Introduction: Right from the Beginning

The Editor of this newspaper has never shied away from taking unpopular positions that were certain to alienate a significant number of subscribers who had been duped by the official narratives of a government that lies to us all the time. I recall a massive loss of subscribers after the Remnant, in columns some of which I wrote, dared to question the mindless invocation of “Support Our Troops” in George Bush’s utterly insane, totally unjustified war against Iraq. As the Remnant predicted months before the invasion, there were no “weapons of mass destruction,” and once the invasion was underway the Remnant warned that Bush’s war would destroy Iraq, empower Shiite fundamentalism, bring on the persecution and exodus of its Christian population,  and destabilize the entire Middle East. As events inevitably confirmed everything the Remnant was saying, most of the alienated subscribers returned in what amounted to an implicit apology to the Editor.

The Remnant was right from the beginning on the Iraq War, just as it was right from the beginning regarding the hysteria over COVID, regarding which I also contributed articles. The Remnant called out from its inception the biggest public policy debacle in Western history: a pseudo-“pandemic,”  the criminal Democrat lockdowns of entire healthy populations—clearly a plot to ruin the Trump economy and provide the pretext for extra-legal authorization of tens of millions of inherently insecure mail-in ballots—the stupid, useless masks imposed as signs of obedience to the tyrants, and the fake vaccines that have done more harm than good, yet were forced into the arms of millions of Americans as an injectable loyalty oath to Democrat dictators, failing which one was literally barred from participation in civil society. 

While no publication has done more than the Remnant to warn about the threat militant Islam poses to the nations of former Christendom, which Islamic fundamentalists are invading at the invitation of the power-mad occupant of the Chair of Peter, when it comes to the Israel-Palestine conflict the demands of justice apply no less to the Palestinians than to the Christians in that region.

Next came the colossally stupid and massively tragic proxy war against Russia in Ukraine: another nation destroyed by warmongering fools in both political parties and the unelected foreign policy potentates whose pathological superbia rises to the level of the explicit declaration that “we create our own reality, We’re history’s actors, and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”  Here too the Remnant issued a defiant nay to the latest bipartisan case of war fever, which has resulted in the expenditure of scores of billions of unaudited U.S. dollars to prop up Zelensky’s military dictatorship and fund its bureaucrats’ pensions, while prolonging the catastrophic and transparently futile deaths of hundreds of thousands of young Ukrainian men who will never live see retirement.

Given its history of being right when our lying rulers were wrong, it was only to be expected that, no matter what the outcry from promoters of the official narrative, the Remnant would say what had to be said about events in Gaza since the brutal attack on innocent civilians by Hamas insurgents on October 7, 2023.  There is much more to the event than “Hamas committed atrocities. Israel must defend itself by any means it deems appropriate. No further discussion allowed.” And while no publication has done more than the Remnant to warn about the threat militant Islam poses to the nations of former Christendom, which Islamic fundamentalists are invading at the invitation of the power-mad occupant of the Chair of Peter, when it comes to the Israel-Palestine conflict the demands of justice apply no less to the Palestinians than to the Christians in that region. Moreover, American foreign policy towards Israel, including its endless support of the Israeli war machine, is accomplishing the same result it has accomplished everywhere else in the Middle East: fanning the flames of radical Islam and raising up new generations of the very enemies it purports to defeat.

Mullarkey’s Factual Vacuum

Enter Maureen Mullarkey and her hit piece entitled “The Descent of Michael Matt,” which accuses Matt of anti-Semitism according to usual dishonest conflation of opposition to Israel’s actions with Jew-hatred.   Now, I have long admired Mullarkey’s writing for its insight and stylistic brilliance, and I have told her so. But how disappointing it is to see Mullarkey’s descent to the rhetorical tricks of the character assassin rather than a sober analysis of the facts. Before we get to Mullarkey’s clearly malicious accusation of anti-Semitism, let’s consider the factual vacuum in which she levels the charge.

