The Free Press
At the end of the Second World War, it took the Allies months, if not years, to uncover the full scale of Germany’s war crimes. That’s because the Nazis tried to hide them.
In October 2023, Hamas broadcast what they did—what they are doing—in real time.
They took horrific videos to document and share it all. Videos of naked women; of a captured six-year-old-boy; of beheaded soldiers.
This young woman—her name is Mor—learned that her grandmother had been slaughtered because a terrorist took her grandmother’s cell phone, filmed her murder, and then uploaded the video to the grandmother’s own Facebook page, ensuring her family would see it.
Now they are threatening to execute the hostages they have captured on live television.
It’s as if the Cossacks had TikTok.
On the one hand I think: surely this will be sufficient. Surely this amount of blood will be enough to shake the world awake. Surely no one can equivocate or justify this. As my friend Sarah Haider wrote, “How easy is it to simply condemn targeted violence against civilians? Can there be a lower bar?”
And yet, across the world, people have sunk below it.
Here you can watch people gathered at the Sydney Opera House cheering “gas the Jews” and “death to the Jews.” People are rejoicing in the slaughter on the streets of Berlin and London and Toronto and New York. (Scroll down to read our Free Press dispatch on the celebrations in Manhattan.)
At our most prestigious universities there is silence from administrations that leapt to speak out on George Floyd’s killing and on the war in Ukraine. Indeed, Meantime, the social justice crowd offers explanations for the massacre—a massacre that, in part, targeted a group of progressive Israelis at a music festival. Terrorists came to that festival on paragliders carrying machine guns to start their slaughter. They raped women there next to the dead bodies of their friends.
In that way, as Free Press editor and writer Peter Savodnik explains in our second piece in today’s digest, the last few days have been extremely clarifying.
Because now we know.
Now we know who would have looked at Jews shoved onto cattle cars and said, “Well, they did undermine the German economy.” Those are the people today saying: “This is a justified response to the provocation of Israel existing.” Now we know whose politics are rooted not in conservatism or liberalism or anything else other than simply hating Jews. Now we can see exactly how people manage to always come up with a reason for why the Jews deserved it.
The people cheering and waving flags are not celebrating Palestinian liberation. The Hamas attack that began on October 7 won’t lead to a free Palestine. Instead, it will lead—it is already leading—to a horrific escalation, with many more dead on both sides. The people cheering are celebrating death. I’m struck that American intellectuals are reprinting the picture of the paraglider as an image of liberation, like a hip new logo, that visual of death.
Hamas broadcast the slaughter. I thought it would be enough.
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Young girls in hijabs waved Palestinian flags in the street. Men in ski masks hung from scaffolding chanting, “Israel, go to hell.” And pamphlets rained from the sky, lauding the recent violence by Hamas as “heroic.”
This wasn’t the Middle East. This was Midtown Manhattan, home to the second-largest Jewish population in the world after Israel, just days after Israel herself was ambushed by Hamas in the deadliest terrorist attack in the country’s history. More than 900 Israelis are now dead, more than 2,000 wounded, and an estimated 100 held hostage.
Many have called it Israel’s 9/11. But unlike America’s 9/11, when New Yorkers stood unified in their grief, this crowd of hundreds seemed bound by their fury.
They chanted for the end of Zionism—or as they put it, “decolonization.”
On Saturday, as the raping and murdering and kidnapping were happening in Israel, Najma Sharif, a writer for Soho House magazine and Teen Vogue, posted on X: “What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers.”
So far, Sharif’s post has been liked 100,000 times and reposted nearly 23,000 times—by, among others, The Washington Post’s global opinions editor, Karen Attiah.
The point was: Don’t be squeamish. Never mind the Jewish girl being pulled by her hair with blood streaming between her legs. Never mind the women being raped beside the corpses of their friends at a music festival. Never mind the children and babies snatched from their parents.
If you can’t handle it, if you condemn it without a preamble or equivocation, you’re an apologist for the Zionist colonizers.
All this is a good reminder that when people say something, they often mean it, and we should believe them, or at least take them seriously.
Ms. Weiss: Watching the events in Israel and Gaza with horror. I have a question or three:
1. I viewed the final exit of the Israelis from Gaza. They left behind complete functioning greenhouses for produce export along with many other facilities and improvements. The Gazans promptly destroyed them. Was there any general criticism of their behavior?
2. Gaza is now essentially cut off from water and power, if I understand correctly. Now, given the billions in aid that flowed through the place, and the billions more available, why didn't the Great and Good in charge of the place build desalinization plants for water, and their own electrical generation and distribution grid? I don't understand. The Saudis and the Emirates did, why not Gaza?
3. Also, given all those resources, it seems high speed rail could have been installed for internal travel. They've got lovely beaches--why not a tourist trade? Access to the eastern Mediterranean--why not major seafood farming operations? Beirut had fallen apart long ago--why not establish a banking hub to rival what once was a few miles north?
I don't understand, I truly don't.
Thank you free press for continuing to report and expose anti semitism. Decolonization and demonizing of Jews are one and the same - an excuse to kill Jews, regardless of their political orientation.