WhatsappThe twin causes of Palestinianism and human rights have destroyed the West’s moral compass.
The “progressive” world is defined by its unchallengeable adherence to two causes: Palestinianism and international human-rights law. The two are symbiotically linked.
“Progressives” believe that these stand for conscience, morality and the betterment of the human race. In fact, both of them have destroyed the West’s moral compass altogether.
They are the principal drivers of the tsunami of Israel demonization and Jew-baiting that’s engulfed the Jewish world since the Hamas-led atrocities in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
This infernal axis is perfectly encapsulated in the person of New York’s mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani.
After the mob attack on Park East Synagogue on New York City’s Upper East Side over the meeting it hosted by Nefesh B’Nefesh to provide information about aliyah, or immigration to Israel, Mamdani said: “These sacred spaces should not be used to promote activities in violation of international law.”
This was clearly ridiculous. Moving to Israel isn’t a violation of international law, nor is any meeting to provide information about doing so. Moving there is no more unlawful than someone moving to the United States, the course pursued by Mamdani’s own parents.
The mayor-elect’s office later said that Mamdani had meant “settlement activity beyond the Green Line” was a violation of international law. That’s untrue in itself, but it’s not what he said and misrepresents the event that he denounced.
It’s quite clear that he believes all immigration to live in Israel is illegitimate because he believes that the existence of Israel itself is illegitimate, as was obvious from his pre-election performances as a street agitator screaming for the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state.
Mamdani made this “violation” remark for one baleful purpose—to delegitimize the right of Jews to live in their own ancestral homeland. That’s because he wants to delegitimize Israel itself by any means possible.
This is the second time he’s made a notable comment involving international law. Weeks ago, he said that if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu set foot in New York, Mamdani would have him arrested under the terms of the arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court.
But this was again absurd. He would have no power to do so. Such an arrest could only be carried out by the federal authorities. And no such arrest could be made by them either because the United States isn’t a signatory to the ICC.
Why, then, is Mamdani so keen to cite international law, which has nothing at all to do with New York?
It’s because international law is a key weapon deployed by the “eighth front” of the war against Israel. This eighth front (the other seven are the countries encircling Israel in a “ring of fire”) is the war of the mind. It is conducted through the entire global apparatus of international human-rights law and the humanitarian establishment, and laundered by the media to demonize and delegitimize Israel in the West and cause people to press for Israel’s extermination.
The United Nations, the international courts and the big NGOs like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International constitute a global infrastructure to promote the Palestinian cause; give the lies of “occupation” and Palestinian rights to the land a spurious justification in international law; and isolate Israel in the court of public opinion.
For the Palestinian Arabs, international human-rights law is a key weapon to destroy Israel. In the 1960s, when they realized they couldn’t achieve this through war, the Palestinian terrorist leader Yasser Arafat and his allies in the former Soviet Union invented the bogus identity of a Palestinian people and thus claimed the right to self-determination.
This hooked Western progressives for whom, as the Palestinian Arabs and their Soviet strategists well understood, universal human rights have become the nearest thing to a religion. To these liberals, campaigning for the Palestinians meant campaigning for justice and the rights of the oppressed.
All the Palestinian Arabs then had to do was to hit Israel with fake accusations of human-rights abuses, and Western liberals would be turned into a weapon to bring about Israel’s destruction. This has been carried out to the letter, turning justice into lawfare and bodies such as the International Court of Justice or International Criminal Court into kangaroo courts captured by Israel’s enemies.
The Palestinian cause has had an even deeper effect. It has simply corrupted discourse and morality in the West. By adopting Palestinianism as their badge of moral worth, people have signed up to an agenda of lies that they assume is incontrovertible truth.
Convinced that the Palestinians are the wretched of the earth, Western liberals refuse to see that they are actually supporting a genocidal agenda. By internalizing Palestinian Jew-hatred, they now see nothing wrong in themselves spewing out vicious antisemitic tropes.
Demonizing Israel in the name of anti-racism, they have turned morality inside out, reversing victim and aggressor. That’s why, after the terror attacks on Oct. 7, so many of them denied Israeli victimization and instead grotesquely blamed Israel for abuses such as war crimes or genocide, of which Israel was innocent but of which the Palestinians were guilty.
This pathological projection by aggressors of their own evil deeds onto their victims is hardwired into the Palestinian cause and indeed the Islamist world.
The Islamists do this because they believe that Islam is perfection, and everything beyond it is the province of the devil. Islamist aggression against the West is therefore falsely framed as a defense against Western attacks on Islam.
This was why British Muslims in Birmingham justified their exclusion of the Maccabi Tel Aviv away-fans from the club’s match against Aston Villa in October by claiming that the Israeli fans had a record of violence.
They based this on the utterly false assertion that a violent, pre-planned Arab “Jew-hunt” against Maccabi fans at a match in Amsterdam last year, in which the Israelis were chased through the city, beaten and one of them forced into a canal, was in fact a major attack by Israeli “hooligans” against local Muslims.
By allowing the Palestinian cause to subvert their ability to distinguish truth from lies and right from wrong, Western progressives have damaged something rather closer to home than the truth about the Israel-Arab impasse. It meant that they can’t see how their own society is being Islamized.
That’s why the knee-jerk response after any Islamist atrocities in the West is to worry about attacks on Muslims. It’s why in Britain, any criticism of the police delivering “two-tier justice” by treating Muslims less harshly than others, or concern about attempts to Islamize the curriculum of some state-run schools, or speaking about the overwhelmingly Muslim identity of the rape and grooming gangs is all denounced as “Islamophobia” and silenced.
Palestinianism is the Trojan horse for the Islamization of the West.
Mamdani is motivated, above all, by his passion for the Palestinian cause and his hatred of Israel.
It’s clear from his transition team—a nightmarish collection of Israel-haters, nihilists and ultra-leftists—that he intends to drive a wedge down the middle of the Jewish community by using anti-Zionist Jews as human shields to protect him from charges of antisemitism as he pursues his vendetta against Israel.
New York Jews who denounce Israel will receive protection and favors; Jews who are assumed to support Israel will be thrown to the wolves.
And it will all be done in the language of human rights, justice and international law.
