JNS TVWhat are the questions we should be asking ourselves about what happened on October 7, 2023, and its aftermath? According to JNS Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Tobin, the key issue is not only learning and understanding the truth about the horrific crimes that occurred on that day. Rather, it is how so much of the world reacted to it by siding with the perpetrators and against the victims.
He’s joined on this week’s episode of Think Twice by documentary filmmaker Gloria Greenfield, the producer, director and writer of the new film, “A Collective Descent Into Evil: The Lethal Obsession with Jews and the Jewish State.” The film, which gives voice to a broad array of scholars, writers and commentators on the subject, isn’t only about the barbarism and the atrocities that occurred during the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab terror attacks on communities in southern Israel. It is, she says, an exploration of the motivations, ideologies and strategies of those involved and their apologists and enablers.
The problem is not just the terrorists and a population that supported and participated in the horrors of Oct. 7. Greenfield explains that her film seeks to broaden our understanding of the subject by pointing out that what happened was the product of decades of indoctrination into hatred for Israel, the Jews and the West. And the same is true of the mobs on college campuses and in the streets of American cities who turned out in support of Oct. 7 and to defend its perpetrators.
The goal of Oct. 7 wasn’t, says Greenfield, merely “destroying the Jewish people and destroying Israel. It’s also about destroying the free world and destroying people who don’t subscribe to Islamist ideologies.”
Greenfield, a feminist publisher who grew disillusioned with the movement because of its tolerance for antisemitism, points out that the “epidemic” of tolerance for Jew-hatred is rooted in the success of Marxist and radical ideologies in their “long march” through American institutions.
