General News
13 October, 2024
A horror date that will live on in infamy
Some events are so tragic, so unexpected and so painful they do not need to be put into words.
Some events are so tragic, so unexpected and so painful they do not need to be put into words.
Their horrors can be defined by reciting the date on which they occurred.
History is replete with examples: September 11 and the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon; October 12 and the attack on the Sari Club in Bali; and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour on December 7.
Just over a year ago, October 7 was added to this grim litany of carnage.
That was when hordes of Hamas terrorists crashed into Israel from Gaza to launch an orgy of murder, rape, and mutilation.
More than 1200 innocent people, including young revellers at a music festival, were slaughtered. Thousands more were wounded.
Hundreds were dragged back to Gaza where their captors were greeted by cheering crowds.
Footage from Hamas's social media, vision from the body cameras of captured terrorists and witness accounts made it very clear the attackers had enlisted rape and sexual assault as weapons of war.
Many of the captured are being routinely subjected to rape, sexual degradation and other forms of abuse. The unknown number who are still alive are literally in hell.
What was the Sydney hate preacher who responded by saying it had been a "day of courage" thinking? Raping, murdering and mutilating helpless women is not heroic.
The palpable dismay felt by Australian Jewry and millions of other Australians at the decision by "pro-Palestinian" agitators to protest is understandable.
On what should have been a day of simple reflection; a time to pause and to remember the fallen and to offer comfort to those left behind, activities which are best described as thinly veiled anti-Semitism have dominated the news coverage.
Yes, moving ceremonies of remembrance were held across the country, but they have been overshadowed by the "useful idiots", fellow travellers, and terrorist sympathisers who marched under thinly disguised versions of the banners of Hamas and Hezbollah to stay within the strict letter of the law.
October 7 did not just change Israel and the dynamic in the Middle East.
It has changed Australia.
What has happened to our multicultural success story? How is it that a conflict on the other side of the world is a greater threat to national cohesion than the pandemic itself?
It is only right to mourn the tens of thousands of deaths in Gaza, and now in Lebanon, as it is right to mourn those lives lost in the nightmare of October 7.
The first anniversary of that fateful date has passed, but there is no end in sight for the bloodshed.
May we take time to reflect on the horrors we have witnessed unfold over the past year as the world teeters on the edge of an abyss.
May we reflect on the thousands of humans senselessly killed in a war that is taking more by the day from people who have already lost so much.
And may we work to let go of hate.
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