Not for Mullarkey is any grappling with the moral questions involved in the endless conflict between Israel and the Palestinians stemming from the wholly unjust partition plan of UN resolution 118 in1947, followed by the consequent mass expulsion of some 700,000 Palestinians from their land.

Not for Mullarkey is any grappling with the moral questions involved in the endless conflict between Israel and the Palestinians stemming from the wholly unjust partition plan of UN resolution 118 in1947, followed by the consequent mass expulsion of some 700,000 Palestinians from their land, the flight of refugees into Gaza—who have been denied any right of return—and the Six-Day War of 1967 in which Israel illegally occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem, including the Gaza Strip—i.e., the Occupied Territories, which are still occupied nearly sixty years later.

Mullarkey is not detained by such other details as the PLO’s willingness to accept Israel’s existence as a state in exchange for relinquishment of the Occupied Territories pursuant to UN Resolution 242, while Israel not only refuses to accept its terms but has seized even more land via illegal settlements in the West Bank and Golan Heights, with the settlers dispossessing still more Palestinians of their land and even killing them.  Mullarkey evidently has no concept of why there were two  uprisings of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories (the First and Second Intifidas), both brutally crushed by the Israeli military. Nor has she assessed the consequence of Israel’s installation of the Palestinian Authority—an arm of the PLO—as its proxy government in part of the West Bank.  

Also of no moment for Mullarkey are events following the election of Hamas as the governing party in Gaza in the election of 2006, promoted by the United States and Israel and pronounced fair by international observers, including Jimmy Carter.  Mullarkey seems unaware that Hamas rose to power with the assistance of both Israel and the idiots who oversee America’s blundering about in the Middle East, who saw Hamas as a counter to the PLO—yet another example of how America’s foreign policy  wizards create the very enemies against whom the next endless war is to be waged. To quote retired Israeli official Avner Cohen: “Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation.”  

Norman Finkelstein, whose parents are Holocaust survivors, explains that because the Palestinians elected the “wrong” party, Israel imposed a US-supported blockade of the Gaza Strip in violation of international law which continues to this day. It matters not to Mullarkey that an arid strip of land measuring 5 miles wide and 24 miles long has, for the past sixteen years, been walled or fenced off on one side and blockaded by land, sea and air, creating the world’s largest “open air prison", filled with the still-living original refugees and their descendants, who are all denied any right of return to their ancestral homeland—the same right Israelis, under the Law of Return (1950) have given to Jews and Gentile converts throughout the world whose ancestors have never even set foot in what is now the State of Israel.

And now the Israeli government demands that even parts of southern Gaza be evacuated. A de facto ethnic cleansing is underway, one of the most horrific examples ever seen of collective punishment in violation of international law and natural justice. 

As a University of London report explains, the veritable siege of Gaza since 2006  has resulted in a 45% unemployment rate, because Gazans can longer take employment outside the Gaza Strip; a consequent poverty rate of 60%; a ban on trade with the outside world, “forcing the population to be a captive market for Israeli goods”; and a substandard health care system with a degraded infrastructure that depends entirely on Israeli supplies and foreign donations.  All of this obtained before the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, for which Israel  has retaliated by killing 18,000 Palestinian civilians and rendering the whole of northern Gaza uninhabitable—a patent war crime, no matter what the provocation, that Mullarkey, as we shall see, ludicrously portrays as Israel’s “self-defense,” along with the other nodding heads of the blindly pro-Israel commentariat.

Finkelstein notes that the blockade has been accompanied by a series of massacres conducted by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), including Operation Cast Lead (2008), which killed 1200 Gazans, including 350 children, destroyed some 6,300 homes, and wrecked the Gazan infrastructure. This was followed by Operation Pillar of Defense (2012) and Operation Protective Edge (2014), which killed 2200 Gazans, of which 550 were children, and destroyed 18,000 homes. Finkelstein further notes that in the aftermath of Operation Protective Edge the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross attested that “never in his professional life had he ever witnessed the magnitude of destruction that he witnessed in Gaza.”

