Shimon Levit

I couldn’t make this up if I tried. Only in a deeply confused world can two billion Muslims be portrayed as an oppressed minority while 16 million Jews are painted as the aggressors. Only in a deeply confused world can a Jewish state smaller than New Jersey, surrounded by dozens of Muslim-majority countries, be labeled a colonial power. Only in a deeply confused world can Jews be told they don’t belong in the countries where they live, only to be called colonizers in the land from which they originated. Only in a deeply confused world can Jews be accused of controlling the world while simultaneously being told they have no right to control their own destiny. Only in a deeply confused world can the Jewish people’s desire for national self-determination be condemned by people who champion that very right for everyone else. Only in a deeply confused world can a growing population be labeled the victim of genocide. Only in a deeply confused world can an army that warns civilians of impending attacks be accused of indiscriminate killing. Only in a deeply confused world can a country that has facilitated the delivery of massive quantities of humanitarian aid be accused of deliberately starving the civilians receiving that aid. Only in a deeply confused world can a Jewish state where all three major religions enjoy legal protections for freedom of worship, and where roughly two million Arabs hold citizenship, be branded an apartheid state. Only in a deeply confused world can people who claim to champion liberal values openly support a religion that violently persecutes people for exercising those very freedoms. Only in a deeply confused world can people who champion LGBTQ rights march in support of people who throw LGBTQ individuals off rooftops. Only in a deeply confused world can people who claim to defend women’s rights excuse or dismiss sexual violence committed against Jewish women. Only in a deeply confused world can the deliberate kidnapping of children and elderly civilians be described as resistance rather than terrorism. Only in a deeply confused world can people demand a ceasefire while refusing to demand the disarmament of the terrorist organization that started the war. Only in a deeply confused world can people deny atrocities that the perpetrators themselves filmed and broadcast for the world to witness. Only in a deeply confused world can one of history’s most thoroughly documented genocides, the Holocaust, be denied while its survivors still walk among us. Only in a deeply confused world can attacking a synagogue thousands of miles from Israel be justified as resistance against Israeli government policy. Only in a deeply confused world can Jewish students be harassed, threatened, and intimidated on university campuses by people who claim to stand against hatred and discrimination. Only in a deeply confused world can countries welcome millions of migrants, witness serious failures of integration and rising extremism at the hands of those migrants, and still refuse to acknowledge the problem for fear of appearing intolerant. Only in a deeply confused world can millions chant about a river and a sea they couldn’t identify on a map. Only in a deeply confused world can acknowledging the dominant role of Islamist extremism in global terrorism be dismissed as racism. Only in a deeply confused world can millions chant slogans calling for the elimination of Israel while claiming to stand for peace and coexistence. Only in a deeply confused world can people demand accountability from a democracy while making excuses for a terrorist organization openly committed to its destruction. Only in a deeply confused world can people condemn Israel for defending its borders while celebrating those who openly call for its destruction. Only in a deeply confused world can the suffering of civilians become a global obsession when Israel is involved while atrocities elsewhere receive a fraction of the attention. Only in a deeply confused world can people demonize an entire nation while benefiting every day from technologies developed by its people. Only in a deeply confused world can the world’s oldest hatred be repackaged as a modern social justice movement and celebrated as progress. Only in a deeply confused world can tens of thousands of terrorist attacks be accompanied by the chant of Allahu Akbar while the world pretends there is no pattern and it’s all just random attacks. Only in a deeply confused world can millions stand in solidarity with a state that never existed. Only in a deeply confused world can millions of people believe Palestine exists without the ability to say when it was established, where its borders are, who the prime minister was, what the currency is, or any other identifying factor that literally every country in the world has. Only in a deeply confused world can so many people believe that all the Palestinians want is a state when literally every single leader of theirs has said that what they want is dead Jews. Only in a deeply confused world can people claim that Jews have no history in a land where archaeological evidence has proven beyond any shadow of a doubt that Jews lived thousands of years ago. Only in a deeply confused world can the United Nations pass more resolutions condemning Israel than all other countries combined. Only in a deeply confused world can nearly a million Jews expelled from Arab and Muslim countries after 1948 be largely forgotten, while Palestinian refugees remain permanently politicized. Perhaps the world isn’t just confused. Perhaps it has lost its moral compass. Just because so many people have lost their minds doesn’t mean you have to fall into their trap. You were given a brain. Use it.