What the hell is going on?

The International Committee of the Red Cross' new director-general, “12.3 million children” have died in Gaza, the word “terrorist” is now a “racial slur,” and more.

Joshua Hoffman

Apr 07, 2024

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Editor’s Note: “What the hell is going on?” is a weekly series in which we bring you the most bizarre, outlandish, and surreal developments from around the Jewish world during the past week.

At a major church in New York, “pro-Palestinian” demonstrators disrupted a religious service by standing up in front of the crowd and holding a sign that said “Silence Equals Death” — yet another reminder that those who express support for Hamas show blatant disregard for both religion and Western civilization.

In other news, Supreme Leader of the Afghan Taliban Hibatullah Akhundzada just announced that Afghanistan will start stoning women to death for adultery in accordance with Sharia law.

But we do not see such “humanitarian” demonstrators bringing our attention to these other atrocities — just for “Palestine.” Seems like a head-scratcher.

A U.S. senator used the Easter holiday to encourage people to “ponder Netanyahu’s indiscriminate bombing of Gaza, which has killed more than 20,000 women and children, and his restriction of humanitarian aid, which has pushed Palestinians to the brink of famine.”1

As one social media user commented, “I say this as a liberal Democrat who probably agrees with you on 99 percent of policy: Why the f*** would you use this framing, on Easter, which is saddled with centuries of blood libel against Jews, to make this argument?”2

A London police officer was unwilling to intervene against people carrying Nazi symbols at an anti-Israel protest in London last week. He said “it depends on the context whether they are illegal or not.”

Where have we heard that before?

Meanwhile, Harvard University student Abdullah Akl publicly called for Hamas to bomb Tel Aviv and murder Jews. Harvard literally has terrorists on their campus.

Is that “context” enough?

Pierre Krähenbühl, the former head of the ridiculously corrupted, terrorist-aiding and -abetting United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), was just named director-general of the International Committee of the Red Cross, the organization’s second-highest-ranking position.

This is the same Pierre Krähenbühl who was forced to step down in 2019 from his position at UNRWA after allegations of mismanagement. Al Jazeera of all “media outlets” reported that an internal UNRWA report detailed alleged abuses of authority among the organization’s senior management, including Krähenbühl, and said that he and other UNRWA leaders pose “an enormous risk to the reputation of the UN.”

What a great hire for the International Committee of the Red Cross, especially after it has done such profound humanitarian work during this Israel-Hamas war, like visiting the abductees in Gaza zero times.

The UN’s top official for the coordination of humanitarian aid in Gaza said the killing of seven staffers from a charity group helping to ease conditions in the strip “is not an isolated incident.”

“At least 196 humanitarians had been killed” in Gaza from October 2023 until March 2024, according to Jamie McGoldrick. “This is nearly three times the death toll recorded in any single conflict in a year.”

What McGoldrick forget to mention is that many UN organizations in Gaza, such as UNRWA, negligently and complicity employ Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists. In other words, the UN pays their bills while these terrorists conspire to try and kill as many Israelis and Jews as possible, hence the horrific October 7th terror attacks and the 250 people kidnapped back to Gaza.

Just when we thought the UN could not sink any lower, they are now trying to lecture us on how terrorists are humanitarians.

Some 600 British lawyers have signed a letter to the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister, denouncing Israel for “breaking international law” and “potentially committing genocide.”

“Not only have they parroted the falsehoods and distortions with which Israel is being demonized and delegitimized across the world,” wrote British journalist Melanie Phillips. “They have also shockingly misrepresented January’s ruling by the International Court of Justice in the case brought against Israel by South Africa.”

These “lawyers” wrote that the International Court of Justice “concluded that there was a plausible risk of genocide in Gaza” — which is a patented lie. The court said nothing of this kind.

“It seems that the letter’s signatories have reproduced that falsehood without even referring to the text of what the International Court of Justice actually said that was accurately reproduced within their own letter,” added Phillips. “This suggests not merely a startling degree of sloppiness. The signatories also seem to have assumed that what they read in the media was correct. And that suggests in turn a mindset which assumes that whatever the ‘progressive’ world says must be true.”

What is troubling, though, is that these signatories are not just a few extreme leftist “usual suspects.” They include some of Britain’s most distinguished legal figures.

At the same time, “progressives” in America are wondering out loud if U.S. President Joe Biden “can be held criminally liable” for the “ongoing genocide in Gaza.”

As one of Israel’s spokespeople replied: “No, unfortunately nobody can be held criminally liable for figments of your imagination.”

These are some of the same “progressives” who are trying to tell us that the word “terrorist” is now a “racial slur.”

Columbia University visiting scholar Tareq Baconi gave a “lecture” last week in which he stated that people are Islamophobic towards Hamas to position it alongside Al-Qaeda and ISIS — “which decontextualizes the movement.” He added that destroying Hamas is a genocidal call and Hamas coming to power in 2007 is a “fig leaf” for Israeli hostilities to enact the blockade.

Fact check: The Egyptians also “blockade” the Gaza Strip, yet Hamas’ charter makes no mention of Egypt. Instead, it states that Israel will exist until Islam obliterates it and calls for all-time jihad against the Jews.

