OPINION:
On Oct. 7, 2023, Israel lost 1,200 innocents to monsters — and too many Americans lost their moral compasses.
Hamas’ barbaric rampage was not only an Israeli tragedy, but also one of the deadliest terrorist attacks on U.S. citizens. Forty-nine Americans were killed. Twelve more were kidnapped, including 3-year-old Avigail Idan, who saw her parents murdered, and Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23, later executed by his captors.
The massacre’s brutality transcended its numbers. The terrorists didn’t just kill. They tied parents and children together with metal wire and burned them alive while they hugged, turning human beings into charcoal. They fired rocket-propelled grenades into bomb shelters crowded with young people who, moments earlier, were dancing at a music festival.
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They didn’t just systematically rape and gang-rape women, men, children and corpses. They cut off women’s breasts and paraded 22-year-old Shani Louk’s naked, beheaded body around Gaza City as a war trophy.
They didn’t just kidnap 251 people. They killed 38 children and abducted 42 more, including eight toddlers and a baby, Kfir Bibas, whom they later murdered.
Hamas’ unbridled savagery was motivated by genocide: Its founding charter vows to “obliterate” Israel and kill all Jews.
Yet even before Israel responded in self-defense, many Americans sided with Hamas’ rapists and murderers. Students at Harvard demonstrated against Israel the next day. Others tore down posters of kidnapped Jewish children.
Then-future New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani falsely accused Israel of genocide on Oct. 20, 2023 — a week before Israeli forces even entered Gaza. His likely inspiration: On Oct. 17, a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket hit a Gaza hospital, which Hamas falsely blamed on Israel.
The most baffling irony: Young people at concerts, who ostensibly support women’s rights, proudly waving the flag of the Palestinian terrorists who raped and sexually mutilated women at an Israeli concert.
As Franz Kafka observed: “They say ignorance is bliss. They’re wrong.”
STEPHEN A. SILVER
San Francisco, California
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