Today, I have further thoughts after seeing the October 7th footage last night. And while I shared these on X earlier, and the posts “went viral”, I feel it is right to repeat what I wrote here.
I am no longer going to speak to people in separate silos. I am going to speak to a universal because I have to honor my lived experience and the parallels you may think are gauche, on either side of this, but for me are fundamentally and chillingly true. So bare with me.
Let’s ask a fundamental question: What is the purpose of this footage? It’s evidence, right? It’s an overwhelming amount of evidence in film, and yet it’s only a fraction of what is available.
Will people react to it the way we want? Well, we have to ask: who is your audience?
And we must look at two camps:
1/ Us, the Jews. The Jews who get it. And our righteous gentiles. This evidence is – for us – our story. I will relate this to the great deal of work I have done around PTSD and specifically sexual assault trauma in the past two years. The evidence of atrocities and the ability to speak to them is akin to oxygen for any survivor. The proof is empowering. It is a weapon against the gaslighting, the betrayal and the constant self-blame for crimes that are the fault solely of the perpetrator.
2/ Them, the non-Jews. The Zombies. The non-believers. The terrorists. The propagandists. The evidence for them is something that has to be discredited. It needs to be ridiculed, ignored and intimidated away at all costs. It needs to be mocked. Turn it into a meme, make fun of it. The great fear is that if we make this footage widely available, those who fall into this camp will either denounce it as propaganda, or they will enjoy it. Both are - unfortunately - highly possible.
As many of you know I walked into a courthouse in Virginia last April for a much-obsessed over and mocked trial between two celebrities. Every day, there were baying mobs of trolls and imbeciles with signs and slogans and looks of perverted joy and bottomless hysterical rage on their faces outside, and inside it was the same: the gallery was filled with goons. I called them The Great Unemployed of America. They had a look in their eyes like Zombies hungry for flesh.
When I walked into the Museum of Tolerance last night it felt the same. Mobs of clowns, protesting with flags and jeering chants and threats of violence lined the streets around the entrance. And when we left, brawls broke out in the street. It was utter carnage. The looks in the eyes of those protesters were looks of criminality. That was their only intent and purpose – not peaceful protesting. I saw people spitting at Jews. They came to intimidate us before we would bare witness to the atrocities and the evidence. It was uncanny how much I recognized this feeling in my skin, how much I felt I could have been transported back to April 2022.
Now, it is naive to say that if we show people the evidence, if only they see it, then they will be on our side. That is incredibly naive. Here’s why.
It doesn’t matter how much evidence we have. We could have more evidence than any one in history. And none of that will matter because the world doesn’t care. They have already come to a foregone conclusion and they are 2,000 years ahead of us in terms of believing the conspiracy theories against us. Newsflash: We are not popular. We are subjects of mockery and taunts. We are people to be beaten in the street. There is no empathy for our experience, or our story. It’s far more fun to hate us. The glee on the faces of Hamas terrorists in the body-cam footage is the same glee on the faces of the kids who are beating Jews on campuses right now. It’s the same glee on the faces of influencers online who post about this with a fervor that amounts to addiction. They’re addicted to it. They have been radicalized. And we must use that word. We must. It is a social conditioning that is clear from the expressions of rage in the timbre of their voices and the psychosis in their eyes.
There is no commonality between us and them. We are not made of the same humanity. And this is the stuff that morphs your reality. This is the shit that’s broken my brain since the verdict from that majorly publicized trial came down on June 1, 2022. I heard the verdict read out, and reality just went down a sinkhole. That’s how it felt. Poof! Where did the real world go? How do you maintain faith in a world where what feels like the overwhelming majority of people cannot see truth, reason, logic, backed up by unparalleled amounts of evidence? How do you continue to see that world in the same way? How do you feel protected in that world? How do you have faith in the systems that are set up to safeguard you? You cannot.
