The darkest day in Israel’s history
On the last day of Succot – Simchat Torah – the nation of Israel woke up to the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust. What happened that day is indelibly etched on the Israeli psyche and will be for generations to come. Even many Jewish people in the Diaspora lost family members or friends.
In the days that followed the massacre, many leaders in the Western world expressed outrage at the extent and scope of the Hamas butchery of the Israeli population who lived in the towns and kibbutzim neighbouring the Gaza border. Some world leaders, including President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, visited Israel to express their sympathy and horror and to proclaim Israel’s right of self-defence against the Hamas terrorists. They endorsed the ‘Swords of Iron’ war that Israel had declared to eradicate the widely proscribed terrorist organisation as a ‘just’ war, with the caveat that it mustn’t flare into a regional war across the Middle East. President Biden, addressing the possible intention of Hezbollah and Iran to attack Israel, pointedly said: “Don’t.” He sent two US aircraft carrier flotillas into the eastern Mediterranean as a show of deterrence. Whether that proves effective or not remains to be seen.
God’s judgement on hatred of His people prophesied
Most political leaders in the West leave God out of the equation. Does the God of Israel have anything to say about what is happening? If so, what?
There are several Old Testament prophecies, which have possibly yet to be fulfilled, that give us an idea. One is Amos 1:6, another is found in Zephaniah 2:4-7. However, I would like to highlight this one in Ezekiel 25:15-17: ‘Thus says the Lord God: “Because the Philistines dealt vengefully and took vengeance with a spiteful heart, to destroy because of the old hatred,” therefore thus says the Lord God: “I will stretch out My hand against the Philistines, and I will cut off the Cherethites and destroy the remnant of the seacoast. I will execute great vengeance on them with furious rebukes, and they shall know I am the Lord when I lay My vengeance upon them.”’
This is the Lord speaking through the prophet Ezekiel more than 2,500 years ago. It is a prophecy against the Philistines – a people that became ethnically extinct well before the time of Christ. Today’s ‘Palestinians’ actually carry the name of the ancient Philistines. Could this be a prophecy about the Palestinians who, like the ancient Philistines and Cherethites, inhabit the region of Gaza? The possible clue lies in Ezekiel 25:15: “The Philistines dealt vengefully and took vengeance with a spiteful heart, to destroy because of the old hatred.” If there is one characteristic that the modern-day ‘Palestinians share with the ancient Philistines, it is the ‘spiteful heart’ that comes from the ancient hatred of Israel.
After the exodus from Egypt, when Pharaoh attempted the first genocide of the Israelites, the first manifestation of this old hatred came from the Amalekites (Exodus 17). The Amalek hatred of Israel continued for many centuries.
The ancient hatred persists.
Of course, this ancient hatred of Israel has been carried through many other peoples and empires – the Philistines, the Greeks, the Romans and the Nazis, all of whom now lie in the graveyard of history – in fulfilment of God’s promise to Israel in Genesis 12:3 – “I will curse those who curse you.” History shows us – as does the Qur’an and many of the Hadiths – that this ancient hatred is hard-wired into the spirituality of fundamentalist Islam. It is very evident in the regime that rules modern-day Persia – Iran – with the Ayatollahs publicly swearing to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. It is notable that the international community ignores this fact. It is this evil regime that is the puppet master of the war that Israel now finds itself engaged in. A question many people are asking is: will Israel launch a pre-emptive strike against Iran?
The Holocaust re-lived
Many people have seen some of the gruesome video footage of the Hamas slaughter in the Israeli communities bordering Gaza on 7th October. Many were shot while others were raped or dismembered in front of their families, and others were burnt alive – some 1,400 men, women and children altogether. Over 200 people, including young children and Holocaust survivors, were taken hostage into Gaza. The words about taking “vengeance with a spiteful heart” – as Ezekiel describes it – are barely adequate to describe what happened. But that is exactly what these Hamas terrorists did when they murdered and butchered more than 1,300 Jews – just because they were Jews. Twenty years ago, when I made the documentary Lest We Forget, which draws a parallel between Nazi and Palestinian Jew-hatred, one of the Holocaust survivors we interviewed said that her brother was burnt alive because the gas chambers and crematoria could not cope with the volume of people the Nazis were murdering. Another survivor said she saw Nazi soldiers smashing babies’ heads against brick walls. On one occasion in Auschwitz, she met Dr Josef Mengele. He would experiment on how much pain his victims could bear by sawing off their limbs with no anaesthetic. The frenzied butchery that Hamas terrorists perpetrated on October 7 was even worse.
Are we about to see the rest of this Ezekiel prophecy come to pass? Time will tell over the next few weeks and months. This is a just war, as the war against Hitler was, and we may well see Gaza all but destroyed because of the way Hamas uses its civilian population as human shields and has embedded its terror operations and infrastructure in densely populated areas, apartment blocks and hospitals. This is something that is forbidden in the laws of armed conflict. The resulting civilian death toll, which is part of the Hamas strategy, is having its intended effect: the world is turning against Israel.