While innocents on both sides have died during these armed conflicts—again, all beginning with the partition of 1947 and the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their land—the death and injury toll on the Palestinian side is staggeringly disproportionate. Between 2008 and 2020, according to Statista, some 5600 Palestinians had been killed and 115,000 injured as compared with 250 Israeli deaths and 5,600 injuries.

Then came the events of October 7, 2023, with Hamas killing 1200 Israelis, including some 70 children.  That atrocity was, as usual, met with a vastly greater Israeli atrocity in retaliation:

• the indiscriminate bombardment of civilian populations in the northern Gaza Strip;
• the leveling of entire neighborhoods, including hospitals and schools;
• the destruction of at least 100,000 buildings;
• the aforesaid deaths of 18,000 Palestinian civilians to date, including some 7,000 children;
• the cutting off of all water, food and electricity to Gaza—a dramatic demonstration that the Gaza Strip is a prison and Israel is the prison warden;
• the reduction of northern Gaza to an uninhabitable wasteland littered with bomb craters;
•  the displacement of 1.9 million Palestinian refugees—85% of Gaza’s population—to southern Gaza.

Let the Palestinian journalist Yari Eid explain what Israel has done, not to Hamas, but to the civilian population in what was already a virtual prison camp:

I’ve lived through four aggressions in Gaza. I've seen people being killed in front of my eyes. But this aggression, this genocide, is something I’ve never ever imagined…. I’ve lost everything. I’ve lost family. I’ve lost my home. I’ve lost my city. I’ve lost my best friend. I’ve lost my boss. My mentor. I’ve lost 60 members of my family.

And now the Israeli government demands that even parts of southern Gaza be evacuated. A de facto ethnic cleansing is underway, one of the most horrific examples ever seen of collective punishment in violation of international law and natural justice. 

Mullarkey does not understand that the Israel-Palestine conflict is not simply a case of mindless Jew-hating by Hamas and their fellow Gazans but rather interminable asymmetrical warfare between vastly mismatched opponents, stemming from an original dispossession of Palestinians from their land, the creation of an Israeli nation-state by force, additional Israeli conquests of Arab territory in 1967, illegal West Bank and Golan Heights settlements since then, etc. 

A Fact-Free Hit Job

Mullarkey’s Fox News-level analysis of the Israel-Palestine conflict in her hit piece is the essence of thoughtless simplicity: Hamas was guilty of atrocities on October 7—which of course it was—while any criticism of Israel’s vastly graver atrocities, or indeed any criticism of its long series of brutalities against the Palestinians since 1947, is “anti-Semitism.” Only Hamas is guilty of war crimes, while Israel—no matter what it does—is only defending itself.  No questions allowed. Anyone who does question the official narrative is denounced as a “Jew-hater” and a “defender of Hamas” with any rational objections drowned out in the chorus of booing and hissing to which Mullarkey has now contributed.

Unfettered by the tedious and time-consuming task of  researching and discussing historical facts, or even by the recognition that there could be two sides to the Israel-Palestine story, with serious grievances on the Palestinian side, Mullarkey writes that Michael Matt “maims his credibility as a truthful observer of events” when, during his broadcast entitled “Cancelling Christ” a month ago, he departs from commentary on the state of the Church and “aims his sights on Israel.” With fact-free abandon Mullarkey—it’s sad, really—resorts to the cheapest trick of the demagogue: guilt by association.  “Suddenly the shtick darkens. Something fetid oozes up from below. Derision curdles into demagoguery in an eerie echo of Father Coughlin from the 1930s.”

An echo of Father Coughlin?  What echo?  The echo expediently detected only in Mullarkey’s imagination. Having contrived this echo, she can then argue, in essence, that Michael Matt, like Father Coughlin supposedly was—a different story for a different time—is a “zealous antisemite” who “replicates Coughlin’s template.” Here we actually have something even more underhanded than guilt by association: guilt by the echo of an association.  Worse, what we have here is guilt by association with a mixed metaphor: a fetid echo that oozes up from below.  Egad!

