Some Jews take it as a compliment that Jews are held to a higher standard. I’m not one of those Jews. I think it’s bigoted and insulting to expect a higher level of morality from some people and a lower one from others.
Take the case of Hamas going on a rampage right now against its own people.
“Hamas is killing hundreds of children, women, youths and elderly people,” Hossam al-Astal says in a video obtained by the Times of Israel. “Under what charge? We came out of a military war into a war of terrorists,” he declared.
Have you noticed the silence of the world? Hardly a peep from the mainstream media, from the UN, from NGO’s and from sanctimonious activists who claim to care for Palestinians.
Because Hamas is now “waging terror against the people in Gaza,” Al Astal is calling on the international community to protect his people. But since Jews are not involved, he’s not getting that protection.
This must be the most insidious aspect of antisemitism—the singling out of Jews for special treatment.
When Jews are seen as perpetrators, the world lights up: reporters are buzzing everywhere, protesters are scrambling with excitement, the UN gets busy drawing up condemnations, the usual suspects of countries and groups release statements of outrage, celebrities speak up, even Jews themselves jump on the bandwagon under the cozy cover of “Jewish values.”
When Jews are not involved, the outrage ecosystem quietly shuts down. It could be a genocide in Rwanda, humanitarian disasters in Sudan, Afghanistan, Congo, China or Haiti, or the massacre of Christians by Islamist forces throughout the Middle East— as long as Jews are not around, the world gets a nasty case of drowsiness.
That same world, however, gets really, truly excited when Jews are involved. They may “love” dead Jews, as Dana Horn has written, but what turns them on more than anything is live Jews who kill people.
They’ve had a field day these past two years with the war in Gaza. They knew that Hamas was hiding behind its own civilians and deliberately sending them to their deaths, but what mattered was that the bullets were Jewish.
Now that the bullets killing Palestinians are no longer Jewish but Palestinian, well, let’s move on, shall we?
“We can expect Western politicians, activists and celebrities to be up in arms about this latest sickening bloodshed in Gaza,” Michael Deacon wrote sarcastically in The Telegraph. “Greta Thunberg, I feel sure, will be setting sail immediately so she can tell Hamas exactly what she thinks of them.”
Sarcasm and disgust are worthy sentiments in the face of such global hypocrisy.
So what are we to make of such brazen discrimination? Are Jews doomed to get special treatment because we were the first to talk to God? Because we brought a moral purpose to life, because we raised the bar on human potential, because we became, unwittingly, humanity’s living conscience, a constant reminder that people could do better?
Maybe, but that is best left to academics. What I care about is what we are seeing now with our own eyes: Palestinians massacring Palestinians and a world that continues to look for Jews.
This obsession with Jews is not just harmful to Jews and to President Trump’s “peace plan.” It also harms millions of victims everywhere.
Until the world learns to hold every human being, every group and every country to the same moral standard, non-Jewish murderers will continue to get away with murder.
Going after these murderers may not be as exciting as going after Jews, but it’s a lot better for humanity, not to mention the Palestinians in Gaza.