Spiralling Jew-hatred in the West
Some two months on from the horrific massacres by Hamas in southern Israel on Simchat Torah, we are seeing anti-Semitism rearing its ugly head through many cities in Western nations on a scale not seen since the 1930s and 40s in Nazi Germany. When I lived in Australia in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, anti-Semitic incidents were extremely rare. Now, with these massive ‘pro-Palestine’ demonstrations and accompanying attacks against Jewish people and institutions on an unprecedented scale, Jewish communities now live in fear. This is not just true in Australia, but in France, Britain and other Western countries, including the USA and Canada.
Why is this anti-Semitic ‘pro-Palestine’ obsession happening? One reason is the massive Muslim immigration into Western nations, both legal and illegal, which is undermining the Judeo-Christian heritage that has underpinned society. Another factor undermining our traditional Western values is the rise of neo-Marxist ideology – identified today as ‘woke’ ideology – that has adopted this ancient hatred of the Jewish people and their nation. Yet another factor in the dramatic escalation of Jew-hatred whenever Israel is involved in any conflict – and now more than ever – is the sickening anti-Israel bias of most of the mainstream media, particularly our state-funded national broadcasters such as the ABC and BBC, which constantly skew the facts and presentation style to portray Israel as the oppressive guilty party.
What does “Free Palestine” really mean?
So, what are these massive ‘pro-Palestine’ demonstrations all about? Is the “Free Palestine” slogan calling for self-determination, and even the recognition of statehood, for the people known as ‘the Palestinians’? Haj-Amin Al-Husseini, the British-appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, is often regarded as the ‘godfather’ of the Palestinian movement. Yasser Arafat took on his mantle, as has Mahmoud Abbas, today’s President of the Palestinian Authority. Both are determined to fulfil Husseini’s legacy, which now goes back for a whole century. Was the Mufti’s goal to create a sovereign state for the Arabs living in Mandated Palestine? If it was, then he would have accepted the Peel Commission’s Partition Plan of 1937. But no, his real aim was to make Mandated Palestine free of Jews from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea. In other words, ‘Judenrein’. Proof of this was his alliance with the Nazis to extend Hitler’s so-called ‘Final Solution’ from Europe right across the Middle East. This could have resulted in the genocide of the hundreds of thousands of Jews in Palestine as well as those in Iraq, Yemen and across North Africa. The God of Israel intervened with an Allied victory at El-Alamein.
The shocking demonstration at Sydney’s Opera House, just after Israel’s response to the massacre began, included calls to “gas the Jews!” as well as other anti-Semitic expletives which we won’t print here. At demonstrations in London, some were calling for jihad, while in some circumstances, can have other meanings, in such a charged atmosphere, can mean nothing but ‘holy war’. This, even in its mildest form, is an incitement to violence. The Metropolitan police refused to make arrests. But much more prominent in demonstrations across the West are the placards and chants “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free!” Free of what? Free of Hamas? No. Free of the State of Israel and free of the Jews! In other words, Judenrein!
The Hamas founding charter of 1988 calls for the eradication of Israel and the murder of all Jews. Martyrdom in pursuit of that aim is encouraged, and that is what the children of Gaza are brainwashed with from the cradle upwards. Hamas was spawned by the Muslim Brotherhood, which has infiltrated many of the Muslim organisations in the West, including in Britain, Australia and the USA. In countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt (where it was founded in 1928), Jordan and the UAE, the Muslim Brotherhood is proscribed as a terrorist organisation, but not in the Western countries just mentioned. President Barack Hussein Obama had Muslim Brotherhood advisors in his Administration who are possibly influencing the Biden Administration today.
Generations of Palestinian children taught to hate and murder Jews.
But it is not just the children of Gaza who are pumped full of this Jew-hatred. The children and young people in the Palestinian Authority-controlled areas are subject to the same curriculum that is funded by tax-payers in the Western world. They are brought up with the values of the PLO Charter (the organisation which controls the Palestinian Authority), which also calls for the destruction of the Jewish state through ‘armed struggle’ (i.e. terrorism) and any means possible. In the days following the October massacre, the Palestinian Authority imams were instructed to preach the ancient Hadith that calls for a tree or a stone behind which a Jew is hiding to call out so that the Jew can be killed. And the Palestinian Authority is Israel’s supposed ‘peace partner’!
Can the Simchat Torah massacres be likened to another Kristallnacht? While the circumstances were quite different – even though the number of Jews murdered on 7th October 2023 was far greater than on 9th and 10th November 1938, the one thing the two atrocities have in common is that they are a wake-up call for the civilised world, including Israel. Just as the nations of the world had turned a blind-eye to what was happening under the Nazis in Germany, in the West a similar blind-eye is turned to what is happening under Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. Lest We Forget was premiered in the British Parliament at the height of the Second Intifada in October 2003. Its exposé of the ancient hatred that has haunted Israel and the Jewish world is even more relevant today. In the last twenty years since then at least two more generations of Palestinian children have been polluted by the genocidal death-cult that we have recently witnessed to our horror. Those children that we saw in Lest We Forget are now adults, and more youngsters are following in their footsteps. Yet the West continues to fund this poisonous propaganda by direct grants to the Palestinian Authority and through other organisations such as UNWRA.
Our political leaders need to wake up to what is really going on. Every Holocaust Remembrance Day we repeat the words “Never Again!” Never again is now!
You can view Lest We Forget on our website: www.whoseland.tv/lest-we-forget
You can watch the full documentary (75 minutes) or a 6-minute preview for free.
0 Comments