Devastating Attack, Day Thirteen

Remembering, Reflecting and Realizing what is at stake

This was one of the first videos I saw on October 7th and it has haunted me ever since. It is impossible to unsee and forget it. You will see a family whose oldest daughter has just been murdered. Father, mother, daughter, son, now held at gunpoint. You are witnessing the mixture of fear and grief as the reality of having just lost a loved one has set in. The heartbreaking realization and matter of factness of what has just happened, but also the denial of it all at the same time. The human mind processing all of these emotions while knowing you could be next. Like in the next minute. The dad’s bloodied hands. The boy crying. The mother saying she cannot afford another loss.

Now, almost two weeks on we know what happened. Apparently Hamas forced one of the neighbours to ring the family’s front door bell at gunpoint. But before the door was even opened they fired a few shots and instantly killed 18-year old Maayan. There is a short video of that too. You don’t want to see it. The ordeal ended with the father taken hostage and the mother and remaining two siblings rescued.

One of the comments, or criticisms if you like, I have been getting over my newsletter updates is that it represents an ‘opinion’. I looked it up in the dictionary to make sure. An opinion is “a view or judgment formed about something, not necessarily based on fact or knowledge”. That is very different from beliefs and moral positions. The latter are fundamental to the way we live and are not exactly subject to change. So calling out and condemning mindless killers is not an opinion. However, if you rush to your keyboard to decry Israeli attacks on Gaza, but have been quiet for more than a week about the fate that befell Maayan you are not only expressing an opinion, but also revealing the dubious state of your morality.

And what does Maayan’s family or what is left of it, have in terms of options? Wait until the enemy comes back for the next round, to finish the job? Pack up their bags and flee? Only to find that Jew hatred has actually increased everywhere else on this planet since your daughters murder? And that such hate is actually directed at you because of your daughter’s murder as it is you that is the evil one, the bad one?

See how this is about anti-Semitism and how it can poison and fester? How it will not stop after ceasefires, how it will raise its ugly head again and again. This is arguably one of the best definitions of the phenomenon:

The cause of anti-Semitism is a profound malaise in the cultures in which it appears. Anti-Semitism is either the last gasp of a declining culture or the first warning sign of a new totalitarianism.

See how it applies to the Hamas philosophy of governing. And how it applies to many democracies where progress and liberal attitudes have morphed into moral relativism. At universities Maayan’s murder is now called ‘resistance’. Anything goes. This definition captures it all too well.

If you consider everything that is going on around you right now and witness the relentless criticism of Israel and the resulting attacks on Jews around the world it becomes that much clearer. It did not end with the Holocaust. In a perverse way our new global world turbocharged the oldest of hatreds to a point where free western democracies and their media gladly look away from the livestreamed destruction of Maayan and her family.

This is not just a conflict in the Middle East. It is a rapidly spreading disease. It is the way Nazism got started. It is another warning sign of what is to come if we do not stop it. And it will come, aided and abetted by social media and politicians from all directions. We never understood how humanity could be switched off during World War II, how the Holocaust could have happened. Never again we said.

But it is here, once more. In a new but equally deadly format. You don’t have to look very far. Look at the media. Look at the silence around you. Or look into Maayan’s eyes. She is no longer here because of it.

Note: watch this video just received it. It goes to the heart of today’s topic and addresses how universities and colleges vacate their moral obligations and allow fear to now govern their campuses.

Also: not sure where the anti-Semitism quote comes from originally. I copied it for reference and want to attribute it to someone, but no idea of its origins.