Spoiler alert: they did it

The first time I walked into the Museum of Tolerance was almost exactly two years ago. I went there on a weekday morning to meet with Bari Weiss and Noa Tishby, and together we had a filmed discussion for an hour that was promoted as a state of the nation address in association with the Simon Wiesenthal Center. I wouldn’t describe the things the three of us discussed that day as “prophetic” – although many do; I would say that the writing was on the wall, and we were the ones prepared to spell it out without apology.

Tonight I returned to the Museum of Tolerance to bear witness. I walked into the same theater that we all had that discussion in openly for the world to watch if only it had chosen to do just that exactly two years ago. And - again - I saw the name of Simon Wiesenthal invoked in the corner of the screen; one ready to host footage that would make Wiesenthal roll over in his grave.

Tonight I bore witness. Alongside a full theater, I saw forty-three minutes of Hamas bodycam footage, iPhone footage from victims and first responder footage from the October 7 massacre. Also included was CCTV footage from inside homes, and from the kibbutzim, plus drone footage of the quiet after the storm. The first thing I want to express about this footage is this: every single person, including academics, authors and journalists, who would call this material “propaganda” need to walk slowly off a plank and disappear to the depths of the deepest and blackest ocean, never to resurface again.

The evil of denying evidence is not as barbaric as the acts themselves, but it is born of the same mentality as Hamas. And it is important to acknowledge that. It is rooted in a need to completely dehumanize Jewish people. And so outside the Museum of Tolerance, a violent pro-Palestine mob had gathered for hours before the screening. They graffiti’d on the ground in Arabic. They blasted Arabic music at the intersection on Wilshire, and they shrilled into the same type of megaphones that became a weapon of death against Jewish elderly man Paul Kessler this past Sunday. They shrieked “FREE PALESTINE!” so loudly that their chanting could be heard in the theatre, during the playback of the footage.

Can you imagine watching terrorists annihilate innocent civilians while screaming similar chants, and also hearing those chants live in a country like America, in a city like Los Angeles, right outside the theater door? Can you imagine exiting a theater having seen unspeakable things and then encountering sick fanatics who are celebrating the same violence you witnessed. I don’t need to imagine.

This is not the first time in the last 18 months that I have walked into a building that was teeming outside with a mob of hateful propagandist unhinged cowards. They were once again there to intimidate those who survived atrocities, and had to bare witness to the evidence. It felt like an eerily similar experience. Except the gaslighting we Jews are experiencing right now is unlike anything the world has ever known.

And thus for the record: the babies were beheaded. I saw them. The bodies were burned, charred black. I saw them. The blood filled the streets. I saw it. The torture was frozen on the emaciated, melted faces of the dead. I saw that, as well. The kids at the music festival were gunned down on the tarmac like dogs. I saw them. And the dogs were shot too.

Sorry for my illegible scrawling. It’s been a while since I took notes in the dark during a film screening. But this was no film. This was raw footage, without any editorializing. “Mom, your son is a hero,” I wrote on that last line. This was from a phone call one Hamas terrorist made on the device of his recently dead female victim to tell his parents their son just killed ten Jews. Just like that.

---

Tonight it is 85 years since Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass. We are just shy of 16 million Jews in the world, but it is estimated that had there been no pogroms, no Holocaust, no mass ethnic cleansing of our people from lands all over the world, no conversions out of the faith, there would be something close to 200 million Jews today. And here we are again, fighting for our survival. The new Nazis are Hamas and the black-and-white pictures from the Holocaust museums are not just in full color now; they are moving.

The Hamas go-pro footage plays out like a single shooter video game. There is no difference between the actions of Hamas and the Nazi war crimes. You can’t even split hairs. There is no context, or reason, other than barbaric ideology. These aren’t acts that were carried out because Hamas have been subjected to certain conditions their whole lives. These are acts that were carried out by genocidal fanatics who don’t see human beings in front of them, but ants that need to be squashed. They will not stop until their mission is complete. They don’t want to negotiate land or talk about a ceasefire. They want to do this over and over again until there’s nothing left to kill.

