A member of Einsatzgruppe D is about to shoot a man sitting by a mass grave in Winniza, Ukraine, in 1942 as other members of the German Army, the German Labor Service and former Hitler Youth watch.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
That question must be on the minds of many who are reading about the Palestinian Arab terrorist attack on bus passengers in Jerusalem this week. The killers were within a few feet of their victims.<\/p>\n
Prof. Daniel Goldhagen considered this question in his famous book, Hitler\u2019s Willing Executioners<\/i>. There are those who dislike comparisons between contemporary terrorists and the Nazis. Let\u2019s take a closer look at Goldhagen\u2019s analysis and consider whether it\u2019s valid to compare up-close killers, then and now.<\/p>\n
Goldhagen focused on a particular German police unit, Reserve Police Battalion 101, which carried out up-close shootings. That segment of the genocide, which historians today call \u201cthe Holocaust by bullets,\u201d took place before gas chambers became the Germans\u2019 primary means of mass murder.<\/p>\n
In June 1942, five hundred battalion members were assigned to the town of Jozefow, in German-\u00adoccupied southern Poland. They were instructed to force local Jews out of their homes, take them to a nearby forest, and shoot them point-\u00adblank.<\/p>\n
When a truck unloaded its Jewish prisoners at the edge of the J\u00f3zef\u00f3w forest, each of the waiting policemen selected a victim. The two then walked together to the nearby execution site. Many of the captives were children. The walk \u201cafforded each perpetrator an opportunity for reflection,\u201d Goldhagen noted. \u201cIt is highly likely that, back in Germany, these men had previously walked through woods with their own children by their sides…In these moments, each killer had a personalized, face-\u00adto-face relationship to his victims.\u201d<\/p>\n
Goldhagen wondered if the typical killer ever \u201casked himself why he was about to kill this little, delicate human being who, if seen as a little girl by him, would normally have received his compassion, protection, and nurturing.\u201d Or perhaps it was that the killer could only \u201csee a Jew, a young one, but a Jew nonetheless,\u201d and therefore accepted \u201cthe reasonableness of the order, the necessity of nipping the believed-\u00adin Jewish blight in the bud.”<\/p>\n
The killing mechanics were necessarily \u201ca gruesome affair,\u201d Goldhagen noted. \u201cEach of the Germans had to raise his gun to the back of the head, now face down on the ground, that had bobbed along beside him, [and] pull the trigger.\u201d They had to \u201cremain hardened to the crying of the victims, to the crying of women, to the whimpering of children,\u201d and to the bloody corpses at their feet. The reserve police officers slaughtered defenseless Jews in this manner for hours on end.<\/p>\n
Goldhagen emphasized the formative role of antisemitic ideology in facilitating the deeds of these killers. The German government-\u00adcontrolled news media and schools dehumanized Jews, depicting them as rats, spiders, or lice that needed to be destroyed. The only solution to the \u201cJewish problem\u201d was the \u201cfinal solution,\u201d death.<\/p>\n
The atrocities of October 7 echoed the savagery of the Jozefow forest. Shooting disabled children and elderly people at close range, binding and executing entire families together, beheading infants. Until just a few years ago, the October 7 perpetrators, like this week\u2019s killers in Jerusalem, were all students in schools run by the Palestinian Authority or Hamas, where they were taught to hate Jews and glorify violence.<\/p>\n
The Jerusalem terrorists, Muthanna Amro, 20, and Mohammad Taha, 21, came from the towns of Qubeiba and Qatanna, respectively. Since 1995, those towns have been governed by the PA. As they were growing up, the boys\u2019 teachers, religious authorities, and news media taught them to view Jews as less than human, and to idolize perpetrators of anti-Jewish violence.<\/p>\n
Only such indoctrination can explain how terrorists were capable of murdering the two youngest Israeli hostages in Gaza, four-\u00adyear-\u00adold Ariel Bibas and his nine-\u00admonth-\u00adold brother, Kfir, \u201cin cold blood, with their bare hands,\u201d as the pathologist reported. Or how other terrorists could walk up to defenseless bus passengers in Jerusalem and shoot them point-blank.<\/p>\n
Just two weeks ago, official PA Television aired a sermon in a mosque by a PA-salaried shari’ah judge named Abdallah Harb. He proclaimed: “O Allah, strengthen our stance and grant us victory over the infidels…count them one by one, kill them one by one, and do not leave even one\u2026\u201d PA TV has aired the sermon at least seven times in the past year, Palestinian Media Watch reports.<\/p>\n
The Jerusalem bus killers heard such rhetoric every day of their lives. And then they acted on it.
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