August 13th, 2025. British author and journalist Stephen Pollard shares his reaction to a banner displayed shortly before a UEFA Super Cup game. The banner reads, “STOP KILLING CHILDREN. STOP KILLING CIVILIANS”:
#UEFA statement on the pitch for #supercup
They might as well have gone the whole way and written “Fuck you, Jews”
April 7th, 2025. Pro-Israel watchdog, StopAntisemitism, calls on the United States Attorney General to investigate children’s entertainer, Ms. Rachel, over social media posts such as,“[the children in Gaza] deserve to live in a warm, safe home again. They deserve to be children.”
…We urge you and your office to investigate whether or not Ms. Rachel is being remunerated to disseminate Hamas-aligned propaganda to her millions of followers.
April 11th, 2024. Danny Danon, the Israeli representative to the U.N., expresses his condemnation of a newly unveiled exhibit of children’s drawings emblazoned with messages like “we are all equal here” and “peace comes from within”:
Look at the drawings of children from all around the world. Nothing about Israel. Nothing about our hostages […] they promote hate in those drawings, that is shameful […] I demand that the U.N. will remove this exhibit immediately and will stop with the hypocrisy against Israel.
Now and then, even though I try to keep up with the latest trends, I discover that I’m behind the curve.
So when I learned that exhibiting children’s drawings, opposing the murder of kids and even enjoying the recent Superman movie might be antisemitic, I rushed over to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s “working definition of antisemitism” to see what else I might be missing:
It is antisemitic to “call for, aid, or justify the killing or harming of Jews in the name of a radical ideology or an extremist view of religion.” Of course, that should go without saying.
It is antisemitic to“[accuse] Jews as a people of being responsible for real or imagined wrongdoing committed by a single Jewish person or group….” Absolutely, this is the same braindead collectivism that many marginalised groups face (including Palestinians, of course).
It is antisemitic to “[hold] Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.” Exactly! I’ve been saying this for yea…wait, what was that last one again?
Hasn’t the entire strategy of the people perpetrating and defending Israel’s genocide been to pretend that Jews are collectively responsible for the actions of the state of Israel?
Haven’t they been claiming that calling for a ceasefire is “antisemitic”? Haven’t they been arguing that condemning the Israeli settlers’ state-sanctioned brutality is “Jew hate”? Haven’t they been insisting that pleading for Israel to stop murdering children and civilians is a “f*ck you to the Jews”?!
There’s been a lot of talk about human shields over the past twenty-three months.
You’ve probably seen the claim that Hamas is using human shields leveraged to justify attacking almost every hospital, destroying nearly every home, and killing over 18,000 children in Gaza.
You might even have seen Israeli soldiers admitting that “almost every IDF platoon” uses Palestinian civilians as human shields, and the widely documented reports of them doing so.
But there’s shamefully little talk about the most consequential human shields in this genocide; the Jewish people that Israel has consistently used to shield its crimes from criticism.
The rabbis being arrested for demanding Israel stop blocking aid, the Holocaust survivors who, despite being in their seventies and eighties, are manhandled for peacefully protesting Israel’s war crimes, the Jewish academics and peace campaigners facing down unbelievably sickening abuse and death threats for supporting justice for Palestinians.
Is there any outrage over the abuse of these Jews? Any performative solidarity from politicians? Can somebody point me to Danny Danon’s sanctimony-laden video?
Sadly, no.
You see, these Jews, their identity, their history, their humanity, are only useful for convincing the world that the people doing the killing still possess these qualities, they’re only useful for shielding genocidal rhetoric from uncomfortable comparisons, they’re only useful for making people so terrified of being labelled antisemites that they’re afraid to speak out against crimes that have nothing to do with Judaism.
Who cares if they feel they have to “qualify their Jewishness” by distancing themselves from Israeli crimes? Who cares if endlessly pretending that these atrocities are being committed in their name increases the discrimination they already face?
Because if you insist on pretending that opposing a genocide is an attack on the ethnicity or the religion of the people committing it, if you claim, at every opportunity, that hating the murder and starvation of children is the same as hating Jews as a people, some people will be stupid enough to believe you.
But they won’t stop opposing the genocide that Israel is committing, they’ll start buying into the lie that Jews as a people are responsible for this very real wrongdoing. Even the ones who oppose it precisely because they are Jewish.
On July 27th, 2025, the Israeli human rights organisation, B’Tselem, published a report entitled, “Our Genocide”:
An examination of Israel’s policy in the Gaza Strip and its horrific outcomes, together with statements by senior Israeli politicians and military commanders about the goals of the attack, leads to the unequivocal conclusion that Israel is taking coordinated, deliberate action to destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip. In other words: Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
Jewish genocide scholars (in consensus with the International Association of Genocide Scholars), Jewish historians, Jewish rabbis, Jewish authors, Jewish Holocaust survivors, Jewish podcast hosts, all of them have come to the same conclusion.
But let’s be absolutely clear, this is not and never was “their” genocide.
Despite the best efforts of Netanyahu and his cronies to convince the world otherwise, Jews as a people are not responsible for the actions of the individuals and groups killing and oppressing Palestinians.
Opposing the war crimes Israel is committing in Gaza has nothing to do with condemning Jews as a people.
When the full horror of this genocide is recorded in the history books, it must never be recorded as a “Jewish” crime.
Because like all genocides, it is a crime of dehumanisation and ethnic supremacy and unchecked nationalism, a crime empowered by wilful ignorance and greed and moral cowardice, a crime made possible by cowards disguising a political ideology as an identity.
Just this once, I’ll go the whole way and say, “fuck you” to those people.
Genocide hinges on intent. If Israel is committed to exterminating the Palestinians, and its attacks do not serve a military purpose, then it is committing genocide. If it is committed to defeating Hamas, to eliminating it as a military or political power, and its actions are consistent with that goal, then it is at war.
To bridge the gap between us, I want to discuss the subtler kind of dehumanizing that I see towards the Arabs in Western media coverage of the war. It seems as though the Jews can be responsible for what they do, but Hamas and the Arabs cannot. Hamas is committed thoroughly, and in writing, to the extermination of the Jews. 10/7 was a genocide by the UN definition. They intended and caused the death of part of the Jews, a non-trivial part. They also intended to kill the Palestinian people. They built a vast underground complex to hide in, built right under the closely packed homes of the Gaza Palestinians. They then committed an atrocity to draw Israel into war with it, knowing that thousands of Palestinians would die as a result.
Part of the UN definition of genocide is "Deliberately inflicting conditions of life intended to cause physical destruction." This is what Hamas did. Their intention is a new kind of thing: seeing to the mass murder of the people you politically and militarily control, expecting it to be blamed on your enemy, and thus further your genocidal intentions towards that enemy.
Another dimension of the media dehumanizing the Arabs is to ignore the war between the Islamists and the vast majority of Arabs whose leaders voted unanimously to tell Hamas to submit to Israel's conditions. Hamas invaded, in part, to head off peaceful relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and they have not succeeded. As far as I can see, the Saudis (and Egyptians and Emiratis) are still on board to sponsor a government which can rule Gaza peacefully (i.e. not Hamas or the corrupt and widely discredited PA, unless it is massively reformed). The war for the future of the Muslims is hugely important, and not just in Gaza. The US, the Israelis, the Europeans, will all benefit, but it will be transformational for the Arabs in general, and the Palestinians in particular.