Hamas unleashed an unprovoked, surprise attack on Israel on Oct. 7, during Shabbat and the Simchat Torah holiday.

The Gaza Strip-based terrorist group’s Pearl Harbor-style onslaught included 2,200 rockets that blasted communities as far north as Tel Aviv. Regardless, Israel’s critics and enemies point their fingers at the Israelis, as if they had bombed themselves.

  • The Biden administration’s statements have improved, but its knee-jerk response was dreadful. “We urge all sides to refrain from violence and retaliatory attacks,” the U.S. Office of Palestinian Affairs declared, soon after the mayhem erupted. Washington’s initial message to Jerusalem: Don’t do anything. Just stand there. This wrongfully even-handed X post sparked outrage and soon disappeared.
  • George Achi, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.’s director of journalistic standards, instructed his newsroom colleagues: “Do not refer to militants, soldiers, or anyone else as ‘terrorists.’ The notion of terrorism remains heavily politicized and is part of the story.”
  • “We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence,” read a joint statement by Harvard Palestine Solidarity Groups on the situation in Palestine. “The apartheid regime is the only one to blame.” Members of 33 undergraduate groups signed this communique.

This manifesto so nauseated hedge-fund billionaire Bill Ackman and other CEOs that they hope to place its signatories on a do-not-hire list.

  • Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., displayed a Palestinian flag in front of her Capitol Hill office, beside the star-spangled banner. Other radical “Squad” members have slammed Israel, even as Israelis hose their countrymen’s blood from sidewalks.
  • Black Lives Matter of Chicago created an “I stand with Palestine” meme, complete with a paragliding terrorist, like those who flew from Gaza into Israel, with guns blazing.
  • Pro-Palestine demonstrators in Times Square dressed as Hamas killers. One protester waved a swastika on his cellphone screen.

These doe-eyed dreamers and Islamofascist fifth columnists should focus on Hamas’ atrocities before they denounce Israel and defend its tormentors.

  • “We saw boys and girls bound, who were shot in the head,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a TV address Wednesday. “Men and women burned alive. Young women who were raped and slaughtered. Soldiers who were beheaded.”

Netanyahu declared via X: “Hamas is ISIS. We will crush and eliminate it as the world crushed and eliminated ISIS.”

  • “Babies with their heads cut off, that’s what [the soldiers] said,” i24 News’ Nicole Zedek reported from Kibbutz Kfar Aza near Sderot, just outside Gaza. “Families gunned down, completely gunned down in their beds.”
  • CNN’s Nic Robertson said, “There were so many murdered members of this Kibbutz. Men, women, children, hands bound, shot, executed, heads cut.”
  • “They killed babies in front of their parents, and then killed the parents,” said Israel Defense Forces Gen. Itai Veruv. “They killed parents, and we found babies between the dogs and the family killed before him. They cut heads of the people.”
  • “A pregnant woman in southern Israel was found by Hamas terrorists,” India’s TV9 Network’s Aditya Raj Kaul explained via X. “They dissected her body. Her stomach was cut open, and they took the fetus out with the umbilical cord. And let the unborn child die slowly out of his mother’s womb. This is what inhuman savages Hamas do to people.”
  • “Israelis—young and old—were slaughtered in their homes,” Aviva Klompas, former head speechwriter at Israel’s U.N. Mission, wrote via X. “Entire families were butchered in cold blood. In one home, a terrorist shot the parents dead, took a child’s cellphone, and livestreamed the horrors on the child’s Facebook account.”

“Our children suffered the most horrific experience no one could even imagine—going to enjoy music with friends in nature and get bombarded with hand grenades and automatic weapons, and just being slaughtered, one after another,” David Abramov told CBS News. His son Laor, an aspiring DJ, vanished after Hamas swiped him in a pickup truck. “Young, beautiful, happy people go to celebrate life and meeting monsters that come to celebrate death.”

  • In a Hamas X video, its forces excavate water pipes, slice them, pack them with explosives, and convert them into do-it-yourself bombs, which they lobbed into Israel. “Allahu Akbar!” (“God is great!”) a men’s chorus sings on the soundtrack.

And what was Hamas’ message to Gazans thirsty for running water? Go to hell.

Hamas makes the Palestine Liberation Organization look like moderates. These rats resemble 1970s-era Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge.

All told, Hamas has killed some 1,200 Israelis. This has been the biggest orgy of Jew killing since the liberation of Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

Conversely, Israel acts in self-defense. Any collateral damage that rank-and-file Palestinians suffer will not be because the Israel Defense Forces gunned them down in their living rooms, but because their jihadist leaders launched this genocidal bloodbath.

Until last weekend, Israel had been pursuing peace like never before. In conjunction with then-President Donald Trump, Israel already had signed mutual-recognition treaties with Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Sudan, and Morocco. Atop these four Abraham Accords, Israel and Saudi Arabia lately had signaled that a separate peace was within reach.

“I believe that we are at the cusp of … an historic peace with Saudi Arabia,” Netanyahu told the United Nations last month. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman told Fox News: “Every day we get closer.”

This is what it looks like when doves fly.

But that enraged the ayatollahs, arguably the most evil, hateful, destructive, and apocalyptic humans alive. The Wall Street Journal reports that Iran and Hamas engineered this war on Israel to car-bomb any truce between Jerusalem and Riyadh.

Hamas’ ensuing carnage has killed at least 27 Americans, as of this writing. Fourteen other U.S. citizens are missing and could be kidnapped or dead.

These facts alone should quell the Far Left’s lust for Hamas.

Alas, this catastrophe hurts America. Thus, too many on the Left are exactly where one typically finds them—on the wrong side of the Stars and Stripes.

The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.

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