The Spiritual War of Oct. 7

“There was a moment when I told myself, ‘I’m not going to pray to Allah.'”

It’s all a lie.

The Oct 7 massacres were not carried out to create a ‘Palestinian’ state, to break out of an ‘open air prison’ in Gaza or any of the lies the media has systemically deluged us with.

They did it to capture Jerusalem.

That’s why Hamas named the operation ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’ after the victory mosque formerly planted by Muslim invaders on the site of the Jewish Temple. That’s why Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh began his Oct 7 invasion speech with complaints about Jewish presence prayers at the Temple site near the Al-Aqsa mosque. That’s why the Hamas emblem features the Al-Aqsa mosque between two crossed swords. Israeli soldiers who served in Gaza reported seeing those same images in homes around Gaza after the Islamic jihadist group had spent a generation riling up the Muslim population to launch a holy war to conquer Jerusalem.

And it’s not just Hamas.

Arafat had constantly proclaimed his vision of “millions of martyrs marching to Jerusalem.” That line is still broadcast by Palestinian Authority media which declares it to be their great mission.

Muslims in Gaza are not dying to create a state that polls show most of them don’t believe will ever exist. They’re killing and dying in a religious jihad to take over Jerusalem.

Every effort to create a ‘Palestinian’ state failed because a state was never the real goal, but a means to the real end, the capture of Jerusalem and its holy sites. The idea that the panoply of fake nationalism, flags, ministries, and an anthem, are just a false front for a religious crusade may be incomprehensible to secularized western nations, but Islam is religious, not nationalistic.

There is no ‘Palestinian’ cause, only a jihadist cause that hides behind it, the way that it hides behind so many other facades, civil rights, social justice, political change, that are just masks.

Why do the jihadist groups want Jerusalem so badly? For the same reason Islam wanted Constantinople, captured Athens and turned the Parthenon into a mosque and then wrecked it during the Great Turkish War, and why ISIS has repeatedly threatened to conquer Rome.

Muslims have Mecca. Why do they need Jerusalem, Athens and Rome?

Islam is a great thousand year darkness obsessed with eliminating all light. Its followers are convinced that if they eliminate every religion and culture, seize its important sites or, like the WTC on 9/11 or the Buddhas in Afghanistan, destroy them, there will be no alternative to Islam.

Unable to win a religious debate, Islam always turns to religious war as if murder were faith.

The real story of Oct 7 is not the one you have heard about in the media. It’s a spiritual war by an enemy determined to drown out the light of Jerusalem, the light of hope and faith, in murder, hate and moral inversion that transforms victims into perpetrators and terrorists into innocents, that inverts everything, replaces truth with lies, and convinces the world to worship evil.

The Jews have long been the canaries in the coal mines of civilization. Here is how that spiritual war between good and evil played out amidst the soldiers, civilians and hostages in Israel.

Keith Siegel, an American from North Carolina who had been kidnapped from his home along with his wife, spent 484 days as a hostage, and described turning to G-d. He didn’t know many prayers, but he began to say what he remembered including the words of ‘Shema Yisrael.’ “Hear O Israel, the Lord is Our God, the Lord is One” which had been recited by martyrs about to die for their faith.

“There was a moment when I told myself, ‘I’m not going to pray to Allah,’” his wife Aviva recalled. “Even though I was forced to, they would pray in front of us, and it wasn’t clear who they were praying to. I moved my lips, but I wasn’t truly praying. They were so cruel to us, and I couldn’t understand it. How can you pray and be so evil? I just don’t get it.”

Agam Berger, another hostage, had her faith restored when she dreamed of a prayer book, a siddur, and then one came her way. “How do you explain that? That’s not chance. That’s faith,” her mother said.

The media and the woke left and woke right have launched an unprecedented propaganda machine to make Israel seem monstrous and its war senseless. And in the face of that, Israelis have turned to G-d, convinced that there is meaning and purpose even in the face of that evil.

“G-d, I speak to you now,” the father of Sergeant Yisrael Natan Rosenfeld, said at his funeral. “People who know me know my doubts, they know my fights. When you have grandparents who went into gas chambers and parents who had great sores and pains after the Second World War. We lost six million people. It is hard to sit down and say, ‘Yes, there is a G-d and I believe and I’m convinced.’ But I’m standing here at the moment where I have to make a decision, and my decision is: G-d, you’re above us, it all has a purpose, a much bigger purpose than we know about.”

“Like in the Book of Esther, where invisible threads are woven by a Master’s hand into a redemptive story – so too we have seen small parts come together into a great picture of miraculous victory: the beepers, the radios, Nasrallah, Assad’s collapse, Trump, Iran. A new biblical chapter is being written in our days. You will never be able to read it, my son, but you will surely be one of its heroes,” Rabbi Tamir Granot wrote to his fallen son Amitay: a platoon leader.

Last summer, Rabbi Granot officiated at the wedding of his son’s fiance who had been introduced to her new husband by the mother of another fallen soldier. It’s not natural, he admitted, “but then ours is a people whose path often travels the supernatural. And when you take that into account, then, yeah, it’s pretty natural for us.”

The war as seen from Israel is very different from the way it is seen in the media and on social media. It’s not the story of endless internet squabbling, but as Rabbi Doron Perez of World Mizrahi, who lost one of his sons and whose other son was wounded on October 7, recently wrote, “a young generation that many had characterized as a self-absorbed TikTok generation emerged as a remarkable generation of self-sacrifice and selfless commitment to our country and cause. A generation no less heroic than the defenders of 1967 and 1973, the founders of the State of Israel, the Maccabees, and perhaps even King David’s army.”