You can see the tear-filled joy they’re experiencing on their wide and smiling faces. The boys on their rampage. By the way, the efforts to identify some of the dead are ongoing, which is why so many are still reported missing. When you watch the footage you understand why the bodies cannot be identified.

I may from time-to-time make reference to some of the things I saw tonight, but I am not going to divulge the full gamut of what was shown right now. There’s too much carnage and words cannot do these horrors justice. We see two sons run to a safe room with their “abba” (Dad) half-naked and just awoken from sleep, and a grenade is thrown in. The boys run out screaming and wailing, knowing their father is dead. They’re covered in abba’s blood. We see them in the kitchen with a terrorist who taunts them and takes juice from their refrigerator drinking it in front of them. The younger brother says “I can only see with one eye” as his older brother repeats crying: “Why am I alive?”

I am glad I saw these things. I can now go out into the world and conduct my speaking engagements, and address communities of supporters and haters alike, knowing full well that I have stared into the eyes of evil, that I understand fully what we face. We face Amalek. The footage that is being shown is not even 10% of what has been found. Hundreds of hours of this exist. The evidence should be embarrassing for Hamas, except Hamas created the evidence (just like the Nazis), and the world is celebrating.

The world is echoing the jubilance of Hamas in the footage.

All that you hear over and over for 43 minutes are screams of “ALLAHU AKBAR!!!!” You see a man being beheaded. “ALLAHU AKBAR!” You see piles of lifeless bodies being shot at repeatedly long after they’re dead. “ALLAHU AKBAR!” You see cars being set on fire, and you see remains of burned bodies paralyzed and charred over steering wheels hours later. “ALLAHU AKBAR!” You see IDF soldiers being dragged with mangled limbs through the streets. “ALLAHU AKBAR!” You see burned corpse after burned corpse, after burned corpses without heads and then - separately - the severed heads, also burned. “ALLAHU AKBAR!”

Burned. Just like in the death camps in the 1940s. Except no longer monochrome. No longer an image from the past. And all the while. “ALLAHU AKBAR!” God is great.

They turned Southern Israel into a death camp on October 7. Three-thousand of them came through the border. And they had the time of their lives. The looks on their faces tell you that these men have never been happier.

I have never watched people on a screen before and hoped that it would be over for them soon, but when I watched the kids at the SuperNova music festival run for their lives, be dragged by their hair through the streets, their still-moving bodies being set on fire as they crawled in the middle of the roads, I hoped for them to die. I did. I hoped for them all to die.

The body bags. The piles of men and women. The hunks of carcass and flesh that are indecipherable. The burned skeleton of a person’s head who still has a gag in their mouth. This was Auschwitz reincarnated.

Only 138 deaths are documented in the footage. Again it’s not even 10% of what exists.

This war in Gaza is not a war of retaliation or revenge. It is a war to ensure that Israel survives. It is a war to rescue the hostages who are still taken from us. It is a war to promise the Jewish people a future.

The protestors and the ones who cry “propaganda!” refuse to see the truth because the truth is unbearable and inarguable. Once you see it, there’s no question about what’s next. Hamas, and all who support them, and everyone who refuses to acknowledge the limitless evidence of these unspeakable atrocities are nothing but a darkness that has poisoned our civilization. History will remember them as such. The Jewish people will live. We will live.

It’s obscene the amount of evidence we have of Jew hatred and desire to kill Jews. But those of us with the temerity to expose it are spat on and demoralised, forced to doubt ourselves in a way that is incomparable to anyone or anything else. It’s too much for the human head to hold both realities at once; the double threat of being both disbelieved and continuously assaulted. They want to drive us to the point of total madness. The only solution for people who cannot argue against truth is to render the truthsayer mad or mentally unwell. They consider themselves the underdog while employing their greater power to discredit us.

Well spoiler alert: they did it. Hamas did it. And they will never do it again.