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‘Eichmann With a Kippah’? The Immorality Behind the Genocide Libel
Students accusing Israel of genocide at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, Nov. 16, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Brian Snyder
For the past few weeks, I’ve been regularly receiving hate messages calling me “Eichmann with a kippah.” The phrase appears in angry screeds from anonymous accounts — often by people apparently pretending to be Jewish women “ashamed” of me for defending Israel. The script never changes: Israel is Nazi Germany, Zionists are fascists, and the IDF is committing “genocide.”
The vocabulary may sound new. The hatred is not. This moral inversion — turning descendants of refugees and survivors of pogroms and genocides into the heirs of their murderers — is one of antisemitism’s oldest tricks, refitted for modern politics.
The “Genocide” Libel Long Predates Oct. 7
The claim that Israel is committing “genocide” didn’t arise after Oct. 7, 2023. Nor did it begin during the Gaza wars of 2008 or 2014. It’s decades old — part of a propaganda campaign that long preceded the current war.
Within hours of Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre, and before Israel fired a single retaliatory shot, protesters from London to Los Angeles were already chanting “genocide.” The accusation was preloaded, not provoked — waiting to be forced into whatever followed.
Its roots trace back to the 1970s, when Soviet and Arab League propaganda began branding Israel “the new Nazis.” State-controlled media in Moscow, Cairo, and Damascus weaponized Holocaust imagery against the Jewish State, reframing Jewish survival as Jewish supremacy.
By the 1980s, “Zionist genocide” was a standard slogan — even as the Palestinian population in Gaza and Judea and Samaria grew faster than almost any on Earth.
The population growth numbers alone should have ended the claim. But this was never about demography or evidence. It was about demonology — portraying Jewish sovereignty itself as a moral offense.
Why “Israel = Nazis” Is Antisemitic
The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism explicitly lists “drawing comparisons between contemporary Israeli policy and that of the Nazis” as antisemitic. That’s not censorship — it’s moral lucidity.
Equating Israel with Nazi Germany desecrates Jewish memory while denying Jewish self-defense. It turns the Holocaust into a political weapon, stripping Jews of moral legitimacy and redefining their sovereignty and survival as crimes.
That’s why these comparisons surge whenever Israel fights back. They aren’t moral critiques but psychological projections — attempts to turn collective Jewish self-defense into the personification of evil.
The “Appeal to Authority” Fallacy
When challenged, those spreading the “genocide” libel typically resort to what Aristotle first called the appeal to authority fallacy. They list various academics and NGOs — the International Association of Genocide Scholars, UN commissions, and other self-declared arbiters — as if citation equals truth.
None of these are credible judicial bodies. Many are activist-driven and politically biased. The UN Human Rights Council has condemned Israel more than all other nations combined, including Iran, China, and North Korea. Even the highly politicized International Court of Justice has made no finding of genocide — only procedural rulings allowing South Africa’s case to proceed.
And even those arguments collapse under scrutiny. Before Oct. 7, the “genocide” claim was absurd: Israel had withdrawn from Gaza in 2005, leaving it under Palestinian rule, even as Gaza’s population doubled.
After Oct. 7, the same activists rebranded Hamas’ war — launched with barbaric mass murder and hostage-taking — as “Israeli genocide.” They ignored the central element of genocide: intent.
Israel’s actions show the opposite intent — an intent to avoid civilian casualties. It issues evacuation warnings, opens humanitarian corridors, coordinates aid deliveries, and risks soldiers’ lives in ground operations to spare noncombatants. No nation in history accused of genocide has ever done those things.
The Ethical Reality
If genocide requires intent to destroy a people, Hamas and its patron, Iran, fit that definition far better than Israel ever could.
Hamas’ charter calls for the extermination of Jews everywhere. Its leaders boasted that Oct. 7 was “only the beginning” and vowed to “repeat it again and again.”
Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, has long declared that Israel must be “wiped off the map” while arming Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis — all sworn to Israel’s annihilation.
