In the overheated arena of Middle East discourse, where passions flare and reason often falters, the rhetoric swirling around Israel reveals a stark divide. On one side, defenders of the Jewish state like me grapple with the complexities of a nation under siege, striving to uphold its right to exist while navigating the fog of war. On the other, detractors—animated by bias, ignorance, or something darker—seize every opportunity to vilify Israel. They obsess over civilian casualties in Gaza, wringing their hands with selective outrage while ignoring the extraordinary measures taken by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to minimize collateral damage in their fight against terrorists. Context, it seems, is their enemy. The comparative restraint of Israel’s military, facing threats no other nation would tolerate, goes unmentioned. So does the larger picture: a global Jihadist movement, fueled by an ideology that prizes domination over life itself, and its troubling defenders in the West.
From this cauldron of distortion emerges Zohran Mamdani, the media-savvy leftist vying for New York’s mayoralty, whose anti-Zionist rhetoric has electrified the progressive fringe. Establishment Democrats, caught flat-footed, fumble to respond, fixating on decoding phrases like “Globalize the Intifada” or “From the River to the Sea.” They debate semantics as if words alone were the threat, sidestepping the harder task of confronting what Mamdani and his ilk truly stand for. Parsing slogans is a distraction. Leadership demands clarity about the intentions behind them—not just what is said, but what is meant.
Let’s dispense with the charade. The useful idiots chanting in Western streets, clueless about the Arab-Israeli conflict’s history or the geography of the Levant, are not the real danger. The Islamist political leaders in Turkey, the Gulf, and Iran, along with their fellow travelers in the West, know exactly what they’re saying. Their code is unmistakable: an anti-Western, barbaric ideology that exalts Islamist supremacy above all else—above liberty, truth, or human life. The Ayatollahs in Iran and their proxies, from Hamas to Hezbollah, are blunt about their aim: a world Judenrein, cleansed of Jews.
Their Western apologists, like Columbia University protest leader Mahmoud Khalil, are cagier. Pressed for specifics, they dodge. When CNN asked Khalil if he supports Hamas, he pivoted, proclaiming opposition to all civilian deaths. It’s a sleight of hand, equating the IDF’s painstaking efforts to spare non-combatants with the deliberate savagery of Iran-backed terrorists who embed themselves in schools, hospitals, and mosques, who disrupt aid to starve their own people, who target civilians as a matter of policy.
This moral blurring is no accident. It’s a tactic to obscure the truth: anti-Zionists like Mamdani and Khalil aren’t fighting for Palestinian rights or equality. Their aim is singular—to strip safety and rights from one group: Jews. They cloak their agenda in the language of justice, but their selective fury betrays them. Why else hijack the term “genocide,” a word seared into Jewish consciousness by the Nazi extermination machine? No other people in modern history have faced such a systematic program of annihilation. Yet, in the hands of these amoral moralizers, “genocide” becomes a weapon to libel Israel and the West while absolving the true heirs of Nazism: the Islamists of Gaza, Judea and Samaria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, and Iran.
So while I cringe at the antisemitic rhetoric filling the news cycles and social media threads, it is the relentless commitment to violence that keeps me awake at night. Hamas and Islamic Jihad could end the war in Gaza tomorrow by laying down their arms and releasing their hostages. Instead, they choose to prolong suffering, sacrificing their own people to glorify a genocidal ideology. Their defenders in the West, whether through ignorance or malice, amplify this madness. They scream about Israel’s “disproportionate” response while ignoring the rockets raining on Tel Aviv, the tunnels built to slaughter, the captives languishing in Gaza’s depths. They demand ceasefires but never call for Hamas to surrender. Why? Because their goal isn’t peace—it’s Israel’s erasure – and by extension, our own.
rubenthoughts 