Let the hate begin!
Bari Weiss: A Year of Revelations
We expected Hamas to try to kill Jews. We didn’t expect Americans to celebrate when they did.
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Someone asked me the other day how I planned to commemorate October 7. I found myself speechless, befuddled by the question.
How do you offer an elegy when the war is not yet over—and 101 hostages, those still alive and the bodies of the murdered, are not yet home? How do you remember a catastrophe when it is still unfolding? How do you mark a past event that feels as though it was a prelude to a much deeper darkness, whose dimensions we are still discovering? How do you look at something with a sense of distance when it has revealed so much, so close to home?
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The genocidal war launched by Iran and its proxies a year ago this morning began with rocket fire and a ground invasion by Hamas battalions who carried maps of every kibbutz and village. These maps, made by Palestinians who worked inside Israel, told them where the daycare centers were, where the weapons were stored, which families owned a dog. After several thousand terrorists, targeting civilians, had raped, murdered, and kidnapped, they were followed by waves of ordinary Gazans—to borrow Chris Browning’s phrase—who played their role in a day of slaughter with millennia-old echoes in Jewish history.
Just look at the terror on the face of Shiri Bibas, clinging to her nine-month-old baby Kfir and her four-year-old son Ariel—an image that flashes across my eyes when I put our children to sleep.
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I do not mean to say that the more than 1,200 human beings murdered by Hamas terrorists on that day—at a music festival, in their beds, in shelters where they sought safety—are symbols of history or politics. Only that what happened on that day—what Hamas did—was exactly what they had always said they would do in their founding charter, which calls for the genocide of the Jewish people. In stealing the Bibas family, and in butchering and maiming and raping and burning their neighbors, the terror group was doing exactly what it promised.
The promise of America was to give “bigotry no sanction,” as our first president wrote in 1790 to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island. “May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”
But on October 7, 2023, the enemies of Washington’s vision—of America’s founding impulse—began to reveal themselves.
As news of the scope of the slaughter was still registering, and the tally of hostages still being made—the final count: 240 people from 40 countries carried off like barbaric spoils of war—progressive groups here at home and across the West began to celebrate.
More than 30 student clubs at Harvard put out a letter holding Israel “entirely responsible” for the massacre. Israel. Not Hamas. Israel. This was on October 8, as Hamas terrorists were still roaming Israel’s south, and Hezbollah began its assault on Israel’s north from Lebanon.
Surely it had to be some terrible mistake, a sick prank. But the statement was sincere. And it wasn’t an anomaly.
In October 2023—just in that first month—George Washington University students projected the words “Glory to Our Martyrs” and “Free Palestine from the River to the Sea” in giant letters on campus buildings. At Cooper Union in Manhattan, Jewish students had to hide in the library from a mob pounding on the door. At Columbia, Professor Joseph Massad called the slaughter “awesome.” At Cornell, Professor Russell Rickford said it was “energizing” and “exhilarating.” At Princeton, hundreds of students chanted “globalize the intifada,” which can only mean: open season on Jews worldwide. At NYU, students held posters that read “keep the world clean,” with drawings of Jewish stars in garbage cans.
Over the weeks that followed, posters with the faces of the hostages were put up on lampposts and bulletin boards in campuses and cities across North America and Europe. And young people—and sometimes not so young—started tearing them down.
At first, we rationalized this by assuming that the people tearing them down were abnormal. But there were more than a few of them, including college professors. And they were gleeful.
Posters of lost cats aren’t systematically torn down by Broadway producers and graduate students, and yet these were human beings stolen from their beds. The only sane conclusion was that our times are not normal. To pretend that they are is as delusional as insisting that the supreme leader of Iran was merely speaking metaphorically when he said over the weekend, at his first public sermon in almost five years: Israel is a “malicious regime” that “will not last long.”
“A total derailment from civilization” is how the Nobel Prize–winning German writer Herta Muller described the Hamas massacre in her extraordinary speech delivered this past May. But the phrase included derailments closer to home.
Listen to the words being shouted on our streets.
Just this weekend, thousands of people in Toronto gathered to declare “We don’t want two states, take us back to ’48,” the kind of call for the elimination of Israel that has been heard in cities across the West over the last year. At a rally in Philadelphia, one speaker recalled: “On October 7 when I was watching those resistance fighters flying into Palestine on paragliders, I was cheering.” In Berlin, protesters shouted in Arabic: “Anyone have a bullet; either you kill a Jew with it or give it to Hamas.”
There is no political argument consistent with the values of a free society that justifies this behavior. There is no moral universe that explains how two visibly Jewish students at the University of Pittsburgh were recently struck with a bottle; or how a literary festival in New York cancelled a panel because the moderator was a Zionist; or why a (now former) member of Congress downplayed the sexual violence Jewish women suffered on October 7; or why medical students and doctors in San Francisco shouted “intifada, intifada, long live intifada!”
This is not to say that the majority of Americans aren’t horrified by these examples and hundreds of others—or that they are without precedent. In 1939, after Kristallnacht, more than 20,000 Americans flooded Madison Square Garden to cheer for Hitler. Today, with the distance of almost a century, that shames us. We owe it to ourselves and to our country to be no less horrified when today, in New York City, Hamas’s allies “Flood New York City,” an allusion to the group’s October 7 massacre, which it called Al-Aqsa Flood.
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So there will be no closure today. Though on October 7, 2024, as with every single day that has elapsed since October 7, 2023, I will think of the human beings—each one a world unto herself—destroyed by terror. I will pray for the hostages and the recovery of those who have been liberated. And I will pray for a lasting peace. Not just for Israelis, but for the Palestinians and the Lebanese and the Yemenis and the Iranians and the Syrians and all those tyrannized by murderous governments and terror groups who choose death over life. And I’ll pray for America, my home.
