Blaming Israel for the rise in antisemitism: the intellectual antisemite

Three months into the Hamas massacre in Israel and we are still subjected to anti-Israel narrative disguised as human rights for the “oppressed” Gazans. The narrative turns insidious when it conveniently omits historical geopolitical facts that disproof the conversation. As recent as a few days ago, an “opinion” piece by Austin Sammut on the Times of Malta (January 6, 2024) revealed the extent antisemites go to vilify Israel and Jews to hide their own antisemitism.

Looking into Mr. Sammut’s background one is not surprised at his intrinsic and imbedded anti-Israel stance. He is the Malta correspondent for the BBC, which was listed as the third most antisemite organization behind Iran and Hamas on the 2021 Global Antisemitism Top Ten List by the Simon Wiesenthal Center.  Any “correspondent” worth his salt and ethics would stay away from the BBC like the plague. But Hamas apologists like Mr. Sammut and the BBC find comfort in each other’s pseudo superior intellectual anti-Israel “reporting”.

In the Times of Malta “opinion” piece entitled “One man’s cruel war” (January 6, 2024), Mr. Sammut attempts to blame the rise in antisemitism and jew hatred on Netanyahu and Israel. He spent much of his “opinion” bashing the former while bringing up the judicial haul protests and the war with Hamas as an excuse for the latter. Mr. Sammut must have deliberately or moronically refrained from mentioning, that the judicial protests have little or nothing to do with the war, and that since October 7, the government and Israel united in their fight against Hamas. Those who protested six months ago are fighting and dying side by side for their country. This is Israel’s war for survival not Netanyahu’s. But deliberate ignorance does not stop the visceral in print if it gets a rise.

Without ever mentioning: the massacres of October 7^th, the fact that Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005 and Gazans elected Hamas in 2006, or that since 1947 statehood was offered to the Palestinian Arabs five times and systematically refused, the accusation of Palestinian genocide in Gaza and West Bank by Israel, albeit impassionate omitted mitigating factors and truth. I should remind Mr. Sammut that the West Bank “settlers” who he accused of attacking Palestinians are in Judea and Samaria, where Jesus was born, as a Jew because it is the ancestral home of the Jews. I guess if Jesus were alive today, Mr. Sammut would accuse him of genocide.

The deliberate omission of terrorist attacks by Palestinians throughout the past seven decades in Israel, and the thousands of rocket attacks by Hamas in between leads me to conclude that Mr. Sammut is either a fool or historically deficient. For the sake of argument, I will point out to Mr. Sammut that it is Hamas who has kept Gazans in squalor for 18 years. The billions of dollars given to Gaza by the UN and the EU should have built a city of gold not ghettos. If Mr. Sammut wants to bring up genocide against Palestinians, he only needs to look at Hamas and their playbook.

Hamas not only anticipates retaliation when it attacks Israel, it bets on it. It is an excuse to turn their own people into martyrs by launching missiles from crowded residential neighborhoods, hospitals, schools, and mosques, hoping that an Israeli rocket hits back and takes out civilians. It is their PR dream realized by idiots like Mr. Sammut who become their proxy marketing executives!

Unless Mr. Sammut has been living under a rock, the footage of kilometers in tunnels under schools, hospitals and private homes should have given him a hint of where evil is perpetrated and by whom. But like the now all too familiar intellectual antisemites, Mr. Sammut does not acknowledge the true evil because it does not fit his narrative. Every sane person knows that Hamas’ sole objective which is in their charter, is to kill Jews and eradicate Israel, and not for the good of the Palestinians, but for the sole purpose of Islamic radicalism in the region.

Mr. Sammut blames Netanyahu’s “massacre of Palestinians” for the rise in antisemitism and jew hatred, and the reason why Jews around the world are afraid to leave their homes. Such inanity is beyond comprehension. Mr. Sammut forgot to mention the October 7 pogroms on villages and their inhabitants, the murder of 200 young people at a festival, or even the hostage taking of over 200 innocent civilians, many of whom have already been murdered. The repeated rapes, beatings, and dragging through the streets of Gaza in celebratory jubilation of Israeli Jewish women and young girls must have also skipped Mr. Sammut’s feeble mind. Some of these Jewish women were later executed amid cheers from Gazans who either participated in the brutality or stood by and watched. Yes, Mr. Sammut, Netanyahu is surely to blame.

