The Hindu’s fortnightly magazine ‘Frontline’ has now officially taken a stand justifying and whitewashing the atrocities committed by Hamas against Israel’s civilian population on the 7th of October 2023. In an ‘editors note’ published on the 30th of October, FrontLine essentially responded to why it refuses to condemn Islamic terror outfit Hamas. This ‘Frontline’ perhaps felt the need to justify its support to terror after the Israeli Ambassador to India had written a scathing open letter to The Hindu for interviewing Mousa Abu Marzouk – a Hamas official.

The Editor of Frontline, Vaishna Roy, took to X to share the despicable note that she penned in the magazine.

Editor’s Note: "When one hears Israeli leaders use the word “Nazi” to describe their enemies and accuse Palestinian supporters of being anti-Semitic, one sees the deep psychological displacement at play." @frontline_india https://t.co/tj5XXdgX1X

— Vaishna Roy (@vaishnaroy) October 31, 2023

The note by Roy essentially starts by insinuating that the Jews, who were the victims of the Holocaust, have now morphed into the perpetrators of the same atrocities against other people – Palestinians.

Roy writes, “When one hears Israeli leaders repeatedly use the word “Nazi” to describe their enemies, repeatedly accuse Palestinian supporters of being anti-Semitic, repeatedly claim that their powerhouse of a nation is the victim, one sees the deep psychological displacement at play. The Zionists have taken their generational rage and turned it not against the powerful West, whose arms and support they need, but against the hapless people on whose lands they have settled”.

At the very outset, Roy sets the base to justify the terrorism that claimed the lives of women, children and the elderly on the 7th of October 2023 when Hamas, for over 8 hours, went on a rampage of unbridled violence against the Israeli civilian population. Not only does she equate the victims – the Jews – to the perpetrators of their genocide – the Nazis, but also insinuates that anti-semitism is a figment of their imagination – a sentiment of absolute hate the world has seen play out during various “protest marches” by Muslims, chanting for the annihilation of Jews.

The crafty insinuation which was far more telling was her snicker at the fact that a “powerhouse of a nation” can ever claim to be the victim. Essentially what Roy was saying is that because Israel is financially and militarily far superior to several nations across the world, it can never claim itself to be the victim of terrorism. Perhaps it would help Roy to understand how terrorism works. Powerful nations with economic and military might win wars owing to that power, however, wars like the one Israel is fighting are generally ‘after the fact’. Terrorist groups and terror nations don’t particularly stick to rules of engagement, international conventions and military ethics. They are human bombs whose sole aim is to inflict damage, for the sake of their vengeful God. What makes them far more dangerous is that death in the process of fighting these “powerful nations”, which are viewed to be the enemies of their fanatic religious campaign, is in itself a reward by their God. When a “powerful nation” is faced with religious mercenaries for whom death itself is a religious reward by God himself, and the worst atrocities against innocent people a not only a tool to achieve that reward but also ordained by their scripture, the “powerful nation” and their people are the victims – notwithstanding their economic or military might.

Essentially, the asymmetrical battle is between an all-powerful nation and an all-powerful, vengeful God – a claim by Roy’s mythical ‘victims’ themselves. The ‘all-powerful nation’ is bound by the rules of a civilised nation. Those who fight for an ‘all-powerful God’ adhere to no rules of the civilised world. They adhere to the rules set by their all-powerful God – a God which allows them, nay, ordains them, to murder those who don’t believe in him in the most brutal way known to man. A modern powerful nation is no match to those who believe in a medieval religious war. They never were. They never will be. Europe, which prided itself on being the birthplace of modernity and at one point ruled the entire world is learning this lesson bit by bit – the lessons are brutal, bloody and excruciating – a pain that, according to the ‘faithfuls’, they are destined to endure. Vaishna Roy wants Israelis to die with a smile on their face because they are rich, being murdered by those perceived to be poor – that is not how the world works – except in a communist’s deranged head.

Roy in her note counts the dead bodies and compares those lost by Israel and Palestine. She writes, “Yom Kippur, 1973, saw 2,700 Israeli deaths and 19,000 Arab/Palestinian deaths. In the First Lebanon War, the numbers were 1,200 and 20,000. First Intifada: 179 and 1,200; Second Intifada: 900 and 3,300. The four Gaza Wars: 144 Israeli deaths and 4,800 Palestinian deaths. As this goes to press, the corresponding numbers for the ongoing war are 1,400 and 7,300, respectively. Hamas has stones, homemade rockets, tractors, and motorcycles. Israel has the world’s most sophisticated weapons. Israel is a nuclear nation while the Palestinians barely have a nation. Wasn’t it Voltaire who said killing is a crime unless you “kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets”?”

What Roy writes here summarily exposes how she has, summarily, decided to be an ally of Islamic Jihad. The Yom Kippur War, for example, was a surprise attack by the Arab-Egypt coalition. It is also known as the Ramadan war because the ‘faithfuls’ believe it is their religious duty to fight and kill the infidels and that holy war, becomes a bit sweeter if the death and destruction are caused on the non-believer’s religious observance day. That Israel was simply better at mounting an offensive, causing more casualties to those who started the war, does not take away from the fact that they were the ones who were attacked. What is far more telling is that Roy even counts the deaths during the Intifadas. The Intifadas were, again, religious wars where the riots and violence were initiated by the Jihadis and sustained by them as well. During the first four years of the Intifada, more than 3,600 Molotov cocktail attacks, 100 hand grenade attacks and 600 assaults with guns or explosives were reported by the Israel Defense Forces. The violence was directed at soldiers and civilians alike. During this period, 16 Israeli civilians and 11 soldiers were killed by Palestinians in the territories; more than 1,400 Israeli civilians and 1,700 Israeli soldiers were injured. Approximately 1,100 Palestinians were killed in clashes with Israeli troops.

