The Nazis Of Our Time
Don't dare look away from Hamas and their Jew-hating backers among us
ROD DREHER
OCT 9

Blurred out: the naked and defiled body of Shani Louk, displayed as a trophy
Good afternoon. I’ve been late getting to you because I had an accident with my laptop on the night before I left for the US. The screen was destroyed. I had to buy a new one, and it took a day to migrate the data. Anyway, I’m back now — and it’s probably for the best that I had no access to writing this newsletter in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas terror attack on Israel. My emotions were very high after seeing those videos going around online. I thought nothing could outrage me more than seeing the body of the Israeli raver, naked, legs broken, being transported around Gaza in the back of a pickup truck by terrorists. A male resident of Gaza is seen in the clip spitting on her body. “Allahu akbar!” they say.

(She was later identified as Shani Louk, a German-Israeli pacifist and peace campaigner who used her German citizenship as a reason to avoid mandatory military service in Israel, which she claimed would violate her conscience. Nothing else needs be said, does it? Here’s the last video clip of her alive, dancing at the rave.)

I thought Shani Louk was the worst thing I had seen, but no. It was the kidnapped Israeli toddlers caged by Hamas. The poor kids have no idea what’s going on. I’m not going to post a photo or a link on the off chance that it’s fake. But we know without question that Hamas kidnapped 150 Israelis, including children. And we know this much (from the Free Press); follow the links if you dare. And I hope you will:

When Hamas invaded Israel this morning, terrorists streamed across the border in pickup trucks, by motorcycle, on foot, and even on paragliders. Once inside Israel, they abducted and murdered Israelis. They shot people in cars and at bus stops, they rounded up women and children into rooms like Einsatzgruppen—yes, the comparison is appropriate—and machine-gunned them. They went house to house to find and murder civilians hiding in their closets, and they dragged the bloody, dead bodies of Israelis back into Gaza where they are now being paraded, beaten, and mutilated in front of exultant crowds.

One young woman was murdered and stripped to her underwear, and her corpse was thrown in the back of a pickup truck so it could be paraded around Gaza while young Hamas men beat and mutilated her body.

Hamas terrorists attacked a music festival in the desert. Dozens were killed and injured, and many more are missing. Footage shows young Israelis running for their lives.

Small Israeli towns and kibbutzim near the Gaza border were turned into scenes reminiscent of ISIS in Syria, with gangs of terrorists riding through the streets in pickup trucks shooting anything that moved. And then there are the Israelis who have been abducted and taken to Gaza as hostages. How many of them, dead and alive, are there? We don’t know, but if the number of appalling videos and heartbreaking social media posts from people looking for missing family members are anything to go by, the figure is without precedent in Israeli history.

These images and videos are repulsive. But they must be seen and understood to comprehend what is coming next.

That’s why you should watch them. You’re not going to be able to understand why the Israelis do what they’re about to do unless you see the horror directly. I read that proportional to Israel’s population, the attacks would be as if the US had seen 25,000 of its people murdered by terrorists on a single day.

This got to me with particular pain because just last week I had been at the Jewish Museum in Vienna, and had immersed myself in the fate of the city’s Jews in the Holocaust. Here’s the newsletter I wrote about it. You might recall my posting a photo of Viennese Jewish children playing next to the city’s Holocaust memorial, and noting the unbearable pathos of the image:

With that in mind, to see the image of the caged Israeli children split me in two. I hope it’s fake. I fear it’s not. In any case, we know Israeli children are in the hands of these Jew-murdering Islamo-Nazis. Here is one: the daughter of Yoni Asher, who I heard on the radio this afternoon talking about how his wife and two “baby girls” (his words) are now in Hamas’s hands:

I have been struck hard by the many images of pro-Hamas protesters in major Western capitals, and online. Not all of them are Muslims. The Democratic Socialists of America in NYC announced a big Palestine rally on the same day of the attacks. It’s incomprehensible to normal people. You don’t have to approve of Israel’s policies towards the Palestinian people to utterly deplore the savagery Hamas visited on innocent people. But there are more than a few people throughout the West who think it’s something to celebrate.

