The Hamas Massacre

By Roger B. Baskin

On Saturday October 7, 2023, the terrorist group Hamas engaged in one of the most sadistic atrocities in world history.  The atrocities included: murdering babies and decapitating their heads; burning elderly people alive, raping women and parading them naked in the street with their crotch bleeding from the rape, raping and killing women and placing their bodies on the street celebrating their murder,  beheading soldiers,  killing parents in front of their children, killing children in front of their parents; taking babies and the elderly as hostages.

One would think that the barbarism of Hamas would be met with universal condemnation.  Sadly that was not the case.  MSNBC in their coverage became the voice of terrorism. MSNBC referred to Hamas as fighters and refused to call them terrorists.   MSNBC made every attempt to justify the actions of  Hamas.  Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL was so outraged, he went on MSNBC two days later and decried the MSNBC coverage and asked whether the MSNBC script had been written by Hamas.  The New York Post accused MSNBC of running “interference for Hamas”. The MSNBC coverage was so egregious that MSNBC lost 33% of its prime time audience during and after the massacre.  At the same time the CNN and Fox News audiences surged. 

MSNBC was not the only bad actor in the United States.  Student groups at Harvard, Columbia, Michigan, Northwestern, NYU and other elite universities released statements blaming Israel for the barbaric attacks by Hamas.  The reaction to these students was swift.  Alumni demanded that the universities denounce these statements and reveal the names of the students who signed the public letters supporting the Hamas massacre.  What  employers would want to hire people with those values? A prominent law firm rescinded a job offer to Ryna Workman, a law student at Columbia  who wrote “Israel bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life”.   Other employers followed rescinding job offers to those who support wanton brutality.  

The tactics of MSNBC and the students who defended Hamas are well known to students of anti-Semitism.  The tactics of dehumanization and blaming the Jews for extreme acts of anti-Semitism goes back to the ancient days in Greece and Rome.  Extreme elements of the left and the right agree on only one thing:  their hatred of Jews.  The left wing Communists of the Soviet Union engaged in pogroms against Jews, which is exactly what the Hamas attack was. The right wing Nazis sent Jews to concentration camps.  

The Hamas charter is not of peaceful co-existence with Israel. The Hamas charter is to destroy Israel and kill all Jews on earth.  The Hamas massacre had nothing to do with bringing peace to the Middle East.  Hamas has opposed all peace efforts between Israel and Arab states.  One motivation of this attack might be to stop a peace agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia.  Anti-Semitism is often thought to be an extreme right wing phenomena.  However extreme left wing anti-Semitism is just as pernicious as right wing anti-Semitism. Extreme left wing anti-Semitism was on full display on MSNBC and college campuses.