October 7

Today marks three years since the largest single massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust.  The monsters of Hamas swarmed across the border into Israel, attacking towns and a music festival -- killing, raping, mutilating, burning people alive, committing every atrocity their imaginations could dredge up from Hell, and doing it with a demonic glee that not even the German Nazis in their day had shown.  They filmed and recorded their own monstrous crimes, uploading and broadcasting them in real time, actually proud and boastful about what they were doing.  Having murdered twelve hundred people, they dragged hundreds more back to their own rat holes beneath the Gaza Strip, to months and years of captivity and further horrors.  (This site is dedicated to documenting what happened.)

Almost immediately -- before Israel had begun to retaliate in Gaza, before it had responded in any way -- the streets of the US and Europe erupted with pro-jihadist and radical-leftist marches in solidarity with the murderers.  I discussed the implications of this here.  Indeed, during the three years since, hate crimes against Jews (yes, against Jews, not only Zionists or Israelis) -- up to and including murder -- have exploded across the Western world.  If the original Nazi Holocaust shamed the anti-Semitism that had infested the West for centuries into relative silence for decades, October 7 seemed to have the opposite effect, emboldening the ancient mentality of pogroms and blood libels to re-emerge into the open.

Even after such a monstrous provocation, Israel in its retaliatory campaign against Hamas in Gaza has continued to take the same kind of extreme, almost absurd measures to minimize harm to enemy civilians as it has always done in the past -- measures no other country has ever taken, certainly not under such extreme circumstances.  There has probably never been a major military campaign in a populated area which resulted in so few civilian deaths relative to the number of enemy combatants killed.  The blood libel of "genocide" in Gaza is defamation escalated to the level of the surreal.

I have extensively discussed the implications of the October 7 attack in this post and this post, but one point deserves strong reiteration.  The attack has permanently eliminated the concept of a "Palestinian state" from serious consideration as part of an eventual settlement of the overall conflict.  Israel had unilaterally withdrawn from the Gaza Strip in 2005, dismantling all of the Jewish settlements there -- from that point on, the Strip was an independent Palestinian state in miniature.  The October 7 attack was the result.  There's no longer any room for debate about what a Palestinian state would mean.  We already know.

The attack made clear that if the jihadists had had the power to kill as many Jews as the Nazis did, they would have done so.  Their determination to annihilate the world's only Jewish state is reiterated incessantly.  Jihadism is at least the equal of the Nazi German regime in its innate and intractable murderousness and malignancy -- and as we've seen with September 11 and its other innumerable atrocities in Europe, India, and even within the Middle East, its bloodlust is not limited to Jews, even if they are the people it hates the most.  Its apologists and sympathizers within the West, the lunatics who shriek with rage at Israel's every effort to defend itself against the ravening monsters who openly aspire to finish the job Hitler started, the sniveling yes-butters and on-the-other-handers, are the Nazi collaborators of our time.  In practical terms it matters little where they fall along the spectrum from evil to naïve.

The October 7 attack was a lesson about the harsh reality of what we are up against.  Most Israelis didn't need that lesson.  The rest of us had damn well better learn it.