02/27 Links Pt2: Melanie Phillips: A vile equivalence; Trauma Envy and the Campus Intifada; BBC admits Hamas family was paid for Gaza documentary; Barnard Admin Surrenders To Student Radicals

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: A vile equivalence

Noa Argamani, the Israeli hostage who was rescued from Gaza by the Israel Defense Forces last June, addressed the U.N. Security Council this week. She spoke about being abducted into a “world of torture and humiliation,” where she tried to comfort two small girls who had been dragged with her into the darkness of the Hamas tunnels and where she saw her fellow hostage, Itai Svirsky, brutally murdered.

Her boyfriend, Avinatan Or, who was dragged into the Gaza Strip with her, remains in captivity. Of the 63 remaining hostages, 36 are believed to be dead.

Argamani’s raw testimony was a necessary corrective to the unconscionable indifference in the halls of the United Nations to Israeli suffering and its shocking embrace of Israel’s genocidal attackers.

Shortly afterward, however, someone else addressed the Security Council. This was Daniel Levy, the British former Israeli peace negotiator and now president of the U.S./Middle East Project think tank.

Referring to Kfir and Ariel Bibas, the murdered Israeli infant hostages who were buried in Israel in heartbreaking scenes the following day, he said: “A minute of silence for each of the Bibas children would be appropriate, as would a minute of silence for each of the more than 18,000 Palestinian children murdered in Israel’s devastation of Gaza. That silence would extend to over 300 hours.”

What a breathtakingly vile comment. Hamas terrorists murdered 9-month-old Kfir and 4-year-old Ariel with their bare hands and mutilated their bodies to conceal the crime. How could anyone equate this monstrous depravity with the fate of children in Gaza killed unintentionally in a war to defend Israel against genocide—killed, moreover, because Hamas uses Gaza’s children as human shields and cannon fodder?

Moreover, the 18,000 figure is merely a claim by Hamas that notoriously makes no distinction between dead civilians and combatants, has reclassified numerous adult fatalities as children and includes as “children” teenagers who serve as Hamas gunmen.

Worse, Levy said all this in front of Argamani herself. As she stared at him, Levy claimed sanctimoniously that it was “important to hear your testimony of an awful experience to which no human should ever be subjected”—and then went on to diminish that experience by equating it with a stream of distortions and unverified Hamas propaganda claims.

He hailed as an equivalent victim Dr. Hassan abu Safiyeh, director of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital, who he said was still being held in detention by the Israelis and mistreated.

The IDF, however, raided that hospital because it was a Hamas hub under the terrorist group’s control. One terrorist arrested there admitted to the IDF that abu Safiyeh had been “orchestrating the terror and Hamas activities within the compound.”

Seth Mandel: Trauma Envy and the Campus Intifada

In other words—and this is the key point in understanding the escalation—these students at Columbia University and other expensive universities have been the most pampered young adults in the history of the universe. Though of course there will be individual exceptions, as a group these folks have been handed more and asked to do less than anyone who walked the earth before them.

The students themselves unintentionally acknowledged this generality last night. After they left their occupation, many of them made a circle outside and cultishly chanted a bunch of slogans, including: “We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

I don’t know how people who have actually been kept in chains would feel about this kind of appropriation by the ultra-privileged, but it tells us something important about the mindset of the comfortable elite: They find themselves and their lives utterly boring.

These activists’ anger at previous generations isn’t for withholding opportunity, it’s for the opportunity itself. There are two kinds of Columbia students who talk unironically about losing their chains: those who know they are privileged and pretend otherwise as a form of escapism, and those who actually think being told to go to class at their expensive private institution is what everybody in history has meant by “chains.”

In the past, this kind of progressive trauma envy took the form of poverty tourism. A trip to Cuba to gawk in admiration at the victims of your own ideology, before getting on a plane and going back to your Manhattan apartment, has long been practically a rite of passage, the closest thing the American left has to a bar mitzvah.

But the mixing in of Palestinian nationalism adds a new and escalatory element to this worldview.

Palestinian advocacy too often teeters into trauma envy. The most obvious example is the obsession with claiming that Jews are perpetrating a Holocaust against Arabs in the Middle East, a lie whose overuse is entirely intentional on the part of anti-Zionists. Holocaust envy has only become more explicit: We see Palestinian journalists and activists calling themselves a “Holocaust survivor” or saying “everyone in Gaza is a Holocaust survivor” and declaring they “will proudly wear the Palestinian Keffiyeh to work, especially during the Palestinian Holocaust, just as I would have worn the Star of David during the Jewish Holocaust.”

To underline the point, “pro-Palestinian” activists in the West routinely vandalize Holocaust memorials, protest Holocaust museums, and fetishize the appropriation of Anne Frank to an uncomfortable degree. Last month, the UK’s Islamic Human Rights Commission went so far as to explicitly say Holocaust commemorations that do not include ceremonies for Gaza should be boycotted.

But it isn’t just the Holocaust. In the early part of the 20th century, Arab leaders openly acknowledged the Jewish connection to the land. When that morphed into Palestinian nationalism, suddenly it became obligatory to deny that history and to perform a sort of Replacement Theology whose writers embarked on an ambitious appropriation project: The Wandering Jew became “The Wandering Palestinian,” Palestinian rewrites of iconic novels like The City Without Jews appeared, Golda Meir’s quotes were repurposed against the Jews.

Trauma envy, a direct outgrowth of progressive grievance culture, is warping minds at a rapid clip, spreading far and wide. But like most other forms of anti-Semitism, it’s just easier to see at Columbia.

The truth about ‘No Other Land’

The Oscar-nominated documentary “No Other Land” portrays the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the microcosm of a collection of Palestinian Arab settlements called Masafer Yatta. In that cluster of makeshift villages, the film gives the impression that impoverished Palestinians confront the oppression of Israeli military demolition crews in an existential struggle to prevent the destruction of Palestinian homes, the displacement of their people and the theft of their land. But ultimately, we are told, the righteous Palestinian resistance survives.

The reality of Masafer Yatta is altogether different. The history of that area exemplifies how Palestinians illegally seize plots of land in Judea and Samaria, and how Israel lawfully defends against these incursions.

The 1920 San Remo Treaty and 1922 Palestine Mandate, under the supervision of the League of Nations, created the state that became Israel. The West Bank, known historically as Judea and Samaria, was part of that allocated territory. These instruments of international law were justified by widespread recognition that the designated land was the ancestral homeland of the Jews.

The State of Israel emerged in 1948 and acceded to membership in the United Nations a year later. By that point, Jordan had illegally invaded and occupied the eastern portion of Jerusalem and land on the west bank of the Jordan River. However, in the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel liberated those territories from Jordanian occupation. Israel then validly applied its sovereign governance to eastern Jerusalem but decided to forego implementing its sovereign right to the so-called West Bank area pending negotiation of peace deals with its Arab rivals.

The Palestinians never had a state that could be occupied. They never even had a treaty or comparable agreement granting them legal ties to eastern Jerusalem, the West Bank or the Gaza Strip. On the contrary, the original 1964 Palestine National Charter of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) expressly disclaimed Palestinian rights to those three domains because they were occupied by PLO ally countries: Jordan and Egypt.

Israel and the Palestinians began an effort to make peace in 1993 when they signed the first of six agreements known as the Oslo Accords. In the area called the West Bank, the accords awarded Israel interim control over a territory labeled “Area C,” and granted the Palestinians interim control of Area A. Area B was marked as shared.

Masafer Yatta lies in Area C, which places it under Israeli civilian and security control.

About 200,000 Palestinians reside in Area C. Some of them live in Masafer Yatta. But in 1999, when Palestinians erected an additional batch of shacks in Masafer Yatta, they violated the Oslo Accords by failing to obtain building permits from Israel’s Civil Administration.

Palestinian Arabs have orchestrated many such unlicensed land grabs in Area C. Using slapdash combinations of cement blocks, mud bricks, corrugated metal sheets, plastic tarps and portable electric generators, they create chess pawns strategically positioned to block the buildout of Israeli communities and enlarge the pretense of “Palestinian land.” The decision to add Palestinian settlements in Masafer Yatta was especially provocative because that barren expanse had been classified in the 1980s as an Israeli military training zone.

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02/27 Links Pt1: Itzik Elgarat, Ohad Yahalomi, Tsachi Idan, Shlomo Mantzur murdered by Hamas terrorists; USAID Official Says Biden Steered Grants to Terror Supporters; Too Stupid To Know They've Lost

From Ian:

‘Killing ourselves,’ Nobel laureate says of releasing terrorists

Yisrael (Robert J.) Aumann was awarded the 2005 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contribution to Game Theory, a branch of applied mathematics that studies strategic interactions between individuals or groups.

Aumann has said that if he could describe Game Theory in one word, it would be “incentives.”

JNS caught up with Aumann on Feb. 23 at his offices in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he is a member of the Einstein Institute of Mathematics and The Federmann Center for the Study of Rationality, to ask what he thought of the current prisoner exchange deal between Israel and Hamas.

The deal called for the release of 33 Israeli hostages in exchange for about 1,900 imprisoned terrorists, many of them murderers serving multiple life sentences.

In a word, said Aumann, “Crazy.”

“The basis of Game Theory is to give incentives to the other side to do what’s good for you,” Aumann told JNS. “And we keep doing the opposite. We are literally killing ourselves. We are killing our own children. It’s not only that they will kidnap more. We are incentivizing them to attack us again and again, to make war against us, to repeat Oct. 7,” he said, referring to the Hamas-led massacre of Oct. 7, 2023.

