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dot org. People tend to gloss over this event.
Well, yes, was around twelve hundred people were murdered on that day, and people taken hostage, but they don't go into the details. and And I remember Franklin Graham had a copy of the video, some of which was taken by the terrorists themselves. says, "Do you want to see this?" I said, "I actually don't." And then he said, "Watch a little of it," and I watched just a little, maybe four minutes. It's still in my mind. It was so horrifying because it was taken from the viewpoint of one of these men murdering an innocent Jewish man, and and you saw how barbaric it was.
And sometimes I feel like have we glossed over that too much? Do we need to just pause for a moment because next to the Holocaust, this is one of the most horrific things that has happened to the Jewish people, and it happened in their homeland. We you know where they have this. Very strong military and you know state of the art intelligence and and everything else that they have you know they have this happen to them. I mean, if it happened in America to compare, because we also just had the anniversary of nine eleven, it would be like forty thousand Americans slaughtered.
Yeah, I think that would get our attention. Having three thousand murdered certainly got our attention, rightly so. How about forty thousand proportionately with the size of Israel? That that's what happened to them. Talk talk about that event.
What actually happened on that day, and why it was so devastating to Israel, and also the hostages, including the children. Yes, they took kids hostage, babies, babies. They killed babies. They they killed babies. Put a baby in an oven.
People want to dispute that one point.
Well, there's no, you know, evidence to support that, but it actually happened. There's a lot of evidence, and you know, you're right. I mean, October 7th was the single biggest attack against the Jewish people since the Holocaust. I remember that morning. I was supposed to fly to Israel that night.
Wow! I was literally getting an award on Wednesday for my work building bridges between Arabs and Israelis. Wow! And then I was going from there to Saudi Arabia. Like that was my my plan that week because we were like on the, we were on the edge of peace between Saudi Arabia and Israel.
And this is part of what Hamas is doing, and and with Iran support to try to derail, these these peace plans. But it was a, it was a singular event of terror. And and what's even what makes it even worse, everything about it's terrible. What makes it even worse is that the people who lived in those kibbutzim, those those little villages next to the Gaza Strip, many of these were the people most committed to peace. Yeah, I mean they they were the people who lived there for that purpose.
And that's where the people at the music festival these hundreds and hundreds of young people it was a peace festival. And in fact, some of the Hamas operatives from that day that that broke through and killed all those people in such horrific ways, they they actually were actually employed on a on a regular basis by those Kibbutzim. They actually they they crossed over and they allowed them to work. And while they were working, they were collecting intelligence in order to prepare for this for this horrible attack. And you know that we are very much living in a pre October seven, post October seven.
Yeah. World and you know I I that that week instead of going to Israel I ended up going to the EU Parliament and I I um I I spoke about the hostages for the first time there and then we led a rally a few weeks after that in Geneva with evangelicals in front of the UN Human Rights infrastructure call for the release of the hostages you know and it just went on and on and on from from there and there are all kinds of obvious things that October seventh revealed. The less obvious things that it revealed was just the total moral corruption of so many of our institutions and so many of our leaders who could not see good in evil, because people forget that on October eighth, when many of our churches were praying for our friends in Israel, on October eighth, twenty twenty three, protests erupted in all of our democratic. Capitals and all of the major cities in the world. You would think there would be protests in favor of Israel, and it was the very opposite.
They were protesting in support of Hamas, and and it just shows what had grown from the River to the Sea. Palestine will be free. They were celebrating it all, and they were celebrating it all as as before Israel. Had retaliated in a war that Hamas started that day, and that's what it was. It was a war that they started.
There were thousands and thousands of Hamas operatives. The objective of Hamas was like we hope that this war accomplishes this goal. Oh, they wanted to wipe wipe Israel out. I mean, what what what Yehya Sinwar was doing was he was number one. He was concerned that if there's going to be peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia, that it would.
It would it would reset the entire region. Yes. Number two, and Iran was involved in all of this. Iran was Iran, the Iranian IRGC, and dreamed up all the tunnels and all the infrastructure. They trained the operatives.
They smuggled the weapons. But what Yahya Sinwar thought was that they would breakthrough in Gaza. By the way, sometimes using paragliders, and the paragliding training actually came from Europeans that were trying to help with tourism. You know, oddly enough, in the Gaza Strip. But Yaya thought that evil, evil man.
