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by Dr. David Fialkoff, Editor / Publisher

I refused to see Schindler's List. When it first came out and friends encouraged me to watch it I would reply, "I don't want to see another Nazi movie." I'm the kind of guy who can cry at a commercial for Hallmark greeting cards. More than one friend persisted, "No, this movie is different."

After a year, when I finally gave in, I discovered that Schindler's List was indeed different. The terror was more immediate, immanent. At any moment, there could be a knock on my own front door, the horror intruding suddenly, fatally, upon any of my ordinary daily activities.

On October 7 in southern Israel there were just such knocks on the door. And in a thousand more instances, the terror entered without knocking.

I'm listening to a lot of articles (thanks to the Read Aloud app) about the Gaza war. One of these, which I publish separately in my magazine this week, describes this anticipatory dread. In it there is no blood and guts, no gleeful gang-rapists killing their 13-year-old victims. It's just the tale of a nervous mother, who chooses to leave Israel.

It's a story by an award-winning author, a Canadian immigrant to Israel, whose ordinary life was uprooted by the October 7th massacre. Just as in Schindler's List, in it there is only slight mention of actual violence. It is an account of daily life disrupted, rendered terrifying. The writer suburbanizes the horror, making it easy for us to relate to it, bringing it within the realm of our imagination.

Vancouver
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The author is an avowed Israeli leftist, a peace-nik. She tells us that she volunteered in a program that transports Palestinian children in need of medical care from the Gaza border to Israeli hospitals, and entertains those children with activities, before and after their treatments. A few days after October 7, she notes, the app for that volunteer service listed the volunteers of that program who had been killed or kidnapped during the massacre. The kibbutzim that suffered the brunt of the attack were leftist.

She and her seven-year-old daughter took advantage of emergency flights sponsored by the Canadian government to get Canadian citizens out of Israel.

Back in Canada (first Toronto and then Vancouver), she received scant little of the solace she needed. She laments this lack of support, expresses her shock at the outright blaming of the victims of October 7. She is further victimized by the street protests and by the fact that the vast majority of academic institutions and civic organizations, most of whom are outspoken in their support of all progressive causes, either do not condemn or explicitly support Hamas.

Still, she hasn't given up her sympathy for the Palestinian cause. Now more than ever, she objects to the absolutist binary of Israel versus Palestine, a binary now more popular than ever.

We Jews are overwhelmingly on the left. We led organized labor. We powered the Civil Rights movement. We instigated the Russian Revolution. We believe that things can and should get better. Progress is a Jewish idea. We invented it.

I'm not the first to observe that the Woke is not the left.

If you weren't sure before, the fact that Hamas, an authoritarian, theocratic, anti-women, anti-trans, anti-gay, anti-freedom death cult, has gained the sympathy of the progressive West, shows you that something is wrong with the Woke.

That not only anti-Israel sentiment, but undisguised Jew hatred ("Gas the Jews!") is permitted, if not condoned, on the streets and campuses throughout the West, shows you that the wheels have come off the progressive cart.

The Arabs teach their children outright Nazi propaganda, that the Jews are the cause of all the world's woes. Woke professors teach their students anti-colonialism, that white culture is the cause of all the world's woes.

The sympathy for Hamas automatically springs from the Woke political philosophy that white society is particularly evil and that everywhere was Eden before the white man arrived.

Many Arab governments do what Western intellectuals cannot, they publicly condemn Hamas. Many more do so in private.

On taking power after the Iranian Revolution, the first thing the Ayatollahs did was to kill all the leftists who fought alongside them for that revolution. The Moslem Brotherhood did much the same thing (and would have finished the job were they not soon ousted), imposing their harsh, undemocratic theocracy when they took control after Egypt's Arab Spring.

All of the useful idiots now chanting "Free Palestine" have no idea what "river" nor which "sea" they are shouting about. Privileged by the system they are trying to destroy, those narcissistic, coddled darlings are wrapped up in revolution as a fashion statement. Should the Islamist extremists they cheer on (rape as a weapon of war, really?) ever get their way, they, along with Queers for Palestine, would be the first to go.

I'm glad that those antisemitic Woke punks and their universities stained by Chinese and Qatari money have finally gone too far. All their playing at revolution puts me in mind of a Leonard Cohen line:

Give a timely listen:

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Dr. David presents Lokkal, the social network, the prettiest, most-efficient way to see San Miguel online. Our Wall shows it all. Join and add your point of view.

Discover Lokkal:
Watch the two-minute video below.
Then, just below that, scroll down SMA's Community Wall.
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