Savagery Abroad, Poison at Home by Alan Dowd
Savagery Abroad, Poison at Home
By Alan W. Dowd, ASCF Senior Fellow
November 2023—As Israel continues the arduous work of uprooting the machinery, infrastructure and high command of Hamas, it’s important for Americans to understand the nature of the enemy Israel faces, the critical role America plays in backstopping Israel’s security, and the history shared by America and Israel.
Premodern Butchery
The butchers of Hamas were ordered to “achieve the highest level of human losses,” “kill as many individuals as possible” and “capture hostages.” They intentionally targeted elementary
schools and planned to deploy “cyanide-dispersion devices.” In a daylong orgy of murder, they burned people alive, raped women, bludgeoned fathers, murdered mothers in front of their children, brutalized pensioners, executed babies, dragged innocents into captivity, used civilians
as human shields, and committed the largest-scale mass-murder of Jews since Hitler’s Holocaust.
In a surreal blending of premodern butchery and 21st-century tech, video evidence—recorded and disseminated via social media by the Hamas hordes—of the atrocities shows attackers using shovels to decapitate unarmed concertgoers, spraying elderly women with machine-gun fire, sauntering through the charred remains of infants. As one IDF general puts it, these are “crimes against humanity…not just Israel’s problem.” A fuller description of the October 7 murder spree—which erased 1,400 Israeli citizens in a few hours of beastly violence—is available here and here.
What Hamas unleashed upon Israel and humanity is somehow both shocking and yet
unsurprising. After all, Hamas learned these dark arts from the Islamic State (ISIS)—yet another gang of mass-murderers masquerading as holy men. ISIS orchestrated beheadings of Christians; crucified children as young as 12; and nearly exterminated the entire Yazidi race. As proof of its savage piety, ISIS murdered thousands of Yazidis; forced Yazidi women into sex slavery;
conducted a systematic campaign of rape imprisoned children as young as eight; and even used
mentally challenged children as suicide bombers.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog is right to label Hamas “a twin of the Islamic State.” Related, the French government has proposed building an anti-Hamas coalition modeled on the successful anti-ISIS campaign—or even combining the anti-Hamas campaign with the anti-ISIS campaign.
Regardless of how the war on Hamas is prosecuted, the Israeli and French governments are framing the Hamas threat in the proper way: Like ISIS, Hamas is the kind of threat that must be destroyed, eradicated, ended — not understood or degraded or managed or deterred.
It’s not fair to compare ISIS and Hamas to animals, for animals do not do the sort of things Hamas and ISIS have done. Perhaps the best description for them is a term our ancestors—unpoisoned by postmodernism’s plague of moral relativism—used for their lawless, shameless enemies: hostis humani generis. Hamas and their
ilk are, quite literally, “enemies of all mankind.”
Shockingly, grotesquely, millions in the Free World are unwillingto believe what their eyes see or what the survivors say. Deformed by postmodern relativism, some even rationalize tensions defend or celebrate the Hamas massacre.
President Ronald Reagan unequivocally explained that “There is a profound moral difference between the use of force for liberation and the use of force for conquest”—or terror. Reagan understood that all uses of force, all acts of violence, all wars, are not the same. It shouldn’t take old women being executed, teenagers being raped, babies being beheaded, the mass-abduction of children, the parading of corpses, or the wanton slaughter of innocents to grasp this truth. But that’s precisely the problem: Generations in the West have been raised and marinated in a poisoned culture that rejects the very notion of truth, of right and wrong, of good and evil. And so, the world must yet again fight not only the horror of anti-Jewish annihilationism—handed down from Pharoah and Haman to Hitler, Hamas and Hezbollah—but also the scourge of Holocaust denialism.
Duty
The horrors of the Holocaust are indeed relevant to this moment.
The impact the Holocaust had on America’s view of the Jewish people and the nation-state they would forge cannot be overstated. It was visceral and personal—and it was brought home and made real by the American GI.
Before he became president, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower was commander-in-chief of Allied forces in Europe during World War II. In his memoirs, Eisenhower recalled that he saw his “first horror camp” on April 12, 1945. He noted that some of his subordinates “were unable to get through the ordeal.” But Eisenhower forced himself to see “every nook and cranny of the camp because I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify at firsthand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that ‘the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda.’…As soon as I returned to Patton’s headquarters that evening I sent communications to both Washington and London, urging the two governments to send instantly to Germany a random group of newspaper editors and representative groups from the national legislatures.” Eisenhower wanted to “leave no room for cynical doubt” about what the Nazi regime had done.
On April 25, 1945, less than two weeks after his first encounter with the horror camps, Eisenhower issued a charge—an order—to a group of subordinates, lawmakers and journalists: “Your responsibilities, I believe, extend into a great field, and informing the people at home of things like these atrocities is one of them...The barbarous treatment these people received in the German concentration camps is almost unbelievable. I want you to see for yourself and be spokesmen for the United States.” With an exquisite sense of human nature, Eisenhower knew it would be easy—too easy—for people to discount or dismiss what some stranger, historian or faceless newsreel reported; it was quite another thing to hear a son or sweetheart, a husband or dad—or in my case, a grandfather—describe the camps and the bodies and the smell and the death and the nightmare.
My grandfather helped liberate the death camp at Dachau. Here’s what he said about it: “We moved in with the 101st, and we occupied that area. I saw firsthand the trenches with people laid out, the furnaces and all that. I personally didn’t know anything about it until we liberated Munich and Dachau,” he recalled before
his death in 2002. “This was an attempt to absolutely wipe out a people.”
The duty of remembering and retelling what happened in Dachau and Sachsenhausen,
Auschwitz and Treblinka, Belzec and Buchenwald—and today, Sderot and Ashkelon and
Re’im — falls to you and me. I try in some meager way to live up to that duty in the essays I write and courses I teach. As the UN General Assembly declared, we must “inculcate future generations with the lessons of the Holocaust in order to help to prevent future acts of genocide.” Make no mistake: Another genocide—a second Holocaust—is the aim of Hamas and its patrons in Iran. Our next issue will discuss how Iran is using Hamas and other proxies to wage war on civilization—and how America and Israel are responding.
