On the third anniversary of 10/7
On this anniversary there are many articles reflecting on the intervening three years and what we have learned.
In some ways, the post-10/7 wars have gone better than expected for Israel. At the beginning, it seemed as though Hezbollah, for example, would be a more formidable foe than it has been. That doesn’t mean it’s been easy, or that Israel can ever rest. But it does mean that 10/7 acted more as a wakeup call to galvanize Israel into taking the threats seriously and understanding that its enemies really do mean to destroy it.
Unfortunately, another thing that’s been learned is how powerful Jew-hatred is, including when it’s cloaked in a fake “anti-Zionism” that is nothing more than a vicious double standard that will not allow Israel to defend itself. This did not begin on 10/7; I’ve written two posts so far about how far back it goes, and how instrumental the Soviets were in spreading the word (please see this as well as this).
The anti-Jewish forces got busy right away, as early as 10/8 when Israel had done nothing as yet except be viciously attacked. But Jew-hatred always finds fertile ground, and it has spread immensely since 10/7, both on left and right. A lie really does get halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to put its pants on. It is sobering and depressing, but it’s reality these days.
Has there ever been a people more frequently or more preposterously lied about than the Jews?
I don’t ask that in expectation of sympathy. It’s perversely flattering to excite the sort of malign curiosity that cannot be satisfied by what’s observably true. But there’s also been a heavy price to pay for being a figment of such superstitious fear and loathing that even the presence of Jews isn’t necessary for fear and loathing to take root and flourish. Distant hearsay can be enough. …
… [F]olklore hasn’t quite given up on the figure of the Wandering Jew, cursed to roam the earth homeless as punishment for taunting Jesus on the way to the crucifixion. Long before academic anti-Zionists began to call for the expulsion of Israelis from Israel, Luther had posited their eternal exile as an expression, sanctioned by God, of their vagabondage of soul. And as for the Jew as companion of the devil, not to say the devil himself, I can personally vouch for the tenacity of that superstition, as more than one of my schoolfellows have asked—in Prestwich, north Manchester, England, 1954—if I would show them what remained of my tail.
Regarding the Blood Libel, the malicious medieval defamation that told of Jews kidnapping and killing Gentile children for their blood, either to add zest to matzah or to replenish the blood of male Jews who menstruated profusely as a consequence of circumcision—another fantasy, too lurid and deranged to be simply called a falsehood—it too has resurfaced in recent years, determining the way the deaths of Palestinian children in the latest Gaza war have been presented as the result of Israel Defense Forces soldiers killing little ones “for sport” and laughing as they do so. No footage of such vile behavior exists, of course. I myself was widely misreported as arguing, in a piece in the [London] Observer a couple of years ago, that the press should cover up all word of such deaths. In fact, I argued for no such thing, nor would the left-leaning Observer have printed the piece had its staff thought that was my meaning. My target was the narrative strategy of the BBC and other news outlets, in which nine stories out of 10 led with the latest death count of Palestinian children—too cruel had they been even a quarter true, but which time and again proved unverifiable.
The charge of genocide leveled at Israel, a charge that invariably comes with the pseudo-authoritative definite article—the genocide, to muffle dissent and to rejig the hierarchy of genocides in favor of Israel’s victims—could be said to be the biggest lie of all.
And an extremely successful lie, at that. On the left in the 2026 election in the US, it is almost required that a Democrat candidate support the claim. The right – or the former right, such as Tucker Carlson – has its adherents, as well.
Powerline has this post of remembrance. The stories remain heartbreaking, just like the 9/11 stories. But there is no going back and undoing what happened. The only way is to go forward. But how to do that in the face of the remarkable moral inversion of much of the world? Here is a comment there which deals with that question:
The most stunning thing to me is the response of Western Civilization to the horrendous Satanic acts of Hamas on October 7th. In a functional, optimistic and honorable civilization, our collective response should have been total commitment to the eradication of Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamism in general. Sadly, the opposite has happened. Many (mostly European) countries have doubled down on Jew hatred, admiration for the sub-human “palestinian cause” and total fecklessness in the face of their suicidal choices of importing millions of proto-terrorists into their own countries.
Israel and the United States of America* have stood virtually alone against the creeping scourge of “submission”.
And there’s this, on Britain’s Green Party:
‘Tell me what you accuse the Jews of [and] I’ll tell you what you are guilty of’, said the great Soviet writer Vasily Grossman. Today, that grim, eternal truth was starkly illustrated by the Green Party’s passing of a motion saying ‘Zionism is Racism’. To throw around the word ‘racism’ even as you single out Jewish sovereignty as uniquely demonic, to pose as an enemy of bigotry even as you dream of the erasure of the world’s only Jewish state, takes moral duplicity to sickening new heights. In their snivelling whisperings about ‘racism’, these scumbags reveal their own.
It was at their conference in Brighton that the Green Party of England and Wales voted in favour of the ‘Zionism is Racism’ screed. The motion expressly defines the Greens as an ‘anti-Zionist party’. It says Zionism is a species of racial hatred, and will henceforth be ‘treated as any other form of racism’. Most obnoxiously of all, it commits the Greens to campaigning for the scrubbing of the Jewish nation from the face of the Earth. It calls for ‘the establishment of a single democratic Palestinian State in all of historic Palestine, with Jerusalem as its capital’. So no more Jewish homeland. No more tiny patch of land, a poxy 263 by 71 miles, for the Jews to call their own. All of it would disappear. Imagine accusing others of being ‘genocidal’ even as you agitate for the total dismantling of the ancestral kingdom of the Jews.
I have been meaning to post this interview with Dara Horn, who has written penetratingly on Jew-hatred and what is actually behind it. Now seems like a good time to recommend watching it. A great many people have tackled that topic, to be sure. But I’m especially impressed with her insight:

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