The Rape of Nanking’s Shadow Falls Across Israel

During World War II when Japanese forces occupied Nanking, Lieutenants Toshiaki Mukai and Tsuyoshi Noda became celebrities for their contest to determine how many Chinese could be beheaded within a single minute using their samurai swords. The sports pages in Tokyo gleefully reported the results: Mukai had edged out Noda, 106 to 105. After the Japanese surrender the victorious Americans tracked down the two, tried them, and hanged them.

Yet that was but a small footnote as concerns the depth and breadth of horror that was inflicted upon the citizens of Nanking; human beings are hard pressed even to look too closely at the details. Iris Chang, the American journalist and historian who spent years interviewing survivors to document precisely what happened, could only manage getting her seminal work, “The Rape of Nanking,” into print before succumbing to the crushing enterprise, losing her sanity, and taking her own life. So the fact remains that while Mukai, Noda and a very few others paid a price many thousands of other Japanese soldiers participated in unzipping the bowels of Hell and inviting it for a stay upon the Earth for a while—and completely got away with it.

Iris Chang’s perilous misstep was a fatal one. Instead of preventing her attention from drifting away from the unvarnished journalistic task of reporting precisely what had occurred, she gave in to her humanity and delved into what sort of mind cancer could have descended upon tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers—individuals and members in good standing with the rest of us as Homo sapiens—so as to have turned them collectively into something that our species had better never become too comfortable understanding and accepting.

The Americans weren’t going down that path however. They tried and executed the two macabre “sportsmen” noted above, General Matsui the commander in charge who permitted the atrocities, and a very few others. But in the American view it was far better to concentrate on the new and wonderful era being inaugurated by the Allies and quit focusing on the demonic behavior of the past that certainly would never raise its ugly head again now that they had prevailed.

But a repeat of Nanking has and did occur and only months ago, in Israel, on October 7, 2023.  There is nothing even beyond the most terrifyingly dark corners of the worst and most diseased minds that didn’t transpire in Nanking—or in Israel at the hands of Hamas monsters. Some of the twisted, despicable and perverted horrors are difficult even to describe using language, as those sorts of actions have never passed into the realm of being elucidated with words, in any language.

Yet here history may be giving the Americans their second bite at the apple. The US president who just days ago brokered a ceasefire between Israel and Iran is the same statesman who has put forth an equally astonishing proposal for putting right the Gaza problem once and for all. And if the US is going to involve itself in rebuilding Gaza, expelling the terrorists, inviting in investors, creating great wealth and stability, insisting on peace where only death, misery, fear and destruction have reigned, it shouldn’t repeat its error from the last world war.

Every leader who planned or facilitated the October 7 massacres should be tried and hanged. Every Hamas murderer who took part should be tried and executed as well. Any and all who aided, abetted, or helped hold hostages should face stiff prison terms. And all those who publicly celebrated the horrors and/or congratulated the murderers should be stripped of their right to walk among normal humans in Israel and be expelled.

It’s not 1945 anymore; it’s 2025. The modern world hasn’t the slightest room for even the last whimper or pained shriek of the brutal primitive past. It’s time to drive another stake in the black heart of the lingering demonic evil that clutches at attempting to remain extant.

Arrest them all, charge them all, try them all—and punish them all.