Pages

▼

Monday, November 20, 2023

11/20 Links Pt2: Israeli women and girls were raped during Hamas attack. Where’s the outcry?; The Red Cross’s Gaza Scandal; Jihadi Journalism- an exposé

From Ian:

Israeli women and girls were raped during Hamas attack. Where’s the outcry?
Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy took a deep breath after warning the audience about the graphic horrors she was about to relate. Then she described just some of the overwhelming visual evidence that has emerged of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel: a young concert-goer, stripped from the waist down, frozen by rigor mortis into a spread-eagle position, her body partially burned. A young woman, similarly exposed in death, torn underwear hanging off one naked leg. