Six Jews Were Murdered in Cold Blood: I Blame You

These were not soldiers. They were not “legitimate targets.” They were regular human beings, murdered because they were Jews. And yet even in the face of these murders, the same narrative persists, the one that excuses or explains away Jewish blood when it’s spilled.

And because of your tacit or overt support for Hamas and their radical Islamist ilk, I also blame you for the deaths of innocent Gazans.

I never went to college. That’s not a boast or a lament, just a fact. There are disadvantages to skipping higher education, but one advantage stands out: I wasn’t spoon-fed the ideological gruel that passes for wisdom on so many campuses. Chief among these doctrines is the crude formula: downtrodden = virtuous, successful = damned. That lens has warped the thinking of artists, journalists, intellectuals—and much of the music industry I’ve spent my life in.

I’ll resist naming names here, but rock stars and rock star-wannabes love to strike the pose of rebellion, casting themselves as tribunes of the oppressed. The irony is they do this while signing contracts worth millions, living in mansions, and gracing the covers of magazines. I remember one moment when the hypocrisy became impossible to ignore. Epic Records held a gathering in New York for their artists and management. Cyndi Lauper was there, warm and magnetic, just as you’d expect. And off to the side stood a new band, perpetually aggrieved, their very name suggesting they were outside the machine.

But there we were, all of us, in Sony’s skyscraper on Madison Avenue, surrounded by lawyers and executives. If you’re on the 30th floor of Sony’s headquarters, you are definitely part of the machine. That’s when I understood how deep the theatrics run. Image is fine—every artist has one. The problem comes when image hardens into ideology. And especially when that ideology is weaponized against Israel, and therefore against the Jewish people.

This “oppressor versus oppressed” binary makes Israel automatically the villain. The narrative requires it: Israel strong, Hamas weak. Once you’ve accepted that framing, the facts no longer matter. And here is where the human cost comes in. I have seen the images from Gaza—children torn apart, families buried. The kind of horror no parent, no human being, should ever have to witness. Anyone who claims those lives don’t matter has cut away their own humanity.

Yet, to see those deaths and leap to the word “genocide” is to compound the tragedy with a lie. When you declare that Zionists are Nazis, you are saying my mother, my late father and sister, my other siblings, my wife, my children, my grandchildren—you are calling nearly everyone I know and love a Nazi. You may revel in the irony of calling Jews Nazis. To you it feels clever. To me, it is sickening. It shows your ignorance, your gullibility, and your malice.

Because I’ve seen the other images too; the ones you never mention. October 7th. Hamas slaughtering, raping, burning people alive. Hostages dragged into tunnels, some barely alive, others fully murdered. And still, marches in Western capitals waving Hamas flags, demanding ceasefire before a single hostage was freed. Hamas is not a liberation movement. It is a death cult steeped in radical Islamist ideology that seeks not peace, but the eradication of Israel and the murder of Jews. That day, as today, showed us exactly what we are up against.

And here is the brutal irony: supporting Hamas does not “save” Gaza—it destroys it. Every rocket fired from a schoolyard, every tunnel dug beneath a hospital, every hostage still held prevents any chance of rebuilding. Gaza cannot be restored so long as Hamas remains, because Hamas thrives on ruin. It needs suffering as its currency. Those who excuse or endorse it are not allies of the Palestinian people. They are accomplices in ensuring that the rubble remains rubble.

And here is the brutal irony: supporting Hamas does not “save” Gaza—it destroys it. Every rocket fired from a schoolyard, every tunnel dug beneath a hospital, every hostage still held prevents any chance of rebuilding. Gaza cannot be restored so long as Hamas remains, because Hamas thrives on ruin. 

Imagine it closer to home. Imagine America waking up to the relative equivalent of 40,000 people slaughtered in a single day. Thousands raped, thousands kidnapped. Imagine, as in Israel, there is no one you know who isn’t personally affected by the tragedy. The killers camped just twenty minutes away. What would you demand your government do? Sit idle? Hold hands and sing? Or fight, however terrible the images on TikTok might look?

This is what the oppressor-versus-oppressed ideology erases. It flattens complexity. It demands you pick the weakest-looking figure and assign them all the virtue. But weakness and virtue are not synonyms. And strength does not equal cruelty.

What’s more, the very people pushing this binary don’t live by it. They talk about colonization while living on Native American land. They talk about privilege while sipping cocktails beside their pools. They rage at Israel from the safety of their bedrooms. If they truly believed their own slogans, they’d hand over the deed to their property tomorrow. They don’t. That gap—that hypocrisy—is not an oversight. It’s the whole point.

I can forgive ignorance. I can forgive not knowing. What I can’t forgive is the willful blindness of those who do know better but cling to slogans anyway. Because slogans are easy. They cost nothing. They make you look righteous on social media while absolving you of any real sacrifice. That’s not justice. It’s performance.

And when performance masquerades as justice, while Jewish bodies are burned, while Palestinian children are buried, while Hamas laughs and feeds their faces in the tunnels. That is not just hypocrisy. It is nothing less than a betrayal of humanity.

Peter Himmelman is a Grammy and Emmy nominated performer, songwriter, film composer, visual artist and award-winning author.