Each of us in our own way has been devoted to the cause of human rights. Each of us, a Muslim and a Jew, has witnessed the impact on innocents when their human dignity has been crushed.

We have witnessed the shattered remnants of communities tottering on the brink of oblivion, whether meeting survivors of the wars of the Taliban in northwest Pakistan, debriefing scores of Christian survivors of genocide in Nigeria, traveling to Iraq to meet the Yazidi and Kurdish survivors of the ISIS genocide, bearing witness to child soldiers inducted into and surviving both the Taliban and ISIS, or meeting with Uyghur and Tibetan refugees.

In every situation, we tried to help. One a physician tending to the open wounds and psychological scars, the other a rabbi trying to repair broken souls. All our efforts depend on a global infrastructure of human rights and intensive efforts to forge coalitions of faith leaders who, in turn, work to forge a realistic path toward hope.

But what we have witnessed these past hellish seven months since Hamas terrorists’ invasion of southern Israel and their brutal mass murder of families, including babies, the mass rape and killing of hundreds of Israeli women, and the kidnappings and hostage-taking, has shaken each of us to our core.

Not only the scope and brutality of the crimes, not only the real-time videos recorded by the celebrating killers and rapists, not only Hamas and its global supporters’ denial of October 7 but the equally devastating and brutal stone-cold silence of the very international organizations and NGOs that advocate for women and children.

It is nothing short of a conspiracy of silence—the refusal, with rare exceptions, to denounce in real time or ever since the rape, sexual violence, dismemberment, and killing of women because civil society, apparently, has no room or sympathy for those guilty of the original sin of being Jewish.

As the infamous and cynical quote often attributed to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin says, “One death is a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic.” The silence of the caretakers of human rights, of the vanguard of protecting women and girls, and of the Al Jazeera's of the world have all but rendered those Israeli victims invisible, which we now know was intentional. This has helped pave the way for the next domino to fall: equating the perpetrator with the defender.

An International Criminal Court (ICC) declaration seems to equate the monsters of Hamas with the democratically elected prime minister of the Jewish state, who must eradicate Israel’s next-door terrorists or watch October 7 be repeated again and again. Indeed, for the Jewish people for whom the Jewish state is its rightful place for self-determination, the ICC decision is nothing if not a blood libel against Jewish nationhood.

Just as the medieval church fabricated the monstrous lie accusing Jews of using the blood of children in matzah, a lie that still lives on centuries later, the ICC accuses the leaders of Israel of deliberately taking the lives of Palestinian children and has the audacity of charging the Jewish state with deliberate “extermination”—a term associated with the Nazi Final Solution and the murder of 6 million Jews.