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Thoughts on October 7th
This post in its original form was eaten by the Chrome browser on my Galaxy Fold 4. I wrote the first version while waiting to pick up my son from his after-school club meeting. This is shorter and has less detail, but hopefully conveys similar thoughts.
I have been reading a lot of The Free Press lately and they have had some amazing coverage of the October 7th tragedy. The first article I recommend is “The Day the Delusions Died” by Konstantin Kisin. He reflects on the tendency for American Jews to align with Progressivism, or at least the Left, and has this quote:
A friend of mine joked that she woke up on October 7 as a liberal and went to bed that evening as a 65-year-old conservative. But it wasn’t really a joke and she wasn’t the only one. What changed?
What changed, indeed? It wasn’t just what happened in Israel on Oct 7th, but what happened in the US with cities hosting Pro-Hamas rallies and college and high school kids chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” For those that don’t completely get that slogan, it is saying that from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, there will be nothing but Palestine. That isn’t a call for a two-state solution but for just Palestine. What happens to the Jews, many born in Israel, when that happens?
Well, Rupa Subramanya went to a Pro-Palestinian rally in Ottawa to see for herself. The level of ignorance and lack of understanding of the history of the region is astounding, but perhaps it shouldn’t be knowing how terrible the Western educational system is. I have no idea how many of these people were educated in Canada or someplace else. She concludes by asking people what should happen to the Jews who live in Israel:
Everyone I spoke with said the political entity of Israel had to be wiped off the map, but they were unclear about what should happen to the Jews living there.
When I asked Abdullah and his friends, including a woman who only agreed to speak with me off-camera, where the Jews should immigrate to, they were vague.
“They should go back to their country,” the woman said. She added that Zionists “believe they have to be there and kill people and take their home, and no matter what they have to stay there. No matter what. There is a difference. But Jewish, they know, this is not their state. This is not their place.”
There’s a certain logic to this thinking—if you accept that the Zionists who first came to Palestine were trespassers, and the founding of the modern Israeli state was an abomination (a nakba). But this formulation glosses over the fact that, as of 2020, 78 percent of Israelis were native-born, or sabras.
Next, Free Press founder Bari Weiss wrote about the double standard that the New York Times is now displaying. She looked back at what drove her from the Times, the op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton on the use of the military to restore order in the cities wracked by “mostly peaceful protests.” She then relates:
[O]n October 17, The New York Times sent a false report to all of its readers that presented, as fact, Hamas talking points. It claimed that Israel had bombed a hospital, killing 500 people: “Israeli Strike Kills Hundreds in Hospital, Palestinians Say.”
The headline was untrue on every level. The bomb was not Israeli, but a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket aimed at Israel that misfired. The bomb didn’t hit the hospital, but the hospital parking lot. Hamas claimed that 500 people were killed, but a senior European intelligence source told AFP he thought the death toll was under 50; U.S. intelligence estimates that the number stands between 100 and 300. And it wasn’t Palestinians that said as much to the Times, but the Gaza Health Ministry—which is run by Hamas.
There was no uproar at the Times in response to this journalistic malpractice—at least not in public. Perhaps some expressed their concerns privately, for fear of reprisal.
Lastly, and this one is perhaps the most powerful, Candace Mittel Kahn writes an article about an old friend of hers who is tearing down posters of the kidnapped. Her article is one of the best clearinghouses for some of the atrocities committed. In just one paragraph (that doesn’t even capture it all):
There are a lot of horrors that have been reported in the last seventeen days—rape that broke women’s pelvic bones, babies riddled with bullets, children whose fingers and feet were cut off, entire families that were burned to death with their hands tied behind their backs, a pregnant woman whose fetus was cut out of her stomach while she was still alive. For parents, though, there may be nothing as agonizing as the ongoing terror of children being held captive by an ISIS-style jihadist terrorist organization that revels in Jewish suffering. As one parent put it, that would be worse than death.
What happens when a person that you know, that you agreed with, is now seen tearing down the missing posters of the kidnapped?
