Sunday, Oct. 15, 2023 | 2 a.m.
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What about “never again” has the world forgotten? Or never knew? Or never understood?
I have to admit that, as I write this, I am not in a forgiving mood. And no one else with a heart and a brain and the ability to understand right from wrong really is.
So as I consider those two words that ever since the Holocaust have been the guiding admonition for Jews around the world — that never again will Jews anywhere stand silent, do nothing and allow the next group of Nazis to march them to the ovens of destruction — I am struck by the ease with which so many others, especially young people, can pay them no heed.
There are no words — as much as world leaders, religious leaders, community leaders and some education leaders have tried — to describe the horrors that the terrorists of Iran-backed Hamas unleashed against innocent Israeli children, babies, grandmothers, teenage daughters, sons and grandsons a week ago Saturday. Not since the Holocaust and Nazi inhumanity destroyed 6 million Jews and others not deemed worthy of the “master race” has there been such horrific carnage directed toward people just because— wait for it— they were Jewish.
But, unlike most of the world back in the 1930s when Adolf Hitler let everyone know his plans for the Jewish people, this time there are good people, decent people, responsible people who are saying we will not let this happen again.
Foremost among the leaders on this planet is President Joe Biden, whose emotional, heartfelt and decisive words left no doubt where the people of the United States stood — squarely at Israel’s back, at its side and right next to it without an inch of daylight separating our nation from that tiny democracy in the Middle East.
There are billboards across Israel thanking Biden and the American people because we have simply said and done the right thing. We have and are standing up against hate, against terror and for a people who have been terrified to their core by those murderous butchers who killed without conscience, without any sense of decency and with the kind of blood-curdling malice that must not exist on planet Earth.
At this writing, a unified Israel is determining the best, most efficient and least destructive way to eliminate Hamas. Hamas, which has built tunnels to hide weapons and hostages beneath and adjacent to homes, mosques and workplaces of innocent Gazans who can’t or won’t get out of the way of Israel’s attempts to destroy Iran’s terrorist puppets.
But destroy these murderers — and their leaders — once and for all time is what Israel will do. They have proved over and over again by standing down to international pressure, instead of standing up to the terrorists,that allowing them to live and foster fear and death yet another time is insanity. So it is incumbent upon all other countries in the region— Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and, yes, Israel to the extent it can — to do whatever they must to help get those people to safety before the fury of hell is unleashed on Hamas.
The great shame in America is not that we aren’t doing what is right, what is moral and what we are commanded to do by all measures of humanity. We are, and our leaders from President Biden on down throughout our communities are speaking and acting out against this evil.
Where we are falling short is on our college campuses, where students and their professors are engaged in victim-blaming and false equivalence in an effort to justify the beheadings, murders, kidnappings and point-blank butchering of innocent Jews.
There is no equivalence. There is no justification. There is no way on God’s Earth that what the world witnessed a week ago in Israel can ever be condoned, explained or rationalized by any living human being.
And, yet, on some of our most outstanding college campuses, there was exactly that. Israelis being blamed for their own murders. Some of our most elite universities, prep schools and private schools across the country have equivocated — for fear of offending, I suppose— when it is time to make clear to young minds what morality means. I blame the leaders. And I blame to a lesser extent the young people who rely so much on social media to the point of believing the anti-social rantings of the world’s most immoral manipulators. The students should know better but they don’t.
The professors and administrators do know better but they won’t teach, educate and elucidate. They are meek when they should be strong. They fail in their primary mission, which is to teach all of their students to be better people.
This is the time for moral clarity. As the weeks go on, there will be very difficult images to see and stories to read. If we have already failed our younger generations, how can we expect to answer their questions when they rightly question what comes next?
I suspect that this reaction on college campuses is not new. I suspect it has happened many times in the past. I know it happened in Germany as Hitler was coming to power and the people who needed to say something said nothing, or worse, said the absolute wrong thing.
Never again must mean exactly what it says. Israelis are prepared to live— and, unfortunately, die — giving those words the respect that the 6 million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust, and now the thousands who have been killed and maimed at the hands of Hamas last week, deserve.
This is not about vengeance. What happens next is on Hamas. It is Israel’s responsibility to keep its people safe. It failed last week to do so but it shall not fail again.
The Good Book says that vengeance is God’s job. So be it. But I have read nothing that says good people, moral people, decent people, can’t lend a hand from time to time.
Brian Greenspun is editor, publisher and owner of the Sun
