They said they’re going to gas us. Believe them

Embed from Getty Images

As the magnitude of the massacre became apparent and I struggled to find the words, a thought surfaced, one echoing the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno: “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” I realize no words of mine could ever encompass nor console the bestial cruelty Hamas unleashed upon Israel, the most lethal pogrom since Auschwitz, but then what could?

The feral monsters who committed these atrocities emit a stench so intoxicating the global masses spill into the streets, hissing and gnashing their teeth before blood-curdling images of Jewish women defiled and Jewish babies incinerated. They deny these crimes ever happened and salivate that it did. They call it justice.

For many Jews, who exactly “they” are still doesn’t register. It sounds absurd under the circumstances, but as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu explains in his autobiography, the ability to identify existential danger is “a quality that was lost to our people over the course of centuries in exile.” Now Israel battles the Amalekites at the gate, and seeing how the world rejoices before our bloodletting, so must the Diaspora – repossessing that old quality for when words defy us.

Wading through the moral wasteland of Twitter, you’re assaulted by the nauseating reality that antisemitism is not just another prejudice. After all, Christopher Hitchens once wrote, “Hutu who regard Tutsi as ‘cockroaches,’ do not accuse their despised neighbors of harboring a plan—or of possessing the ability—to bring off a secret world government based on the occult control of finance.” Our enemies cannot simply be unlearned, they must be defeated.

The vast majority of Jews readily adopt this position against right-wing antisemites, and justifiably so – white supremacists have relentlessly incited pogroms online, propagating one blood libel after another since war broke out. Even “free-thinking” conservatives are parroting Hamas-approved talking points in the journalistic spirit of “just asking questions.”

That said, capital W white people are otherwise political eunuchs gradually committing demographic suicide. And for what it’s worth, Republicans overwhelmingly support Israel. The left, on the other hand, poses a far greater threat to Jews, and yet they’re given a hall pass. The prevailing consensus within the Jewish establishment maintains the left is simply misguided and manageable, not calculated and compulsive. To call it denial would be insufficient, it’s tantamount to betrayal.

So allow me to explain what our leaders won’t: Surrendering the most intrinsic elements of your Jewish identity to a movement that so explicitly wants to kill you is not virtuous; it’s irrational, and will not lead to our acceptance. This is the same submissive mentality that confined us to the ghetto for centuries, a mentality Zionism ultimately liberated.

But now you’ve gotten a taste of the leftist vision realized, how those colorful infographic concepts manifest. How “decolonization” requires raping little girls to death. How “social justice” is achieved through decapitating babies. How “Never Again” means burning Jews alive.

And you can see how the world is a more equitable place when it embraces these values. In Berlin, “Free Palestine” means marking Jewish homes with Stars of David and firebombing a synagogue. In Tunisia, it means torching one to the ground. In Detroit, it means stabbing the president of a synagogue to death. In Sydney, it means “gas the Jews.”

“Palestine” is more than an aspirant nation state, it’s the final solution to the Final Solution, the ideological love child of Adolf Hitler and Haj Amin al-Husseini. It’s beneath me to explain the genocidal origins of Palestinian national identity to people who arrogantly claim they would have resisted Nazi Germany, all the while chanting to drown us in the Mediterranean. They simply can’t be unlearned.

We are commanded to love our fellow Jew, and this love necessitates being firm when those among us are wrong. We often pay a price beyond comprehension for who we are, but never forget that “out of blood and fire and tears and ashes a new specimen of human being was born,” Menachem Begin once wrote, “a specimen completely unknown to the world for over eighteen hundred years, ‘the Fighting Jew.’”

In times like these, when words defy us, fighting speaks. They said they’re going to gas us. Believe them.