In Gaza, Hamas hides in hospitals and schools, fires rockets from residential areas, and turns its own civilians into human shields. It even has uniforms for parades but not for combat — deliberately fighting in civilian clothes to endanger its own population. Hamas has built more than 700 kilometers of tunnels, not to protect civilians, but to shelter its commanders and stockpile weapons. When Gazans try to flee to Israeli-designated safe zones, Hamas often blocks or attacks them to increase civilian death tolls.
This is not a liberation movement. It is a fascist death cult that thrives on civilian suffering. Every Palestinian death becomes Hamas propaganda.
Israel, by contrast, spends billions on defense — bomb shelters, Iron Dome, and precision weaponry — yet is condemned as genocidal for refusing to surrender to the openly genocidal forces Iran has armed and financed around it.
If the genocide label were applied honestly, it would have been used for Syria, where over half a million non-Alawites were slaughtered, or in Yemen, Sudan, and Ethiopia, where famine and ethnic killings reach truly genocidal levels. But the same NGOs and academics most vocal about “Israel’s genocide” are largely silent in the face of those atrocities. Their outrage isn’t proportional to suffering — it’s proportional to Jewish sovereignty.
The Psychological Comfort of the Lie
The “genocide” accusation persists because it serves two needs.
First, it comforts those who crave moral simplicity. Admitting that Hamas and Iran are fascist aggressors would mean acknowledging that evil exists outside the West — and that Jews are its target once again.
Second, it soothes those who resent Israel’s existence — who hate that Jews took “Never Again” seriously and built a thriving democratic state to ensure it. The libel restores the moral hierarchy they prefer: Jews as either evil or as victims, but never as defenders.
Calling Israel “Nazi-like” lets these moral poseurs feel righteous without learning anything. It turns ignorance into empathy and hashtags into heroism.
The Continuity of Antisemitic Tropes
From “Christ-killers” to “baby-killers,” from “poisoners of wells” to “genocide perpetrators,” the accusation never truly changes — only the vocabulary does.
Now a new smear circulates alongside “genocide”: “denier.” Anyone who defends Israel or questions Hamas’ death tolls is labeled a “genocide denier,” as if doubting Hamas propaganda were equivalent to denying the Holocaust. This isn’t moral reasoning. It’s moral sadism.
What we’re witnessing isn’t a policy debate but a war over moral reality. One side believes Jewish sovereignty and self-defense are rights; the other believes their crimes.
The Hatred That Never Dies
Those accusing Israel of “genocide” aren’t defending human rights. They’re heirs to a long tradition of antisemitic inversion — from medieval blood libels to Soviet propaganda — now repackaged as “justice.”
It should go without saying: Israel is not Nazi Germany. It is the living refutation of Nazi Germany — a pluralistic democracy where Jews, Muslims, Christians, and Druze, men and women alike, share full civil rights, and whose army does more to prevent civilian casualties than any military in history.
The “genocide” libel says less about Israel than about those who need to believe it. Because to accept the truth — that Jewish self-defense and sovereignty are not crimes — would mean confronting an ancient hatred they can’t let go of.
And that hatred, history shows, never dies. It just changes its vocabulary.
Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, antisemitism, and Jewish history and serves on the board of Herut North America.
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21 Arab, Islamic, African States and Entities Condemn Israel’s Recognition of Somaliland
The signatories’ flags enclosed in the statement in Arabic. Photo: Screenshot via i24.
i24 News – A group of 21 Arab, Islamic and African countries, organizations and entities issued on Saturday a joint statement condemning Israel’s recognition of Somaliland sovereignty.
The statement’s signatories said that they condemn and reject Israel’s recognition of Somaliland “in light of the serious repercussions to peace and security in the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea region, and its serious impacts on international peace and security, which also reflects Israel’s clear and complete disregard for international law.”
It was signed by: Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Qatar, Jordan, Algeria, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Libya, Palestine, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Comoros, Djibouti, Gambia, Maldives, Nigeria and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).