“This is a safety event for the Jewish People,” said Baconi. “And that Jews, Israeli Jews, can’t feel safe while apartheid persists. And Hamas made that clear by the scale of its attack.”

Baconi also tried to recruit college kids to become activists for Hamas due to “solidarity” and “asymmetry,” adding: “The resistance that happens here (in the United States) is just as important. This becomes a front for liberation that’s just as important as what’s happening on the ground.”

What great education American students are getting.

In León, an ancient city in northwest Spain, locals poured into the streets to knock back glasses of wine-lemonade during “Holy Week” (in commemoration of Easter), an annual festivity that is punctuated with a cheerful cry: “Matar judíos,” or “Kill Jews.”

One fixture of these frenzied days is a Leonese cocktail made from red wine, lemons, cinnamon, and sugar, sometimes with oranges and figs. There it is called “limonada,” and virtually every bar in the city’s nightlife-packed medieval quarter is plastered with signs advertising their version. It is a local tradition to drink 33 “limonadas” during Holy Week, representing the age of Jesus when he was crucified.

It is also a centuries-old tradition for revelers seeking “limonadas” to say they are going out to “kill Jews.”

“It’s an expression here,” said Margarita Torres Sevilla, a professor of medieval history at the University of León. “For example, you tell me, ‘Have a drink with me? Okay, let’s go kill Jews.’ Another typical sentence of Holy Week is, ‘How many Jews have you killed? Three, four, five [limonadas]? Oh, you have killed a lot.’”3

L’chaim, I guess?

On August 29th, 2021, a U.S. drone fired a missile at a truck in Kabul, Afghanistan — killing an aid worker and nine other civilians, including seven children. It took the Pentagon weeks to admit it was a “tragic mistake” — and it was only one of many mistaken attacks on civilians that the U.S. has carried out in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere.

Indeed, many of these attacks happened while Joe Biden was either president or vice president. In May 2023, for instance, the Pentagon announced the killing of a senior Al-Qaeda official, but they actually killed a 56-year-old civilian. Civilians were killed in another airstrike in Iraq just this past February.

Hence why Biden’s overly bloated reaction to Israel’s mistaken airstrike on the aid workers in Gaza last week is so hypocritical. Wars are complex. There are a lot of people doing a lot of things and the communications are not always perfect. Mistakes are made by even the best armies. And the most professional armies in the world, with the most human rights values, sometimes kill civilians despite their best efforts to avoid it.

If Biden is so outraged at Israel’s mistakes, he should take personal responsibility for the U.S. killings of civilians to the extent that Israel does. As far as I can tell, he has not publicly apologized for a single killing of civilians by his armed forces, like Netanyahu did last week.

“Israel’s President, Prime Minister, and Defense Minister have all apologized for the mistaken killing of the World Central Kitchen workers,” wrote Aviva Klompas. “Who has apologized for the intentional slaughter of 1,200 people on October 7th? What about for abducting 250 civilians?”4

This does not mean that two wrongs make a right; Israel’s accidental airstrike last week should have never happened, and you can be certain that the mistakes which led to it are being deliberately reviewed and fixed. But the outrage that followed what happens in every war, by every Western power, is more than a little disingenuous.

As one social media user put it: “When Jews and Israelis do anything seen as bad, it’s viewed as 1,000 times worse than when anyone else does the same thing. When Israelis and Jews do anything good, it’s devalued 1,000 times less than when anyone else does the same.”5

Speaking of “a little disingenuous,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said last Thursday that Israel is on the verge of becoming indistinguishable from Hamas, the foreign terrorist organization responsible for murdering 1,200 people on October 7th, wounding thousands more, and kidnapping 250 people, including children, women, and the elderly.

Blinken himself said: “Israel is a democracy; Hamas, a terrorist organization” — and then, following this same logic, suggested that Israel’s military campaign against Hamas risks making the country “indistinguishable” from the terrorist organization — even though Israel has taken unprecedented steps to minimize civilian casualties, including warning civilians to evacuate areas where Israel would conduct military operations.

Blinken also said that there is “no higher priority in Gaza than protecting civilians, surging humanitarian assistance, and ensuring the security of those who provide it” — while six American citizens are still being held kidnapped in Gaza.

As one social media user commented: “Biden administration: Israel must provide three hot meals per day plus snacks and dessert to the people who just raped and murdered their children.”6

And then there was the media tour that José Andrés did (presumably to fundraise, because everything is political and cynical) after aid workers from his World Central Kitchen were accidentally and tragically killed by Israeli forces early last week.

“You cannot win this war,” wrote Andrés, “by starving an entire population.”7

As journalist Matthew Continetti said in response to Andrés’ words: “The accusation is grotesque. And stupid. If ‘starving an entire population’ were Israel’s policy, what was World Central Kitchen doing in Gaza in the first place?”8

And it would not have been a ridiculous week without a plethora of fake news, such as this AI-generated photo of “Palestinian victims” in Gaza:

Then there was Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Andrzej Szejna, who said during a press conference that the accidental World Central Kitchen airstrike “has no precedent in the history of the civilized world.”

As one social media user commented: “I don’t know what history books he has read.”9

And then there was another antisemitic appearance by the president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who said in a speech that “12.3 million children” have died in Gaza since the beginning of this war. To be sure: The combined population of Israel and Gaza is 11 million.