There was instigation from the mosques of Palestine to kill Jews, justification for the genocide of their people and everything that we see the world over when the innocent faithfuls decide to rise against the infidels. After the unbridled violence by Jihadis, Israel defended itself. That defence in itself becomes a reason for Roy to dismiss assertions of the Jews being the victims of Jihad.

Vaishna Roy’s shameless apologia for Jihad becomes painfully obvious as she concludes her note. She writes the following:

“We are being harangued to condemn Hamas, but Hamas was not begotten in a vacuum. It was born from the bloody union of broken promises and daily humiliations, settler violence and soldier atrocities. Hamas was midwifed when basic humanitarian values were aborted. When UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said exactly this, pointing to the “56 years of suffocating occupation” the Palestinian people have suffered, Israel called for his resignation”, she says.

Before we dissect what she has written, let us recap how this war started – what happened on the 7th of October 2023.

On the 7th, Israel woke up to her worst nightmare. As the sirens blared and citizens of Israel looked for shelter, a couple of thousand Islamic terrorists from Hamas attacked the bewildered civilians from air, sea and land. As thousands of rockets and missiles rained down on Israel leaving in its wake destruction and a trail of dead bodies strewn on the streets, hundreds of terrorists on motorbikes, on foot and followed by tractors breached the fence separating Israel from Gaza. Simultaneously, terrorists also attached the beaches of Israel riding on motorbikes, overwhelming the unsuspecting Israeli soldiers. As the embers and smoke engulfed Israel, some of the Islamic terrorists descended on paragliders. 

After descending on Israel, the terrorists went city to city, village to village and kibbutz to kibbutz hunting down women, children and men alike. The visuals from the assault could perhaps be classified as traumatising, but worlds fall short when the Jihadi barbarity is laid threadbare, captured in images of charred bodies, burnt babies, raped and dishonoured women, and bloodied and murdered men. Several Jews were taken hostage by the terrorists as they cried and screamed for help, amidst the chants of Allahu Akbar, they were beaten, spat on, dishonoured and kidnapped – carried at the back of their trucks to Gaza. 

The wound of seeing babies bloodied and murdered is one that Israel and the Jewish community would perhaps never be able to heal from. From babies who slept peacefully in their cribs to partygoers dancing their worries away, where 260 of them were slaughtered, the Muslim terrorists spared none. There are painful eyewitness accounts of women being raped, dismembered, burnt alive and tortured, There are testimonies of babies, and toddlers being burnt alive, dismembered, shot and killed. There are testimonies and documented evidence of the brutality that Hamas inflicted. Beheadings. Rapes. Murders. Tortures. Kidnappings and worse – amidst chants of Allahu Akbar.

After the terror attack by Hamas, Israel decided to defend itself and unleashed its military might to ensure Hamas – a terrorist organisation – is wiped out. Israel was defending its citizens and also attempting to recover the hundreds of hostages that Hamas had taken. What is pertinent to remember here that Hamas knew this was a war they would not win. They knew that their treacherous attack would lead to Israel using its military might to ensure the hostages were freed and also, that Hamas was wiped off the face of the earth. They still chose to attack Israeli citizens because that is the zealotry that Holy Wars inspire among the followers of the all-powerful God.

Vaishna Roy essentially says that the Jews are Nazis because they chose to retaliate after women, children, babies and the elderly were tortured by Islamic terrorists. In the same breath, she also says that her magazine will simply not condemn Hamas because their action is a result of oppression.

The reduction of that is simple – Hamas has a right to rape, torture, and behead civilians because they have supposedly been oppressed. They should not be condemned, rather, their barbarity must be understood in context. The language of the victims, so to speak. However, when those being raped, tortured and beheaded decide to say “thus far and no further”, they automatically become Nazis deserving annihilation because any form of retaliation against the Jihadis is “collective punishment” which further victimises the very Jihadis who raped, tortured and beheaded to avenge the oppression that the rapists and murderers experienced, leading them to rape, behead and torture innocent civilians.

Further, it is evident that Roy is not particlarly concerned about the lives of Palestinians. If she were, she would, ideally be, a voice against Hamas. Hamas is no friend of the Palestinians. They use Palestinians as human shields, especially children, make hundreds of kilometers of tunnels were civilians are not allowed to take shelter, use aid money to buy weapons and deprive the Palestinians of a normal life. Even if we choose to ignore that Palestinians themselves overwhelmingly support Hamas, if Roy was so concerned, she should be picking her pen up to fight against Hamas, not be their ally.

This may seem like intellectual masturbation at best and harakiri at worst, however, it is far more sinister than one imagines – sinister beyond just the context of Israel and Palestine. The overarching and blanket classification of all Muslims as the perennially oppressed endorses their delusion that owing to this mythical oppression, they are allowed to carry out their blood lust for those who refuse to believe in their all-powerful God. Every atrocity, every act of violence, every beheading, every rape, every riot, every stone thrown, every molotov cocktail hurled, every woman stripped, every baby killed, every innocent tortured, every person dismembered is the “language of the oppressed” and therefore, is not only pardonable but even understandable, or worse, acceptable. This delusion of Hamas collaborators like Vaishna Roy puts every Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Christian, Parsi, Sikh etc at the risk of an impending genocide. This delusion of Jihadi collaborators like Vaishna Roy will ensure that when the next genocide happens, it is contextualised and supported in the name of vengeance for those who used the blanket victimhood handed over to them by these very Jihadi collaborators as a convenient excuse for their Holy War.