Monday, November 06, 2023

11/06 Links Pt2: Take them at their word; Hamas has shown the world who they truly are, and this is a gift; UNRWA staffers praised Hamas’s 7/10 massacres

From Ian:

Victor Davis Hanson: Take them at their word
Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, at the United Nations in New York, just bluntly threatened individual American officials with violence: “I say frankly to the American statesmen, who are now managing the genocide in Palestine, that we do not welcome [an] expansion of the war in the region. But if the genocide in Gaza continues, they will not be spared from this fire.”

I don’t think Mr. Amir-Abdollahian would come into our country to issue such a direct threat to American leaders had the Biden administration not assigned Robert Malley to reboot the atrocious but then-inert Iran Deal. Had it not lifted oil export sanctions—resulting in a multibillion-dollar windfall to Tehran. Had it not tried to ransom American hostages from Iran at $1.2 billion a captive. Had it not restored hundreds of millions of dollars in support to the West Bank and Gaza. Had it not allowed U.S. aid and remittance dollars to Lebanon to seep into Hezbollah coffers. Had it not dropped past American declarations that the Houthis were a terrorist organization, and had it not ignored rather than retaliated for dozens of attacks on U.S. forces in Syria and Iraq by Iranian surrogates.

We should also take at his word one Ghazi Hamad. He’s a high official in Hamas and one of their PR megaphones. And in an Oct. 24 Lebanese television interview, Hamad boasted: “We must teach Israel a lesson… and we will do this again and again. The Al Aqsa Flood [the Oct. 7 attack] is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth… It is Israel, not us. We are the victims of the occupation… On Oct. 7, on Oct. 10, on October one-millionth, everything we do is justified….”

Hamad was quite clear on the motivation for his envisioned million more murder sprees: “The existence of Israel is what causes all that pain, blood and tears.”

So Hamad is promising more beheading, executions, rape and mutilation. I don’t think Hamad—apparently waging endless jihad against Israeli civilians from a safe distance in Beirut—got the message about the much-heralded American “two-state solution” of mutual co-existence. In other words, Hamad has no problem adhering to the Hamas-charter agenda of wiping out Israel: “Israel is a country that has no place on our land. We must remove that country because it constitutes a security, military and political catastrophe to the Arab and Islamic nations, and must be finished.”

So is this final solution to Israel the “from the river to the sea” envisioned by our campus activists? Our Turkish NATO ally Recep Tayyip Erdogan, at a huge public rally, praised the Hamas mass murderers as “freedom fighters.” He declared the Israeli response to the Hamas apparat a “massacre,” and threatened to send the Turkish army to Gaza and to hit Israel with a swarm of missiles and bombs—or as he put it, his military can “come at any night unexpectedly.” (He issued the same sort of threat not long ago to NATO member Greece.)
Hamas has shown the world who they truly are, and this is a gift
Hamas did not just attack – it slaughtered and recorded the slaughter with joy and pride. That is a message we understand. We understand Hamas’s intent. We also understand now that Hezbollah has 150,000 rockets that they intend to use against us. It is also clear that Iran is developing the nuclear bomb with the intent of using it against the Jews. What was unthinkable is already here. Hamas has given us that sight.

Jews outside Israel, too, have been offered this gift: Allies and friends of the Jews are, in reality, neither this nor that. Jews were among the first to support Black Live Matter, but how does that group view Jews? Can you name any gay organization that has stood up for Israel against barbarous murder? Yet Jews are beyond doubt some of the biggest boosters for gay rights.

And of course the universities, which Jews have attended in mass numbers to integrate into America – it’s fair to say that the universities have been, and still are, extremely unsupportive of Jews on campus or in the world. We now read of American Jews buying guns in record numbers, and a possible turn to the political Right after 100 years of voting Democrat.

Do these Jews see now? Have they accepted the gift of sight?

For the US, the past 10 days have witnessed dozens of attacks on US troops in Syria and Iraq by radical Islamic proxies supplied and financed by Iran.

The Iranian ambassador to the UN, in a public speech, threatens the US. Many Americans have accepted the gift of sight, but has Joe Biden? Just now the US has launched two air assaults against Iranian weapons facilities in Syria, but President Biden makes no threat or promise against Iran. Iran threatens the US, but not vice versa. Has America accepted the gift of sight?

Finally, for all those who have lived in or otherwise benefited from Western civilization, the hundreds of millions, in fact the billions of people in all inhabited continents of the globe, North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia: Do you think that the Islamicists, the fundamentalists, those who believe in the necessity of worldwide Islam, attack the Jews and no more?

Do you feel they will leave Christians, Hindus, and Buddhists, to continue in their non-Islamic faith? Do the people of Sweden feel that they will successfully integrate more than 1,000,000 Muslim immigrants from the Middle East and Africa?

Do the people of Paris, London, or Berlin, truly believe that violent demonstrations against Israel and astounding rises in hate crimes against local Jews will leave them untouched? Will the Evangelicals of Brazil and the Catholics of Argentina support the barbarians or civilization? All of these people have benefited so much through Western civilization, but will they defend it now?

All these groups have been offered the gift of sight.

Let them not be deluded. Let them not be confused that the barbarism has been visited solely upon a small people in an obscure corner of a tiny state in the middle of one chaotic region of the world. And let them “send not to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee” (John Donne, 1624).
Brendan O'Neill: The absolution of Hamas
Is Hamas now getting its talking points from Harvard University radicals? Something’s going on.

On 7 October, the day of Hamas’s apocalyptic pogrom against the Jews of southern Israel, 34 student groups at Harvard rushed out an open letter absolving Hamas of guilt for the ongoing horror. We ‘hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence’, said the self-righteous mob from the leafy, luxurious, non-blood-spattered lawns of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Israel is ‘the only one to blame’ for what is happening today, they said (my emphasis).

Got that? Even as the neo-fascists of Hamas were still shooting, stabbing and burning alive hundreds of people for the offence of being Jews in Israel, privileged poseurs at Harvard were breezily decreeing that these monsters were not really guilty of the war crimes they were committing. Guilt laid with the victim. Israel was to blame.