After October 7, Israel warned Gazans of the pending retaliatory attacks. Hamas refused to evacuate its people. More deaths give better media coverage.  Hamas welcomes idiots like the BBC and Sammut. They are their mouthpiece without being on the payroll.

The unfortunate truth is that Mr. Sammut is not alone in the systematic antisemitism and Jew hatred disguised as polite political intellectual conversation. Him and those of his ilk are terrorist apologists proponing self-righteous support for what and who they consider a victim. These are individuals who excuse criminals and fault victims.  A degradation in ethics and morality that justifies a massacre while labeling the murderers victims. A special reminder to Mr. Sammut: justifying terrorist attacks on Israel, a Jewish State, is the definition of antisemitism.

Reading Mr. Sammut’s visceral “opinion” column and Golda Meir’s biography on the same day fired me up in exposing intellectual antisemites like Mr. Sammut, Ivy League universities, and the UN Security Council, who are either purposely moronic, comfortable in their antisemitism, or unable to differentiate between both.

Golda Meir’s pragmatism left little room for undetermined opinions or decisions. In Golda’s biography written by her son Menahem, the “White Paper” was discussed in detail. The useless Chamberlain government in London, threatened by the Arab claim of joining the Axis, drafted what was referred to as the “White Paper”. It was basically the betrayal of all Jews in Europe. This paper sent Jews to their death by ending all immigration of Jews from Europe.

After WWI Golda Meir and thousands of Jews like her had been living in British Palestine. They bought land from the Arabs and transformed it into productive self-sustaining farmland. Using innovating irrigation, the Negev which the British had dismissed as “entirely uncultivatable” produced an abundance of tomatoes, wheat, cotton, and cucumbers. Although attacks on Jews by Arabs were frequent, the British refused to intervene.

The desperate situation of Jews in Europe was ignored, and the British remained steadfast to the White Paper and wary of the Arabs. After the war, Holocaust survivors had no homes to return to. Their previous homes and all their possessions were destroyed or confiscated. The large influx of refugees, mostly children, were homeless and stateless. Nobody wanted them. Europe and the world could no longer ignore the creation of a Jewish state as imperative. This was not presumption of resettlement, but the fact Jews could not return to their homes in Germany, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Soviet Union which included Ukraine, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, and every other state in between. Maybe Jews should have demanded their property back “from the Black Sea to the Dutch coast”!

The British attempted to stop the thousands of refugees from Europe heading toward Haifa and Tel Aviv. This included intercepting ships from docking into the ports, or worse, allowing them entry only to reload the Holocaust survivors on British cargo ships and returning them back to Germany and “allied” camps. Some were taken to Cyprus and placed in similar camps there. Such determined atrocities were virtually ignored until the UN (formerly the League of Nations) finally recognized the desperate need for a safe Jewish state. An important fact: at the same time that Israel was created, a Palestinian Arab state was also offered to the Arabs. They refused. That refusal continues until today. And that, Mr. Sammut, is what you should have an “opinion” about.

Golda Meir was of the strong opinion that the destiny of Jews had always relied on strangers. The British, the Americans, even the UN determined what was “good” for the Jews. This impeded Diaspora Jews to assist Jews in Europe. The “White Paper” blocked any evacuation of Jews being rounded up in Europe and as she put it: “…the one and only thing that blocked their way from death to life, was a political regulation laid down by strangers-the White Paper”.

Such historical geopolitical consequential facts are subsequently repeatedly ignored because truth has very little value in any antisemite narrative. Reading an “opinion” peace on a major newspaper by an assumed credible ethical litigator, but rife with false accusations, historical and political inaccuracies, deliberate omissions of facts, and published as a plea for justice and peace, is not only nauseating, but categorically morally wrong.

In three months, we witnessed antisemitism and Jew hatred rise from unacceptability to a brazen unchallenged distortion of truth with immunity. When such rhetoric is perpetrated by supposedly intellectual professionals, then the professional legal and higher education world is ethically and morally bankrupt. One redeeming factor for the Times of Malta and Malta, was the influx of comments from Maltese readers who took exception to Mr. Sammut’s distorted opinion and exposed him as an antisemite who ignores the massacre of innocent civilians in defense of terrorists. A welcome glimmer of hope.

Sammut. A. January 6, 2024. One man’s cruel war (timesofmalta.com)

Meir, M. 1983. My Mother Golda Meir