Gary Willig

(A7) Today is Yom Hazikaron, Israel’s Remembrance Day, where we remember and honor all of the brave soldiers who fell defending our right to live, as well as the innocents who were murdered by genocidal antisemites in brutal terrorist attacks. A week ago, on Yom Hashoah, we remembered and honored the 6 million souls who were extinguished by Nazis.

The memory of those losses weighs heavily on us not only from the pain, but because this world wants to forget them, to pretend that they never died and that they never even lived. Immediately after 1,200 people were massacred by modern-day Nazis on October 7, the international effort to memory-hole and deny the massacre began. Just one month after the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, antisemitic thugs used violence to try to prevent a screening in Los Angeles of the 43-minute video documenting Hamas’s atrocities that had been arranged by Israeli actress Gal Gadot.

Where the Wonder Woman actress sought to ensure that the world would remember the victims of October 7, the antisemites were already hard at work attempting to ensure that those victims would be forgotten. Because if their memory was forgotten, Hamas would be free to do it again. That is the same reason Greta Thunberg refused to watch the footage of what her beloved Hamas did.

These efforts to forget the victims extended to the hostages. When UN Special Rapporteur announced that it was “unacceptable” to demand that Hamas release the innocents it had kidnapped, she was directly calling for the world to forget the Bibas children, 9-month-old Kfir, 4-year-old Ariel, and all of the others who were held in the hell of Gaza’s terror tunnels. Albanese sought to erase the memory of the innocents who were suffering at that very moment, because she supports Hamas’s genocidal ambitions.

The Bibas brothers were similarly forgotten by all of those supposed child advocates who shed crocodile tears about the “children of Gaza” while spreading fake Hamas propaganda and erasing the suffering of Jewish and Israeli children targeted for extermination by Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran. These fakes include Ms Rachel, whose response to October 7 was to turn into a Hamas mouthpiece and pretend that the Bibas children did not exist, as well as The Strokes, the band that recently used its platform at the Coachella music festival to whitewash Hamas and erase the victims of the massacre at the Nova music festival.

And then there is the rape deniers, those people who refuse to acknowledge the mountain of evidence of Hamas’ rapes and sexual violence on and after October 7. Even after the UN investigation concluded that there was “reasonable grounds to conclude” that such atrocities were committed and other investigations documented the scale of the rapes, figures like UN Rapporteur on Sexual Violence Reem Alsalem still tried to erase the Israeli victims from history with false claims that “no investigation” had found that rapes were committed.

There is a phenomenon of fake empathy in the anti-Israel movement, empathy for nameless “children” that pretends that zero combatants or adults were ever killed on the Hamas side in the war Hamas started on October 7. This empathy is withheld from Jewish children, from Jewish hostages, even from Druze children who happen to be Israeli citizens, as the lack of outrage over the 12 children who were murdered in a Hezbollah rocket attack in July 2024 demonstrated all too clearly.

This “empathy” does not even extend to Gazans who are brutalized and murdered by Hamas. The beatings and murders Hamas has committed against the people of Gaza lead to zero protests, zero condemnation from those who profess to care the most about Gaza. The recent reports out of Gaza of Hamas raping Gazan women in exchange for food are met with a silence that speaks louder that a million shouts. There is no empathy for Gazans and there never was.

What there is, is hatred masquerading as empathy. Hatred for Jews that uses the cover of “empathy” for their enemies to justify every war crime, every atrocity, every horror committed by Hamas and Hezbollah. A genocidal hatred that can only truly empathize with the likes of killers like Yahya Sinwar and Hassan Nasrallah for their dedication to murdering Jewish children.

The false claims of “genocide” and “war crimes” against Israel have had nothing to do with protecting the children of Gaza, but were always meant to protect the likes of Sinwar and Nasrallah. It is an empathy that turns Jewish babies too young to walk into legitimate targets and turns genocidal mass murderers like Sinwar into “innocent children.”

The hatred masquerading as empathy which seeks to erase the victims of Hamas and Hezbollah is the same hatred that seeks to erase the victims of the Holocaust. The goal is the same, to erase the memory of atrocities committed against Jewish civilians so that similar atrocities can be committed again. Hamas supporters in the west have been open about their desire to see millions of Jews killed today in a repeat of the Holocaust. They have no problem attacking Jews in Los Angeles, in Michigan, and in London. Their Jew-hatred disguised as empathy for Palestinian Arabs justifies attacks on synagogues and Jewish preschools, shooting young couples in the back outside a Jewish museum, destroying Jewish ambulances, and every form of violence against Jews.

And with every act of violence, the same attempt to erase every crime committed against Jews repeats itself, the same tired “false flag” claims that seek to erase every Jewish victim in history in order to justify the next attack on Jews.

But – as long as the Jewish people exists, we will continue to remember those the world tries so hard to forget:

-The victims who were murdered because the world cannot tolerate empathy for Jews.

-The heroes who gave their lives to ensure future generations would live on and keep their memories alive. —-

-All of the children who never got to grow up because someone else grew up hating Jews enough to kill their babies.

The world may want to forget them, but we never will. Their memories are eternal, because we have actual empathy, empathy for those who are forgotten by the world, the same empathy that led Menachem Begin to be the first leader in the world to admit Vietnamese refugees as soon as he took office in 1977, that led to the rescue of Ethiopian Jews in the 1980s and 90s,and that led Israel to facilitate unprecedented amounts of food and aid into Gaza and the vaccination of 600,000 Gazan children against polio during the war.

We remember those we have lost. We honor their memory. And we also remember those who have no empathy for our children, whose hatred leads them to try to erase the memory of Jewish victims and heroes so that they can add us to the list of victims. Because we remember, we learn, and because we learn, we survive and we thrive.

Am Yisrael Chai.