In the immediate aftermath of the sickening Hamas terrorist attack on Israeli citizens, the usual pundits rushed in to assure people that the atrocities were justified. It's all about "context," they instructed us, as if that's the way morality works. These sages alone possess the moral clarity to judge whether or not the degree of rape, murder, and torture that Hamas terrorists meted out was something the Israeli people, including children and elders (one Holocaust survivor), had coming to them—in a "proportional" way—because of past abuse perpetrated by their government. Their conclusion: they had it coming to them.
Christopher Stone is one of these moral arbiters, and his recent, error-ridden piece for Splice Today—"Jimmy Savile, Israel, and the BBC"—couldn't be differentiated from rest of the boilerplate apologia for the barbarism in Israel if it didn't have one bizarre twist—comparing Israel, a country the writer obviously detests, to notorious British pedophile Jimmy Savile. If you're going to try to minimize the shamelessness of the kidnapping and killing of children, you have to put a new spin on it!
But as for Stone's ability to make a case for the justification of the barbarity, like Clara Peller once said, "Where's the beef"? First, there's the ludicrous Savile "connection," on which the writer devotes seven paragraphs to detailing the old story of what a monster Savile, a media celebrity, was. One paragraph would've sufficed to make the point that Israel is the pedophile of nation states, and that the BBC protected both of these demons equally, even though the BBC recently announced it won't call Hamas a terrorist organization because it doesn't want to take sides. That's hardly the best way to protect Israel.
Leave out six superfluous paragraphs in which we learn such pertinent details like Savile was a bleached blond who loved cigars, and there's plenty of space to make the case for Israel, a tiny country surrounded by Jew-hating enemies, being the most despicable nation on earth. Because only a pariah nation would deserve what Hamas did, with glee, to its citizens, right? Then, at the end, tack on the "context" for Hamas violating every single concept of human decency, and you've got a story!
Stone makes a direct comparison—"Israel is the Jimmy Savile of nations"—between an evil freak, whose youngest known victim was two, and the Jewish state of Israel. Speaking of children, how many of them did Hamas just kill and kidnap? Savile didn't kill even one child. Maybe Stone, since he's in the business of making complex moral calculations, could tell us how many children, given the level of oppression being redressed, Hamas is morally allowed to kidnap and murder. I want a number. The writer conveniently skips over the details of the Hamas grotesquery because bringing up the "militants" (what AP and other media outlets call them) beheading a body with a hoe would interfere with his canned narrative. Except for the weird Savile bit, it's so generic that it could've been written before this latest war even began.
The pedo angle would appeal to the world's many anti-Semites. They're always looking for a new, extreme knock on the Jews, so the writer has made an original contribution to this group, which includes all those who showed up for the far-flung, so-called Day of Rage protests that Hamas called for just days after its terrorists paraglided into an Israeli music festival in order to murder over 250 young people in the desert. "Rage" over exactly what when your side just slaughtered and kidnapped hundreds of your sworn enemies, which is considered a major "win" in some twisted way.
Stone doesn't want to discuss the level of depravity the people he stands up for. As he wrote in the comments section to his article, most of it is just propaganda. But it has to be discussed. One of the victims at the music festival was a German woman whose lifeless, semi-nude body was displayed, in "victory," in the back of a Hamas pick-up truck in Gaza as terrorists sat on top of her, jeering. A group of cheering Palestinians ran alongside the truck, spitting on her mangled corpse. If Israel is Jimmy Savile, who didn't kill anyone, then who are these despicable ghouls? A survivor of the Nova music festival attack said that the Hamas terrorists from Gaza were laughing as they shot and raped their female victims. Sky News reported that Hamas terrorists took their time with their captives, binding families together, torturing them, and then killing them after they'd had their fun. Remember the "BTK killer"?
In the aftermath of their attack on Israel civilians, Hamas itself distributed a "greatest-hits" video compilation of the atrocities it committed. Not even the Nazis did that. When the Third Reich was about to fall, they tried to cover up evidence of their unspeakable acts so the Allies couldn't find it. Nazi comparisons are often absurd, but in this case they're not so far-fetched.
Stone describes the atrocities mentioned above as "regrettable" in the single—obligatory and perfunctory—sentence in which he levels some criticism against Hamas, but the most chilling (not to mention loathsome) thing he wrote in justifying the subhuman level of violence was that "Hamas' violence is at least understandable." Understandable? How many people in the entire world, regardless of the injustices they'd received, could imagine themselves raping, murdering, torturing, kidnapping, and mutilating the corpses of citizens of the nation they perceive as having oppressed them?
Some are so wrapped up in the hate-filled, Day of Rage narrative they've swallowed whole that they're blind to depraved violence that exceeds, by a long shot, any norms regarding what's "understandable" in response to perceived oppression. They've lost their moral compass. Perhaps it's also "understandable" that protesters were filmed chanting, "Gas the Jews" at the massive anti-Israel rally held on the steps of the Sydney Opera House in Australia. These are the people Stone has aligned himself with.
I mentioned that his article was error-ridden. Most of the errors are by omission, but this one's a doozy: "The Israeli violence is of a different order. It's a cold and calculated act perpetrated, not in the heat of the moment, but in advance, according to a schedule, on an innocent population, as part of a long-term plan."
Seriously? This latest Hamas attack was two years in the making. It was a cold and calculated act perpetrated, not in the heat of the moment, but in advance, according to a schedule, on an innocent population, as part of a long-term plan.
