Watching video footage of the heinous Hamas attacks on Oct. 7 is a moral obligation

What I remember most is the blood. It was vibrant red, and more blood than I knew was possible for a body to contain.

Last month, I watched a video that showed in gruesome and heartbreaking detail how Hamas terrorists carried out their heinous attacks on Oct. 7 that claimed the lives of 1,200 people.

The video — a compilation drawn from multiple sources, including security cameras and confiscated footage that was filmed by the terrorists — is being distributed by the Israeli Defense Forces for screenings at gatherings around the world. I saw it on Oct. 19, 12 days after the massacre, in an auditorium at Winthrop College in Rock Hill, S.C. I was there to moderate and speak at a presidential forum with Ron DeSantis and Asa Hutchinson, hosted by the South Carolina and North Carolina Federations of Republican Women.

When I arrived at the event, one of the organizers told me that they had added a last-minute panel on Israel, which included Anat Sultan-Dadon, consul general of Israel to the Southeastern United States. I was to introduce her and another guest for a panel. After their panel, they would screen the video for the audience of Republicans and local college students.

Sultan-Dadon warned I must emphasize to the attendees the barbaric and graphic nature of the video they were about to view. I went on stage and gave the 300 attendees an opportunity to leave. None did. Together we bore witness to the violence.

Portions of the video contained images that were apparently filmed using GoPro-style cameras that were mounted on the terrorists’ heads. I still find it so traumatic that I can only recall fragments. The faces of two dead babies. One lay dead in crib. Was that a footprint of a man’s boot on the baby’s white onesie? The other was on the floor, arms by his side, peaceful. I thought the baby was alive until a man shoved a long metal rod into the infant’s eye socket. I recoiled in my seat.

The video brought to mind grainy, black and white images of emaciated people behind the barbed-wire fences of concentration camps. Or of piles of dead men and women, Jewish stars affixed to their clothing, lying at the feet of their Nazi murderers.

Never again, was what my parents taught me. After the Holocaust, never again will we let evil people systematically murder Jews.

Growing up in Philadelphia, my baby boomer Roman Catholic parents had me read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich when I was 12 years old. My parents spoke of the Jews who led the uprisings at the Warsaw Ghetto, Sobibor, and Treblinka as heroes. They taught me that anyone who helped Jews during the Holocaust was a paragon of morality. The state of Israel, my father told me, was how the Jewish people would ensure this never happened again.

These lessons where so impactful that I went alone to Germany and Austria to spend my 21st birthday at the Mauthausen concentration camp to bear witness. I felt it was my moral obligation.

I teach my children as my parents did me, and have handed them my worn copies of Winter in the Morning by Janina Bauman and Alicia, My Story by Alicia Appleman-Jurman.

None of this makes me an especially moral or righteous person. It does make me a surprised person. I thought all Americans were raised to understand Israel and the Holocaust as I did. I never thought that after the Oct. 7 massacre, so many Americans would turn on our Jewish brothers and sisters and applaud Hamas, a terrorist organization.

I asked a spokesperson for the IDF, Lt. Col. Amnon Shefler, why the military had made copies of the video available for viewing.

“There have been efforts underway to call into question what happened on Oct. 7 — efforts to cast doubt on the barbarity of who Hamas really is,” Shefler wrote in an email.

“History,” he added, “has taught us that bearing witness is one of the most important ways to counter such denial and distortions.”

It will be graphic and traumatic, but I encourage anyone reading this column to seek an opportunity to view the video for yourself. Shefler said the IDF will not release it publicly out of respect for the victims and families. I cannot disagree.

I was invited by my friend to another private screening of the video on Nov. 9 organized by the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia. The Rev. Luis Cortés Jr. was one of approximately 150 Philadelphians who attended the screening at the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History.

He told me after the viewing that he was repulsed by not only the “barbaric actions” of the Hamas terrorists, but also that “their praising of God as they murder innocents is incongruent with the very faith they profess.”

Bearing witness to these atrocities not only helps the Israelis and our Jewish brothers and sisters here in America, but also the innocent Palestinians in Gaza who have long suffered under the barbarism of Hamas.

We can all take a stand against such evil by bearing witness.