Fast forward two weeks and Ghazi Hamad of Hamas’s political bureau was saying the same thing. Almost word for word. In an interview on Lebanese TV, Mr Hamad said ‘the existence of Israel is what causes all [the] pain, blood and tears. It is Israel, not us’. ‘We are the victims…’, he continued, and ‘therefore, nobody should blame us for the things we do’.

Shorter: Israel is the only one to blame. Sound familiar? We in Hamas might have slit the throats and incinerated the families, but Israel was entirely responsible for it. Ring any bells?

It is indistinguishable from what the preening Israel damners at Harvard said. Though at least the Hamas official waited a fortnight before monstrously blaming Israel for the racist barbarism visited on its people by his organisation – the Harvard lot were doing that before the worst anti-Jewish pogrom in 75 years was even over. You couldn’t ask for a more searing indictment of the academy than the fact that some of America’s cleverest kids at its most Ivy League of universities were quicker to make excuses for Hamas’s anti-Semitic slaughter than Hamas itself.

Of course, we cannot know if Mr Hamad actually read the terrorist apologetics penned by Harvard’s overeducated fools. (I wouldn’t be surprised, though – the letter made waves around the world and sparked a furious debate about who’s to blame for the bloodshed in the Middle East.) And yet it seems unquestionable to me that Hamad’s grotesque opportunism, his self-infantilising disavowal of responsibility for the heinous crimes committed by his own men, was influenced by the chatter of Western elites. The absolution of Hamas, the pardoning of it for its own pogrom, was enacted here before the same shameful utterances were made by Hamad.

It is time to ask ourselves if our woke elites are not just Hamas’s useful idiots, but its unofficial spindoctors. Not just excuse-makers for Islamist barbarism, but authors of the very justifications the Islamists offer up for their barbarism. Beyond the Harvard apologism, we’ve seen commentators ceaselessly provide ‘context’ for the October pogrom. ‘Israeli barbarism begets barbarism’, they snivellingly cry. 7 October was ‘a direct result of Israel’s apartheid regime’, say the Democratic Socialists of America. So not a direct result of Hamas’s own careful planning and execution, but of Israel’s temerity to exist. Your throat is to blame, not my knife. As a writer for Haaretz said, ‘It’s the context, stupid!’ has been the abject howl of far too many in the ‘global left’.
Ecstasy and Amnesia in the Gaza Strip
There has been a larger cause that has at least in part appropriated the anti-Israel cause the same way global jihad did the last time, the same way the Soviet bloc did the time before that, and the same way unrepentant fascists did the time before that. A global program of anti-colonialism and left identity politics has taken up the existence of Israel as the worst example of white, European colonialism on the planet, and the Palestinian cause as its rightful, justice-bringing nemesis. The result has been the same: an unfinished project of national liberation, which is solvable for pragmatists, is instead reframed as a cosmic struggle against an evil entity whose existence stands in the way of the path to justness.

If there was a specific moment when that cause helped kick the next catastrophe into motion, it was during a few fevered months of 2021, when every major human-rights group started issuing glossy reports accusing Israel of practicing apartheid.

The faulty reasoning, poor data, and circular research methods of these reports have been the subject of numerous other essays and won’t be the subject of this one. What’s important is the timing. The fact that so many organizations came up with portentous announcements about a threshold being crossed at almost the exact same time, without any apparent coordination among them, is telling. The legal status of the territories changed drastically when they came under Israeli occupation in 1967. Arguably it changed again with the creation of Israel’s civil administration there in the early 1980s. It certainly changed again radically with the implementation of the Oslo II agreement over the course of 1996-97. The freedom of action that the IDF granted itself at the end of the second intifada in Area A of the West Bank, which had been off limits to Israeli forces during the Oslo years, arguably constituted another legal change.

But nothing whatsoever changed in 2021, or the year before, or even the decade before. How then did so many reputable organizations discover a new legal category that Israel violated at the same time? No doubt some of their motivation emerged from the fear that Arab-Israeli normalization was going to continue and in so doing bury the Palestinian issue. Mostly, though, it demonstrates how much anti-Israel activism in the West is a social activity, a moral pose, always maneuvering under the twin shadows of Western imperialism and the Shoah, that requires periodic reaffirmations of faith. And nothing lightens the burden of imperialism and the Shoah simultaneously like imagining the victims of the latter as bearers of the sins of the former.

In this way, a national movement motivated less by a vision of its own liberation than by a vision of its enemy’s elimination received another global tailwind as toxic as the previous fascist, Soviet, and jihadist ones. The upshot has been the same. The three years preceding October 7 were a period of unbridled optimism among Palestinian intellectuals. Israel was rotting, losing its legitimacy, and couldn’t possibly sustain itself, they knew. An outbreak of violence in May 2021 led many of them to conclude that a comprehensive Palestinian struggle against the Zionist entity in all its manifestations was finally taking form. The violence came to be seen as part of a “unity intifada,” whereby rockets from Gaza, low-intensity combat with settlers and the IDF in the West Bank, and a week of Jewish-Arab rioting inside Israeli cities were all seen as separate fronts of the same fight—Palestinian natives rebelling however they could against an Israeli colonial imposition.

It was a horrible misreading of the situation, not least because of the evolving relationship between Arabs and Jews in Israel. Less than two months after the May events, an independent Arab party joined a coalition government for the first time in Israel’s history, a clear sign that Israel was not rotting or losing legitimacy, a sign reinforced by those growing ties between Israel and other Arab nations around the same time. Ultimately, what appeared to Palestinians to be an emerging global consensus that Israel was an essential evil—not a state or a society whose actions might arouse controversy and opposition but an irredeemably malignant presence on the international scene whose food and language were themselves tainted by its sin—was as dazzling, and ultimately blinding, as previous attempts from outside the region and its conflicts to jam the Palestinian cause into a rigid ideological framework.

