by Bill Levinson
We make a mistake when we answer false accusations against Israel with politeness. When the United Nations, the International Criminal Court (more accurately, the International Kangaroo Court), and people like Francesca Albanese accuse Israel of genocide and human rights violations, or call for boycotts of the Jewish state, they are spreading blood libels, and we should confront them head-on. People are entitled to their own opinions but not their own facts, and a false statement of fact is a lie. “Nice” does not work with people who spread lies.
The word “nice” comes from the Latin nescius, meaning “ignorant.” In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Benvolio tells the Prince of Verona, “Tybalt, here slain, whom Romeo’s hand did slay. Romeo, that spoke him fair, bid him bethink how nice the quarrel was, and urged withal your high displeasure.” Benvolio did not mean the quarrel was pleasant. He meant it was foolish, and we are just as foolish when we think good manners will answer Hamas supporters and antisemites. So how should we deal with them?
Antisemites, Blood Libelers, and Hamas Water-Carriers Must Be Denounced
Back in the good old days, any self-respecting member of the gentry would give a false accuser “the lie direct,” calling him a liar outright, with the understanding that a demand for satisfaction would follow. The Code Duello explains:
Rule 4. When the lie direct is the first offense, the aggressor must either beg pardon in express terms; exchange two shots previous to apology; or three shots followed up by explanation; or fire on till a severe hit be received by one party or the other.
Why would gentlemen risk their lives over insults and even minor physical assaults? Stephen Decatur, who fought the Barbary Pirates, and Alexander Hamilton, both died in duels, and Andrew Jackson took a serious wound in one. A member of the gentry was only as good as his or her reputation, which is why you did not accuse one of lying or cheating at cards. Nor, if you valued your life, did you call Rachel Jackson a bigamist. Even today, lying and cheating are grounds for expulsion from the U.S. Military Academy, because soldiers need to be able to trust one another.
Hamas and Its Water-Carriers Are Nithings
“Nithing” is, as far as I know, the most inherently offensive word in existence. The website The Bone Kindred explains, “A giant insult in Anglo-Saxon England would have been to call someone a ‘nithing.’ This word essentially means ‘vile coward,’ ‘villain,’ or ‘waste of space.’ It was often a title given to criminals, murdering scum, oath-breakers, those without honor and other lows of society.”
If somebody called you a nithing in Viking times, you had to challenge him to a holmgang, a duel that sometimes took place on a holm, or small island. Poul Anderson’s science fiction story Holmgang puts it plainly: “Two men would go off to a little island, a holm, to settle their differences; one would come back.” The only other acceptable response was to strike your accuser, which of course led to a holmgang anyway. A man who did neither faced ostracism and possibly outlawry (útlagi). Wikipedia quotes a 13th-century law that spells out how it worked:
If someone speaks insults to another man (“You’re not the like of a man, and not a man in your chest!” “I’m a man like you!”), they shall meet where three roads meet. If he who has spoken comes and not the insulted one, then he shall be as he’s been called: no right to swear oaths, no right to bear witness, may it concern man or woman.
If the insulted one comes and not he who has spoken, then he shall cry “Niðingr!” three times and make a mark in the ground, and he is worse who spoke what he dared not keep.
The law put a burden on both men. The accused had to answer the charge, and the accuser had to stand behind his words or lose his own place in society.
How We Must Handle Today’s Nithings
Criticism of Israel’s government is not antisemitic, just as criticism of the United States government is not anti-American. Calling for the destruction of Israel is something else entirely. It is support for terrorism, antisemitism, or both, and anyone who does it deserves to be denounced as a nithing.
Abraham Lincoln once came close to fighting a duel with cavalry broadswords, but physical violence outside a boxing ring is illegal and socially unacceptable today. Besides, a holmgang proved only who was better with a sword or axe, not who was right. Today we have courts of law and the court of public opinion, and that is where we should fight.
UN Watch Executive Director Hillel Neuer showed how. He gave UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese the lie direct when he called her “Hamas’s de facto spokesperson at the UN.” Albanese reacted the way a nithing does when someone exposes her: she accused Neuer of defamation. Neuer answered with the lawful, nonviolent equivalent of a holmgang challenge:
“Please sue me, Ms. Albanese. As you are a non-lawyer, let me explain: Truth is an absolute defense. I repeat: You are Hamas’s de facto spokesperson at the UN. I would love to put your record before a court. Of course, to sue me, you’d have to admit you know exactly who I am.”
