07/10/2024
A year ago, everything changed, and really nothing changed.
Monsters gleefully rampaged through peaceful towns happily murdering civilians. They slaughtered parents in front of their children, and children in front of their parents. And they did all of that on camera in front of the whole world. They murdered people dancing at a festival, they murdered people in their homes. They murdered people as they fled and as they hid. They killed pets. They burned people, sometimes whole families alive.
Then they proudly desecrated the corpses. Often on camera for the whole world to see.
They chanted God is great as they did it. They called their parents and bragged about it. And their parents were proud of them and their wonderful news.
And then they brought the bodies of the dead and hostages back to Gaza. They proudly paraded them through the streets as trophies to the cheering crowds who gleefully spit on the hostages and tried to get in their own blows.
A year ago, hundreds of thousands around the world poured out into the streets to celebrate the horror, the death, the pain and suffering. The celebrations were from college professors and religious leaders, devout feminists, LGBTQ activists and beyond.
A year ago, America's greatest warship pulled a u turn in the Atlantic and headed right back to the middle east.
A year ago, Iran stepped up attacks on US bases around the middle east, spilling American blood. I still don't understand that.
A year ago, soldiers and airmen from around the world knew they would be called upon and that not all of them would be returning.
A year ago, I sat in my synagogue with family and friends, when the Rabbi got up and announced that something terrible had happened in Israel. Israel is now at war. Terrorists had captured entire towns, and hundreds, probably thousands are dead.
I had been expecting to dance with the Torah. I had been expecting my kids to be eating too much candy and getting into trouble with their friends. Instead, we switched to psalms. And then we danced with the torah. But everything had an ominously pensive note to it.
A year ago, I found out how my great-grandparents felt 100 years ago in Germany. And I got to show my children what my great-grandparents showed my grandparents: We carry on.
Once I got online, I saw the madness that's become all too familiar now: people simultaneously celebrating the attacks, while claiming the IDF actually killed the civilians, and also claiming it was all CGI. And then somehow claiming that the attackers were the actual victims.
A year ago, several coworkers, who I'm not especially close with, walked up to me and quietly asked if I was OK. They asked about my family and friends. I can't sufficiently express my gratitude and admiration to them.
But they had to do it quietly.
I used to think Holocaust denial was a product of history, naivete, and gas lighting. It's not. It's the desire to facilitate further horrors by trying to give good people the opportunity look away. I commend those who don't.
And over the next few days we all saw hostage posters being torn down by people pretending there were no hostages. Oddly enough, when Israel negotiated to have 100 hostages released no one apologized about tearing down the posters. In fact, we saw those same people praise the monsters for treating people, who had obviously been starved, maltreated, and in some cases obviously tortured, for the fine treatment they had provided.
We saw the usual media outlets happily manipulated by terrorists and enemy governments.
This has all happened before. It's not new. It's just frightening and sad to watch the world descend into this madness again. We don't have to do this again. I hope we don't. But it looks like we are.
Let's hope this coming year the good people of the world pull together so that we can actually have a much brighter future.
Don't look away.