It shouldn’t be naive to think that people will believe the evidence, accept the evidence, listen to us, want justice for us, even if they don’t like us. It is beyond a shadow of a doubt that Hamas are evil, and that they must be eradicated. That a call for a ceasefire is a call to stay in a cycle of terrorism with Israel’s neighbors who don’t want to rehabilitate, but who desire to continue committing these atrocities.
It’s not that our enemies can relate to people in Gaza. They’ve never been to Gaza! Which is clearly evident from their impression of a diverse strip of land that is abundantly not an “open air prison”. Rather, it’s that the idea of oppression, whether aptly applied to any given situation or not (and blaming Israel for the Gazans’ oppression is absolute falsehood), has become so woven into their identities that to invite them to consider anything else is to ask them to separate from a fundamental piece of themselves. Gaza is part of them. Free Palestine is their becoming.
Last April, I witnessed hoards of people render a rapist and an abuser their guy. They made their identity him. They’d never met him, had no contact, no experience of him. But decided he was emblematic of their outsiderdom, their sadness, their loner status. The power of misogyny is such that it took over the world and became the biggest trial in history. Similarly, and even more globally, I have witnessed for 20+ years even bigger hoards of people render this cause of Free Palestine their raison d’etre, without any skin in the game, or any empirical experience, or any first-hand accounts. “Free Palestine” has become emblematic of their war against subjugation, oppression and capitalism. It is just as meaningless, and just as insane. It is 2+2=5.
OK, so you’re wondering: How do we break their radicalism? How do we undo the identity that they’ve adopted, that will wind up being their downfall?
I don’t know how to answer that question. I don’t know how to make them see beyond themselves, their extremist ideologies and their self-imposed mission. They consider themselves foot soldiers for a global cause. They are so far gone. They tell themselves that this is their humanitarianism. When, truly, they are on the side of barbarism.
Look into the faces of these Canadian university students. See their abject pleasure at bullying and abusing Jews. They are totally convinced that the hatred they have is ethical. That it’s right. That’s how we get millions of dead Jews.
This footage will not change these minds.
And yet the world must watch this footage.
I don’t have answers.
We have to keep speaking the truth despite them in the hope we can change the world.
Here is Dr Einat Wilf, who nails the difference in psychology here, between us and them. They “feel” good. We are “doing” good. In other words, the adults need to take charge.
I’m always ambivalent - part of me wants to shut up and just support you. Not to detract any attention from your searing posts. The other part of me is inspired to comment and respond to the stimuli you present. Today I’ll try to do both.
I understand the same urge that drove the American liberating troops to force German civilians to “tour” the concentration camps - to face the atrocities in which they were complicit. But that was only after the victory. My visceral thought about the Oct 7 footage was that only those who (like you) will do something constructive with the knowledge should watch. I also feel in my bones the primal nobility of Jews respecting life so much that Jewish organizations like ZAKA go to tremendous pains (and it does cause them pain) to find and gather for dignified burial every violated bone, tissue, and ounce of spilled blood. I don’t know how to square widely broadcasting the video with that ethic. A survivor is entitled to make that choice as part of a battle for truth and the survival of their people, but dare we make it for the dead? Could we face the memes that will live online longer than any of the atrocity victims? It may be inevitable that someone will hack something, the film will leak, and then all bets are off. But my gut tells me that, for now, the high road of “chessed shel emet” requires protecting our dead from further desecration. But given that this is an existential fight , I will not judge those on the front lines who honorably disagree
“Reality just went down a sink hole.” And how. Pardon my French, but just stop for a second and think how fucked up in the head you have to be to reason, “I could stay home and watch Netflix, but no, I’d rather grab my anti-Israel and Jewish-star-of-David-in-the-trash signs and take myself on over to the Museum of TOLERANCE , named for the NAZI-HUNTER Simon Wiesenthal, so I can join a crowd screaming that Israel (and its Jews) should be wiped off the map, and express my outrage over a PRIVATE screening of mostly PERPETRATORS’ videos documenting their undisputed massacre of 1400 of the inhabitants of said Israel, (which Western governments and main stream media all confirm actually happened).” It’s chillingly beyond parody