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Gaza: Radical Islam’s new Trojan Horse

October 7. A day of infamy. Hamas terrorists crossed the border into Israel and went on a murderous spree. How do we know? Because they used their own cellphones to record and post their deeds on the Internet. The images are there for the world to see. Stark. Brutal. Unbearable. Yet the world does not want to look. The fact is that the voices of those who have seen and still have nightmares are struggling to be heard. People cover their ears so as not to listen to the story of what happened that day. Killings, tortures from a bygone brutal era, the savagery of multiple rapes, naked, dismembered, burned bodies, little corpses from lives ended by a frenzied mob yelling Allah Akbar – Allah is the greatest. They close their eyes so as not to look at the terrified faces of these young women with their blood-stained trousers, dragged by their captors towards a terrifying unknown, the anguish of a mother, carried away as  “spoils of war” of a grinning fighter, clutching her two little ones to her heart and casting a look over her shoulder, desperately searching for help. Because to see or hear, to understand, would be to be forced to react. At the very least, to take a stand, to show one’s revulsion at that hate-fueled frenzy of bestiality, to demand the immediate release of the hostages, to do something. A broad mobilization would have changed the course of things. It did not take place.

Historians will one day wonder by what strange alchemy atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7 in the name of Allah triggered a wave of support for that terrorist organization around the world and calls to destroy the Jewish state. Because that is exactly what happened. As Hamas launched hundreds of missiles on southern and central Israel, with Hezbollah following suit, targeting the north, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres went on record finding mitigating circumstances for the monstrous crimes committed by the terror organization and deftly shifting the blame on Israel.

Addressing the Security Council meeting on October 10 to discuss the conflict that had just erupted, he said that the  attack “did not happen in a vacuum” because the Palestinians “had been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation”. He added that he was “deeply concerned by the gross violations of international humanitarian law that we are witnessing in Gaza”. Unfortunately, he was not talking about the hostages.

There was no one to point out that Israel had completely withdrawn from the Gaza Strip in 2005 and that there was therefore no suffocating occupation in the Hamas-controlled enclave that had ousted the Palestinian Authority in a bloody coup. Israel’s enemies in Tehran, the supporters of Shiite Islam who had made the elimination of Israel the cornerstone of their strategy and who had allegedly helped Sunni Hamas plan the attack, were well pleased. They had succeeded beyond their wildest expectations.

Spurred on by the support of the United Nations Secretary-General, who had spoken of “suffocating occupation” without bothering to check facts on the ground, they went on the offensive. Their rallying cry  – “liberate Palestine “ – resonated the world over. From that moment on, the hostages and the massacre of October 7 faded into the background. “From the river to the sea” – from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea – Palestine will be free, chanted hundreds of thousands of demonstrators on both sides of the Atlantic, openly calling for the death of the Jewish state. Were the students at Columbia University in New York or those at Sciences Po in Paris who were denying Jews access to their campus aware of the true meaning of the slogan they were spouting with such  fervor? The Secretary-General of the United Nations remained strangely silent and did not find it necessary to protest those threats to a country which was a member of the UN. And so it goes on. Palestine flags are everywhere. Attacks against Jews are multiplying, and Holocaust commemoration sites are desecrated. The only ray of hope is that recent elections to the European Parliament have shown a gradual awakening to the new reality and the threat posed to European values by radical Islam.

About the Author
Michelle Mazel was born in France. A graduate of the Institute for Political Science of Paris and of the Law school of that city, she was a Fullbright scholar to the United States. She married an Israeli diplomat and for forty years, until he retired in 2004, she went with him from one interesting country to another, witnessing Sadat’s assassination in Cairo and the fall of Ceausescu in Rumania.
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