The Plot To Make October 7 the New Nakba
Seth Mandel for Commentary.org
Some anti-Zionist tactics develop over decades. Once they do, however, they provide anti-Semites with a cookie-cutter template so that other versions can roll right off the assembly line. The most consequential of these innovations was the Nakba, a concept from Arab intellectuals that referred to the failure to destroy Israel immediately upon its declaration as a state in 1948. Since then, “Nakba” has been branded instead as a tragedy created by Jewish aggression.
But while it took decades for the meaning of Nakba to be turned against the Jews, October 7 is going to be turned against us right from the start, beginning with its first anniversary.
And we must be prepared for it, especially in the Diaspora. Turning October 7 into an anti-Jewish “holiday” requires an outpouring of hate that American Jews have rarely, if ever, experienced openly from their neighbors, classmates, coworkers, and peers.
It is a dark day, and it appears it will only get darker.
The most recent indication is an arrest made along the Canada-New York border over the weekend. Muhammad Shahzeb Khan, a 20-year-old Pakistani citizen living in Canada, was caught trying to cross into New York to set up a massive terror attack on October 7 with the aim of killing “as many Jewish civilians as possible” in New York City. “New york is perfect to target jews,” he apparently texted a friend, as detailed in the Justice Department complaint. “We could rack up easily a lot of jews.”
He added that, if successful, it would be “the largest Attack on US soil since 9/11.” Khan was reportedly planning the attack in ISIS’s name.
Less deadly, but arguably more concerning from a cultural standpoint, was the controversy at the University of Maryland that centered on Students for Justice in Palestine. Chapters of SJP are like franchises of fast-food anti-Semitism: McSinwar’s, if you will. Maryland SJP had a very special idea in store for its customers: to take over a large campus quad on October 7 and revel in the anniversary of the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
The initial approval of the hate rally raised two problems—one easily solvable and one very difficult to fix. The easy one was the rally itself: The school could cancel the permit, which is what it ultimately did, although a school theoretically needs to show good reason for the cancellation of an otherwise approved event.
According to Jewish Insider’s timeline of events, an associate dean (and parent of a UMD sophomore) named Gilad Chen wrote a letter, signed by tens of thousands connected to the university’s Jewish community, asking the school to take action to protect its Jewish students from the effects of the hate rally it had okayed. University president Darryll Pines followed with a public letter kinda-sorta announcing it had canceled the SJP Klan rally. Pines’s letter was opaque and roundabout but included the statement that, “out of an abundance of caution, we concluded to host only university-sponsored events that promote reflection on this day.”
The letter made clear that other events were free to take place before October 7 and after. Which means that an SJP rally in celebration of the October 7 massacre will almost surely take place on campus, though it might be on a day near the anniversary instead of on the anniversary.
Which brings us to the second problem—the one that is much harder to solve. And that is the fact that the university contains within the student body a shocking number of people who want to celebrate the pogrom of October 7 in public. The desire to do so, unlike the event itself, cannot be canceled by a mealymouthed letter from an administrator.
In fact, the desire to celebrate the deaths of October 7 requires a level of sociopathy that suggests the people organizing and attending this rally possess a fetishistic attraction to evil. They are joined in this death cultism, of course, by the rest of the national members of SJP and similar groups of McSinwar’s franchises. And the attendees at those chapters’ events. And the faculty and administrators who support them—who, in fact, likely inculcated this bloodlust in the students. They are also certainly joined by men like Muhammad Shahzeb Khan, a college-age attempted terrorist seeking to take up the tentifadas’ call to arms on behalf of ISIS and other identical twins of Hamas.
Dozens of Americans were murdered on October 7. Yet in America (and elsewhere in the West), the organizers of political-protest culture regard that day not as one to mourn but one to celebrate—and their plan is to make sure history sees it the same way.
Of course, UMd is the same university that students spray painted, on the outside of the student union building, the events of October were to begin the ‘second Holocausts’. That was an event the university President never directly addressed.