Horrifyingly, antisemitism has become a moral obligation for liberals. Opinion.
Melanie Phillips, a British journalist, broadcaster and author, writes a weekly column for JNS. Currently a columnist for The Times of London, her new book, The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West and Why Only They Can Save It, is published by Wicked Son and can be purchased on Amazon. To access her work, go to: melaniephillips.substack.com.
(JNS) It was inevitable that the pre-pogrom climate created by the “globalize the intifada” mobs in the streets and on campus over the past 19 months would result in murder. On Wednesday night, this became a sickening reality when two young Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, D.C., were gunned down outside the Capital Jewish Museum by a man shouting, “I did it for Gaza!”
This is what “Free Palestine!” looks like.
The murderer pulled the trigger. But many others have the blood of these two innocents, who were reported to have soon become engaged, on their hands.
The university principals who have allowed hate mobs on campus to incite the murder of Jews and destruction of Israel, week in, week out; the politicians who have allowed the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and Iranian extremists to spread their influence throughout western civil society; the media and all those who relentlessly demonize Israel with blood libels and murderous lies, including the British, French and Canadian governments that this week threatened to punish Israel for defending itself—these all bear responsibility for what happened in Washington.
This week, another falsehood about Israel’s war in Gaza was added to the relentless incitement against the Jewish state. This one came from the U.N.’s emergency coordinator, Tom Fletcher, who told the BBC that “14,000 babies will die in 48 hours” from malnutrition.
A moment’s thought would suggest that such a synchronized mass mortality event was simply incredible.
The media, however, parroted it as valid. It duly spread like wildfire. Countless Israel-haters leapt upon it to validate their loathing. In a poisonous debate about Gaza in Britain’s House of Commons, members of parliament referred to it no fewer than 13 times.
It soon turned out, however, that it was indeed nonsense. As the BBC later clarified, Fletcher had misrepresented a claim made on May 12 by the U.N.’s IPC food classification system—a claim that was itself highly questionable—that an estimated 14,100 severe cases of acute malnutrition were expected to occur among Gazan children aged between 6 and 59 months from April 2025 to March 2026.
So two days actually turned out to be one year, and 14,000 certain deaths turned out to be 14,000 possible cases of malnutrition.
We don’t know whether Fletcher can’t read, was feeling the worse for wear that day or maliciously misrepresented what the IPC had said. What we do know is that the United Nations and the entire global humanitarian establishment constitute a bubbling sewer of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hatred.
False claims of imminent famine and starvation in Gaza have been made on a regular basis since the very start of the war. It’s an emotive blood libel that has incited a murderous hysteria of the kind that led to the gunning down of the young couple on Wednesday night.
The famine and starvation never materialized. Instead, video footage has regularly been shown on social media showing Gaza’s markets and shops groaning with food.
It’s quite astounding that, despite all these claims of famine having been proved false, they are still being made and believed. Indeed, many now think it beyond doubt that Gazan children are being starved by Israel.
The certainty has been fed by the distressing images of apparently starving children being transmitted on TV. Some of these pictures have been of children suffering not from starvation but from terrible diseases; others have involved Gazans either paid or forced by Hamas to stage “Pallywood” tableaux of desperation born of hunger.
Some of this hunger is indeed real. But it’s been caused not by a dearth of food entering Gaza but by Hamas stealing it for themselves or selling it on the black market at prices the Gazans can’t afford.
The global humanitarian establishment, however, speaks with one voice to tell the world that Israel is wantonly killing children and causing the Gazans to starve. People assume that the humanitarian establishment is inspired by the most pure and elevated motives of compassion and justice. So they believe absolutely every statement it makes about famine, starvation and the cruelty of Israel.
On this issue, however, the humanitarian establishment is the voice of bigoted hatred. It subjects Israel to a campaign of demonization and delegitimization that it inflicts upon no other people, country or group anywhere else in the world.
The United Nations is the world’s principal engine of these falsehoods and distortions. It routinely pumps out Hamas statistics that turn out to have no basis in reality; it both draws upon and feeds in turn the malevolent untruths issued by bodies such as the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice, and the big NGOs like Amnesty and Human Rights Watch.
The consequences of this behavior go far beyond harming the State of Israel to put every Jew at risk and to trap the West inside a sinister mindset that undermines civilization itself.
As has often been noted, the reason liberals hate Israel is because they think that Zionism is a colonialist ideology and that Israel oppresses the indigenous people of the land.
Israel, where the indigenous people are, in fact, the Jews, is actually the historic victim and current target of Arab colonialism, and Zionism is the ultimate decolonization movement. Nevertheless, Israel is deemed to be colonialist and white. That’s because it’s thought of as a Western nation and is therefore inescapably mired in the West’s original sins of colonialism, racism and whiteness, even though the majority of Jews have moved there from other Middle Eastern countries that they were forced to leave and are dark-skinned.
It’s an article of progressive faith that the Western nation is the source of division, oppression and war. Its institutions and laws should therefore be trumped by transnational institutions such as the United Nations and international courts that represent the world, and are thus assumed to possess a moral legitimacy that the Western nation lacks.
Given these institutions’ appalling attitudes towards Israel and Zionism, however, this has helped drive the West off its moral compass.
Moreover, since Zionism is the self-determination of the Jewish people in their historic homeland of Israel, and since Judaism fuses the religion with the people and the land, anti-Zionism is unarguably anti-Judaism.
But there’s even worse.
To those who believe that Israel is a colonialist occupier that’s driven out the rightful inhabitants of the land and that it’s committing war crimes in Gaza, it follows that Israel and Zionism are evil. So, too, therefore, are those Jews who support Israel and Zionism.
If something or someone is evil, it’s not only permissible to loathe, detest and try to destroy them. It’s a moral obligation to do so. If Israel, Zionism and the Jews are evil, then it’s a moral obligation to loathe, detest and try to destroy them.
To the Western liberal, for whom Zionism is racism and Israel starves babies to death, antisemitism is therefore not just the shield behind which the Jews sanitize Israel’s crimes. It’s no longer a uniquely murderous and deranged creed that all people of conscience must oppose. Horrifyingly, for the Western liberal, antisemitism has become a moral obligation.
We’ve gone through the looking-glass into a nightmarish landscape where evil is being embraced as virtue. The shocking murders in Washington, D.C., are the result.
From the French revolutionary terror in the 18th century through the mind control of communism to the tyranny of fascism, a desire to bring about the perfection of the world has led instead to tyranny and mass slaughter. Today, Western liberals have become the accomplices of Islamo-Nazism through their own misguided fantasies about the brotherhood of man.
So it has come to pass that the global humanitarian establishment of transnational institutions and human-rights law that was established after the defeat of Nazism to ensure that such a terrible evil should never arise again, has itself become a monstrous force inciting the conditions for a second Holocaust.
