The 2023 film Bearing Witness witnesses thousands blaming Jews, blaming the Jewish state, for being butchered, raped, their children beheaded. If we thought humans couldn’t reach new depths post-Holocaust, we were wrong.
In 1969, at age 18, I went to Israel. My aunt took me to Yad Vashem, my first time. I held my tears in until the very last exhibit. I saw a silent towering pile of children’s shoes – worn, scuffed, shoelaces torn. I broke down sobbing. In 2015, again in Israel, I went through the Yad Vashem Children’s Memorial. It was hollowed out from an underground cavern, darkly lit, with uneven steps, keeping you unbalanced. The ceiling is filled with stars for each of these murdered children. As you walk slowly through, you hear the names of the 1.5 million slaughtered Jewish children called out, one by one. The unbearable ache never completely goes away.
One little girl stays with me. She is never far from my consciousness. The Holocaust documentary shows her trying to roll up the sleeve on her tattered coat, as she was asked to do, to show the tattoo of the number on her tiny arm. She did this with earnestness and intensity, as if to say to the world, to someone, to anyone, “If I do what I’m told, if I am a good girl, maybe this nightmare will stop.” It did not stop.
As I write this now, my tears welled up again, for this little girl, and the millions like her who were butchered just because they were Jews. I never thought that in 2023 I would again be sobbing with rage and grief for Jewish Israeli children literally torn apart, beheaded, women raped, their naked, dead bodies stomped on, the dead paraded like war trophies, families trapped, their charred remains found, and a video of a young woman, kidnapped and burned alive, as she writhed on the ground in pain. At least the Nazis gassed us before cremating us, although towards the end, as the Allies were descending, they threw Jewish children alive into the ovens.
“‘Where are you?” – a question that so many asked God during the Holocaust, and which so many of us have been asking God ever since – is not a question for us to ask God but a question for God to ask us. Where was the moral compass of the millions who simply looked the other way as the Nazis and their army of willing executioners perpetrated such monstrous evil? Rather than honestly confront this standing question, people instead tried to excuse their inaction. Too often, they justified their failure to accept our moral obligations to one another by hiding behind another question.” - Elders of Zion
The lies we bear witness to in the media
And now, we again hear those hiding behind more “questions” and false accusations. We bear witness to mainstream media calling Hamas “militants” vs. genocidal terrorists, and calling “Palestinian” terrorists “activists.” If beheading children is now under the amoral Orwellian definition of “militants,” what does this tell us about our future to remain civilized? We witness worldwide rallies, once again blaming Jews, blaming the Jewish state for being butchered by Islamic Jihad Hamas whose charter and stated goals openly say it will rid the Middle East of all Jews, then go after us worldwide
Some say, “Well, we don’t go along with what Hamas has done, but we still blame Israel for what Hamas did.” That is as amoral as saying “We don’t go along with what the Nazis did to Jews, but we support their reasons for murdering them. They deserved it.’
Blaming Israel for the plight of Arabs in Gaza whose homes have been destroyed, instead of blaming Hamas and Gaza for brutalizing Arabs living in Gaza for years, only serves to perpetuate Hamas’s ability to oppress their people. Hamas and Fatah opted for more jihad, built terror tunnels inside homes and mosques to plot kidnappings, smuggle arms, and construct launch pads among UN facilities and schools.
British commentator Melanie Phillips wrote: “The ignorant and malicious lie of Israeli ‘oppression’ and injustice is embedded in Western ‘progressive’ circles. Totally ignoring the Palestinians’ genocidal antisemitism, this narrative has sanitised, emboldened, and incentivised Palestinian incitement against Israel and the Jewish people for decades. Jews on the Left, including those now wringing their hands over the massacre in Israel, are complicit in this malignant echo chamber. They are part of a Western culture that is no longer prepared to recognise evil. It seeks instead to ascribe it to motives like oppression. It tells itself that every aggressive cause is amenable to compromise. It refuses to accept that sometimes there’s no alternative but to fight until the forces of evil are crushed by a military victory. By refusing to accept this, such ‘progressives’ sentence countless innocents to die. That is what has happened in Israel. That’s why yet more innocents there will be slaughtered, and yet more young Israeli conscripts are now being sent into the line of fire. Israel will fight to destroy this evil because it has no choice. Many Western progressives have chosen to support evil instead.”
So, to all the media who fail to do any fact-based, objective research, to those who base their opinions on the Big Lies put forth, and to all the just plain Jew haters out there, who have always needed a bogeyman to blame for their woes, do us a favor. Find someone else for a change to blame, like Abbas or Hamas or Hezbollah or Fatah, whose collective and individual Jew hate are bottomless, violent, and barbaric and who won’t stop until there are no Jews left on Earth.
We’ve already been scattered to the ends of the Earth, post-Holocaust. We’ve had more than our share of the world’s hatred, from the Spanish Inquisition to the Holocaust, and now in 2023, butchering, burning, beheading Israeli Jewish children and adults.
Leave us alone. “Never again” means never again. This time, we will take you down with us if forced to.■
The writer is a commentator in Jewish and mainstream newspapers, and lecturer on strategies for combating media bias, antisemitism, and BDS. She has an MSW and a certification in “Understanding Media Bias & Israel Advocacy: Defending Israel from Media Bias”, 23rd Mission to Israel, HonestReporting: June, 2015. She resides in Arizona.