Good riddance to Craig Mokhiber!
And shame on Cori Bush!
These two craven individuals have revealed themselves as contemptible Hamas apologists.
Mokhiber, the New York director of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, resigned on October 31 in protest over the current Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip. In his self-serving letter of resignation, he condemned Israel’s military campaign against Hamas as “a text-book case of genocide.”
Bush, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives and a leading light in the Democratic Party’s progressive wing, accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing” in its offensive against Hamas.
Mokhiber and Bush are two peas in a pod.
They tacitly justify Hamas’ mass murder of 1,400 Israelis and foreigners on October 7. They align themselves with a murderous organization whose national charter reeks of antisemitism. They deny Israel’s fundamental right of self-defence, which is costing Israel dearly in terms of lives lost.
To misguided people like Mokhiber and Bush, Israel should lay down its arms and abide by an immediate ceasefire, which would hand Hamas a victory on a silver platter.
They have obviously forgotten, or never knew, that countries have a right, an obligation and a duty to respond to aggression.
The past is a useful guide. Britain and France declared war on Nazi Germany after its invasion of Poland. The United States invaded Afghanistan after Al Qaeda terrorists attacked the homeland on September 11, 2001.
Only Israel has no right to defend itself after the monstrous events of October 7, as far as these two questionable characters are concerned.
In his letter/rant to his boss, Volker Turk, Mokhiber speciously condemned Israel’s justifiable military response to Hamas’ massacre as the “wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian people.” He also claimed that Israel’s reaction was “rooted in an ethno- nationalist settler colonial ideology. ” Continuing in this rank vein, he glibly branded it as “a text-book case of genocide.”
Beyond these outright lies, he airily dismissed Israel as a “European, ethno-nationalist, settler colonial project in Palestine” which, he wrote, is intent on expediting the “destruction of the last remnants of indigenous Palestinian life in Palestine.”
And in another sickening remark, he called for a one-state solution, which amounts to Israel’s disappearance as a sovereign nation.
Mokhiber’s accusation that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza is a text-book case of deceitful misinformation.
Under the United Nations’ Genocide Convention, genocide is defined as the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. This definition was coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish lawyer, as the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Poland reached its horrifying crescendo. In accordance with its genocidal ideology, Nazi Germany was bent on exterminating the Jews of Poland and the rest of Europe. Every last Jew had to be murdered on an industrial scale to fulfill Adolf Hitler’s genocidal fantasy.
Much to his discredit, Mokhiber ignorantly twisted and distorted this definition of genocide to suit his own partisan political and ideological ends.
Israel, in this war foisted upon it by Hamas, is not targeting the Palestinians per se. Even right-wing Israeli nationalists in the West Bank seek a form of coexistence with the Palestinians. And Israel’s 1.1 million Palestinian Arab citizens live in peace and equality, though admittedly they have been the victims of unjust policies.
To be sure, Israel’s enemy is Hamas, a Palestinian organization dedicated to Israel’s destruction and opposed to a two-state solution. Lest it be forgotten, Israel urged Palestinians to leave northern Gaza, giving them advance warning that it would become a bloody battleground. Some of them listened and fled southward. Still others, to their detriment, remained there.
From the very start of its miserable existence, Hamas has endangered the lives of Palestinians by embedding itself among Palestinian civilians, whom it mercilessly regards as convenient human shields. Hamas has established its bases and weapons caches in civilian neighborhoods and, more specifically, in schools and mosques and beneath hospitals.
This is a deliberate tactic, designed to turn regional and international public opinion against Israel when it attacks Hamas. This is an undeniable fact that Mokhiber cannot grasp or refuses to understand.
The reason is clear. Like Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran, he rejects Israel’s very existence and seeks a binational state in place of Israel. Interviewed on CNN yesterday, he had the effrontery to say that a one state solution would be Israel’s “salvation.”
Mokhiber cannot be taken seriously. His arguments fall flat when exposed to scrutiny.
Bush, in a post on the social media platform X a few days ago, charged that “millions of people with nowhere to go” are “being slaughtered” by Israel. And she added, “We can’t be silent about Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign … The U.S. must stop funding these atrocities against Palestinians.”
Israel most definitely is not engaged in ethnic cleansing, but rather in an existential struggle of self-preservation in the face of Hamas atrocities aided and abetted by Islamic Jihad, Iran and Hezbollah.
Hamas started this war, knowing full well what Israel’s ferocious reaction would be. It was under no illusions that innocent Palestinians would die needlessly in the crossfire. Yet the tragic deaths of thousands of Palestinian civilians is of no concern to this death cult.
Bush, who is hardly an objective observer, fails to understand these realities as well.
Although she deigned to condemn Hamas’ “appalling attack” on October 7, her crocodile tears are worthless. What really counts is that she and her pro-Palestinian colleagues, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign, whose ultimate objective is Israel’s dismantlement as a Jewish state. And they erroneously think that Israel is an “apartheid” state, which is patently untrue.
Israel is a flawed state, like all other states, and its last government, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was hardly one of which Jews could be proud. Yet Israel is still one of the only democracies in the Middle East, a region rife with authoritarian regimes and dictatorships.
This is of no importance to myopics like Mokhiber and Bush. They despise Israel and want it dead. They are doing the bidding of Hamas and its despicable allies.
Israel can safely ignored their false and useless critiques. As a war in the Middle East rages yet again, Israel has more important matters on its plate.