In Memoriam
October 7th, 2025
In Memoriam
The words for this article are a conglomeration of facts and raw emotion. It felt at the same time more and less difficult to write. I hope I have done justice to the victims and the survivors.
Two years. Two entire years since October 7th, 2023. Has anything stayed the same since that darkest of days in modern history? I said then that it marked a turning point in world history much like the eleventh of September, 2001. Our worlds before and after both dates were irrevocably changed, and changed for the worse. The entire course of my life has taken a different path because of it; and I am far from the only one who has had this experience. We cannot forget the events that catalyzed the troubles of our present. We cannot—we must not—forget October 7th, 2023, when over twelve hundred Jews, Arabs, Israelis, Americans, and foreign nationals including Thai and Nepalese foreign workers were murdered, and over two hundred and fifty more taken hostage by the genocidal terrorists of Hamas.
It is hard to imagine history ever forgetting the name of the Supernova Music Festival. Such unspeakably evil events as those that took place there and in the surrounding environs on that day; they chill to the bone. Yet who at least in the gentile world can now recall the details of the Kishinev/Chișinău pogrom that murdered nearly fifty Jews in April 1903? Of the 4200 attendees at the Nova festival near Kibbutz Re’im, Israel, approximately four hundred souls were murdered and over twenty kidnapped to Gaza. These were not “occupiers” or “colonists” on a mission to oppress. They were teenagers and young adults that wanted to rave in the desert next to their Palestinian neighbors. It was the Supernova Music Festival for PEACE. What do you think their political orientation was? Do you think the vast majority had a particular love for Bibi Netanyahu? Do you think a single one of them would have chosen war over coexistence?
But war came to them anyway. The brave men and women of the IDF—the Israel Defense Forces—those who protect and defend the safe haven of the Jewish people scattered all across the world: you who are so young, but so unstoppable; you have stepped up to the challenge of your generation. You are the only ones in all the world that have. Where my soon-to-be-30 last-wave-of-millenials have only disappointed history, you have sacrificed so much to do right by your people and right by future history. You lead the way of that future, and damn anyone who thinks otherwise. They slander and libel you who are the great-grandchildren of Holocaust and Farhud survivors. Holocaust inversion will be regarded by future history with the same moral disgust as Holocaust denial; you have my word on that.
I have studied Shoah history for a number of years. I first read Dr. Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning about a decade ago, which was my entry point into Holocaust education. I think what shocked me most about October 7th is this very fact: I saw history repeat in front of my eyes. Jews murdered simply for being Jews, and on a scale one hundred times that of the Squirrel Hill synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh of 2018. I have worn my ‘Stronger Than Hate’ memorial shirt loudly and proudly since that day, but I never expected it to carry the significance it does now post-October 7th, 2023.
For we now stand at the precipice once more: we overlook a world taken with antisemitic lies. Just this last week a delusional antisemite stabbed and murdered two Jews in Manchester on Yom Kippur. Why? Why do you think? He believed it to be the “right” thing to do. As Israeli journalist Haviv Rettig Gur put it, antisemitism always feels moral in the present. It is not until decades later that any who express it feel remorse; if indeed they ever feel it at all. Those who spread lies about the people of Israel carried the Manchester stabber’s knife with their own hands. We cannot wait for them to catch up to almighty Truth. We must move the world forward in spite of their efforts to drag us back into the worst sections of history textbooks; for those sections almost invariably involve unmitigated violence against Jews.
For the third time I have now watched Sheryl Sandberg’s documentary ‘Screams Before Silence’ on the sexual violence of Hamas. As with the past two viewings, it does not get easier. Women zip-tied to trees and…but I won’t elaborate here. I don’t have the heart. But knowing that the brave Amit Soussana is alive and stronger than I could ever be after surviving Hamas captivity and sexual assault; just hearing her tell her story as a living, breathing person after the fact gives hope that we can and will get through this. Together.
How can anyone forget the dear child Ariel and baby Kfir Bibas, and their mother Shiri, who were kidnapped from Nir Oz, taken hostage to Gaza, and then MURDERED for being Jewish? A baby and a four-year-old child strangled to death with bare hands. What kind of MONSTER does something like that? How can ANYONE, ANY RATIONAL HUMAN BEING ON THIS PLANET side with Hamas knowing what they’ve done? Their father and husband, Yarden Bibas, survives them. A crueler fate I cannot imagine; yet October 7th is an infinite collection of such horrors. The next Edgar Allan Poe need find no more inspiration than that day.
How can the world simply discard the tragedy of the Arab-Israeli al-Ziyadne family? Aisha, a teenage girl, was taken hostage by Hamas along with her father Youssef and brother Hamza.
I apologize to Bilal for leaving him out of the original article.
Aisha was released in a hostage deal, but she had to endure waiting unending for news on her family members still hostage. Then, news finally broke that their two bodies had been recovered by the IDF from a terror tunnel in Gaza, in RAFAH. You world, you have shamed yourselves. You promised to KEEP YOUR EYES ON RAFAH. But you alerted not a soul to the plight of Youssef and Hamza. Which circle of hell do liars belong to? Or at this point have you crossed all the way down to betrayal?
