October 7, 2023, was many things.

It marked the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust, with Hamas militants infiltrating Israeli territory, resulting in the murder of over 1,689 civilians and the taking of hundreds of hostages. The attack ignited a war between Israel and Iran’s network of proxies, eventually escalating to direct confrontation with the Islamic Republic itself.
It became a litmus test for the international community’s response to terrorism and civilian casualties. The varying reactions from governments, institutions, and individuals around the world exposed deep divisions in moral clarity and revealed troubling fault lines in what was once considered a unified stance against terror. The ugly antisemitism showed in every demonstration of the purple hair kids.
Please start from the end: #hamasIsISIS and it must be eliminated

“By the time Americans woke up on October 7, 2023, it was clear that what had unfolded while we slept was not like previous wars or battles Israel has fought in its 75-year history. This was a genocidal pogrom. It was a scene out of the many places Jews had fled—a scene from the history of the Nazi Holocaust and of the European pogroms before that and of the Farhud, the 1941 massacre of Jews in Baghdad, a city that, it’s hard to believe now, was 40 percent Jewish at the beginning of the twentieth century—all of which remind us of Israel’s necessity.

The Hamas terrorists came across the border into southern Israel on foot and on motorbike. They came by truck and by car and by paraglider. And they came with a plan. They came to Israel to murder and maim and mutilate anyone they could find. That is what they did.

These Cossacks had smartphones. They called their families to brag that they had murdered Jews. Dad, Dad, I killed 10 Jews! Others filmed the slaughter with GoPros. Some used the cellphones of their victims to upload the footage of their torture and murder to their Facebook pages. In all of this, the terrorists are euphoric. No one who has watched the unedited footage fails to note the glee of the butchers.

Some Israelis were literally disappeared on October 7—burned at such high heat that volunteers are still sifting through the bones and the remnant teeth to identify them. But we know that more than 200 people are currently being held hostage by Hamas and that more than 1,400 were murdered in those terrible hours. Among the dead are some thirty American citizens. There are at least ten Americans among the hostages.

…The difference between 9/11 and 10/7 was that the catastrophe of 10/7 was followed, on October 8, by a different kind of catastrophe. A moral and spiritual catastrophe that was on full display throughout the West before the bodies of those men and women and children had even been identified.

People poured into the streets of our capital cities to celebrate the slaughter.

In Sydney, crowds gathered at the Sydney Opera House cheering “gas the Jews.” People rejoiced on the streets of Berlin and London and Toronto and New York.” – The full speech of (the amazing) Bari Weiss is here.

The last year in numbers that don’t tell the full story: