November 1, 2023 | Longitude
Resetting our policies
What went wrong? How did the barbarians get in? How can they reverse the story of their ferocity and hope that the blame falls on Israel? As thirty years of Western foreign policy in the Middle East have been overwhelmed, it’s time for a rethink.
November 1, 2023 | Longitude
Resetting our policies
What went wrong? How did the barbarians get in? How can they reverse the story of their ferocity and hope that the blame falls on Israel? As thirty years of Western foreign policy in the Middle East have been overwhelmed, it’s time for a rethink.
Excerpt
The Barbarians arrived at dawn, destroying everything along their path. Fuelled with amphetamines, and with orders to resort to the most brutal cruelties in killing their victims, they massacred indiscriminately, burning alive men, women, and children in their cots, raping women before executing them, disemboweling pregnant women and raging on those tiny bodies of their inert fetus, mutilating their victims before killing them and after, as if their heads and limbs were trophies. They brutalized the elderly and children, taking them away as hostages. Afterwards, they paraded through the streets, proudly displaying the violated corpses of their victims in the streets. They left no doubt as to what they are: barbarians from what the free world believed was a bygone era.
These events, meticulously recorded and documented by body cameras and their mobile phones, were quickly shared by the torturers themselves on the Telegram channels and social networks they used. They were also spread through the victims’ cell phones, which their perpetrators, once in possession of the phones, sent to theirfriends and relatives, to inflict further trauma on those they could not kill.
Emanuele Ottolenghi is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.