In Israel, the story isn’t about world opinion, it’s the story of volunteers cooking meals, soldiers returning to duty, mothers raising children on their own, and people living with the reality that they may have to run to shelter any moment, and yet believing that there is a purpose to all this.

They know that they are fighting another battle in an ancient war between good and evil.

“We know that the power of life which we so deeply believe in will ultimately triumph over those who celebrate death,” Rabbi Perez said at the funeral of his son Daniel, after being left with nothing to bury other than his bloody shirt. “The blood of our son that we buried, this blood will overpower the spilling of blood. We know with certainty that those who believe we are all created in G-d’s image will defeat those who have lost any semblance of that image.”

Those who know history also know that this is not a new war and it has nothing to do with Gaza, the Six Day War in 1967 or even Israel’s successful fight for independence in 1948.

During the High Holy Days, among the penitential prayers that are read is a 13th century liturgical poem by an otherwise unknown Jewish man writing about the Islamic occupation.

“Those who have made Moloch their king, rule over me,”  he bemoans. “Those who serve abominations have befouled my lands.” The prayer goes on to describe how “I have wept and shed tears from the yoke of Ishmael’s children” who “call a prophet a man who never prophesied” while preventing me from “ascending to Jerusalem during festivals”.

“How can the enemies of all that is pure reside in Zion,” the prayer asks. “How came they to dwell in my temples and made themselves a dwelling there?” It prays, “remember us and recall us with your salvation from those who worship things that are not you. Hurl them out and swallow them up from your holy dwelling place. And I through your great kindness will at last enter your house.”

Hamas ascribed the leading cause of its assault on Oct 7 to Jews entering the former site of the Temple Mount which the Muslim invaders claimed as their own. Countless peoples of all religions visit the Vatican. Bethlehem operates under Muslim rule. And people of all religions visit Hindu and Buddhist holy sites. Non-Jews, including President Trump and the Pope, visit the Western Wall. Why is Islam obsessed with driving people away?

“My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.” Isaiah 56:7 envisions the day when everyone will pray there. That is a vision that Hamas, the Muslim world and the UN are obsessed with blocking.

Why was Hamas, a Muslim Brotherhood terror group, so obsessed with Jews entering the site of the Temple Mount that it launched a catastrophic war that claimed thousands of lives?

Under colonial rule, Jews were forbidden to even blow the shofar at the climax of Yom Kippur at the bottom of the Western Wall which had been reduced to a trash heap under Muslim rule.

“Eyewitness accounts told of a white-bearded Chassid in a black caftan running for his life, chased by a mob through an alleyway leading to the Western Wall. The pursuers brandished clubs, sabers, and daggers, and howled: ‘Death to the Jewish dogs!’ and ‘Allahu Akhbar!’”

67 Jews were killed in these Muslim massacres, not over Gaza, but over Jews praying.

This is not just a matter of ancient history. The Biden administration repeatedly warned Israel not to allow Jews to enter the Temple Mount or to pray there.

“Some Jewish groups escorted by Israeli police at the Temple Mount performed religious acts such as prayers,” a more recent State Department report on religious freedom complained, while attacking religious freedom. “In most cases, Israeli police acted to prevent them from praying and removed them, but in other cases, some of which were documented on social media in photos and videos, the police appeared not to notice the acts of prayer.”

“Far-right Israeli minister prays at Jerusalem’s most sensitive holy site,” an outraged CNN headline stormed.

What is it that evil and darkness fears the most? Beneath all the lies, it will always show us.

Hamas killed over 1,000 people and would have killed millions more to seize Jerusalem and stop prayers to G-d. It took hostages and then tried to pressure them into converting to Islam.

This is a spiritual war in which evil uses the tools of moral inversion to make darkness seem like light and turn light into darkness, to make monsters into heroes, to celebrate the worst crimes, and to make the most horrifying atrocities into the moral high ground of mankind. What drives this war? Fear. And what is it that darkness fears above all else? Darkness fears the light.

Hitler’s Mufti, one of the allies of the Muslim Brotherhood before it officially spawned Hamas, justified his jihad against the Jews by claiming that they were plotting the “rebuilding of the Temple that is called Solomon’s Temple.” In one poll, 52% of Muslims claimed that  Israel was planning to rebuild the Temple even though the country had no intention of any such thing.

“Why Israel is closer than ever to building the Third Temple,” Middle East Eye, a Qatari propaganda site that often promotes Hamas, warned. Last year, an Al Qaeda bulletin also warned that Israel was about to “rebuild the third temple.”

In Judaism, the Temple can only be rebuilt by G-d, not by man. If Israel had wanted to build a temple, it had nearly 60 years in which to get it done

What do Hamas and its Islamic terrorist allies really fear?

Evil fears our bullets less than it fears our faith. It does everything possible to convince us that evil is good and we are evil. Its greatest victory is when we come to believe it. As too many do.

But when we reject evil and turn to G-d, it boils with rage and commits atrocities to terrify us. But underneath the crimes and lies, it is possessed by the terror of the day when “the redeemed of the Lord shall return, and they shall come to Zion with song” (Isaiah 51:11) and “So said the Lord: I will return to Zion, and I will dwell in the midst of Jerusalem; and Jerusalem shall be called the city of truth, and the mount of the Lord of Hosts be the holy mountain” (Zechariah 8:3).

That is the fear and the hate at the heart of the Islamic jihad. They don’t kill us, torture us and terrorize us because they believe they’re right, but because they fear they are wrong.