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US journalist Chris Hedges speaks at Leinster House, criticizing Israel's Gaza assault and accusing the West of forfeiting democratic credibility.
US journalist Chris Hedges delivered a lecture at Leinster House in Dublin, condemning Israel's assault on Gaza as the start of a new world order rooted in technologically advanced barbarism. The event took place at the invitation of Sinn Féin TD Aengus Ó Snodaigh and drew TDs from multiple Irish political parties and members of the public. Hedges is in Ireland to promote his book Requiem for Gaza, co-authored with illustrator Joe Sacco. The Gaza health ministry reported on September 26th that 74,016 inhabitants have been killed.
Holocaust Studies and Moral Authority
Hedges argued that the destruction of Gaza has shattered the moral authority of Holocaust studies and memorials. He stated that these institutions have been exposed as vehicles not to prevent genocide but to perpetrate it, and not to explore the past but to manipulate the present. According to Hedges, the purpose of Holocaust studies should be to examine the dark side of human nature and the frightening propensity we all have to commit evil.
Instead, he said, most Holocaust scholars use it to sanctify Jews as eternal victims and absolve the ethnonationalist state of Israel of its crimes of settler colonialism, apartheid, and genocide. Israel has denied perpetrating genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, saying it was fighting Hamas militants and accusing the group of hiding behind civilians.
Western Complicity and Global Genocides
Hedges alluded to genocides committed by Belgium, Germany, the US, and the UK against indigenous populations, stating that genocide is not an anomaly but is coded in the DNA of western civilisation. Yet other holocausts are minimised or left unacknowledged, he said. The sacralisation of the Nazi Holocaust unites western powers and Israel in a tacit quid pro quo, according to Hedges.
He explained that arming and funding the state of Israel, blocking UN resolutions and sanctions that would condemn its crimes, and demonising Palestinians and their supporters becomes proof of atonement. Israel, in return, absolves the West of its indifference to the plight of Jews during the Holocaust, and Germany for perpetrating it, Hedges said.
Jewish academics in the US who have criticised Israel's exploitation of the Holocaust, including Norman Finkelstein and Raz Segal, respectively the son and grandson of Holocaust survivors, have seen their careers stunted, Hedges noted. He added that Israel is admired by the far right because it has turned its back on humanitarian law and uses indiscriminate lethal force to cleanse its society of those condemned as human contaminants.
October 7th and Far-Right Zionism
In Requiem for Gaza, Hedges writes that the Hamas atrocities of October 7th, 2023, which included the deaths of 1,195 Israelis, gave Israel the pretext for what it has long craved: cover to implement its own version of the Final Solution. October 7th, he said, marks the dividing line between the slow-motion ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and their wholesale extermination and removal from historical Palestine.
Hedges reported for seven years from Israel-Palestine for The New York Times. He maintains there is a genocidal impulse at the heart of the Zionist project, which he defines as the desire by large segments of Israeli society to eradicate and expel all Palestinians. He recalled the extremist rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the Kach Party, who was assassinated in New York in 1990, and Baruch Goldstein, a Brooklyn-born doctor and Kach member, who murdered 29 Muslim worshippers in a mosque in Hebron in 1994.
Kach's racial intolerance and calls for mass violence against Palestinians infected larger and larger segments of Israeli society, Hedges said, and it found near universal acceptance after the attacks of October 7th. Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu has spent his political career nurturing these Jewish extremists, including Itamar Ben-Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, Avigdor Lieberman, Gideon Sa'ar, and Naftali Bennett, according to Hedges. Ben-Gvir, Israel's minister of national security, hung a portrait of Goldstein in his living room.
The decision to obliterate Gaza has long been the dream of far-right Zionists, heirs of Kahane's movement, Hedges said. He noted that Israel has dropped more bombs on Gaza than were dropped on London, Dresden, and Hamburg combined during World War II. The atomic bomb that obliterated Hiroshima had a blast of 15 kilotons of TNT, while 75 kilotons have been dropped on Gaza, he added.
Hedges won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of al-Qaeda but resigned from The New York Times in 2003 after 15 years with the newspaper when it reprimanded him for opposing the US invasion of Iraq in a graduation commencement speech.
Chris Hedges Gaza Israel Leinster House Holocaust Studies Sinn Féin October 7Th
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