Spare Us the Selective Outrage

Spare Us the Selective Outrage

Israel is condemned for surviving a massacre while regimes guilty of actual ethnic cleansing and mass slaughter escape outrage and scrutiny.

By Victor Davis Hanson

Since October 7, we have been lectured nonstop about the supposedly singular sins of Israel.

The campuses, the left-wing media, and the new Democratic Socialist officials, both federal and state, following the cue of student activists and professors from the Middle East, have painted Israel and their Jewish supporters as Nazis, fascists, and among the worst murderers in today’s bloody world.

This is nonsensical. The medieval-style massacre of 1,200 Jews in their homes on October 7, during a time of peace, should have increased awareness of the existential dangers Israel faced. Instead, it spawned a gathering storm of antisemitism.

What Was Israel Supposed to Do?

Note that leftists and pro-Hamas students and faculty were shouting the eliminationist slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” in euphoria almost immediately in response to the news of the slaughter. Hundreds of dead Jews set off a Pavlovian spasm of glee from the Middle East to American campuses.

Indeed, during the three-week hiatus following the mass killings—well before the IDF entered Gaza on October 27—Israel and its supporters were damned in ways we have not seen for years. Even as Israel sought to negotiate a release of the 251 hostages and a surrender of all those in Hamas responsible for the massacres, the international furor at Israel only mounted. Or was it instead an ebullition of anticipation that still more slaughter of Israelis would follow?

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