On October 7th, it was one year since 1,200 were murdered and 250 taken hostage in the worst terror attack against Jews since the Holocaust and the bloodiest day in Israel’s modern history.
The massacre opened the gates of the realm of death. Torture, kidnappings, desecration of corpses, and rapes. Women were pulled from shelters, raped, and their bodies were burned.
The massacre was celebrated in the streets across the Arab world, and shortly after the terror attack, Hamas promised that the massacre would be repeated until Israel was wiped out.
We need to remember and honor the victims of the massacre and pray for the release of the hostages, but also together break the silence in the church and society as the world—much like what happened in the 1930s—once again turns against the Jewish people.
“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil,” said theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer when he confronted the terror of Nazi Germany.
After October 7th, Turkey’s president called Hamas “freedom fighters.” Qatar held Israel responsible for the massacre. Syria described it as an “honorable achievement.” Iran and Iraq echoed the praise.
Delegations from the terror group were later received as honored guests in Moscow, Istanbul, Tehran, and Beijing to give Hamas a role in a Palestinian state. It’s like having given the Nazis the task of rebuilding Germany after the Holocaust.
No Muslim countries have condemned the massacre, except for the small island state of Bahrain. Former arch-enemies in the Middle East have instead united in their hatred of Jews—Saudi Arabia and Iran, Syria and Turkey. Even in moderate Arab countries like Jordan and Egypt, incitement against Israel and Jews has increased.
Israel is fighting a seven-front war against terrorist groups and neighboring countries that seek to annihilate it. Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iran, as well as militias in Iraq and Syria, have fired more than 20,000 rockets at Israel over the course of one year.
Hatred against Jews has increased dramatically even in the Western world. Europe, which during the Holocaust saw its Jewish population decimated from 9.5 million to just over one million—after nearly 3 million Jews had emigrated to the USA decades earlier to escape antisemitism in Eastern Europe—now has countries like Norway, Ireland, Slovenia, and Spain that have rewarded the terror attack by recognizing a Palestinian state. In the USA and Sweden, universities have been illegally occupied; a university lecturer in Växjö had their office vandalized with graffiti, and recently tomatoes and onions were thrown at Sweden’s Foreign Minister in parliament.
Just this February, Ekot revealed that Iran had planned the murder of three Swedish Jews. In May, it emerged that Iran had recruited criminals who carried out several violent attacks on the Israeli embassy. In October, Swedish gang criminals carried out attacks at the Israeli embassies in Copenhagen and Stockholm.
Over the past year, several UN bodies have attacked Israel. In the UN, Muslim dictatorships—together with China, Russia, and their allies—hold an automatic majority to demonize the Jewish state. In the past ten years, the UN General Assembly has adopted more than twice as many resolutions against Israel as against the entire rest of the world combined.
The General Assembly recently decided to ban Jews from living in Judea and Samaria, the biblical northern kingdom of Israel. In the Arab world, this ethnic cleansing has already been carried out, as 800,000 Jews were driven out after 1948.
Even the UN body, the International Criminal Court (ICC), attacks the Middle East’s only democracy by seeking to arrest Israeli politicians for war crimes, while real perpetrators of genocide in Syria and Sudan remain free.
In Sudan, over 150,000 people have died and 10 million have been displaced since last year, without any response from the ICC. In the genocide in Syria, half a million have been killed and twelve million have become refugees. Two hundred thousand of them came here to Sweden.
UN chief Guterres recently visited Putin, who is wanted for war crimes after the UN body ICC issued an arrest warrant. The former head of the Socialist International, Guterres—who is persona non grata in Israel—refused to condemn Iran’s extensive missile attack on Israel.
While the UN aims to absorb refugees in other crises so that their refugee status can end as quickly as possible, suffering Palestinian refugees are denied integration because the UN refugee agency UNRWA forces them to inherit their refugee status across generations—as a political weapon against Israel.
Employees of UNRWA took part in the terror attack on October 7th. Sweden’s Television was recently censured by the Broadcasting Authority for claiming the opposite. Lebanon’s Hamas leader, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike at the end of September, was a principal at a UNRWA school.
Israel’s defensive war is about destroying Hamas’s military capacity and freeing the hostages. Hamas leaders deliberately target Israeli civilians, use Palestinian civilians as human shields, and meanwhile hide themselves in tunnels or luxury hotels in Qatar.
News broadcasts have long ignored all these facts. Instead, they often air multiple segments per day criticizing Israel’s war against Hamas, while overlooking the terror group’s goals, methods—as well as the causes of the war and the main actors behind it.
Even church leaders and Christian influencers remain silent, which fuels growing antisemitism and creates conditions for some of the world’s most brutal dictatorships to prepare unhindered for war aimed at wiping out the Jewish state.
Let us honor the victims of Hamas’s massacre. But as the body of Christ, let us together pray for forgiveness for the silence and indifference toward the vulnerability of the Jewish people—who, for the first time since the Holocaust, no longer feel safe on the streets—in Israel, in Sweden, in Europe, and around the world.
Ruben Agnarsson
