Man carrying child’s body in Gaza. Fars Media Corporation. Attribution 4.0 International license.
On May 20, Israeli forces bombed two homes in Gaza, where, Reuters reports, “children were among the 18 dead.” The attack was justified, the Israeli regime claims, because — who knows? — there might have been a Hamas member hiding in one of the closets or something. To criticize those killings, we’re told, is “anti-semitic” even though the dead were almost certainly all semites (Palestinian Arabs). And there are a LOT of such attacks.
On May 21, a gunman killed two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, DC. Cue outrage — THAT attack, the Israeli regime tells us, was both unjustified and “anti-semitic.”
It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the victims being actual, voluntary employees of the regime that’s conducting those daily attacks in Gaza, even though the perpetrator (allegedly one Elias Rodriguez of Chicago) was shouting “free free Palestine” as he was taken into custody outside a pro-Israel “Young Diplomats” event. He obviously just hates Jews, see?
And maybe he DOES just hate Jews. There’s certainly a lot of ethnic hatred out there, and it’s sick regardless of who’s infected with it or who it’s aimed at.
A lot of that ethnic hatred is aimed at Palestinian Arabs (who are, again, semites), by the Israeli regime, used by that regime and its supporters to justify the murders of, at a minimum, tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians over the last year-and-a-half. Multiple Israeli officials have openly called for the “ethnic cleansing” of Gaza and even genocide of the Palestinian Arab population.
But we’re supposed to ignore all that — the pro-Israel media “charm offensive” is already in full swing. The victims (Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky), the New York Times laments, were young. They were in love. They were just minding their own business and looking forward to a trip to Israeli-occupied Jerusalem next week, where Lischinsky intended to propose.
Yes, it’s very sad. I mean that. When it comes to murder, my sympathies are always with the victims, not the perpetrators.
But similarly sad things could be, and haven’t been, widely reported concerning the victims of the Israeli strike. Mainstream media haven’t mentioned the victims’ marriage or travel plans, their occupations, or even their names. They’re just not important, I guess.
As in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, “all animals are equal — but some animals are more equal than others.”
What can we do about that? I’m not going to try to solve the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians here. That’s a thorny matter with a long, ugly history.
But there’s one obvious first step, and that’s for people to stop murdering and excusing murder over it.
Unfortunately, both sides suffer from an over-abundance of people who aren’t willing to take that first step.
Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.
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