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 murder 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 antisemitic slogans calling for erasure of the nation of
Israel.
They interrupted shoppers, blocked highways, attacked businesses, and swarmed bridges. They assaulted the police.
The majority wore masks to hide their identities in the fashion of antisemitic Klansmen.
Why
did the doctrinaire left, the youth of the Democratic Party, and the
campuses outdo each other in their antisemitic 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 northern Cyprus by Turkey apparently do not warrant "refugee'' status either.
Few
protestors knew that Jews had lived in present-day Israel for over
three millennia. The longest colonialist presence there was Muslim
Turks, who brutally ran the Holy Land for 300 years until they lost in
World War I and were expelled.
How exactly did the eighth-century A.D. Al-Aqsa Mosque happen to be built within King Herod's earlier Second Temple enclosure?
The
pro-Hamas crowd has little appreciation that colonizing Arab Muslims
has 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 to remain 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
antisemitic, pro-Hamas street.
Victor Davis Hanson is a
distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is a
classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University,
and the author of "The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict
Was Fought and Won," from Basic Books. You can reach him by e-mailing
authorvdh@gmail.com.
