Am Yisrael Chai
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Am Yisrael Chai
The world is offered a stark choice between Medieval sectarian feuding and modern civilization
First, our deepest condolences to the people of Israel, and all of Israel’s guests, regarding the October 7th massacre committed against them by Hamas terrorists.
Head of Israel's National Center of Forensic Medicine: "In 28 years, I can't recall such infernal damage. Babies, young children, without heads, without legs. I can't understand how the entire world doesn't grasp the sheer cruelty of this situation."
We saw the pictures and video that Hamas broadcast to the world to brag about their massacre of Israelis, including Muslim Israelis, and foreign visitors to Israel. We saw them parade their victims in the streets.
Instead of only seeing pictures of the bodies, the bloodstains and bullet holes in the children’s bedrooms, the mangled rape victims, or hearing about the families tortured to death in front of each other, some people had to see that in person. Some looking at the pictures of the young people slaughtered at a music festival had to look for a last glimpse of their loved ones.
As we kept watching, we saw a worrying number of people in western countries not only celebrate these terror attacks on civilians, but accuse Israel of genocide before they’d even responded to the outrages, and call to “globalize the intifada.” Mind, the intifada was a series of terror bombing campaigns aimed deliberately at civilians. This only compounds the horror of what happened.
Second, our condolences to Jewish people all around the world who’ve been made fearful by pro-Hamas rallies calling for their extermination outright, with slogans like “Gas the Jews,” or calling for it more subtly, with the phrase, “From the river to the sea,” with mobs that have repeatedly been aggressive towards or even chased down nearby Jewish people.
In Paris, Jewish homes and businesses are being defaced with Stars of David in an echo of the Nazi markings of Jewish properties before the Holocaust.
In Dagestan, Russia, the landing of a plane from Israel was met by a local mob looking for Jews to menace. They couldn’t find any because the plane was full of cancer patients, who were being treated at an Israeli hospital, and their families.
What Jewish parents thinking of sending their children to college will not now also look at how any prospective schools reacted to having parts of their student body come out to support anti-Semitic terrorism?
Many doctors, lawyers, journalists, professors, activists, and other public figures in democratic countries, have also come out supporting the pogrom against Israelis. They’ve shared memes accusing the Jewish people of being just like the Nazis, or worse, and have spread lies accusing Israel of bombing a hospital whose parking lot was damaged by an Islamic Jihad rocket that fell short.
Who can trust that these individuals can responsibly carry out any serious duties to the public?
The 10/7 massacre has become a danger for Jewish people all over the world. It’s inspired waves of copycat assaults and intimidation that must not be allowed to escalate further.
Third, our condolences to everyone in a democratic country who woke up this October to the revelation that there are a lot of supporters of terrorism and mass murder amongst our neighbors. Many of us have parents or grandparents who fought the Axis powers, or supported the war effort at home. Now we are inundated with people who openly say they want to finish what Hitler started (and what Muslim governments continued), in the name of Allah, global intifada, and decolonization.
It’s hard to understand people who would shout chants of praise to God while publicly raping women and girls in front of each other. They cheered as if they were committing a holy act instead of filming the world’s most terrifying and psychotic snuff p0rn and then bragging about it to their deranged, actually proud parents. Hamas supporters in Gaza had a big street party to celebrate.
Though it’s even harder to understand people living comfortably, in nations that have enjoyed many decades of domestic peace, who see the 10/7 massacre as a righteous act of resistance or decolonization.
They are our neighbors here in western countries, living in peace and prosperity. They saw the images of the tortured and charred bodies and thought that this was righteous resistance that must not be punished, but praised.
"Almost instantly after the Hamas attack, a legion of people emerged who downplayed the slaughter, or denied actual atrocities had even happened, as if Hamas had just carried out a traditional military operation against soldiers. October 7 deniers, like Holocaust deniers, exist in an especially dark place." - Simon Stebag Montefiore in The Atlantic
If people are chanting about bringing a global intifada to a country where you live, to decolonize it, now we all can see what that means. If intellectuals praise Hamas as being part of the global left, well, now we all know what a large part of the global left wants.
