Losing Liberal Friends

Et tu, Brute?

Day 163 since October 7th.

Rape deniers, rape apologists, and Jew haters are everywhere, on campuses, on TV, on social media, in newspapers, in online feminist journals, marching in major city streets, attacking Jewish owned businesses and blaming the victims for the atrocities committed against them.

Babies. Grandmothers. Young girls were dragged away by their hair, with hands bound behind their backs, bloodied pants, barefoot, some just teenagers. October 7th was an onslaught of grotesque up close violence, much of it intentionally targeting women.

The October massacre was not an anomaly, look up Farud in Baghdad, look up the slaughter in Hebron before the Jewish State was established. Hitler didn’t invent Jewish genocide. He just industrialized it on a massive insidious scale. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem hung out with Hitler during WWII and was hoping that Germany would win so they could do the same to the Jews in the Middle East.

US and Canadian politicians worried about domestic politics talk loud about replacing Netanyahu’s government and creating a nation state for Palestine while mothers are still screaming their daughters’ names across the desert towards Gaza to let them know they have not been forgotten. Netanyahu will be voted out just like he has been voted out before but Hamas cannot and will not remain in power.

UC Berkeley anti Israel protestors have barricaded the main entrance to the University against Jewish students walking freely. 

The rockets have not stopped targeting Israel, the raping has not stopped. If you believe that mass rape committed on October 7th is an act of resistance and mutilating and murdering babies is legitimate armed resistance then you have lost all credibility as a progressive leader. Girls and women are still being held five months later, in underground tunnels with psychotic rapists and murderers. And still you march. 

Pramila Patten, the UN’s Secretary-General’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict stated recently:

“What I witnessed in Israel were scenes of unspeakable violence perpetrated with shocking brutality resulting in intense human suffering. We found clear and convincing information that sexual violence, including rape, sexualized torture, and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment, has been committed against hostages, and we have reasonable grounds to believe that such violence may still be ongoing against those in captivity,” she added. 

Chen Kugel, the Director of the National Center of Forensic Medicine in Israel, described crime scenes of unimaginable horror. The terrorists filmed it all, foaming at the mouth with glee, they carried out their mission of butchery including decapitations and mutilations. They have kept human remains as bargaining chips.

And yet just the other day, feminist theorist Judith Butler called the atrocities ‘armed resistance’ and refutes the truth just like recent Academy Award winner, Jonathan Glazer ‘refutes his Jewishness’ after winning an Oscar for a film about the Holocaust.

Hollywood stars wore red hand pins at the Academy Awards recently in support of Artists4peace. The red hand related to Palestinians glorifies Aziz Salha who held up his bloody hand to an angry lynch mob in Ramallah in 2000 to prove he had helped murder and dismember an Israeli soldier who had been lost and separated from his unit. I don’t believe most of the Hollywood narcissists wearing these pins even put these facts together or were aware of the intense pain and betrayal it sends to Israeli citizens, but after October 7th, I’m not assuming anything anymore. Maybe they are aware and they don’t care. This is the truth I have had to realize for the last 5 months.

Queers for Palestine have nothing to say about Ahmad Abu Marhia who was kidnapped and decapitated for being gay in 2022. He was murdered while seeking asylum in Israel. 

I wonder if they know that Israelis don’t care about their privileged point of view. The hollow virtue signalling is nauseating.

Masks are off. The chants and signs are now full throated attacks against Jews, Jewish Cultural Centers, Synagogues, businesses, Jewish Professors, and more. City Councils across the United States have passed resolutions condemning Israel without condemning Hamas. Cities like London have been deemed unsafe for Jews. 

I have witnessed with my own eyes and my own life experience how groups like SJP (Students for Justice in Palestine) and JVP (Jewish Voice for Peace) have infiltrated college campuses and political caucuses and pretend to speak for so many while they target so few. It’s no accident how fast the Israel backlash erupted.

Follow the money. The hate is constantly fed and bred for generations. Groups were poised and ready to activate.

Israel exists AGAIN, Israel was brought back to life despite thousands of years of persecution, colonization, destruction, and forced expulsions that led to the Jewish Diaspora. There has always been a Jewish presence in Jerusalem. There were massive waves of refugees after WW2 as well as Jewish refugees from all over the Middle East and Northern Africa who fled Arab persecution but there has always been a Jewish presence.

Like the Kurds, Israel is a minority, surrounded by masses of hostile forces who colonized the region and continue to subjugate minority populations. Until 1948, the Jews in the region had been colonized by Arabs, they were oppressed by Muslim Arab conquests. Hamas has declared it will commit more October 7ths again and again. 

From the river to the sea means kill all Jews, destroy Israel, and reestablish an Islamic Caliphate. Feminist pals who used to believe in smashing the patriarchy coo like fan girls over ‘solidarity marches’ convincing themselves they are justice warriors when in reality their good intentions have been hijacked and manipulated by one of the most patriarchal and brutal regime in modern times.

Using a framework of oppressor and oppressed, religious fanatics who worship death are being called freedom fighters by western socialists who categorize Israel as a colonizing force. What they fail to grasp is that this isn’t about land, this isn’t about borders, this isn’t about right of return or refugees. This is an existential threat to Israel’s existence and the likes of Hamas won’t stop until an Islamic caliphate extinguish the Jewish presence that has been there for over 4,000 years. Rashida Tlaib, who wears a keffiyeh scarf to work, was the only sitting member of the 117th US Congress to not condemn Hamas’ sexual crimes against women. I don’t know where she left her moral compass and I am not waiting for her to find it. 

Radical racist fundamentalists like to tell a story to western ears that Jews displaced them. Pull the thread on this narrative and you untangle the hate fuelled connective tissue to those who marched and chanted, ‘Jews will not replace us.’ 

I refuse to be a history revisionist, I refuse to be manipulated by fanatics, and allow Jew hatred and misogyny to be perpetuated, glorified, celebrated, and exalted. 

Jackie Bruckman

March 17, 2024