October 7th 2023 & The Definition of “Hero” • The Clash Of Civilizations
The video at this link, showing Israeli babies Ariel & Kfir Bibas and their mother on the day Kfir came home from being born, set the train of thought in motion resulting in my choosing to write and post the Blog entry below on this, the 3rd anniversary of “The Black Sabbath” of 7 October 2023.
As a former writer/editor of definitions for a major English dictionary, and life-long writer/editor for periodicals and books, raised and educated to be concerned with the accurate meaning of words and phrases, the train of thought below came naturally to me.
It may also have been sparked by a recent event in the English language: the loss of the word “literally.” The Oxford English Dictionary recently took away from the English Language the meaning of the word, “literally” by adding to the definition its incorrect, colloquially habituated use among some English speakers as a hyperbolic and untrue intensifier, not literally meaning “literally” anymore. So now – saying, “There were literally millions of little kids at my son’s party this weekend,” the OED affirms as a correct sentence. We are without a dependable understanding of the meaning of“literally” any more.
I thought in the above way this week about the Islamist Jihadist use of the word “hero.”
I share my thoughts on it here below.
May it all be for shalom.
Few things have ever more clearly highlighted the "clash of civilizations" between The West and Jihadist Islam than the October 7th Massacre of 2023 committed by Hamas and its supporters (like Islamist-Hegemonist Iran) against the peaceful, loving-their-Arab-Neighbors Jews of Southeastern seacoast-region Israel.
One clear example of this total non-alignment is a single word's definition: that of "hero."
In western civilization the definition of "hero" is:
he•ro: a person who chooses to face danger in order to fulfill a purpose or meet a goal rightfully having a higher priority than personal advantage, safety, or even survival.
E.g.: Jewish men and women who, when hearing gunfire on 7 October 2023, rather than running away from the sound to make themselves as safe as possible, ran toward and into the gunfire to give what help they could to the targets and victims of it. – ALSO - New York men and women who, seeing the World Trade Center towers on fire on 11 September 2001, ran toward and into them to help or rescue whomever they could.
In Islamic Jihadism, a "hero" is defined as:
he•ro: an adult Islamist who for the sake of “Palestine,” and/or Pan-Arabic/Islamic rulership of the world, strangles two Jewish babies to death, defiles their unarmed mother, and then murders her also. Or, who mutilates and murders a living Jewish woman while in the act of raping her in front of her still living family. Or - a dagger-armed man who slices open the belly of a late-stage pregnant Jewish woman, pulls the baby out of her womb while she is still alive as her shot-but-still-living husband helplessly watches from the floor where he is bleeding out - and cuts off the baby's head while it is still attached via the umbilical to its mother, with the fully-conscious mother seeing the beheading from inches away - and then leaves the mother and father alive on the floor next to each other and their dead child’s still bleeding corpse, to die from their wounds, suffering the mental anguish also of seeing their unborn child beheaded and each other mortally wounded as they all die.
These are "heroes" according to the Arab press.
Heroes.
We remember and will never forget the actual Israeli and Western anti-Jihadist heroes.
And the Jihadist criminal monsters? As the old prayer goes, Yemach shemam u'zeek-ro-nam meh'atah v'ad olam. (May their names/identities and the memory of them perish forever.")
Kadima. (Forward!)
HaYishuv (The Return of The Jewish People to "their own Land") and The Innovation-Nation Israel will go forward. The 5th Happiest Nation on earth (even after 7 October 2023) will continue to live into its core value: "L'Chaim!" To Life.
And we pray to God: "From the river to the sea: no more Jihad let there be."
So writes and prays this Israeli-American rabbi, serving in Manhattan for 33 years and Israel for 40 years.
We remember. And - we live on. Am Yisrael chai.
Rabbi Bruce Louis Cohen • ר׳ברק לוי כהן
7 October 2026 • New York City