Melanie Phillips
JNS, May 22, 2025
“The global humanitarian establishment, however, speaks with one voice to tell the world that Israel is wantonly killing children and causing the Gazans to starve.”
It was inevitable that the pre-pogrom climate created by the “globalize the intifada” mobs in the streets and on campus over the past 19 months would result in murder. On Wednesday night, this became a sickening reality when two young Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, D.C., were gunned down outside the Capital Jewish Museum by a man shouting, “I did it for Gaza!”
This is what “Free Palestine!” looks like.
The murderer pulled the trigger. But many others have the blood of these two innocents, who were reported to have soon become engaged, on their hands.
The university principals who have allowed hate mobs on campus to incite the murder of Jews and destruction of Israel, week in, week out; the politicians who have allowed the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and Iranian extremists to spread their influence throughout western civil society; the media and all those who relentlessly demonize Israel with blood libels and murderous lies, including the British, French and Canadian governments that this week threatened to punish Israel for defending itself—these all bear responsibility for what happened in Washington.
This week, another falsehood about Israel’s war in Gaza was added to the relentless incitement against the Jewish state. This one came from the U.N.’s emergency coordinator, Tom Fletcher, who told the BBC that “14,000 babies will die in 48 hours” from malnutrition.
A moment’s thought would suggest that such a synchronized mass mortality event was simply incredible.
The media, however, parroted it as valid. It duly spread like wildfire. Countless Israel-haters leapt upon it to validate their loathing. In a poisonous debate about Gaza in Britain’s House of Commons, members of parliament referred to it no fewer than 13 times.
It soon turned out, however, that it was indeed nonsense. As the BBC later clarified, Fletcher had misrepresented a claim made on May 12 by the U.N.’s IPC food classification system—a claim that was itself highly questionable—that an estimated 14,100 severe cases of acute malnutrition were expected to occur among Gazan children aged between 6 and 59 months from April 2025 to March 2026.… [To read the full article, click here]