Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
October 7 should have been an open-and-shut case of moral condemnation.
During peace and holiday, invading Hamas gunmen murdered, tortured, mass raped, decapitated, and mutilated some 1,200 Israelis. The vast majority were unarmed women, children, infants, and the elderly.
The cowardly murderers proudly filmed their atrocities and then fled back to Gaza—to cheers from the Gaza street.
Before Israel even retaliated, the mass murdering of Jews earned praise from the Middle East, the international hard left, and especially the faculty and students of elite Western campuses.
When the Israeli Defense Forces struck back, the killers dispersed to the safety of their multibillion-dollar subterranean cities. The cowardly elite architects of the mass murder fled to Arab sanctuaries in Lebanon and Qatar.
From its headquarters burrowed below hospitals, mosques, and schools, Hamas bartered hostages for a reprieve from the IDF and the release of its own convicted terrorists in Israeli jails.
Hamas shot any of its own supporters who refused to shield Hamas gunmen.
It continued launching rockets at Israeli civilian centers. It serially lied about its casualties, expropriating intended relief food and fuel for its underground tunnel city of killers.
Abroad, Hamas supporters also emulated the methods of the pro-Nazi demonstrators in Western cities of the 1930s. Unlike their pro-Israel critics, the pro-Hamas demonstrators in the U.S. and Europe turned violent.
They took over and defaced private and public property. They chanted genocidal anti-Semitic slogans calling for erasure of the nation of Israel.
They interrupted shoppers, blocked highways, attacked businesses, and swarmed bridges. They assaulted police.
The majority wore masks to hide their identities in the fashion of anti-semitic Klansmen.
Why did the doctrinaire left, the youth of the Democratic Party, and the campuses outdo each other in their anti-semitic venom toward Israel?
For the first time in their lives, many of the ignorant protestors suddenly professed concern about refugees, colonialism, disproportionality, innocent civilians, and the rules of war.
But none could explain why the Palestinians who fled Israel in 1947-48 still self-identify as victimized “refugees” when 900,000 Jews ethnically cleansed from Middle-East Arab cities about the same time do not.
The 200,000 Greek Cypriots driven out from norther Cyprus by Turkey apparently do not warrant “refugee’’ status either.
Few protestors knew that Jews have lived in present-day Israel for over three millennia. The longest colonialist presence there were Muslim Turks who brutally ran the Holy Land for 300 years until they lost World War I and were expelled.
How exactly did it happen that the eighth-century A.D. Al-Aqsa Mosque was built within King Herod’s earlier Second Temple enclosure?
The Pro-Hamas crowd has little appreciation that colonizing Arab Muslims have one of history’s longest records of “settling” other countries far from their historic birthland.
They “settled” and “colonized” the Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine Middle East, Berber North Africa, and southern Spain. Millions of Middle Easterners migrated to—“settled?”— supposedly infidel European cities, where they often self-segregate, and do not assimilate fully with their magnanimous hosts.
As far as “disproportionality,” it is the goal of every power at war, Hamas included.
What protestors are furious about is that Israel is more effective at being disproportionate in retaliation than Hamas and its Iranian supporters were in their preemptive mass murdering.
Targeting innocent civilians? Hamas is among the current greatest offenders in the world.
It rockets Israeli cities without warning. It mass murders Jews in their beds during peace. It exposes Gazans to mortal danger by impressing them as human shields. Hamas shoots those who refuse.
The “rules of war” are violated by Hamas daily. Such protocols require combatants to wear uniforms not to blend in with civilians, not to use them as shields, not to murder noncombatants, not to rape them, not to mutilate them, and not to execute civilians without trial.
Why then would millions ally themselves with this odious reincarnation of the SS?
Are they ignorant of the history of the Middle East?
Are they arrogant since few challenge their hate and threats?
Are they opportunists who feel mouthing anti-Western shibboleths gains them career traction in leftist-run media, academia, and popular culture?
