If there is one tiny silver lining to the October 7 massacre in Israel, it is that it seems to have made Democrats and the media finally shut up about January 6, at least for now.
For nearly three years, we were told that the riot at the Capitol was one of the darkest days in American history, on par with 9/11 and Pearl Harbor. Kamala Harris said so, in as many words in her speech on the first anniversary of the riot: “Certain dates echo throughout history… Dates that occupy not only a place on our calendars but a place in our collective memory. December 7, 1941. September 11, 2001. And January 6, 2021.”
They could only get away with this comparison because the memory of those other days has faded. Most of us weren’t even alive for Pearl Harbor, and even for those of us who remember 9/11, the emotional impact has been softened over the intervening decades. If January 6 had happened in 2002, when the trauma of the planes hitting the towers was still freshly imprinted on Americans’ minds, no one would have been able to get away with saying that the two events were even on the same continuum of atrocity.
October 7 put this all into perspective again. Even though the attack happened on the other side of the globe, and most Americans have no personal connection to Israel, it was horrific enough to remind us all what a true “date which will live in infamy” looks like and that January 6 did not come close.
To be sure, January 6 was singular. It was a rare right-wing riot and one of the most severe security breaches of the United States Capitol since it was burned in the War of 1812. But singular does not necessarily equate to horrific. An absurdist tableau of idiots dressed as Vikings roaming through the Capitol – and even somewhat more malignant idiots attacking police – was simply not a manifestation of the same type of evil displayed on 9/11 and October 7.
Of course, it shouldn’t have taken 1,200 innocents being slaughtered to remind us of this. But in a grim epoch, we should take whatever small mercies we can get. For the near future, we can expect Democrats to quietly shelve the January 6 narrative or at least some of its more melodramatic elements. It’ll come up again when Trump goes on trial next year, but the whole thing is starting to go stale, and they know it.
There is another observation to be made from this, which is that all too many on the left are willing to excuse a particular brand of terrorism but not another.
In the aftermath of October 7, even before Israel had begun to retaliate, the Hamas apologists made their narrative clear. The attack “did not happen in a vacuum,” as United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres put it, but was the inevitable result of Israel’s alleged mistreatment of the Palestinians. Radical Israel-hating scholar Norman Finkelstein compared it to Nat Turner’s bloody 1831 slave rebellion. By this narrative, the poor, long-suffering Gazans were pushed to the brink and finally snapped.
Well, January 6 did not occur in a vacuum, either. The rioters who stormed the Capitol were orders of magnitude less violent than the Hamas terrorists, and they certainly had their grievances. The insanity of 2020 – the medical tyranny, the peaceful protesters burning down cities, the endless gaslighting by “experts” and “independent fact-checkers” – needs no recap. If the root causes of one violent uprising ought to be carefully examined, then so should the root causes of the other.
And yet the January 6 rioters can only hope to be treated as gently by the progressive left as Hamas has been. For Black Lives Matter and Islamic terrorists, a riot is the language of the unheard; for white conservatives, it is an unforgivable atrocity. Also, those who urge moderation from Israel in its pursuit of baby-killing monsters have had no problem relentlessly hunting down and prosecuting every single buffoon who wandered through open doors into the Capitol on January 6. No “ceasefire” for them.
Kamala Harris is correct: January 6 will have its place in history. So will October 7. Let us hope we learn the right lessons from both.