In a viral monologue, newscaster Chris Cuomo explains his profound change of perspective about the Hamas attacks in Israel on October 7 and the subsequent Israeli response, saying that the degradation visited upon Israelis that day was “just like the Holocaust” — with Hamas saying “we’re going to take children, women, innocents and more, tie them up and burn them alive.”
Cuomo had gone to the Israeli Consulate to view video footage of the attacks, some which is publicly available and some which is still closely held, and came away with a new understanding of the attack, in which “a decision was made that Jews are less than human, and treated that way in words and deeds.”
Cuomo was viscerally reminded of 9/11 and the no-holds-barred response to it, equating 9/11 and 10/7 in the sense that both attacks represented “terrorists robbing us of who and what we are about at home.”
Today I was among the journalists who have attended a private screening of the raw footage of October 7th and I want to express to you what I saw since it’s not been made public. It’s been a very heavy day. A decision was made that Jews are less than human, and treated that way… pic.twitter.com/b455joHQxs
— Christopher C. Cuomo (@ChrisCuomo) December 15, 2023
As a result of 9/11 and faced with an existential threat scenario that was binary — us or them — the U.S. used, Cuomo says, everything in its arsenal to attack the enemy, a situation which he says made targets of not just those who claimed responsibility for 9/11 but also the “complicit, the sympathetic, and sometimes, even often at points, the innocent.”
That is “the truth,” Cuomo says, appearing to rank the necessity of a comprehensive retaliation above regret over collateral lives lost. Cuomo asserts that when people have “been given reason to believe it is you or them, they are capable of anything.”
Acknowledging the pro-Palestinian support and sympathy and accompanying calls for a cease-fire among citizens in many global democracies, Cuomo concedes that had there “been social media [during 9/11],” he doesn’t know how “public opinion at home would have been different.” But what mattered most was that the “fact that they hit us where it hurt” and the U.S. responded.
It’s the same now, Cuomo asserts, with how Hamas struck Israel, “robbing” Israelis of “who and what” they are at home. “Merely murdering innocents was the least of it,” Cuomo says his Consulate viewing revealed. “This was absolute genocide,” he said, noting how the terrorists had celebrated the torture.
Cuomo makes a major distinction next, saying in defiance of those who claim the attack was a sort of freedom cry: “This was not the irrepressible angst of the desperate who want freedom, who want better, nor anything approximating peace,” he says. “[Hamas] wanted the Jews to know that they wanted them to burn. Again.”
Cuomo notes a huge contemporary problem while describing his revelation — that is, that whatever facts do get presented to the public must contend with powerful forces of distrust and confirmation bias. In a sentence that could describe election deniers and Holocaust deniers and January 6 deniers, Cuomo laments that evidence — however factual — means little to minds that won’t be swayed by it. “I understand the concern” he says, “that if you don’t want to believe October 7 happened “then it doesn’t matter what you see.”
