The indestructible myth of famine in Gaza Universalism’s falsehoods are protected by a doctrine of infallibility Melanie Phillips
https://melaniephillips.substack.com/
Yet again, the myth has been revived that there is a famine in the Gaza Strip.
This claim, which has done so much to incite attacks on Jews, has been promulgated repeatedly by mainstream western media during the past 18 months of war. It is a lie that distorts yet another lie.
Time and again, UN agencies and NGOs have warned that famine and starvation are imminent. But this has never happened. More food has been admitted to Gaza than people need.
The problem has been that Hamas took much of it to feed themselves and to sell it on the black market to finance their infrastructure of war.
Nevertheless, the Gazans have overwhelmingly remained conspicuously well-fed, while the people who really have been starved are the Israeli hostages they hold captive. Yet the media has continued to insist that civilians in Gaza are being starved to death.
Two months ago, with an estimated four months’ worth of food supplies remaining in Gaza, Israel instituted a blockade on further aid transports to force Hamas to release the remaining hostages.
The Israel Defence Forces will now oversee food distribution in southern Gaza in order to stop Hamas stealing it and to funnel civilians into those areas, isolating and weakening Hamas to enable the IDF finally to destroy it. The United Nations has refused to accept this plan, demonstrating that its aim is not to alleviate Gazan suffering but to aid Hamas in its war against Israel.
Stupefyingly, it is simply impossible to change the wicked media narrative that Israel is starving Gazan civilians to death. Facts and evidence get absolutely nowhere. Many believe that this is because of the false and obsessive belief that Israel is a colonial oppressor. But this embrace of revolutionary Marxist ideology is only part of the reason.
These lies have penetrated far beyond the keffiyeh-clad hordes of demonstrators. In Britain and elsewhere, it’s now the accepted unwisdom across great swathes of the professions, administrative class and business world that Israel is starving children and committing war crimes in Gaza.
When confronted with facts contradicting every one of these claims, such people ask incredulously: “Are you really saying that you are right while everyone else — the UN, the international legal tribunals, the entire humanitarian establishment — is wrong?”
To which the answer is “Yes.” This does indeed sound incredible because it is incredible. The West is gripped by an epidemic denial of reason.
So why have all these transnational bodies swallowed and promoted these lies? And why are these bodies deemed to be beyond challenge?
As I write in my new book, The Builder’s Stone, the reason is the belief by the educated classes that while the western nation-state is the source of division, prejudice and war, transnational legal bodies and laws representing the “brotherhood of man” stand for truth and conscience.
Institutions such as the United Nations, international courts and nongovernmental agencies such as Amnesty and Human Rights Watch are assumed to be disinterested, moral and just.
In fact, the very opposite is true. The International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice have betrayed the law and behaved as kangaroo courts over Israel. The NGOs that supply them with “evidence” are cesspits of exterminatory hatred against the Jewish state.
The United Nations has long singled out Israel for vicious discriminatory treatment meted out to no other country.
As Britain’s Henry Jackson Society think tank has detailed in a new report, the world body has produced 367 reports on Gaza since the Hamas-led atrocities in southern Israel on October 7, 2023. Yet it has barely mentioned Hamas’s human-shield tactics and not once in a serious analysis.
Amnesty, Human Rights Watch and other NGOs have produced hundreds of pages accusing Israel of genocide while airbrushing Hamas’s crimes out of the narrative.
The moral bankruptcy of this humanitarian establishment, however, was always implicit in the universalist human-rights doctrine that it embodies.
At the heart of this doctrine lies a fatal contradiction. Its proponents, who were appalled by the world’s failure to stop the Holocaust, believed that the way to save Jews and others from oppression was to trump national sovereignty by holding oppressors to account through international tribunals.
As detailed in James Loeffler’s book, Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, another post-war visionary — the Lithuanian-born lawyer Jacob Robinson — fruitlessly warned that for the Jewish people, this was a trap. He understood that only strong sovereign democracies would safeguard diaspora Jews.
He grasped that the universalist doctrine of human rights was innately hostile to Jewish particularism, as expressed through the Zionist dream of recovering the Jewish national homeland.
This fundamental flaw inevitably turned the United Nations — the designated vehicle of international human rights — into a mortal enemy of Zionism and the Jewish people.
There was an even deeper flaw. Law derives its authority from being passed by parliaments representing the will of the people. International laws and tribunals, which have no such inherent jurisdiction, lack that legitimacy and therefore inescapably become instruments of politics rather than law.
Instead of acknowledging this problem, however, the West turned universalism and human rights into a dogma that couldn’t be questioned.
According to Loeffler, the growing demonisation of Israel didn’t occur principally because people believed that Israel was now in occupation of Palestinian territory. More fundamentally, “human rights” became a global catchphrase for moral universalism.
The discrediting of socialism by the Soviet Union, the crisis of American liberalism as a result of both the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, and the radicalised “anti-colonialism” of the developing world all contributed to the search in the West for another universalising idealistic creed.
The disturbing history of Amnesty demonstrates that human-rights doctrine has become a kind of secular religion.
Amnesty’s founder, Peter Benenson, was a Jew whose conversion to Catholicism led him to conclude that the path to sanctity was through abandoning national identity. Amnesty’s ultimate goal, he believed, was the transformation of humanity into “a single world community … [that] encompasses the whole earth … .”
To reach this universal plane, human rights had to stand against particularism. And nothing was more particularist than Judaism and the State of Israel. If Jews were to embrace human rights, thought Benenson, they had to renounce their Jewish distinctiveness.
The consequences of this profoundly warped thinking were illustrated in April 2024 with the death in an Israeli jail of Walid Daqqa, a Palestinian Arab who had been in prison for 38 years.
In 1986, Daqqa was convicted of commanding a terrorist group that had abducted and murdered a 19-year-old Israeli soldier, Moshe Tamam. His killers held him hostage for two days and then gouged out his eyes, mutilated his body and castrated him before shooting him dead.
Yet upon Daqqa’s death, Erika Guevara Rosas — Amnesty’s senior director for research, advocacy, policy and campaigns — accused the Israelis of “chilling levels of cruelty”. This was apparently illustrated by the fact that Daqqa “was not permitted a phone call with his wife since 7 October” — the day Palestinian terrorists slaughtered 1,200 Israelis and took more than 240 of them hostage.
The “human rights” doctrine that inspires today’s “humanitarian” and human-rights establishment has increasingly turned it into a weapon against humanity. But its supposedly universal and elevated purpose has placed it beyond challenge.
So people believe the lies told by these bodies that the Israelis are slaughtering Gazan babies or causing Gaza’s civilians to starve, despite the evidence to the contrary that’s available to anyone who bothers to look. But they don’t, because those telling these lies have been elevated onto a pinnacle that puts them above mere considerations such as evidence, facts and truth.
Like the blood libels of the medieval church that caused the slaughter of countless thousands of Jews, the secular religion of universalism is inciting mass anti-Jewish lunacy under a doctrine of infallibility that has chilling historical echoes.
*** My new book The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West – and Why Only They Can Save It, can be bought on amazon.com and amazon.co.uk
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