1/ I get the hesitations about describing the Israel-child-killer! narrative as a "blood libel"—a reprise of the medieval habit of fomenting antisemitism by claiming Jews murder Christian kids. That analogy, too, is imperfect, as @NickKristof put it.
But something's rotten here:
But something's rotten here:
2/ There's something rotten, ugly, and mendacious when someone describes Hamas—a group that has just killed children, and that certainly targets Jewish children—as merely "shelling Israel" in the same breath as he characterizes Israel as "killing children."
3/ Hamas, after all, is the group that used its most precise weapon—suicide bombers—to stand in crowds of Israeli children at pizza shops and dance clubs and detonate themselves. With clear intent, it attacks Jewish children.
4/ Yes, it's true, and absolutely tragic, that Palestinian children lost their lives in the recent fighting. War is ugly.
War kills children. Hamas murders children. Kristof slurs Israel.
War kills children. Hamas murders children. Kristof slurs Israel.
5/ So yes, I certainly do hear an echo of the blood libel when people like Kristof (and other, less-subtle Twitter warriors) point at Israel—not all the countries of the world that have had to go to war, and not even Hamas—and scream "child killer!"
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