“In every generation they arise to annihilate us.”
That statement appears in the Haggadah, the book read from at the Passover Seder. The book is about 1,000 years old; the statement is more than 2,000 years old.
A generation or two ago, it was the Nazis who arose to annihilate the Jews.
In this generation, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, and other Islamic movements have risen to annihilate the Jews.
The widespread overuse of the term “Nazi” — like the overuse of the terms “fascist,” “racist,” “existential threat,” “genocide,” “misinformation,” “threat to our democracy,” among others — has rendered “Nazi” little more than a word to dismiss people who oppose the Left.
“Nazi” should never be used to describe non-Nazis. Nazi evil was sui generis. There has never been as organized, as industrialized, an attempt to murder every member of a religious/ethnic group — “every member” meaning babies, women, and the elderly as well as adult males — as the Nazi attempt to murder every Jew in Europe. Within a mere four years, they nearly succeeded: The Nazis murdered two out every three Jews in Europe.
But the term “Nazi” is applicable to one ideology today. There is an ideological successor to the Nazis. Just as the primary aim of Nazism was to kill every Jew in Europe, the primary aim of tens of millions of radical Muslims is to kill the seven million Jews in Israel and eradicate the one Jewish state.
The Muslim leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran regularly announce that the annihilation of Israel is their paramount aim. They would rather murder the Jews of Israel and eradicate Israel than feed their people. In fact, they have stated that the death of tens of millions of their fellow Iranians is a price worth paying if it means annihilating Israel.
That is why the purpose of Hamas’s attack was to slaughter as many Jews as possible. No army base was attacked — because the attack had no military aim. Hamas Einsatzgruppen (the name of the Nazi mobile killing units) attacked a music festival, where they murdered at least 270 young people and maimed an untold number of others. Their other targets were homes, so as to kill entire families — because their aim was not military victory but the murder of Jews. Babies and grandmothers are not military targets.
Many Jews not initially killed by Hamas were taken as hostages, including toddlers and grandparents. “Social media,” the Times of Israel reported, “were filled with horrifying videos of men, women and children being carried into the (Gaza) Strip, many of them appearing to have been abused.”
The celebrations in Gaza and elsewhere in the Muslim world were over Jews having been murdered and displayed. You can see the ecstatic joy of throngs of Palestinians in Gaza as Hamas terrorists display Jewish bodies in the back of pickup trucks driving through the streets of Gaza.
From the Times of Israel:
“The video of the woman stripped down to her underwear appears to be of Shani Louk, a German citizen who was identified by her mother, and who had been attending the music festival which was staged close to Kibbutz Re’im. Hamas operatives are seen celebrating and cheering in the pickup truck in which they had placed Louk’s body, which was contorted in an unnatural angle, while Palestinians surrounding the truck shouted, ‘Allahu Akbar’ (‘God is the greatest’). Two of the men spit on her.”
From the Daily Mail:
“A woman was seen being kidnapped with her children as horrified onlookers screamed: ‘She has a baby.’ The mother was later identified as Shiri who was taken with her husband, Yarden, sons Ariel, three, and nine-month-old Kfir, as well as her elderly parents Yossi and Margit. They were believed to have been snatched from Shiri’s home … on the border with Gaza.
“Disturbing footage shows a boy of ten being dragged towards an opening in the border’s fence by terrorists.
“Erez Kalderon, who was snatched from his home in Nir Oz in the south of Israel by Hamas, looks terrified as he is led through the streets by the heavily armed men. His father Ofer and sister Sahar, 16, were also abducted.
“Ditza Heiman, 84, was kidnapped from her home in Kibbutz Nir Oz, close to the border, and taken into Gaza… Another grandmother, 85-year-old Yaffa Adar, was bundled into a golf buggy at gunpoint by a group of terrorists.”
The result was that on Oct. 7, 2023, more Jews were murdered than on any one day since the Holocaust. Percentagewise, it was as if 40,000 Americans had been murdered. And these Israelis were murdered for the same reason Jews were murdered during the Holocaust — because they were Jews.
Radical Islam’s useful idiots on the Left deny this fact. They say that Muslims who seek to annihilate Israel are not motivated by antisemitism but by anti-Zionism, as if there is any real-world difference between the two, and as if seeking to eradicate one nation in the world — the only one that happens to be Jewish — is in no way anti-Jewish.
It should therefore be noted, to cite but one example of non-Israeli Jews being murdered by Islamists, that in 1994, Hezbollah, the Iran-backed terrorist organization in Lebanon, bombed the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, killing 85 people and injuring more than 300. They weren’t Israelis; they were Argentinian Jews.
It should also be noted that Hamas’s charter makes no distinction between Zionists, Israelis, and Jews:
“The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight Jews and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: ‘O Moslem, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.’”
This column was originally posted on Townhall.com.