The civilian death toll in Israel is now over 700. Many of the victims were cravenly executed, within view of family members, in random sprees of house-to-house massacres. The sight of lifeless Israeli mothers, fathers and children stripped naked with their hands bound behind their backs tells the story of pre-medieval barbaric killers. In video after video, mobs of chanting revelers kick dead bodies around like discarded refuse. In one video, a woman is dragged disheveled and terrified from the back of a jeep, her pants stained with blood. So much for the religion of peace.
It is hard to believe that, not so long ago, the world smugly insisted that Israel was the obstacle to peace. That it was the indignity suffered as a result of Israeli “occupation” that for decades triggered Palestinians to joyfully turn their own children into human bombs, targeting Israeli civilians sitting with family at Passover seders or in pizza parlors, discos and buses. Many peoples throughout history have been “occupied,” but none have disregarded the sanctity of human life like the Palestinians have.
What we are witnessing today is simply the grand finale of a decades-long hate fest that, because of its seemingly disjointed and random acts of terror, was substantially papered over. But the heinous truth revealed on Saturday was so morbidly grand in scale that it cannot, as has been our practice before this, be filed away and forgotten.
If reality isn’t blatantly obvious now then it never will be. The abscess of terror Israelis have suffered over the past three decades and was benignly compartmentalized by non-Jews and Jews alike, has erupted like Mount Vesuvius. Pure unadulterated Jew-hatred for the sake of Jew-hatred is the abyss into which we are all staring. For Jews especially, who had for so long been afforded the luxury of squirreling Palestinian atrocities away, there is no longer any escape from the truth. The meaning of dead children and parents laid out like yesterday’s garbage is too simple to misconstrue.
Giving credit where credit is due, the Iranian-Hamas axis has done exactly what their charters—which the fawning world has always taken for theatrics—set out to do. Revenge is prohibited by the Torah. It is now time to ingest this axis of evil’s racist words and actions and fulfil our obligation to protect ourselves, our families and our communities. We must ensure that, down to the last cancerous cell, Western civilization is liberated from the ravages of this pre-medieval perversion.
