Get the Ricochet app
Ricochet will work fine in a browser on your mobile devices, but for the best experience please download our app.
The war isn't just with Hamas/Hezbollah/Iran. The fight also must be against the antisemites in the West making excuses for terrorists. They are in academia, the media, student bodies, all around us. The IDF is fighting them as well with a 45-minute screening of unedited videos and pictures of the Hamas terror attack against Israelis for international journalists and media members.
By all accounts, many were incredibly shaken by what they saw. Some left the screening in tears. No cameras were allowed out of respect for the victims and their families but I completely agree with the IDF doing this. It is incredibly important for people to bear witness to what happened.
Obviously, some of the media is trying to turn a blind eye to what happened while simultaneously calling for a ceasefire and allowing these monsters to get away with it. I'm glad Israel and the IDF are combating the enemy on public opinion as well.
Here is a link to a Medialine article about the screening. It is very graphic both in photos and content. Don't feel like you have to click on it if you don't want to.
Discussion (28)
To read this bio, please join Ricochet.
I won't click on it, but I'm glad you're writing about it.
To read this bio, please join Ricochet.
It's not gratuitously graphic but that doesn't mean it isn't disturbing. I believe the IDF has only released some redacted and blurred videos and images but what the journalists saw was unedited.
MODERATOR
To read this bio, please join Ricochet.
I agree with the IDF doing this, and given the very elevated degree of respect that Jews customarily show the dead, this was quite remarkable. What is so damning of our culture is that the IDF needed to do this at all, with the usual anti-semites in the media and in academia questioning eye-witness reports of the savagery.
I haven’t watched yet, waiting for a time when I feel psychologically able, but people - journalists- have to see this. That’s their job.
Otherwise basic human psychology will abstractify and minimize these retail atrocities, then lump them into a category and move onto the next thing.
In the 9/11 attack the 3,000 dead were the result of one heinous act, and we quickly forgot the individual lives destroyed. For a few days, we saw clips of people jumping to certain death to save themselves from the torture of heat and flames… the phone calls of desperation… and then nothing.
This attack was different - very different. These monsters deliberately tortured and humiliated ordinary people up close and personal. It takes a certain kind of evil to do things like that.
Most ordinary people cannot fathom that level of brutality and inhumanity. One has to see it for themselves. I know I had to see it to (really) believe it.
If you ask me, these atrocities show a stark contrast between these two forces beyond any political dispute. The fact these acts have not been denounced in the strongest terms possible makes it a simple choice.
These journalists are not going to be able to see simple equivalencies between the two ‘sides’ after that.
I happen to be intimately familiar with an atrocity that occurred during WWII as my father survived it.
A Japanese submarine torpedoed and sank a merchant ship in the Indian Ocean, picked up the survivors, bound them and selected them one by one to be beaten, stabbed and killed by the crew armed with pipes and bayonets. 77 men were killed and 20 survived. My father was a POW in Japan for 18 months including 40 days handcuffed to a pipe on the sub and beaten almost daily. My father held no grudges against the Japanese people- and he was a tough, tough man. He did work to track down the commander of the sub who had done the same thing with survivors of a Dutch ship after the war and testified at the war crimes trials.
He and many other Americans had no desire to torture, rape or humiliate Japanese civilians or even combatants once they were defeated (or during the war).
So which society was superior? Proud to say I think it’s ours.
You're seeing five of 28 comments. Sign in, or join for just $5 per month, to read them all and add your own.