I have been relatively quiet for the last two weeks, preferring to take my time to process what just happened. Unfortunately, my job and my personal inclination compel me to follow social media. I have noted a strange shift. Until the Hamas attacks, Palestinian advocates routinely twisted the message of the Holocaust to suit their nefarious genocidal plans to murder Jews. Of course, that was perverse and sick, but it was, nonetheless, prevalent. That has all but disappeared from social media. Instead, Israelis are referring to the attack with comparisons to the Holocaust in a way that was previously avoided and even denigrated. Nothing was ever comparable to the Holocaust.
Until now. Many Israelis feel that we are reliving pre-Holocaust reality.
But are these Holocaust comparisons valid? In my opinion, they are absolutely called for and should be amplified in the public forum. This was indeed the worst single day of murdering Jews since the Holocaust officially ended in 1945. But the comparisons go much deeper.
The images bore unmistakable similarities. I saw one photo of a bomb shelter in which an entire family was murdered. The walls bore the bloody handprints of the family’s last moments, reminding me of the scratches of fingernails in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. The Hamas animals went to great lengths to burn Jews before and after they were executed, just as the Nazis did. In one case, forensics indicated that a fetus had been ripped from its mother, and the bodies burned beyond recognition. Many, including babies, were decapitated.
This was not just a mass murder. This was an expression of hatred for the Jewish people, an attempt to incinerate any memory of our existence. This was Amalek and, as Jews, we are commanded to eradicate their memory.
All this is true and while I am deeply saddened, I recognize that I am blessed to be part of the Jewish people at a time when we are in the land of Israel. Our soldiers are the physical descendants of the warrior King David, singing psalms when they are not fighting. I can say with one hundred percent honesty that neither my wife nor I are afraid. While it is true that Israel faces numerous enemies who will resort to the most horrific means to kill all the Jews, this is not new. Throughout history, many have tried and none of these enemies exist today. And I am content, knowing that I am precisely where God wants me to be.
If Israel is wiped out (God forbid one million times), the world will suffer horribly for its crimes and its loss. Without the Jews, there will be no Torah in the world and it will surely sink back into its pre-Ten Commandment ways.
When Gen. Eisenhower entered the Ohrdruf concentration camp in April 1945, he was horrified by what he witnessed. Eisenhower invited the media into the camp to document the horrors. He forced those Germans living in the surrounding towns and any soldier not fighting at the front to witness the atrocities for themselves. Despite the magnitude of the Holocaust, Eisenhower envisioned a day when men would deny that it had ever happened.
We are witnessing this today. In the first days after the October 7 massacre, images of the brutality were provided by the Palestinians themselves who supported Hamas and saw the murder of more than 1,400 Jews as a great success, a necessary aspect of their nationalist aspirations, the beginning of a Palestine “from the river to the sea” where the Jews have been murdered. Independence was not enough. The Palestinians will only accept a land that has been soaked in Jewish blood.
But after a few days, the narrative shifted and the same people who had been crowing in delight now denied that Jews had died. Despite the undeniable evidence, much of the media went along, complicit in the genocidal movement, confusing evil with good, clamoring for “humanitarian treatment” of Hamas. I read social media and am stunned at the posts that decry Israel’s military response without any mention of the murder of 1,400 Jews. It feels like Holocaust denial.
The lies were blatant. Israel was guilty of killing 500 Gazans by bombing a hospital despite video and audio evidence that the destruction was caused by a rocket fired by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Despite later images clearly showing that the hospital was still standing, Israel was still blamed by many media and by some Democratic politicians. The media reported on and then denied that Hamas had decapitated babies, despite forensic proof. This allowed the media to give Hamas a pass for the murder of the babies. Israel was blamed for closing border crossings into Gaza that had been destroyed by Hamas in the assault and despite hundreds of tons of humanitarian aid being held up at the Rafah crossing in Egypt.
Israel is challenged. On one hand, we must remain holy in a region dominated by Ishmael. At the same time, the Western nations hold us to standards they don’t even pretend to uphold when they go to war.
This is an impossible task. The Western nations will never forgive the Jews for surviving the Holocaust.
But I am not worried for myself. I am worried for the American Jews. Moments after more than one thousand Jews were massacred in the most horrific way possible before we could even count our dead, mass rallies began. While they claimed to be in support of the “Palestinians”, these rallies began before Israel began its response. These were not people motivated by humanitarian concerns. These were people coming to celebrate, to exult in the murder of Jews that they had been anticipating for years. Their murderous aspirations had finally materialized. It didn’t matter that Gazans would inevitably suffer. Jewish blood was flowing and that was all that mattered.
This is the result of an unholy Gog and Magog alliance of Esau and Ishmael, of the dark side of liberalism collaborating with Ishmael, the historic enemy of Christianity. While the precepts of liberalism seem to contradict the dictates of Islam, the two have united in their hatred of Israel. This has been in the works for decades. While Islam immigrants were welcomed as refugees, Islam, whose name means ‘submission’, requires that their ‘faith’ rules.
Using liberalism as a means to take over the education system, American children are now the shock troops for radical Islam.
In 1975, I was freshly Bar Mitzvah-ed when my synagogue in the suburbs of Philadelphia told all the children that we were going to New York City. The United Nations passed resolution 3379, declaring that Zionism was racism. We proudly wore pins declaring “I am a Zionist”, filling lower Manhattan from the Hudson to the East River, packing it with Jews unafraid to declare that we were Zionists.
But the times have changed. The reaction of the Jews to the murders in Israel was muted, at best. Friends told me that they were afraid to protest. The Jewish response was overshadowed by huge rallies euphemistically claiming to support the Palestinians. What they really supported was the murder of Jews. These “pro-Palestinian” rallies were a celebration.
Never again had lasted 80 years and no more.
The tides have turned and the mask is off. There are no more pretenses. The Palestinians are Arabs, members of a movement with its beginnings in Yasser Arafat’s PLO. They do not want land. Israelis have always known this.
Jews in exile have been in denial for so long that they actually began to believe the obvious lie that anti-Zionism was not Jew-hatred. Synagogues are being burned and Jewish houses in Germany are being marked with Jews stars. Assaults of Jews have been commonplace in the US since the attack. It is clear that the folks protesting for Palestine want to bring Hamas to their town.
When I learned about the Holocaust as a teen, I thought to myself that my generation was so much smarter than the silly European Jews who waited too long, ignoring the clear signs. As I watch what is going on in the US, I realize that I am seeing history repeat itself.