But nowhere in the few minutes Matt devotes to this subject is there even the faintest allusion to the polemic Father Coughlin advanced during the rise of Soviet Communism and his opposition to the socialist policies of F.D.R., much less a “replication” of his “template.”  Mullarkey has simply invented the linkage for dishonest rhetorical purposes.

Having launched the suggestion of anti-Semitism based on nothing but the “echo” she contrives, Mullarkey trods the well-worn path of all the other demagogues who hurl this accusation in order to silence legitimate objections to Israel’s actions.  Matt, she writes, “prefaces what he is about to say with a disclaimer that he is not—not—an antisemite. He simply has the guts to censure Israel even in the wake of October 7.” But, of course, once an echo of Father Coughlin has been detected, fetidly oozing up from below, it’s no use to deny that one is an anti-Semite.  Indeed, that very denial only proves the charge!  Likewise, while Matt “is careful not to use the term Zionist entity,” his very avoidance of the term proves that he is an anti-Semite à la Coughlin because, as everyone knows, only antisemites would oppose the Zionist political agenda.  In fact, the very word Zionist is an anti-Semitic dog whistle, is it not? Never mind that the fiercest critics of precisely Zionist aims in the Middle East since World War II have been Orthodox Jews.  As the Jewish Virtual Library explains:

Jews who criticize or oppose Zionism are usually [but hardly always!] Orthodox and maintain that Israel can only be regained miraculously. They view the present state as a blasphemous human attempt to usurp God’s role, and many actively work to dismantle the  secular State of Israel. However, unlike many gentile anti­-Zionists, Jewish anti-Zionists usually firmly believe in the Jewish right to the Land of Israel, but only at the future time of redemption. The best-known group of the Jewish religious anti-­Zionists are the Neturei Karta.

If she were interested in discovering facts as opposed to publishing calumnies, Mullarkey would know, as the Jewish Virtual Library further explains, that the current minority position of  Neturei Karta “was actually the position of the bulk of the Orthodox world… well up until the United Nations voted to partition Palestine on November 29, 1947,” and that  “Representatives of another Orthodox party, Agudat Israel, actually asked the General Assembly to vote against partition.”

For Mullarkey, as with all the other blind apologists for an Israeli nation-state created and maintained in existence by force, “self-defense” means killing 18,000 Gazan civilians, including women and thousands of children, destroying entire neighborhoods, and pushing 85% of Gaza’s population into the southern half of the narrow strip from which they are now also expected to depart. If that is “self-defense” then the term has lost its meaning.

So, it seems that if Mike Matt is “replicating” anyone’s “template”, it is that of the Orthodox Jewish minority of today, or the Orthodox Jewish majority prior to UN Resolution 118.  But according to Mullarkey, in Matt’s brief commentary “No disclaimer can muffle the echo of Coughlin’s antisemitic braying.” Maureen, please. You embarrass yourself with such clumsy rhetoric.

Continuing her impressionistic substitute for rational argument, Mullarkey avers that “the animus of the Arab Muslim pejorative infuses his [Matt’s] commentary.” So, as Mullarkey would have it, only Arab Muslim animus explains opposition to the actions of the Israeli state—not the reasoned opposition of many Orthodox Jews, or secular Jews like Norman Finkelstein, whose entire extended family beyond his surviving parents was exterminated by the Nazis. And what of the reasoned opposition of the 40% of Americans who think “Israel’s military response in the Gaza Strip has gone too far”? 

