Gary Willig is on the news team at Arutz Sheva.
Political commentator Michael Kinsley once called a gaffe what happens “when a politician tells the truth – some obvious truth he isn't supposed to say.” This is what happened during an anti-Israel rally in London on Saturday, when Palestinian Arab political activist Mohammed el-Kurd told a cheering crowd, “we must normalize massacres as a status quo.”
El-Kurd clearly did not intend to say the quiet part out loud as he did, but he still revealed the goal of these anti-Israel protests, the calls for an immediate ceasefire, and the South African government’s charge of genocide against Israel in the International Court of Justice.
A smarter man would realize the gravity of his blunder and apologize for misspeaking in a manner that appeared to endorse mass murder. El-Kurd cannot seem to bring himself to do that, instead attacking his critics for pointing how horrible what he said actually is.
The rest of his speech, the words he actually intended to speak, were hardly any better than his blunder. “Zionism is apartheid, it’s genocide, it’s murder, it’s a racist ideology rooted in settler expansion and racial domination, and we must root it out of the world,” he said, calling for the destruction of the State of Israel, an act which would necessitate a genocide of the Jewish people on the level of the Holocaust. If el-Kurd got his way, massacres of the Jewish people would indeed be normalized in a manner unseen for nearly 80 years.
This has been the goal of the global anti-Israel movement since the Hamas massacre of October 7, when the genocidal terrorist organization murdered more than 1,200 people in southern Israel and took over 240 people hostage: To normalize October 7 and make mass murder of Jews the new normal.
In the immediate aftermath of October 7, before Israel had even begun to respond and the bodies had not been counted, 34 student organizations at Harvard University signed a statement saying that they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence” and that “the apartheid regime is the only one to blame.”
Translation: Israel’s supposed crimes are so egregious that the worst massacre of the Jewish people since the Holocaust is a normal response.
Less than a month after October 7, Hamas spokesman Ghazi Hamad said in a video interview, "We will repeat the October 7 attack time and again until Israel is annihilated."
Even with Hamas’ vow to repeat the atrocities of October 7 over and over again until every last one of the over six million Jews in Israel is dead and gone, still there is a widespread global movement to save Hamas and to allow it to rebuild and continue to commit mass murder with impunity.
This is the true purpose for which anti-Israel protestors block bridges and tunnels in New York, blockade a heavily Jewish neighborhood in Canada, and attempt to break down a White House fence: To normalize massacres of Jews and delegitimize any attempt to protect the lives of Jewish children.
This is the true purpose of the statements of United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese in which she claimed that Israel dos not have the right to defend itself against Hamas and the book she wrote following October 7 in which she attempted to shift the blame for the massacre from the perpetrators to the victims. The book, titled ‘J’Accuse,’ deliberately co-opts the phrase made famous during the antisemitic show-trial of Alfred Dreyfus in late 19th Century France.
And this is the purpose of South Africa’s attempt to accuse Israel of genocide at The Hague as well, a modern remake of the Dreyfus affair. The South African government is well-aware of how Hamas’ charter calls for the annihilation of not just Israel, but all Jews wherever they may be. It is fully aware of Hamas’ intentions to commit genocide and to repeat October 7 so many times that the number of dead Jews will not be in the thousands but in the millions. And it is doing everything in its power to ensure that Hamas will get that chance to fulfill its dark and evil desires.
The case before the International Court of Justice is that October 7, the murder of 1,200 people, the beheading and burning of babies in ovens, the mass rapes, the taking of hundreds of hostages and refusal to allow the Red Cross to visit any of them, is normal and therefore does not justify any military response whatsoever. The threat of a thousand October 7s is normal, according to the government of South Africa, and Israel must be forced to allow these massacres to occur as if they were as normal as a hurricane or tornado.
For 2,000 years, massacres of Jews were indeed the norm. The history of Christianity and Islam is filled with slaughters of defenseless Jews. In the 11th century, Crusaders slaughtered Jewish communities in Europe by the thousands on their way to the land of Israel. The army of Mohammed massacre the Jewish community of Khaybar in 628 CE, a massacre still celebrated today with the chant ‘Khaybar Khaybar ya yahud’ at anti-Israel rallies around the world. In 1066, 5,000 Jews were massacred in Granada, Spain by Muslim mobs. Thousands more Jews were massacred in Fez, Morocco in 1465. Jews were massacred in Safed, a holy city in Israel in 1517 and 1834.
By the late 1800s, government-sponsored pogroms were a normal part of life in Russia-controlled areas of eastern Europe. Meanwhile, massacres of Jews still occurred in Israel and Arab lands, the worst of which were the Hebron massacre of 1929 and the Nazi-inspired Farhoud in Baghdad in 1941. And of course, there was the worst massacre of them all, the crime that was so horrible it led to the creation of the word ‘genocide,’ the Holocaust.
All of this only begins to scratch the surface of the massacres the Jewish people were subjected to regardless of who ruled over them during their 2,000-year exile. A full list of every massacre committed against the Jews would require far too much space.
It is to these bad old days that Mohammed el-Kurd, Francesca Albanese, those 34 Harvard student groups, and all pro-Hamas protestors who actually know what they are protesting about want to return. The creation of the State of Israel de-normalized the massacre of Jews by finally allowing the Jews to defend themselves and no longer be dependent on the whims of their rulers for their safety and survival. The creation of the State of Israel de-normalized the massacre of Jews by forcing those who attempt to destroy the Jews to pay a price for their evil actions.
In seeking to normalize October 7, they seek to normalize the Khaybar of 628, to normalize the Granada of 1066, the Fez of 1465, the Kishinev of 1903, the Hebron of 1929, the Baghdad of 1941, and of course, the Auschwitz of the 1940s.
Unfortunately for el-Kurd, Albanese, and their ilk, the Jewish people are not as powerless as they had been for the previous 2,000 years. Their evil goals are much harder to achieve than they were before there was an IDF. What was normal against a defenseless people is not normal against a people with an army and the will to live.
Hamas must be destroyed so that October 7 is never normalized. The ambitions of Israel’s enemies must be defeated so that massacres of Jews are never normalized again. We will not go quietly into the night. We will survive and we will thrive, no matter how much our existence offends those who would see us dead. And no one will be allowed to get away with slaughtering Jews ever again.
That is the new normal of the world in which Israel exists.