We expected Hamas to kill Jews. We didn’t expect Americans to celebrate it.
Starting today is the “Week of Rage”, marking five days of pro-Hamas faculty, students, and staff acting out their hatred of Israel and Jews on our campus—and campuses across America. Odd, isn’t it, that the week begins on October 7, the first anniversary of the day the evil butchers of Hamas (and their allies) slaughtered 1200 people and kidnapped 250? One might even say that celebrating on that day violates common decency.
To many activists and their supporters shown below at the University of Chicago, that was a glorious day, marking the revival of the “resistance.” No matter that the dead and kidnapped were almost all civilians, and that about 70 are still languishing in horrible conditions in the dank tunnels beneath Gaza. No matter that Hamas and its ally Hezbollah (and their masters in Iran) continue to fire rockets at civilian targets in Israel. After all, it was ‘justified resistance” from the very beginning in 1917.
Here is a video, taken last Friday and put on the Instagram page of “fsjpuchicago,” which stands for Faculty and Staff for Palestine at the University of Chicago. The video calls for a continuation of protests along with a promise that they will continue protesting until Chicago “discloses and divests”.
This is all free speech, of course, but it doesn’t mean that these people are not odious apologists for terrorism and, as the term goes, “anti-Zionists” (we all know what that means).
Turn up the sound. The first speaker is Eman Abdelhadi, an assistant professor in the Department of Human Development, and the second is Callie Maidhof, Associate Director and Assistant Senior Instructional Professor in our Global Studies group.
The speeches are the usual tedious repetition of propaganda, cant, and lies, blaming the war entirely on Israel–in fact, going all the way back to blaming the current conflict on the 1917 Balfour Declaration from the British government that called for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. Now, that state is, to these people, a “settler colonialist” state, a gross distortion of history.
The implication is that Israel shouldn’t be there at all. Pity that it’s here to stay!
Abdelhadi then decries America’s and Chicago’s emphasis on free expression, saying that the University’s dismantling of the encampment last summer (which violated University rules) was really a violation of free speech, thus “laying bare the contradictions of the Western World” and of the University of Chicago. The U of C is said to be “complicit in the murder of Palestinians”, “covered with Palestinian blood,” and dedicated to the erasure of Palestinian history. As Abdelhadi promises at the end (after some chanting), the FSJP group is not going anywhere until it accomplishes its goals. That will be. . . . well, never, and so we’re in for a long and rough yer as these protestors disrupt campus in their futile cause.
“Uchicagounited” is composed mainly of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)( and some non-student allies. (SJP, a registered student group here, was sanctioned last year by the University for disruption). This appeared on the uchicagounited Instagram page.
Here’s a larger-type version of their mission:
Next week marks one year of “israel’s” genocide in Gaza — and one year of resistance.
“israel” has spent the past twelve months brutally bombing and displacing the people of Palestine and now Lebanon; cutting off their food, water, and education; and perpetrating every kind of atrocity against them, causing over 186,000 deaths. Despite this genocidal onslaught, the Palestinian and Lebanese people have remained steadfast in their resistance.
SHOW UP ON FRIDAY, OCTOBER 11, AT 2:30 PM ON THE CENTER QUAD (by 1100 E 58th St) to express our grief and rage as the University continues to put their money behind this massacre. While our administration ramps up its repression, surveillance, and censorship against students and community members, WE WON’T TAKE IT FOR A SECOND.
This is a masked event; keep yourselves and others safe! Masks will also be provided for those without them.
The masks, of course, are not intended to prevent the spread of respiratory diseases, but to hide the identity of the protestors from the authorities. When Jewish students congregate in solidarity, you see no masks.
Well, the administration has made its position clear; it is in favor of free speech but against disruption. And it will not entertain the idea of divesting according to the protestors’ demands. In a statement issued recently, President Paul Alivisatos, while calling for truth-seeking and the expression of diverse voices, added this:
While constructive dialogue is the gold standard to strive toward, speech should never be chilled. Actions that chill the speech or learning of others are out of bounds, and the University’s academic and administrative leadership is obliged to act to protect the community from such actions. Such chilling actions can include disrupting the speech or expression of others, disrupting the ability of classes and events to proceed, and other efforts intended to impose rather than propose a viewpoint for others. Acts of discrimination and harassment are inimical to our values and purposes, and we will defend our community against such actions.
It is clear, at least to me, what prompted this statement.
The student manual has also been updated in light of what happened last year. As the Chicago Maroon reports:
The changes include an explicit ban on “staying overnight in outdoor structures on campus or in non-residential campus buildings,” a clarification that “the erection or construction of any structure on campus” requires advance approval from the Director of Student Centers, and that amplified sounds are only permitted on campus at certain times and “not inside campus buildings.”
No encampments! But, as the pro-Palestinian protestors promise, they’re not holding back: “WE WON’T TAKE IT FOR A SECOND”. I’m afraid they’ll have to, unless they want to face sanctions from the University.
I absolutely defend the right of the miscreants above to say what they want so long as it adheres to our “time, place, and manner” guidelines for speech. But that doesn’t mean that counterspeech is not the proper response. Count this post as that kind of speech. But the lies mouthed by the protestors above are sufficient to discredit them and their “cause”. Israeli genocide, indeed! They willfully omit that it is Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran’s other proxies who are really dedicated to genocide: the extermination of Israel and its Jews. Israel has no intention to wipe out all the Palestinians, which is why their attacks are targeted.
The Jewish students and faculty here will celebrate October 7 with a show not of resistance, but of sorrow, hope, and solidarity. I won’t disclose the details because the pro-Palestinian demonstrators are prone to disrupting such events.
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