Once Israel’s attack on Gaza ramps up, I fear that a lot of European cities will burn. Europeans have been complete fools to allow so many Islamic migrants into their countries. What they’re celebrating doing to Jews in Israel today they will celebrate doing to Christians and secular Westerners in Europe tomorrow. What more do you need to know? There it is, right in front of you.

If this were Hamas attacking the Israeli army, it would be distressing, but that’s war. But this was Hamas massacring innocent people, raping women, kidnapping women and children. This was absolute barbarians driving through town displaying the naked and defiled corpse of a peace activist, inviting the public to desecrate her body.

This is who they are, Hamas. This is who the people you see in Western cities protesting in favor of Hamas are.

Meanwhile, Europe’s borders remain wide open to the south. This is what a pack of f—king fools the European ruling class are:

European elections are coming up. There had better be a swing to the hard right in Europe, or there won’t be a Europe in time.

This past weekend’s events have also lifted the veil over the hard left in the West. I told you in Live Not By Lies that they are totalitarians. Now look:

Years ago, I began writing about Tommy Curry, a radical black philosophy professor at Texas A&M. Curry wrote and said things — publicly documented — talking about how white people needed to die for the sake of racial justice — and saying there is no such thing as innocent whites. I wrote about him extensively on The American Conservative, but the magazine, in its wisdom, has paywalled everything I wrote. Unsurprisingly, some powerful people in Texas wondered why the hell a taxpayer-funded university was employing a race hater in its philosophy department. Curry decamped for Europe, and the Chronicle of Higher Education wrote a pathetic long piece painting Curry as a victim of right-wing white lunatic Rod Dreher.

You had better take the dehumanizing rhetoric of the Tommy Currys of the academic world seriously. You don’t think they mean it? Of course they mean it! They are talking themselves into legitimizing terrorist atrocities. They are celebrating people who did things like record the murder of an elderly Jewish woman with her own phone, upload it to the old woman’s Facebook pagefor her relatives to discover.

Take a moment to pray for the innocents of Gaza who will suffer and die because of Israel’s just retaliation against Hamas, which rules Gaza. If Israel had another choice, it would take it. Here is an amazingly detailed analysis from Agence France Presse explaining how the Israeli leadership completely misunderstood Hamas. They really believed Hamas could and would moderate in time.

It won’t. They are complete ideological fanatics. We in the modern West cannot understand this. Shame on us, because it happened within living memory of the oldest of us, when the Nazis came to power. The Jews of Vienna, Berlin, and elsewhere could not fathom what their Gentile neighbors were prepared to do to them. Not all were Nazis, but nobody was strong enough to stand against the Nazis. When Germany annexed Austria, German troops were greeted as heroes.

There are people who pity the Palestinians. I am one of them. Last year, I stood on the roof of a building in Bethlehem while a European who works there pointed to me Palestinian lands that were being usurped by Israeli settlers. This is unjust! I walked around Bethlehem, which, the first time I visited (in 2000), was a nice city, but which now is more or less a prison. The Westerner goes there and sees that, and thinks: this is not right. This cannot be right.

How many people know what happened to cause the Israelis to build those walls and fortifications? A long campaign of suicide bombings during the Second Intifada (2000-2005). How many people know that the Israelis ceased to occupy Gaza in 2005, dismantled its settlements, and let the Palestinians rule themselves. They elected Hamas. What many in the West don’t know or refuse to acknowledge is that Hamas does not want a two-state solution, or any settlement with the Israelis. It wants the total eradication of the Jewish state. In its 1988 founding document, Hamas states:

The Islamic Resistance Movement is a distinguished Palestinian movement, whose allegiance is to Allah, and whose way of life is Islam. It strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine, for under the wing of Islam followers of all religions can coexist in security and safety where their lives, possessions and rights are concerned. In the absence of Islam, strife will be rife, oppression spreads, evil prevails and schisms and wars will break out.

