(Truth of the Middle East) Herta Muller - The war in Gaza began on Oct. 7 when Palestinian Hamas terrorists committed an unimaginable massacre in Israel, killing 1,200 people. They filmed themselves as heroes and celebrated their bloodbath. The terrorists dragged severely abused hostages back home to Gaza, and presented them as spoils of war to the jubilant Palestinian population. This massacre by Hamas is a total derailment from civilization. There is an archaic horror in this bloodlust that I no longer thought possible in this day and age. The destruction of the Jews and the destruction of Israel remain the goal and desire of Hamas. This is exactly the same as in Iran, where the destruction of the Jews has been state doctrine since 1979. In Gaza, you cannot separate the civilian from the military. The Israeli army was forced to defend itself and to make itself guilty by destroying the infrastructure with all the civilian victims. It is precisely this inevitability that Hamas wanted and is exploiting. It has been directing the news that goes out to the world. Hamas controls the selection of images and orchestrates our feelings. Our feelings are their strongest weapon against Israel. Since Oct. 7, I have been thinking about a book about the Nazi era, Quite Normal Men (Ganz normale Manner), by Christopher R. Browning. He describes the annihilation of Jewish villages in Poland by Reserve Police Battalion 110, when the large gas chambers and crematoria in Auschwitz did not yet exist. It was like the bloodlust of the Hamas terrorists at the music festival and in the kibbutzim. In just one day in July 1942, the 1,500 Jewish inhabitants of the village of Jozefow were slaughtered. Children and infants were shot in the street in front of their houses, the old and sick in their beds. All the others were driven into the forest, where they had to strip naked and crawl on the ground. They were tortured, then shot and left lying in a bloody forest. This reserve police battalion did not consist of SS men or Wehrmacht soldiers, but of civilians who were no longer considered suitable for military service because they were too old. I lived in a dictatorship for over thirty years. I am appalled that young people, students in the West, have apparently lost the ability to distinguish between democracy and dictatorship. It is outrageous when Israel's war in Gaza is portrayed as an arbitrary war of conquest and annihilation by a colonial power. It is absurd that homosexuals and queer people demonstrate for Hamas as they did in Berlin on Nov. 4. It is no secret that not only Hamas, but the entire Palestinian culture, despises and punishes LGBTQ people. As blogger David Leatherwood wrote on X: Demonstrating for Palestine as a queer person is like demonstrating for Kentucky Fried Chicken as a chicken. The writer, a Romanian-German novelist, is a recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature.
2024-06-20 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive