“It was completely natural for me to favor not only the most disadvantaged but those who distill hatred for the West most purely.” – French writer Jean Genet (1974)

The rejection of Israel is the Muslim’s most powerful aphrodisiac. – Morocco’s King Hassan II

Today marks one year since the Hamas terrorist group, aided by Gazan civilians, launched the greatest pogrom against the Jews since the Holocaust, killing almost 1300, of which just 300 were soldiers.

Here in NZ Philip Crump (aka “Thomas Cramner”) writes of what he saw when viewing the collection of videos and photos of the attack, almost all of it from the phones and Goro cameras of Hamas members killed or captured by the IDF counter-attack, Bearing Witness to October 7. Some key quotes:

The Embassy invited approximately 60 people from New Zealand media to attend – 12 of us accepted.

This is the media that the Far Left supporters of Hamas criticise as being pro-Israel. They too are marking this date, as John Minto does in that link, with a huge effort in telling people like Cranmer not to believe their lying eyes:

After some reasonable initial reporting, which included interviews with Hamas leaders, within 24 hours a massive wave of Israeli propaganda overwhelmed the western world’s mainstream media. This propaganda was not aimed to downplay the striking success of the Palestinian resistance, which was undeniable, but to deploy a surge of misinformation and disinformation to turn Israelis into the victims and Palestinian resistance fighters into bloodthirsty inhuman monsters whose only aim was to slaughter Israeli civilians, behead Israeli babies, rape Israeli women and children, pillage and destroy Israeli homes and communities….From a guerilla war point of view, in a David Vs Goliath context, the attack was a stunning success. 

Getting yourself destroyed is not what I’d count as a “striking” or “stunning success”, but that single comment sums up the depths of self-deception Minto’s Far Left mind is capable of, as well as his description of a media that quite clearly did not want to see what Hamas themselves showed. With Minto it’s like watching the novel Nineteen Eighty Four wearing a living, breathing skinsuit.

By contrast this is what Cranmer saw:

I expected to see men, women and children slaughtered but the level of hatred and barbarity was incomprehensible. Often the mutilation continued after the victim was killed as if that were only one stage in a process that would continue until what was left was unrecognizable. We saw 139 killings or bodies but in many cases the bodies were so disfigured or burned that they ceased to look human.

I’ve written before about the likes of Hamas in Longing for Auschwitz: they do not long for anything so distancing of the human soul as the industrialised Nazi death camps. They don’t just want the jews to die, but to die in torment, they want it to be up close and personal and on October 7 they made it so.

In another scene, a dead man is lying prone on the ground. An attacker takes a garden hoe and hacks the head from the body with repeated strikes.  In the next scene, a man calmly bends over and uses a large knife to remove the head of a dead IDF soldier before walking off with it. There are too many images of young children in their pyjamas to count – mostly shot in the head or the chest.  

While murdering an adult may merely make you a killer, with the title of barbarian needing the extra act of decapitation, murdering babies and little kids is an instant transition to the latter form of human being.

Back to Minto:

Dozens of Israeli soldiers were killed and many more taken back to Gaza as prisoners of war. It was an astonishing feat of military ingenuity, daring and courage in the face of Israel’s newly elected far right government…

The treatment of those Israel soldiers resembled more what was seen in WWII with the treatment of Nazi and Soviet POWs by each side and the treatment of Allied POWs by the Japanese Imperial Army. This time the treatment extended to the dead:

There are communications back to Hamas commanders – one instructs the gunman to “bring the body back to let the people play with it”. In others, gunmen are calling their parents to boast of the number of Jews that they had killed.  In other scenes bodies are taken back to Gaza as trophies to hundreds of people celebrating in the streets with mobile phones in their hands.

Much of that had already been seen in public anyway, since Hamas and the Gazans saw no shame in uploading and broadcasting such open celebrations. Yet even with that visceral hate exposed, Minto is in full-blown denial that echoes the communist propaganda used in defence of the Nazis between September 1939 and June 1941. I’m not going to quote his defence here, but you can check it at the link.

There’s something eerily Terminator-like about his denials and accusations, which are two sides of the same propaganda coin (no systemic rape by Hamas, but definitely practiced by the Israelis), but then that dead-eyed roboticism is also a characteristic of the communist shills of history. Being a modern version he naturally talks not of class but, “the oppressor-oppressed paradigm“, which ties into his approach to South Africa and here at home in New Zealand.

