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Spare Us the Selective Outrage

25 0
28.05.2026

Since October 7, we have been lectured nonstop about the supposedly singular sins of Israel.

The campuses, the left-wing media, and the new Democratic Socialist officials, both federal and state, following the cue of student activists and professors from the Middle East, have painted Israel and their Jewish supporters as Nazis, fascists, and among the worst murderers in today's bloody world.

This is nonsensical. The medieval-style massacre of 1,200 Jews in their homes on October 7, during a time of peace, should have increased awareness of the existential dangers Israel faced. Instead, it spawned a gathering storm of antisemitism.

What Was Israel Supposed to Do?

Note that leftists and pro-Hamas students and faculty were shouting the eliminationist slogan "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" in euphoria almost immediately in response to the news of the slaughter. Hundreds of dead Jews set off a Pavlovian spasm of glee from the Middle East to American campuses.

Indeed, during the three-week hiatus following the mass killings – well before the IDF entered Gaza on October 27 – Israel and its supporters were damned in ways we have not seen for years. Even as Israel sought to negotiate a release of the 251 hostages and a surrender of all those in Hamas responsible for the massacres, the international furor at Israel only mounted. Or was it instead an ebullition of anticipation that still more slaughter of Israelis would follow?

Yet Israel's demands were met with more defiance. Hamas, and its delusional supporters, both in the Middle East and in the West, saw October 7 not as the end of bloodletting but as the beginning of far more slaughter – and of the hoped-for end of Israel altogether.

Again, that dream explains the giddiness among the Democratic Socialist/pro-Hamas leftists. In their unhinged hatred, they assumed that Iran's vaunted "ring of fire" (the terrorists of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis and scattered contingents in Syria and Iraq) would now ignite Israel from all sides.

The master planner of the attacks, Iran, had concluded that Israel would eventually be overwhelmed by hundreds of thousands of incoming drones, missiles, and rockets – the very reason why Iran had spent years arming its Arab terrorist clients.

Yet when Israel finally invaded Gaza on October 27, it was almost immediately damned for conducting "genocide." None of its libelers offered alternate pathways for how Israel might stop the Hamas slaughterers or get the hostages back.

So how exactly was Israel supposed to restore deterrence, punish the guilty, and prevent such future mass butchery?

Go to the U.N. Security Council and beg China (one million Uighurs in Chinese camps) and Russia (engaged in a Verdun-like invasion of Ukraine) to examine the facts empirically?

Ask Hamas to shed their civilian shields and fight Israelis head-to-head?

Fly to Geneva to have European premiers and presidents like Pedro Sanchez, Emmanuel Macron, and Keir Starmer oversee "negotiations"?

What Would America Have Done?

Alternatively, consider this hypothetical: the United States is roughly 34 times larger than Israel, with roughly 340 million to Israel's 10 million citizens. Apply that asymmetrical magnitude to a thought experiment about how Americans would react to a........

© Townhall