In other words, the righteousness and unfounded certainty of victory preceding 1947, 1967, and 2000 were back, and the scene was set for widespread ecstasy when, on the morning of October 7, the partisans of the Palestinian cause worldwide woke up to the news of the Hamas atrocity in southern Israel. In the immediacy of overwhelming passion that momentarily cast aside all thoughts of consequences, they exulted. Examples are so numerous and will likely be so familiar to most readers by now that they need not be described at length. There was the Hamas fighter who called his parents from Israel to tell them “Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews!” to which both parents wept with joy and pride. There was the history professor at Cornell who shouted, “It was exhilarating, it was energizing,” at a celebratory march the next week. There was the British Palestinian woman who crowed on TV that “Nothing will ever be able to take back this moment, this moment of triumph, this moment of resistance, this moment of surprise, this moment of humiliation on behalf of the Zionist entity—nothing ever.” These emotions were further inflamed by the name of the Hamas operation, “al-Aqsa Flood,” geared to bring in the emotions relating to Jerusalem, even though the fighting was nowhere close to it; for the same reason, Hamas leaders promoted propaganda claiming that Israel was planning to destroy the mosque.

And yet passion subsides and ecstasy is fleeting. The exultation spurred by the October 7 massacre is already fading, and the now-familiar sense of loss kicking in. At the moment, the war is contained in Gaza, though no one can guarantee that it won’t spread to the West Bank and beyond. The price for Israel will be high, and Israel is far from blameless in the string of events that brought it about. But the price for the Palestinians will be much, much higher, and much of what will be lost will be unrecoverable. And if the present generation follows its predecessors and transforms that loss into a story of victimization that papers over the defeat and the excitement that preceded it, odds are good that one day yet another in the chain of Palestinian disasters will appear again.


Danny Danon: The UN secretary-general should retract or resign
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres took office two years into my tenure as Israel’s Ambassador to the U.N. Over the years I got to know him well. We talked on many occasions, worked together and navigated some challenging situations in the Middle East.

I respected Guterres for his extensive experience in diplomacy. It seemed to me at the time that he had a nuanced and insightful understanding of the complex and volatile situation in the Middle East. He remained committed to promoting dialogue and peaceful resolutions to conflicts.

However, Guterres’s Oct. 24 speech to the U.N. Security Council on Israel’s war against Hamas, followed by an attempted clarification the following day, was reprehensible. There can be no justification for his claims that the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre “did not happen in a vacuum,” clearly implying Israeli responsibility for the savage and inhuman attack on its own citizens.

Guterres appeared unaware of the fact that there is no justification for beheading babies, raping young girls, torturing children and their parents, tearing babies from their mothers’ wombs, burning children and the elderly alive, mutilating and dismembering bodies and desecrating the dead—no justification whatsoever.

While Gutteres admitted, “Nothing can justify the deliberate killing, injuring and kidnapping of civilians—or the launching of rockets against civilian targets,” he then turned to justifying precisely that, not only with his “vacuum” comment, but also with lengthy remarks on the “56 years of suffocating occupation” the Palestinians have supposedly suffered.

I would like to suggest to the secretary-general that the facts may have escaped his attention. Israel does not occupy Gaza in any way. Israel exited Gaza in 2005 in the hope that it would help promote peace and tens of thousands of Israeli citizens were removed.
How Israel Can Respond Ethically to Hamas
Contemporary military ethics are built around one central principle: Keep noncombatants out of warfare as much as possible. This principle imposes two major rules on fighting parties: Do not target noncombatants, and do not entangle your troops with the civilian population, so that it remains clear who are combatants and who are noncombatants. The 1977 Additional Protocol I (AP/1) to the Geneva Conventions lays out these principles:

51 (2): The civilian population as such, as well as individual civilians, shall not be the object of attack. Acts or threats of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population are prohibited.

51 (7): The presence or movements of the civilian population or individual civilians shall not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations, in particular in attempts to shield military objectives from attacks or to shield, favour or impede military operations.

The authors of these laws thought they would minimize the bloody costs of war, as long as everyone played by the rules. The success of the international law project depends on reciprocity.

In practice, however, terrorist groups such as Hamas fight with one basic principle: Kill as many people as possible. Hamas’s only exception has been to seize people as hostages instead. In the unprovoked October 7 attack on Israel that killed 1,400 people, Hamas also raped women, beheaded children, kidnapped grandparents, and shot rockets indiscriminately at Israeli cities. Hamas continues to offer no access to the prisoners of war they are holding in Gaza as hostages.

While their recent actions were particularly brutal, the complete disregard for military ethics is nothing new. For many years, Hamas has committed war crimes that include fighting from civilian areas and utilizing protected buildings including schools and hospitals as “human shields.” To kill Israelis, Hamas takes cover behind its own people, making it very difficult to distinguish between the terrorists and the noncombatants they are allegedly fighting for. Given Hamas’s disregard for civilian lives, Israeli and Palestinian alike, one might argue that Israel should be able to attack Hamas without regard to killing noncombatants, too.

This is a particularly important question because Hamas’s tactics are not unique. As international-law expert Michael Schmitt documents, all terrorist and guerrilla groups from around the world — Iraq, Lebanon, Bosnia, Gaza, El Salvador, Somalia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Chechnya — treat international law as irrelevant to their actions while also using it as shield to protect them from counterattacks, crying “war crimes” when civilians die as an inevitable result of how they defend themselves.
Phyllis Chesler: What Jews must do to fight back
From a psychological and practical point of view, here’s what the students must learn. I am now addressing them directly:

First, you must understand that you have suddenly been drafted into a war. You must think like soldiers. In particular, you must accept that it does not matter if your enemies do not like or love you. A soldier’s only duty is to fight to win.

Second, you have to learn not to take anything personally. If you are cursed as “colonialists, racists, Islamophobes, capitalists,” it has nothing to do with you, who you are or anything that you’ve done. Jew hatred/antisemitism/anti-Zionism is a sickness, a virus, a plague that has afflicted Jew-haters. The shame is theirs, not yours.

Third, you must accept the fact that, despite exceptions, most people, both young and old, tend to be cowards and conformists. If you stand up to evil, if you stand up for Israel, you will lose friends, teachers, employers, even family members who may strongly disagree with you. This is the price that telling this particular truth exacts.

Fourth, you—or your parents or Jewish and Christian organizations—must fund armed guards to keep each one of you safe, just as synagogues and Jewish centers require armed guards. More importantly, you must spend at least a year or more learning Krav Maga or some other form of self-defense.

