith that “War is deceit”?
“Where is Hamas in all the political rage over what happened in Nuseirat? It has been invisibilised, scrubbed from the narrative so that the blame might be heaped on Israel alone. Hamas merits not one mention in Francesca Albanese’s angry doggerel. Does she not know that Hamas started the Battle of Nuseirat, by firing its lethal weaponry at the IDF from amid the civilian hordes? Or perhaps she doesn’t care? You have to go beyond the headlines about Israel ‘killing 274 Palestinians’ to discover that the IDF came ‘under heavy fire’ and ‘fought intense gun battles’ with Hamas militants. To describe an army’s response to the bullets and missiles of terrorists as ‘genocidal’ is an unconscionable manipulation of language for cynical political ends.
The truth is this: Hamas is responsible for every death in Nuseirat. It will be literally responsible for some of them, unless we are expected to believe that you can fire grenades and mortar rounds in an area teeming with civilians without one of the deadly loads going anywhere near an innocent. And it is morally responsible for all of it, for all the suffering we saw on Saturday amid the joy of the four Israelis being liberated from the confinement of the antisemites. For the simple reason that it is the author of this hellish war, the instigator of it. Hamas and Hamas alone brought war to Nuseirat.
What the Battle of Nuseirat really exposes is not Israel’s ‘genocidal intent’ but Hamas’s evil. That Hamas placed the four hostages in a crowded civilian area confirms its callous disregard for Palestinians as well as Israelis. That it started a bloody battle with the IDF even as women were shopping and children were playing confirms its terroristic indifference to the injury and loss of innocent life. That it prioritised trying to hurt the IDF and keep a hold of the hostages over and above keeping the civilians of Nuseirat safe from harm confirms how zealous, how unhinged, its anti-Israel, anti-Jewish doctrine has become. This is a movement that prizes killing a Jew more highly than saving a Palestinian. Its cruelty is unparalleled in the modern era….”
O’Neill’s indictment of Hamas, held blameless by so many, and his defense of Israel, accused of atrocities by too many, bristles with Swiftian saeva indignatio (the words Swift used about himself in his Latin epitaph), that is, his “savage indignation.” Keep it up, Mr. O’Neill. More such savage indignation from you is exactly what Fleet Street needs.
No question about it.