The Shoah is not merely a historical episode. It is a benchmark of human evil. To invoke its name while describing the actions of the Jewish state, especially without so much as acknowledging the genocide that gave rise to that state, is not brave. It is obscenely careless. It treats the Holocaust not as a wound in Jewish memory, but as a rhetorical tool, a metaphor made available for political anger.

And that is the root of the problem. Coppola’s essay is written with the language of witness, but it is not witnessing. It is omission. It cites Forensic Architecture as gospel, rejects Israeli statements as propaganda, and attributes every fire, every injury, every corpse solely to Israeli intent. There is no mention of Hamas embedding in civilian zones. No acknowledgment that tent fires may result from secondary explosions, or that the IDF’s warnings are routinely documented. She speaks of “the world turning away,” but what she offers is not light. It is shadowplay.

There is something else too, more disturbing. In the closing paragraphs, Coppola writes of “a burnt offering to the spawn of Moloch.” Here, the metaphor is not just religious. It is apocalyptic. It reaches for the oldest and darkest tropes: the language of pagan sacrifice, of children burned for a tyrant god. It is hard to read that line and not think of medieval accusations of ritual murder, of blood libel in another form, rewritten for the modern left. One hopes that was not her intent. But intentions matter less than consequences.