Believe it or not, if civilian haters, even in mobs, know they you know how to fight, they may decide to leave you alone. It’s happened many times before in Jewish history.

Fifth, it is important that you find like-minded students and meet regularly both in person and on the internet.

You have no choice. Please realize that the sight of Jewish blood excites and thrills the Jew-haters. The sight of Jews fighting back brilliantly and methodically, as the IDF is currently doing, enrages the Jew-haters.

We are not going to win any popularity contests no matter what we do. Like Golda Mair, I say: Let’s survive. Let’s win. We are in that kind of battle.

I must thank trauma psychiatrist Dr. Larry Amsel, with whom I discussed these ideas. You will hear more from both of us soon.
The 'Massacre' Coming to Judea and Samaria | The Caroline Glick Show In-Focus The Biden administration warns against settler violence, the IDF goes soft against West Bank violence and the terror coming to Judea and Sumeria.

Melanie Phillips: Goodbye to all that
The picture below surely has to be one of the saddest and most telling illustrations of the state of Britain today.


What you are looking at is a table set up on Saturday in London’s Charing Cross station, where people could buy poppies to be worn as a lapel pin in the days leading up to Remembrance Weekend in a few days’ time. That’s when the country commemorates British service members who have died in two world wars and other military conflicts since the onset of World War I.

The group selling the poppies are typical of the British people for whom this weekend is a solemn rite of collective memory, an affirmation of the supreme sacrifice that so many have made to defend the nation and its values.

But surrounding them are the ugly faces of the new Britain, those who have poured onto the streets in their tens of thousands to bellow their support for the annihilation of Israel and the murder of Israeli Jews — people who call the genocide of Israeli Jews “resistance” and Israel’s resistance “genocide”.

Yesterday saw the fourth of these weekly demonstrations, which have brought out Muslim-led mobs onto the streets of Britain and other western countries exulting at the barbaric massacre of 1400 Israelis on October 7 and demanding a ceasefire — not by Hamas, which continues its war crimes by firing volleys of rockets every day intended to murder more Israelis, but by Israel which is waging war in Gaza to destroy Hamas and end its criminal onslaught.

The image of those people surrounding the poppy sellers, whose own faces are a picture of pained stoicism, is as obscene as it is frightening. For those demonstrators stand for the barbarism and depravity that the defenders of Britain who are being commemorated by the poppy died in the attempt to defeat.

Indeed, on one of the posters behind the poppy sellers but out of shot in this picture was a swastika, the Nazi symbol which these mobs are so grotesquely trying to pin on the Jewish nation that arose from the ashes of the Holocaust.
Gerald M. Steinberg: Human Rights Watch: Destructive Agenda, Token Balance
As the propaganda campaign accelerated, HRW revived and amplified proven themes, such as the use of the term ‘collective punishment’ to demonise Israeli counterterror operations in Gaza. On 22 Octobe, this was the theme in Bashi’s ABC News interview, and on 23 October, among many others, and in an HRW media statement headlined ‘Israel Still Blocking Aid to Civilians in Gaza: Collective Punishment of Palestinians is a War Crime’.

In dozens of interviews and posts, Bashi and Shakir repeat accusations that Israel is withholding fuel to the civilians in Gaza, erasing the clear evidence that Hamas has stolen and stockpiled over one million litres, as well as food and water supplies. On 13 Octobe, Sari Bashi published an article in The New York Review titled ‘Nowhere to Go in Gaza‘ claiming, ‘The evacuation announcement risks mass forced displacement … in what amounts to a form of collective punishment—itself a war crime…’ This and others articles erase the reality that Hamas has used the Gaza population, estimated at between 1.5 and 2 million, as human shields to protect its arsenal of 30,000 rockets and vast underground tunnel system from destruction. For Bashi and HRW, this arsenal – all made from stolen humanitarian aid – is erased, as are the systematic war crimes on which Hamas’ strategy is based.

Tokenism and the sham appearance of artificial balance to fool uninformed virtue-signaling donors and journalists is another part of HRW’s soft-power war strategy. On October 18, HRW gave wide publicity to a video and accompanying statement (‘Israel/Palestine: Videos of Hamas-Led Attacks Verified’) claiming, ‘Human Rights Watch has verified four videos from the 7 October 2023 attacks by Hamas-led gunmen, showing three incidents of deliberate killings.’ With hundreds, if not thousands of far more comprehensive sources, HRW’s investment of resources into ostensibly ‘verifying’ three (!) incidents is the barest of fig leaves. And true to form, both the video and statement repeated the mantra that ‘for decades,’ Israel ‘has systematically repressed Palestinians.’ (For 20 years, a token appearance of balance has been a standard and successful feature in HRW’s strategy. In November 2002, they published a one-off report on Palestinian suicide bombing, after months of pressure from donors. Afterwards, this publication was barely mentioned while HRW led UN and other international campaigns condemning Israel for ‘war crimes’ in the IDF Jenin counterterror operation and called for bringing Israelis to trial before the International Criminal Court. Similar token reports were published on the 2006 Lebanon war, and in 2017, when the team of Bashi and Shakir published a one-off statement on two Israeli citizens with mental illness who crossed into Gaza and were held by Hamas.)

Perhaps at some point, journalists, government officials, HRW’s donors, and others will recognize the false accusations and obvious manipulation through token balance, and stop providing the organisation with platforms and funding to promote this destructive agenda. And perhaps the dissonance between HRW’s carefully manicured image of promoting morality and the blatant immorality of the organization’s Israel agenda will become too obvious to ignore. But until this happens, HRW will continue to lead the soft-power warfare that accompanies Hamas’ brutality.
By the Numbers: Israel’s Campaign Demonstrates Incomprehensible Restraint
As of last week, Israel has struck over 11,000 terror-related targets in Gaza since October 7, according to a new report. In a separate report, the Gaza Ministry of Health claimed that Israeli strikes have killed over 8,500 people in Gaza during the same period. Even if the Gaza Ministry of Health can be trusted (and it cannot), this would mean that Israel has killed, on average, less than one person per strike, and that more than 20% of Israel’s strikes have killed no people at all. And we don’t know how many of those killed were Hamas terrorists vs civilians.

