“Israel! Go to Hell!”

“On the one hand I think: Surely this will be sufficient. Surely this amount of blood will be enough to shake the world awake. Surely no one can equivocate or justify this. As my friend Sarah Haider wrote, ‘How easy is it to simply condemn targeted violence against civilians? Can there be a lower bar?’

“And yet, across the world, people have sunk below it.”

I thought, given the scale and ferocity of the attack, that Weiss must be wrong. That most Americans, conservative and liberal alike, would be condemning the action. Especially since the attack was so ferocious and the bloodshed was so indiscriminate.

But that’s not what happened. When I forwarded the issue to a group of my friends, some thanked me, affirming Weiss’s sentiment. But some others indicated that they disagreed, and that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians over the years somehow justified the attack. One said he thought the Israelis “deserved” it.

What I know about the Arab-Israeli conflict is more or less what anyone that has been “impartially” following it in the media for 40+ years knows. I was vaguely familiar with arguments on both sides. But considering the brutality of the Hamas soldiers, I thought that those that were sympathetic to the Palestinians’ plight would at least moderate their responses.

And brutal it was. We know, for example, that they paraglided into a music festival and proceeded to slaughter men, rape woman, and kidnap children, beheading some of them on the spot, and recording and publishing many of their barbarous acts. In one instance, a Hamas soldier took a woman’s cellphone, used it to film him butchering her, and then sent the video to her Facebook page so her friends and family back in Tel Aviv could see his handiwork.

And now they are threatening to execute the hostages they have captured on live television.

This is not the first time we’ve seen this sort of barbarity by radical Muslims. But I don’t think we’ve ever seen the sort of moderate and even defensive reaction to it that this attack has generated.

“People gathered at the Sydney Opera House,” Weiss wrote, “cheering ‘gas the Jews’ and ‘death to the Jews.’ People are rejoicing in the slaughter on the streets of Berlin and London and Toronto and New York…. At our most prestigious universities there is silence from administrations that leapt to speak out on George Floyd’s killing and on the war in Ukraine.”

And among other things, she included this from a report on Oct. 9 by Olivia Reingold and Francesca Block:

“Young girls in hijabs waved Palestinian flags in the street. Men in ski masks hung from scaffolding chanting, ‘Israel, go to hell.’ And pamphlets rained from the sky, lauding the recent violence by Hamas as ‘heroic.’

“This wasn’t the Middle East. This was Midtown Manhattan, home to the second-largest Jewish population in the world after Israel, just days after Israel was ambushed by Hamas in the deadliest terrorist attack in the country’s history.”

If you have the stomach to read more, click here.

And if you’re interested in the mechanics of the attack – how and why it worked so horrifically well – click here.