As we've noted in the past...

MONDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2023

...it's all anthropology now: In this report for The Atlantic, Graeme Wood describes scenes from the carnage which Hamas created on October 7.

The footage was shown to the press by the IDF. In this passage, Wood describes a part of the 43-minute showing which was especially striking to him:

WOOD (10/23/23): To me the most disturbing section was not visual at all. Like the clip of the [Israeli] father and his boys hunted in their pajamas, it was upsetting in part because it showed a relationship between parent and child. The clip is just a phone call—placed by a terrorist to his family back in Gaza. He tells his father that he is calling from a Jewish woman’s phone. (The phone recorded the call.) He tells his father that his son is now a “hero” and that “I killed 10 Jews with my own hands.” And he tells his family, about a dozen times, that they should open up WhatsApp on his phone, because he has sent photographs to prove what he has done. “Put on Mom!” he says. “Your son is a hero!”

His parents, I noticed, are not nearly as enthusiastic as he is. I believe that the mom says “praise be to God” at one point, which could be gratitude for her son’s crimes or pure reflex, indicating her loss for words to match her son’s unspeakable acts. They do not question what their son has done; they do not scold him. They tell him to come back to Gaza. They fear for his safety. He says, amid rounds of “Allahu akbar,” that he intends “victory or martyrdom”—which the parents must understand means that he will never come home. From their muted replies I wonder whether they also understand that even if he did come home, he would do so as a disgusting and degraded creature, and that it might be better for him not to.

For the record, most people back in Gaza have not behaved in such ways. In the rest of Wood's report, he details acts of undisguised butchery. For example, this:

WOOD: It was, as IDF Major General Mickey Edelstein told the press afterward, “a very sad movie.” Men, women, and children are shot, blown up, hunted, tortured, burned, and generally murdered in any horrible manner you could predict, and some that you might not. The terrorists surround a Thai man they have shot in the gut, then bicker about what to do next. (About 30,000 Thais live in Israel, many of them farmworkers.) “Give me a knife!” one Hamas terrorist shouts. Instead he finds a garden hoe, and he swings at the man’s throat, taking thwack after thwack.

Tribal loathing of The Other has always played out in such ways. Throughout history, the Jewish people have been a global scapegoat, but many other groups of the loathed have been treated this way.

This is part of the natural history of our species. Concerning that phone call home, demagogues in love with ideas of "difference" can get people to behave in such ways.