For an army with firepower and accuracy capable of killing hundreds or even thousands in a single strike, these figures represent an absolutely astonishing degree of precision and restraint.

The Massacre of October 7
Hamas, the US-designated terror organization that controls Gaza, perpetrated the largest massacre of Jewish life since the Holocaust on October 7, 2023 — including massacring and burning some 40 babies, raping Israeli women, murdering over 1,400 people, almost all civilians, and kidnapping hundreds of hostages. Many of the hostages are women and the elderly, and 30 are children and babies.

In an action reminiscent of America’s targeting of Al Qaeda after 9/11, Israel has responded with a military campaign, to free the hostages, but more important, to remove Hamas and stop its promise to carry out similar massacres of Israeli civilians and destroy the Jewish State.

As the campaign proceeds, there has been much discussion of how many civilian casualties have occurred on “both sides.” Yet developing an accurate count is not as easy as it seems.

The Gaza Ministry of Health is intentionally misleading
The Gaza Ministry of Health, the sole source of information on Palestinian casualties, is not an independent health agency, but merely an arm of Hamas — a terror organization designated on the same international lists as ISIS and Al-Qaeda.

An unusually frank report last week by the Associated Press revealed that “the [Gaza] ministry [of health] never distinguishes between civilians and combatants.” The report further states that “The Health Ministry doesn’t report how Palestinians were killed, whether from Israeli airstrikes and artillery barrages or other means, like errant Palestinian rocket fire. It describes all casualties as victims of ‘Israeli aggression.’”
Muslim America’s antisemitism problem
A very large part of the Muslim American community has collapsed into antisemitism. This is a terrible thing to have to say, but if recent polls are accurate—and they confirm the evidence of our eyes—then it must be said.

A week and a half after Hamas’s Oct. 7 rampage of war crimes, long past the time when the scope and nature of the atrocities became clear to any thinking person, the Cygnal group conducted a poll showing that a decisive majority (57.5%) of Muslim Americans believe that the Hamas slaughter was either somewhat or decidedly justified.

This was mere statistical proof of what is in evidence in every major American city: Thousands of Muslim antisemites taking to the streets, shrieking their support for murdering as many Jews as humanly possible.

These spectacles have been matched with actual acts of physical violence, vandalism and intimidation, including one that involved a Muslim-American editor of the Harvard Law Review. There have also been numerous reports of Muslim American academics, politicians, educators, clerics and others engaging in apologetics for Hamas’s atrocities.

This is not to mention the major Muslim American political organizations and NGOs, many of which are spearheading the campaign to force an Israeli surrender to Hamas and defame Israel as a war criminal for defending itself. They and their political allies are now doing everything in their power to terrorize the Democratic Party and President Joe Biden into withdrawing their support for Israeli military action.

Several things, then, are now clear. First and most important, the majority of Muslim Americans hate Jews and support killing them. No other conclusion can be drawn, and the implications are obvious: Millions of Muslim Americans have embraced antisemitism and, as a result, have collapsed to a moral nadir unseen in the United States since the days of segregation and lynching.
Fauda creator: 'Everyone in Gaza knows Hamas HQ is under hospital'
Fauda creator Avi Issacharoff says it is a "known fact", even among children, that Hamas leaders have a headquarters under Gaza City’s Al-Shifa hospital – which is why he depicted this in a series of the Netflix show written five years ago.

Last week, Israel struck an ambulance convoy that it said was being used by Hamas outside Al-Shifa, Gaza's largest hospital. The attack resulted in 15 deaths and at least 60 wounded civilians, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent Society.

The IDF confirmed the strike saying the ambulance it hit was being "used by a Hamas terrorist cell in close proximity to their position in the battle zone".

It added: "A number of Hamas terrorist operatives were killed in the strike."

Issacharoff, an Arabic-speaking Israeli who wrote Fauda with former army friend Lior Raz about their experiences in an underground unit, has spoken about how Hamas is using the Gazan people as human shields during the war, and claimed the terror organisation wants them dead.

"The sad thing about all this is Hamas doesn’t care about their own people," Issacharoff said.

"They use them as human shields and you see that in Shifa Hospital. In the third series of Fauda, which we wrote in 2018, we showed the headquarters of the Hamas military wing being there.

"It was something the IDF knew about – every kid in Gaza knows that under Shifa there is a Hamas headquarters. But no one talks about it which is why we decided to show it."
October 7 Has Forced People to Choose Sides
Oct. 7 changed everything. A terror invasion massacred 1,400 Israelis - including babies, infants, women, families and the elderly. The sheer magnitude of these atrocities has forced everyone to pay attention.

It leaves no room for nuance. The cruelty overflows with clarity. The unprecedented magnitude of Oct. 7 has been a clarifying moment. It has shown us people's true colors.

Our revulsion at those blaming Israel has zero nuance. Our revulsion at those who have been wishy-washy in their condemnation of the barbaric slaughter of 1,400 Jews has zero nuance. Oct. 7 is a day when so many Jews lost their innocence.

The trauma of losing 1,400 Jewish souls and then seeing much of the world rise up against Jews will not easily go away. It is now hardwired in our collective memory.

We don't know where this war is going, but we know where the Jews are going. The great majority of Jews have picked a side. Their own.
Telegraph Editorial: Free Palestinians from Hamas
The full, murderous horror of Oct. 7 continues to emerge, in accounts of genocidal savagery that are almost beyond imagining. Yet facing what happened, in all its monstrosity, is the only way to see Hamas for what it is, and why it must be destroyed.

Hamas places its genocidal goal to destroy Israel above all else, including the Palestinian people. Its refusal to accept Israel's right to exist and hence its rejection of any two-state solution has brought nothing but misery and eliminated any hope of peace.

Some argue that Israel's campaign to remove Hamas from power in Gaza cannot succeed. That it will only make the situation worse by radicalizing a new generation. Yet this fails to see how Hamas indoctrination brewed the wild hatred which slaughtered 1,400 people. The leaders of Hamas are proud of their atrocities. The end of Hamas is the only possible path back to the negotiating table.

