Two Years Since the Oct. 7th Slaughter
...what it tells us about non-Israelis...
Hard moments in history are clarifying events. The more difficult, the clearer they can make things for you.
As I have mentioned before, one of the big wake-up calls I received after October 7th, 2023 was how much very real Jew-hate was in modern Western society. Not just there, but excused by a large part of our cultural and political system.
People and institutions revealed themselves to us. Distressing, but clarifying. Don’t look away when you see what is being said and done today. No. Look closer. Remember. Note. Act. Don’t forget.
Politicians, academics, media, entertainment, and just the people down the street revealed themselves. The mask did not slip, for many it was gleefully ripped off.
As for Gaza in 2025, I have no more sympathy than I have for Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. They started wars of aggression, and the victims of that aggression rose to the occasion to stand against evil. They started total war, they invited total war.
Don’t start wars. Don’t support leaders who foolishly bring you into wars. If you are one that wanted war, supported war, or did nothing to stop a war—then behold the feast you brought upon yourself.
Behold the wages of your enterprise.
Israel was, if anything, restrained in this war—more restrained than almost any equally justified military in history.
As we are now starting into the third year of the Israeli-Gaza War of 2023, I’m not going to retell a lot that I’ve already written on the topic. If you want to catch up, see the posts with Gaza and Israel tags.
As we have a peace offering on the table, I want to remind everyone how we got here.
Talk to anyone familiar with the political realities on the ground on October 6th, 2023, and they will tell you that the communities that surrounded Gaza were, politically, the most accommodating and left-leaning you would find in Israel. The ones who had the most sympathy for Gazans. It was those Israelis who received the nightmarish wrath that extruded out of Gaza the morning of October 7th, 2023.
Just look at the killings and kidnappings numbers for a perspective.
Since October 7, 2023, Israel has been at war with the Palestinian Sunni Islamist group Hamas (a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization, or FTO), which led an attack that day from the Gaza Strip into Israel. More than 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals (including 46 U.S. citizens in Israel) were killed on October 7, and Hamas and other groups also seized some 251 hostages.
How should Americans look at those numbers (besides the very real 46 fellow Americans killed). When adjusted for population, that would be as if in one day, 40,729 Americans were killed by an invading force. 8,519 Americans kidnapped.
Would we do any less? I think not.
That is just the murder and kidnapping. I would refer everyone to the Dinah Project Report if they want details of the campaign of rape on October 7th. The injured are in the thousands more.
Now, today, see what is right in front of you. All across the world, the rape and murder that Gazans opened their war with has been rewarded by recognition of a state that never existed. Left-wing cities and college campuses have allowed open Jew-hate to flourish. Hundreds of thousands have marched from Amsterdam to Dearborn supporting Hamas, and as such, wholesale rape, murder, torture, and kidnappings.
It really is that simple. Those who excuse it are, in my mind, as morally bankrupt as those who support it.
Never again? For the worst reasons, we have decided that, perhaps, just a little.
Demand accountability and call it as you see it.
Speaking of institutional rot, I would be remiss—because it is inside the Navy lifelines—if I did not once again remind everyone of the moral cowardice of one of our own institutions. In a venue that justified its existence largely on the lack of attention to the plight of women as victims of war, the staff that run the Women, Peace, and Security program at the Naval War College ignored—just weeks after the mass rape and slaughter of women and girls—the entire atrocity by Gaza.
I am still waiting for full accountability there.
To finish things up, Konstantin Kisin has some points that need to be heard.
My daughter married into a Jewish family, she and her husband live in NYC near NYU. She texted me once that a mob was walking down the street in front of their building chanting "Kill the Jews."
I told her the only real response to that was interlocking fields of automatic weapons fire. I still feel that way.
Well said.
I, too was shocked by the unholy alliance between the Communists, Jihadists and the woke Reich in their hatred for Israel in particular and Jews in general.
I was particularly disappointed in the likes of Tucker Carlson, Andrew Napolitano and others who are undermining Donald Trump as he tries to undo the damage done to our country by the far left.
What I find most distressing is to see the Democrat party of Harry Truman, JFK, Hubert Humphrey and Henry Jackson degenerate into the party of Bernie Sanders, AOC and the Squad and Zohran Mandani under the leadership of Nancy Pelosi and Charles Schumer.
None of this bodes well for America and I haven’t even gotten to Starmer and Macron.