After I attended a recent screening of the Oct. 7 terrorist attack footage, it became clear to me that Americans are overwhelmingly taking the wrong message away from the still-unfolding Israel-Hamas war. There are millions of people in the U.S. who cling to cultural resentment and violent ideology with religious fervor, just like members of Hamas, and their numbers are growing. In many ways, the domestic threat we face could soon be more dangerous than Hamas is to Israel.
The Oct. 7 footage largely reiterates what we already know: Jihadis find delight in murder. They quite literally have a religious obligation to slaughter innocent people — in this case, Israelis — who belong to ethnoreligious groups outside their own.
If you followed along with the events of Oct. 7 as they occurred or viewed social media footage of the attack in its immediate aftermath, this will sound familiar. Islamist soldiers gleefully decapitated noncombatants, burned people alive, and slaughtered people in their homes. They butchered parents in front of their children, giddily stomped on the heads of those they massacred, and shot people in their backs as they attempted to escape. When they returned home, they were greeted as heroes. Gazans flooded the streets to run alongside pickup trucks filled with bodies — some lifeless, some alive for political capital. All of this was done to victorious shouts of “Allahu akbar.”
The Islamic world, particularly those aligned with Hamas, believes Israel is an illegitimate colonial state. Israel, a Western nation in
