The longtime hatred behind this massacre
‘Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious.” “When they will have digested the region they overtook, they will aspire to further expansion, and so on. Their plan is embodied in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying.”
“With their money, they took control of the world media... With their money, they stirred revolutions in various parts of the globe... They stood behind the French Revolution, the Communist Revolution, and most of the revolutions we hear about... With their money, they formed secret organizations – such as the Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, and the Lions – which are spreading around the world, in order to destroy societies.”
You wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the quotes above are from Adolf Hitler, the man responsible for the worst crimes against the Jewish people in history. They are built around the same antisemitism, they use the same conspiracy theories, and they drip with the same hate.
But those words weren’t spoken by Hitler, although they could easily have been. Those quotes come from Hamas’s charter. They were written by the same terrorist organization that carried out the October 7 massacre in Israel.
That brutal massacre was an act of antisemitism. It was driven by a hatred of the Jewish people, a hatred of the Jewish state, and a hatred of Jews.
It had nothing to do with national aspirations. It was an act of murderous terrorism, motivated by deeply embedded racism. Nothing in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict justifies the brutality the world witnessed. Nothing in that conflict drove Hamas to carry out some of the worst abuses the world has ever witnessed.
More Jews were murdered on that Saturday than on any day since the Holocaust. Let that fact sink in. The last time so many Jews were murdered in one day was by the Nazis. That was the worst period of murderous antisemitism in history.
Does anyone truly doubt that if they could, Hamas and Islamic Jihad would have murdered every single Jew in Israel? Does anyone doubt they would have carried out a genocide?
The connection between the horrors of the Holocaust and of the massacre in Israel are clear. The Nazis hated Jews because they were Jews. They murdered Jews because they were Jews. And Hamas did too. They hate Jews and they hate the fact that Jewish people have a sovereign country of their own.
It was the dehumanizing effect of antisemitism that motivated Hamas terrorists to murder babies, to execute elderly couples, to abuse corpses, and to rape women.
Antisemitism is also the reason Hamas supporters across the world are celebrating this week. It is the cause for the rise in attacks on Jews across Europe, it is the cause for speakers at rallies extolling the virtues of those who carried out unspeakable acts of barbarism. Those people on the streets of London or New York cover themselves in progress labels but they are racists, nothing more, nothing less.
Israel will defeat Hamas. It will recover from the devastating events and use its military might to ensure that what happened last Saturday can never happen again. That is the right and responsibility of any country toward its citizens.
For the rest of us, there is another mission, a parallel one. That is to wage a no less committed and concerted campaign to defeat antisemitism. It won’t be with military force but it should be with all the tools we have at our disposal. Through education, through legislation, through the media, and by calling out antisemitism wherever we see it.
In 1945, the world promised “Never Again.” But it did happen again. This past week, not for the first time we were reminded exactly where antisemitism always leads. We were reminded that the fight against antisemitism is a fight to save Jewish lives. It is a fight we have no choice but to win.