OPINION:
A version of this story appeared in the Higher Ground newsletter from The Washington Times. Click here to receive Higher Ground delivered directly to your inbox each Sunday.
Falsehoods. Slander. Antisemitic antics. These are just a few descriptions of the absolutely depraved reactions to Hamas’ Oct. 7 terror attack on Israel — a surprise invasion in which militants slaughtered at least 1,400 innocent men, women and children.
Within moments of the ghastly event, anti-Israeli talking heads and activists were taking to their keyboards, the airwaves and the streets to support the Palestinians, blame Israel, and spew misinformation, hatred and downright vileness.
Meanwhile, the Israeli people were forced into emotional shock — and bomb shelters — as they struggled to grapple with the utter senselessness of it all.
Stories of rape, the barbaric killing of infants, and other actions so wicked they seemed more torn from fiction than rooted in reality shattered hearts and minds across the globe.
But Israel was somehow painted by its critics as the villain.
SEE ALSO: Harvard student groups blame Israel for attack by Hamas
The entire debacle was an expression of insanity but also a gut check — a reminder that the only solution to cancel culture, moral chaos and evil is to speak the truth on steroids. And when the lies intensify, we must speak it again more clearly and boldly. It’s the only antidote.
Nicole Zedeck, a reporter with i24News who broke the story about 40 children and infants slaughtered in Kfar Azza, a kibbutz near the Gaza border, told me she could barely put together the words to describe the horror.
“These are never words that I thought would come out of my mouth; they’re never words I thought I would hear,” Ms. Zedeck said. “Because these are acts I didn’t know were humanly capable — that someone was humanly capable of committing.”
Her reporting sparked worldwide headlines when she said emotional Israel Defense Forces members told her some of these babies had been beheaded. Some media outlets suddenly went into a bizarre speculative mode, questioning whether these slaughtered innocents were truly decapitated, as though the manner of their killing would somehow temper Hamas’ rampage.
Rather than retreat from her coverage amid questions of the report’s veracity, Ms. Zedeck spoke out clearly and boldly, turning the focus back to what mattered most: the loss of life.
“If later it comes out that these soldiers, what they witnessed — [that] they misspoke, and it turns out the baby’s head wasn’t cut off, it was shot off — this is a dismembered child we’re talking about,” she told me. “So the life is lost, and that’s what people need to focus on.”
Despite Hamas’ attack being otherworldly, inhumane and unworthy of any defense, these strange deflections and defenses plagued facets of the conversation. Another example surrounds Yoni Michanie, research and data manager for the Combat Antisemitism Movement and doctoral student at Northeastern University, who recently joined me on the “Higher Ground With Billy Hallowell” podcast to state the obvious.
“Hamas carries [a] Nazi-like ideology,” he said. “They’ve shown their willingness and determination to carry out a systematic extermination of Jews.”
And yet the reaction to this common sense proclamation shows us why sense isn’t always all that common. Mr. Michanie, who teaches at Northeastern University, is the subject of a Change.org petition created by “students” at the school — a treatise demanding he be investigated for his public statements about the latest war between Hamas and Israel.
Mr. Michanie has been accused of “targeting Palestinian students, Muslim students and other members of the community on campus, calling them Nazis, terrorists and inciting dangerous conflict on campus.”
One of his proclamations at the center of this angst was an Oct. 13 message on X in which he wrote: “We don’t make Nazis comfortable on campuses at the expense of those they victimize. Stop making Islamists comfortable on campus while they call for more Jewish babies to be decapitated and burned — it isn’t that hard to do.”
This comment, among others, led students to proclaim they “feel very unsafe knowing Northeastern is allowing a professor to continue to spread hate speech in our increasingly polarized learning environment.”
As for Mr. Michanie, he made it clear his campus comments were general, referring to Hamas, and have been taken out of context.
“What we’re talking about here is condemning the actions of a terrorist organization that … [is] similar in nature to ISIS and committed similar atrocities to those carried out by the Nazis,” he said. “And so the tweet that they decided to pull and quote in this petition is completely taken out of context, because when you look at the tweet, it … never referred to any member of the Northeastern student body.”
Mr. Michanie isn’t backing down amid the pushback and calls for an investigation. His plight, of course, has become all too common on our campuses.
Flashback to Harvard, which was also in the crosshairs after more than 30 student groups released a joint statement saying the “Israeli regime [is] entirely responsible” for the horror perpetuated by Hamas.
“Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum,” the letter read, in part. “For the last two decades, millions of Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to live in an open-air prison.”
And at the University of Pennsylvania, donors have been pulling out over inappropriate responses to the Hamas terror attack. The Washington Times’ Valerie Richardson noted a mixture of other troubling student and professorial proclamations around the country.
“Examples include praise for ‘our heroic resistance in Gaza’ by Ohio State University’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, a Cornell University professor saying he was ‘exhilarated’ by the Hamas attack and the University of North Carolina’s SJP chapter sanctioning ‘violence’ in the name of ‘liberation,’” she wrote.
The perpetuation of lies, evil and excuses for Hamas show the need for truth to permeate the chaos. There’s absolutely no justification for what unfolded this month in Israel — and any sane and rational person knows this to be true. Furthermore, the absolute madness surrounding it all implores us all to speak out in truth and offer moral clarity.
We need more people like Ms. Zedeck and Mr. Michanie who are willing to stand up to the mob to ensure sanity prevails and truth lives on in an era determined to squelch it.
• Billy Hallowell is a digital TV host and interviewer for Faithwire and CBN News and the co-host of CBN’s “Quick Start Podcast.” He is the author of four books.
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