Or, as Kurt Russell put it as Wyatt Earp in Tombstone, “Are you going to do something, or just stand there and bleed?” Neuer’s reply puts Albanese in the position of the accuser who “speaks what she dares not keep.”
I am not an attorney, but I will make a gentleman’s bet that Albanese will not sue. Litigation brings discovery, which could drag her emails and other correspondence into the open, along with the social media posts of her husband, Massimiliano Calì. UN Watch has already published some of Calì’s Facebook posts. Discovery is like turning over a rock, and the things crawling around underneath do not want to see the light of day.
Neuer also chose his words carefully. A statement does not have to be accurate in every detail to count as true in a defamation case; it only has to be substantially true. By calling Albanese Hamas’s “de facto” spokesperson, Neuer did not claim she takes orders from Hamas. He claimed she carries Hamas’s message, above all the false charge that Israel, rather than Hamas, is committing genocide. Her own public record makes that case for him.
The U.S. State Department agrees: “Albanese has spewed unabashed antisemitism, expressed support for terrorism, and open contempt for the United States, Israel, and the West. That bias has been apparent across the span of her career, including recommending that the ICC, without a legitimate basis, issue arrest warrants targeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.” The Anti-Defamation League has collected many more of her statements in her own words.
Shove England’s Face in Its Own Dirty History
The United Kingdom recently announced sanctions over what it calls illegal settlements in Judea and Samaria. Israel responded with measures of its own, and Florida Representative Randy Fine warned that companies taking part in anti-Israel sanctions could face consequences in Florida. As One Israel supports settlements in Judea and Samaria, I sent it a donation as an intentional, public act of contempt for the UK’s decision.
These are good starts, but somebody needs to go Wyatt Earp on John Bull. Israel and its supporters should remind the world that the conflict in the Holy Land, including the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, is one more mess the washed-up British Empire left behind on its way out, just as it did when it partitioned India and Pakistan.
During the First World War, Britain made promises to both sides. The 1917 Balfour Declaration pledged British support for a Jewish national home in Palestine at a time when Britain wanted Zionist backing for its war effort. Britain also promised the Arabs independence in return for their revolt against the Ottoman Empire, and it left the boundaries of that promise vague. Jews and Arabs both came away believing Britain had promised them the same land. Britain then ruled Palestine for nearly thirty years and walked away in 1948, leaving the two peoples to fight it out.
Israel should invite Jordan to join it in a case at the International Court of Justice demanding trillions of dollars in reparations from the UK. Israel would never collect a penny, but the case would humiliate the British in front of the entire world, and they have earned it.
Britain Put Civilians in Harm’s Way Long Before Hamas
Hamas hides weapons among civilians and then blames Israel when civilians die. Britain has its own history of mixing civilians with war materiel. When a German U-boat sank the British liner Lusitania in 1915, nearly 1,200 people died, 128 of them Americans. Nobody disputes that the Germans sank her. But the Lusitania was also carrying millions of rounds of rifle ammunition for the British war effort, and Germany had published warnings in American newspapers that ships in the war zone were liable to destruction. Britain knowingly sent paying passengers through a war zone on a ship loaded with munitions.
Britain also sent out Q-ships, warships disguised as harmless merchant vessels. U-boats often surfaced and let merchant crews abandon ship before sinking them, and Q-ships exploited that restraint, much as Hamas fighters exploit Israel’s restraint when they dress as civilians. Once German commanders learned that any merchant ship might be a disguised warship, they began attacking without warning, and genuine merchant sailors drowned as a result.
We Must Get in the Enemy’s Face
In Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 3, Lord Clifford says, “I will not bandy with thee word for word, but buckle with thee blows, twice two for one.” That is the spirit we need.
Hamas’s water-carriers get away with blood libeling Israel and making universities hostile for American Jews because we are too polite, too “nice” in the old sense of the word, to answer them. The antisemite and the Hamas apologist are brave enough when they play to a friendly mob and nobody pushes back. Once they realize somebody is coming to take them apart in the court of public opinion, armed with the facts, their own record, and the law, they make themselves scarce in short order.
Bill Levinson is the author of numerous articles and books on manufacturing, quality, and industrial productivity, and a diligent student of history and psychological warfare. He played a role in exposing antisemitic and other hate speech at MoveOn.org in 2006, and questionable activities by the original Million Mom March in 2000.