Are they bullies who count on the Western silent majority remaining quiet as they disrupt lives, trash Western tolerant culture, and commit violence?
Like Hamas that they support, do they despise Jews? Why else do they express an existential hatred toward Israelis that they never display to any other group?
Those now on the street utter not a peep about the Sudanese Arab mass killers in Darfur, Chinese oppressors of the Muslim Uighurs, Russians targeting civilians in Ukraine, or ISIS, Syrian, and Yemeni murderers of fellow Muslims.
Yet all of these terrorist killers are guilty of the very charges the protestors falsely attribute to Israel. But they are all not Jewish—and that explains the pass given them by our anti-Semitic, pro-Hamas street.
2Timothy3 I believe, explains the behavior of the haters.
The new Islamo Left.
“Why then would millions ally themselves with this odious reincarnation of the SS?
Two words:
Willful ignorance: Of history, of any humanity, of moral compass. If the world shall be a better place? It is not a world without Jews, It is one without Hamas and all other groups in any similar vein.
Amen! If Hamas laid down their arms and never attacked againn, there would be peace. If Israel laid down their arms, there wold be no Israel.
The very best thing that could happen to these historical illiterates is that we attack them directly and drive them off the streets, severely punishing them as they are demanding of the Jews, but, more to the point, of showing them that they must be held accountable for their actions. That is the issue here; no God, no shame, and no accountability; man’s hubris is in charge without any thought for the consequences of his false pride and damaging actions. These protesters need to be taught a lesson and they need to see what happened in the past to useful idiots. .
The protestors not only need to be taught a lesson–they need to be taught history… right now they are only brainwashed lemmings
I must add………”odious” is far too kind.
Spot on.
Thank you for your willingness to speak out publicly and express the views I have but could never articulate.
Your like a quieter Rush Limbaugh in a tweed jacket. As Rush was irreplaceable you are becoming as well. Don’t stop this country needs your voice.
VDH’s calm, rational analysis keeps this grandma going. Please don’t stop Victor–Paul is correct–we need you..more than ever.
yeah,yeah, yeah, and 911 was a terrorist attack but our killing of 1,000,000 plus Iraqis (Sunis) so we could steal their oil was business as usual. The numbers say it all; America and its vassals (allies) commit murder with impunity but triggered responses are acts of terror. The IDF kill 10 non-jews for every Jew killed. Also. Get off the anti-semite meme. Those Palestinians are just as much semites as the Jews, maybe more so as Israel (modern) was created by returning European Jews, not the native Palestinian Jews.
James –what flavor Kool Aid did you drink to take in ALL of the propaganda and lies so readily?
And yet these so called ‘european jews’ suffered the same pogroms in europe and the holocaust for being semites of the jewish heritage, and they were called ‘palestinians’.
Immanuel Kant called Jews that had been living in europe for many centuries “the Palestinians among us.”
Wilhem Marr established the “league of anti-semites”. Why? Because everyone already knew where the Jews in Europe originated, the middle east, spanning modern day Iraq, Syria, the land known as Israel or ‘eretz yisra’el.
Why did the Nazis put racist posters and racist cartoons in print that depicted these ‘european jews’ as middle eastern looking swindlers and pedophiles? Because they were indeed middle eastern.
Nearly all Jews from Europe are originally from the middle east. It is based in real history, both within the jewish community and and the european host population. It was indeed basic knowledge or common sense…..that is, until the 21st century era of TikTok and Youtube which spread anti-israeli, pro-arab and pro-iranian propaganda among the younger generation in the west. In the digital age, radical anti-semites attempt to deny the history of Israeli people and replace it with completely contrived narratives including the so called ‘nakba’.
Why do white supremacists/neo-nazis like Aryan Nation hate jews? For racial reasons, just like the nazis.
Even genetic studies prove that jews, who settled in spain, france, italy, poland etc are middle eastern, not european.
