By Steve Huntley

September 27,2024

In just 10 days we will mark one year since the Oct. 7 massacre in Israel — the deadliest day for the world’s Jews since the Holocaust and the most catastrophic assault on the West since the 9/11 attack that brought down the Twin Towers.

Make no mistake, the same evil movement is responsible for both — a savage, merciless, genocidal, radical Islamism committed to relentless war against the West, our values, women’s rights, individual liberty, and open society.

Hamas, the barbarian terrorist gang that murdered 1,200 people (40 of them Americans), raped women, burned human beings and took 250 hostages a year ago in Israel, is an Islamist organization.

So was Al Qaeda, the fanatical terrorist gang that flew planes into iconic New York skyscrapers and the Pentagon in 2001, killing nearly 3,000 Americans.

Yet these days, Israel’s war against Hamas seems to be seen as something separate from the Islamist war on the West. Somehow the Israeli struggle against the Islamist Hamas butchers is unrelated to the Islamist terrorist horrors in recent years in the United States, Europe, India, and Africa. That’s wishful and dangerous thinking.

The radical Islamist threat has been superseded by concerns over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s aggressiveness around the globe, especially in the Pacific and in its ambition to perhaps invade Taiwan.

All that fuels growing worry about the possibility of World War III. War among nations with atom bombs is definitely the most serious threat there can be and overwhelms fears about radical terrorism.

It’s worth noting that China and Russia have a growing relationship with the number one state sponsor of Islamist terror — Iran, which aspires to bring to the world an Islamist nuclear weapon.

Add North Korea to that mix of aggressive-minded nations and you have a formidable alliance dedicated to undermining American power and challenging the West.

Still, Israel’s war of defense should serve as a reminder of the continuing Islamist threat.

The encouraging news is that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are slowly winning the righteous war against the Hamas terrorists in the Gaza Strip.

At least 17,000 terrorists have been killed, Israel reports. The Israelis have eliminated several top Hamas commanders. One was assassinated in a safe house in Tehran under the noses of Iran’s fanatical mullahs.

The steady progress in Gaza enabled the Israel Defense Forces to shift focus to the terror threat from Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Hezbollah has bombarded Israel with thousands of rockets since Oct. 7 while avoiding any attack it thinks would provoke massive retaliation.

But Israel cannot tolerate that menace. It effectively shrinks the size of the country by keeping 60,000 Israelis evacuated from northern Israel. The IDF has made restoring them to their homes a war aim.

So, Israel is turning up the heat. Three dozen Hezbollah operatives were killed and 3,000 wounded when the pagers and walkie talkies they use for communications exploded a week ago.

That was a stunning demonstration of Israeli ingenuity, technological skill, and commitment to victory. Hezbollah bought the devices from an Israel shell company. So, it paid for the explosions that killed and maimed its people. What a sweet triumph for the people of Israel.

No doubt it has Hezbollah chieftains and Iran’s mullahs looking over their shoulders, wondering what Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, has up its sleeve next.

Israel followed that up with air strikes against hundreds of Hezbollah command posts and rocket sites. Those attacks killed key Hezbollah commanders and eliminated thousands of rockets and missile sites.

All this progress doesn’t mean final victory is inevitable. More hard fighting is ahead.

Hezbollah is a much more formidable foe than Hamas. It boasts a huge arsenal of weapons of all kinds and tens of thousands of determined fighters. The Wall Street Journal calls it “probably the world’s most heavily armed non-state paramilitary force.”

Around 100 hostages, several of them Americans, remain in captivity. As recently seen in the murders of six hostages about to be freed by Israel forces, Hamas thugs will slay the innocent to prevent them being liberated.

The architect of the Oct. 7 massacre, Yahya Sinwar, remains at large, probably somewhere in the complex of tunnels underneath Gaza.

And let’s not forget that obstacles to victory are not all on the battlefield.

The dispiriting news is that the Neville Chamberlains in the White House, the State Department, and the capitals of Western Europe have forgotten or don’t realize Israel’s fight is the latest battle in the war to defend the West from medieval barbarity.

They spend more time condemning Israel than Hamas. They constantly try to restrain the Israelis with mindless appeals to not escalate the fight. In other words, don’t win the war.

The Biden administration slow walked delivering some weapons Israel needed for its defense. The war might have been over with an Israeli victory by now if Washington hadn’t hamstrung Israel by swallowing the libel of Israeli targeting civilians and instead issued full-throated support for crushing Hamas.

Demands for a cease-fire erupt regularly. Forgotten is that there was a cease-fire in effect on Oct. 6, one savagely broken by Hamas. And that Hezbollah stockpiled up to 150,000 rockets in a strip of southern Lebanon designated by the United Nations as a demilitarized buffer zone.

