My friend Steve Hunegs of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas invited me to attend a showing of the atrocity video compiled by the IDF in the aftermath of the October 7 massacres and atrocities perpetrated by Hamas. I am grateful to Steve for the invitation and for opening his home to his guests. Other reporters in attendance included Reid Forgrave of the Star Tribune, Matt Sepic of Minnesota Public Radio, and Alex Steil of the Minnesota Daily along with some prominent Minnesotans who asked not to be identified for professional reasons. Our viewing of the video was subject to the terms of a confidentiality and nondisclosure agreement that allows us to describe the contents.
The video was teed up for us by Consul for Political and Commercial Affairs Itai Biran of Israel’s Chicago-based Midwest Consulate. Mr. Biran told me before the showing that he has previously played it for comparable audiences in Chicago and Detroit. He told me, “We need to fight for the truth. We’re fighting for the very basic truth.”
Israel first showed the video for select journalists this past October. Since October “the fight for the very basic truth” has only intensified. Now it is under attack by mobs of Hamas sympathizers in the streets of major Western cities and on the campuses of our elite universities.
Among those who attended October screenings of the video were Kelly Jane Torrance, who covered it in the New York Post (“A terrorist takes his two boys back into the house, and a security camera captures their devastation. The blast blinded one boy in an eye. The other falls to the ground, plaintively pleading, “Why am I alive? Why am I alive?”), Graeme Wood, who covered it in The Atlantic (“Some of the clips I had not previously seen simply show the victims in a state of terror as they wait to be murdered, or covered with bits of their friends and loved ones as they are loaded into trucks and brought to Gaza as hostages”), and mainstream media cretins such as those of NBC News (who covered it with the obligatory reference to those darned “militants”). The AP’s Julia Frankel also reported on it in this October 16 story.
Several of the clips compiled in the video have previously been posted to social media. I think we have included several on Power Line. I know I have commented on the sadistic glee of the Hamas madmen that is apparent throughout the 45-minute video. They shriek in ecstasy as they perform their barbaric deeds. They take sensual pleasure in committing acts from which we recoil in disgust and horror.
I wondered as I watched the video: Has Dementia Joe or blind Tony Blinken seen this? (Kelly Jane Torrance notes in her column that Biden has seen it.) If so, what are they doing hectoring Israel, yammering about a two-state solution, and disparaging a country acting in self-defense while in the throes of a crisis that goes to its reason for being? If that’s the best they can do, why won’t they shut up?
The country, by the way, happens to be one of the closest friends of the United States. After the showing of the video, Mr. Bitan stated: “America is our true friend. We don’t take it [i.e., its support] for granted. Its support gives us the power to cope.” He’s a diplomat. He won’t note the anomalies.
Biden’s yammering about a two-state solution is unreal in the context of the reality underlying the video. The two-state solution: it isn’t gonna happen. The “solution” is part of the problem. A people must have civilized norms and civil institutions on which to predicate a state. It can’t be created ex nihilo or ex worse than nothing.
Israel exists as a homeland and refuge for the Jewish people. The events of October 7 undermine its reason for being. Thus the war on Hamas in which it is currently engaged.
No government freely elected by the people of Israel can tolerate what Israel withstood on October 7. There can be no return to the status quo ante or its functional equivalent under the supervision of the Palestinian Authority, whose president for life himself supports terrorism with funds generously provided by his supporters among the Biden administration and elsewhere. As I say, the two-state “solution” is part of the problem.
Israel has also to contend with Iranian proxies including Hezbollah and the Houthis as well as Iran itself. The day of reckoning is coming. That seems to me the message of the atrocity video.
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