We have seen many grim images over the past two weeks. Images of the apocalyptic, Isis-style violence visited upon the people of Israel by Hamas. Images of destruction and grief in Gaza as Israel hammers Hamas for its crimes against the Jewish people, as is its right.
And yet it is an image from London, not Sderot or Gaza City, that has haunted me all day today. Which has made me feel a visceral revulsion. It’s a photo of two sisters who were kidnapped by Hamas. Emma and Yuli are their names. They are twins, just three years old. They are hugging and smiling in the photo. They are a picture of innocence.
Then you notice the black scrawl above their smiling mouths – someone has daubed a Hitler moustache on them.
Read that again. A photo of two Jewish girls has been desecrated with Nazi-style imagery. Infant sisters violently seized by the anti-Semites of Hamas have been grotesquely maligned on the streets of London. Hamas violated their lives, then some scumbag in London violates their likeness.
The cruelty of this, the sheer malice of it, feels unfathomable to me. Try as I might, I cannot comprehend the mind that would denigrate children in this way. In fact, in reimagining little Emma and Yuli as fascists, with Hitler-style taches, whoever did this has not only defamed these poor mites – he has completely dehumanised them.
It happened on the Finchley Road, an area with a large Jewish population. This is where a mob of ‘pro-Palestine’ activists drove through the streets in 2021 shouting ‘Fuck the Jews! Rape their daughters!’ over a loudspeaker. And now this. Is nowhere safe for Jews now?
Of course it is possible the poster was defaced by dumb kids. The police are reportedly investigating. However, the graffiti scrawled on other ‘kidnapped’ posters on Finchley Road suggest something more sinister is at play. For example, the image of 17-year-old Tomer Eliaz Arava has been defaced with horns. And where it says ‘kidnapped from his home by Hamas’, someone has crossed out ‘Hamas’ and replaced it with ‘real men’. This would appear to be a very serious incident of racial hatred. (Young Tomer was not in fact kidnapped. He was murdered.)
And yet, even as we are shocked by this desecration of the innocents, we should not be surprised by it. One of the most disturbing trends of the past two weeks has been the defilement and destruction of posters showing the Israelis who are being held by Hamas. In the UK and the US, on the streets and on university campuses, there have been many incidents of poster desecration.
In Leicester Square last night, people were seen tearing posters down. Two young women in Camden ripped up posters and shouted: ‘This is for Palestine.’ Also in London a man was seen writing ‘coloniser’ on a poster featuring a two-year-old child who is being held hostage. Again, imagine how far a person must have fallen, morally, to dehumanise a literal infant as a ‘coloniser’; to imply that a kid had it coming.
Where are the anti-racists?
In the US posters have been torn down in New York. In Brooklyn a furious woman confronted a couple who were ripping down posters. Some of these hostages are ‘American citizens’, she said, pleading with the couple to show a little humanity. The man just smirked. Radical students have been spotted attacking posters too. ‘Get the fuck out of my way’, said a man at the University of Pennsylvania when someone asked why he was taking posters down.
What is going on here? How do we explain this hateful violent uprising against images of the Israeli victims of Hamas barbarism?
To my mind, it is grim proof of the extent to which Israeli Jews have been dehumanised in many people’s minds. Courtesy of the cultural elite’s myopic loathing of Israel, the good people of that country have come to be viewed as an inferior species, essentially. As ‘colonisers’, not civilians. ‘Settlers’, not citizens. Legitimate targets, not human beings.
How else do we explain the spoiling even of images of Israeli-Jewish children? All of them are guilty, you see. All have been damned as players in the ‘evil’ of Zionism. The chattering classes’ relentless demonisation of Israel as a uniquely wicked state has led inexorably to the demonisation of Israeli people as uniquely lacking in the features of humanity. The end result is unconscionable. Hitler moustaches on children. Toddlers branded colonisers. And sympathy notable by its stark, pitiful absence.
The irony is horrendous. The West’s agitating haters of Israel pose as ‘anti-colonial’ and yet they dehumanise Israelis in a way that would have made even the colonialists of old balk. They have come to see Israeli Jews virtually as subhuman. That has been the drip drip effect of the Israelophobia that’s rampant among the elites, and it is now playing out on our streets.
Where are the anti-racists? ‘Silence is violence’, they said during the Black Lives Matter uprising in 2020. And yet now they are silent on the surge in anti-Semitic hate and the public mockery even of persecuted Jewish children. Their silence will haunt them. They will not be able to escape it. ‘Daddy, what did you do when the child victims of the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust were being demeaned in London and New York?’ ‘Son, I said nothing.’
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