George Orwell wrote in 1984, ‘The words kept coming back to him, statement of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity.’

The sentence describes, with alarming accuracy, the current situation concerning pro-Palestinian protests where absurdities and mystical ‘truths’ are being continuously forced down the gullets of the public. Worryingly, many institutions, particularly journalistic ones, are swallowing these fantasies and regurgitating them to the public.

The notions peddled by the pro-Palestinian protesters, who are often either pro-Hamas or suspiciously incapable of criticising Hamas, is that the October 7 massacre of Israelis was a justified response to the grievances of a downtrodden people. The real victims are not the Israelis who were killed and maimed, they argue, but the perpetrators.

Hamas terrorists killed some 1,200 Israelis, including women, children, and babies, while more than 240 hostages were taken.

To paraphrase Joseph Stalin, a single death might be a tragedy, but a million deaths is a statistic. The details that matter are lost in the annotation of numbers, yet this is precisely how atrocities were carried out.

Keeping this in mind, it is astonishing to think anyone would parade themselves on the side of Hamas, which is a designated terrorist group in America, the EU, UK, Australia, Canada, Argentina, and of course Israel.

The atrocities themselves are not under any realistic question, with numerous reports and videos, often taken by the terrorists themselves, depicting mass sexual violence, gang rape, and mutilation. One captured Hamas terrorist boasted that they were allowed to rape the corpse of a girl. The silence from the so-called Western feminist groups is deafening.

We have also heard that Gazans were promised cash rewards and an apartment for kidnapping Israelis. Journalists who have seen the raw videos of the atrocities, deemed too graphic for the public, describe the conduct of the terrorists as pure predatory sadism. Hamas, which has run Gaza seemingly with the purpose of attacking Israel, has stated publicly that they want more such attacks.

Hamas is responsible for the deaths of not only Israeli babies, but also Gazan babies. It has deliberately built its military headquarters and tunnels underneath hospitals, as well as supplanting fuel for hospital generators for military purposes. This is not surprising behaviour, as Hamas, which stopped elections in Gaza after it came to power, has a long history of using civilians as human shields for the military. For example, when Israeli forces advised a residence in Northern Gaza to evacuate in anticipation of its ground offensive in response to the massacre, Hamas ordered its civilians to stay.

Hamas does not care a jot about the people they supposedly represent. While the people of Gaza rely largely on international aid (including from Israel, a notoriously dry place but which supplies around 13 per cent of Gaza’s water), Hamas’ leaders accumulate wealth and live in opulence. Much of Hamas’ income is drawn from illegal activities, including smuggling of goods and drugs.

And for those who blame Israel for keeping its border with Gaza closed, the Hamas charter explicitly states that their purpose is the obliteration of Israel. They have shown again and again that they are willing to use the most brutal tactics to achieve this, including diverting billions in foreign aid to create the most sophisticated set of military tunnels in the world. Unlike Israel, where almost 20 per cent of its population are Muslim, Jewish people are not tolerated in Gaza.

This is why talk of the two-state solution is deemed utterly pointless. With Hamas in power, no real negotiation or peace is possible because Hamas do not seek peace, nor do they care about the Gazan civilians which they use as pawns in a grand game to achieve their version of Judenrein. What Israel faces in Hamas is a primitive hostility that has been incubated across centuries, and now sits as an existential challenge that refuses co-existence.

The ignorance and weakness of Western governments is appalling. The idiocy is perhaps distilled in this event that took place in London where an Iranian dissident holding a placard calling Hamas terrorists, was assaulted by a horde of protesters. Instead of protecting his right to state an opinion peacefully (let’s not forget that the UK government recognises Hamas as a terrorist organisation), the feckless Metropolitan Police threatened to arrest him unless he agreed to leave the area.

There has been many similar cases – recently a Jewish couple in Melbourne were allegedly assaulted by pro-Palestine protesters on their way to attend a debate about the Israel-Hamas conflict at the Melbourne Town Hall. The Victorian police dragged the Jewish man away for ‘breaching the peace’.

George Galloway, a UK leftwing politician with a history of speaking sympathetically about terrorists and dictators, such as Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and Bashar al-Assad, has been elected MP in Rochdale after pandering to talking points on the Israel-Hamas war. ‘This is for Gaza!’ he yelled in his victory speech. In Rochdale, where child poverty rate is the highest in the UK, and where a horrendous child sex traffic ring, run majority by Middle-Eastern men targeting working class white girls, was exposed, it almost beggars belief that Galloway can win partly on a platform of anti-Israel demagoguery.

One is sadly reminded of Yeat’s line from The Second Coming:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Such naked propaganda, mass ignorance, and absurdities must be fought head-on. What is at stake is the decency of entire societies, and the risk of sinking again into some of the darkest abysses in human history, with the Jewish people once more bearing the weight of it all.

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