Excavating Evil

    Note: I finally took up the heart-wrenching but essential task of reading the report recently laid out by the British Parliament, on the atrocities committed by Hamas against Israel on October 7, 2023. I took specific notes on a number of things as I was reading (knowing I would be foolish enough to attempt writing something about it), but at the same time I committed many items, feelings, etc., to memory. The following has already been written and checked and written again, but my insecurities at writing about such a weighty and emotional topic made it necessary for me to say something in advance. It is my sincerest hope I got everything right. My apologies, in advance, for any shortcomings you, the reader, may find.

    They reduced Jews to ashes. In 2023, a fascist army burned Jews to death. The Jews’ names were Ram Itamari, 56, a transportation manager, and his wife, Lili Itamari, 63, a schoolteacher. They were in their home in Kibbutz Kfar Aza in southern Israel on October 7, 2023 when the unit of anti-Semites showed up. The gunmen saw the Jews through a window so they set fire to the house. It burned at such a scorching temperature that when the Israeli authorities finally went in, they found not one trace of the couples’ bodies. It took archaeologists 3 weeks of sifting through the soot to discover even a tiny sliver of bone. It was subsequently DNA-tested. It was them.

    We are three decades into the 21st century and we are again searching among ash for the remains of Jews. Following decades of the cry, ‘Never Again’, humanity once more found itself foraging in the blackened remains of a building for the incinerated remnants of the Jews who lived there. This detail from the new British parliamentary report on the barbarism of October 7th should chill the blood of everyone who reads it. For it is October 7s clearest echo, among thousands of clear echoes, of the Nazi atrocities of the 20th century. This report leaves no doubt: October 7th was more than terrorism, more than a war crime – it was a savage rupturing of human civilization itself.

    The October 7th Parliamentary Commission Report, overseen by the excellent biographer and historian Lord Andrew Roberts, is a horrifying and essential document. It bears witness, in grim, meticulous detail, to the carnival of anti-Semitic violence carried out by Hamas and its allies on that day. It is a forensic account, over 300 pages, of every crime committed by those armies of anti-Semities on that darkest day. And it names and pays tributes to the Jews and others who were slaughtered. ‘‘We have done this so that future generations will not be misled about the true extent and the horror of the massacre’’, says Roberts. ‘‘This report is a ship of truth in the West’s frothing waters of denialism and apologists.’’

    It lays out all the brutal facts. It tells us that 1,182 people were murdered and more than 4,000 were wounded. Of the dead, 863, or 73%, were civilians. Two-hundred-and-fifty-one people were taken hostage, 210 of them alive, 41 of them dead. That’s 41 corpses, mostly of Jews, dragged to Gaza, trophies of the pogrom. More than 90% of the killed and kidnapped were Israeli citizens, including Jewish Israelis, Arab Israelis and Bedouins. Among the remaining 10% were citizens from 44 nations. The largest number of foreign victims were Thai workers. Seventeen Britons were murdered – the highest British death toll in any foreign terror attack since 9/11.

    The youngest victim was 14 hours old. That was Naama Abu Rashed, a Bedouin Israeli, shot while still in her mother’s womb. The bullet went through her tiny leg. She was born gravely wounded, and later died. The oldest victim was Moshe Ridler, a 92-year-old Holocaust survivor. He perished when Hamas militants fired a rocket-propelled grenade at the safe room in which he had sought refuge from the rampage. They then shot to death his care-giver, Petro Boscov. Mr. Ridler, as a kid in Romania, had survived the Nazi ghetto and deportation trains, but he could not survive Hamas’ sadistic crusade.

    The methods of murder included shooting, burning, asphyxiation, grenade explosions and missile attacks. Many of the victims were subjected to mutilation, sexual violence and ‘other forms of deliberate brutality’, either before or after death. A woman was raped at gunpoint. Other women were raped in their bedrooms before being murdered. Rescue forces found women’s bodies ‘stripped of their underwear’ as well as ‘signs of semen’. The part of the report where I had to take a break from reading describes the discovery of a woman’s body where there had been ‘[the] insertion of a knife into the genital area.’

