Understanding October 7th Through Historical Context

Understanding October 7th Through Historical Context

And when I struggled after October 7th, I’ve said this many times, but it’s a fact. It’s not a drama point. You know, what happened October 7th was awful. There’s no doubt in my mind about that. The magnitude was significant. 1,200 people killed. About estimates. It’s not an estimates. Close to 800 of them civilians, 400 combatants, Israeli IDF, members of the Israeli Defense Forces. So significant number can’t get around that.

I know there are all sorts of stories about Israel having killed a large number. I’ve investigated as best I can. And I’ll admit, you know, there’s still room on the margins for error, but I think it was overwhelmingly committed by Hamas. And so how do you reckon something like that?

But in politics there are many levels. There’s the facts, there’s your political judgment, there’s your legal judgment, there’s your moral judgment. And they don’t come directly from the facts. They do not. They go through many filters or sieves before you get a moral judgment.

The Nat Turner Parallel

And when I started to try to think it through, I latched, I came upon in my mind the Nat Turner Rebellion. So those of your listeners who are unaware, it was the largest slave revolt in American history. And Nat Turner, he gave the order. All the historians agree on this. There isn’t a huge literature in Nat Turner, but there is a literature they all agree on. One point, he gave the order, which he never denied. He did a famous confession. We don’t know how much of the confession is actually him and how much is the person who’s writing it. But this part seemed real. The order was kill all white people. Kill all white people.

And that’s what they proceed to do. They went on what you might call a 48 hour rampage, less than 48 hours actually, and hacked men, women, babies. It was brutal. It was brutal.

But then something struck me. One historian, his name is Stephen Oaks, and he’s trying to understand Nat Turner’s motivation. Why did he do it? And he said Nat Turner was a very smart guy. There was no question about that. The person who took down his confession, he said he was white. He said white or black. Everybody agreed. Nat Turner was a very smart guy.

And then he said, the historian now, he said there was this huge gulf for Nat Turner, very smart guy, between what he aspired to be in life and what he was destined to be because he was a slave. That huge gulf. He knew he was smart and yet he also knew, as the historian Stephen Oakes put it, that this is only earthly existence. He was born into, languish in, and would die a slave.

And that was the people, the young people in Gaza. They knew. You see, now Gaza is in the news, but by October 6, 2023, Gaza had vanished from the news.

Gaza’s Disappearance from Public Consciousness

I have made the point because I do believe it’s relevant. I had spent about 15 years just chronicling the details of what’s happening in Gaza. I began roughly in the early 2000s, and by 2020, I gave up. That’s a fact. And it was not a fact I was proud of because I was writing books. They were getting more and more detailed, I mean, so micro detail and nobody was reading them.

The last book I wrote was called “I Accuse.” My publisher not happily informed me it sold 370 copies of those 370. I purchased half of them. No, it’s a fact, because it was about a case related to Gaza in the International Criminal Court. And I was hoping to influence the court through my research. So I was going to present it to the ICC.

But by 2020, I said, Norm, you know, you have only one life to live and am I just going to stubbornly persist in the face of the fact that nobody cares? And that was the situation in Gaza. Gaza had vanished from the political scene by October 6, 2023. All the talk was about whether Saudi Arabia would join the Abraham Accords. Nobody was talking about Gaza anymore.

And so the people of Gaza basically did what Nat Turner did. Now here’s the thing. Imagine an account of Nat Turner that doesn’t mention he was a slave, just this crazy religious fanatic. He was a religious fanatic. No question about that. Nat Turner was a religious fanatic. He used the language of the Bible to try to make sense of his condition. That’s what a religious fanatic meant.

You know, John Brown, who led the insurrection before the Civil War, he also was a religious fanatic. He deeply, fanatically believed slavery was an abomination. To the point that, you know, I don’t want to get off on a digression, but when Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist, when he went to meet John Brown, Douglas comments in one of his, he had three autobiographies. When one of them, he comments, he just wouldn’t stop talking about slavery. He said he was boring. He was a fanatic. He was Johnny One note. John Brown only about slavery and Nat Turner too. He was a religious fanatic.

But imagine if you tried to make sense of the Nat Turner rebellion by focusing only on his religious fanaticism, like the religiously fanatical Hamas, only focus on that and not mention the guy who’s a slave.

