October 7 should have been an open-and-shut case of moral condemnation.
During peace and holiday, invading Hamas gunmen murdered, tortured, mass raped, decapitated, and mutilated some 1,200 Israelis. The vast majority were unarmed women, children, infants, and the elderly.
The cowardly murderers proudly filmed their atrocities and then fled back to Gaza—to cheers from the Gaza street.
Before Israel even retaliated, the mass murdering of Jews earned praise from the Middle East, the international hard left, and especially the faculty and students of elite Western campuses.
When the Israeli Defense Forces struck back, the killers dispersed to the safety of their multibillion-dollar subterranean cities. The cowardly elite architects of the mass murder fled to Arab sanctuaries in Lebanon and Qatar.
From its headquarters burrowed below hospitals, mosques, and schools, Hamas bartered hostages for a reprieve from the IDF and the release of its own convicted terrorists in Israeli jails.
Hamas shot any of its own supporters who refused to shield Hamas gunmen.
It continued launching rockets at Israeli civilian centers. It serially lied about its casualties, expropriating intended relief food and fuel for its underground tunnel city of killers.
Abroad, Hamas supporters also emulated the methods of the pro-Nazi demonstrators in Western cities of the 1930s. Unlike their pro-Israel critics, the pro-Hamas demonstrators in the U.S. and Europe turned violent.
They took over and defaced private and public property. They chanted genocidal anti-Semitic slogans calling for erasure of the nation of Israel.
They interrupted shoppers, blocked highways, attacked businesses, and swarmed bridges. They assaulted police.
The majority wore masks to hide their identities in the fashion of anti-semitic Klansmen.
Why did the doctrinaire left, the youth of the Democratic Party, and the campuses outdo each other in their anti-semitic venom toward Israel?
For the first time in their lives, many of the ignorant protestors suddenly professed concern about refugees, colonialism, disproportionality, innocent civilians, and the rules of war.
But none could explain why the Palestinians who fled Israel in 1947-48 still self-identify as victimized “refugees” when 900,000 Jews ethnically cleansed from Middle-East Arab cities about the same time do not.
The 200,000 Greek Cypriots driven out from norther Cyprus by Turkey apparently do not warrant “refugee’’ status either.
Few protestors knew that Jews have lived in present-day Israel for over three millennia. The longest colonialist presence there were Muslim Turks who brutally ran the Holy Land for 300 years until they lost World War I and were expelled.
How exactly did it happen that the eighth-century A.D. Al-Aqsa Mosque was built within King Herod’s earlier Second Temple enclosure?
The Pro-Hamas crowd has little appreciation that colonizing Arab Muslims have one of history’s longest records of “settling” other countries far from their historic birthland.
They “settled” and “colonized” the Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine Middle East, Berber North Africa, and southern Spain. Millions of Middle Easterners migrated to—“settled?”— supposedly infidel European cities, where they often self-segregate, and do not assimilate fully with their magnanimous hosts.
As far as “disproportionality,” it is the goal of every power at war, Hamas included.
What protestors are furious about is that Israel is more effective at being disproportionate in retaliation than Hamas and its Iranian supporters were in their preemptive mass murdering.
Targeting innocent civilians? Hamas is among the current greatest offenders in the world.
It rockets Israeli cities without warning. It mass murders Jews in their beds during peace. It exposes Gazans to mortal danger by impressing them as human shields. Hamas shoots those who refuse.
The “rules of war” are violated by Hamas daily. Such protocols require combatants to wear uniforms not to blend in with civilians, not to use them as shields, not to murder noncombatants, not to rape them, not to mutilate them, and not to execute civilians without trial.
Why then would millions ally themselves with this odious reincarnation of the SS?
Are they ignorant of the history of the Middle East?
Are they arrogant since few challenge their hate and threats?
Are they opportunists who feel mouthing anti-Western shibboleths gains them career traction in leftist-run media, academia, and popular culture?
Are they bullies who count on the Western silent majority remaining quiet as they disrupt lives, trash Western tolerant culture, and commit violence?
Like Hamas that they support, do they despise Jews? Why else do they express an existential hatred toward Israelis that they never display to any other group?
Those now on the street utter not a peep about the Sudanese Arab mass killers in Darfur, Chinese oppressors of the Muslim Uighurs, Russians targeting civilians in Ukraine, or ISIS, Syrian, and Yemeni murderers of fellow Muslims.
Yet all of these terrorist killers are guilty of the very charges the protestors falsely attribute to Israel. But they are all not Jewish—and that explains the pass given them by our anti-semitic, pro-Hamas street.
Since October 7th I’ve been appalled at the ignorance displayed by our college educated youth as they have given Hamas their full throated support. But more than that, I have been taken aback by the success of the Socialist Left as they have used that atrocity to further their cause as well. Even certain Congress members feel invulnerable enough to shed any scintilla of human decency by fomenting anger—not just against the Israeli government–but ALL Israelis and ALL Jews nationwide.
While the events of today were foretold a couple of thousand years ago (and even longer by Old Testament prophets) it is saddening to see these events unfold in real time.
The good news is now we know what these people are like. We can see the indoctrination of our colleges to our youth, we can see the hatred and know who are our enemies.
Secondly, we should know that hatred for Christians comes second only to their hatred for Jews.
We need to start taking our colleges back and sending the haters home to Gaza.
Outstanding, as usual. It isn’t just Middle Eastern history of which these idiots are ignorant. It is history in general. They don’t know that Islamic pirates kidnapped and enslaved hundreds of thousands of people from Spain, France, Italy, the Balkans, and Greece between 700 and 1850. Oh, and that is just the tip of the iceberg of what these young “savants” don’t know.
Hanson is missing the point. The Palestinians have been confirmed by a group ideological decision of top-flight lefty intellectuals as colonized and victimized. And so, as our lefty friends are the Allies of the Oppressed Peoples in their fight against the White Oppressors, the Israelis are colonizers and oppressors, and that is all.
There’s enforced ignorance ( denied education), willful ignorance (tied to our emotions and confirmation bias) , and ignorance by design ( the American/Western school system)… Lucky us we get to see all three wrapped up in these fools aka useful idiots. There has to be push back against this frightening evolution of our younger generations or we are truly doomed as a nation and culture.