The Siren Song of Dresden
A letter to my friends about what happened to us after October 7th.
There is gruesome footage of Hamas slaughtering Israelis on October 7th. Yet, one of the most distressing videos I watched was just a boy trying to rub tears away with the back of his wrist, though he didn't quite make contact with his eyes, as if his hand was too heavy.
His thin arms seemed unequal to the weight of his despair.
Bearing Witness
To my dismay, some of my friends did not believe reports about the extent of Hamas’s barbarity. A particular flashpoint on social media was the claim of beheaded babies at the Kfar Aza kibbutz, which I amplified.
Soon after Israeli Defense Forces recounted recovering tiny, headless corpses, the Israeli government could not confirm the reports and an I.D.F. spokesperson declined to provide evidence on the grounds that it would be “disrespectful for the dead.” This was immediately seized upon by outlets like Al Jazeera as a confession that the reports were nothing more than malicious propaganda. The Israeli Prime Minister's Office then wised up to the bad optics of withholding proof, and reversed course on October 11th by releasing photos of bloodied and charred babies, “So that the world will see just a fraction of the horrors that Hamas carried out.”
Later in October, the I.D.F. invited journalists like The Atlantic’s Graeme Wood to view “a grisly matinee screening of 43 minutes of raw footage from Hamas's October 7 attack” compiled from the murderers' body cams and cell phones, and explained to the assembled journalists that they chose to show Hamas’s snuff films out of necessity, because, “What we shared with you, you should know it.” Wood relayed how an audience member heaved a little when terrorists lobbed a grenade at a father and his young sons in their pajamas. “The boys are covered in blood, and one appears to have lost an eye. They go to their kitchen and cry for their mother. One of the boys howls, ‘Why am I alive?’ and ‘Daddy, daddy.’ One says, ‘I think we are going to die.’ The terrorist who killed their father comes in, and while they weep, he raids their fridge.” But the most disturbing moment for Wood was not gory:
The clip is just a phone call—placed by a terrorist to his family back in Gaza. He tells his father that he is calling from a Jewish woman’s phone. (The phone recorded the call.) He tells his father that his son is now a “hero” and that “I killed 10 Jews with my own hands.” And he tells his family, about a dozen times, that they should open up WhatsApp on his phone, because he has sent photographs to prove what he has done. “Put on Mom!” he says. “Your son is a hero!”
His parents, I noticed, are not nearly as enthusiastic as he is. I believe that the mom says “praise be to God” at one point, which could be gratitude for her son’s crimes or pure reflex, indicating her loss for words to match her son’s unspeakable acts. They do not question what their son has done; they do not scold him. They tell him to come back to Gaza. They fear for his safety. He says, amid rounds of “Allahu akbar,” that he intends “victory or martyrdom”—which the parents must understand means that he will never come home. From their muted replies I wonder whether they also understand that even if he did come home, he would do so as a disgusting and degraded creature, and that it might be better for him not to.
Journalists were also invited to Israel's National Center of Forensic Medicine (Abu Kabir) in Tel Aviv, where the director Dr. Chen Kugel presented more evidence of the massacre. When one reporter asked Kugel if Hamas decapitated babies, he answered yes, with the caveat that forensic scientists could not determine whether the terrorists cut off their heads before or after death, or whether they were “cut off by knife or blown off by RPG.” To date, Israel has not released images of beheaded babies.
Even those who took Dr. Kugel at his word approached the controversy gingerly. After posting about the Israeli forensic presentation on X, Intelligencer's Eric Levitz apologized the next day for asserting, “that this report indicated that babies were beheaded. This was an overstatement. I should have said that the report established that babies were found headless, a fact that lends plausibility to claims of beheading, but which does not prove them.” He added, “I personally don't think much of anything follows from this distinction; we are describing horrific atrocities in either case. But some people disagree.”
Another journalist, Ben Dreyfuss, framed this disagreement more colorfully, “If you find yourself arguing that they only beheaded the mothers and some of the babies, the rest of the babies they merely shot to death, there is a lot broken in your brain. I’m going to want to read a psychiatric report on you before I invite you to poker night.” A charitable interpretation of why anyone took issue with the beheaded babies claim is that it may have sensationalized an already grim situation; and yet, babies burnt to a crisp is equally deviant, and for this we have the receipts.
I shared Dreyfuss's zinger in a flurry of furious social media posts aimed at my friends who had been “fact checking" the beheaded babies claim.1 In doing so, I deviated from one of my goals in creating this publication. The tagline for Fashionably Late Takes quips, “I can't draw fast enough for hot takes,” but in all seriousness, I aim at a slower approach because I want to be thorough and thoughtful. And so, it behooves me to elaborate on my social media hot takes here after having taken time to gather my thoughts.
And I can distill my dismay to this plea:
My dear friends, please do not countenance this new Holocaust denial.
My Most Perverse Possession
I own a signed copy of a book written by a Holocaust denier. It is a history of the Nazi’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, written by an infamous Englishman named David Irving. Before ordering my used copy of The Virus House, I agonized over the timeline of Irving's descent from a respected historian to a Holocaust minimizer to a full-on Hitler apologist. Was this book, a unique account of Germany's version of the Manhattan Project, written before Irving altogether succumbed to his inner demons? Hopefully. Because I am fascinated by the history of nuclear weapons, I ordered it.
