by Seth Mandel
Oct 23, 2023
Commentary
The headline on ABC News’s Chicago affiliate was: “Chicago protest today: Hundreds of Palestinians march downtown as death toll rises in Israel, Gaza.” The date: October 8. Which means, if you were involved in organizing that protest, you almost certainly began to do so on the day of Hamas’s horrific October 7 massacre, while the body count was still rising faster than anyone on the ground could record. That same day saw the “All Out for Palestine” rally in Dallas. The organizers “told FOX 4 they are calling on the Dallas community to uplift and honor Palestinian voices.” Socialists in Georgia called a rally on October 8 in Athens “because the Palestinian people, yesterday, fought back successfully against Israeli occupation,” according to an organizer.
These were celebratory rallies, as was the most infamous of the bunch, the Democratic Socialists of America’s New York hate-fest—the one at which protesters chanted “Resistance is justified when people are occupied” and held signs proclaiming “By Any Means Necessary.”
These spectacles of vicarious bloodlust were not concerned with the “proportionality” of Israel’s response, which had only just begun. They were simply in support of Hamas and were staged to preempt any consensus that Hamas should be removed from power.
Proponents of supposedly peaceable measures to forestall more deaths, like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, were calling for “an immediate ceasefire and de-escalation” on the very day of the massacre—thus leaving unpunished and unanswered the Hamas rampage that murdered 1,400 and injured another several thousand. She said the same two weeks later, this past Sunday, on MSNBC. Would Ocasio-Cortez support a ceasefire, she was asked, that “would leave Hamas in place”? Indeed she would, “in the immediate sense.” Following in her train, 18 House Democrats have signed a resolution in support of such a ceasefire. They are joined by an interesting array of ceasefire-callers: China wants a ceasefire, the UN wants a ceasefire, Turkey wants a ceasefire, and left-wing writers and actors and artists want you to see their name on a list calling for a ceasefire and to then remember they exist.
What these people and countries and entities are asking for, and have been from the beginning, is an unmolested Hamas-run genocide collective on Israel’s border. By now all these figures have had ample opportunity to see a fraction of the recordings of Hamas attacks on October 7 and read the testimony of witnesses and emergency workers and Hamas terrorists in custody. Israel began showing and playing the totality of them to journalists yesterday. Those who have seen the footage say it is the worst thing they have ever seen. And for those of us who have merely read the transcripts, they are the worst things we have ever read.
October 7 was a watershed day for humanity’s capacity for barbarism.
The obsessive and immediate calls for a ceasefire represent a moral catastrophe. They were and are intended not to moderate an Israeli response but to avert one. They do not deserve to gain an
ounce of credibility just because two weeks later those calls continue. They are aging like milk, not wine. There are terrorists who must be brought to justice, hostages who must be returned, and millions of Israelis and Palestinians whose fate must not be left to the whims of monsters and their apologists.