Remembering October 7th

Remembering October 7^th

By Sarah N. Stern

  In 1942, when the world was ravaged by the atrocities of World War II, the Polish-Jewish legal scholar Raphael Lemkin, coined the term genocide, meaning the obliteration of an entire race, religion, or tribe.

   On October 7^th, exactly one year ago today, wave upon wave of Hamas members crossed into Israel, brutally butchering 1200 young and old Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, and secular Israelis and other nationals. There is no other way to describe what had been attempted by Hamas and what Hezbollah, the Houthis, and all the proxies, and including the Islamic Republic of Iran, is attempting  to execute today-then the term “genocide.”

    The brutality, the cruelty, the sheer sadism is what astounds me. We all would have thought that humanity, as a whole, would have remembered what happened on October 7^th. When looking at the photos of what occurred on that Black Sabbath of October 7^th, 2023, one cannot erase those indelible images of burnt and brutalized bodies, of the women and of the men barbarically raped, of limbs, of organs missing, of babies charred in ovens in front of parents, of mothers and fathers tied to chairs and slaughtered in front of the eyes of their children.

  These are scars that will never heal. Some of us had naively thought that the very last remnant of pure evil perished with the gas chambers of our fathers’  and grandfathers’ generation, but the Nazis tried to hide their actions.

   But this, where their GoPro camera filmed the event, and they joyfully boosted about it, where a young Hamas man calls his mother gleefully reporting, “Mom, I killed 10 Jews today, with my bare hands. And the mother triumphantly responded, “Praise be Allah.”

  This is an unparalleled and unprecedented form of evil.

All of us have got to realize that it is the nation of Israel that has taken the first hit—and is protecting all of Western civilization with their young, courageous members of the IDF. Over 700 young IDF men have been killed fighting in Gaza this year. My daughter and her young children have less than one minute to run into their sealed rooms and shelters, and her husband is now fighting in the front, up north.

Israel has begun the long journey of healing with its sophisticated and well-executed military maneuvers in Lebanon. The taking out of Hassan Nasrallah, 440 Hezbollah terrorists, and almost the entire Radwan Hezbollah network has sent a powerful message to the world and to Israel’s Sunni Arab neighbors that Israel has regained its formidable military might and that Israel is here to stay.

 But we, as a society here at home, have failed our children.  By October 9^th, Students for Justice in Palestine held massive rallies throughout universities in the United States in support of this abominable behavior. This indicates that there is something very much amiss— something extremely sick-within our society. We have failed to teach the distinction between good and evil and between right and wrong. The Israelis are on the front line of attack, while we in the United States have been asleep at the wheel of history and are not very far behind. We have got to wake up and heal ourselves before it is too late.

Sarah N. Stern is the Founder and President of the Endowment for Middle East Truth, EMET, a think tank and policy institute that specializes in the Middle East and meets regularly with US Congressmen and Senators.