I was scrolling Instagram this week when I came across another one of these videos. This one was of a woman and a man together ripping down the posters in Williamsburg. I almost skipped past it when I noticed something. I turned up the volume.
After the woman finishes scraping the remainders of the poster from the street post, while muttering the word calba, the Arabic word for dog, she then turns to the camera—presumably to the person filming her vandalism—and says, “[REDACTED] you. [REDACTED] you. And burn in hell.”
And that’s when my heart dropped: I know her.
I can only imagine how painful that is…well, I do have some frame of reference, and it hurts when people that you know…who are friends or were, say things that are hurtful, or worse.
There is a question that David Harsanyi and Mollie Hemmingway pondered on this week’s podcast. Will Jews break with the Left? Some think they will, others are more skeptical. Put me in the skeptical category.
Intersectionality has never really made sense. I remember watching the movie Milk with Sean Penn, where San Francisco politician Harvey Milk created a coalition of conservative Blacks, Hispanics, Gays, and progressives to get elected. He promises the Blacks that if they support the Gays, then the Gays will support them later. That this ever worked doesn’t make a lot of sense as the coalition is inherently unstable because too many of the underlying goals differ. Of course, for politicians, it doesn’t matter because they don’t tend to have any integrity anyway, but they snowed the voters and have for decades, and I suppose it works OK until the goals of one group are the death of another.
I suspect that American Jews will stick with the Democrats for two reasons. One will be that they can delude themselves that American Muslims don’t want to kill them all, and two, the Media and the organs of the Intersectionality Caucus will continue to portray Republicans as anti-Semites and bigots and American Jews will believe them because the Media says it’s true. Just look at those people in Ottawa for a glimpse of how people delude themselves.
Published in General
Losing what you think is a very well-written thing, especially in such a way, can be upsetting. If you must use a phone for such things, I would encourage you to first write the text as a gmail to yourself, since gmail auto-saves the draft frequently.
I agree with you. Some may leave the Dems but most won’t.
Ive been reading a lot of the same things as you. Some other amazing resources are Tabletmag.org, The Media Line, and of course Commentary. The article about the realization that you know someone tearing down posters of hostages was really powerful.
I read Ms. Kahn’s piece as well and it is strong.
The tearing down of these posters was contemplated by someone on X. He said he wasn’t able to make the act fit within the biases and mindsets he can usually discern as the basis for an action, but then he figured it out.
The posters, he said, are a slap in the face to the leftist worldview. They challenge the set narrative and shame the believer. Rather than examining the beliefs, a person will destroy the thing that challenges them. So, if the posters are gone, so is the shame and any need to reconcile conflicting beliefs.
Wish I could recall the thread, but I’ll try to locate it.
I should have hit save draft on the post.
Speaking of a slap to the face of the leftist worldview… I might be late to the game here, but lefties have spent the last two decades reflexively deriding everyone to the right of Rachel Maddow as Nazis. Nazis were a particularly notorious brand of aggressive war makers, the worst ever, because of their genocidal actions. Now that another group is actively pursuing Nazi goals of killing Jews just because they are Jews, they must be suffering from some cognitive dissonance. Libs are now effectively supporting Nazis in robes. That’s gotta hurt when your team advocates for the very thing you’ve been condemning for your whole life.
For the most part, the only Dems I see condemning Hamas and Tlaib appear to be Jewish. Wha? Maybe your team ain’t who you thought they were. Hey Obama! Which side of history are you on?
That’s great if you remember. And if you haven’t made some significant changes since the last “save” and THEN it gets lost…
gmail seems to do it automagically every few seconds.
So does Word, and Outlook, OneNote, etc. That is all well and good, but when I am sitting in my car reading X or FB and see something that I think the community will appreciate I usually just open up Chrome and hit the Start a Conversation button. It just so happened that I was about 90% done when my son finally came out of the school and I just closed up my phone and drove home. Then I opened it back up to finish the post…and the post was gone. Sometimes I am disappointed by mobile OSes when they aren’t quite as robust as desktop ones.
Sure, but you don’t need to install Word or anything else on your phone, if you just use gmail, through Chrome which you already have. Even if Chrome gets closed, your draft is still safe within your gmail account.