That’s where the quote from French writer Jean Genet enters the picture as the article, A Palestine of the Mind, explains the history that has produced the Western Minto’s of this cause:

[The Palestinians] were poor, in contrast with the purported colonizers, who arrived partly from Europe (though a million Jews thrown out of Arab countries, beginning in 1948, also became Israelis); and they were Muslims, that is, members of a religion that some on the left see as the spearhead of the disinherited. Thus, during a time when leftist revolutionary horizons were darkening, a certain orphaned progressivism took up the Palestinian revolt against Israel. Surprisingly, however, what originated as a minority preference has developed into a majority position, winning significant support from the highest reaches of political power and from the academy, in both Europe and the United States—and reshaping the mind of an era.

I don’t think Minto and company are Jew-haters. Rather they are like their forebears, completely transactional in who they support and oppose (and always without nuance, with 100% screaming either way), as long at it pushes forward their global cause of smashing down the West. As such they’re not really supporters of the Palestinians, any more than they ever really cared about South African Blacks. Minto in particular has simply moved from targeting and helping destroy the most indefensible Western nation to what he sees as the next most indefensible. Of course in the case of Israel the whole oppressed-oppressor thing is a lot harder to pull off due to history:

The actual fate of millions of men and women subjected to daily humiliation and to precarious life circumstances, governed by a corrupt Palestinian Authority and, in Gaza, by Hamas, a terrorist group, seems to matter little. The reason: the Middle East has become the site of a global contest for the title of victim—a title that must be wrested from the descendants of the Shoah. 

In that the Far Left have had remarkable success in the last few decades. For example, in 2002, the editor of Témoignage Chrétien – a French weekly of the Catholic Left, Georges Montaron, wrote that:

In the hearts of all the poor of the Arab world, the Fedayeen are heroes, the living image of liberators. Like Che Guevara in Latin America, the Palestinian resistance is a flame that illumines the oppressed and spreads from each person to his neighbor. Here again, even more than among us, resistance is a synonym for Revolution, and it bears an incalculable messianic power.

Considering what a murderous, torturing piece of shit Che Guevara was well known to be by 2002, you’d think anybody not a Communist, even a Left Catholic, would shudder to associate him with the Palestinians, although given the behaviour of the Gazans on October 7 perhaps Montaron was more correct than he knew. In any case that reference to the 1960’s glory days of Guevara is not accidental:

Radical Islam has become the last great left-wing political narrative, replacing Communism and Third Worldism. In the category of the good revolutionary subject, the shaheed, the jihadist, the martyr of Hamas or of al-Qaida replaces the proletarian, the guerrilla fighter, the Bolshevik.
…
This pro-Palestinian activism had its precedent in the twentieth century, when the far Left—having lost the USSR, the working class, and China—first embraced the idolatry of Islam. The neo-Koranic enthusiasm of the lost believers in Marxism forced activists into ideological contortions concerning the rights of gays, women, and other groups, and such contradictions are evident in the current protests.

Have they ever: Queers for Palestine is mentioned, as is the case where on March 8 2024, the International Day of Women’s Rights, French feminists, who wanted to demonstrate alongside other activists to call attention to the rapes and killings perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, were denounced as fascists by keffiyeh-wearing agitators – another echo of Minto in his denial that Hamas used rape as a weapon of war, even as multiple other Islamic Jihadist groups have done so to non-Jewish woman.

In any case, since the distant days of 2002 “revolutionary flames that illumine” have been replaced by 21st century ideas of the Post-Modern Left, the ideas that lead to those “ideological contortions”:

The new Judeophobia typically expresses itself in the name of antiracism. It rejects any comparison with the sickening doctrines of the 1930s, and even claims to fight against anti-Semitism, but condemns the Jews—excuse me, the “Zionists”—in the name of humanity. Purported altruism, in France as in America, now allows for drawing up lists of “Zionists” to unmask and stigmatize in film, music, media, politics, and business as complicit with the “genocidal state” of Israel.
…
Let us add that Wokeism—above all, in its critical race theory manifestations—legitimizes Judeophobia: since Jews are white, and all whites are racists by birth, in its view, then to be antiracist is also to be anti-Semitic. 

Of course there is still a chunk of the Old-Right around (and perhaps a New Right in the underground of 4Chan and such) that are attracted to “Judeophobia” like moths to the flame, forming so-called Red-Brown alliances, which so far has not been a problem for Minto and company here in NZ but which have been in France:

… most notably, La France insoumise, the movement led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood and tireless scourge of Jewish lobbies.

Meh. Like the Nazi-Soviet cooperation of 1939-1941 I’m sure they’ll shrug it off, just as they have the history of alliedship between arch-communist Ho Chi Minh and arch-Zionist David Ben Gurion:

One morning The Daily Worker followed Pravda and described Nazis as true friends of the working class; the next, nothing too strong could be said against them. Crucially, and as Orwell dramatized in Nineteen Eighty-Four, there was never an admission that any change had taken place.