The Blogs: Naming Evil, Confronting the War on Truth

“Acharei Mot” — After the death.
So begins this week’s Torah portion, shadowed by the sudden, tragic deaths of Aaron’s sons. In response, God commands a ritual: the sacred drama of Yom Kippur. Two goats. One was offered on the altar. One cast into the wilderness, burdened with the sins of the people. A ritual of atonement, of collective reckoning, of confronting what we carry — and what we cast away.

But the parsha doesn’t stop there. It moves beyond ritual into the raw terrain of moral boundaries—the laws of intimacy, sacrifice, and blood.
This is a Torah not just of purity, but of responsibility.
Not just about what we do in the Temple, but about who we are after trauma, after sin, after evil.

It is a parsha about atonement — yes. But also about silence. About complicity.
About the danger of evading guilt by choosing the wrong scapegoat.

And now, we too are living acharei mot.
After October 7.
After the murders.
After the kidnappings.
After the rape and mutilation of women.
After the slaughter of babies, of families in their beds, of concertgoers and kibbutzniks.

But also, after the silence of too many.
After the deafening distortion.
In the midst of a global war, not only against Israel’s right to defend itself, but against the very notion of truth.

We live in a time when evil is explained away, when murderers are called militants, when rape is denied or justified.
Where victims are blamed, and terror is rewarded with platforms, funding, and moral relativism.

I want to share a few words describing old and new phenomena.

Kinocide: A New Word for a New Horror

Coined by the Civil Commission on October 7 Crimes, kinocide refers to the intentional targeting of families. Hamas terrorists murdered parents and children together, often forcing loved ones to watch one another suffer.

They filmed it. They livestreamed it. They posted it using the victims’ own phones.

This was not just war. This was psychological terror, meant to violate the sacred bond of family itself.

Hamacide: The Worship of Death

A proposed term derived from Hamas + -cide, hamacide describes the celebration of murder. It is an ideology that glorifies genocide, frames death as martyrdom, and teaches children that killing Jews is a path to holiness.

Unlike the Nazis who hid their crimes, Hamas broadcast theirs with pride.

Genocide: A Word for the Holocaust — Now Turned on Its Victims

The word genocide was coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin to describe the systematic extermination of the Jews during the Holocaust — the defining atrocity that led to the creation of the UN Genocide Convention in 1948.

Now, the term is cynically used to falsely accuse Israel, the state born from genocide’s ashes, of committing the very crime that defines its existence.

This is not justice — it is scapegoating.
Just as in Acharei Mot, the scapegoat is cast into the wilderness. Today, Israel is cast out to atone for the world’s refusal to confront real evil.

But there’s another inversion at work — deeper, older, and unresolved

The ancient Yom Kippur ritual — the sending of the goat into the wilderness — was meant to carry away the people’s sins after they had truly repented. But in the case of the Holocaust, the perpetrators and enablers have not atoned. The stain of that crime — and the failure of nations, institutions, and societies to prevent it — remains unlifted.

It is a moral burden too heavy to bear. And so, instead of reckoning with their guilt, many in the world project it back onto the victims. They obsess over Israel, seeking to prove — subtly or explicitly — that the Jews somehow deserved what happened, or worse, that they have become the new villains of history.

This isn’t atonement. It’s transference. It’s a desecration of memory.

And now, in chilling continuity with medieval history, we are once again witnessing the resurgence of the blood libel, clothed in modern imagery. As Howard Jacobson wrote, the media’s singular focus on images of dead Palestinian children, night after night, feeds into ancient, unconscious superstitions of the Jew as child-murderer — the one who kills the innocent for pleasure, revenge, or ritual. A protester in London holds up a mock dead baby. Gaza becomes the new Lincoln, and Israel the killer of “Little Hugh.”

Even when facts are wrong, corrections are rarely issued. As Jacobson notes, it doesn’t have to be a conspiracy — laziness, emotional drama, and cultural memory are enough. In a world where Jewish blood was once falsely accused of being baked into matzah, it is not surprising that images from Gaza are now read as proof of Israel’s monstrousness. The Jews, again, are cast as infanticidal demons, regardless of truth.

This is not just offensive — it is dangerous. It amplifies the anxiety, alienation, and fear Jews are feeling worldwide. It revives old hatred in a new guise. And all too often, it is done without awareness, but not without consequence.

Other Words We Need to Know

Infanticide: From Pharaoh to Herod to modern China and India — the killing of children as an act of control or ideology.
Femicide: The murder of women because they are women. A modern plague in Latin America, jihadist war zones, and beyond.
Digitalcide (emerging): The use of digital platforms to weaponise murder as viral propaganda, most starkly seen on October 7.

Historical Revisionism: The Arab’s greatest Victory

Historical revisionism, when abused, is the erasure of truth to delegitimise a people. And it is perhaps the greatest victory in the Arab world’s long war against Jewish sovereignty.

It is the quietest victory — and the most effective.

It looks like this:

Denying the Jewish connection to Jerusalem
Rewriting Jews as white colonialists, not indigenous returnees
Ignoring the expulsion of 850,000 Jews from Arab lands
Turning Jewish survival into Zionist aggression
Teaching that the Holocaust justifies nothing

The Blood Libel Then and Now

The blood libel — the accusation that Jews murder non-Jewish children for ritual purposes — has been one of the most persistent and deadly antisemitic myths in history. It led to massacres, expulsions, and centuries of Christian anti-Jewish violence. Even when the Church eventually condemned these lies, their poison endured.

Today, that same libel is resurrected, not in medieval cathedrals, but in media headlines and protest placards. Jews are no longer accused of using blood for matzah; they are accused of targeting children in Gaza with malice and precision. These accusations do not arise from fact, but from a need to cast the Jew as uniquely cruel.

This modern blood libel is not just a tragic echo of the past — it is its direct continuation.

And now: The Weaponisation of the Holocaust Itself

In one of the most cynical abuses of memory, the word “Holocaust” — once reserved to describe the systematic extermination of six million Jews — is now being hijacked to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza. Posters comparing Israeli leaders to Nazis, and Gaza to Auschwitz, are paraded in Western capitals by those who ignore the gas chambers of the past and the terror tunnels of Hamas today.

This is not just offensive — it is a strategic inversion: to equate the defenders of Jewish life with the perpetrators of Jewish genocide. It is a grotesque form of moral theft, and it has taken root in universities, NGOs, and even mainstream media.

As the Holocaust is diminished, its lessons are undone, and the world becomes fertile ground once again for antisemitism, under the false guise of activism.

They’re fighting for “Death to Israel.

As Einat Wilf has warned, this revisionism is not accidental. It’s the backbone of Palestinianism as theology — a movement that denies Jewish peoplehood and transforms antisemitism into anti-Zionist virtue. When the Jewish past is erased, the Jewish present becomes indefensible, and the Jewish future unsustainable.’

And this is the same objective of the Houthis –

‘The Houthis have been clear from day one. They’re not fighting for “Palestine.” They’re fighting for “Death to Israel.” This isn’t strategy. It’s theology. And we treated it like noise until it shook Ben Gurion’s runway. ‘ https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/407964

This is perhaps the greatest Arab victory in a century-long war — a victory not won with weapons, but with false words, votes, and narrative capture.

Let This Be the Generation That Names and Reclaims

The message of Acharei Mot is not just about ritual atonement — it’s about moral memory.

Let us call things by their name: