by Victor Davis Hanson
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.
Its way past time to have Hamas condemned as Terrorists group and added to the list and its violent behavior condemned