Sheryl Sandberg’s Great Documentary—and the Cataclysm That Continues October 7 was only the beginning of a moral collapse. David Hornik
The new one-hour documentary Screams Before Silence by Sheryl Sandberg, former COO of Meta, is one of the major events since October 7. It’s a harrowing, profound, utterly unforgettable film, superbly directed by Anat Stalinsky. In it Sandberg, who came to Israel to get the background for the film, “interviews multiple eyewitnesses, released hostages, first responders, medical and forensic experts, and survivors of the Hamas massacres,” people who have seen some of the worst sights and undergone some of the worst experiences imaginable—or beyond imaginable. Released on YouTube on April 26, Screams Before Silence already totals half a million views and will indelibly engrave the horrors of sexual assault and other crimes, both on October 7 and in its aftermath, among large portions of humanity not hopelessly lost to antisemitic hatred or ludicrous ideologies.
And for that, Sheryl Sandberg must be credited with a tremendous achievement.
Screams Before Silence begins with a visit to a devastated, largely burned-down kibbutz, then takes you to terrifying footage from the onset of the attack on the Nova music festival very early that Sabbath morning at 6:30 a.m., and then—mainly via the interviews—takes you deeper and deeper into hell until you reach its core. It does not show you images from that abyss (“Out of respect for the victims and their families, we chose not to show explicit images in this film”); but you hear the voices and see the facial expressions of people who were there; or who, as first responders, came upon the scenes of horror; or who, as forensic experts, had to deal with the corpses; or who, as hostages, continued to suffer in hell for weeks on end.
To look up—dazed and silenced—from this film and stare around at the world almost seven months later, a world of crazed “demonstrations” on US campuses and attacks on Jews in London, Paris, and elsewhere, is to have the bewildering feeling that what happened on October 7 was really just the inception, the igniting spark, of a global wave of hysterical hatred of Jews and, particularly, of the Jewish state that was already, latently, there, and just needed something like a horrific massacre to set it in motion. The tens of thousands of people bellowing “From the river to the sea…,” “Resistance by any means necessary,” “Globalize the intifada,” and the like know exactly what happened on October 7, and continues to happen in its aftermath in the tunnels of Gaza, and think it’s great.
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Pro-Palestinians protests spread at US colleges. (CNN)
Not to put too fine a point on it: they love it. The wild celebrations of murder, rape, torture, mutilation, and every form of bestial sadism began in the streets of Western cities on October 7 itself and more than half a year later are only gathering steam. That so many people seized with a genocidal passion are prancing around in the major universities and cities of Western “civilization” does not augur well for the future.
The main driver of this frenzy is the Arab and Muslim world, for which—76 years after its birth—the existence of the one Jewish state remains an intolerable affront, or as Israeli commentator Haviv Rettig Gur put it:
This is about your supremacist rage that we could not be exterminated with tanks, haven’t fled to some imagined home country we don’t have, and don’t cower and beg for you to tolerate us, as Middle Eastern Christians, Baha’i and other minorities must everywhere from Baghdad to Algiers.
And that ugly supremacism is—always, of course, under the guise of “human rights,” “anticolonialism,” and other such twaddle—wholeheartedly joined by the Western far left that has attached itself to every barbaric cause from Stalinism to Maoism to Palestinian terror and now, Houthi terror and the Iranian exterminationist program against Israel. And along with the Arab and Muslim and far-left ideologues, there may be dumb, ignorant Western university kids who really don’t know the meaning of the slogans they’re mouthing or the real aspirations of their fellow “protesters.” But if so, their ignorance and irresponsibility are inexcusable.
It can only be hoped that Sheryl Sandberg and Anat Stalinksy’s evocation of the deepest circle of hell will help awaken more and more decent people to the danger and the need to combat it.
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