The joint statement voiced support “for the sovereignty of Somalia and reject any measures that would undermine its unity, territorial integrity, and sovereignty over all its lands.”
The signatories also “categorically reject linking Israel’s recognition of the territory of the land of Somalia with any plans to displace the Palestinian people outside their land.”
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Nvidia, Joining Big Tech Deal Spree, to License Groq Technology, Hire Executives
A NVIDIA logo appears in this illustration taken Aug. 25, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration
Nvidia has agreed to license chip technology from startup Groq and hire away its CEO, a veteran of Alphabet’s Google, Groq said in a blog post on Wednesday.
The deal follows a familiar pattern in recent years where the world’s biggest technology firms pay large sums in deals with promising startups to take their technology and talent but stop short of formally acquiring the target.
Groq specializes in what is known as inference, where artificial intelligence models that have already been trained respond to requests from users. While Nvidia dominates the market for training AI models, it faces much more competition in inference, where traditional rivals such as Advanced Micro Devices have aimed to challenge it as well as startups such as Groq and Cerebras Systems.
Nvidia has agreed to a “non-exclusive” license to Groq’s technology, Groq said. It said its founder Jonathan Ross, who helped Google start its AI chip program, as well as Groq President Sunny Madra and other members of its engineering team, will join Nvidia.
A person close to Nvidia confirmed the licensing agreement.
Groq did not disclose financial details of the deal. CNBC reported that Nvidia had agreed to acquire Groq for $20 billion in cash, but neither Nvidia nor Groq commented on the report. Groq said in its blog post that it will continue to operate as an independent company with Simon Edwards as CEO and that its cloud business will continue operating.
In similar recent deals, Microsoft’s top AI executive came through a $650 million deal with a startup that was billed as a licensing fee, and Meta spent $15 billion to hire Scale AI’s CEO without acquiring the entire firm. Amazon hired away founders from Adept AI, and Nvidia did a similar deal this year. The deals have faced scrutiny by regulators, though none has yet been unwound.
“Antitrust would seem to be the primary risk here, though structuring the deal as a non-exclusive license may keep the fiction of competition alive (even as Groq’s leadership and, we would presume, technical talent move over to Nvidia),” Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon wrote in a note to clients on Wednesday after Groq’s announcement. And Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s “relationship with the Trump administration appears among the strongest of the key US tech companies.”
Groq more than doubled its valuation to $6.9 billion from $2.8 billion in August last year, following a $750 million funding round in September.
Groq is one of a number of upstarts that do not use external high-bandwidth memory chips, freeing them from the memory crunch affecting the global chip industry. The approach, which uses a form of on-chip memory called SRAM, helps speed up interactions with chatbots and other AI models but also limits the size of the model that can be served.
Groq’s primary rival in the approach is Cerebras Systems, which Reuters this month reported plans to go public as soon as next year. Groq and Cerebras have signed large deals in the Middle East.
Nvidia’s Huang spent much of his biggest keynote speech of 2025 arguing that Nvidia would be able to maintain its lead as AI markets shift from training to inference.
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Russian Drones, Missiles Pound Ukraine Ahead of Zelensky-Trump Meeting
Rescuers work at the site of the apartment building hit by a Russian drone during a Russian missile and drone strike, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, in Kyiv, Ukraine December 27, 2025. REUTERS/Viacheslav Ratynskyi
Russia attacked Kyiv and other parts of Ukraine with hundreds of missiles and drones on Saturday, ahead of what President Volodymyr Zelensky said would be a crucial meeting with US President Donald Trump to work out a plan to end nearly four years of war.
Zelensky cast the vast overnight attack, which he said involved about 500 drones and 40 missiles and which knocked out power and heat in parts of the capital, as Russia’s response to the ongoing peace efforts brokered by Washington.
The Ukrainian leader has said Sunday’s talks in Florida would focus on security guarantees and territorial control once fighting ends in Europe’s deadliest conflict since World War Two, started by Russia’s 2022 invasion of its smaller neighbor.