They were going to break through, and then Hezbollah was going to join from the north with 150,000 rockets, and it would be the destruction of of Israel, and. For whatever reason, Hezbollah did not join in, and the and the reasons for for all of that, some of which was Sinwar was really operating on his own timetable and wasn't wasn't coordinating with all of the Iranian proxies and all of these things, but it was not inconceivable that had that plan actually been implemented as he imagined it. With an attack from the south and attack from the north, Iranian proxies in Syria and maybe even Iran itself joining. It was an existential moment for Israel. It was a shock that, with all of their technology and all of their innovation, that they could still be be be vulnerable.
You know, it's ironic. I was on a phone call with a number of other pastors and Christian leaders. Orchestrated by Mike Evans, and Prime Minister Netanyahu was on, and he was telling us. How safe and secure Israel is! How advanced they are technologically!
They've never been stronger. He was talking about this peace treaty or this, you know, new relationship with Saudi Arabia, and it was so optimistic. And it was only a couple of few days after that that this happened.
So clearly, he did not see this coming. How could there be a breach of this kind without? Israelis, intelligence, Mossad, their military, knowing about it. I mean, all of that will be will be studied and analyzed. But I think it's a lesson for all of us.
Yes, that even the most powerful, sophisticated countries in the world can have can have blind spots. I mean, the United States has some blind spots.
Some of which I know about, which I will not say on this microphone, right? Because you know you don't want other people to know about them. But every country does. Yeah. And one of the things that Israel lost in the October seventh attack was that sort of like mysterious deterrence and invincibility.
Which they steadily gained back as they prosecuted the war with the pager operation in Lebanon, and and now you're seeing the Middle East just totally, totally, totally reshaped in front of our eyes. And I think you know the net effect of it will be: this is not actually the beginning of a period of more another generation of war and terror in the Middle East. It's actually the last gasp of the of the extremists, and I believe there will be a. Different Iran. I believe these proxies will be defeated.
I believe, you know, you will see a wave of peace all, all across, all across the region. But it was a shot, you know, not only to Israel, it was a shot to all those who love peace and freedom, you know, around around the world. That there really is evil in the world, and we have never in our lifetimes seen evil like we saw that day on on October seventh, which, by the way, wasn't just an attack on Israel. The victims of October seventh, both the hostages and and those who were who were massacred, were citizens not just of Israel. They were citizens of forty different countries, including virtually every country in Europe.
And yet we watched in front of our eyes as the victims of that attack were treated as. As the criminals, and it was—it's been insane, insane to watch, even our own politics in America.
Well, and then so Israel's responded, and of course they're accused by some of genocide. I don't even think people who use the word genocide know what the word means. If Israel wanted to commit a genocide, they they could do it, and they could do it in short order. But they've done nothing of the kind. But but their response, you know, they there's innocent children that have been killed, but we don't even know how accurate some of that information is that's relayed through a very compliant and cooperative press with this sort of agenda, this anti-Israel agenda.
So. Tell me what you think about the response of Israel, and maybe bring clarity to what's going on in Gaza, because you know a lot about that in particular. Yeah, I mean, there was obviously not a genocide in Gaza, and and. And the shocking thing is, even even as we're speaking, we're speaking. You know, after the UN General Assembly took place in New York, and the the absolutely horrible Secretary General of the United Nations included in his remarks that the worst thing he's seen as a Secretary General of the United Nations is what happened in the Gaza Strip.
While he's been Secretary General of the United Nations, like literally millions of people have died under his watch. What did happen in in Gaza was Hamas started a war. That's right. And to your point, if there was an attack like that on the United States of America, like we would respond, and the Israelis responded to that war, and all wars are horrible, yeah, and civilians die in wars, and yet on this on the same token. It's not only a compliant press; it's that what we've been experiencing is actually the first, what I call the first global information war, where we have seen basically everything Hamas said, the global media and many governments took it face value, and everything Israel said.
They they treated it as as a lie, and it should have been the exact opposite. Yeah. So why is it this way? And I think I think it has a lot to do with anti semitism. Hey everybody, thanks for listening to my podcast.
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