Last week, two Christian organizations held a conference about the need for Catholics to confront anti-Semitism. Herewith, some of Mary Eberstadt’s comments, from an interview by Simone Rizkallah:

All [young Catholics] need to know to rise to the occasion is that the refusal of the Jewish people to die has enraged their enemies throughout history. That the Jewish love of life—which is nothing less than a love of life enjoined by God Himself—binds Jews and Christians together, as no other force. As I noted at Franciscan University, “Hamas and the other enemies of the Jewish people often say, scornfully, ‘the Jews love life.’ So they do. And so do we.”

This joint love for life is a slap in the face to our common enemies: desiccated, antilife secularism; bloodthirsty Islamicism; suicidal, marriage-and-baby denialism. The same people and forces that who hate the Jews hate the Christians too—especially the Catholics. Since October 7, anti-Semitic offenses have risen almost three-fold in the United States. Since summer 2020, a record number of Catholic churches and properties have been attacked and defaced.

And not only in the United States. As Robert Royal shows in his new book, The Martyrs of the New Millenium, more Christians are in more danger of martyrdom today than at any other moment in history. As the months and years since October 7 have also shown, the desire to wipe Jews from Creation has been invigorated anew by Hamas, by other terrorist groups, and by their cold-blooded cheerleaders in American and Europe, including on certain feral campuses.

You can read the rest of the interview at the link below, and watch the entire conference, whose speakers included Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver, here.

As this newsletter noted last week, Gaza is not suffering from famine, and the efforts to suggest that it is—which have been going on since at least the beginning of last year—are based on deliberate manipulation of the data. Nor, as Shany Mor explains, does international law require Israel to feed its enemies:

Article 23 of the Fourth Geneva Convention does oblige High Contracting Parties to allow for the free passage of medical and religious supplies along with “essential foodstuff, clothing, and tonics intended for children under fifteen” for the civilians of another High Contracting Party, as long as there is no serious reason for fearing that “the consignments may be diverted from their destination,” or “that a definite advantage may accrue to the military efforts or economy of the enemy” by the provision.

The Hamas regime in Gaza is, of course, not a High Contracting Party, and, more importantly, Israel has reason to fear both that aid provisions are diverted by Hamas and that a direct advantage is accrued to it by such diversions. Not only does Hamas take provisions for its own forces, but its authorities sell provisions donated by foreign bodies and use the money to finance its war. It’s notable that the first reports of Hamas’s financial difficulties emerged only in the past few weeks, once provisions were blocked.

Yet, since the war began, even European states considered friendly to Israel have repeatedly demanded that Israel “allow unhindered passage of humanitarian aid” and refrain from seizing territory or imposing “demographic change”—which means, in practice, that Gazan civilians can’t seek refuge abroad. These principles don’t merely constitute a separate system of international law that applies only to Israel, but prolong the suffering of the people they are ostensibly meant to protect:

By insisting that Hamas can’t lose any territory in the war it launched, the international community has invented a norm that never before existed and removed one of the few levers Israel has to pressure it to end the war and release the hostages.

These commitments have . . . made the plight of the hostages much worse and much longer. They made the war much longer than necessary and much deadlier for both sides. And they locked a large civilian population in a war zone where the de-facto governing authority was not only indifferent to civilian losses on its own side, but actually had much to gain by it.