When it arrived in the mail, I was taken aback by Irving's signature on the title page. The used book listing did not advertise a signed copy. It felt too intimate.
Irving rose to fame as a historian for his 1963 international best-seller The Destruction of Dresden, in which he lamented “the biggest single massacre in European history.” A few decades later, it became apparent that he had wildly inflated the death toll from the bombing of Dresden by approximately four times the accurate estimate of 25,000 civilian casualties and based his estimates in part on a document forged by the Nazis. (Unfortunately for me, the fact that his earliest and once highly regarded text was fraudulent does not bode well for the accuracy of The Virus House, but I made an informed purchase.) Irving’s corruption was carefully examined by Michael Shermer, co-author of Denying History: Who says the Holocaust never happened and why do they say it?, who explored his backstory:
After failing to complete his degrees, Irving moved to Germany and worked in a steel factory where he learned the German language and culture first hand. It was here that he first heard about the allied mass bombing of Dresden (from the German perspective, of course), which led to the publication of his first book The Destruction of Dresden, and his decision to become a writer. His empathy for the plight of the Germans during the war, and his sympathetic portrayal of the Nazi leaders, led him into what he calls “the Magic Circle”—the surviving former Hitler confidants. And it is here where he chose the path down which he has never diverted.
For all David Irving’s plentiful flaws, it was empathy that in large part set him down the path toward Holocaust denial. He did not balance compassion for the German people with condemnation for the Nazi regime, and he allowed a ferocious attack by the Allied forces to confuse his ability to identify true evil.
A survivor of the bombing of Dresden named Margaret Freyer recounted:
The firestorm is incredible, there are calls for help and screams from somewhere but all around is one single inferno. To my left I suddenly see a woman. I can see her to this day and shall never forget it. She carries a bundle in her arms. It is a baby. She runs, she falls, and the child flies in an arc into the fire.
War Crimes
Former JAG officer David French used his experience in combat and law to analyze the war in Gaza for The New York Times. About fifteen years ago, his job was to review the legality of his unit’s missions when he deployed with the U.S. Army to Iraq, including invading and searching hospitals that may have harbored leaders of a suicide bombing cell. His analysis of the Israel-Hamas War is worth reading in full and his conclusion is worth quoting at length:
When Hamas attacked Israel, it violated rules against aggressive war. When it intentionally slaughtered civilians and then hid among civilians after the attack, it violated the most basic principles of the law of armed conflict. As a result, Israel has a right under international law to defeat Hamas, and while it is also bound by the laws of armed conflict (which credible observers already claim Israel has violated), Hamas bears the legal responsibility for the civilian deaths that result from its own violations of the laws of war.
The overwhelming weight of domestic, international and diplomatic protests against Israel turns this system upside down. They place political pressure against Israel’s military resolve and — crucially — diminish the chances of legal accountability for the Hamas leaders and commanders who planned and executed a grossly illegal and brutal attack.
These protests also play directly into Hamas’s illegal military strategy. The entire reason for embedding in a civilian population is to make it impossible for others to respond to terrorist attacks without endangering or killing civilians, and an armed force that is almost certainly unable to prevail in direct combat with the I.D.F. utterly depends on outside forces demanding that Israel stop its attacks.
In addition, these protests are reverberating across the world in the absence of proof of Israeli war crimes. (Amnesty International claims there is “damning evidence” of war crimes in several Israeli strikes, and those claims should be thoroughly investigated.) The civilian deaths in Gaza are utterly horrific, but they are not on their face proof of I.D.F. wrongdoing. The fact is we don’t yet have the necessary information to adjudicate Israeli strikes, and the existence of civilian casualties is not proof of Israeli war crimes…
The following thought experiment is how I know that there is no moral equivalence between Hamas and Israel:
I can imagine why the I.D.F. would be tempted to commit war crimes. If Hamas held my children hostage, then I would commit war crimes to try to save them. Let us hope that the Israelis are nobler than me.
But I cannot imagine myself committing the depraved violence that Hamas perpetrated on October 7th. Some of my friends have made excuses for Hamas by lamenting the conditions in Gaza. They seem to believe that Hamas planned their terrorist attacks in the spirit I just espoused — an attempt at securing their children’s freedom.
If so, my friends that have characterized Gaza as a “concentration camp” or an “open-air prison” should familiarize themselves with the conditions in Gaza before October 7th.
helpfully compiled data from the CIA World Factbook, the University of Gaza, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, the UN Population Fund, the Arab League, and the Palestinian Ministry of Health, which all “converge on a similar picture: Gaza, if it were its own country, would be somewhere between the 39th and 50th percentile of nations in terms of living conditions—in the neighborhood of Egypt, Mexico and Vietnam (rather than, say, Haiti and Somalia).” Personally, living under those conditions would not compel me to commit war crimes, even for my children.
