The Villains of My Dreams

And Other Assorted Real-Life Evildoers.

Last week, evil entered the cockpit of Flydubai Flight FZ1073 from Dubai to Tel Aviv.

According to Emirati authorities, the co-pilot—identified in multiple reports as Hamam al-Hammami and reported to have a history of radical Islamist views—attacked Captain Smit Machchhar with a crash axe and attempted to seize control of the aircraft in what Emirati authorities finally called a terrorist act—and the media finally reported it as one.

God forbid the clout-chasing “legacy media” do its job.

Some people claim the line between heroes and villains is complicated. That good and evil are two sides of the same coin.

This was not one of those situations.

The wounded captain who used what might have been the last of his strength to open the cockpit door was a real hero, as were the passengers and crew who charged toward danger instead of running from it.

Together, they gave us one of the most heroic moments in aviation history—certainly since United Flight 93, whose heroes did not die in vain.

What happened next? Before the accolades could even land, online idiots declared the hijacking attempt a “false flag.”

But the real false flag is the pro-Palestine movement’s claim to humanitarianism.

This deranged mob has been seduced by terrorists while excusing the terror of October 7. They deny the atrocities, call for the murder of Jews, and then, in the obscenest display of moral depravity imaginable, call themselves the “resistance.”

And they celebrated the third anniversary of October 7 because they are vile creatures—unworthy even of knowing a Jew.

How they live with themselves—surely without grace—boggles my mind. As if they deserve any goodness.

There were no false flags here. Radical Islamism must be confronted and defeated—not explained away, contextualized into innocence, or disguised as resistance.

The villain in that cockpit was hardly the first evildoer to haunt our imaginations. The list is long, especially now with all these Jew-haters slithering about.

The most villainous villains in my dreams are the men who separated my grandparents from my mother and her siblings in the Vilna Ghetto, never to be seen again.

My mother’s retelling of that horrific incident lodged itself deep in my psyche, along with a slew of other unbearable stories she shared about the atrocities she survived. They have haunted me ever since.

My mother survived Dachau. Her parents never got that far. My grandmother was sent to a crematorium and my grandfather was sent to Ponary, a forest just outside Vilna which became a killing field in 1941.

Tens of thousands of Vilna’s Jews—young and old—were shot there and buried in mass graves.

The Nazis stole my mom’s innocence along with her family.

She carried the pain and loss for the rest of her life and passed part of the grief down to me—not through stories alone, but through the silences, the tears, and the warnings that no one could truly be trusted.

My mom was right.

’Cause here we are, living through the echoes of the pogroms, the Inquisition, and the Holocaust like a recurring nightmare.

There is however one monumental difference now:

We have Israel—whether you, they, them, like it or not.

Villains no longer parade around in black leather boots and perfectly fitted uniforms once manufactured by Hugo Boss—a vision fit for Berlin Fashion Week, sans swastikas.

My new enemies are Islamist clerics draped in flowing white robes, preaching Jewish extermination with dramatic flair and unsinkable Molly Brown confidence.

They look like angry castoffs from RuPaul’s Drag Race.

If only we could make them all sashay away.

It’s actually quite funny when you realize evildoers love to play dress-up—cosplay at its most pathetic. Thankfully, they make themselves easy to recognize, which may ultimately prove self-defeating.

Today’s masked, hormone-raging Islamist street trash wraps itself in keffiyehs, chanting for an intifada.

The costumes change. The hatred does not.

The villains who perpetrated the Holocaust still appear in my dreams every now and again.

Worse still, this new crop of douchebags plagues the social-media landscape. Like airplane terrorists, they have hijacked the algorithm that once connected me to a massive community of like minds. In this post–October 7 world, I find myself increasingly isolated as hateful bots and assorted gross baboons have taken over.

Criminally insane and violent Islamists and their teenybopper fan clubs curse the Jews under the guise of anti-Zionism on college campuses and crowded city streets, chanting “From the river to the sea” as if they even have a clue where on the map they’re pontificating about.

All I can say is: “Be careful what you wish for girls. Because don’t look now, you’re not winning this river-to-the-sea game of chicken.”

The villains in our streets will meet the same miserable end as the villains in my dreams. And people like me will live happily ever after.