RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/opinion/383639/up-close-killers-then-and-now/

    What kind of human being is capable of walking up to another person—an innocent, defenseless, unarmed civilian—and, at close range, shooting him or her?

    That question must be on the minds of many who are reading about the Palestinian Arab terrorist attack on bus passengers in Jerusalem this week. The killers were within a few feet of their victims.

    Prof. Daniel Goldhagen considered this question in his famous book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners. There are those who dislike comparisons between contemporary terrorists and the Nazis. Let’s take a closer look at Goldhagen’s analysis and consider whether it’s valid to compare up-close killers, then and now.

    Goldhagen focused on a particular German police unit, Reserve Police Battalion 101, which carried out up-close shootings. That segment of the genocide, which historians today call “the Holocaust by bullets,” took place before gas chambers became the Germans’ primary means of mass murder.

    In June 1942, five hundred battalion members were assigned to the town of Jozefow, in German-­occupied southern Poland. They were instructed to force local Jews out of their homes, take them to a nearby forest, and shoot them point-­blank.

    When a truck unloaded its Jewish prisoners at the edge of the Józefów forest, each of the waiting policemen selected a victim. The two then walked together to the nearby execution site. Many of the captives were children. The walk “afforded each perpetrator an opportunity for reflection,” Goldhagen noted. “It is highly likely that, back in Germany, these men had previously walked through woods with their own children by their sides. . . . In these moments, each killer had a personalized, face-­to-face relationship to his victims.”

    Goldhagen wondered if the typical killer ever “asked himself why he was about to kill this little, delicate human being who, if seen as a little girl by him, would normally have received his compassion, protection, and nurturing.” Or perhaps it was that the killer could only “see a Jew, a young one, but a Jew nonetheless,” and therefore accepted “the reasonableness of the order, the necessity of nipping the believed-­in Jewish blight in the bud.”

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/09/10/the-pathological-chutzpah-of-israels-critics/

Israel’s in trouble now. For none other than Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart, the two cheeks of the bony arse of British centrism, have done an ‘emergency podcast’ on its bombing of Hamas leaders in Qatar yesterday. I bet the Jewish nation is quaking. It might have faced off against the neo-fascists of Hamas and Hezbollah but now it faces a far more formidable foe: an army of turbo-smug centrist dads in Next cardigans nodding vigorously as the two perfumed ponces of The Rest is Politics give it what-for on an impromptu pod. It’s curtains for you now, Israel!

Have you ever, in your life, heard of anything as hubristic and ridiculous as an ‘emergency podcast’? These are hitherto untapped depths of human vanity, as if the world and its dog are just sitting around waiting to hear what a cranky old spin doctor and failed Tory have to say about Israel’s wars. It was Campbell who announced it. ‘We will be doing an emergency podcast [at] 4.15pm’, he said, ‘on the catastrophic events in Qatar’. It’s hard to know what’s more batshit: telling us the weirdly specific time at which they’ll be recording their prattle, or thinking it’s ‘catastrophic’ that some Hamas cunts got blown up.

Actually, here’s what’s most batshit: the idea that Alastair Campbell has the moral authority to wag a finger at a nation at war. The Qatar strike proves we live in a world where ‘strongman leaders think they can do what they want where they want with impunity’, he said. That sound you can hear is a hundred thousand Iraqis rolling in their graves. This is the man whose bollocks and bluster when he was Tony Blair’s spin doctor helped to justify a truly ‘catastrophic’ war against a nation that hadn’t even attacked us. And he thinks he can hold forth on Israel’s targeting of the anti-Semitic freaks who raped and murdered more than a thousand of its citizens? These are industrial-strength levels of brass neck.

The Campbell / Stewart wang-fest on Israel’s ‘catastrophic’ bombing of Islamofascists really does sum up the imperious conceit of Israelophobia. Here we have a propagandist for one of the bloodiest wars of modern times (Campbell), and the man who served as a colonial-style governor in Iraq once it had been violently subdued by the West (Stewart), badgering Israel for firing a few missiles at the terror army that invaded its territory and murdered its people. It’s like being lectured about misogyny by Fred West.

Israel’s strike on the Hamas leaders holed up in Doha really has exposed the pathological chutzpah, the cavernous gall, of its preening critics in the West. No sooner had it fired its missiles at the assembled militants than a chorus of condemnation was ringing out in the West’s corridors of power and our haughty media. This was a ‘flagrant violation of Qatar’s sovereignty’, yelped useless Keir Starmer. Oh, so Mr Second Referendum, that implacable old foe of Brexit, suddenly gives a shit about sovereignty? Good to know.

To be clear, Israel’s whack on Doha is a striking development. This is the first time Israel has fired at a Western-backed Gulf state. Qatar had long considered itself immune to the Middle East’s waves of violence, not least because it is close to mighty America and home to Al Udeid, the largest US airbase in the Middle East. It seems Britain had no advance warning of Israel’s attack but America did, and apparently America is not best pleased. Trump reportedly feels ‘very badly’ about it. And it’s unclear if the strike was a success: Hamas says five of its members were killed but its leaders survived.