claudita

A Letter to the World’s Leftists and to Righteous People : 7th of October. There are days history writes in ink, days it writes in tears, and days so terrible that history writes their names in blood. October 7 was such a day. The morning came quietly. Some were sleeping. Some were praying. Mothers were beside their children. Then Hamas terrorists, the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood, entered homes in Israel. Blood. Fire. Screams. Women were raped. Children were burned. Families were executed. Babies were kidnapped. Jews were hunted and murdered. Homes that once held prayers, laughter and children's footsteps became places of death. Beds became graves. A mother's arms became empty. A child's room waited for a child who would not return. There are no words large enough for such grief. Only the silence afterward. The silence of a mother waiting for her child. The silence left when evil has finished screaming. Once again, Jews were murdered for being Jews. An ancient nightmare suddenly had a date in the present tense. The old hatred had found new mouths and new excuses. From my country, the United Arab Emirates, a Muslim Arab country, came a voice within minutes calling it by its name: A terrorist attack. No excuse. No ideology can make rape resistance. No slogan can make burning a child justice. No flag can make kidnapping a baby freedom. And yet, London. Paris. Toronto. You would have expected tears. Instead, people celebrated while Jewish families searched for the missing and children remained with kidnappers. People waved the flag of the kidnappers of babies instead of demanding freedom for the babies. This was another wound of October 7. Innocent people were murdered, while others had forgotten how to mourn them. It felt as though civilisation had turned backwards. Back toward 1936. Back toward the old darkness. That was where morals failed. I have travelled to universities around the world and stood beside Jewish communities attacked simply for being Jewish, to tell them: You have a friend here. When the Holocaust happened, I was not there. I cannot go backwards and stop the trains or take one terrified child by the hand. But I was alive on October 7. And I had a choice. One day my children may ask: Where did you stand? I want to tell them: I stood with the baby, not his kidnapper. I stood with the mother, not her rapist. I stood with the murdered, not the murderer. I stood with the Jew hunted simply for being a Jew. When people found sophisticated words to excuse barbarism, I chose humanity's simplest word: No. No to rape. No to kidnapping. No to burning children. No to terrorism. No to antisemitism. Hamas, the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood, may have lost in Gaza, but an ideology does not die because it loses a battlefield. Look at the streets of the West, universities, some parliaments and city councils. Too many young minds have become hostages to propaganda for Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran's proxies in the West. When you become silent about an October 7, you do not guarantee that October 7 will remain in the past. Hatred begins as a sentence before it becomes a scream. Extremism begins as an excuse before it becomes an act. Evil first asks to be tolerated, then excused, then normalised. Remember October 7. Remember the empty beds. Remember the empty arms. Remember the kidnapped. Remember the murdered. Remember Jewish families hunted in the one place every human should believe is safe: home. Be like my country, the UAE, where antisemitism is not an opinion to celebrate. It is a crime. Where the Muslim Brotherhood is banned, not romanticised as activists. History will ask something simple: When a child cried, where did you stand? On October 7, I knew my answer. With the baby, not the kidnapper. With the mother, not her rapist. With the innocent, not the terrorist. And when my children read this chapter of history, I want them to know: Their father did not look away.