Q: Do we know the recidivism rates of these released prisoners who return to terror?

A: We don’t have the exact number. It’s important. Someone should pull together those numbers. It doesn’t even require any analysis. It’s just a matter of gathering the available data. There are a lot of sources.

When it comes to recidivism, not every terrorist attack is successful. In fact, my subjective impression is that most terrorist attacks are not successful. Most of the time, they kill the terrorist, or they stop him before he manages to kill someone.

Let’s say the number of unsuccessful attacks is somewhere between 50% to 75%. But that leaves successful ones between 25% and 50%, and if you talk about 1,000 terrorists released, we get maybe between 250 and 500 successful terrorist attacks where they manage to kill somebody, at least one person. That’s at least 250 dead for 33 live hostages.

Just on that basis alone, it’s obviously a terrible deal.

But that’s not the worst of it. The worst of it is that again and again we’re going to have people kidnapped. We’ve shown the enemy that it’s worth it, that we will completely give up and raise a white flag even if you abduct one, like with Gilad Shalit [an IDF soldier kidnapped by Hamas in June 2006 and exchanged five years later for 1,027 terrorist prisoners.]

We’ve given them incentives to go and kidnap more and more. And they’ve said they’re going to do it. They did it in the past. So we better believe them.

Hamas dropped its victim narrative with sadistic hostage releases

The summer of Gazan love has ended with a thud. The ability to scream about the resistance, about the river and the sea, along with the free-wheeling accusations of genocide, all without accountability, is over.

Hamas has, to no one’s surprise in Israel, made itself completely unpalatable, let alone heroic. It has required its fellow travelers to excuse, contextualize, or defend conduct that, were there no Jews involved, would be universally condemned and despised.

Hamas did it all by itself and to itself. It did it by showing its true colors and straightforward world view, on its own initiative. The morphing realities and narratives in Gaza

In this regard, the ironies are immense and all but overwhelming. That is because, with its discretionary handling of the return of the hostages, Hamas has just made Israel’s case for why it should be expunged from Gaza, and indeed from history.

What happened to the starving, bereft Gazans? We have morphed from pictures of bedraggled Gazans to pressed uniforms, cheering crowds, and an environment worthy of a Hitlerian rally in the 1930s.

All of this was to show the world that Hamas had won. This in and of itself undercuts the case of devastation that must be stopped, privation that must be addressed, and an all-but-eradicated people that must be rescued.

The face that Hamas has chosen to show the world is not one of “We survived Israel’s onslaught,” but in effect one of “Israel never laid a glove on us.” That, of course, beggars the imagination.

However, it is with its treatment of the returned hostages that Hamas has shown its true colors to any who would look objectively at its doings, and listen to what it is, in effect, saying.

Of course, the images of the returned hostages, particularly the men, speak for themselves. Those of us who are allergic to any analogies with the Holocaust nevertheless found ourselves invoking such comparisons when presented with pictures of some of the released men.

The world clearly saw the heinousness of Hamas, and, by extension, its formerly bereft but now screamingly happy acolytes, as Hamas stormtroopers orchestrated scenes that could have easily devolved into lynchings and certainly had all the feel of them.

Itzik Elgarat, Ohad Yahalomi, Tsachi Idan, Shlomo Mantzur murdered by Hamas terrorists

The Prime Minister’s Office announced on Thursday that the deaths of Ohad Yahalomi, Tsachi Idan, Shlomo Mantzur, and Itzik Elgarat have been confirmed following forensic analyses.

“Following the completion of the identification process by the IDF, the Health Ministry National Center of Forensic Medicine and the Israel Police, IDF representatives have, overnight, informed the Yahalomi, Idan, Mantzur and Elgarat families that their loved ones—Ohad Yahalomi, Tsachi Idan, Shlomo Mantzur and Itzik Elgarat, of blessed memory—were murdered and have been returned for burial in Israel,” the PMO statement said.

“Pursuant to the intelligence and all of the information at our disposal, Ohad Yahalomi, Tsachi Idan and Itzik Elgarat were murdered while held hostage in Gaza. Shlomo Mantzur was murdered in the 7 October 2023 massacre and his body had been held in the Gaza Strip,” the statement continued.

“We share in the families’ sorrow at this difficult time.”

Kibbutz Nir Oz announced earlier on Thursday that Israeli hostages Elgarat and Yahalomi, whose bodies were among four returned to Israel overnight Wednesday, were murdered in Hamas captivity in Gaza.

The Hostages and Missing Families Forum and Idan’s family shortly thereafter confirmed the identification of Mantzur’s and Idan’s remains, respectively.

The terrorist organization handed over to the Red Cross what it claimed were the bodies of the four Israelis at around midnight in Gaza.

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02/26 Links Pt2: This Is Our Moment for Fearless Zionism; If Hamas Won’t End the War, Israel Will; The Myth of the ‘War That Created Israel’; Trump shares Gaza AI-video

From Ian:

Gil Troy: This Is Our Moment for Fearless Zionism

Fearless Zionists are not swivel-headed, forever looking over our shoulders, wondering, “What will they say?” We are level-headed, forever looking straight ahead, asking ourselves, “Who are we? What do we need to do? And how do we do it right?” We learn from Americanism, not just Zionism, that liberal-democratic nationalism is a force for good in this world, and that while no nation is perfect, some dictatorial regimes and terrorist organizations are perfectly evil. We are proud, passionate, thoughtful patriots, not afraid of words like “pride,” “love,” “power,” or “anger.” We define true patriots as those who love their country because of its politics always, despite its politics always.

Fearless Zionists understand that war is hell. We know that this war’s moral calculus starts with holding Hamas responsible for everything that has happened since October 7: They started the war, committed despicable crimes, keep holding and abusing hostages, refuse to surrender, and hide behind their own civilians as human shields. We can regret the deaths of Palestinian civilians caught in the crossfire, we try to minimize the death of innocents, but we know the moral onus is on Hamas, not us.

Fearless Zionists aren’t “April 1 Zionists”: supporters of Israel who nevertheless blamed Israel and not the fog of war, along with the instigators of the war Hamas, when seven aid workers were killed mistakenly, tragically – and then started saying “enough, stop fighting,” as the media turned increasingly on Israel. Fearless Zionists don’t call fending off 320 Iranian missiles “taking the win.” They know the difference between defense and offense, between avoiding catastrophe and restoring deterrence. And fearless Zionists have a moral code too, but theirs doesn’t come from anguishing and blaming our soldiers for the holy work of doing the Western world’s dirty work. Our moral code comes from fighting evil, not just condemning it, while understanding how restrained and disciplined and, yes, ethical Israel has been despite facing an enemy that turns mosques into HaMosques, hospitals into Hamaspitals and kindergartens into killergartens.

We reject Jean-Paul Sartre’s formulation, and The New York Times’ assumption: The antisemite doesn’t make the Jew. The anti-Zionists, including that small, loud minority of anti-Zionist Jews, don’t define the Jew. The Jew makes the Jew. I am not a Zionist because of their hatred, but I do occasionally have to shape my Zionist agenda to fight it.

Fearless Zionists learn from our courageous soldiers. We can come from the right and the left, be religious and nonreligious, be pro-Bibi or hate him, pro-Trump or hate him, but we focus on our enemies and fight them with clarity when they come to get us. And we never, ever, stop singing and dancing and continuing our celebration of life.

At Texas Hillel, before starting Friday night services, so many students said how grateful they were for their community, their camaraderie, their people. And one student — soon enlisting as a lone soldier in Israel — declared his gratitude about belong to a people who refuse to be Jews with trembling knees. That’s Fearless Zionism.

And in building our big, broad, blue-and-white tent, we emphasize our foundational consensus, which doesn’t start in hedging or regretting or fixating on those who betray us. Instead, we affirm. We root ourselves in our amazing tradition and our 3,500-year-old story, reach out to our people and likeminded allies worldwide, and find our strength and joy in shouting from the rooftops: “We are Zionists – and will continue to thrive, not just survive.”

Melanie Phillips: Reconciliation — or surrender?

At a time when the west is beginning to wake up to the nature and extent of the threat from the Islamic world, Jewish faith leaders in Britain appear to be waving the white flag of surrender.

Earlier this month, a group of prominent Jewish and Muslim faith leaders — including Britain’s Chief Rabbi — presented to the King the “Muslim-Jewish Reconciliation Accords” which had been created in secret over the course of a year.

Described as a “framework of reconciliation, understanding, and solidarity”, the document calls for “sustained dialogue, mutual understanding and practical collaboration”.

Acknowledging that “tensions in the Middle East often have ripple effects on Muslim-Jewish relations locally,” it says:
These conflicts can lead to mistrust, heightened emotions, and fractures to relationships that we cherish and value so dearly.

Talk about understatement. “Tensions”? “Ripple effects”? “Mistrust”? Do such bland vagaries really convey the impact of the past 16 months of Muslim-led hate-marches against Jews and Israel following the Hamas-led pogrom in Israel on October 7 2023?

While most Muslims pose no threat whatever, and many of the most vicious antisemites and Israel-bashers are white-skinned, Muslims have played a disproportionate part in this anti-Jewish hysteria. The incitement against Israel and the Jews has been orchestrated by both Sunni and Shia Muslim extremists in alliance with the western left. And as opinion polling repeatedly reveals, antisemitism in the Islamic world is far higher than in the general population.

The inter-faith document says that “both communities must strive to offer reassurance, promoting dialogue and reaffirming our shared commitment to peace and mutual understanding”.

