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War Crimes and Hate Crimes Are Both Crimes [1]
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Date: 2025-06-08
Usually, violence is not the best solution to a problem.
I say usually because I’ve come to believe that there are times when violence is indeed the best answer, albeit the last step taken based on the individual facts of the issue and after all other reasonable non-violent efforts have been exhausted.
You may think violence in protest of violence is a proportionate response. I don’t know about that, but I do know it’s often an ineffective response. I can be supportive of the Black Lives Matter movement -- although as a White person I can’t relate personally to a lot of a Black person’s experiences in life -- but when BLM protests turned violent you lost that argument with me.
The same with the pro-Palestinian actions we’re seeing in this country. When you’re killing or hurting innocent people I stop listening.
And I don’t want to stop listening, because the belief here is that two things are true – that Hamas’s attack on Israel was horrific and it justified that country’s retaliation against the terroristic organization, and that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his government, and his military have committed a series of war crimes in its slaughtering and starving of Palestinian civilians.
Still, killing or injuring Jewish folks on behalf of Palestine is just another type of crime. Calling for harm to them in some way is simply an eye-for-an-eye mentality. These are failures of character of those trying to express their beliefs on a serious problem.
That’s a shame, because what Israel is getting away with is terrible, and the fact that the U.S. government is going along with it is even worse.
We get lost in the terms sometimes. If you oppose what Israel is doing in Gaza are you antisemitic? Anti-Zionist? If you wouldn’t be doing anything if Israel hadn’t committed war crimes, but you wrongly hurt a Jewish person because it is committing war crimes, what are you then?
I’ll tell you what you are in the latter case: a criminal who deserves whatever he has coming to him from the legal system.
And to muddle it even more, we have the most corrupt president in history railing against antisemitism but who continues his own pattern of the same offense. Leadership at its hypocritical worst.
Condemnation of Israel’s actions have come from all over the world. A New York Times article from last month titled “Israel’s Allies Condemn Expansion of Gaza War” reported that Britian, France, and Canada had sharply criticized Israel’s threats to dramatically escalate the war in Gaza and its blockade of humanitarian aid.
“We have always supported Israel’s right to defend Israelis against terrorism,” a joint statement by the three countries said. “But this escalation is wholly disproportionate.”
Netanyahu responded that the three countries had handed a “huge prize” to Hamas. He accused them of tacitly encouraging a repeat of the October 2023 attack in which about 1,200 people were killed and 250 were taken hostage.
That, of course, is bullshit from a man who doesn’t care how many innocent Palestinian civilians – including women and children – he kills in retaliation for a deadly attack that occurred on his watch.
Israel has killed more than 53,000 Palestinians, according to Gazan health officials. They don’t distinguish between civilians and military personnel.
You can read the Times story here.
Also last month, NBC News reported that a former Israeli senior military official and longtime critic of Netanyahu said his country risked becoming “a pariah state” over the war in Gaza.
“A sane country does not wage war against civilians, does not kill babies as a pastime, and does not engage in mass population displacement,” Yair Golan, a left-wing opposition voice and former chief of staff of the Israeli army, said in a radio interview.
This isn’t to minimize what the Jewish community throughout the world has been going through.
Eight people were hospitalized in Boulder, Colo, after a man threw Molotov cocktails at a group of protesters marching in support of hostages being held in Gaza. Two Israeli Embassy employees were shot and killed as they left a reception at a Jewish museum in Washington. An arsonist set fire to the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion on the first night of Passover while Gov. Josh Shapiro, who is Jewish, slept upstairs with his family.
“That all three attackers alluded to political objections to Israel raised concerns among many about the threat of left-wing political violence connected to the war in Gaza,” the Times reported.
“What we’ve seen these last few months is a shocking pattern of anti-Israel sentiment manifesting itself in antisemitic violence,” said Halie Soifer, chief executive of the Jewish Democratic Council of America. “With each incident, there’s a further shattering of our sense of security.”
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The fact that this country is virtually devoid of any intelligent or moral leadership from the federal government shouldn’t be lost in all of this. A real president would at least be trying to send some kind of clear message to the American people that violence isn’t acceptable.
Donald Trump? His antisemitism message has proved to be a con. A method of attack from a man who, as the Times put it, has an “extensive history of amplifying white supremacist figures and symbols, even now as he presents himself as a champion for Jewish students oppressed by what he says is a wave of hatred on American college campuses.”
A Times article titled, “Denouncing Antisemitism, Trump Also Fans Its Flames” is a very good wakeup call for the truth about Trump. It lists various actions by the president over the years that show his claims of being a champion of justice for Jews is a bald-faced lie.
Trump has gone after various colleges – most notably Harvard University – claiming they’re beds of anti-Jewish activity. He doesn’t give two shits about that. This is a power play, plain and simple.
As the Times reported, some of his critics believe “his real motivations in using the power of the federal government to crush Harvard, seen by the political right as a bastion of America’s liberal, multicultural order, have little to do with concern about a hostile environment for Jewish students.”
Those critics are absolutely right.
Amy Spitalnick, the chief executive of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, a nonprofit group that promotes an inclusive American democracy, said, “If this administration were serious about countering antisemitism, it would not be appointing antisemitic extremists to senior positions” and “it would not be normalizing antisemitic conspiracy theories that have fueled attacks on Jews and others.”
You can read the Times story here.
***
It’s been written here before that the United States should quit supplying military aid to Isreal – ally or not – until it stops it willful killing of so many civilians. Of course, that hasn’t happened, either under former president Joe Biden or with Trump.
In the meantime, Democrats have watched their party become increasingly divided over the war in Gaza. As with so many other issues, they seem to be struggling with how to handle this problem
Here’s a simple rule of thumb: Hate crimes = war crimes, and both are bad. The solution won’t be found in terrorist attacks.
Whether it comes with a day of reckoning for Netanyahu and Israel remains to be seen, but if it doesn’t the injustice will be historical and very disappointing.
***
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