Oct. 7 exposed terrifying American truths and launched a righteous reckoning

The attacks of Oct.7, 2023, unfurled 5,678 miles from America’s shores; they impacted just a handful of American citizens.Yet they may prove to be, in retrospect, one of the more significant events in our nation’s recent history.Because that’s the day when many Americans woke up and realized, to our absolute horror, that we were living in a very different country than the one we had imagined.Before Israelis could even bury their 1,200 dead or attempt to rescue 240 hostages, before the IDF launched its operation in Gaza, thousands of our fellow Americans took to the streets — not to mourn the victims, but to cheer for their executioners.On college campuses, students gleefully waved the banners of Hamas and Hezbollah, terror groups with a long and benighted tradition of murdering Americans as well as Israelis, and took pleasure in pummeling and harassing their Jewish classmates.In print and on the air, pundits indulged in preposterous conspiracy theories, including logic-defying tales of Israelis allegedly training dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners.And if we sought escape by watching our favorite actors or listening to our favorite rock stars, we too often found them wallowing in bloodlust — sporting, for example, a pin shaped like a red hand to honor a Palestinian mob that lynched two Israelis in Ramallah in 2000.Daily life began to feel like that terrifying scene, early on in every zombie movie, when the folks who used to be friends and neighbors are suddenly infected by some brain-rotting virus that turns them all into ghouls.It was a tough reckoning.In the three years since, as Americans of good will have tried to make sense of the torrent of Jew hatred suddenly flowing all around us, we’ve had to grapple with two devastating truths.The first was that there was nothing sudden or spontaneous about this explosion of hate.

Subscribe to our daily Post Opinion newsletter! Please provide a valid email.By clicki...