The attack continued throughout the morning, with a nearly 10-hour air raid alert for the capital. Authorities said two people were killed in Kyiv and the surrounding region, while at least 46 people were wounded, including two children.
“Today, Russia demonstrated how it responds to peaceful negotiations between Ukraine and the United States to end Russia’s war against Ukraine,” Zelensky told reporters.
In Russia, air defense forces shot down eight drones headed for Moscow, the city’s mayor Sergei Sobyanin said on Saturday.
THOUSANDS OF HOMES WITHOUT HEAT
Explosions echoed across Kyiv from the early hours on Saturday as Ukraine’s air defense units went into action. The air force said Russian drones were targeting the capital and regions in the northeast and south.
State grid operator Ukrenergo said energy facilities across Ukraine were struck, and emergency power cuts had been implemented across the capital.
DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private energy company, said the attack had left more than a million households in and around Kyiv without power, 750,000 of which remained disconnected by the afternoon.
Deputy Prime Minister Oleksiy Kuleba said over 40% of residential buildings in Kyiv were left without heat as temperatures hovered around 0 degrees Celsius (32 degrees Fahrenheit) on Saturday.
TERRITORIAL CONTROL: A DIPLOMATIC STUMBLING BLOCK
On the way to meeting Trump in Florida, Zelensky stopped in Canada’s Halifax to meet Prime Minister Mark Carney, after which they planned to hold a call with European leaders.
In a brief statement with Zelenskiy by his side, Carney noted that peace “requires a willing Russia.”
“The barbarism that we saw overnight — the attack on Kyiv — shows just how important it is that we stand with Ukraine in this difficult time,” he said, announcing 2.5 billion Canadian dollars ($1.83 billion) in additional economic aid to Ukraine.
Territory and the future of the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant remain the main diplomatic stumbling blocks, though Zelensky told journalists in Kyiv on Friday that a 20-point draft document – the cornerstone of a US push to clinch a peace deal – is 90% complete.
He said the shape of U.S. security guarantees was crucial, and these would depend on Trump, and “what he is ready to give, when he is ready to give it, and for how long.”
Zelensky told Axios earlier this week that the US had offered a 15-year deal on security guarantees, subject to renewal, but Kyiv wanted a longer agreement with legally binding provisions to guard against further Russian aggression.
Trump said the United States was the driving force behind the process.
“He doesn’t have anything until I approve it,” Trump told Politico. “So we’ll see what he’s got.”
Trump said he believed Sunday’s meeting would go well. He also said he expected to speak with Putin “soon, as much as I want.”
FATE OF DONETSK IS KEY
Moscow is demanding that Ukraine withdraw from a large, densely-urbanized chunk of the eastern region of Donetsk that Russian troops have failed to occupy in nearly four years of war. Kyiv wants the fighting halted at the current lines.
Russia has been grinding slowly forwards throughout 2025 at the cost of significant casualties on the drone-infested battlefield.
On Saturday, both sides issued conflicting claims about two frontline towns: Myrnohrad in the east and Huliaipole in the south. Moscow claimed to have captured both, while Kyiv said it had beaten back Russian assaults there.
Under a US compromise, a free economic zone would be set up if Ukrainian troops pull back from parts of the Donetsk region, though details have yet to be worked out.
Axios quoted Zelensky as saying that if he is not able to push the US to back Ukraine’s position on the land issue, he was willing to put the 20-point plan to a referendum – as long as Russia agrees to a 60-day ceasefire allowing Ukraine to prepare for and hold the vote.
On Saturday, Zelensky said it was not possible to have such a referendum while Russia was bombarding Ukrainian cities.
He also suggested that he would be ready for “dialogue” with the people of Ukraine if they disagreed with points of the plan.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said Kyiv’s version of the 20-point plan differed from what Russia had been discussing with the US, according to the Interfax-Russia news agency.
But he expressed optimism that matters had reached a “turning point” in the search for a settlement.
($1 = 1.3671 Canadian dollars)