Mullarkey claims that Matt “turns history and politics upside down by advancing the delusion that the Gazans—‘these little Hamas guys’—were goaded into butchery and mass abduction.”  If Mullarkey were being honest about the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict, she would admit that, as with all interminable wars, one side is always goading the other into committing atrocities. The point Matt is making—surely Mullarkey knows this—is that both sides in this endless conflict are guilty of atrocities and that it is the height of moral dishonesty to pretend that Israel is blameless, particularly when the atrocities it has committed massively dwarf the toll exacted by the Palestinian side with its comparatively puny military capacity.  As Finkelstein has observed, both sides in the conflict are rightly subject to war crimes prosecution. But in terms of the sheer scale of death and destruction, whose war crimes are greater?  The question needs to be asked.  According to Mullarkey, anyone whose asks it is an anti-Semite.  Her polemic is really just that crude.

In classic demagogic style, Mullarkey zeroes in on Matt’s off-the-cuff choice of words in posing and answering his own question: “Why did these little Hamas guys do this? . . . It’s because they were desperate. I’m not defending Hamas. But I get why they’re triggered.”  Triggered, again, as both sides are in an endless war’s deadly gyre of atrocity-for-atrocity.  Feigning ignorance of any reasonable interpretation of Matt’s comments, Mullarkey writes: “He gets it! By offering a rationale, Matt does indeed defend Hamas. Gazans were in despair, you see. Zionist oppression triggered that pogrom of slaughter, rape, mutilation, beheadings, and burnings alive. How else could they counter Israel’s ‘land grab’?” 

Note first of all Mullarkey’s sneering dismissal of the entire history of the conflict with the phrase “land grab” in scare quotes—her fleeting dalliance with historical fact. Well, what about the land grab in 1947, and the displacement of 700,000 Palestinians, not a few of them Christians? What about the land grab during the Six-Day War? What about the 450,000 illegal Israeli settlers on the West Bank, the 220,000 in East Jerusalem, and the 25,000 in the Golan Heights? And what about the criminal blockade of the Gaza Strip, the only land left to the dispossessed and their descendants, under which no one can enter or leave without Israel’s permission and the very necessities of life can be cut off at Israel’s sole discretion?

In Mullarkey’s blinkered view, Hamas had no rationale—not even an immoral one—for the attack of October 7.  There was no provocation at all!  They just hate Jews, is all. True, Hamas committed unspeakable acts: “slaughter, rape, mutilation, beheadings, and burnings alive,” claiming 1200 victims. But is Israel to be excused for killing 15 times as many civilians, including thousands of children, and destroying all their neighborhoods in retaliation merely because it used jet-fighters, bombers, tanks and advanced armaments to commit mass murder rather than hang gliders, rifles and machetes?

No ceasefire! The wanton killing of civilians must continue until Israel is satisfied it has “defended itself against Hamas”—which of course will continue to exist, and for which support has only increased since Israel’s annihilation of northern Gaza. But that is American foreign policy in a nutshell: blundering interventions and the promotion of endless, catastrophic foreign wars that make every situation in the Middle East and elsewhere immeasurably worse.

It is impossible to believe that Mullarkey does not understand that the Israel-Palestine conflict is not simply a case of mindless Jew-hating by Hamas and their fellow Gazans but rather interminable asymmetrical warfare between vastly mismatched opponents, stemming from an original dispossession of Palestinians from their land,  the creation of an Israeli nation-state by force, additional Israeli conquests of Arab territory in 1967, illegal West Bank and Golan Heights settlements since then; and, over the past 16 years, the confinement of 2 million Palestinians to an open-air prison from which the only escape is a violent uprising.

Mullarkey repeats Matt’s phrase “These little Hamas guys” no fewer four times for maximum rhetorical effect, thus deceitfully suggesting that Matt is minimizing the atrocities they committed on October 7 when his point, obviously, is that they are “little guys” in terms of military capability compared to the US-funded and supplied military colossus that is Israel, which has the world’s fourth-largest army and a nuclear arsenal. Here it must be noted that the massive Palestinian death toll Israel has racked up over the years would not be possible without U.S.-supplied weaponry. John Mearsheimer quotes Israel general Yitzhak Brick as follows: “All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the U.S. The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability.… Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”

Matt is quite right to observe that Hamas hides in its underground network while Israel, drawing from the bottomless US purse, slaughters the civilian population above—putting the lie to the claim that Israel’s wanton destruction of northern Gaza is about “exterminating Hamas” as opposed to inflicting limitless collective punishment on innocents in violation of all moral norms.

