PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania — Hitler taught the Arabs how to slaughter Jews, yet it can surprise us that the Einsatzaruppen’s chapter in Gaza City could not find a 50-foot deep ravine to gun down the 1200 or more Jews who were massacred on Saturday morning.
Nor did they think to build sufficient space in the gas chambers that could be waiting for 150 captives routed from Israeli villages and other sites; most towns are located east of the border separating Israel from Gaza.
Let us call them out for what they are. They are Nazis. They are wannabe Putins. They are war criminals.
People insist that we should avoid comparing contemporary events to Adolf Hitler or the Holocaust. I concur for the most part, but at times Hitlerian references suit the occasion.
These savages are even more barbaric than the Nazis, who were often satisfied with a few fatal bullets or mass gassings. The Gazan monsters beheaded both babies and soldiers, shot hundreds of fleeing Israelis in the back, burned families alive in their homes and seized hostages that included children, grandmothers and the disabled.
The beheading of babies was confirmed by the Israel government at 11:15 a.m. Wednesday, just as I was completing this column. One broadcaster on CNN said she was “losing it.”
Two comparisons to Nazis were presented on Tuesday, first when Jonathan Greenblatt, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, told CNN that the attacks constituted “Nazi-level” activity, and a victim’s mother called the Gazan terrorists “Nazis” during an interview with MSNBC.
We can dispute Greenblatt’s characterization. He is wrong when he calls It “Nazi-level” activity. It is Nazism. Period. Even that is incorrect. Try Nazism-plus.
By the late evening, New York Times reporter Ronen Bergman told “The Last Word“ host Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC, “They don’t have any boundaries.”
The Hamas raid resembled the Babi Yar bloodbath more than any other event in Jewish history that I can recall. At Babi Yar, Hitler’s Einsatzgruppen mobile squads swept into Kiev, Ukraine’s capital, on Sept 19, 1941, and subsequently posted this order:
“K—s of the city of Kiev and vicinity! On Monday, September 29, you are to appear by 7:00 A.M. with your possessions, money, documents, valuables and warm clothing at Dorogozhitshaya Street, next to the Jewish cemetery. Failure to appear is punishable by death.”
The Jewish Virtual Library recounts that the Jews were marched to Babi Yar, a ravine two miles from the center of the city where they were stripped, shot and buried. A truck driver at the scene provided eyewitness testimony:
“Once undressed, the Jews were led into the ravine…When they reached the bottom of the ravine they were seized by members of the Schultpolizer and made to lie down on top of Jews who had already been shot. That all happened very quickly. The corpses were literally in layers.
“A police marksman came along and shot each Jew in the neck with a submachine gun…I saw these marksmen stand on layers of corpses and shoot one after the other … The marksmen would walk across the bodies of the executed Jews to the next Jew who had meanwhile lain down and shoot him.”
In the space of a week, almost 34,000 Jews were massacred in the same manner. Reading through the JVL description nauseated me, just as the Hamas raid on Saturday nauseated most of the Jewish people and much of the rest of the world.
It was the carnage at the music festival that most resembled Babi Yar. Terrorists found hundreds of young Israelis gathered in a large open space at about 7 a.m. Saturday and wiped out 260 people or more and sent many of them to Gaza as hostages.
Survivors managed to outrun the killers and their guns or hide for hours in nearby bushes.
The starkest differences from Babi Yar were the numbers of the dead and failure to find a ravine for piling up the bodies. I almost forgot to mention Nazi efficiency.
The terrorists’ search for Jews in the Israeli border towns is reminiscent of the nights when Nazi soldiers broke into Jewish residences, dragged them from their homes and transported them to concentration camps where many died in gas chambers.
In case of doubt, my opening reference to gas chambers is sarcasm. Still, Hamas and other terrorists will surely try any tactic murder Jews and destroy Israel. That would be Hitler’s most grisly posthumous feat.
*Bruce Ticker is a Philadelphia-based columnist. He may be contacted via bruce.ticker@sdjewishworld.com