Daily Wire Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro shredded the anti-Israel rhetoric of an activist at the University of Oxford on Monday regarding morality in the war between Israel and Hamas.
The student accused Israel of waging an unjust war against Hamas and of killing Palestinians needlessly and at will. Shapiro pointed out that Hamas is ultimately responsible for Palestinian deaths because the terror group hides military targets in civilian areas. His remarks quickly went viral on social media.
“Civilian casualties are a cost of war. That is just a reality of life. During World War II, there were 70,000 Brits who died during The Blitz bombing, and there were two million Germans who died – civilians – who died during World War II,” Shapiro said.
But on the difference between Israel and Hamas, the host of “The Ben Shapiro Show” said “there’s a vast difference in moral scope between deliberately going into a civilian area and murdering everyone you can find, and trying to kill a terrorist who is deliberately hiding beneath a civilian area.”
The student said “Israel is effectively doing the same because Gaza is the most densely populated region in the world.” She went on to claim that Israel has “killed 3,500 children” in Gaza since the start of the war. The figure comes from the Palestinian Ministry of Health, which is run by Hamas in the Gaza Strip and the U.S. and Israeli governments have said is an unreliable source of information.
When pressed on whether using civilians to shield military operations gives Hamas immunity from retaliation, the student responded: “Where are the children left to go?” Shapiro pointed out that using civilians as cover violated the Geneva Conventions on just war.
The student went on to claim that the inequality of deaths on the Hamas side versus the Israeli side shows Israel is waging an unjust war.
“Since 2005, 23 out of every 24 conflict deaths have been Palestinian,” the student said. “I don’t see any moral equivalency there. It’s clearly unjust what the IDF has been doing to the Palestinians because there is a vast disparity in the number of Palestinians being killed than the number of Israelis being killed.”
Shapiro responded: “If, based off the numbers, more Germans died than Brits in World War II, did that mean that the British were wrong in World War II? Because they did. Many more Germans died than Britons.”
The student then elicited a strong reaction from the crowd as she claimed that “Britain wasn’t bombing civilians.” The allies, including Britain, targeted population centers in aerial bombing runs toward the end of World War II in an effort to flood Germany with refugees.
After being rebuked by the crowd, the student fell back and asserted that Israel’s war on Hamas was “not a just war” and “Israel has been killing civilians for the past 75 years.”
Shapiro responded by citing the toll from Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel: roughly 1,500 dead, mostly civilians, and more than 200 more captured and taken back to Gaza.
“Israel does not purposely kill civilians, Palestinian terrorists do. If Israel put down its guns tomorrow, there would be a second Holocaust. If the Palestinians put down their guns tomorrow, there would be a Palestinian state. That is the reality,” Shapiro said.
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Shapiro ended the engagement with a final question to the student: “Which part of Palestine is occupied?”
“The entirety of Palestine,” she responded.
Shapiro said: “There it is once again. I appreciate you expressing your full genocidal intent for the Jewish people living between the river and the sea.”
Epic exchange between @benshapiro and an anti-Israel activist at Oxford University today. This “highly educated” student doesn’t know basic history pic.twitter.com/vbpfDnetgu
— Chaya Raichik (@ChayaRaichik10) October 31, 2023