Ah, but the Gazans are not innocent, suggests Mullarkey.  After all, she notes, according to a recent poll “the vast majority of Palestinians support the October 7 pogrom. 75% of all Palestinians supported the massacre; only 12.7% opposed it.” In other words, kill them all based on what the majority is alleged to think!  But then, what about the nearly 60% of Israeli Jews who think “the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) were using too little firepower in Gaza.” Or the “nearly half of Jews in the country [who] support the ethnic cleansing of Arabs” and agree with the proposition that “Arabs should be expelled or transferred from Israel.”  Mearsheimer cites a video in which Israeli children are “singing a blood-curdling song celebrating Israel’s destruction of Gaza: ‘Within a year we will annihilate everyone, and then we will return to plow our fields.’”  As Mearsheimer summarizes:

[I]t is commonplace for Israeli leaders to refer to Palestinians as “human animals, ‘human beasts,” and “horrible inhuman animals.” And as Israeli President Isaac Herzog makes clear, those leaders are referring to all Palestinians, not just Hamas: In his words, “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible.” Unsurprisingly, as the New York Times reports, it is part of normal Israeli discourse to call for Gaza to be “flattened,” “erased,” or “destroyed.” One retired IDF general, who proclaimed that “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist,” also makes the case that “severe epidemics in the south of the Gaza Strip will bring victory closer.”

Mullarkey can only be pretending that hatred of the other animates only the Palestinian side in this endless conflict, which began precisely with the “land grab” and dispossession of hundreds of thousand Palestinians that Mullarkey dismisses with a sneer, but whose descendants are now confined to the devastated remnants of the open-air prison that is the Gaza Strip.

The “human shield” rationale for the post-October 7 scorched earth attack on northern Gaza is quite a moral proposition for a Catholic to defend: kill the innocent behind whom the guilty are allegedly hiding. But once all the killing is done, the Hamas insurgents will still be hiding in their underground lairs, so the mass murder above ground is nothing but a gratuitous act of vengeance directed at the available targets. 

Mullarkey trots out the “human shields” argument to justify the mass extermination of Gazan civilians. First of all, as Finkelstein notes, “human shielding” is not a codified term of international law, but is commonly understood by human rights organizations to mean “the forcible conscripting of civilians to shield a combatant or to shield a military site”—for which, he says, the evidence is “near zero” as to Hamas but well-documented as to the Israeli use of Palestinians as human shields, including booby trap detectors, during their various operations to “mow the lawn” in Gaza, such as Operation Protective Shield and Operation Defensive Shield (2002), during which Israeli soldiers fired from the windows of occupied homes while standing behind the occupants.  (See, e.g.  Report of UN Secretary General on Operation Defensive Shield.)

At any rate, the “human shield” rationale for the post-October 7 scorched earth attack on northern Gaza is quite a moral proposition for a Catholic to defend:  kill the innocent behind whom the guilty are allegedly hiding.  Indeed, kill them all, to allude to Matt’s protest, which Mullarkey derides even though that is exactly what she is defending. After all, poll results support this!  But once all the killing is done, the Hamas insurgents will still be hiding in their underground lairs, so the mass murder above ground is nothing but a gratuitous act of vengeance directed at the available targets.  Which is Matt’s obvious point—another one Mullarkey pretends not to get.