An ideology committed to abominable cruelty in the name of territorial conquest and genocide cannot be reasoned with. As with Japan and Nazi Germany in World War II, it simply needs to be defeated.
The Rot in the Universities Runs Deep, and Is Spreading to Elementary and Secondary Schools
On October 10, an instructor at Stanford University, in two separate classes, singled out Jewish and Israeli students as colonizers and oppressors. The instructor was suspended, but Peter Berkowitz asks how it is possible that, in our age of sensitivity, one of America’s most prestigious universities hired someone who thought such conduct would be acceptable:

The suspended Stanford instructor’s proselytizing reflects a powerful pedagogical creed within the American educational system. Throughout the nation, teachers indoctrinate students to believe that the crucial categories for understanding America in particular and Western civilization in general are variations on the theme of oppressor and oppressed: colonizer and colonized, subjugator and subjugated, villain and victim.

These vulgar binaries force students to place themselves—and cram the rest of humanity—into one of two mutually antagonistic camps. They obviate the need to study the evidence of science, the intricacies of history, the subtleties of literature, and the arguments of philosophy because they render the good guys and the bad guys fixed and unalterable. And they foster ignorance, self-righteousness, and intolerance.

Unfortunately, the fostering of intolerance within the American education system extends well beyond universities; . . . in the name of inclusivity and under the rubric of ethnic studies, K-12 schools teach students to understand life in America primarily in terms of oppression manufactured by America’s privileged to maintain their power. For instance, . . . James Logan High School in California offered a course in ethnic studies and social justice that aimed “to teach students to challenge and criticize ‘power, oppression, capitalism, white supremacy, imperialism, colonialism.’”

These curricula always rank Jews as among the oppressor, not the oppressed.
UNRWA's Terrorists
I have spoken with dozens of reporters. Not one journalist has even glanced at the new UNRWA textbooks that glorify the murder of Jews.

Not one reporter has seen our movies that depict Arab children trained to murder Jews in cold blood.

I and my colleagues who work to document lethal incitement to massacre Jews predicted the current war.

On Sept. 27, I brought four Arabic-fluent journalists with whom we have worked for 25 years to brief Israel intelligence on how UNRWA indoctrinates a new generation to murder Jews in a cold and systematic manner, devoid of emotion.

That is precisely what occurred on Oct. 7, when 3,000 highly trained and well-disciplined Palestinian Arab UNRWA terrorists traversed the porous Gaza fence and went on a killing spree, attacking anyone in their path—men, women, children and babies. Many of the UNRWA terrorists knew their victims by name.

This fact is worth reiterating: Testimonies showed that as the UNRWA attackers killed children, often in front of their parents, many of the killers knew each victim by name.

Our new movie will depict how UNRWA mesmerizes youngsters in Bethlehem and Jerusalem to engage in the kind of killing spree that the world witnessed on Oct. 7.

The world needs to know that UNRWA teaches murder.
Several UNRWA staffers praised Hamas’s October 7 massacres, report finds
Some members of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees have expressed praise for the atrocities committed by the Hamas terror group on October 7, according to a Monday report by the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se) organization.

The report details social media posts by numerous Gaza- and West Bank-based members of UNRWA, which provides welfare and humanitarian services for Palestinian refugees from the 1948 and 1967 wars and their descendants. The posts by staff members, including teachers and educational staff, expressed praise or approval of the October 7 onslaught, during which thousands of terrorists murdered 1,400 people in Israel, mostly civilians massacred amid brutal atrocities, and abducted at least 245 to the Gaza Strip.

IMPACT-se, an organization based in the UK and Israel, monitors education curricula around the world to determine whether they are in compliance with UNESCO standards on peace, tolerance and nonviolence.

The Monday report highlights comments by 14 UNRWA members, and examines the participation of UNRWA school graduates in terror attacks against Israeli civilians as well as the presence of antisemitic and jihadist content in textbooks used in UNRWA schools.

Among those UNRWA staff highlighted by the report were Ebrahim Al Azaiza, whose Facebook page says he works for UNRWA and lives in Gaza City.

On October 7, Al Azaiza posted a video showing cars burning following a rocket strike that hit an Israeli city, which he captioned with the words “What a splendid sight!” along with happy emojis and fire emojis.


Holocaust Survivor: Israel Must ‘Get Rid of’ Hamas to Prevent Genocide of Jews

Michael Savage Slams ‘Biggest Lie of Our Time’ on Palestine, Shows Continuous Jewish Presence in Israel Since 1900 BC

Michael Savage: How Long Have Jews Been In Israel?

Yusuf Islam’s Killer Performance
“My message today is to plead for an end to the bombing of innocent families, their homes, and especially the little children who make up half the number of the those who have been killed,. This is not a battle between equals. If we look at the attack on Oct. 7 comparing it to the scale of the vast military response, it is just beyond comparison. In Islam the protection of women and children and non-combatants is fundamental.”

That was Yusuf Islam, the British recording artist formerly known as Cat Stevens, known for hits such as “Morning has Broken.” Islam was addressing the “Great Palestine Meeting,” a massive pro-Hamas rally in Istanbul last Saturday.

“One hundred years have passed, and Turkey is now stronger than ever,” Islam told the cheering crowd. “Before this we had 600 years as the ultimate empire, and when Jerusalem was under your wings, it had peace for 400 years. Allahu Akbar. I say thank you to the people of Turkey and the leadership of Turkey, for taking the right stand on this issue, while many other countries, especially the so-called international community, is falling on the wrong side of justice, even assisting this genocide which we are witnessing.”

And so on from the former Cat Stevens, born Steven Demetre Georgiou in London in 1948, and who attributes his conversion to a reading of the Quran. “Islam is perfect,” the singer explains, “and if we imitate the conduct of the Holy Prophet (Sallallahu alayhi wa sallam) we will be successful.” Yusef Islam was successful at supporting the Iranian fatwa on Salman Rushdie.

The Satanic Verses author, “must be killed,” Islam said. “The Koran carries the death sentence. If someone defames the prophet, then he must die.” Remember, according to the recording artist, “Islam is perfect.” In 2020, Islam claimed, “I never supported the fatwa.” In 2001, he denounced the “indiscriminate terrorist attacks,” of 9/11, hoping to “reflect the feelings of all Muslims and people around the world,” but there was more to it.


Israel-Hamas War Proves America’s Ivy League Colleges Are Festering With Violent Antisemitism – Part One

Gil Troy: Harvard must fight educational malpractice, not just antisemitism

The events at Cornell are a microcosm of our society

Harvard Law Student Says Pal at Anti-Israel Protest Was Protecting Her From 'Aggressive' Jew

Organiser of pro-Palestine ‘f***k the Jews’ convoy planning new protest on Armistice Day

'War Criminals Work Here': Pro-Palestinian Activists Vandalize Israeli Company's Virginia Office

“Cornell really needs to get a handle on the poisonous ideology which has now inflicted campus”

GWU student told to leave Jewish star at home

Ivy League colleges no longer ‘safe places’ for Jews
Sky News host Rita Panahi warns Ivy League colleges are no longer “safe places” for Jewish people after a Harvard University student was mobbed by pro-Palestinian protesters.

American college campuses have become focal points for pro-Palestine demonstrations since Hamas’ attack on October 7.

Troubling video footage recently emerged showing a Harvard University student getting aggressively mobbed by pro-Palestinian demonstrators on the Ivy League campus.

“They are tolerating things that are absolutely indefensible,” she said.

“They weren’t just screaming shame into his face, they were physically stopping him from going where he wanted to go, they were blocking him, it was a physical action.”




NGO Monitor: Available Information on Funding for Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)

Tycoon Bill Ackman says he's 'lost confidence' in Harvard president Claudine Gay over college's anti-Semitism and says she'd never have parroted 'free speech' defense if students mocked George Floyd

The Hate for Jews at Sarah Lawrence Does Not End with Administrators; It Has Deeply Infected the Faculty as Well. Israeli satire show pokes fun at Western liberal support for Hamas

Repeat Performance: How the Media Failed to Learn the Lessons of 2014’s Operation Protective Edge

ABC’s ‘biased’ coverage on Israel-Hamas conflict sparks ‘dozens of complaints’
Sky News host Sharri Markson has criticised the ABC’s “biased” coverage on the Israeli-Hamas conflict.

ABC’s latest 'Behind the News' tried to explain the Israel and Hamas war to primary and high school students.

Ms Markson said there was only just “one mention of terrorism” in ABC’s coverage.

“That one-sided coverage has sparked dozens of complaints,” she said.

Ms Markson was joined by the Director of Policy Community Security Trust Dr Dave Rich to discuss the media’s coverage of the Israeli-Hamas conflict.


BBC NEWS FAILS TO TELL ALL ON RAFAH CROSSING RECLOSURE

MEDIA OUTLETS SANITISE LONDON HATE MARCH

SOCIAL MEDIA ‘INFLUENCERS’ AND NAZI ANALOGY IN BBC NEWS REPORTING

CNN: REPORTING PALESTINIAN GRIEF, OMITTING PALESTINIAN CELEBRATION OF MURDER

While Terrorists Tweet, I Was Censored for Telling the Truth About Islam

Deceived one of Spain's largest newspapers: "Israel recruited me as a mercenary. They pay me 3,900 euros." - Walla! Berenger

Advancing Israel-Saudi normalization hinges on defeating Hamas

Rep. Ritchie Torres: one of Israel's most stedfast defenders in U.S Congress
As U.S sees rise in antisemitism amid Israel-Hamas war, Rep. Ritchie Torres is still one of Israel's most stedfast defenders in Congress

'October 7th was a crime against the Jewish State, against humanity. So barbaric it can't be ignored, can't go unpunished... Israel has every right to do to Hamas what the U.S did to ISIS, Al-Qaeda in the 21st century, and what the U.S and its allies did to the Nazis in the 20th century. Israel has a moral obligation to rid the world of its terror,' he says




South Africa Recalls Diplomats From Israel to Assess Its Position

Labour Party's mutiny chaos deepens as 11 Burnley councillors RESIGN over Keir Starmer's Gaza ceasefire stance - including the council's leader

Israelis Gal Gadot, Guy Nattiv to Host Hollywood Screening of Uncensored Footage of Hamas Massacre

Over 200 Indian Bnei Menashe Jews join IDF's fight against Hamas

Bedouin family offers $1m. for info on terrorist who killed son

Can We Be Sure UK Aid Won't Help Hamas?
Along with the rest of the international community, we in Britain have been played for fools.

For decades, the West has been funneling billions into Gaza, despite the opacity of its expenditure.

In fact, much of the expenditure is far from opaque. Since 2014, Hamas has been building terror tunnels under its civilians worth hundreds of millions of dollars, with command centers beneath hospitals.

As we signed cheque after cheque, how much vetting work was being done to ensure Hamas couldn't take advantage to fund their rockets?

In our hubris, the international community gambled that economic security would win peace. This proved to be a devastating foreign policy miscalculation.

Hamas has been hiding in plain sight. In fact, it hasn't even been hiding. It has made no secret of its genocidal intentions. We have been propping up this system.
Settler leaders outraged after NYT reports US sets conditions on rifle sales

Egyptian Journalists: Hamas Is A Terror Organization Bent On Destroying Israel And The Jews; Its October 7 Attack Involved ISIS-Like War Crimes

Ahed Tamimi arrested after 'slaughter the Jews' post on Instagram

Lahav Harkov: Israel, U.S. Differ over Palestinian Authority's Future Role in Gaza
Discussing the Palestinian Authority's role in a post-Hamas Gaza, a senior Israeli official cautioned that "No one has any illusions about the Palestinians. The Palestinian Authority wants to destroy the Jewish state in stages and politically, and Hamas wants to do it violently and abruptly." Once Hamas is removed from Gaza, Israel must have "ultimate security control" over the Strip, a diplomatic source said Sunday.

U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken visited Ramallah on Sunday and said, "Palestinian voices have to be at the center" of shaping the future of Gaza. "The Palestinian Authority is the representative of those voices so it's important that it play a leading role."