I wouldn’t call it an open-and-shut case, but there is also an very unsettling theological issue hanging over the horrible assault of October 7th. What violation(s) of the (biblical) covenant
between overlord and contractural people would trigger (or at least allow) this carnage and
debilitation ?
Most of the people marching in the streets and on campus are definitely unhinged as you suggest. They march and say things in blissful ignorance of the facts you have provided. Yet I think they have been guided in their absurd pursuit of “justice” by brilliant diabolical people. The real battlefield is on the streets and campuses of the US and Europe. The atrocities were committed in a horrific way to by Hamas induce a predictable Israeli response. This response has produced civilian casualties. Thus a victory for Hamas. The fictional Palestine described by Joan Peters in “From Time Immemorial” has been restored. Hamas and its directors in Iran may take a victory lap while their supporters in the academy and elsewhere exchange high fives. The strategic purposes of this war have been accomplished: The false history of Palestine has been renewed; Israel has been diminished; and Jew hatred is again out in the open.
We endure a near tyranny of what VDH calls the “arrogant and ignorant”. Such fools should be shunned at minimum or deported to the ME if they really believe their own ignorant utterings. Those who taught these ignorant should definitely be made to live among Hamas. The teachers of such idiocy should definitely be made to live there. The fools who last week demonstrated carrying a banner touting Queer support for Hamas in Palestine know not what they do.
Yes. Ignorance and arrogance have become prime characteristics of woke western culture and self-serving, amoral mainstream media.
I want to say that most of this is sheer ignorance of world history, which is terrifyingly evident when the young are asked to comment on just about any landmark event these days. That doesn’t cover well-educated baby boomers like me, however, who “should know better” because we grew up in an era with better educational standards. My peers who say yes, but… My Jewish fellow New Yorkers, who say nothing. There used to be something called morality, which was an absolute but today has become like defining what is a woman. When we’re in doubt about what is obviously downright evil, where do we go from here except down?
Well said as always Victor! Murdering Coward Savages who are all going to meet their God and He’s not who they expect him to be! God Bless the IDF…..no more cease fires! Send them all to Hell
so the American Bund pulled this nonsense in the 30s. Meir Lansky had a solution: “marinate them boys, but don’t ice anyone”. Stirs nostalgia for the good old days
The idiocy extends even to the LGBQxyz folks, not realizing they’d be the first Hamas victims…..
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VDH wonders why the protesters don’t understand or care about the history of the middle east. If they knew this history, perhaps their actions would be quite different.
But the left lives in a world devoid of such information. This is by design, not to protect them, but to influence their thought and subsequent actions. If you are taught, from birth, to hate certain other people, then that is what you become. If all of your news sources and schooling promote these same ideas, then that is how you turn out. Simple, really. We are pattern recognition machines.
The narratives in your mind, the stories that are supposed to hold us together, are supplanted by hateful rhetoric. This is also referred to as brainwashing.
We are seeing it more every day. It makes you wonder: What happened to free will?
Perhaps citizens’ loss of free will (to learn history and understand the present) has been a side-effect of the woke ignorance and arrogance promoted by self-serving, amoral mainstream media. Not part of their professed mission statements, but driven by their inbred lust for viewer eyeballs and advertiser $.
So magnificently explained that most all will understand the horrors that we, as Americans, can now see the loathsome errors of our young and ignorant countrymen. They who have been so indoctrinated from middle school to university with hate, deceit and lies. I suffer now with great sorrow at what our educational system has dealt to our next generation.
Hello Mr. Hanson
I’m confuse on the Hamas-Israel war. I see and listen to experts like Norman Finkelstein that claim Israel is the one committing genocide on the Palestinian people and that Gaza is one big prison. Also, other war experts like Douglas Macgregor and Scott Ritter claiming Israel is losing the war, and they control the Politician in D.C. Do they have a legitimate claim on Israel’s history?
Thank you for your time.
