Juliet Moses has expressed her sympathy for the three people killed at a San Diego mosque on Monday. But the New Zealand Zionist has shown no such sympathy for the tens of thousands of innocent people killed in Gaza by the Israeli military.
FOR MORE than two years Juliet Moses, President of the Zionist-controlled New Zealand Jewish Council, has acted as one of the most unflinching New Zealand defenders of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza. No matter how grotesque the violence, no matter how many bodies pile up beneath the rubble, Moses has found a way to justify it. Her public interventions have followed a predictable pattern: deny, minimise, deflect, and when all else fails, smear critics as 'antisemitic.' It is a strategy as tired as it is cynical, and it has worn thin with a public that has watched, in real time, the devastation of an entire people.
Moses has not merely defended Israel’s military actions; she has actively worked to delegitimise anyone — including many Jewish New Zealanders — who oppose them. Her extremism has become so entrenched that she now treats dissent within the Jewish community as a kind of heresy. Those who refuse to align themselves with Israel’s war are dismissed, patronised, or accused of betraying their own people. It is a grotesque inversion of reality: the people calling for an end to mass killing are painted as the problem, while those defending it claim the mantle of moral authority.
And yet, when three people were killed at a mosque in San Diego — reportedly influenced by the Christchurch terrorist — Moses took to X to express her sympathy. “Dreadful news,” she wrote. “And thinking of our Muslim community here, for whom this will bring back the worst memories and trauma.”
The hypocrisy is staggering. It apparently has not occurred to Moses that the Muslim community here is traumatised not only by the Christchurch massacre, but by the daily images of Gaza’s destruction — the very destruction she has spent two years defending. The same community she claims to be "thinking of” is watching, in horror, as tens of thousands of Palestinians are killed, maimed, starved, or buried alive. Their grief is not abstract. It is personal, immediate, and relentless. Yet Moses has shown no empathy for that suffering. Instead, she has rationalised it, sanitised it, and in some cases outright denied it.
We have to be clear: Juliet Moses and those who follow her Zionist ideology are no friends of Muslims. Moses sudden expression of sympathy rings hollow when placed alongside her unwavering support for a military campaign that has killed more than 75,000 Palestinians and injured over a 100,000. You cannot cheer on a war that has obliterated entire neighbourhoods, wiped out families, and left children orphaned, and then expect to be taken seriously when you claim to care about Muslim trauma. It is moral incoherence, to put it mildly, dressed up as compassion.
Moses’s record speaks for itself. In 2021, at He Whenua Taurikura — a conference supposedly dedicated to countering terrorism and violent extremism — she used her platform not to address the rise of white supremacist violence, but to launch yet another attack on supporters of Palestinian rights. She repeated her claim that a 2018 Auckland rally was “pro-Hezbollah” and “pro-Hamas,” despite offering no evidence. She had just described both organisations as terrorist groups, a framing that was met with shouts of “Free Palestine!” from the audience. The message was clear: people were tired of her attempts to conflate solidarity with terrorism.
Azad Khan of the Foundation Against Islamophobia and Racism put it bluntly: his group was “not going to sit there with dignity and listen to her say that.” And why should they? Moses’s comments were not only inflammatory; they were part of a long-running pattern of using the label “terrorism” to delegitimise any expression of Palestinian identity, resistance, or grief. It is a tactic that mirrors the worst excesses of the global “war on terror,” where entire populations were criminalised for daring to exist under occupation.
What Moses does not understand — and is probably incapable of understanding — is that defending genocide disqualifies you from claiming to stand for human rights, democracy, or community safety. You cannot throw up your hands in horror at an atrocity in San Diego while applauding a military campaign that has produced atrocity on an industrial scale. You cannot mourn the victims of one act of violence while excusing the victims of another simply because the perpetrators are your political allies.
This is not a matter of political disagreement. It is a matter of moral consistency. If you believe that the deliberate killing of civilians is wrong, then it is wrong whether it happens in a mosque in California or in a refugee camp in Gaza. If you believe that communities deserve safety, dignity, and freedom from fear, then that principle must apply to Palestinians as much as it applies to anyone else. Moses’s worldview cannot accommodate this basic truth, because her ideological commitments require her to see Palestinian suffering as either justified or irrelevant.
The result is a politics devoid of empathy, honesty, or accountability. It is a politics that weaponises trauma when convenient and dismisses it when it challenges the narrative. It is a politics that demands silence from those who have lost the most. And it is a politics that has no place in a society that claims to value justice.
Juliet Moses has made her position clear. She has chosen to defend the indefensible. She has chosen to attack those who stand against mass killing. She has chosen to align herself with a project of domination and dispossession. That's up to her. But she does not get to do so while pretending to speak for all Jewish people, and she does not get to cloak herself in the language of compassion when it suits her.
The rest of us have a responsibility to call this out. Because if we cannot name hypocrisy when it stares us in the face, then we have surrendered the very moral ground that allows us to oppose violence in all its forms.
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