After the horrific events of last year and the war that followed, Hamas was finally recognized as a genocidal terror organization – but only by some and only for a moment. The global community almost immediately cast Hamas in a conciliatory light by contextualizing its brutality as “resistance to occupation,” though Israel withdrew from Gaza nearly twenty years ago.

Many world leaders blamed the victim by (a) criticizing Israel for a blockade designed to prevent the flow of weapons and terrorist materiel (but not the importation of food, health supplies, or essential goods) and (b) falsely portraying Gaza as an “open-air prison” (if anyone prevented Gazans from leaving, it was Hamas and Egypt) in the “most densely populated” urban area in the world.

Though demonstrably wrong on all counts, such propaganda was reinforced through constant repetition by the mainstream media and progressive political establishment, including many prominent Democrats. Honesty and common sense were thrown out the window by progressives who effectively called for another Holocaust by chanting “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and perpetuating the correlative myths of Palestinian Arab indigeneity and Jewish colonialism – in a land where only Jews have a documented presence going back to antiquity.

Nevertheless, these and other odious canards were embraced as articles of faith by progressive politicians, leftist academics, identity community activists, and mainline liberal churches, who became standard bearers of the “new antisemitism,” which is merely a reworking of classical stereotypes and calumnies used to malign Jews through the ages.