    The violence was ferocious. Molotov cocktails were thrown to burn people alive. A father and his baby daughter suffered savage burns when Hamas militants used a butane gas cylinder to make an inferno of their home. Dad spent 58 days in an induced coma, his daughter spent eight days. Hamas entered one home screaming ‘Yahud!’ meaning Jews. And they found Jews: a father, a mother, and their four kids. Dad used a piece of furniture in a desperate effort to ward off the invaders – they shot him dead. They then shot his daughter in the face. She had ‘a hole in her cheek and she was gasping her last breaths’, her mother later recounted. Mom and the three surviving kids were taken to Gaza and forced into a ‘hole’ in the ground. Why? Because they are Yahud.

    The report is full of accounts like this, of the most horrific, inhuman, and animal-like violence, visited with extreme prejudice on men, women, and children. October 7th feels like a thing from the last century, the century of war and extermination. It was as if ancient and ancestral, yes, atavistic hatreds had leaped from the history books and imprinted themselves on our complacent era. Perhaps the report’s most valuable contribution is to make it crystal clear that this was no impulsive assault. This was not the Wretched of the Earth ‘breaking out’ of their ‘prison camp’ to wreak desperate revenge on their oppressors, as Hamas-adjacent leftists would have us believe. No, this pogrom was years in the making. It was a conscious and thoroughly organized massacre of Jews.

    Seven-thousand militants took part. That included 3,800 of Hamas’s elite Nukhba forces and its Al-Qassam Brigades and 2,200 individuals from other terror armies, including Palestinian Islamic Jihad. A further 1,000 pogromists remained in Gaza to fire missiles at Israel and provide tactical back-up to the killers on the ground. Hamas had been planning this onslaught since 2018, when it set up a ‘Joint Room for Palestinian Resistance Factions’ to pool terror resources and plot the invasion. On the day itself, the pogromists attacked by land, sea and air. Far from an act of spontaneous violence, fueled by despair, this was a highly disciplined act of fascist terror with the express purpose of killing as many Jews as possible.

    Reading this report is a distressing and depressing task, but it’s one everyone would benefit from. It is our human duty to know and tell the truth about October 7th. I remember reading the words of the wonderful German novelist Herta Müller in a piece after the invasion and its atrocities. She described October 7th as a ‘‘total derailment from civilization.’’ ‘‘There is an archaic horror in this bloodlust that I no longer thought possible in this day and age,’’ she wrote. The report brings crashing down the sniveling and unforgivable moral equivalence many Western observers make between Hamas’ violence and Israel’s response. The war in Gaza is awful, but it is war. What happened specifically on October 7th was something else entirely. It was the intimate, barbarous torture and slaughter of Jews, carried out with pride and glee. It was fascism. As I have written in this space before; Hamas and their ilk are the spiritual children of Hitler.

    This, then, is what the activist class has been making excuses for. This is what they referred to as ‘resistance’. This is what they called ‘a day of celebration’. The burning to death of Jews. The rape of Jewish women. (And I am still waiting for one, just one, comment from a holier-than-thou American feminist regarding the brutal acts of violence and uncivilized treatment of Israeli women during this attack.) The murder of Jewish children. The assassination of a Jew who had the temerity to survive the greatest crime in history, only to be snuffed out in the twilight of his life by the evil that men do. On the other side of that coin you have your hard-core conservative Protestants and Catholics, as well as many of your Evangelical Christians, and the even crazier, know-nothing Christian Nationalists, who have told me, live and in person, that, “Well, Peter, isn't this what the Jews get for turning their backs on Jesus as the Messiah?” More graphically known as the “Christ-Killer” mythology. Morons. 

    All of which brings us to the here and now. So, we have all the data, all the timelines, and all the information about October 7th. But we still await that moment of moral clarity when many of our intellectual elites, and those groups mentioned above, finally acknowledge the gravity of this crime against Jews and humanity, and devote themselves to defending the civilization this massacre so gravely offends.

Write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com