Judith Butler speaking back in 2006: “Hamas and Hezbollah are social movements that are progressive and are part of the Global Left"
They said it was about justice and safety. Apparently it’s about the right to tear down anything that looks like a functional civilization with the most obscene and indiscriminate violence witnessed in this new century.
“Another world is possible,” the left has said for years. If that’s how you get there, we’ll keep this one, and try to muddle through somehow, thanks.
Readers can surely think of various problems they have in their communities or countries that they’d like to see solved. Would any of those problems be improved by coordinated, mass sprees of serial murder and rape, of ethnic or religious pogroms and torture, of bombing campaigns that target civilians on purpose?
We hold that there is no legitimate problem on the planet that can be solved by torturing any family to death in front of each other. It endangers every person in the world if it becomes a normative standard of behavior in conflict that is then occasioned by global street parties lionizing the torturers.
Many Israelis and guests of Israel died or were taken hostage on 10/7.
A shared sense of public decency was taken hostage at the rallies afterwards, in idolatrous worship of Hamas. “Glory to the resistance fighters,” they chanted at universities in America. Glory.
Media guides on discouraging copycat crimes in the case of single-shooter mass shootings or suicides recommend avoiding terms that promote maladaptive thinking. Now, every boy unlucky enough to grow up in a decolonial or Islamic death cult has been told he can expect a veritable ticker tape parade in Harvard Yard if he grows up to be a serial killer of people designated as “settlers.”
This is dangerous to Israelis, and to all other living persons, including Arab Muslims whose deaths at the hands of other Arab governments or terrorist organizations have been roundly ignored by the pro-Hamas cheerleaders.
Gaza says they are running out of everything… except rockets, and Hamas’s fuel to launch them. Hamas leadership has said they feel no responsibility towards the people of Gaza, putting the responsibility for their safety and care on the United Nations and Israel.
Hamas Official Mousa Abu Marzouk: The Tunnels in Gaza Were Built to Protect Hamas Fighters, Not Civilians; Protecting Gaza Civilians Is the Responsibility of the U.N. and Israel
Still, Hamas will not return the hostages, and refuses to surrender to justice. They say themselves they will not stop until Israel is destroyed.
Hamas Official Ghazi Hamad: We Will Repeat the October 7 Attack Time and Again Until Israel Is Annihilated; We Are Victims - Everything We Do Is Justified
It’s a terrible situation for the people of Israel, who remain under constant bombardment. It’s a terrible situation for the people of Gaza, used as illegal shields for terrorist belligerents who keep setting up rocket launchers near their homes and schools, or under their hospitals and apartment buildings.
Our mission here at LGB United is predicated on a foundation of civil discourse, on peaceable and just congress between nations. But the aim of peace must encompass a right of self-defense, or it’s a unilateral suicide pact, binding only on those who value the same goals of peace.
Maybe the “slow boring of hard boards” that constitutes peaceful civil society and diplomacy are dissatisfying at times. No one is always happy with it.
Yet every society that chooses to try first resolving its differences peacefully, and gives up having heresy laws in favor of freedom of speech and conscience, reaps a bounty of better health, educational achievement, scientific advancement, and prosperity in business. That works for every people that has tried it; even for Western Europeans, whose history before the middle of the 20th Century was one of nearly interminable warfare and religious persecution.
As the apocryphal saying popularized by Sigmund Freud goes, “the man who first flung a word of abuse at his enemy instead of a spear was the founder of civilization.”
So our condolences to all innocents and their families harmed in this conflict, and our heartfelt wish that every person who witnesses these events will be moved to choose a future that we would all really love, and be at peace in.
Am Yisrael Chai
When I see that horrifying video of the Israeli girl treated like a war trophy by those brutalizing men, I see the blood on her pants and think: Don't call it rape. The word is too familiar. She has been sexually tortured. We are witnessing sexual torture treated as a gleeful spectacle. It makes me physically ill.
Why is there so little outcry on the left about the heinous misogyny that is part of the Hamas death cult?
Amen.