Of course, Israel cannot be expected to turn the other cheek, says Mullarkey. They have the right to self-defense, as even Our Lord would recognize. For Mullarkey, as with all the other blind apologists for an Israeli nation-state created and maintained in existence by force—moreover, contrary to Sacred Scripture as the aforesaid Orthodox rabbis maintain—“self-defense” means killing 18,000 Gazan civilians, including women and thousands of children, destroying entire neighborhoods, and pushing 85% of Gaza’s population into the southern half of the narrow strip from which they are now also expected to depart. If that is “self-defense” then the term has lost its meaning.

On this score, Mullarkey proposes a laughably ironic exegesis of Our Lord’s precept on turning the other cheek:

Living under the heal of Roman occupation, Jews lived in servitude to their overlords. A slap on the face was a customary humiliation served to slaves. For a Jew to stand on his dignity and return the slap from a Roman could cost him his life on the spot. Jesus’ injunction to turn the other cheek was a prudent restraint on fellow Jews’ reflexive reaction to insult by sword-carrying Romans. It was not a universal command against self-defense.

According to this exegesis—which appears to be something fetid that oozed up from below in an echo of Modernist Scriptural revisionism—Gazans under Israeli occupation, like the Jews under Roman occupation, should “prudently” live “in servitude to their overlords” rather than risk death by offering even the slightest resistance to the occupiers. Israel, on the other hand, has a warrant to kill as many Gazans as it deems necessary for “self-defense.”  But then, on Mullarkey’s view of “self-defense,” why were the Romans not justified in slaughtering Jews in order to “defend” the Empire against Roman-hating Jewish insurgents, as well as the very Jew accused of calling Himself a King?  “Self-defense” of the Empire was the very rationale by which “the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ,” as Vatican II teaches in Nostra Aetate. Irony stacks upon irony in Mullarkey’s apology for the indefensible.

Mullarkey belittles Matt’s reference to Jewish Israel critic and Holocaust-survivor Dr. Gabor Maté. Maté is not a real Holocaust survivor, suggests Mullarkey, because he was only a baby when his mother escaped the Nazis. Besides, “Maté talks about the Palestinian children killed but ignores Israeli ones.”  No problem, however, with talking about Israeli children killed while ignoring more than 100 times as many dead Palestinian children—just since October 7.

Here is what Maté , a former Zionist, told Piers Morgan about the plight of the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories:

I used to be a Zionist… I am a Holocaust survivor. Zionism was very important to me as a salvation of the Jewish people.  Until I found out that the state was founded based on the extirpation, the expulsion and multiple massacres of the local population, and that’s not historically controversial.

In the absence of historical awareness, it all just looks like Israel defending itself. But against whom?  Against a population that it has been massacring  in a number of thousands for eighty years.  And taking their lands. And destroying their homes. And jailing their children.  And torturing them. Now unless we know that, it all looks like this poor little country trying to defend itself….

I don’t make this stuff up. That’s the history. I wish it wasn’t true. I wish I would believe in the dream of the Jewish state. I love that dream.  Except I found out: At what price? At what nightmare that [dream]imposed on the Palestinians?...

Moreover, says Maté, there can be no peace in the Middle East “until the international community, and particularly Israel’s big brothers, the U.K and the U.S., stop supporting its illegal, brutal, inhumane and rapacious occupation.”

Mullarkey objects that Maté “calls for a ceasefire—the very thing desired by Hamas for strategic, not pacific, purposes.”  No ceasefire!  The wanton killing of civilians must continue until Israel is satisfied it has “defended itself against Hamas”—which of course will continue to exist, and for which support has only increased since Israel’s annihilation of northern Gaza.  But that is American foreign policy in a nutshell: blundering interventions and the promotion of  endless, catastrophic foreign wars that make every situation in the Middle East and elsewhere immeasurably worse. Yet another point by Matt that Mullarkey pretends not to see.

Mullarkey has not only sullied her considerable craft with this exercise in calumny; she has made her own little contribution to the very climate in which the FBI is investigating traditionalist Catholics for challenging the official narratives of the same lying governments that have ruined the world.  As far as I am concerned, with this sleazy betrayal Mullarkey has revoked her own credentials as a Catholic commentator worthy of respect.

