On October 7, 2023, the Iranian mullahs’ instruments in the Gaza Strip, known as Hamas, carried out a vicious attack on the people of Israel. Terrorists poured through the wall and engaged in devastating action, primarily against unarmed civilians at home or at festivals. By day’s end, 1400 Israelis and Israeli guests had been murdered, hundreds had been taken captive, and thousands more had been injured or forever broken by the experience.
But why?
And why did Hamas choose that day?
To understand this requires some knowledge of how the Enemy works.
Hamas had been planning for this attack for years – building tunnels, training operatives, studying weak spots in Israel’s defenses. As a free country, Israel has public events like music festivals and parties, and private homes and farms like the kibbutzes. Freedom makes for a happy life, but it also provides ready victims for a violent enemy.
The Enemy has different values than we do. The Judeo-Christian West values human life and freedom; we value progress and prosperity, variety and happiness. The Enemy only values such things to the extent that they can be twisted to the Enemy’s purposes.
Consider the Garden of Eden, in the Book of Genesis. Adam and Eve were interested in knowledge; the Enemy used that interest to serve his purposes and bring about the Fall.
Consider the Temptation of Christ in the Book of Matthew. The Enemy quoted the Bible at Christ, in a vain attempt to turn Him away from His mission.
Consider the many great medical accomplishments of modern times. Mankind invents painkillers to cure people; the Enemy spreads drug dealers to infect the weak with addiction through their abuse.
And consider O’Sullivan’s Law, the dictum that any organization not specifically founded to be conservative will eventually be twisted into a tool of the Left. So many great free market entrepreneurs have left legacies that their descendants have used to fund marxist organizations bent on the destruction of the free market.
The Enemy twists things. It’s what the Enemy does.
And dates are among the things the Enemy values for that purpose as well.
The Enemy values land, to the extent that if a piece of land was ever muslim-held, they feel they have both a right and an obligation to grab it again, even if it’s been hundreds of years, or even if it was muslim-held only briefly. Winning back a plot of land that was once “theirs” is even more important to them than winning a new plot of land.
Similarly, the Enemy looks to history and remembers the pain of a loss, on a certain date, and hopes to win a victory on that date so that the date can become a glorious day for their side, instead of for ours.
October 7 is such a date.
As the Ottoman Empire spent centuries expanding throughout the world, in the latter 16th century, a “Holy League” arose to stop their advance, and on October 7, 1571, the Ottomans were finally stopped – for a while – in one of the greatest naval battles of all time. Pope Pius V, Don Juan of Austria, hundreds of ships, and some 65,000 European sailors and warriors, confronted the Ottomans at the Battle of Lepanto. Through timing, brilliant strategy, and undoubtedly the blessing of Divine Providence, the Holy League finally saved Europe by stopping the Ottomans on that day.
There have been other such victories on October 7.
King John III Sobieski, whom the Ottomans named the Lion of Lechistan, was leader of both Lithuania and Poland when his armies and the Holy Roman Empire – both separately and together – fought the Ottomans in the 1670s and 1680s. One of the lesser land battles in that series was the Battle of Niemirow, a decisive victory on land, in Ukraine, on October 7, 1672. This series finally helped lead to the decisive victory at the Battle of Vienna in 1683, again stopping their incursion into Europe until modern times.
The Enemy smarts when reminded of its historical defeats, and always hopes to find a way to gain its version of a victory to “win back that date” as they win back land.
On October 7, 2023, the world watched with horror as crowds in the islamic world – especially in Hamas-ruled Gaza – cheered at the news that Hamas terrorists had charged into farmhouses, slaughtering unarmed grandparents, raping their daughters, burning their children in ovens. Gazan crowds danced with perverse joy, at the news that Hamas monsters had driven into a peaceful international music festival and shot up the place, mauling, maiming, raping and killing the young partiers for sport. And Gazan crowds cheered on the terrorists driving around Gaza in cars and trucks with chained Israeli captives and Israeli casualties in them, paraded around as if in the barbaric post-battle triumphs of Ancient Rome.
The world looked on in horror, and many learned more about the Enemy from three lessons – the awful, barbaric crimes of the day itself – the ghastly joy that the nonparticipants back home showed in celebrating those crimes – and, just as shocking for we of the West, with our softer western sensibilities, the discovery that Hamas filmed so many of their atrocities that day, and publicly shared the videos with pride.
For some westerners, this realization that there was no shame in retrospect, no remorse at all, no feeling – ever – in the year since, that they might have gone too far, was as revelatory as anything else we have learned.
In the year since the October 7, 2023 atrocities, Israel has done what it needed to do:
Israel has scoured Gaza, finding and neutralizing hundreds of terror cells, and destroying the weaponry, the launch pads, the munitions factories, the tunnel systems, the hideouts, that Hamas had been spending all its money on for decades.
But that’s not all.
Israel has revealed truths that the world had never before acknowledged and was now forced to confront:
Israel has shown that foreign “humanitarian” donations to terrorists will always be spent on instruments of war; that it is a fool’s conceit to imagine that terrorists can be trusted to “take off their terrorist hat” when receiving humanitarian aid (as the west deluded itself into believing they could), and honorably spend those billions on food and shelter, education and commercial investment for the noncombatants under their care.
Israel has shown how so many global relief organizations – especially the many “humanitarian” offshoots of the United Nations – are in fact largely allied with bloodthirsty terrorists rather than with the innocent refugees they are supposed to assist.
Israel has shown how corrupt much of the global news media are, both in demonstrating the clear collaboration between many reporters and the terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah, and also in the exposure of clear newsroom bias, as newspapers give the benefit of the doubt to the terrorists in terms of headlines and stories, even trusting their sources (such as the ridiculous stats made up by the Hamas health agency), while slamming Israel for every necessary response as if Israel had started all this. Even the blind can see through these double standards.
And oh, how Israel has exposed our politicians.
In the year since October 7, 2023, Israel has responded with the decisiveness and sheer force necessary to protect its people in the future. In so doing, Israel has done a great favor to the West, because their battle is our battle too.
Iran and its many client state and nonstate actors are just concentrating on Israel first, after all; they have every intention of taking on the United States next.
Everything Israel has done this past year to fight the Enemy has been a service to the entire civilized world. May Divine Providence continue to bless Israel and its allies, that future years are able to finally be safer, more peaceful, more prosperous than this past one has been.
Copyright 2024 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance professional and consultant. A onetime Milwaukee County Republican Party chairman, he has been writing a regular column for Illinois Review since 2009. His book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel) and his political satires on the current administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), are available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.
His newest nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” was just released on July 1, and is also available, in both paperback and Kindle eBook, exclusively on Amazon.
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