This is why Palestinian Christians with whom I spoke over twenty years ago in the Holy Land told me on background that they didn’t like the Israelis, but they were terrified of Hamas.

And:

There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors.

No government, and no state, that endured what Israel just suffered at the hands of Hamas can permit such an enemy to live, if it has the power to stop them. You readers who sympathize with the Palestinian cause must recognize that Hamas is not fighting for a two-state solution. It is fighting for the annihilation of the Jewish state, and the imposition of an Islamist state. There is a reason that Hamas held one election in Gaza, and after it won, no more. We are talking about totalitarian religious fascists. There can be no compromise with people like that. The Israelis allowed themselves to think otherwise.

I said in the past that the rage I felt over 9/11 carried me into believing in a foolish and unjust war, because the US Government told me to. The Israelis don’t have the luxury of contemplating war. The existence of the Jewish state is on the line right now. There is reason to believe that the mighty IDF is in worse shape to fight this war than we thought.

The world could look very different, very soon. This war could easily spread. As I write this, reports are coming in that Hezbollah is mobilizing on the Lebanon-Israel border. Islamic militants living in Europe could burn cities. Turkey is making war noises. This could all happen not months from now, but days.

I hate the reflexive instinct by US journalists in times like this: to frame everything in terms of Is It Going To Increase Islamophobia? They are so far down the left-wing hole that they can’t help themselves. That said, it is important to keep in mind that not every Muslim supports what Hamas did. Right after 9/11, a friend who was at the time a Jewish anti-terror investigator who worked closely with Muslim informants said that they couldn’t do their work dismantling terror plots without the cooperation of plenty of Muslims. These were Americans who despised the radicals, but who had to be very quiet to save their own lives from Islamists who live in this country. We may never know who among our own Islamic population despises what Hamas did, but who can’t speak up for fear of violent reprisal. Still, if we have Muslims among us who don’t have to fear, I hope they speak up. It’s important. Here’s one who is speaking out: Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, who said this on Twitter:

The fantasy of liberating and free Palestine always included the idea of the indiscriminate mass murder of Jews in their towns, streets, shops, and living rooms. Living in Egypt for 23 years, I grew up in a general culture in which a good portion of political and religious moral identity and thinking during my upbringing revolved around Palestine. Every Arab and Muslim who is honest with themselves knows this! Those who follow me know I have dedicated a good part of my life to track, understand, and combat this fantasy. Since then, I have located the origins of these murderous fantasies, the antisemitism, and the mass political nightmare in 19th-century German political theory and not in something inherent to Islam itself or Arab culture. Regardless, none of this changes the fact that this way of thinking is too prevalent and too common, systematically legitimated, supported, and defended by Western liberal and leftist academic and political institutions. The images we saw were no doubt a glimpse of how such a fantasy would look in reality. This much is clear from the enthusiastic reactions from far too many people, which is a cruel reminder of how much such antisemitism is widespread spread, particularly among Arab and Muslim societies and communities. Most of the reaction, or the lack thereof, from the Abraham Accord countries was an utter disappointment and helped to solidify a conclusion that has been dawning on me, yet I have been resisting for some time: this was much less about a new Arab internalization of values of human life or human rights, or some new enlightening understanding religion, God, man, or his place in the cosmos than it was about strategy, economy, technology, and prosperity very narrowly and exclusively understood as economic development. These people want to make money and thus most of their concerns currently have to do with the possible strategic and regional fallout, instability, etc. than the continuation of a dehumanizing culture and mass atrocities in the Middle East, "the Europe of the 21st century." These tendencies among the new generation of GCC professional pundits, commentators, officials, etc. were sadly mostly enforced by their Western education and value-free liberal education. In this, I can unironically say they are the last liberals. Where do we go from here? I do not know. But I know one thing: what I wish to see from a lot of my young, multi-lingual, Western-educated Arab and Muslim friends. We, and I'm one of you, made it to the Western middle class. We have prodigious education and good careers, and we genuinely feel that his new cosmopolitan professional class is where we truly belong. Continued in first comment.