So what did motivate Hamas? Perhaps the terrorists and their handlers in the Iranian regime wanted to scuttle normalization and long-term peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia. It may well have something to do with the genocidal Judenhass upon which Hamas was founded. Considering The Washington Post’s reporting that Hamas “intended not just to kill and capture Israelis, but to spark a conflagration that would sweep the region and lead to a wider conflict,” and of Hamas’s “expectation that the group’s actions would compel an overwhelming Israeli response,” it is unlikely that Hamas was aiming to uplift the quality of life for Palestinian children, who Hamas believe must be raised to wage jihad and seek martyrdom:
Hamas meticulously planned and prepared for a massacre of Israeli civilians on a scale that was highly likely to provoke Israel’s government into sending troops into Gaza, analysts said. Indeed, Hamas leaders have publicly expressed a willingness to accept heavy losses — potentially including the deaths of many Gazan civilians living under Hamas rule.
“Will we have to pay a price? Yes, and we are ready to pay it,” Ghazi Hamad, a member of the Hamas politburo, told Beirut’s LCBI television in an interview aired on Oct. 24. “We are called a nation of martyrs, and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs.”
Hamas was willing to accept such sacrifices as the price for kick-starting a new wave of violent Palestinian resistance in the region and scuttling efforts at normalizing relations between Israel and Arab states, according to current and former intelligence officials and counterterrorism experts.
Atrocities will not soothe the troubled past haunting the Arab-Israeli conflict. And no conceivable historical context could rationalize the obscenities that Hamas committed — all such attempts lead to the path that David Irving chose. Unlike Irving, we should choose to balance compassion for the Palestinian people with condemnation for Hamas terrorists, and not allow a ferocious attack by the I.D.F. to confuse our ability to identify true evil.2
As David French wrote:
At the same time, it’s important to repeat that Israel has a legal and moral obligation to prevent unnecessary civilian suffering even as it exercises its right of self-defense. Its actions in Gaza should be scrutinized, both now and after the war. Any war crimes should be exposed and prosecuted. Moreover, as I’ve said before, not everything that’s legal is also moral. Israel should hold itself to a high standard, and it is acceptable for the United States and its allies to hold Israel to the same standards it applies to their own military actions abroad.
If the goal, however, is to end civilian suffering, the best course of action is for Hamas to release its hostages and for its military forces to lay down their arms. That is the solution that is by far more in line with the entire postwar legal structure designed to end or limit armed conflict, and that should be the primary object of international pressure.
Israel has killed over 17,000 people in Gaza since October 7th, and between 5,000 to 10,000 are estimated to have been enemy combatants. Approximately a third were young children.3 It is conceivable that the death toll may approach the 25,000 civilians killed in the bombing of Dresden if this war is protracted — as it is likely to be, because Hamas has promised that the assault on October 7th “is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth.” That “Hamas bears the legal responsibility for the civilian deaths that result from its own violations of the laws of war” does nothing to shrink this suffering. Of this tragedy, a Jewish friend told me, “We can forgive you for killing our children, but we cannot forgive you for making us kill your children.”
The footage coming out of Gaza right now is soul crushing. In one video, a small boy with giant eyes trembles in shock. He stares hard but does not seem to be looking at the room he’s in. I wonder if he is still alive
Additionally, my posts reacted to other commentary from my friends that I found unsavory, such as erroneously reframing Hamas as a “charity organization,” bemoaning the “double standard" that Hamas terrorism was not “applauded" like Ukrainian resistance against Putin, and spreading the risible conspiracy theory that it was actually the I.D.F. who slaughtered Israeli citizens on October 7th.
One colleague shared an essay lecturing that Israel “is a machine for the conversion of grief into power… The state will do – already is doing – what it does with Jewish grief: transmute it into violence.” It discouraged mourning because, “The Israeli government… will gobble up your grief for Jews and use it to make more victims of Palestinians.” I wonder if this essay's author, Gabriel Winant, an assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago, could manage to say this in person to Ayelet Levy Shachar, the mother of a 19-year-old young woman still held hostage by Hamas. Her daughter featured in one of the more widely shared videos that Hamas broadcasted, in which the terrorists dragged her out of a jeep by her hair to parade her through a crowd of men, as she hobbled on slit ankles, with a conspicuous blood stain on the seat of her sweatpants highly suggestive of rape.
On that note, The New York Times recently detailed how prominent human rights groups like UN Women, the United Nations's women's rights agency, have until recently ignored “ample evidence" of “large-scale sexual violence” committed by Hamas on October 7th. Headlines announcing “Growing Evidence of Hamas's Sexual Violence" proliferated last week in reaction to the longstanding posture of Hamas apologists that the terrorists did no such thing.
At the very least, even if you are convinced that the I.D.F. is true evil, then you should be able to invert this to maintain that “we must be capable of balancing compassion for the Israeli people with condemnation for the I.D.F.,” which would preclude denying or minimizing how Hamas murdered babies on October 7.
I am basing this approximation on the numbers for children under age 14, using the last available data with a breakdown of age categories that the Palestinian Authority health ministry released on October 26.
Cannot read this piece while drawing breath, and can't bring myself to click on the insignificant heart button to signal having read it. I would thank you but: horror, horror, and unutterable horror.
Really insightful! 👏👏