The senior Israeli official referred to incitement against Jews and Israel in PA-sponsored media and textbooks, as well as the PA's payments to terrorists and their families. A new study from the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se) showed that at least 14 teachers and staff at schools run by UNRWA - the UN agency for Palestinian refugees - celebrated the Oct. 7 massacre on social media.

According to Lt.-Col. (res.) Maurice Hirsch, director of the Initiative for Palestinian Authority Accountability and Reform at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, the 100 terrorists who took part in the massacre and were captured by Israel received their first installment of a monthly payment of $365 at the end of October, an amount that will increase the longer they are in prison.

Hirsch said, "PA involvement, direct and indirect, in the Oct. 7 massacre was extensive. The constant indoctrination and brainwashing of the Palestinians to hate Israel and Israelis, the constant demonization of Israel and Israelis, and the outright incitement of violence and terror are all integral parts of PA policy...topped off with the huge terror reward payments, and finally the absence of any PA condemnation."
What does the ‘post-Hamas era’ look like?
Dr. Harel Chorev, Palestinian affairs expert at @DayanCenter tries to answer.
Plus - what is the future of the PA and why he’s not surprised Palestinians in the West Bank aren’t participating in the violence in large numbers


MEMRI: Online Animated Video Mocks October 7 Massacre Victims, Portrays Israelis As 'Pigs' Turned Into Minced Meat And Shawarma
"The Deer Took Over The Places That The Pigs Had Occupied From Them For Many Years; They Branded The Pigs ['Halal'], Loaded Them On Motorcycles, And Shipped Them In Their Boxer Shorts To Where [The Deer] Lived; Whoever Didn't Like It Was Trampled Underfoot And Turned Into Shawarma"

Narrator: "On October 7, 2023, at dawn, the pigs heard the sound of rockets on their way to some of the settlements that these pigs occupied, or plundered, from the deer, who are the original owners of this land. The pigs were terrified and did not understand what was going on, when all of a sudden, deer riding motorcycles came down from the sky. OMG! Motorcycles from the sky! Did we get wasted last night, or what? Before they could figure it out, they saw deer coming by sea, and then by sea, riding motorcycles and 4x4 vehicles. Hands up! What's going on, people? Is it Judgment Day, or what?"


PA: Murderers of Jews are innocent victims

“Allahu Akbar!” - West Bank schoolchildren rally in support for Hamas

Abbas’ advisor: Israel wants to take over Arab world

Abbas’ advisor: Israel is “the American arm in the region… preventing Arab world from progress”

Abbas’ advisor: Israel and US are carrying out a satanical plan that won’t stop with Gaza and Hamas

Hamas’ massacre on Israel was a “noteworthy, beautiful, and wonderful operation”



To What Extent Does Hamas Represent the Palestinians?
Jerusalem Center expert Brig.-Gen. (res.) Yossi Kuperwasser told the Jerusalem Center War Room zoom briefing on October 31, 2023:

We hear repeatedly from Western leaders including President Biden that Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people. I beg to differ. There's a big part of the Palestinian people that consider Hamas their representative, not only in Gaza but even in Judea and Samaria. Hamas represents a very important part of the Palestinian people. Many Gazan civilians followed Hamas operatives into Israel to loot and murder.

Fatah, the ruling party of the Palestinian Authority, has avoided elections for the last 18 years, since Hamas is likely to be victorious. Since the October 7 massacre, Hamas' support has grown in the West Bank from 44% to 58%. As evident on Arabic social media, the massacre was seen as an historic victory for Islam. Hatred for Israel and the Jews has kept Hamas popular.

Both Hamas and Fatah share the same narrative: the denial of a Jewish identity and an opposition to Zionism - Jewish sovereignty. Yet the West and the international community share a willful blindness in recognizing that Hamas represents a large part of the Palestinian population, and that Fatah's ideology is similar to that of Hamas.

Admitting this would mean the West must accept Israel's claims about the difficulty of making peace with the Palestinians.

Without demanding that the Palestinians change the Israel-negative narrative, not much will come out of Israel's expected victory in Gaza politically. Yet changing a narrative takes many years, at least a generation.

Without first priority given to this fundamental change, Israel will have to unwillingly govern Gaza for a long period.


PA police demand Abbas declare ‘confrontation’ with Israel

JPost Editorial: Nasrallah's speech shows he's still being cautious

After Nasrallah's Friday Speech, Israeli Military Sees Diminished Hizbullah Threat
"Everyone talks about the intensity of the air force attacks on Gaza," a senior Israeli security source said Friday.

"But the truth is that the force is only operating at 40% of its capabilities, because all eyes are on [Hizbullah leader] Nasrallah's north. If the northern arena ignites, Hizbullah will feel the full capability of the air force."

Hizbullah should know that Israel's capabilities have been significantly upgraded since the Second Lebanon War in 2006, he added.

A senior Israeli military source said that Nasrallah's Friday speech suggested that he was not willing to significantly up the ante of rocket attacks on Israeli targets.

"He apparently understood that this event was too big for him. The American presence here also helped," the source said, referring to the two U.S. aircraft carrier strike groups deployed in the Mediterranean.

The disagreements between Israel and the U.S. on the humanitarian issue in Gaza are not believed to be serious. Israel understands President Biden's domestic political needs.

Israeli forces have encircled Gaza City, the heart of the Hamas military command, and is operating within the city.

"The progress is better and faster than planned, but Hamas resistance is stubborn and difficult," a senior war cabinet source confirmed.

"We have sustained losses and will likely sustain more, but what we see now on the ground is what we said in advance: When the IDF exerts its full strength, there is no stopping it."

Fighting at the current level of intensity is expected to last one to two months.
MEMRI: Article In Qatari Daily: Israel's Demise Is A Divine Promise

Iran's Genocidal War Against the Jews

National Holocaust memorial legislation to be unveiled in King's Speech

Germans rename Anne Frank daycare centre to avoid upsetting immigrant children

How Books Looted by the Third Reich Made Their Way to Los Angeles

Montreal Suburb Proves Solidarity with Israel



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This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For 20 years and 40,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I've written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going.

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