A Catholic priest and celebrated human rights activist who has dedicated his life to documenting Nazi crimes against the Jews and other genocides, Father Patrick Desbois, tells the publisher of the New York Sun, Dovid Efune, that today’s student protesters care more about being anti-Israel than actually helping Palestinian Arabs. 

“How many students are fundraising to send materials to Gaza to help people?” He answers his own question: none. The cause they care about is “to be against Israel,” the Catholic priest says. 

Father Desbois is president and founder of Yahad-In Unum, a French organization that for 20 years has been locating the sites of mass graves of Jewish victims of the Nazi mobile killing units during World War II. Father Desbois and his team have pioneered the effort to apply modern forensic research to the study of genocide.

But his thoughts today are on the illness of antisemitism. He believes that most of the anti-Israel protesters wouldn’t actually care about Palestinians if the conflict didn’t involve Jews. “If I say one day the Jews will leave Israel,” he asks, then, “who will care for Palestinians?” 

His Palestinian friends, he says, know that the energy behind the pro-Palestine protests has little to do with a love of Palestinians, but rather, an excuse to hate the Jews. Father Desbois urges students to show they care by taking “concrete” actions to help Palestinians in Gaza, rather than just protest from their college campuses. 

“You love Palestinians? I can give you a program,” he says. Father Desbois is planning on visiting Israel soon and is looking for ways to help. 

He still hopes that today’s students will get “a real education from the ground up,” and learn about Middle Eastern geopolitics and radical Islam, adding that the ignorance of the young is grave. For example, young women “don’t know” that if they go to Gaza, “they will not survive Hamas.” 

Father Desbois is no stranger to the barbarism of Islamic extremists.  After ISIS forces took control of the Sinjar region of Iraq in 2014 and began their campaign to ethnically cleanse Yazidis, a minority group in the region, Father Desbois set out to volunteer in Iraq with the help of a Yazidi barber he met while in Brussels. 

In Iraq, Father Desbois interviewed hundreds of Yazidi survivors, including women who had been kidnapped and brutally raped. He and his team collected their testimonies and provided them with resources for rehabilitation. “There are still 2,600 women in slavery” under ISIS, he says. 

The Yazidis who remain enslaved under ISIS are classified as “Kufr” or “non-believers” and stripped of any rights by the terrorists. “You can take their babies, you can rape the girls, sell the girls, you can kill the old ladies,” he says. “It’s what they did.”

So could ISIS’s ethnic cleansing of the Yazidis, or the Nazis’ genocide of the Jews be compared with Israel’s war against Hamas? “I know what genocide is,” Father Desbois says. The war in Gaza, he says, “is not a genocide.” 

“When there is a genocide in a country, when people say there has been 45 years of genocide, you would see the devolution of demography,” he says. “In Gaza, you see the growth of the population.” 

While the future for the Palestinians remains unclear, Father Desbois knows that keeping Hamas in power will only serve to hurt the Palestinian cause. “I cannot think Hamas can lead a safe country. It’s impossible,” he says. “Their mentality is to hate the non-Muslims and to even destroy any Muslim who is not a ‘good’ believer.” 

In spite of all of these challenges to a peaceful future, Father Desbois advises against getting bogged down by the bad news. Instead, he calls for action. “I always say to people, do something. Do something for others.”

Everybody has a part, he adds. “Action is healing.”