Avi Benlolo: October 7 has strengthened the Jewish people’s resolve

A teddy bear is seen left on the ground near the bomb shelter of a home attacked by Hamas on October 7, in Holit, Israel, on Nov. 1, 2023. Photo by Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images

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This week, Israel and Jewish communities around the world marked the third anniversary of the atrocities committed on Oct. 7, 2023. On that tragic day, thousands of Palestinian terrorists infiltrated Israel from Gaza, committing the most heinous and barbaric crimes against humanity.

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They not only murdered unarmed civilians in cold blood, they burned families alive, they killed children in front of their parents and parents in front of their children. They raped, humiliated and mutilated women in ways even hell could not imagine.

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My friend Remo El-Hozayel survived the massacre. He says even a horror movie could not come close to the carnage he witnessed with his own eyes at the Nova music festival. An Israeli Bedouin policeman, El-Hozayel saved nearly 200 young people at the festival, but the memory of a young woman shot in the back of the head as she ran toward him for safety haunts him to this day.

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We know the scale of the atrocities committed on that day because Palestinian terrorists recorded and live-streamed their heinous crimes for the whole world to see. They wanted to instill fear. They murdered 1,200 people in a single day and kidnapped 251 others, holding many of them in Gaza under brutal conditions for more than two years. The hands of the devil could not muster the savagery and brutality of the Gazan terrorists who stormed into southern Israel on that dark day.

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Social media videos show students shamelessly holding a pro-Hamas memorial at the University of Toronto on Wednesday, chanting, “We will honour all our martyrs” — in other words, the murderers and rapists.

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You would think that Israel’s detractors would crawl back into the hole they came from after seeing Hamas’s savagery. One might believe that campus feminists and LGBT activists would protest its grotesque behaviour; that the difference between good and evil would be obvious.

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Instead, what the world got since October 7 is a depraved and frenzied mob of ignoramuses fuelled by antisemitism. Their stated objective is to “globalize the intifada” — to take the war against Judeo-Christian values to the rest of the world.

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On Wednesday, the anniversary of the massacre, even New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani could not bring himself to show compassion for the large Jewish community he serves. In a gross statement on X, he wrote: “The suffering did not begin nor end that day. It instead continued through the Israeli government’s devastating, ongoing genocide in Gaza.”

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Mamdani’s “genocide” libel was debunked by 75 retired American generals, admirals and military lawyers. Their open letter, released Wednesday, stated that Israel has gone out of its way to assist civilians, providing over “3.5-million tons of food, 48,000 tons of medical supplies, 5,000 tons of baby food and up to 15,000 cubic meters per day of water,” while vaccinating over 500,000 children and sending around 5,000 Gazans for medical treatment in other countries.

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Israel has waged a just war against barbarians. In the aftermath of October 7, I visited numerous destroyed Jewish communities. I know what I saw: blood-stained floors; bullet-riddled walls and doors; burnt out homes where families huddled in fear; trees where young girls were bound and raped.