Already Forgotten

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Tuesday, October 31, 2023

 

Every 9/11 memorial I’ve seen seems to include the words “Never Forget.” I remember that the phrase, so closely associated with the Holocaust, shook me up. But it also felt superfluous. I used to think: How could I? The September 11 attacks changed my country, changed the way we travel, changed our vocabulary. We still hear notices in Grand Central about unattended baggage. Everyone had a story about where they were, what their institution did in response, and even the conversations they had that day. It was also unforgettable because it was cinematic. The destruction of the towers, an iconic part of the New York City skyline, was broadcast. It was the closest thing to collective humanity walking onto the set of a disaster movie.

 

We were supposed to “Never Forget” the death of George Floyd either. And again. How could you? The pandemic orders that had kept everybody shut in were suddenly suspended for anti-racist demonstrations. One black man in Minneapolis died at the hands of a white policeman, and cities across the world saw mass protests against police brutality. Police departments were attacked and defunded. And new terms started entering the lexicon, such as “Soros-backed district attorney.” Half the country saw riots, the other peaceful protests. This bifurcation of perception was memorialized for me in a since-deleted tweet by the BBC that I’ll never forget: “27 police officers injured during largely peaceful anti-racism protests in London.”

 

Even though it was the equivalent of a dozen per-capita 9/11s, even though it was the most fatal day for worldwide Jewry since the Holocaust, and even though it has kicked off a worldwide wave of popular antisemitic expression unseen in decades, the October 7 massacre of Jews by Hamas in southern Israel is being actively, willfully forgotten.

 

It is being buried in fake news about Israel bombing a hospital and wantonly killing 500. In fact, Hamas or its allies in Islamic Jihad fired the rocket that exploded in that hospital’s parking lot. It is being buried in fake histrionics from European politicians about Israeli war crimes. It is being buried day by day by front-page pictures in the New York Times and Washington Post of destroyed buildings in Gaza, with no real description of what purpose the buildings served for Hamas. It is being buried in fake-out news that the half-German beauty Shani Louk, whose lifeless body was paraded and spat on as a war trophy by Hamas, was in fact recuperating in a Gaza hospital. That fake-out was used by online trolls to allege that Israel had been falsely using Louk’s death in a propaganda operation. But, as it turned out again and again, Hamas was in fact more monstrous than you first suspected. Weeks later, buried under the pictures of Gaza, the news comes that Louk had been beheaded.

 

We rightly deplore the pointless violence of terrorist groups such as the Provisional IRA, who led 30 years of mayhem across two islands, only to get a deal very similar to one already offered to them more than a decade before their cease-fire. In 2019, America’s reading public made a bestsellers of Say Nothing, a gripping journalistic account of just one gruesome IRA murder: the execution of Jean McConville, mother of ten, an Irish woman who was killed by Irish terrorists as a suspected informant.

 

For perspective, in just six hours Hamas killed nearly as many victims as the IRA did in 30 years. While IRA bombs killed innocent civilians and children, according to exhaustive accounts such as Lost Lives, over half the IRA’s victims were uniformed military, police, security, or prison officers. In Hamas’s rampage, uniformed personnel were incidental casualties in a pogrom that hunted any and all Jews — babies put in ovens, knives plunged into pregnant bellies, Holocaust survivors in old-folks’ homes shot in the face, children forced to watch their parents’ execution before they were summarily executed. You can find videos of Hamas killers taking GoPro videos of their killing sprees, recordings of themselves calling their parents to report, “I killed ten Jews. Their blood is on my hands. Be proud of me, mother.” This isn’t the logic of a terrorist making his heart cold in order to pursue a political goal; it is the short-of-breath, hot-blooded boast of an exterminator pursuing genocide.

 

Will an American journalist write a prize-winning book about a killer such as that?

 

No. It is already being forgotten, interred in false equivalencies. If Hamas laid down its weapons, faced justice, and gave up its hostages, the people of Gaza would be still in a pitiable state, but unmolested by Israel. If Israel laid down its arms, October 7 would repeat itself until the shared dream of Hitler and the Ayatollah was accomplished. Don’t forget it.