Hands across America for Hamas

OPINION:

“Nothing appeals to intellectuals so much as the idea that they represent the people,” British historian Paul Johnson observed, but he added, “Nothing, as a rule, is further from the truth.” Indeed, while many American citizens are struggling to make ends meet, some U.S. elites are advocating for those who would murder and kidnap them.

On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas and other Iranian proxies invaded Israel, perpetrating the largest slaughter of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust. The terrorists killed 1,182 people, including women, children and the elderly, injured more than 4,000, and kidnapped 251 others, taking them hostage back to the Gaza Strip. Many were killed in the most horrific manner possible, their deaths often livestreamed by their tormentors.

A recently published investigation for the British Parliament, the Roberts Report, documents the grim details of what unfolded. Three-fourths of those killed were civilians, many killed in their own homes, often in front of their loved ones. The youngest victim was a 14-hour-old Bedouin Israeli, the oldest a 92-year-old Holocaust survivor. Some were burned alive, others tortured and mutilated as their family members watched. Babies were shot to death in their cribs; migrant workers were beheaded with garden hoes.

As the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis recently noted, the terrorists intentionally targeted families, the backbone of society, and they did so with unadulterated glee.

In the town of Holit, 4-year-old Eshel Kaploun later told his father how his mother, Adi, tried to protect his 4-month-old brother, Negev, from terrorists, and then “she was gone.” The mother’s last words to her sons were, “Remember, Mommy loves you more than anything in the world.” After killing their mother in front of them, the terrorists filmed themselves feeding and playing with Negev and Eshel and shared the footage for propaganda purposes on social media.

In the village of Kfar Aza, terrorists fatally shot the Berdichevsky parents while leaving their “10-month-old twins to fend for themselves,” one report noted. In Nir Oz, terrorists killed an elderly grandmother and uploaded footage of her dead body to her Facebook account for her family to find.

The barbarism is horrifying, but the intention of the terrorist groups and their Iranian patron has long been clear. All explicitly call for the destruction of the world’s sole Jewish state. The events of Oct. 7 show that they should be taken at their word.

The assault was the largest invasion and organized mass killing by an Islamist terrorist group against a democracy in modern history. Adjusted for population, the massacre was more than 10 times the number killed by al Qaeda on 9/11.

The Israeli military responded by launching a war to vanquish the terrorists on its borders and prevent another attack. No other nation would have done otherwise.

The blood hadn’t even dried before the barbarians had their apologists.

Across college campuses, students organized celebrations of the attack. Some of the leaders of these movements have included foreign students who are ostensibly here to study, not support U.S.-designated terrorist groups. Both then and now, many in the press would label these efforts as “protests” against Israeli “genocide” in Gaza, but this is disingenuous at best.

The so-called protests began before the Israel Defense Forces even commenced operations to root out Hamas. Later, to buttress the claim of “genocide,” the anti-Israel activists would rely on casualty figures supplied by Gaza’s “Health Ministry,” a Hamas-controlled entity. The terrorist group has a long history of inflating casualty statistics as part of an effort to influence world opinion against Israel and curtail its ability to defend itself.

Indeed, throughout the war that followed the attack, Hamas and its “Health Ministry” have been caught manipulating these figures. The press, however, has been unbothered. The Washington Post continues to treat the terrorist-controlled ministry as credible and has even uncritically quoted Hamas officials. They are what Russian dictator Vladimir Lenin would have called “useful idiots,” but some fall into a different category.

As the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis has revealed, several journalists, including some at The Washington Post, celebrated the Oct. 7 attacks on social media, and others have called for Israel’s destruction. Shortly after the attack, Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah proudly retweeted “what did y’all think decolonization meant?” More recently, including during the Jewish holiday of Passover, The Post opened up its op-ed pages and column space in defense of foreign students deported for their role in the pro-Hamas demonstrations.

At a time when many Americans are struggling to pay bills, it is curious for the self-styled intelligentsia, whether privileged Ivy League students or the editorial boards of famous newspapers, to prioritize advocating for terrorists. It’s no accident. It’s part of a long-standing trend.

Thomas Paine and many other self-styled revolutionaries celebrated the French Revolution, only later to be engulfed in its excesses. More than a century later, liberal muckraking journalists such as Lincoln Steffens would cheer on the creation of the Soviet Union, exclaiming, “I have seen the future and it works!” Intellectuals would similarly support Lenin’s successor, Josef Stalin, as he purged his way through the 1930s. Journalists such as Walter Duranty of The New York Times helped cover up Stalin’s crimes and won a Pulitzer in the process. Others, notably influential reporters Edgar Snow and Herbert Matthews, would fete China’s Mao Zedong and Cuba’s Fidel Castro. Indeed, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini came to power in Iran in 1979, a bevy of journalists and intellectuals, including the influential philosopher Michel Foucault, applauded.

Duranty helped Stalin and his henchmen deny the Holodomor, the Soviet-created famine that killed millions of Ukrainians in the 1930s. His modern-day descendants serve a different master, but their purpose is effectively the same: to aid and abet genocidal totalitarianism. From positions of privilege, they pretend to stand for the underdog while being mouthpieces for murderers. They write for fancy papers and attend fancy colleges. They cosplay as revolutionaries but are little more than apologists for terror. Their pretensions aside, none is our moral better. Far from it. History will record as much.

• The writer is a senior research analyst for the 65,000-member, Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis.