So the date October 7th was previously only on my calendar for one reason, which is that it is Vladimir Putin's birthday.

He's 72 today.

Congratulations.

But now for me and for you and for everybody, the date October 7th

is its own unforgettable, indelible thing,

the same way that 9-11 is an unforgettable, indelible date for us forever now, too.

On October 7th, Israel lost 1,200 people in the Hamas attack.

October 7th, 2023, one year ago today.

They lost 1,200 people.

And if you sort of extrapolate that, given the relative size of the population of our two countries,

an attack of that size in our country, that would have been the equivalent of us losing more than 35,000 people.

We lost 3,000 Americans on 9-11.

They lost relative to their population,

the equivalent of 35,000 people on October 7.

And they didn't lose them by crashing planes

or crashing planes into buildings.

Those people were all killed face to face person to person by hand one by one

After 9-11 our country started wars in Afghanistan and then in Iraq those stretched out into America's

longest ever wars. Those wars killed hundreds of thousands of people.

After October 7th Israel's year of war has spread from Gaza and the West Bank now into Lebanon.

It has even started to include some significant military exchanges with Iran. In Gaza alone, the death toll from the past year is said

to be roughly 42,000.

...