Tomas
PS – there’s a channel on YouTube called A Day In History. It talks and shows the history of dictators and war atrocities through out history. Was asking how accurate they are with documentary?
Who organizes these street mob protesters? Who prints their signs ahead of time? There’s somebody’s money behind all this.
Excellent and highly appropriate question. One should follow the money. What constitutes sedition? Is not that financier guilty?
Superb article–accurate and easy to understand. Thank you, Professor Hanson!
PLEASE don’t stop your clarion call, Victor!
For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools…
Therefore God gave them up in the lust of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves…
For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another…
And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done…
Romans 1:21,22,24,26,27,28
The Democrat Party Hates America, by Mark Levin, 2023 explains why and how the entire party despises America.
Pre-Civil War and throughout Jim Crow, via anti-Black racism in the South and anti-Semitism. Post Jim Crow via anti-White racism (DEI, CRT, 1619 project etc) and anti-Semitism. Heap on top of that their drive for Language and Thought Control (censorship, and imprisonment), and the War on the American Citizen, the Nuclear Family, and the Constitution.
In other words, the Democrat Party is at war with everything America stands for. So if you stand with Israel as an American citizen, then the Democrat Party is at war with you.
Ignorance and arrogance, combined with zero moral values looks just like this. Oh, and somehow it’s cool to hate the Jews again. Cuz like the Holocaust was so yesterday….if it ever happened…. Well said VDH.
An Israeli Kollel rabbi who lives in the Golan Heights, of whom I read his d’vrai Torah; his commentary on the Torah portion we read each week, asked a self introspection question last week – “Why do I hate the UN; the WHO; the Red Cross: etc., More than I hate Hamas?”
This was in regard to Yaakov’s father in law, Lavan, who cheated and lied to Yaakov at every turn…
Long answer short –
Because these organizations; this father in law Lavan who did indeed provide him with wives and children and wealth – are Supposed to be organizations that look out for everyone’s welfare in a fair and reasonable manner.
Yet, they are lying, cheating, corrupt, hateful institutions that promote injustice, violence, and most of all – hatred towards Israel and Jews.
They excuse Evil and condemn Good.
Hamas is a feral beast supported by drones; idiots; fellow travelers; and nincompoops.
Today, these supposedly respectable organizations are festering cultic gangs led by the thoroughly corrupt Industrial Entertainment Media!
Although generally not covered in the still-dominant media outlets, the pro-Israel rallies have been orderly and larger. . . . I take some solace in that.
Are they ignorant of history??? Yes they are, not just the middle east but everywhere. What happened ? I am 56 loved history, had decent history teachers in highschool and university. Now it seems like no one has even heard of some of the books and authors i took for granted, no offense VDH. It is not just the absence of historical knowledge in context but the nonsense diversity moral code of conduct that has oozed its way into the gaps. This is not going to end well.
One thing I’ve learned from Professor Hanson is that history does indeed repeat itself.
I think that the saying “Those who don’t learn from history, are doomed to repeat it” needs to be updated to “Evil doesn’t care to learn from history, except to determine how not to lose in the present”.
I’ve often wondered what life pre-WW2 might have been like, and it seems like the universe is giving me the opportunity to experience it.
Excellent, as always!
The unhinged, the rabid minds are always among us. I met them in the service in 1967 in Vietnam, I met them when I returned to the states in the Summer of 1968. On the “right” they ranted about the godless communists and fellow travelers. On the “left” they ranted about “The Man” with a religious fervor one finds in very fundamentalist Christians. Both sides never could offer reasoned and logical argument, only the most base of emotions boiling like a witch’s brew at midnight. Anything I said, anything I believe was always wrong to the point that I was an apostate to some religious belief I never knew or held. At least in the San Francisco Bay area I could hold rational discussions with most individuals and while we may not have agreed we could at least have some modicum of respect for each other. I can’t say that much has changed since that time.
“Graffiti is only illegal when you do not have permission to do it from either the owner of the property or the local council”.