“Shared commitment”? Really? How many Muslim members of this group publicly denounced Hamas after the October 7 atrocities and said “Not in our name”? How many have publicly rejected the Muslim Brotherhood, the jihadi parent body of Hamas that’s entrenched in Britain’s Muslim community? How many have publicly condemned those members of their community who regularly parade through the streets chanting for intifada, the death of Jews and the destruction of Israel?

Seth Mandel: The Myth of the ‘War That Created Israel’

The Israeli War of Independence has no other name. This shouldn’t create much of a problem, even for anti-Zionists: they simply oppose the state that won its independence in that war.

But lately, the trend of discounting Israel’s existence has picked up steam in the media, which has latched onto the “nakba” narrative. Now, “nakba” is not a replacement for “Israeli War of Independence.” Nakba is a descriptive term coined by Arab intellectuals after the war for the combined Arab armies’ military defeat by Israel. (Later on, it was repurposed to refer to the flight of Arabs during the war.)

The fact that nakba isn’t a substitute for the war’s name poses a problem for the Western press: What does one call the war if one doesn’t want to accurately convey what one is talking about?

It would appear the current answer is: Call it “the war that created Israel.”

Now, it should be noted that this, too, is purely descriptive. So it is possible to use this phrase organically and not necessarily to signal one’s disapproval of the fact of Israel’s existence. But the context in which it is usually used makes clear that, most of the time, it is deployed in bad faith.

Sometimes the bad faith is overt and undisguised.

In the New York Times this week, Fatima AbdulKarim and Erika Solomon published a highly editorialized “report” about Israel’s current operation in and around Jenin, where Iran-backed separatists have dug in and threatened the security of both Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

Israel’s attempt to suppress the terrorist hive required evacuation of certain neighborhoods. (There is a dispute as to whether 14,000 or 40,000 were temporarily displaced, and a few thousand have already returned to their homes.) Although Palestinians were already returning home after three weeks, AbdulKarim and Solomon claim the displacement “evoked painful memories of the Nakba, the Arabic word that has been used to refer to the mass flight and expulsion of Palestinians during the 1948 war that created Israel.”

You can see from the text how awkward it would be to call the war by its name: It would make clear that the nakba has always been about the failure to destroy the Jewish nation.

The clunky phrase “war that created Israel” isn’t new, but it has been cropping up all over print media recently. (It is rarely used even in the written stories of broadcast news agencies like CNN and Fox.) In October, the Financial Times ran an absurd piece making the case for UNRWA—the Hamas-adjacent agency whose employees were involved in the Oct. 7, 2023 slaughter—to win the Nobel Peace Prize. In it, UNRWA is described as having a “mandate to care for Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war that created Israel.” The Financial Times had used that exact same phrasing just months earlier in reporting on UNRWA’s Hamas-connected employees.

Seth Mandel: If Hamas Won’t End the War, Israel Will

This is a good reminder that the deal on the table here has always been on the table. Gaza invaded Israel to spark the war, taking hostages; Israel went into Gaza to get those responsible—i.e., the leadership of Gaza’s governing party and armed forces, Hamas—and to bring back its hostages. That Israel was willing to let Hamas leaders leave the enclave alive was generous. There is no reason that all of the pressure from world leaders (and, ahem, protesting publics) should not have focused on lobbying for this particular outcome from Day One.

Wars are not over when both sides get a few good shots in; that’s a hockey fight. Wars do not end when their fundamental underlying conditions are left intact, even if fighting temporarily ceases; that’s an intermission. It is rather maddening to remember that “give back the hostages you took and leave Gaza” was the offer to Hamas leadership—not every member of Hamas, let alone everyone in Gaza; just the top leaders—and yet the war continues because Hamas and its supporters around the world believe “give back the hostages you took” is incompatible with a freshman decolonization course someone tricked their parents into paying thousands of dollars for.

What if Hamas leaders don’t want to live in a penthouse in Qatar? They can keep releasing hostages under the rubric of phase one.

So that’s two overly generous offers from Israel to Hamas. What’s behind door number three? Ah, that would be the gates of hell: “Hamas can choose the end of the ceasefire, which would mean a return to all-out war.” As one Israeli official told the Times of Israel, “It would be different [than before]. A new defense minister, a new chief of staff, all the weapons we need, and full legitimacy, one hundred percent, from the Trump administration.”

The deadline is March 8. If there are no additional hostage releases by one week from Saturday, the cease-fire ends.

This clarity is, as the official suggests, almost entirely a function of the change of administration in Washington. Donald Trump came into office wanting this war over. Both sides have the means to end this war—Hamas by surrendering and accepting exile for its leaders, Israel by forcing Hamas out of power and its leadership out of Gaza. For the next 11 days we will watch as Hamas mulls over whether it or Israel will end the war.

But one of them will. And after the series of demonic festivals-of-death performed by Hamas each week, and after the revelations of what Palestinians did to those hostages and to the Bibas family, and after it became clear that there was no famine and certainly no genocide and that Hamas had made it all up, Israel may very well have the stomach to end the war if Hamas won’t.

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02/26 Links Pt1: Israel comes to a standstill to mourn the Bibas family; President Herzog: As president, I ask for your forgiveness; Hamas To Hand Over Four Hostage Bodies

From Ian:

Israel comes to a standstill to mourn the Bibas family

Tens of thousands of Israelis have paused to pay their respects at the funeral procession for Shiri Bibas and her two young sons, Ariel and Kfir, who were taken hostage and murdered during the Hamas-led attack on October 7.

Mourners gathered in central Israel, including at Kfar HaMaccabiah in Ramat Gan, before the procession passed through Yavne, Ashdod and Ashkelon, en route to the Sha’ar HaNegev Regional Council near the Gaza border.

The private burial ceremony took place at Tsoher Cemetery near Kibbutz Nir Oz, the family’s home. Eulogies were being broadcast live from Israel at 9.30am local time, as crowds gathered in solidarity at Hostages Square in Tel Aviv.

Yarden Bibas, husband of Shiri and father of Ariel and Kfir, who was recently released from Hamas captivity as part of the ceasefire deal, shared emotional tributes to his family.

Shiri, Ariel and Kfir Bibas were buried together in a single casket.

The funeral’s MC, Carmit Palty Katzir, whose family members were killed and kidnapped on October 7, said: “They will remain together and close, just as Shiri enveloped the children, always, including on that accursed day.”

Speaking through the Hostage Family Forum, Yarden expressed his deep love and heartache for his loved ones taken from him.

“Shiri, I love you and will always love you! Shiri, this is the closest I've been to you since October 7th, and I can't kiss or hug you, and it's breaking me!,” Yarden said, paying tribute to his late wife.

Reflecting on the loss of his two sons, he added, “Ariel, you made me a father. You transformed us into a family. You taught me what truly matters in life and about responsibility. Ariel, I hope you're not angry with me for failing to protect you properly and for not being there for you. I hope you know I thought about you every day, every minute.”

Yarden also spoke of his youngest son, Kfir, with heartbreaking tenderness: “Kfir, I didn't think our family could be more perfect, and then you came and made it even more perfect… I remember your birth.

"I remember during the delivery when the midwife suddenly stopped everything—we were frightened and thought something was wrong—but it was just to tell us we had another redhead. Mom and I laughed and rejoiced. Kfir, I'm sorry I didn't protect you better, but I need you to know that I love you deeply and miss you terribly!”

Dana Silberman-Sitton, the sister of Shiri Bibas, spoke emotionally about her sister and her two young nephews, Ariel and Kfir, at their funeral.

Using the nicknames she had for her loved ones, “Baz,” “Lulu,” and “Purpur,” Sitton reflected on the special bond they shared. “We waited to be aunts together, just to be called ‘aunt,’ and you, Shiri, were like no other aunt, loving and protective,” she said.

Shiri, Ariel and Kfir Bibas buried in a single casket: ‘They will remain together’

Shiri Bibas and her two young sons, Ariel and baby Kfir, who were abducted by terrorists to the Gaza Strip and then murdered there, were buried together Wednesday in a single casket, mother and children wrapped in an eternal embrace, at their joint funeral.

They were buried at Tsoher Cemetery, near the home in Kibbutz Nir Oz, from which they were seized on October 7, 2023.

“They will remain together and close, just as Shiri enveloped the children, always, including on that accursed day,” said Carmit Palty Katzir, who acted as MC at the funeral.

She was referring to a haunting video clip of traumatized Shiri, clutching her boys to her chest, as a mob of terrorists dragged them from their home. The images became symbolic of the horror of the attack and seared their fate into the national conscience.

Ariel was four years old when the family was kidnapped from their home in Kibbutz Nir Oz on October 7, 2023, and Kfir was just nine months old. The kibbutz was one of the hardest hit on that day — terrorists broke into all but six homes in the community.

Though the funeral was kept as a private event — state officials and the public were asked to stay away — it was broadcast live on a video feed that was simultaneously carried by all major Israeli networks.

The funeral procession began in the central city of Rishon Lezion where the bodies were prepared for burial. Tens of thousands of people gathered along roads and highways of the 60-kilometer route from there to the cemetery to pay their respects. Many held orange balloons or wore orange, a tribute to the bright colored hair of Ariel and Kfir that became an icon of their plight.

In a heartbreaking address, Yarden Bibas eulogized his wife and children at their funeral, speaking with his sister Ofri at his side. Yarden, who was also taken hostage, was released earlier this month as part of a ceasefire deal with Hamas.

Bibas Brothers Join Count Of 55 Israeli Children Killed Since October 7 Attacks

The bodies of Ariel and Kfir Bibas were returned to Israel on Thursday by the terrorists who kidnapped and murdered them. Upon official identification of their bodies, their death increases the total number of children from Israel who have died in the fallout of the October 7 attacks to 55.

Kfir was nine months old when he was kidnapped, and Ariel was 4.

According to a July 2024 report from Israel’s Ministry of Justice, 53 children were known to have been killed during Hamas’s October 7 massacre and during the war that followed. Twelve of those children were killed by a Hezbollah missile while on a soccer field in the Druze Town of Majdal Shams.

“Our hearts were broken today. On October 7, 2023, Israel suffered its deadliest attack in history,” Dr. Cochav Elkayam Levy, the founder and chair of the Civil Commission on Oct 7 Crimes by Hamas against Women and Children, told The Daily Wire. “ Families were massacred, tortured, taken hostage, witnessed the murder of their loved ones, separated from each other and many, including children, were exposed to the atrocities on social media.”

A total of 870 youth lost one parent in the war, and another 23 lost both parents. Three nuclear families were entirely wiped out.

A report by the Dvora Institute, which Levy helped author, found that Hamas killed civilians as their family members bore witness, especially children. Levy’s report deemed Hamas’s tactics on October 7 a “kinocide,” or a systematic and widespread attack directed against families.

“The Bibas family is not alone,” Levy said. “They are among many who faced unimaginable horrors. Families like the Idan family, Arava family and Sharabis suffered devastating losses.”

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02/25 Links Pt2: The Anti-Semitic Takeover of the Health and Education Industries; Sydney nurse charged for threatening to kill Israelis; Roger Waters loses libel case

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: The Anti-Semitic Takeover of the Health and Education Industries

In order to believe anti-Semitism isn’t at a crisis point, you’d have to believe in coincidences to a degree that would strain credulity.

Two recent controversies provide cases in point.

First, from George Washington University: “A federal civil rights investigation uncovered evidence that the George Washington University faculty retaliated against Jewish students based on ‘shared ancestry-related advocacy’ by placing them in a remediation program after the students lodged an anti-Semitism complaint against an anti-Israel professor,” reports the Washington Free Beacon.

This incident has always been one of the most important anti-Semitism-on-campus sagas because it demonstrates just how far beyond the classroom the bias extends.

The investigation stemmed from a civil-rights complaint filed by Jewish students at George Washington taking a mandatory graduate course by psychology professor Lara Sheehi. (Sheehi has since left to work for a school based in Qatar.) According to the complaint, Sheehi attacked a student’s Israeli background in front of the class. She then invited an infamous blood libelist to give a guest lecture in which, according to the complaint, the speaker “suggested that good deeds done by Jews and Israelis are done to mask sinister activity.” She repeatedly denigrated Israelis and “lionized” a Palestinian who took part in a terrorist attack against a Jewish child in a candy store.

Jewish students raised their concerns with Sheehi at the beginning of the following class. Sheehi responded by denying that the textbook anti-Semitism the students had been subject to was anti-Semitism and that this was a “non-negotiable truth.” Zionism—the belief in equal Jewish rights to self-determination—was arguably the real anti-Semitism, she suggested, thus accusing the Jewish students themselves of being anti-Semites. Sheehi then encouraged the class to see the students’ complaints as evidence of Islamophobia, even though the Jewish students did not mention Muslims. Sheehi further defended her guest lecturer’s advocacy of violence against Jews.

The students spoke with an official in the psychology program who brushed them off, then a dean who refused to let them even exit the class. Sheehi then retaliated against the students by telling the faculty in the graduate program that the Jewish students were racists. She then initiated disciplinary proceedings against the students for objecting to anti-Semitism in a diversity course.

The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has since vindicated the Jewish students’ account.

Mandatory diversity courses such as this have been common in recent years. Orwellian disciplinary processes against students are common. The language used repeatedly in this course—“Islamophobia,” “white Israeli racism,” “white fragility,” etc.—are common. Anti-Zionism is common, to put it mildly.

Which is to say: What happened here is common. And it was essentially a derailing, or an attempted derailing, of Jewish students’ professional education and careers because they were Jewish, full stop. All the evidence above suggests that, too, is common.

Seth Mandel: Antisemitism in America a "virus" which mutates - including as DEI

JFeed: To end off: obviously, none of us are prophets, but based on what you know now and assuming trends continue, how do you see the anti-Semitism wave continuing? Is it going to continue to be in recession or do you see an explosion happening?

Seth Mandel: So I tend to be an optimist by nature, but I'm not on this issue. So...I don't come bearing any sort of sunny optimism on this. I think that the reason we always rely on the comparison of antisemitism to a virus is because it mutates. And I don't think that anything in general stays the way it is. It's sort of like an object in motion stays in motion unless acted upon by an outside force. So it's gonna keep going forward and not just tread water.

I think that antisemitism behaves that way. And so on campus, we had the Tentifada and I wrote a piece warning that it can get worse than this, even if it's not as public, right? That these things have to change to survive. And the Tentifada, especially once the active war stopped, there was not gonna be the same amount of Jews for the tent protests, right? But there were the seeds planted among especially young activists that you could and should wave a Hamas or a Hezbollah flag or wear a hoodie with the picture of Abu Obeida, the spokesman for Hamas on it, like he was Shea Guvara. There was like this normalizing of explicit violence against Jews. And then we saw investigations and some arrests.

You may not have the numbers, but I think that antisemitism itself has been strengthened in a really important way during this time. And you don't need that many people to do terrible things. I'm not saying they're all terrorists on campus or whatever, or even budding terrorists, but the point is that they get, activists tend to get older. Activism itself tends to get older. And it's certainly true in American politics over the years.

Things don't tend to mellow out, pauses don't mellow out because if they do, they disappear, right? You have to always find a reason to push onward. And if your cause relies on the ability to shock, which antisemitism and the... Tentifada and a lot of the pro-Palestinian movement does, then what shocks people changes over time. It's the Overton window problem of moving the Overton window.

So I think that we've accepted, not we, but we as a sort of society, considering the behavior of a lot of elected leaders and institutional leaders, a certain level of Jew hatred as normal. And that wasn't the case before. They would have denied before October 7th and before all these protests, a campus administrator would have flatly denied that such a thing, that level of Jew hatred existed in those places.

And it's gone in those 16 months to now being: not only does it exist, but it's basically been sort of accepted as normal. And then the question turned to what do we do to make our campus safe for everybody? There's almost no thought given to the fact that they sort of read this vile Jew hatred in students and among professors and people on campus. There's just like, all right, well, what do we do about it? So that Jews stop asking, Jewish students stop asking to take their classes via Zoom. and they're not afraid to come on campus. It's been normalized. It's like, all right, this is the status quo.

The status quo is we've got chapters of SJP and all their followers and people who will behave like this and a very large number of people who hate Jews with every fiber of their being and will cheer violence against them with almost no limit. And that's like, all right, that's where we are. Now what do we do just to make our institution run? Not what do we do to turn back that tide and cleanse our institution of the ideas and the hatred and I would say the enabling agents of it, the things that push people to do that or see them as the incentive structure, I guess you could call them.

So, I don't know what form it's going to take. And like I said, it's not a partisan thing, and there's no way to see the future. But I think that there are warning signs that you just have to expect that whatever it is, this is a thing that mutates. And you have to just try to assess the political climate wherever you are. And think about how that virus might gain a foothold, how it might survive, and how it might evolve. in the changing environment. And that's really kind of the best you can do to try to stay ahead of it.

Trouble in Australian Jewish paradise

Australian Jewish community leaders explain the unnerving spate of anti-Semitic incidents in a country so long seen as a safe refuge.

Last month, two men with covered faces, dressed in black, came to a house in Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs. They sprayed the garage with red paint, set the cars parked in the street on fire, and added anti-Semitic graffiti. Their chosen target was the former home of Alex Ryvchin, co-CEO of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, the representative body of the country’s Jewish community. They apparently thought that Ryvchin still lived there.

"My wife and I woke up early that morning, because we received the security camera recordings from our old neighbor who lives opposite," Ryvchin relates. "On the cameras, we saw a car pull up and two men pouring gasoline on the road leading up to the house and setting two cars alight. On one of the cars they wrote ‘Fuck Israel’ on one side and ‘Jews’ on the other side. For us it was a shock, but it’s one more event in a series of very similar attacks."

As Ryvchin says, this was certainly not the first anti-Semitic incident in Australia lately. Just over a month ago, for example, a children’s daycare center next to a synagogue in Sydney was set on fire, and in December a Molotov cocktail was hurled at a synagogue in Melbourne. According to data gathered by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, the number of anti-Semitic incidents in the country jumped to 2,062 in the twelve months to September 2024, from just 495 in the previous year. Community leaders tell of continual reports of harassment, abuse of authority against Jews, and shocking physical attacks. The other week, the premises of a Jewish-owned business in Melbourne were sprayed with the words "Gas the Jews".

As if that were not enough, a couple of weeks ago the world received a particularly viral demonstration of the anti-Semitism in Australia. Israeli content producer Max Veifer happened upon two nurses from a Sydney hospital on TikTok the other week. The two, Ahmad Rashad Nadir and Sarah Abu Lebdeh, refugees from Afghanistan, made clear at the beginning of the conversation that they were not exactly fans of Israel, but things rapidly deteriorated. Lebdeh said of Israeli patients, "I won't treat them, I will kill them," and added later, "I want you to remember my face, so you can understand that you will die the most disgusting death," while Nadir chimed in with, ""You have no idea how many Israeli dog (sic) came to this hospital and I send them to Jahannam (hell)."

The Australian authorities reacted quickly to the incident. The nurses were suspended from the hospital and an investigation was opened. But the situation has caused great anxiety among Australia’s Jewish population of almost 120,000. "We are chasing every rabbit down every hole, and that takes time," New South Wales deputy police commissioner David Hudson told "The Wall Street Journal." State and federal police have set up a special hate crime investigation unit. Last year, Australia outlawed Nazi salutes and the public display of Nazi insignia, and the other week the federal parliament passed government-sponsored legislation introducing mandatory prison sentences for hate crimes.

Even so, many in the Jewish community still think that the Labor government, headed by Anthony Albanese, is not doing enough. Whether or not that is a fair assessment, police helicopters currently patrol Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs nightly, and synagogues and Jewish businesses are protected.

How has a country perceived by Israelis as a place of refuge where no-one cares about their ethnicity become a place where they are hated? Local sources say that antis-Semitism began to rear its head in Australia straight after October 7. A few days after the war broke out, a grotesque demonstration took place outside the Sydney Opera House, with participants recorded shouting "Death to the Jews" and "Jews to the gas chambers." The world was horrified, the Australian government condemned the incident, but nothing substantial was done.

Sydney nurse charged for threatening to kill Israelis

A Sydney area nurse was charged for threatening to kill Israeli patients in a viral video that created a massive uproar around the world, the New South Wales Police Force announced on Wednesday.

Twenty-six-year-old Bankstown Hospital nurse Sarah Abu Lebdeh was arrested on Tuesday and charged with threatening violence to a group, using a carriage service to threaten to kill, and using a carriage service to menace.

The Condell Park woman was granted conditional bail and is set to appear at the Downing Centre Local Court on March 19.

NSW Police Commissioner Karen Webb said in a statement that the antisemitic task force had exhaustively investigated the incident, in which Abu Lebdeh wished a harsh death on Israeli influencer Max Veifer that she wouldn't treat Israeli patients but instead would "kill them."

“Strike Force Pearl detectives must be commended for acting swiftly under enormous pressure and public expectation,” Webb said of the antisemitism task force established in December to address rising antisemitic incidents in New South Wales. "These charges have been laid following a lot of hard work and legal advice, received yesterday from the Commonwealth DPP [Director of Public Prosecutions]."

Webb noted that the detectives had to overcome obstacles and jurisdictional challenges since their commended their investigation on February 12. The NSW police faced controversy when they had contacted Veifer for a full version of the video, but had allegedly not provided him with an email address to submit the content.

The full video showed Abu Lebdeh and a male nurse engaging in conversation with Veifer over a random video chat platform. When the other nurse discovered that Veifer was Israeli, he said that Veifer would eventually be killed and go to hell.

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02/25 Links Pt1: A Sickening Display of Evil; Noa Argamani addresses the UNSC; The Red Cross' shameful failure on Israeli hostages

From Ian:

A Sickening Display of Evil

This was not just a crime against innocent people, but a crime against decency and humanity itself.

Unsurprisingly, Hamas and their twisted apologists around the world still blame Israel for their deaths, saying Israeli airstrikes are what killed them. But this is a double lie, a twisted perversion of reality, of which Hamas have become such masters, on two separate levels.

Forensic evidence now shows the two brothers, along with their mother, were murdered by gunman, not in an airstrike.

But even if that were not true, Hamas has been responsible for every death, both Palestinian and Israeli, since October 7 and every day afterwards, no matter the context. If they had not decided to launch a genocidal war on the people of Israel then Shiri Bibas and her children would be alive today. So would every Israeli child and every Palestinian child and every Thai worker and every pensioner and every teenager dancing at a festival celebrating peace.

Everyone.

The ceasefire deal for the release of Israeli hostages held captive by Hamas was not a diplomatic negotiation. It was blackmail and ransom, no different than if someone was to hold a gun to your child’s head and threaten to pull the trigger unless you give in to their demands.

And yet some world leaders, including Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong, hail this deal as a step toward some kind of lasting peace, still failing to grasp the magnitude of the enemies Israel faces— their sheer brutality and unwavering, maniacal goal of destroying a country and its people.

Hamas does not seek compromise – it seeks annihilation, and any leader who does not understand this fundamental truth is not just misguided but complicit in enabling further atrocities. Can they truly not see that any group capable of the sadistic events of October 7, is totally incapable of forging any kind of lasting peace?

However, beyond the politics and the diplomacy and the international statements, is a very human story. In Israel tonight, there is a man called Yarden Bibas who was held hostage for 484 days of hell. When he was kidnapped, he had a loving wife and two small children – flaming red hair, smiles that could melt your heart. Today, his family is gone.

And so, our hearts will break, as they should.

Our tears will flow, as they must.

The grief is immeasurable, and the trauma in our community is real and it’s raw.

Throughout our history, we have endured unimaginable tragedies, yet we continue to fight for our existence and our rights, standing tall and proud – even if, at times, it feels like we’re standing alone.

We will mourn Shiri, Kfir, Ariel and every other victim of the October 7 atrocities. As painful as this moment is, it will not weaken our resolve, but strengthen it to keep on fighting our enemies so that such atrocities can never be repeated.

Seth Mandel: What Do the Palestinians Want?

The nature of the Arab-Israeli conflict is that a lot of people claim to speak for the Palestinians. In our current moment, that role has lately fallen to Egypt, which has been putting specific conditions on a postwar plan for Gaza.

Egypt opposes, understandably, forced population transfer. And it insists that any postwar plan puts the two sides on track to achieve a two-state solution.

But Egypt also opposes voluntary population transfer—that is, emigration. It doesn’t want Palestinians. Therefore, it opposes any plan that relocates Gazans while rebuilding the Strip out of fear they will land in Egypt (Jordan shares that fear for itself).

Arab countries simply don’t want Palestinians going anywhere. That is not what Palestinians want, as pollster Khalil Shikaki found by actually asking them: “On the eve of October 7, about a third of Gazans and about a fifth of West Bankers said they were considering emigrating from Palestine… The most preferred destination for immigration is Turkey, followed by Germany, Canada, the United States and Qatar.”

And that was before the war.

The more glaring contradiction between the purported spokespersons for the Palestinians and the Palestinians themselves, however, is on the two-state solution. Today the BBC premiered a documentary in which former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert displays the map of a proposed two-state solution he offered Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in 2008. Abbas rejected the offer.

It is not the first time the basic contours of Israel’s 2008 offer of Palestinian statehood have been described—those details came to light about a decade ago. But it is the first time that Olmert’s map itself has been revealed. And the documentary also gives us the reaction from Abbas’s then-chief of staff Rafiq Husseini.

The map was the result of a series of negotiations held between Abbas and Olmert. The two leaders agreed to hold a joint meeting of the their respective map experts the following day. History was, Olmert sensed, being made.

Yet, as Abbas and Husseini drove away that night, “Of course, we laughed,” Husseini says.

Of course they laughed! Nothing is funnier than stringing Israel along to a final deal and then walking away from the altar.

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour: Why There Should Not Be a Palestine

Watching the gruesome spectacle of Hamas parading dead bodies as cheerful families celebrated the occasion, Hussein Aboubakr Mansour came to the conclusion that “the Palestinian national cause, as conceived and developed over the last half-century, has become irredeemable.” The hope of a deradicalized national movement focused on building a new Arab state rather than destroying the Jewish one, Mansour argues, is in vain.

Any attempt at constructive state-building has been ground into dust by corruption, murderous factionalism, and the unabashed worship of violence. Hence, Palestine must die if the Palestinians are to live. Some might say it is drastic, even cruel, to declare that a people’s aspiration to statehood should be abandoned. But the events we just witnessed . . . are not an isolated atrocity but the peak of a long march of destruction. They reflect a deeper moral and cultural collapse: no meaningful leadership capable of guiding Palestinians toward a humane, tolerant society appears to exist.

To argue that Palestinians should be absorbed into existing states is not to remove their communal identity; it is to acknowledge that the formal structure called “Palestine” has, in practice, become a source of destruction for themselves and for the region. If the dream of a stable, rights-based Palestinian sovereignty were within reach, it would have emerged during at least one of the diplomatic windows over the past decades. Instead, repeated attempts have collapsed into bloodshed.

The idea of Palestine has, tragically, turned into an ideological snare that captures each new generation from birth, seeding them with the promise of “liberation” that only ever seems to produce more suffering. In many Arab countries, Palestinians have lived as second-class refugees for decades, denied meaningful integration or citizenship by the very governments that proclaim solidarity.

Perhaps the most merciful and responsible course is for the Palestinian identity—as a state-bound ambition—to be gently laid to rest while families find refuge in the more concrete structures that already exist around them. The cost of perpetuating a vision that repeatedly descends into cruelty is simply too high. If we truly care about the lives of Palestinians, Israelis, and their neighbors, it may be time to walk away from the fantasy of “Palestine” and offer every real opportunity for inclusion and a dignified future elsewhere.

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02/24 Links Pt2: Olmert reveals map of Palestinian state he offered Abbas; There was no famine in Gaza… according to famine review groups’ own data

From Ian:

Yisrael Medad: Jewish anti-Zionists weaponize Jewish customs to attack Israel

Jewish anti-Zionists have been gnashing their teeth in uncontrollable grimacing these past years in reaction to the IHRA’s (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) working definition of antisemitism.

The definition includes denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, that Israel’s existence is a racist endeavor, comparing Israeli policy to that of the Nazis, or aiding the harming of Jews in the name of an extremist view of religion.

Those elements negate most of the essentials of Palestinianism, especially the version promoted by Hamas.

Psychotherapist Mark Golden, from Newton, Massachusetts, published a column in The Boston Globe on February 13 positing that criticizing Israel is not being antisemitic. Moreover, as a Jew, Golden asserted he is “offended when legitimate critiques of Israel’s violent campaign in Gaza are branded as antisemitic.”

He fears he may be silenced. All, of course, depends on the criticism’s content.

Jewish anti-Zionists
A decade ago, Richard Landes wrote that “forms of Jewish self-criticism need to be understood” as they can cross over “into pathology” when shared by Jew-haters and deniers of Jewish national identity who “would use it to promote demonizing and scapegoating narratives.”

And that is what has happened.

Golden’s column is in harmony with the recent “Stop the Ethnic Cleansing” advertisement published in The New York Times, which displayed the names of 350 rabbis and a few actors and public figures. According to the Vatican News, the ad was financed by progressive donors affiliated with the In Our Name Campaign.

This collective of Jewish philanthropists seeks to raise $10 million for organizations that support efforts to “build self-determination in Palestine.”

Their signatures were nowhere to be seen on a similar advert in 2005 when more than 8000 Jews, including corpses, were ethnically cleansed from Gaza. Nor will you see their signatures on petitions protesting a planned ethnic cleansing of 725,000 Jews from Judea & Samaria and post-1967 Jerusalem neighborhoods.

Who is calling who a Nazi?

The use of Nazi imagery has become so ubiquitous among Democrats that it almost precludes notice. But Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s parallels between U.S. President Donald Trump’s political agenda and the rise of Nazi Germany during his “State of the State” budget address on Feb. 19 hit a new low.

Veering from his speech, Pritzker, who is Jewish, referred to Nazis no less than six times during his criticism of Trump and his policies. In a glaring warning to Illinois citizens, he compared the rise of the Nazis to the Republican Party leader in the White House.

After castigating the president’s policies, including the deportation of violent illegal criminals, Pritzker said: “It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic.”

Such deceitful criticism of Trump reeks of partisan animosity of the basest kind. The governor’s confusing use of Nazi imagery is targeting the wrong culprit and, in the process, exonerating the real perpetrators.

Pritzker’s comments lend fuel to the anti-Israel and pro-Hamas protestors who have regularly used Nazi euphemisms against the Jews, libeling them as “genocide” perpetrators in Gaza and calling for the “final solution” for Jews all over the world. His comments ignore the reality of a president who was praised by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “the greatest friend that Israel has ever had in the White House.”

Indeed, Pritzker’s rebuke of the president came on the same day that the Trump administration stopped all funding for the Palestinian Authority, which continues its “pay for slay” policies, paying terrorists and their families for murdering Jews. It comes two days after Israel received a shipment of heavy MK-84 bombs from the United States, following Trump’s lifting of a block imposed on the export of the munitions by the Biden administration.

Pritzker must not have gotten the memo regarding Trump’s executive order two weeks ago outlining a broad federal crackdown on “the explosion of antisemitism” in the United States, especially on college campuses. The executive order cites “an unprecedented wave of vile anti-Semitic discrimination, vandalism and violence.” It instructs U.S. policy to use “all available and appropriate legal tools to prosecute, remove, or otherwise hold to account the perpetrators of unlawful anti-Semitic harassment and violence.” This includes the canceling of visas for foreign students who are “Hamas sympathizers” and deporting “pro-jihadist” protesters.

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02/24 Links Pt1: Detoxing Gaza: The Problem Beyond Hamas; Israel should judge all attacks by intent and respond accordingly; Where is the outrage for the Bibas family?

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: ‘Palestine’ has proven again and again it is a death cult of lies

These similarities are no coincidence. From the early years of the 20th century, when Hitler’s ally the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al Husseini falsely accused the Jews of aiming to destroy the al-Aqsa mosque — a claim repeated even today by al Husseini’s explicit fanboy, the Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas — the attempt to suppress and then destroy the Jewish homeland has been a feature of Islamic holy war.

The Jews are the only people for whom the land of Israel was ever their national home. Palestinian identity is a fabrication that was cooked up in the 1960s by the Egyptian-born “Palestinian” terrorist leader Yasser Arafat — who was radicalized by al Husseini — and the Soviet Union, in order to steal from the Jews their ancestral home and their own history in those lands.

Yet Palestinianism is the default cause of Western progressives, who believe the lie that the Palestinians are the indigenous people of the land who have been exiled and oppressed by the Israelis — and are mostly merely wretched and poor and have nothing to do with terrorism.

But behind the Hamas storm troopers who led the October 7 attack, Gaza civilians poured across the shattered border to rape, murder and kidnap Jews and others.

“Ordinary” Gaza civilians paraded and abused those who were dragged back into Gaza and desecrated the bodies of those who had already been murdered.

The Arabs of Gaza not only elected Hamas, but the vast majority have said repeatedly that they support the murder of Jews and want Israel destroyed.

Polling shows even greater majorities for this agenda among the Arabs of the “West Bank.” Officials of Fatah — the main party in the supposedly moderate Palestinian Authority — have openly celebrated the October 7 atrocities and declared their intention to repeat them.

For months, the Israelis have been struggling to keep the lid on dozens of terrorist plots emanating from the Arabs of the “West Bank,” against a backdrop of threats to perpetrate an October 7-style invasion of Israeli towns in central Israel.

A few days ago, an enormous plot to detonate bombs on rush-hour buses in central Israel was foiled only when a number of these devices exploded in empty buses the previous evening — because when priming the bombs, the terrorist had confused 9 a.m. with 9 p.m.

Support for the Palestinians has knocked the West off its moral compass altogether. It’s not just that it’s signed up to a cause that’s profoundly anti-Jew. It’s because the West has come to believe that an evil cause represents conscience itself.

Islamism is a death cult. So is its “Palestinian” offshoot. But the West is unable to acknowledge this because it’s in the grip of a death cult of its own.

As I write in my new book, “The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West — and Why Only They Can Save It,” the West has had a cultural death wish for decades. Undermining its core values, it no longer believes in objective truth. Everything is a matter of opinion. Feelings trump facts and evidence.

Inverting truth and lies, victim and aggressor, the West is unable to see the Palestinian cause for the evil that it is. And consumed by the belief that Western civilization is fundamentally bad, it refuses to acknowledge the Islamist threat not only to Israel but also to itself.

So as the West’s cultural elites undermine and hollow out their own civilization, the Islamist death cult is moving in for the kill — with the Palestinian Arabs creating the Trojan Horse of the Middle East.

It’s high time the West woke up to the bitter reality of the entire Palestinian cause, and to the way its own agenda of cultural self-loathing has softened it up for the triumph of its enemies.

Seth Mandel: Detoxing Gaza: The Problem Beyond Hamas

What is one to do with this information? The Bibases don’t just symbolize Hamas’s brutality, though Hamas was the reason the invasion happened and the party responsible for the demonic ceremony celebrating the dead children.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, in addition to participating in that ceremony and perhaps holding the captive Bibas family, not only joined the Oct. 7 pogrom but has taken the lead in shepherding anti-Zionism on campus, training participants in the pro-Hamas tentifada, and organizing a high-profile conference at which a Democratic member of Congress spoke. The PFLP and its front groups should be treated no differently from Hamas as part of any permanent cease-fire.

Hamas’s feats of terror would not be possible without Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which Hamas used as a decoy organization in its prewar deception scheme and which is Hamas’s most prominent Gaza-based ally in this war. Surely any policy applied to Hamas would be applied to PIJ and its members.

The same, presumably, would go for the Mujahideen group that claimed credit for the Bibas kidnapping, as well as the other groups represented in the grotesque Hamas-led ceremony. Which is to say: Every so-called resistance organization in Gaza must be disbanded, with no exceptions.

Finally, how does a sweeping policy toward institutions deal with civilians? The answer is, it isn’t just armed groups responsible for what happened on Oct. 7. Gaza’s government and armed forces led an invasion that opened the way for civilians to take part in the murder and looting spree.

How is it that the removal of parts of a fence can inspire civilians to cross into another territory and randomly murder, torture, plunder, and kidnap? The answer is that generations of Palestinians in Gaza have been brainwashed from birth to believe that that is a reasonable course of action toward Jews. And who brainwashed them? We can start with the UNRWA schools responsible for “educating” Palestinian children.

These schools quite famously teach the most demented Jew-hate one can imagine. The textbooks have been opened, the schoolchildren have told the world what they have learned. We don’t wonder what happens in an UNRWA school; we wonder how any country could possibly fund it, support it, defend its existence.

UNRWA is now being ordered to cease its operations in Israel and the territories. Gaza’s de-Nazification should encompass both its ideological institutions—of which UNRWA is one—and its institutions of violent governance. Dismantling Hamas is necessary, yes. But it would be far from sufficient if we want to give future generations of Gazans a chance at a life outside of a death cult.

Khaled Abu Toameh: Hamas's October 7 Massacre Is Part of Its Jihad to Destroy Israel

Some people in Israel are demanding that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu step down and agree to Hamas's demand to end the war in the Gaza Strip.... These Israelis fail to understand that the October 7 massacre is just another phase of the Islamists' Jihad (holy war) against Israel.

Since its violent, brutal takeover of the Gaza Strip in 2007, Hamas has done nothing to help the local residents. Instead of building hospitals, schools and economic projects, Hamas, with the help of Iran and Qatar, has devoted huge resources to manufacturing weapons, such as rockets and missiles, and building a massive network of tunnels throughout the Gaza Strip.

Hamas, in a document published shortly after the October 7 attack, openly admits that it is opposed to the presence of Jews in Israel. The document frankly admits that the conflict did not start as a result of the Holocaust, or when Israel declared independence in 1948, or on October 7, 2023, but 105 years ago, "including 30 years of British colonialism and 75 years of Zionist occupation." The document goes on to explain that Hamas "is a Palestinian Islamic national liberation and resistance movement. Its goal is to liberate Palestine and confront the Zionist project."

Hamas's 1988 charter emphasizes the importance of Jihad as the main means for the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) to achieve its goals...

Significantly, the charter quotes Hassan al-Banna, who founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928, as saying: "Israel will arise and continue to exist until Islam abolishes it, as it abolished what went before." Hamas is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.

US President Donald J. Trump would do well to designate the Muslim Brotherhood, the font of all the Islamic jihadist organizations, as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. Such an act would make it difficult for those countries that promote and finance jihadi terrorists to keep on doing so.

What happened on October 7 should be seen in the context of Qatar's, Iran's and Hamas's continuing Jihad. The massacre on October 7 was just another phase in the Islamist groups' efforts to eliminate Israel. After the October 7, massacres, the Qatari government media consistently praised the massacres, and weeks ago vowed more of them.

Anyone who believes that Hamas would abandon Jihad as a result of a ceasefire agreement is engaging in extreme self-deception. Hamas has not yet accomplished its mission of destroying Israel. Hamas's main goal, especially now, is to remain in power after the war.... Any deal that keeps Hamas in power would pave the way for the Islamist murderers, rapists and baby-killers to carry out still more massacres against Israelis.

Regrettably, there is no alternative to eradicating Hamas.

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02/23 Links: The child murderers of Gaza; The BBC is turning into a megaphone for Hamas; Andrew Roberts: History’s Case for Trump’s Gaza Plan

From Ian:

Ruthie Blum: Babies in bandanas

Before the caskets were transferred to the Red Cross, masked Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Fatah operatives proudly basked in the cheering crowds of Palestinian “civilians.”

These male and female jihad-lovers came out in droves, with children of all ages in tow, decorated in bandanas. Not ones with bat wings, of course. No, those with terrorist insignias. After all, their superheroes are “martyrs” for Allah. That’s whom they are taught to glorify and emulate.

Following the horrifying display of joy over the dead Jews, the crowd dispersed and the coffins were transported back to Israel, a short car-ride—yet light years—away. Once past the border that separates hell from heaven, they were delivered to the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute for autopsy.

Lifshitz was identified relatively quickly. It took several more hours before members of the extended Bibas family were informed of the even worse news than already expected.

The remains of the woman being examined did not belong to Shiri. Furthermore, Ariel and Kfir had been murdered in cold blood in November 2023, about three weeks after they were snatched.

“The terrorists did not shoot the two young boys; they killed them with their bare hands,” Israel Defense Forces spokesman Daniel Hagari revealed on Friday. “Afterward, they committed horrific acts to cover up these atrocities.”

Gasps could be heard around the country and beyond. Memories came flooding back of the footage of a terrified Shiri, clutching her babies for dear life, being ushered by Palestinian “civilians” into a residence in Khan Yunis, never to be seen or heard from again. Until Friday night, that is, when Hamas deigned to return her actual body.

No mother in Gaza empathized with her fate. On the contrary, the women of the Strip continue to view her as a perfectly legitimate target for sadistic abuse.

It’s in keeping with how they educate their children in the art—and skill—of savagery. It’s why so many Gazan youngsters continue to be taken to observe the nauseating hostage-return ceremonies aimed at a last hurrah of humiliation for the State of Israel.

Those children wear the headbands of one terrorist faction or another. You know, for the cuteness of it all.

Batman symbolizes the fight for justice. He stands for righteousness in the face of evil. His mission is to protect the innocent. To fight for the weak. To ensure that villains do not triumph over good.

This is what Israeli children grow up to admire. Heroes who defend, not attack. Warriors who sacrifice for the sake of others, not themselves. The IDF soldier who protects civilians at all costs. The paramedic who rushes to the scene of terror attacks, unarmed, to save lives. The firefighter who runs into flames while others flee.

Contrast this with the children of Gaza and the Palestinian Authority, who are raised on a steady diet of hatred. Their heroes are bombers, not Batman. Mass murderers, not saviors.

This is the reality of a society governed by blood lust. It’s the result of rulers who use their people as human shields and ideological pawns, indoctrinating generations into believing that the path to paradise is paved with mutilated Jews.

It’s high time for the Tribe, in Israel and abroad, to internalize this reality and realize that coexistence with heathen monsters is impossible. Anyone who has a temporary lapse in judgment on this score should remember what befell the Bibas family.

Daniel Greenfield: The child murderers of Gaza

“O God, do not be silent; hold not Thy peace, and be not still,” IDF Chief Rabbi Brig. Gen. Eyal Krim prayed the words of Psalm 83 over the bodies of two murdered children, their mother and an old man, in the Gaza Strip on Thursday.

Hamas and PLO terrorists had mockingly paraded their coffins to the cheers and jeers of Muslim men, women and children occupying Gaza while upbeat music played, they had mixed up the bodies, locked the boxes and then attached keys that did not work. After inspecting the coffins for explosives, Israel had covered them with its blue and white flag and prayed over them.

Islam is an honor-shame culture; to humiliate the bodies of the children of your enemies is to show the strength of Allah, and jeering the bodies of murdered children shows the glory of Islam.

The celebration and mocking of the bodies of murdered children was not the work of some fringe group. Hamas took care to have every Islamic terrorist organization taking part in claiming victory, including the PLO’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades representing the Palestinian Authority and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (Martyr Omar Al-Qassem Forces), popular on college campuses, as well as the Al-Ansar Brigades, which has links to Al-Qaeda.

There is no “Palestinian” group that was not there to take its share of credit for the dead children.

The message being sent by the representatives of seven Islamic terrorist groups in Israel, carrying the coffins of their victims, is of a united front committed to the destruction of Israel, and the killing of all non-Muslims to be followed by the creation of an Islamic theocracy.

Nor was the ghoulish scene some local “Palestinian” phenomenon as people like to think.

Hen Mazzig: Indifference is worse than hate

The silence of the world in response is not neutrality—it is complicity. When atrocities against Jews elicit only passive indifference, they encourage more brutality. When protests erupt worldwide over justified military actions, yet remain silent about slaughtered children, it creates an unmistakable double standard, one that implicitly declares Jewish lives less worthy of global empathy.

“Never Again”—a solemn vow forged from the ashes of the Holocaust—once seemed immutable. Yet, as atrocities against Jews grow more grotesque and are met only with deafening silence, one wonders if “Never Again” was ever more than mere words, comforting yet hollow, easily forgotten when the victims become inconvenient.

We cannot allow humanity’s moral compass to be reset in the face of such brutality.

Silence is complicity; indifference is enabling. As Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel famously said, “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.”

We owe it to Avera Mengistu, to Shiri Bibas, to Ariel and Kfir, to Evitar David and Guy Gilboa-Dalal—to every victim of this unimaginable cruelty—to speak loudly, clearly, and urgently.

Because if Jewish dignity is negotiable, if atrocities reminiscent of our darkest past provoke no global outrage, then “Never Again” isn’t just a broken promise—it’s a devastating lie.

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02/22 Links: Six hostages released by Hamas including two held for a decade; Hamas forced 2 other hostages to watch fellow hostages freed

From Ian:

Sickened, Yes. But Shocked? By Abe Greenwald

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Some of those liberals are employed in media, government, and international nonprofit organizations, and they worked to make the slaughtering of babies on October 7 a contested issue. They didn’t entirely succeed, but they managed to distract attention away from Hamas’s infanticides and child-killings by raising doubts about various details. And when anti-Israel journalists had nothing else to use, the phrase “Israeli authorities claim” got the job done. Because on the left, the specter of the Jewish lie outshines the reality of the terrorist atrocity.

On social media, of course, the defense of Hamas has been more straightforward. Go to X at any hour and you’ll find someone with thousands of followers who just posted that the IDF itself is responsible for October 7. Those who aren’t conspiracy theorists or outright Jew-haters adopt what they believe is a more reasonable-sounding elision, something to the effect of “Hamas’s attack was bad enough. We don’t have to exaggerate it with tales of baby murder.”

That brings us to the larger reason that so many have resisted the truth of Hamas’s degeneracy. There’s a line from Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing that I return to almost daily: “The wicked know that if the ill they do be of sufficient horror that men will not speak against it. That men have just enough stomach for small evils and only these will they oppose.” Hamas had the timorous world of “global opinion” beat from the start.

What’s more interesting about McCarthy’s line is that, like so many other axioms, it applies to almost everyone—except the Jews. In fact, for Jews, the inverse applies. While men don’t have “enough stomach” to oppose Hamas’s murdering children, in the second century B.C.E., men invented the Jewish blood libel for the very purpose of opposing the Jews. And it’s never stopped. It’s why the Gaza Ministry of Health exists—to amplify the blood libel and perpetuate Jew-hatred. So Jews are falsely accused of killing gentile babies and anti-Semites are falsely cleared of killing Jewish babies.

Given the millennia of persistent and murderous anti-Semitism, it should be hard to shock the Jews. Given the facts of October 7, it should be impossible for Hamas to do so. And I confess that, while infanticide should always be shocking, I wasn’t shocked by the killing of Ariel and Kfir Bibas. Disgusted and enraged, but not shocked. What shocks me is that Hamas and its supporters in Gaza are still alive. And it shocks me because, for Jews, the other implication of McCarthy’s formula should also be inverted. Unlike other men, Jews must oppose those evils of “sufficient horror.” I am more certain than ever that we will.

