On Saturday morning, several thousand young Israelis were celebrating a Jewish holiday at an all-night music festival in southern Israel, a few miles from the border fence that separates Israel from the Gaza Strip. Shortly after sunrise, hundreds of Hamas operatives armed with machine guns and grenades broke through the fence and headed for the festival, murder on their minds, wielding the tools with which to carry out a massacre.
Descending on the terrified youngsters, who ran for their lives, the Hamas gunmen mowed down the children with everything they had, chasing them by car, surrounding them and blowing them to pieces. They slit these youngster’s throats. They bound the limbs of these kids, some lifeless and some barely clinging to life, and rammed their bloody bodies onto their vehicles, speeding back into Gaza, where Palestinians on the street screamed with joy, passed around celebratory sweets and once again displayed the bloodlust which so tragically has come to characterize significant segments of Palestinian society.
When Hamas’ rampage at the festival was over, 260 young Israeli bodies were found. That doesn’t count those wounded, kidnapped or still missing.
Meanwhile, other Hamas gunmen were invading 22 Israeli villages, going from home to home, executing the elderly, the disabled, women, husbands, children and babies at point-blank range while the victims begged for their lives. This should surprise no one: Hamas has functioned as a kind of Palestinian SS, the Nazi organization which carried out the genocidal murder of 6 million Jews, ever since its founding as a radical Islamic killing enterprise in 1987. Hamas’ very raison d’etre has always been the annihilation of Israel.
After Hamas violently seized control of the Gaza Strip from the Palestinian Authority in 2007, it commenced intermittent mass rocket attacks on Israeli civilian centers, using Palestinian innocents as human shields from which to fire several tens of thousands of rockets at Israeli innocents. Each time this occurred, it was funded and equipped by Iran, long regarded by our State Department as the world’s foremost state sponsor of terror, which, like Hamas, vows to wipe Israel off the face of the map.
And each time this has occurred, Israel has found itself reeling under the rocket attacks, while its armed forces were required to stop the rocketing. Each time, it took the Left but seconds to decide that it was Israel that was to blame for trying to stop its civilians from being blown to smithereens. The truth is simple: Hamas’ apologists, among them The Squad in the Democratic caucus in Congress and academics in fashionable faculty lounges on elite college campuses, are not troubled by Hamas’ determination to terminate Israel’s existence. Progressive poseurs operating under the umbrella of groups with clever names like “Students for Justice in Palestine” work 24/7 at intimidating pro-Israel students and, indeed, at driving Jewish students underground with fear.
Since Saturday’s sunrise, Hamas has not confined itself to murdering at gunpoint, slitting throats and abductions. It has fired about 5,000 more rockets into Israeli communities, smashing houses, apartment buildings and hospitals. Emboldened by the hatred of Israel that has spread like a virus on the far Left, indulged by supposed human rights advocates who do not recognize Israelis’ rights to live in peace and armed to the teeth by Iran, Hamas is a chicken that has come home to roost.
By Sunday night, it had emerged that over 700 Israelis had been murdered by Hamas, more Jews murdered on any day since the Holocaust. Over 2,200 had been wounded. Israel’s death toll is the proportional equivalent of over 21,000 Americans massacred in a single day, the equivalent of seven times the number of those killed on September 11, 2001.
If there is a meaningful distinction between Hamas and ISIS, it is not apparent. Nevertheless, Hamas has benefited from international support in malign quarters and, incredibly, from people who actually hold themselves out as progressives. Hamas has blood on its hands, and plenty of it. But it isn’t the only one.
Jeff Robbins is a Boston lawyer, former assistant United States attorney and U.S. delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council.