Questions About October 7th

CANDACE OWENS: Or mention if it were the circumstance for Nat Turner, and it isn’t. Or mentioned the fact that Nat Turner actually the rebellion was funded by money that one of the slave owners gave him. That would be something that would be important if there was the Bibi Netanyahu circumstance there or that, you know, the slave owners received multiple warnings and for some reason just decided to ignore the fact that this rebellion was brewing.

I mean, there’s a lot of things. I’ve been to Israel and it is, Charlie Kirk said it best immediately after because he had been many, many times. Truly unbelievable. It’s actually quite scary because every 15 feet there’s an armed person. They take their security very seriously.

They were, I mean, now people are speaking out and a lot more is going to come out because they have been censoring. Bibi has been lying, censoring, editing transcripts. I’ve been following the case against him pretty closely because there are Israeli publications that have been documenting everything. Obviously, he’s not well liked by the people in Israel. They were taking to the streets to protest him.

But it is almost unbelievable that that circumstance, plus when you add to the fact they intercepted a document right way earlier that said 200 hostages were going to be taken by Hamas, it’s almost unbelievable that they ignored everything plus Egypt warning him that something was happening on the border.

I have never bought that there was not, not that it took place, of course it took place, and it was terrible, but that it wasn’t intentionally allowed. And I truly believe that in my soul after I saw the footage prior to October 7th of Bibi Netanyahu. I’m not sure if you’ve seen this, but he thinks he’s off record. He says, you know, put the cameras down, off record. And he starts detailing a plan where he’s like, we got to hit Gaza so hard that they can’t go back. And so they sort of needed a pretext of sorts.

And do I think Bibi Netanyahu is evil enough to sacrifice his own people? Yes, a million times over. What’s been happening in Gaza is a tremendous evil. And I don’t think we will truly know the full picture of how evil it was until Bibi Netanyahu is removed from power and we’re able to see the transcripts that he’s blocking of the conversations he had that day with his cabinet.

NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: Look, there are obviously areas of interpretation here, and I don’t want to pretend as if I have a monopoly in the truth. If you look back at 9/11, our own September 11th, if you look back and there are many people who wrote at the time, there were a lot of people in the national security establishment who had reports that there was going to be an attack. They came in, the reports came in. No question about that.

You have to remember when you are a state the size of the United States and the power of the United States, you’re going to be getting each day 10,000 intelligence reports about possible terrorist attack here, possible terrorist attack there. The United States has huge number of bases around the world, so you’re always getting reports. But an intelligence establishment has to rank threats and they ranked the Osama bin Laden threat low or lower than it should have been ranked.

In the case of Israel here, we’re free to disagree. Israel is a Jewish supremacist state. That’s not my opinion. The head of Israel’s main human rights organization, it’s called B’Tselem, and the head of Israel’s human rights B’Tselem, this is a few years ago, it’s a guy named Hagai El-Ad, very decent guy. I’ve never met him, I’m not sure if he ever wanted to meet me, but decent guy. He was a Harvard trained PhD in physics, serious fellow.

And he put out a little report or he was the executive director when B’Tselem put out a report. It was probably 10, 15 years ago now. And he said, here are the basic facts. There’s one state from the Mediterranean to the Jordan, there’s no Israel and occupied territories. There’s just one state. And he said that state, its foundation is Jewish supremacy.

There are different levels of Jewish supremacy. It’s different for the situation of Arabs, the Palestinians living in Israel, Palestinians living in the West Bank, Palestinians living in Gaza and Palestinian refugees. It’s different levels, but the foundation is it’s a Jewish supremacist state.

Now why do I mention it? Because for the people of Israel, Gazans are vermin. They’re garbage, they’re human refuse. And so when you’re getting intelligence reports from Gaza that they’re going to launch an operation, the Israeli intelligence establishment thinks, what are you talking about? They’re going to outsmart us? They are going to trick us with our surveillance, with our technology, with our IDF? This vermin is going to be able to pull this off?

So I think they did the same thing as our Bush administration did with Osama bin Laden. They put it on a low priority. They were shocked that Hamas was able, after October 7, they were shocked that Hamas was able to pull it off.

Norman Finkelstein on Candace Owens Podcast