Alarming echoes from yesteryear resonate today

Now that the dust has settled on the most contentious election of our lifetime, it is time to pivot our attention to an age-old and intractable problem that just will not go away, Israel’s fight against the hypocrisy of a double standard.

The most recent outrage is that International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor, Karim Khan, issued warrants for Prime Minister Netanyahu and Gallant. He is the same individual who faced accusations that he tried for more than a year to push a female aide into a sexual relationship against her will.

In a statement Khan said that there was reason to believe that Netanyahu and Gallant used “starvation as a method of warfare” by restricting humanitarian aid and intentionally targeting civilians in Israel’s campaign in Gaza — charges Israeli officials dismissed as false and antisemitic.

The ICC has no credibility, except to those who harbor anti-Semitic views. It ignored Hamas’ practice of using civilians as human shields, as well as commandeering mosques, hospitals, and schools and using them as launching pads from which to indiscriminately send missiles into Israel’s civilian population centers. The court also charged the Israeli leaders with starving the residents of Gaza, when it has been clearly documented that Hamas pilfered tons food, medicine and supplies that Israel delivered to Gaza civilians.

John Spenser, chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute (MWI) at West Point; served for 25 years as an infantry soldier and two tours in Iraq, said, “Despite the unique challenges Israel faces in its war against Hamas, it has implemented more measures to prevent civilian casualties than any other military in history.”

It is both shocking and troubling that the same demonstrators, without cause, call for additional humanitarian aid for residents of Gaza, have failed to call upon Hamas to release the babies, the women, the elderly and the disabled it holds hostage. A sure sign of the demise of the Judeo-Christian moral code is that academia and their impressionable charges openly celebrate the murders, beheadings and burning alive of innocent civilians, while demonstrating in defense of the barbaric actions of Hamas.

Those who say, it is obvious I am against the horrific attacks by Hamas, so there is no need to call it out, are offering but a tepid and indifferent response to the perpetration of crimes against humanity which Iran, the world’s biggest exporter of terrorism, generously funds, clandestinely orchestrates, and covertly executes through its proxies. The Hamas charter calls for the elimination of Israel, so those who march to the rhythmic chant “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” are supporting the genocidal aims of the radical Islamic terrorists of Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis.

During the years leading up to WWII, German universities declared ‘a day without Jews,’ which inevitably led to a call for a Judenrein day, a countrywide day without Jews, and finally a country without Jews. Today the same detestable calls, fueled by the hatred of Israel and Jews, hop-skip across university quads, and reverberate throughout the halls of Congress. To paraphrase Shakespeare, the past is prologue for the future and what a frightening and wretched future we see unfolding. Europe stood silent in the face of the murder of a third of European Jewry, today there are rallies and calls for the utter destruction of the ancestral homeland of the Jews and all its Jewish inhabitants.

How ironic that today, the same people who decry the expulsion of the indigenous Native Americans from their lands, call for the expulsion of Jews, the indigenous people of Israel, from their ancestral homeland.

The hypocrisy of a double standard is the new morality; it has gone mainstream. It is fueled by ignorance and animated by a tradition of age-old prejudices. Unfortunately, today the same people who vociferously call for increasing humanitarian aid to Gaza, of which 60 % is pilfered by Hamas, deny the Jewish people the ability to leave in peace, the very people who 3,500 years ago introduced the idea and practice of humanitarianism to the world.

Today, the media, university academia, the ICC, and the US administration give voice to the canards, tropes and outright fabrications against Israel. Unfortunately, the defiant ‘Never again’ is happening again, and the instruction ‘Zachor’ (Remember), has been all but forgotten.