Wallace Shawn’s Grotesque Assault on Israel
Feb 12, 2025 2:00 pm
By Hugh Fitzgerald
15 Comments
Most antisemites are content to compare Israel to the Nazis. Not Wallace Shawn, he of the high-pitched squeal and rebarbative face. He wants the world to know that the state of Israel is “demonically evil” and the Israelis are “worse than Nazis” because they “are proud of what they do,” whereas “Hitler had the decency” to try to hide his killing of Jews. (No, Hitler did not. History is not Wallace Shawn’s strong suit.) Has he forgotten how the war in Gaza started, with 6,000 “demonically evil” members of Hamas smashing into Israel, where they proceeded to rape, torture, mutilate, and kill 1,200 Israelis? Does he know about the babies who were decapitated? The adults who, before being killed, had their eyes gouged out and genitalia cut off?
More on Wallace Shawn’s grotesque assault on Israel can be found here: “Jewish Actor Wallace Shawn Calls Israel ‘Demonically Evil,’ in ‘Some Ways Worse’ Than Nazis for Gaza War,” by Shiryn Ghermezian, Algemeiner, February 5, 2025:
Jewish actor Wallace Shawn, who is most famous for his roles in “Clueless,” the “Toy Story” franchise, and “The Princess Bride,” compared Israel’s military actions in the Gaza Strip during the Israel-Hamas war to the war crimes committed by Nazis against Jews during World War II.
The New York-born actor and playwright, 81, said during an appearance on the podcast “ The Katie Halper Show” on Monday that Israel is “doing evil just as great as what the Nazis did.”
Can Wallace Shawn really be unaware that the IDF makes colossal efforts to minimize civilian casualties in Gaza, by warning them away from sites and buildings are soon to be targeted? Does he know that the IDF, halfway through the war, had by March already dropped nine million leaflets, sent fifteen million text messages, and made sixteen million robocalls, all done in order to warn civilians in Gaza away from buildings soon to be hit, so that they would not be harmed?
Does he know that Hamas tries always and everywhere to maximize civilian casualties, even going to the extent of preventing civilians from escaping from the very areas that the IDF has warned them to leave? Is he aware that British Colonel Richard Kemp, a veteran of half-a-dozen military campaigns and the commander of British forces in Afghanistan, has described the IDF as “the most moral army in the world:” because of its elaborate warning system? Has he read the study of the Gaza war by West Point Professor of Urban Warfare John Spencer, who concluded that “Israel has implemented more precautions to prevent civilian harm than any military in history—above and beyond what international law requires.”
Does Wallace Shawn, the embarrassing son of the legendary editor of The New Yorker, William Shawn, not know any of this? Is he aware that Hamas’ stated goal — it’s in its charter, for all to read — is the destruction of the Jewish state and the expulsion or murder of all of its Jews?
The IDF invaded Gaza because it was determined to defeat the terror group Hamas, and to so devastate it that it would never again be able to commit such attacks. What should the IDF have done after those Hamas atrocities of October 7, 2023? Tell us, Wallace Shawn. We’re all ears.
“The Israelis invaded someone else’s territory. They took people’s homes and they did many of the things that the Nazis did to the Jews,” he claimed while speaking to Halper, a Jewish comedian and author. “And now they’re really doing it. You can’t be more evil than what they’re doing.”
“They did many of the things the Nazis did to Jews.” Like what? Did the IDF round up people in Gaza and send them to “showers” where they would be murdered by inhaling Zyklon-B? Did the IDF use, like the Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing wagons? Did the IDF lock Gazans in railroad cars, where they would be suffocated? Did the IDF commit “medical experiments” in the manner of Dr. Mengele? Did they strip Gazans naked, and shoot them in the back of the head one-by-one — tens of thousands at a time, as the Nazis did at Babi Yar outside Kiev — so that they would topple, dead or dying, into vast open pits? Did the IDF inject phenol into the hearts of Gazans? Or inject highly concentrated solutions into their veins, using hydrogen perhydrol, ether, hydrogen peroxide, benzene, and Evipan? Did the IDF soldiers grab Gazan babies, and throw them up in the air, to be shot at in front of their mothers — the way the Nazis so enjoyed doing?
“And in some ways it’s worse, because they kind of boast about it,” Shawn added. “Hitler had the decency to try to keep it secret. For some reason, Hitler didn’t want people to know he was doing these things to the Jews. The Israelis are almost proud of it, and it’s demonically evil. You can’t be more evil. And anybody who doesn’t recognize that it’s evil, I can’t properly communicate with that person. That might be temporary insanity.”
What bespeaks moral idiocy is Shawn’s remark that “Hitler had the decency” to try to keep the mass murder of Jews a secret. It’s a nauseating choice of words. And not just nauseating, but flatly wrong. Hitler never hid from his subordinates in the Nazi Party— hundreds of thousands of them —his intentions to carry out the Endlösung, the Final Solution. The extermination camps were known to the Allies, who shamefully did not bomb the railroads that took Jews to those camps. It was only in the last months of the war that those directly involved — the SS men and other guards at the death camps — tried to hide the evidence of their handiwork by burning bodies in the camps’ crematoria.
The Israelis do not “boast” about killing civilians. They forthrightly explain that their intended targets are the members of Hamas, but that sometimes they cannot avoid civilian casualties despite their best efforts to warn civilians away from places about to be targeted. The Israelis are right to be proud — not “boastful” — of the bravery of their soldiers, who are defending the people of Israel against a monstrous enemy, an enemy about whom Wallace Shawn has nothing to say. And the Israelis express pride in the young people who showed up to defend their country and their people, and in the 300,000 older reservists too, who also appeared as one when called up. The Israelis have everything to be proud of, and nothing to be ashamed of, in the performance of their soldiers. |
