In 2003, the Israeli Air Force carried out an important mission: a coordinated F-15 flyover above Auschwitz as an Israeli memorial service was being conducted on the ground. What became known as “Eagles Over Auschwitz” was the ultimate statement of “never again.” As Brig. Gen. Amir Eshel said in a flight broadcast:
“We pilots of the Israeli Air Force, flying in the skies above the camp of horrors, arose from the ashes of the millions of victims and shoulder their silent cries, salute their courage, and promise to be the shield of the Jewish people and its nation, Israel.”
The IDF is the army of a nation-state, yes. But it is much more than that—and not just symbolically. The terror masters eliminated by Israeli soldiers hunt Jews all over the world, who are thereby made safer by the existence of the IDF. And this doesn’t even include the rescue flights, airlifts, and other heroic tasks of the army of the Jewish state, which carries the heavy burden of Jewish continuity.
The world knows this, too. Diane Abbott, for example, knows this. The British MP made a slight slip of the tongue in a tweet yesterday, in which she sought to portray Jews as scheming child-murderers. Abbott reposted a tweet that accused the IDF of “entic[ing] children like mice, into a trap, and murder[ing] them for sport,” and added her own message: “Beyond horrific that the Jewish Defence Force is gunning down Palestinians as they queue for food.”
Now, it can be hard to decide what to correct first. The quote she reposted is old, so it has nothing to do with Israel’s post-Oct. 7 counteroffensive. But of course the IDF isn’t gunning down anyone “as they queue for food.” It’s what we might call a compound blood libel: It takes a classic libel—Jews entice children to their deaths—and stamps it on a particularly vicious lie about a current conflict.
But much of the reaction understandably focuses on the fact that Abbott had confused a key plank of anti-Semitic propaganda: You are supposed to swap out the word “Jew” in favor of the word “Israel” or “Zionist.” Abbott got it twisted: she said what she—and everybody else who shares her worldview—believes.
It’s the classic Kinsley Gaffe, when a politician accidentally says something true.
As MP David Taylor told the Jewish Chronicle, “This isn’t a slip of the tongue, it’s a slip of the mask.”
Abbott’s brief moment of honesty came on the heels of the Glastonbury Festival’s own anti-Semitism controversy. As I wrote on Sunday, the music festival was turned into a blood rally as an artist led attendees in the chant of “Death, death to the IDF.” This call for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews was broadcast on the BBC, which may have led to countless viewers wondering if they’d accidentally switched the channel to Al Jazeera.
The tweet Abbott reposted was almost surely in the ghoulish spirit of the defense of “death to the IDF.” This sort of thing is supposed to be left to the Twitter trolls, not the MPs. No doubt many a Labour parliamentarian has since reminded Abbott that she isn’t supposed to say stuff like this out loud. Use your inside voice, Diane!
It will not surprise you to be reminded that Abbott was elevated to shadow home secretary during the years of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party leadership. A couple of years ago, Abbott attracted unwanted attention to the party by writing a letter to the Observer claiming that Jews don’t face racism. “It is true that many types of white people with points of difference, such as redheads, can experience this prejudice. But they are not all their lives subject to racism,” wrote Abbot the supergenius. She added, for good measure, that “at the height of slavery, there were no white-seeming people manacled on the slave ships.”
Goodness, what an embarrassment to Britain this lady is. But she does not stand alone—Diane Abbott simply has less of a filter than much of her party. It’s refreshing, in a way. And it saves some of us time and energy that we don’t have to waste on explaining why people pretend to believe that “death to the IDF” is anything but a call for the mass killing of the Jews.
