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On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas killers slaughtered 1,200 people, more than two-thirds of them civilians, inside Israel. For the ensuing three weeks, they refused Israel's demands to turn over the 251 hostages and to surrender the architects of the massacre. No matter -- within a day of the attacks, when Hamas gunmen were still fighting Israeli troops on Israeli soil, the American Left was already screaming "Genocide!"
What was most surreal about the charges of "genocide" against Israel was that they so often came from elite first- and second-generation Middle Eastern immigrants to America. Yet these prominent American accusers have remained silent about whether their lurid accusations might far better reflect the sordid histories of their own homelands.
Take the Turkish-American anchor baby Hasan Piker, the millionaire podcaster who has dual citizenship and grew up in Turkey. Piker has gained celebrity as the socialist heartthrob who is the brain of the new Democratic/Socialist/Islamist alliance. Besides his antisemitic rants, he has declared that "America deserved 9/11" and "Oh God, I f-ing hate America so much."
Yet the outspoken Piker has only once in passing mentioned Turkey's 1974 invasion and the half-century-long occupation of nearly 40% of Cyprus.
Nor did Piker, who damns the creation of Israel in 1948, ever say a word about the Turkish torching of the historic Greek-majority Ionian city of Smyrna in 1922, in which tens of thousands of civilians were incinerated.
Representative Ilhan Omar, a first-generation immigrant from Somalia, also brays loudly about supposed Israeli war crimes. Omar spouts "genocide" and "apartheid" in her frequently antisemitic rants. She has also labeled her adopted nation as "one of the worst countries" in the world.
But Omar is the daughter of a well-known colonel in the truly genocidal army of Somali dictator Siad Barre. The latter waged a decadelong war of extermination against the rival Isaaq clan that opposed Barre's 21-year-long dictatorship.
Zohran Mamdani, mayor of New York City, employs the same tired anti-Israeli and anti-American verbiage. Yet he went further than other antisemites when he launched grandstanding threats to jail Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu any time the latter visited New York to address the United Nations.
In short, we should remind these privileged ingrates -- regardless of what corner of the world they hail from -- to look inward before they blast their adopted country and not to project the sins of their own homelands upon either Israel or America.