Monday marked the first anniversary of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 massacre of 1,200 Israelis. The Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, geared up for his celebrations by posting a message on X late Sunday evening that he apparently intended to be a taunt of Israel, as he wrote it in Hebrew. His taunt fell oddly flat, however, in light of the facts on the ground one year into the present conflict: the outlook isn’t exactly rosy right now for Iran’s proxies. Nevertheless, Khamenei also had a point — one that should be disquieting to all those who value free societies and the rule of law.
Khamenei wrote: “The ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’ operation set the Zionist regime back 70 years.” "Al-Aqsa Flood" is what jihadis call the Oct. 7 massacre. This was more than a little tone-deaf, as at the moment it looks as if Khamenei's proxies in Hezbollah and Hamas have been set back more than Israel has, despite the generosity of the Biden-Harris regime.
On the other hand, the exalted Supremo has a point: the hatred of Israel and Jews that we see worldwide today is nothing like anything the world has seen since 1945. Almost immediately after the massacre, the left’s well-oiled victimhood propaganda machine swung into action, beginning a barrage of lies and distortions that one year later has made Israel more isolated on the global stage than it has been since the founding of the modern state of Israel in 1948.
Chief among these forces were the cadres of student activists who began to agitate for “Palestinians” and in an increasingly open manner for Hamas itself and other jihad terror organizations on campuses all across the country. These miseducated and self-righteous students had been skillfully and thoroughly propagandized, courtesy of the leftist professors who dominate virtually every college and university in the nation. When the massacre took place, these students, generously financed through unseen sources, were ready with claims that Israel was an illegitimate “settler-colonialist” entity, an apartheid state, an occupying power, and so on and on.
The propaganda barrage effectively turned attention away from what Hamas had done on Oct. 7 and focused it on what the Israelis were supposedly doing to the “Palestinians.” Oct. 7 then became an understandable incidence of an oppressed people lashing out at its oppressors. Never mind that it was all nonsense and falsehood. Never mind that in Israel, non-Jews have full equality of rights and that Israel is the only state that has any legitimate legal claim to the territory it is supposed to be “occupying.”
Meanwhile, Hamas chipped in and did its part by publishing demonstrably false casualty figures of “Palestinians” in Gaza. The establishment media dutifully repeated those casualty figures as if they were reliable. Even the UN published them without caveats or even a clear indication of their source. Israel, went the claim, had committed Oct. 7 massacres for years before Hamas carried out its own and was still doing so. Here again, none of this was true, but after all these years of leftist media propaganda and miseducation, a significant segment of the American people are just as incapable as college and university students of winnowing out truth from falsehood and recognizing propaganda for what it is.
This put Old Joe Biden and Kamala Harris under pressure. The party’s far-left base has been in a state of perpetual rage ever since Oct. 7 because even though the Biden-Harris regime has financed the jihad against Israel by sending $10 billion to Iran and one billion to Gaza, the likes of Rashida Tlaib and Nihad Awad of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) have repeatedly demanded that the betrayal of Israel be more comprehensive and thoroughgoing. They have threatened to bolt from the Democrats’ shaky coalition if they don’t get this full betrayal.
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If Muslims stay home and don’t vote, Kamala Harris could conceivably lose Michigan and Minnesota and the election. To try to keep that from happening, both Biden and Harris have cravenly endorsed and parroted the Hamas propaganda and striven mightily to stymie Israel’s war effort and make sure it loses.
Khamenei thus had a point. There is more antisemitism in the mainstream today than there has been in decades. He issued his taunt at a time when Israel has never been so isolated. Its foremost ally hates it, the rest of the world hates it, and only the hated state is standing against the bloodthirsty forces of jihad that also hate the U.S., and will target us next. When these jihad forces do strike the U.S. directly, Khamenei will be ready with more taunts, and the leftist political elites will continue as deluded as ever. They'll just find some way to blame Donald Trump.
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