Мелани Филлипс: мировая интеллигенция системно дезинформирует общественность о войне Израиля

Melanie Phillips, a British journalist, broadcaster and author, writes a weekly column for JNS. Currently a columnist for The Times of London, her new book, Fighting the Hate: A Handbook for Jews Under Siege, has just been published by Wicked Son. Her previous book, The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West and Why Only They Can Save It, was published in 2025. Access her work at: melaniephillips.substack.com. (JNS) One of the most pernicious effects of the Soviet system of mind control was what’s called today “gaslighting," the belief that you are guilty of the insanely preposterous things of which you are being accused but of which you are in fact innocent. In the Soviet-style war of defamation that’s been waged against Israel ever since the Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, the Jewish people have been relentlessly gaslighted. Israel has been systematically demonized with falsehoods that are patently ludicrous. But the fact that this has been perpetrated across the board by the intelligentsia, mainstream media and global institutions purporting to represent justice, law and human rights has caused many Jews to ask themselves: “Is it possible that the entire world is wrong, and we alone, the Jews, are right?" To which the answer is “yes," and currently, this is being proved. 1. The claim that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza-the mind-bending accusation that’s powered this whole obscene onslaught and which now trips off the tongues of countless numbers of people who clearly have absolutely no idea what the word even means-has now fallen apart. It’s been totally disproved by statistics produced by Gaza’s own Hamas-led institutions. These record that, in a population of about 2 million, around 74,000 deaths were caused by the war (failing implausibly to note one single terrorist among that number). Yet during this period, they also record that some 121,000 babies have been born. Since genocide means the intended destruction of a people in whole or in part, the fact that Gaza’s people produced a net gain for humanity of nearly 50,000 souls during this period of Israeli bombardment-not to mention Israel’s facilitation of repeated polio vaccinations to around 600,000 Gazan children-demonstrates that the genocide claim was ridiculous. 2. The related libel that Israel was starving Gaza and causing imminent famine has also been shown to be totally untrue. A newly released U.N.-led nutrition survey of Gaza’s children has found that acute malnutrition, which ranged from 0.2% to 0.8%, was lower than it was before the war when the rate stood at 0.8%. It was also well below the acute malnutrition rates reported in nearby countries such as Egypt (2.9%) or Jordan (2.0%). 3. Then there were the repeated claims that Israel was killing Gazan health workers and journalists. Yet over the past few weeks, more and more of these have been shown to have been combatants. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad have named and celebrated as “martyrs" dozens of “healthcare workers" whom they have identified as military commanders and terrorist operatives who used hospitals as command centers. Far from selflessly treating the sick and injured under bombardment, these “healthcare workers" were using them as cannon fodder while duping the credulous West. As for the “journalists" who were killed, far from bringing truth to the world, many of these were delivering lies designed to sanitize their true aim of exterminating Israel and murdering Jews. Bit by bit, Western organizations purporting to speak on behalf of media operatives have been revealed as hopelessly complicit in this. Last month, The Washington Free Beacon reported that between June 21 and July 9, the world’s largest advocacy group for reporters, the International Federation of Journalists, had quietly removed eight terrorists from its widely cited list of journalists killed in Gaza. In June, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists announced that it would be conducting an audit of its own database, because terrorist organizations had been publishing obituaries exposing individuals on that database as their operatives. The CPC has already removed eight names because of their involvement in hostilities, and seven more for not meeting the definition of a journalist. The media monitoring group HonestReporting says Reporters Without Borders “stealth edited" at least two Hamas and PIJ terrorists from its own database of Gaza “journalists" killed by the Israel Defense Forces. Yet Reporters Without Borders has filed complaints to the International Criminal Court alleging that Israel was responsible for the murder of a number of “journalists" subsequently shown to have terrorist connections, including one of the two whose names it has now withdrawn from its database. HonestReporting says that almost 27% of the 67 “journalists" who remain listed on its database as having been killed in Gaza had terrorism ties. None of this-not the collapse of the genocide and starvation libels, nor the remorseless revelations of health workers and journalists’ terrorist affiliations-has been acknowledged by the United Nations, NGOs or mainstream Western media outlets that transmitted these libels and poisoned the West against Israel and the Jews. Words matter. They shape the way people see and react to the world. Even now, they’re continuing to promote the same lies as if they are unchallengeable truths. The reason isn’t just that their reputations would be shredded and their organizations discredited if they admitted how they had misled the public. It’s that they are wholly committed to that process of misleading. That’s because the nightmarish fact is that the extermination of Israel is now equated with conscience itself. The lies can’t be acknowledged because they are driven by the incontrovertible if insane belief that Israel is a unique force for evil in the world. Exposure of these lies can therefore be safely ignored as the product of Zionist partisans. “Zionists" has become a synonym for Jews, both as a way of sanitizing Jew-hatred and because of the belief that all Jews must be assumed to support Israel. Since Zionism is framed as racist, destructive and positively demonic, all Jews are now held to be positively demonic. The result is Jews across Europe and elsewhere in the West being abused, insulted, screamed at, spat at, threatened with murder and physically attacked. This gaslighting on steroids has produced an alarming response among some American Jews. Instead of fighting back, they are deliberately avoiding any reference to Zionism. A poll taken last February by the Jewish Federations of North America found that only 37% of American Jews describe themselves as Zionists, even though 88% said Israel had the right to exist as a Jewish, democratic state. The study said respondents were either unclear about what Zionism was or else they thought it implied blanket support for Israeli government policies and actions with which they disagreed. Some badly gaslighted American Jews are now even saying that the words “Zionism" and “Zionists" should no longer be used. The existence of Israel, they say, means these terms are outdated; and since they’re now associated with racism and killing, they should be junked. This is a catastrophically wrong conclusion. Words matter. They shape the way people see the world. When the United Nations passed its infamous 1995 resolution declaring “Zionism is racism," it lit the fires of Jew-hatred across the world. Language has been hijacked to turn words into weapons to destroy Israel and the Jews. Zionism has been cast as an evil doctrine to detach Israel from Judaism. But the land of Israel is an essential part of Judaism. That’s why anti-Zionism is an existential attack on Judaism itself. “Genocide" is another word that’s been hijacked as a weapon for Israel’s destruction. To deal with the patent absurdity of describing as a “genocide" Israel’s totally justified war of self-defense, in which it has gone to unprecedented lengths to avoid killing civilians as far as possible, Israel’s foes have changed the meaning of the word. According to them, genocide now means merely killing any Palestinian Arabs, or-even more imbecilically-just destroying Gaza’s buildings. Jews should absolutely not be aiding the intended dismemberment of Judaism by helping remove “Zionism" from the lexicon and from the world. Jews should be asserting that the land of Israel is inseparable from Judaism, that the Palestinian Arabs are ethnic cleansers and that Zionism was the greatest anti-colonialist liberation movement of the 20th century. The proper response to a malevolent narrative of lies is not to shuffle away for cover. It is to get up off your knees and fight back with pride.