A reflection

This article comes with a warning. There is no happy ending, no summary of hope. So if you are looking for light at the end of the tunnel this one is not for you.

Yet I’m sure that many of my subscribers have felt like this over the last eighteen months. So I wanted to let you know that you are not alone. I have days where it feels hopeless too. It’s ok, I get it.

Some events have such a profound effect on us that we become forever changed.

October 7 was such an event for me. The shock and repulsion of the events of the day were one thing, the struggle with understanding the aftermath has been quite another.

I’ve always felt like I’ve lived an unconventional life, but I’ve always had a social group to which I belong to. I’ve always felt I was part of a community that gave me a sense of belonging. Common values and shared principles that transcend the surface demographics. I never realised what a comfort it was to feel like I had a support network, until it was gone.

The thing is, the atrocity that was perpetrated on the people of Israel on the seventh was of a magnitude that I have never before witnessed. I can remember clearly the day of September 11, I can remember where I was, I can remember the shock, I can remember that every available television channel in Australia was running ‘breaking news’ about the event—for hours on end. It took days for normal programming to resume.

I remember watching in horror, live, as the second plane hijacked by Islamic terrorists flew into the South Tower of the Trade Centre in New York City. It felt cataclysmic. It was.

But as the terrorists own videos started circulating of October 7, it became crystal clear to me that what I was witnessing was something even more disturbing.

A level of depravity that I had naively believed was the unique domain of the serial killer or psychopath, the one in a million lunatic like Charles Manson or Jeffrey Dahmer, or even Adolf Hitler.

It felt like these people were far away—hardly real. More like a character from a history book or a horror movie, than someone I could run into into in my actual life.

But here we had hours and hours of footage with hundreds if not thousands of people all acting like crazed psychopaths at the one time. Not as enemy combatants in a battle, not in self defence, but against unarmed civilians, children, families, young people dancing at a festival, the elderly, entire families—it was like nothing I had ever seen before.

It would have made more sense if it had been a zombie apocalypse. That the zombies had been infected with whatever zombies are infected with, and they had lost their minds and craved only human flesh. But they weren’t zombies, they were Islamic terrorists and they were Palestinian civilians, trying to kill as many Jews as possible, many just tagging along for the ride, content to loot the personal belongings of families that had been slaughtered in their homes with bloody drag marks in their halls.

The Palestinian terrorist calling home in Gaza to boast to his Dad and Mum about how many Jews he had killed with his bare hands. Ten he kept repeating. Ten Jews I killed with my bare hands. And the pride that his mother clearly had for her son who had just slaughtered unarmed Jews in cold blood. So proud.

The images from the Nova Festival massacre will stay with me for life. Innocent unarmed young people hunted down and slaughtered by men with machine guns. Piles of dead in porta-loos, the DJ tent, bushes, cars, everywhere.

364 people slaughtered in a few hours, including a young handicapped girl in a wheel chair and her father. Dead girls were found with their legs spread and naked from the waist down. Some were found that way tied to trees.

Then the footage started rolling in of the celebrations in Gaza. 'The streets erupting with unbridled joy and exhilaration when the contorted corpses of Israelis were paraded down the main street.

I have struggled to come to terms with what happened on that day. Quite simply as a human being I felt a sense of deep pain for the horrors that other human beings endured. I felt a deep sense of connection for people that I had never met. It is hard to explain. Words don't suffice.

But the worst was yet to come.

The denial.

The excuses.

The justification.

The smug indifference.

The lies.

The hate.

The reaction to the atrocity of October 7 has changed me. I never thought that I would be ostracised from a community for standing with innocent unarmed civilians who were raped and slaughtered. I never thought I would be trolled and abused for condemning terrorists who burnt children and hacked the heads off people with a shovel. I could never have imagined that standing with hostages that were ripped from their homes and held captive, believing they were victims would make me a pariah.

I’m not the person I was. And I no longer want to be. My husband once told me I was too blasé, which meant nothing much fazed me. But this was different. It was a line in the sand that I could not get past. This wasn’t just a difference of opinion, this was a moment of truth at the very heart of my own humanity, of who I was, of what I believed, of love, of life. This was a reckoning of good and evil, there was no grey area here.

This marked the end of many of my friendships. I could no longer break bread with people who believed that rape was resistance. Funny how I’ve never felt more strong in my beliefs while also never feeling so alone. It’s a strange feeling knowing in your bones that you are on the side of good when the overwhelming majority disagrees with you. It’s a different level of powerlessness being unable to have the truth be acknowledged. A painful level of acceptance.

And I’m not sure if I can ever forgive their ignorance, or their stupidity, or their unwillingness to seek the truth, or their abhorrent disdain for the people of Israel who deserved our unequivocal support. Their actions have caused too much pain, the consequences of which are too significant—to humanity, to the free world, to Jews all around the world and to the world that my own children will inherit.

I wish I believed in God. I wish I had faith that this was all part of some grand plan and that a great equilibrium was just around the corner, a day of judgement to sort out the worthy from the unworthy. I wish I believed that good always prevails over evil in the end—but I don’t. I believe that WE are the good and the evil in the world, and that WE are responsible for creating the reality that we live in.

And the last eighteen months has made me doubt that as a society we even deserve better. If people can’t even tell the difference between innocent unarmed civilians and sadistic Islamist terrorists murderers, then truly what hope do we have.

Love Kelli x