Nowhere in the entire Middle East-North Africa region are the Arab people freer than in the only Jewish state, where they enjoy the same fundamental protections of freedom of speech and of religion and of expression as every other citizen of Israel. Try blaspheming Mohammed in Saudi Arabia or Dubai. Try converting to another religion than the one your parents raised you in. Try being anything other than a straight heterosexual in your outwards presentation. That is not to say that there haven’t been problems of integration and discrimination against Arab-Israelis; but these problems are improving, and rapidly so in the wake of October 7th. Ironically, the social cohesion of Israel was only increased by Hamas’s attempt to spread genocidal division and hate. “Apartheid”? Garn.
How could anyone ever, ever forget those still held captive, ESPECIALLY knowing what we know now about the fate of the Bibas family and so many others? Those still alive have souls, HUMAN souls, and they endure suffering unending while deliberately being kept from everyone and everything they ever knew. And those dead who Hamas still withholds from their families…the cruelty is the point. WHY can the world not understand that the side HOLDING HOSTAGES are NOT the “good guys”? But we already know the answer, as much as we may not want to hear it: Jewish hostages simply don’t count in the eyes of present-day humanity. For many, this is simply a continuation of Hitler’s war on the Jews; and we already know Kanye’s feelings on that.
Spiritually, Hamas is a continuation of Nazi ideology vis-a-vis Haj Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and Hitler’s close ally that worked to propagandize the Arab and Muslim worlds towards Nazism. The NSDAP explicitly sponsored an Arabic-broadcast radio station outside of Berlin, with a decidedly anti-Zionist agenda. What do people think, that if Nazi General Erwin Rommel the ‘Desert Fox’ had reached Jerusalem Herr Hitler would have just let the Jews live? Hamas is cut whole cloth from the same ideological background as the Nazis, along with the Houthis, Hezbollah, and the genocidal fascists in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Those who refuse to see these facts simply don’t have a clue.
Tragically, Hamas learned well from the kidnapping and eventual return of hostage Gilad Shalit; the rotting corpse once known as Yahya Sinwar learned well indeed. This is a good point at which to remind everyone that the enemies of the Jewish people—no matter how vicious, powerful, or cruel they are now—all eventually end up as Sinwars and Hitlers and Hamans. Dust in the winds of history that the Jewish people rebuild stronger on top of. So shall it be with Hamas, and Hezbollah, and the Houthis, and Khamenei, and all who now support them. They are dust, and they don’t even know it. The evil that these men do lives on after them; and no good shall be interred with their bones, for they have brought none into being. So shall it be with this basket of deplorables, taken by brutishness and brutality; and all have lost their reason.
For there is no true difference between wishing for extermination of Israel and Israelis and wishing for the extermination of the Jewish people. It was an improbable miracle of history that the Jewish people survived at all to have their own nation again two thousand years after losing sovereignty in the land. And now the antisemites of the world want to take it away again. Tell me, did the Vulcans thrive in the new Star Trek when their planet was destroyed? Would the Japanese have been better off if we had just detonated all of Honshu and the rest of the Japanese archipelago? Please. Destroying a people’s nation in the present reality of nation-states at a minimum reduces them to second-class citizens of the world. There are many such peoples now; but none so vulnerable to hate as those who have been known as always stateless and powerless across two thousand years of culture built on top of their suffering. Israel exists despite the majority of the world hating its mere existence as Jewish. This proves more than anything else the simple fact of its necessity.
I know I have written fiercely in the past and in the present. I have also shown a certain level of vulnerability especially recently. There is not a single reason to feel shame for expressing your grief long and loud. While writing this, Eden Golan’s ‘October Rain’ happened to play on my YouTube feed; perhaps it was fate. It is her original version of the song ‘Hurricane’ that had to be censored for the 2024 Eurovision song contest; apparently antisemitic massacres are “too political” to be spoken or sung about in Europe. I have typed this sentence while crying. I recommend wholeheartedly that you get a good cry in when you can.
O, would that the masses understand! How do they not feel this too? What is this curse of feelings and emotion that I have been afflicted with? How can they say such brutish things and behave so awfully to their fellow homo sapiens? That is all any of us are. We are all one gigantic glob of humanity partitioned into our own little islands of consciousness. Can we not feel for each other across these rifts in our psyches?
I have no philosophy to deal with this moment. Nothing in the books on my shelves can help me. Where is the answer to the most fundamental question of human relations? Where can we hope to find that universal principle that will finally allow us to be kind to one another? Where do we turn to when all other lights go out?
Dylan Thomas commands us to ‘rage, rage, against the dying of the light’. I do not despair the future; for I have faith in human progress that we the gentile world will come to embrace the Jewish people as I know we are capable. No more hatreds unending. Humanity can and will be better; not by forgetting our past, but by its remembrance and our shared commitment to moving forwards together. Such that one day we shall recite Walt Whitman in celebration and commemoration of inextricable tragedy and hope,
‘O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.’
So long as I live, the memory of the dead shall not fade. Chag Sukkot Sameach to those who celebrate.