What would the U.S. reaction be to a major terrorist strike against us that claimed 41,000 American lives?
We have already witnessed our response to a far lower loss of lives – the nearly 3,000 caused by al-Qaida's 9/11 attack. But that tally represents only one-thirteenth of the 41,000 total. It did lead to us sending military forces overseas to destroy the group and to locate its founder, Osama bin Laden, and his No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
It took almost a decade, but on May 1, 2011, bin Laden was located and killed in an Abbottabad, Pakistan, safe house by U.S. Navy SEALs conducting a quick in-and-out helicopter raid. It would take 11 more years to locate al-Zawahiri, found living in a safe house in Kabul, Afghanistan, where he was killed on July 21, 2022, by a remotely piloted vehicle firing two Hellfire missiles.
But what if another terrorist attack occurred – by a group that had been regularly penetrating our borders for years to kill our citizens – striking at a city, for example, like Albany, New York, killing 41,000 of its citizens? Such a toll would equal 40% of Albany's population in one fell swoop.
Undoubtedly, such an attack would release a wave of fury among our population demanding that we seek to eliminate that threat forever.
What the West fails to grasp about the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas raid into Israel that claimed the lives of 1,200 innocent civilians is that it was equivalent – based on Israel's current population compared to ours – to the U.S. losing 41,000 citizens. Any country suffering such a dramatic loss of its citizens – further enraged by the fact the attackers not only tortured and brutalized their victims but also took over 200 of them hostage as they withdrew – has a license to undertake whatever actions it deems necessary to prevent the terrorists from ever posing a threat again.
In its Oct. 7 attack, Hamas was acting to fulfill its declared mission to eradicate Israel. So committed is it to that mission that negotiations to cease hostilities have no purpose but one – to buy time to heal its wounds, as it did after the 2014 war with Israel, only to launch future attacks against Israel. And, Hamas is not alone in its effort to eradicate Israel as it is now known that at least 7,000 Gazans accompanied the terrorist group on its attack to rape, pillage and plunder the Jewish state.
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