Without analysis, Mullarkey dismisses Matt’s reference to commentary by Scott Ritter as “canards memorized by undergraduates in any ivy league Palestinian Solidarity Committee.”  She homes in on an essay Ritter published the day after Matt’s podcast in which Ritter called the October 7 attack by Hamas “The Most Successful Military Raid of the Century.” But whatever you think of Ritter and his past, his point is that the attack was not a mere instance of mindless terrorism, but a coordinated military operation in the context of long-running asymmetric warfare. That Hamas fighters committed atrocities is undeniable, as Finkelstein recognizes. But, once again, Matt’s point—like Finkelstein’s, like Maté’s, and like the conclusion of every major human rights organization and the entire international community outside of the United States, Great Britain and Israel—is that Israel is also guilty of atrocities and war crimes, and on a much vaster scale.

Revealing that her knowledge of the Israel-Palestine conflict is limited, if not non-existent, Mullarkey scoffs that Ritter “touts the discredited two-state solution—which the Arab world violently rejected in 1948—as the only way to defuse Hamas’ reason to exist.” But just days ago Lindsey Graham—the defender of Israel than which none greater can be conceived—declared on “Meet the Press” that the Arabs of today seek precisely a two-state solution as the only hope of ending the conflict:

… Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries cannot normalize with Israel if they’re seen – if they’re having been seen as throwing the Palestinians under the bus. We have two choices: continue the death spiral, or use October 7th as a catalyst for change. I think the Arabs are going to demand some form of two-state solution to recognize Israel. I think Israel’s going to demand security buffers different than before, and they need to make those demands. I don’t know how this ends, but I’ll tell you this: If we don’t get this right this time, we’re talking about another generation of just tit-for-tat death.

Yes, once again, Hamas has no moral justification for committing atrocities.  But, once again, neither does Israel. At least Graham sees, however, what Hamas sees: that its hopeless war against Israel might indeed be the catalyst for a two-state solution that could finally bring this decades-long, deadly tit-for-tat to an end. Given that Hamas has already accepted a Palestinian state with the 1967 borders, despite the illegal establishment of those borders, much of the groundwork is already done (although Hamas would have to recognize the Israeli state, while Israel would have to withdraw from all or most of the illegal West Bank settlements). 

But Mullarkey is not concerned with such political details of the conflict, with which she does not seem to have even a passing acquaintance.  Her “analysis” of Ritter’s advocacy of the two-state solution is as follows: “Ritter appears not to have heard of Muslim Jew-hatred.”  No need to discuss Jewish Muslim-hatred, which of course is of no account whatsoever.  The Muslims just hate the Jews so much that, according to our Middle East political expert Maureen Mullarkey, nothing can be done to end the conflict so long as all this hating is going on. I sense something oozing up from below in an echo of Jewish leaders’ statements about the “human animals” in Gaza: the only solution to the conflict is to eliminate the Gazans.  As it now appears, Israel is intent on doing just that.

Conclusion

Having falsely accused Mike Matt of anti-Semitism on the basis of nothing but her gauzy impressions arising from an imaginary echo of Father Coughlin, Mullarkey concludes her screed by condemning Matt’s “despicable performance.” But the despicable performance is hers, and the tail end is the scorpion sting of an indictment of the Remnant’s entire audience as suspect of anti-Semitism: “How many in The Remnant’s audience carry—however unwittingly—an historic strain of Christian hostility to Jews that predates Islam? I hate to ask. And dread to know.”

A note of phony melodrama concludes the phony indictment. But Mullarkey has not only sullied her considerable craft with this exercise in calumny; she has made her own little contribution to the very climate in which the FBI is investigating traditionalist Catholics for challenging the official narratives of the same lying governments that have ruined the world.  As far as I am concerned, with this sleazy betrayal Mullarkey has revoked her own credentials as a Catholic commentator worthy of respect.

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