Daniel Greenfield: Fake Quotes by Saudi and UAE Imams Condemning Hamas Go Viral

Fake quotes by Saudi Grand Mufti Abdulaziz bin Abdullah Al-Sheikh and the Grand Mufti of Dubai Ahmed al-Haddad condemning the Hamas treatment of the bodies of the Bibas children have gone viral.

People are promoting these quotes with the best of intentions but there is no Arabic source for them.

“What we say today in Gaza is a disgrace to Islam, an act of blasphemy against Allah,” Saudi Grand Mufti Abdulaziz bin Abdullah Al-Sheikh reportedly said.

The social media posts claiming this racked up millions of likes. They were even quoted by a few papers which failed to do their research.

The quote has been disavowed.

The quote by Grand Mufti of Dubai Ahmed al-Haddad reportedly stated that, “Hamas has brought shame to Islam on a level never seen before.”

The quote has not been officially disavowed, but an Emirati journalist stated that he had never heard of it.

The only place the quote appears in Arabic is on a Christian Arab pro-Israel woman’s Facebook page. It should be assumed to be fake until proven otherwise.

People insisted on making up and then tweeting these fake quotes out of some hope that Islam was more merciful and decent than it is.

Gaza captor told hostages that Hamas collaborates with US campus protesters, lawsuit alleges

A Hamas member who held Israelis hostage in Gaza told the captives that the terror group was coordinating with “allies” on college campuses and in the media, according to a lawsuit filed in US court on Friday.

The lawsuit was filed by former hostages Almog Meir Jan, Andrey Kozlov and Shlomi Ziv. All three were taken from the Nova music festival in southern Israel during Hamas’s October 7, 2023, invasion of Israel.

They were held in Gaza by Abdallah Aljamal, according to the lawsuit and the IDF. Aljamal was a writer for the Palestine Chronicle, a news outlet run by the People Media Project, a US-based, tax-exempt nonprofit that is the focus of the lawsuit.

The hostages were rescued after 246 days in captivity in an IDF operation in June that also extracted hostage Noa Argamani, who was held separately nearby. Aljamal, his wife Fatima and his father Ahmad Aljamal were all killed during the hostage rescue mission. The family’s children survived.

Jan initially filed the lawsuit last year. The judge in the case granted a motion to dismiss the case last month, saying there was insufficient evidence to prove the defendants were aware that Aljamal was a Hamas operative. The judge allowed Jan to refile an amended complaint, however.

The new complaint was filed on Friday, adding Kozlov and Ziv as plaintiffs. The lawsuit, backed by the National Jewish Advocacy Center, was filed in a federal court in Washington State, where the People Media Project is based.

The case argues that the Palestine Chronicle provided Aljamal with a platform to “disseminate Hamas propaganda,” providing material support to a US-designated terrorist organization, in violation of international law.

According to the amended complaint, Ziv said Aljamal “repeatedly expressed his hatred for the State of Israel and the United States,” and told the hostages that “Hamas was in contact and actively coordinating with its affiliates in the media and on college campuses.”

Aljamal told the hostages that “Hamas was going to ensure that the United States, as well as Jews and Israelis, are hated everywhere and that Hamas in Gaza was coordinating with its allies, including its allies in the media and on college campuses, to foment hatred against Israel and Jews,” the complaint said.

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02/21 Links Pt2: Columbia students, stand with humanity and against barbarity; BBC removes Gaza doco following ‘terrorist propaganda’ claims

From Ian:

David Friedman: Columbia students, stand with humanity and against barbarity

To Columbia’s faculty and administrators: Academic freedom is not a shield for moral abdication. If you champion free speech, wield it with integrity to denounce terrorism unequivocally. Silence in the face of terror is not neutrality; it is a dereliction of duty.

To the members of Students for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voices for Peace (a grotesque misnomer for those who promote violence), Columbia University Apartheid Divest, and others who rally behind Team Mohammed: When you chant “violence is the only path forward," you are glorifying the murder of Sara and Matthew and the kidnapping of Sagui. You are celebrating the kidnapping, torture, and butchering of innocent children, parents, and grandparents. When you shout “Globalize the intifada!” you are endorsing not just past atrocities but future violence against Jews worldwide, including in the United States.

Your allegiance to a cause that sanctifies bloodshed is a stain on your humanity. If you genuinely believe in these causes, reflect deeply on the moral abyss you have embraced. And if your support is merely performative or driven by peer pressure, know that you are pawns in a dangerous ideology that would discard you as readily as it did the lives of innocent mothers, children and elderly, and fellow Columbia students.

To those at Columbia, and on campuses elsewhere, who remain indifferent—who just want to focus on classes, social lives, and future careers: Your desire for normalcy is entirely understandable and while we sympathize with you, we also encourage you to heed the post-World War II words of regret from German pastor and theologian Martin Niemöller: “First they came for the Communists and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist…then they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.”

Today’s targets are Jews; tomorrow, it could be you. This is your moment to educate yourself on a critical issue of our time and become engaged.

To all Columbia students, faculty, and administrators: Now is the time to reject the moral rot of excusing barbarism and supporting terrorism. Instead, act to honor the lives of those like Sagui and the legacies of those like Sara and Matthew as well as Ariel, Kfir and Oded. Stand with humanity and on the right side of history. Choose moral clarity over moral equivalence. Choose courage over complacency. History will judge us all—may it judge us favorably.

Gil Troy: Campus intifada shaped a generation of thoughtful, passionate, and proud Jewish students

These violations of academic standards, classroom etiquette, administrative and professorial responsibility, and basic decency constitute mass educational malpractice.

Garbage in, garbage out. Three generations of activist professors, imposing their oppressed-oppressor and settler-colonialist binaries often targeting Israel, have raised students and teachers who parrot these lies. They think teaching involves radicalizing the classroom, even if they harm some students.

Four factors ripped the mask off Canadian niceness. A rapidly growing, rabid, pro-Palestinian movement of Muslims has been raised to despise Jews, not “just” Israelis, and import thuggish mob politics into Western democracies. Second, the campus’s illiberal liberals obsess about Israel.

Convinced that Israel is committing genocide, they decided that, from “woke” kindergarten to “woke” math, all protests are legitimate. Third, the media firestorm delegitimizing Israel’s actions and demonizing Netanyahu’s government, while minimizing Palestinian crimes, makes Israel look hateful.

Finally, Canada’s weakening national identity and many Canadians’ polite passivity tolerates the intolerable, even as their Jewish neighbors suffer.

All, however, is not lost. At the University of Ottawa, when anti-Zionist goons tried banning me from campus, top administrators, including President Jacques Frémont – a human rights expert – appeared, so the masked cowards didn’t.

At McGill last year, an older non-Jewish colleague approached a Jewish colleague whose “Zio-courses” were protested, found four tall, strong professors nearby, and assured their buddy they had his back. I kept meeting non-Jewish students and professors resisting these outrages, while in Ottawa, many non-Jewish religious leaders attended my talk – on the holiest day of the North American year, Super Bowl Sunday, hours before kickoff.

Most importantly, I met wonderful students. They love Israel, Zionism, the Jewish people and Western values. They laugh off many of their fellow students’ excesses. They refuse to be cowed. They reassured me – and us – that they made new friends, discovered community as extended family, and clarified who they are, what’s important to them, and who they want to be.

They are this moment’s pearls – produced by the grit of Jew-hating oysters – reflecting the best of us and our civilization. Their world has been “turned upside down,” as one student told me. But many students landed on the right side of history and are making their stand.

Fetterman: Palestinian support of Hamas comes with ‘accountability’

Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) condemned the scenes in Gaza on Thursday, where Hamas paraded the coffins containing what were believed to have been the remains of four Israeli hostages down the streets of Khan Younis to cheers from Palestinian locals. Three of the bodies were identified as Oded Lifshitz, Kfir Bibas and Ariel Bibas.

Speaking to Jewish Insider from the Capitol on Thursday evening, the Pennsylvania senator said Hamas’ hostage transfer ceremony that took place earlier in the day was indicative of the level of support the terror group has among the Palestinian people. Fetterman argued that such support came with “accountability” attached to it.

“I think it just really reflects just how much of a lot of the population in Gaza supports Hamas and the kind of terrible things that they do. Every time they have these releases, they have people cheering it like they’re cheering for the [Pittsburgh] Steelers or something,” Fetterman said.

“It just reinforces that they actually really want that kind of leadership. Maybe there’s some accountability with everything that happened. I mean, you elect terrorists and you cheer them,” Fetterman continued. “It seems it might attach some accountability to a lot of it. If you’re cheering at dead babies and children, I think there’s some accountability in all of it.”

Fetterman also took issue with the prisoner release that Israel had to adhere to in exchange for the remaining hostages, specifically criticizing the release of Mohammed Abu Warda, a former Hamas commander responsible for several suicide bombings that killed a total of 45 Israelis, as part of the deal.

“I read that the IDF identified that that actually wasn’t them,” Fetterman said, referencing that the coffin containing what was believed to be Shiri Bibas’ body instead held the body of an unknown Palestinian. “They had to release a prisoner that was involved in 45 killings. I just look forward to those prisoners, the ones that killed people, I hope Israel follows up and wastes them. You know, they should never forget and forgive. I fully support that.”

“The fact that they kidnapped, tortured and murdered children, I’ll never understand why you still have people in our country to protest and support that kind of absolutely vile, repugnant stuff. It’s almost normalized in the media,” he added.

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