On the menu today: Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal lives quite luxuriously in Doha, Qatar, safe and far away from the massacre in southern Israel and the ongoing, large-scale, violent retribution of the Israel Defense Forces. Earlier this week, Mashaal called upon:
Arabs and Muslims around the world to be “more creative” than in the past and let the world know that they “are part of this battle.” Mashaal urged Arabs and Muslims in their own countries and in “the streets of the diaspora everywhere” to turn tomorrow, Friday, October 13, into a day of “rage” tomorrow against Zionists and Americans in support of Hamas’ terror war against Israel.
Some nutcase terrorist schmuck who’s spent the past few decades living in luxury hotels calls for violence, and schools here in America start closing for the day. Sooner or later, the problems over there turn into problems over here.
Let’s Just Get Through Hamas’s ‘Day of Rage’
Today is Friday the 13th, and Hamas has called for a “Day of Rage.” Hopefully, by the time you read this, nothing significant will have happened, and nothing significant happens for the rest of the day. One of my colleagues observed that we rarely see large-scale terrorism committed on days when groups call for “rage,” but we do see terrorist attacks out of the blue on some seemingly random day, or the anniversary of some long-forgotten event that matters to the terrorists but not to the general public.
I’m not a big fan of shutting down schools or any place “out of an abundance of caution.” Perhaps I have too much of that post-9/11 mentality that if you stop doing what you want to do, “then the terrorists win.”
Londoners worked during the Blitz, the Ukrainians are working while the country fights off a Russian invasion, and most of us went back to work on September 12, 2001, although we were no doubt still emotionally reeling from the previous day’s horrors. In circumstances where we feel so helpless, we can get a certain grim satisfaction from the fact that despite everything that’s happened, we can still keep on trucking. Our ability to carry on is a psychological middle finger to the terrorists.
I attended a vigil at our local Jewish Community Center last night. Security wasn’t overwhelming, but it was noticeably present. Was there a chance that some nut or some group of young punks would show up, high on the endorphins of their own anger and eager to harass some Jew in America in solidarity with the Palestinians? Sure. A few years back, some jackass spray-painted a bunch of swastikas on the building in the middle of the night. But the theoretical risk of some snot-nosed punk showing up and looking for trouble shouldn’t stop you from going out and living the life you’re supposed to live.
But then again, different people choose to live with different thresholds of risk, and I wouldn’t tell anyone to go to some place or event where they won’t feel safe. Fear is a survival instinct that developed to help us avoid life-threatening danger. If some situation feels wrong to you, it could well be your subconscious mind is picking up on something that your conscious mind hasn’t processed yet.
The ominous warnings on days like this are another indicator that as much as we may not want events in faraway lands to affect us, they do affect us, and the question is how we want to respond to a dangerous world. Problems that start over there don’t stay over there. We can debate the best course of action in response to these events, but there is no course of action that will wall us off from the rest of the world. (For example, the procedures in Chinese state-run virology labs doing gain-of-function research on coronaviruses found in bats can have a huge impact on your life!)
Nor is it reasonable to argue that you and I, as Americans, just sitting on our couches, have somehow provoked them, or this is an inevitable or justified consequence of our actions and decisions. The knee-jerk “this wouldn’t happen if we just minded our own business” statements are psychological opt-outs of actually addressing reality. Isolationism is akin to the ostrich sticking its head in the sand. At some point today, you may run into someone who contends, “That’s over there, it doesn’t affect me.” Yeah, it does; those people just choose to not acknowledge it.
“That’s over there, it doesn’t affect me.”
The threat from Hamas and the “Day of Rage” don’t feel all that far away, here near the nation’s capital:
Police in the Washington region will have an increased presence at places of worship, and some schools plan to close Friday after a former Hamas leader called for supporters to come out for a day of rage, the militant group’s standard call for demonstrations.
D.C. police and Montgomery County police said in statements Thursday evening that there are no credible threats to the area, but to expect increased visibility “to help ensure the safety of our community.”
Capitol Police also said they will “enhance security” throughout the Capitol complex.
“That’s over there, it doesn’t affect me.”
New York City mayor Eric Adams, yesterday:
With large‑scale protests planned for tomorrow, we must remain vigilant. New York City is the most diverse city in the world, and protecting our residents is the most sacred responsibility that we have. We have directed the NYPD to surge additional resources to schools and houses of worship to ensure that they are safe and that our city remains a place of peace.
We’re also stepping up NYPD patrols in other key neighborhoods to help protect all of our city residents. New York City will do whatever it takes to keep our people safe; an if New Yorkers see something, we’re saying to you, do something by reaching out to your local authorities. New York City rejects terrorism. We reject hate. We stand united.
