24,669 Americans Murdered by Terrorists in One Day

WWAD (What Would Americans Do?)

“Terrorists” is perhaps too much of an honorable word to describe the death squads that set out from the Gaza Strip this weekend hunting civilians.

I started to do this post about the failure of intelligence, imagination, and the seduction of modernism to see the nature of man - and perhaps that will be my post for tomorrow - but I want to make sure we establish an understanding, a baseline, to what has happened.

(Editor’s note: Sunday night I decided to break this in to three parts after reading the above. I know I’ve had a habit of late of putting out posts just too long for normal consumption. So:

• Monday Part I: Perspective and Baseline

• Tuesday Part II: How Israel Got Here

• Wednesday Part III: COA Decision Brief

We are already seeing in the West the useful idiots in the externalized self-loathing left, and the imported Jew hatred already his the streets in support of death squads, rape, and the kidnapping of women and children.

We have also seen the defenders of the fruit of faculty-lounge-foreign-policy that we’ll discuss in Part II start to tut-tut Israel’s budding response and what “smart policy” recommendations they have on offer to layer on top of their already failed world view’s prior policy recommendations that got os here - but again, I’m getting ahead of myself, we’ll get to that tomorrow.

Today we need to make sure we have our mind right.

Considering America’s vast population and geography, we may not really understand the scale. There is also so much coming out of Israel, it is hard to focus, so I’ll pick just one event and two families to set the mind, then we’re going to help establish a perspective in a broader context.

One part of the attack that sticks in most people’s mind is the attack on the music festival. Exceptional reporting from Liel Liebovitz at Tablet;

I’ve spent the last 12 hours speaking to Israelis who were at the Supernova music festival. Their testimonies, as you would imagine, are very emotional. At least one broke down mid-conversation and wasn’t able to continue his recollection.

The attack on the festival outside of Re’im began around 7 a.m. The party was at its peak by then—which meant that by then most people were inebriated. At first, partygoers heard a loud explosion, which they took to be another sporadic rocket attack on southern Israel. But then the explosions grew louder and constant, and kept going for about five minutes. The music stopped, and the police protecting the 4,000 or 5,000 ravers began pushing everyone to leave.

As is always helpful in such situations, we should go to the map.

Re’im. It is just 3.5 miles as the rocket flies from the Gaza border. The difference is so stark, all you need is an overhead;

That isn’t a difference in soil or terrain. That is simply culture based on a dividing line put on a map 73 years ago, back when the Gaza Strip had a population of about 120,000. Today, it has a population of about 2.3 million.

Problems do not get better with time.

By then, the terrorists were approaching in pickup trucks bearing Hamas military markings.

Shooting began. Many were executed on the spot. 260 bodies have been found, so far, on the site of the rave.

Many of the young men and women started running in the flat expanse of the western Negev desert. Faced with the spectacle of kids fleeing for their lives on a largely flat surface, the terrorists began rounding up the rest of their victims.

Others were captured and bound and kidnapped. “I saw videos with a male getting held by a group of Arab kids. Like, they’re like 16, 17,” one survivor recalled. “They’re kids, but they’re they’re young men already, and they’re holding this guy, and he looks as his girlfriend is being mounted on a bike and driven away from him. God knows what she’s going to experience… Women have been raped at the area of the rave next to their friends bodies, dead bodies.”

Her name is Noa Argamani, 25. A little younger than my oldest daughter

You can see the video here, but I think her face captures well the moment history returned to Israel.

Another datapoint about what we’re dealing with here;

A Hamas terrorist called the mother of two young women who were kidnapped at a music festival and mocked them after they were dragged off to the Gaza Strip, a family friend said.

Tamar David, of Beit Dagan, received the harrowing phone Sunday morning call from the operative, who apparently obtained the phone number from one of her daughters, Hodia, 25, and Tair, 27, Mako reported.

“He called Hodia and Tair’s mother Tamar and laughed at the family,” family friend Tal Hezekiah told the news outlet in Hebrew, adding that he grabbed the phone from the anguished mom.

“Then the terrorist laughed and said to me in broken Hebrew: ‘Do you want to marry her?’ And hung up,” Hezekiah added

And here they are in normal times.

One of the most advanced and modern nations on our planet, little Israel, was subjected to a brutality of the type that is the most base condition of our species - one that is, literally, in our DNA and back to the dawn of the written word.

Young men venture forth to settled people, surprise them, kill the men, and take the women and small children. You cannot get more brain-stem homo sapiens than that. Combine it with modern drones, rockets, and even EU endorsed paraglider air mobile infantry insertion; here we are.

So, the very 21st Century Israel, in a fashion, is being subjected to the most base of human behavior. To fix old problems, you often have to resort to old solutions, but we’ll cover that in Part III.

As most, but not all of my readers here are American, let me jolt us back into the now.

As outlined by the Jerusalem Posts’ Avi Mayer, as of Sunday, it appears Israel has suffered 700 killed in the first attack, other reports state almost 100 are assumed kidnapped.

By geographic size, Israel is a little smaller than New Jersey, In population it has a population of 9.34 million souls - also close to New Jersey.

Coincidentally, it is estimated that New Jersey lost 750 residents on 11 September 2001.

The attacks from Gaza this weekend is not an “Israeli 911.” That isn’t accurate for a whole host of reasons … but for the American mind, it might be useful in order to understand the human scale of the attack.

To use round numbers, the USA has a population of 330 million.

On 911, the USA lost almost 3,000 souls.

The attack on Israel from Gaza this weekend, if scaled up by population, would be the same as if the USA had 24,669 people killed not by aircraft turned in to flying napalm, but by roving terrorist death squads, with an untold number of women and small children kidnapped and taken back across the border. 24,669.

Scaled up to USA proportions - that 100 kidnapped and taken back to Gaza to be subjected to horrors you really don’t want to hear the details of = about 3,500 kidnapped.

What would the USA do in such circumstances?

Why should we expect Israel to do anything less?

I expect more and better information as the week progresses that may make my Part II and Part III OBE. We will also find that some of what we thought was accurate over the weekend and even right now, isn’t - as there is still just too much “first 48-hrs” going on.

So, that’s it for today. Again, tomorrow I’ll post again focused on how we got here. Perhaps Wednesday I’ll share some thoughts about Israel’s options … or at least the three Courses of Action I would brief.

Until then, think of the families who have lost in Israel, and also think of and throw a prayer to if you can, those who will be asked to respond to the attackers and their supporters with the only thing they understand.