The West's acceptance of Israelophobia costs innocent lives
The final post on X made by Yarón Lischinsky, the 28-year-old Israeli diplomat who was gunned down with his girlfriend in Washington DC on Wednesday night, drew attention to a 'blood libel'.
'All UN organisations have obligations to be neutral and impartial,' the post said. 'Your reports are founded on lies and on Hamas numbers.'
The smear that so appalled him was the lurid claim that 14,000 babies in Gaza would die within 48 hours. Tom Fletcher, the UN humanitarian chief, had made it the day before on Radio 4's Today programme. Social media lit up in excitement.
People love tall stories of Jewish baby killers. Later that day, the smear was repeated in Parliament by no fewer than 13 enthusiastic MPs – seven from the Labour Party, three Liberal Democrats, the Green Party leader, a Plaid Cymru representative and a Gaza Independent – when they gathered to give Israel a kicking.
This was the notorious debate in which David Lammy blustered that 'history will judge' the Jewish state for the outrage of defending its people against jihadism and refusing to give up before winning. Hamas had already applauded Lammy's 'principled stance'.
Yet while parliamentarians were merrily repeating the obviously fishy '14,000 babies' claim, it was being debunked by the BBC. They questioned the UN about it, prompting frantic backpedalling. Initially, a spokesman said aid was needed 'ideally within the next 48 hours,' which felt rather less life-or-death than we had been led to believe.
It then emerged that the claim was based upon a UN report saying that 14,000 children between the ages of four and six may suffer malnutrition by March 2026.
No babies. No 48 hours. No acute malnutrition, in fact; that was merely a projection of what may happen if nothing changed for a year.
Let's not get ahead of ourselves. Downplaying the suffering in the war zone of Gaza would be an ugly thing. But it is equally important to deal with reality, not to filter everything through a tissue of Israelophobic lies.
The awful truth is that civilians, including babies, lose their lives in warfare. According to the UN, the global average is nine non-combatant casualties for every combatant killed. When the RAF joined American airforce and Iraqi and Kurdish troops to obliterate Islamic State in Mosul in 2017, an Amnesty report described it as a 'civilian catastrophe'.
In March, a UN report revealed that half of all children under five in Yemen, that's 540,000 boys and girls, are 'acutely malnourished', a condition described as 'agonising, life-threatening and entirely preventable,' by a humanitarian official. Did anybody care? Clearly, there's something about Jews and the blood of babies that gets people going.
Ironically enough, Lischinsky and his girlfriend, Sarah Milgrim, 26, had just attended an event exploring practical solutions to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza when they were murdered.
They were both wounded at first, then shot dead at point blank range. Milgrim, who had obtained a master's degree from the UN University of Peace and had spent her summers working for a Palestinian-Israeli peace initiative, was crawling away when the final bullet came. She will never learn that a few days before, her boyfriend had bought her an engagement ring.
Did their alleged killer, a Gaza activist from Chicago by the name of Elias Rodriguez, believe that 14,000 Palestinian babies were dying when he pulled the trigger? We will never know. But we can fairly assume that such propaganda inflames anti-Semitism globally and places Jews in danger.
By rights, these MPs should retract and apologise or lose the whip. But I'm hardly holding my breath.
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