Bari Weiss has some interesting comments on the whole mess in Israel.  I haven’t always agreed with Mr. Weiss over the years, but I have always found her worth reading, and this is no exception.

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. Parents across the country have been told to delete apps like Instagram from their children’s phones so they do not see the carnage.

It’s as if the Cossacks had TikTok.

For some years now I’ve been describing Hamas, ISIL and their ilk accurately and bluntly: They are fucking savages. They deserve not arrest and trial; after the acts of this week past we see them for what they are, and we see that the proper response to their acts is for Israel to hunt them down like rabid animals and put them down, decisively.

And that seems to be what’s happening.

But here’s the onion: There are too many among us here, in the supposedly civilized West, who are aligning themselves with the savages.

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. 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.

Here’s the thing: Those who are supporting of this insanity will sooner or later be called to account for that support.  At this juncture I’m not sure what form that will take; these are, after all, people whose mouths are writing checks their asses can’t cash, and while they talk a big game they aren’t acting, other than shouting and waving signs.  Yet.

We are engaged in a major conflict of civilizations.  Israel is the front line.  The conflict is radical Islam vs. civilization.  That is what it is.  Europe may well already be lost.  The next century may be very uncomfortable – but it may also be the hard times that brings us strong people.

Bari Weiss, yes, makes some good points.  Hopefully enough people are listening.