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.
GERAINT LLOYD says
This sounds like the old adage of “pissing in the wind” when it comes to getting the general populace to recognise the reality of what is the reality in this conflict. So sad.
somehistory says
I have seen in recent days msn reporters saying some Truth about this whole issue of hamas and the count of *civilian* deaths, telling their readers “hamas” is the one keeping the war going, and keeping the killing going.
At some point, those people who have not been hearing the Truth or reading it, will do so. ‘All things done in secret will be revealed,” said Jesus.
The Truth about who is responsible for all of the carnage, the murders, etc. will become known by the many.
Those who already know, have to keep saying it.
40 rounds says
End times, maybe SH
somehistory says
I’m convinced of it >>>pc messing with me again forty
Everything is in place!
Ray Jarman says
+++++1
Somehistory, to add to your excellent comment, this reminds me of one of my favorite people searching for the truth in the leadup to the Second World War and once realizing God’s truth, Whittiker Chambers, “Witness,” traveled the road to Communism to becoming an American patriot. Brendan O’Neill, seems to be a parallel to my hero.
somehistory says
Thank you very much, Ray, for your supportive comment. And the illustration/example of someone searching and finding the Truth.
The Bible says that God will let Himself be found by anyone searching, though He “is not far off for each one of us.”
Laura says
Yet it’s not a secret at all. The evil of hamas is very much out in the open, the truth is obvious, but the west refuses to see. Perhaps the west thinks that appeasing muslim savages will save themselves. It won’t work anymore than appeasing the nazis saved Europe from hitler.
Cynthia says
We are in bizzaro world now, where the righteous saving of the hostages is seen as evil. Evil Hamas and all the surrounding civilians who picked up machine guns in the neighborhood started the shooting in the midst of a heavily populated area. Since October 7 every casualty is on Hamas and their sympathizers.
dunk says
Hamass killed and stole,period So?
OLD GUY says
The MONEY CHANGERS are back in the house, the White House. Sending more money to Palestine is a terrible mistake and miss-justice to the American tax payer. If the Biden Admin. is so hell bent on spending 220 million dollars go ahead and payoff the student loan debt, but DON’T send it to Palestine/Hamas. And I don’t support the student loan payoff at all, but if we are going to spend money we don’t have let’s spend it on our children not our enemies.
Siddi Nasrani says
If Gaza is indeed, as some assert, a giant concentration camp, then who made it so?
Let’s try Hamas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MIlP1kKwGw
James Lincoln says
Yes, Siddi Nasrani.
That is the inconvenient truth.
Lilith Wept says
The Bible says “ Woe to those that call evil good and good evil, who,pit darkness for light and light for darkness , who put bitter for sepweet and sweet for bitter! Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes and shrewd in their own sight”.
2 Timothy 3:1-5
Finally “ But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful , unholy, heartless unappeasable, slanderous, without self control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen wirh conceit , lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of Gid, having the appearance of godliness but denying its power. Avoid such people.”
Proverbs 17:15
This sounds like Islam and the terrorist organizations that uphold its ideology and try to force it on the World.
This sounds like the Woke Leftists in America and in Europe.
This sounds like the biased leftist democrats , and all,those that support them and their aganda.
All,of these twist words, changing the definitions of words to mean what they want them to mean. Exhibiting cruelty, and hatred, arrogance and eveything described in these verses.