The only cease-fire proposal Hamas boss Sinwar will accept is one that effectively ends the war. That would mean he, his henchmen and Hamas would survive to regroup, rearm, scheme and, on a future date, carry out another atrocity. One Hamas leader has boasted that Oct. 7 attacks will occur “again and again.”

Exemplifying the clueless thinking of those trying to restrain Israel is Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. She declares that while Israel “has a right to defend itself … how it does so matters.”

What she and the chattering class who echo her are talking about are the civilian casualties and destruction in Gaza from months of war.

The sole cause of all that misery is Hamas. The terrorists, murderers, rapists, and kidnappers hide behind civilians, site their command posts in hospitals, schools, and humanitarian centers, and imprison hostages in the homes of civilians. Yes, many civilians want to help Hamas.

The Israelis have no choice but to pursue their enemies where they go. Military experts who’ve had the chance to see IDF operations up close have been universal in their assessment: Israel conducts this war scrupulously to try to avoid civilian harm.

Yet, the pro-Hamas and antisemitic demonstrators blocking traffic in American cities, disrupting college campuses, and harassing Jewish students at elite universities chant that Israel is committing genocide.

The undeniable fact is that it is Islamist terrorists who deliberately and continuously target civilians in Israel — and elsewhere in the world.

It’s true that there are moderate Muslims, plenty of them. It’s true that for many Islam is a religion of peace, as then President George W. Bush told us after the Twin Towers lay in ruins.

But the cold, harsh reality is that no other religion in the world has seen so much terrorist mayhem committed in its name in the 21st century.

In this country since the 2001 atrocity, think of the Fort Hood attack killing 13 and injuring more than 30, the Boston Marathon bombing that killed three and injured 183, a mass shooting at a San Bernardino, Calif., Christmas party, leaving 14 dead and 22 hurt, an Orlando, Fla., nightclub shooting that killed 49 and injured 53, and the stabbing of author Salman Rushdie in New York state.

Around the world, many Islamist mass murder crimes come to mind: In France, the Charlie Hebdo massacre with nearly two dozen dead and wounded over cartoons depicting Mohammed. In India, shooting and bombing attacks over four days in Mumbai killing 175 and injuring more than 300. In Barcelona, Spain, another case of coordinated attacks, this time leaving 15 dead and 120 hurt. In Britain, Islamist fanatics in a van ran down pedestrians on London Bridge, killing 11 and injuring 48.

Often these outrages were committed by immigrant men with no formal affiliation with any Islamist organization, such as Al Qaeda or the Islamic State. They draw inspiration from Islamist propaganda on the Internet.

The reality is clear. A primitive, intolerant, hateful strain of Islam is loose in the world. Traveling with the mass migrations of the past decades, unassimilable Muslims populate cities in Sweden, France, Germany, Britain and elsewhere in Europe. They bring not only terrorism, but rising crime rates in tourist-loved cities once famous for tranquility.

In our own country, we see how the rising Muslim population in Michigan — most of them no doubt fine people but many also Hamas sympathizers — has Democratic politicians kowtowing to Israel hate.

To take note of any of this likely will get you labeled an Islamophobe.

Yet facts are facts.

Of course, Americans are weary of forever wars. But the Islamist fanatics love jihad and have dedicated their lives to it.

It’s been a few years since the last mass terror attack in this country. Many Americans may believe the worse is over. That if we just leave Islamists alone, we’ll be safe. That if we treat each terrorist attack as an isolated event and ignore the broader picture, all will be well. That if we appease Iran, Qatar and the other friends of terror, our lives will be secure.

Well, Israelis once thought they had achieved a sort of stability, balance, and equilibrium. Sure, terrorists occasionally fired rockets into Israel from Gaza. But Israeli communities in the southern part of the country provided jobs for Palestinians from Gaza. Israelis drove Palestinians — people they were friendly with — to doctor appointments. Israeli young people, many of them advocates for peace, flocked to a music festival with the Gaza border just over the horizon.

The situation seemed manageable, and life went on.

Then, a year ago, on Oct. 7, the Hamas butchers came.

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Steve Huntley, a retired Chicago journalist now living in Austin, Texas, has contributed other pieces to johnkassnews, from an examination of the secret jail for Christopher Columnbus and other politically problematic public art to an essay on Americans suffering from Joe Biden gas pain.

For almost three decades Huntley spent most of his career in Chicago journalism at the Chicago Sun-Times, where he was a feature writer, metro reporter, night city editor, metropolitan editor, editorial page editor and a columnist for the opinion pages.

Before that he was a reporter and editor with United Press International (UPI) in the South and Chicago, and Chicago bureau chief and a senior editor in Washington with U.S. News & World Report. Northwestern University Press has issued soft cover and eBook editions of Knocking Down Barriers: My Fight for Black America by Truman K. Gibson Jr. with Steve Huntley, a memoir of a Chicagoan who was a member of President Roosevelt’s World War II Black Cabinet working to desegregate the military.