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This Happened—January 28: Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster


As it was being watched live by millions, the Challenger space shuttle suddenly exploded 73 seconds after launch, killing everyone aboard. It happened on this day in 1986.

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What was the Challenger mission?

The crew had the mission of deploying a communications satellite and studying Halley's Comet while they were in orbit, in addition to the task of taking school teacher Christa McAuliffe into space.

Why did the Challenger explode?

A failure of the shuttle's right solid rocket booster (SRB) caused by record-low temperatures of the launch, and allowed hot pressurized gas from within the SRB to leak and burn the surrounding machinery. The failure of the internal system through the shuttle at incredible speed with aerodynamic forces that tore the ship apart.

Who was aboard the Challenger?

There were 7 crew members onboard, including F. Richard Scobee, the Commander, pilot Michael J. Smith, Mission Specialists Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka and Judith Resnik, Gregory Jarvis a Payload Specialist and Christa McAuliffe, a Payload Specialist and teacher from Concord, New Hampshire.

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FOCUS: Israel-Palestine War

The Problem With Calling Hamas "Nazis"

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other top Israeli officials have referred to Hamas militants as "the new Nazis." But as horrific as the Oct. 7 massacre was, what does it really mean to make such a comparison 80 years after the Holocaust? And how can we rightly describe what's happening in Gaza?

photo of man wearing a kippah with a jewish star

A pro-Israel rally in Sao Paulo, Brazil

Paulo Lopes/ZUMA
Daniela Padoan

-OpEd-

TURIN — In these days of horror, we've seen dangerous equivalences, half-truths and syllogisms continue to emerge: between Israelis and Jews, between Palestinians and Hamas, between entities at "war."

The conversation makes it seem that there are two states with symmetrical power. Instead, on one side, there is a Sunni Islamic fundamentalist terrorist organization with both a political and a military wing; on the other, a democratic state — although it has elements in the majority that advocate for a mono-ethnic and supremacist society — equipped with a nuclear arsenal and one of the most powerful armies in the world.

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And in the middle? Civilians violated, massacred, and taken hostage in the horrific massacre of Oct. 7. Civilians trapped and torn apart in Gaza under a month-long siege and bombardment.

And then we also have Israeli civilians led into war and ideological radicalization by a government that recklessly exploits that most unhealable wound of the Holocaust.

On Oct. 17, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu referred to Hamas militants as "the new Nazis." On Oct. 24, he drew a comparison between Jewish children hiding in attics to escape terrorists and Anne Frank. On the same day, he likened the massacre on Oct. 7 to the Babij Yar massacre carried out in 1941 by the Einsatzgruppen, the SS operational units responsible for extermination. In the systematic elimination of Jews in Kyiv, they deceitfully gathered 33,771 men and women, forced them to descend into a ravine, lie down on top of the bodies of those who were already dead or dying, and then shot them.

The "Nazification" of opponents, or the "reductio ad Hitlerum," to use the expression coined in the 1950s by the German-Jewish political philosopher Leo Strauss, who fled Nazi Germany in 1938, is a symbolic strategy that has been abused for decades to discredit one's adversary.

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