Letter to the editor: Evil must be obliterated

Jodi Hirsh is wrong in her op-ed “Demanding an Israel-Hamas cease-fire” (Nov. 16, TribLive). Not for a minute do I underestimate or deny Hirsh’s family. But I urge her to learn more about the Holocaust and history of the American, allied war to defeat Germany, especially from books focusing on the last six months of the war, to learn how fanatical the German army/SS population fought while continuing to kill Jews and a million-plus others through those last months before the Allies “ground them to powder” (Winston Churchill).

Several hundred thousand German children and elderly people died in the allied bombings and Russian ground invasion. But that’s what it took; anything less would not have ended the Holocaust. More Jews and others would have been shot, dumped into pits or jammed into underground concrete bunkers while poison gas entered vents, where it took 30-60 minutes for them to die.

Hirsh needs to read the Israel Defense Forces accounts, view the Hamas videos of babies’ throats being slashed, Jews and Arabs killed in cold blood, locked in and burned.

As a U.S. Marine, I know what it takes to slash a throat, knife a struggling enemy. One disassociates; this is an enemy soldier, not a baby, teenager, child.

Our closest understanding of the Holocaust and all the Islamic terrorists’ atrocities come from World War II veterans who saw things, and veterans of Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. These Americans know, and current witnesses know that the evil must be obliterated.

D’Anthony Kennedy

Plum