Governor Kathy Hochul said, “There is currently no intelligence showing any active threats in New York — that is, the entire state of New York.” That’s somewhat reassuring, but apparently a week ago, there wasn’t any intelligence showing any active threats in southern Israel, either, or at least none that were regarded as sufficiently serious to warrant precautions in that region.
Hundreds of protesters gathered at Columbia University on Thursday for competing pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian demonstrations that earlier in day led school administrators to take the extraordinary step of closing the campus to the public.
Students waving banners and flags faced off across hedges dividing the Manhattan campus, one day after an Israeli student there was assaulted. Other campuses around the city also erupted with rallies on Thursday following the Hamas attack on Israel over the weekend and the Israeli military response in Gaza.
“That’s over there, it doesn’t affect me.”
Synagogues and police forces in the Chicago area and around the country are on high alert after Israeli officials said Hamas leadership has called for a “Day of Rage” Friday.
A temple in north suburban Skokie received a bomb threat and was forced to evacuate Thursday.
“That’s part of the horror that we are facing, the psychological warfare of terrorism, and we cannot give into it,” said Rabbi Shaanan Gelman of Kehilata Chovezei Tzion. “Part of the threat of terrorism is not just the physical threat, but the psychological threat. This is what they want. They want people to be afraid.”
Three Bay Area Jewish day schools plan to close Friday amid security concerns and following what one head of school described as an “exhausting week.”
Wornick Jewish Day School in Foster City, Gideon Hausner Jewish Day School in Palo Alto and South Peninsula Hebrew Day School in Sunnyvale will all be closed Friday, according to school officials.
“That’s over there, it doesn’t affect me.”
Down the coast a bit in Los Angeles:
While there have been no specific credible threats in Southern California, local law enforcement including the Santa Monica, Beverly Hills and Los Angeles police departments have put out statements confirming that they are aware of the purported threat and have added additional security at synagogues and other places of worship throughout L.A. County.
“We don’t have credible threats to this area right now, but that doesn’t mean somebody that’s working by themselves may see that and decide to take some action,” said Blake Chow, LAPD Assistant Chief. “We’re really asking everybody to be alert.”
When cops must put in longer shifts and everyone’s on high alert for some nut with a gun or some other weapon deciding to go out in a blaze of glory of killing Jews . . . hell yes, this affects us.
ADDENDUM: So, yesterday in the comments section, a reader fumed:
This Harvey Dent clown is so scared he says: “Over in that other Washington publication I write for”
Spoiler alert: it’s the WASHINGTON POST where he writes namby pamby slightly conservative stuff. He saves the red meat for NR. Phoney!
I regularly refer to the Washington Post as “that other Washington publication I write for” as a joke that it’s some obscure inside-the-Beltway publication, instead of one of the biggest newspapers in the country with roughly two and a half million paid subscribers. I want my NR readers to know what I’m writing in the Post — they may well enjoy it! — but I also don’t want anyone to think I’m using much of my valuable journalistic real estate here at NR to send readers to the Post.
Also, this reader’s diagnosis of what I write for each publication is inverted. I write a lot of conservative stuff that outrages a lot of liberal Washington Post readers over there — columns about how electric cars require fewer workers, how the Hunter Biden scandal is a real story that demonstrates the president’s egregious judgment, how only about a third of Americans view Merrick Garland and the Department of Justice in a positive light, how federal workers need to get back into the office, how the facts contradicted the Biden administration’s happy spin on those Chinese spy balloons, Ron DeSantis’s impressive record as governor, and so on.
Over in this space, I often tell NR readers that the electorate as a whole is unwilling to vote for the full-scale agenda that they wish to enact. Recently, I’ve pointed out that Biden didn’t really flip-flop on building the wall, that a late presidential bid by Glenn Youngkin is extremely unlikely to succeed, that the House’s impeachment inquiry against Biden is a mistake that will go nowhere, and that the Europeans are pulling their weight in terms of aid to Ukraine.
I tell the Never-Trumpers that there’s no precedent or justification for various secretaries of state removing Trump from the ballot, and that Trump likely has better-than-expected odds in the Mar-a-Lago documents case. I like Ron DeSantis, but when he makes a weird and unconvincing argument, I say so. When he has a good debate performance, I say that, too.
I do the opposite of telling people what they want to hear; I tell them what they hate hearing, but need to hear, with metronomic regularity. “What we want to be true” and “what is true” are two circles on a Venn Diagram that only partially overlap.
This is one of the reasons why most days the comments section for this newsletter often looks and sounds like the mid 1990s Balkans. I do this because seeing a problem clearly and accurately is a prerequisite for solving it. Otherwise, you’re like the drunk who’s looking for his keys under the lamppost because the light is better, even though he knows he didn’t lose his keys over there.
I can hear people asking, “Why do you care what some commenter says?” Well, when someone says something false about you, you can ignore it, or you can correct it. Today, I’m in a mood to correct it.