Avi Benlolo: António Guterres blames the victims of Hamas's massacre

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In 1996, Daniel Goldhagen published a seminal book that changed the Holocaust narrative. In “Hitler’s Willing Executioners,” Goldhagen showed that the vast majority of the German public supported Hitler’s determined effort to commit genocide against the Jewish people because they were motivated by a unique and virulent form of “eliminationist antisemitism” that had been ingrained in German identity for centuries.

Antisemitism, in other words, empowered ordinary people to believe that Jews deserved to be eliminated from the face of the earth.

The view that 1,400 Israelis deserved to be murdered by Hamas is not dissimilar. Having been indoctrinated with large doses of antisemitism since childhood, Hamas terrorists brutally murdered Jewish men and women, babies and children, the infirm and the elderly. Their barbarism mirrored the heinous genocidal crimes committed by the Nazis.

Despite these crimes, the Jewish people have been re-victimized by those who have attempted to justify this mass murder. In ancient times, pogroms and crusades against Jews blamed the Jews themselves. After all, we were supposedly responsible for things like deicide, the black plague and a global conspiracy to control the world. We deserved all the pain and suffering that befell us. That’s antisemitism.

In light of this history, it was disturbing to hear United Nations Secretary General António Guterres tell the world in front of the Security Council this week that Jews were essentially responsible for Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre. “It is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum,” he declared.

Caught red-handed, the following day, Guterres refused to apologize, instead saying, “I am shocked by misrepresentations by some of my statement yesterday in the Security Council — as if I was justifying acts of terror by Hamas.” Yet that is exactly what he appeared to be doing, given that, in the same breath, he said that, “The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.”

This is equivalent to telling the Rwandan Tutsis that they were responsible for their own murders. It’s like telling the girls that Boko Haram kidnapped and raped that it was their fault. It’s akin to telling Ukrainians that they invited the Russian slaughter.

Guterres is not antisemitic. He has denounced antisemitism vigorously in the past. Yet somehow, perhaps because of the prevailing bias against Israel at the UN, he adopted the rhetoric espoused by Hamas apologists, blaming Israel for the massacre inflicted on its citizens.

His comments seemed out of character to me, given his past support for the Jewish people, but it demonstrates how easy it is to succumb to the concerted PR campaign Hamas supporters launched even before the bodies of the dead Israelis had grown cold.

Guterres would have appeared like a statesman had he used the opportunity to scold the Palestinians for not accepting the UN’s 1947 partition plan and for consistently scuttling opportunities for peace. He could have held the Palestinians accountable for creating and supporting Hamas. He could have castigated them for decades of incessant terrorist attacks against Israelis and relentless incitement against Jews.

Guterres could have used the moment to critique the UN for maintaining the status quo by ensuring Palestinians remain as perpetual refugees. He could have criticized the antisemitic indoctrination of Palestinian students in UN-run schools.

After being blamed by the United Nations for the murder of innocents, Israel has rightly stopped issuing visas to UN officials and called for Guterres’s resignation. Like the instantaneous false blame Israel received over the bombing of the hospital in Gaza, it’s too late to walk this back. This kind of sentiment seeps into the public consciousness immediately and invites antisemitism and more incitement against Israel.

Words are weapons and they are used today, as they were used by the Nazis and those who came before them, to invite hate against the Jewish people. This must stop.

National Post