Longing for Auschwitz

As time removes us from the horror of October 7th it's easy for those of us living in relative peace and comfort in the U.S. to lose track of exactly why the Israelis are at war with Palestinians in Gaza. We know that the Palestinian military arm, Hamas, and not a few Palestinian civilians perpetrated an attack on Israeli towns, but the sheer savagery and barbarism of the attack gradually recedes from our memories.

Alvin Rosenfeld, writing for Tablet, gives us a vivid reminder in an essay titled "Longing for Auschwitz." He writes:

Hamas’ assault on Israelis on Oct. 7 was not an act of war as we normally think of it but something far worse. We don’t have an adequate term for what occurred on that day, so people use words like “terrorism,” “barbarism,” “atrocity,” “depravity,” “massacre,” and so on.

All are correct, and yet all fall short of capturing the annihilationist fury set loose at the Nova music festival and in the kibbutzim and small towns of southern Israel. The people attacked in those places were not only to die, but to die in torment. In addition to the merciless torture, killings, slashings, burnings, beheadings, mutilations, dismemberments, and kidnappings, there were gang-rapes and other forms of sadistic sexual assault, including, according to some reports, the cutting off of women’s breasts, nails driven into women’s thighs and groins, bullets fired into their vaginas, and even intercourse with female corpses.

Unimaginable? For most normal people, yes. But before going into Israel, the Hamas assassins were instructed to “dirty them” and “whore them.” And that’s precisely what many of them faithfully did.

If it were possible to encapsulate all the evil of that day in a single image, it would be that of the violent seizure of a young Israeli woman, Naama Levy, 19, barefoot, beaten, and bloodied, her hands tied behind her back, the crotch of her sweatpants heavily soiled, possibly from being raped, dragged by her hair at gunpoint into a Hamas car, and driven off to Gaza to suffer an unspeakable fate among her captors there.

Her assailants filmed every second of her ordeal; and as one watches the clips of her being taken away, one sees crowds nearby loudly shouting “Allahu Akbar”—“Allah is the greatest”—a victory cry that offers religious sanction to the malign treatment of Naama Levy and countless others seized, slaughtered, and abducted on that horrific day.

All wars cause human suffering, but the cruelties visited upon Israelis on Oct. 7 far surpass what normally happens when armies go to war. Hamas’ actions had a different aim: not conquest but the purposeful humiliation of Jews by people who detest them and were sworn to degrade and dehumanize them before murdering them.

Our media has largely downplayed the religious nature of this inhuman, demonic attack - although had the attackers been Christian or Jewish there would doubtless be much less reticence about making the connection - but Rosenfeld makes it clear:

The carnage carried out on that day, far from being a by-product of war, was a religiously sanctioned, orgiastic display of unrestrained Jew-hatred. One cannot begin to understand it if one ignores the Hamas Charter and other Islamist teachings that make Hamas the organization it is and inspires it to do what it does.

The cruelties inflicted by Hamas have been the standard Muslim manner of dealing with "infidels" ever since the days of Mohammad. It shocks us largely because we're ignorant of the history of Islam's 1300-year-long war against the West, a history in which atrocities such as Hamas inflicted on October 7th were unexceptional.

Rosenfeld continues:

Hamas originates as a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. It is and always has been a jihadist organization, which sees the existence of the State of Israel as an intolerable intrusion into the Domain of Islam (Dar al-Islam) and is committed to removing Israel by whatever means necessary.

The preamble to the Hamas Charter declares that “Israel exists and will continue to exist until Islam obliterates it, just as it obliterated others before it.” The “Palestinian problem,” it affirms, “is a religious problem” and is not amenable to a negotiated political settlement.

The only way to “raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine” is through “jihad,” a holy war that is a “duty for every Muslim wherever he may be.”

And once they've destroyed Israel they'll resume the assault on Europe that ended temporarily with the failed siege of Vienna in 1683. The imperative to do so is ingrained in their religion, and the West ignores this uncomfortable fact at our peril.

There's more in Rosenfeld's important column at the link.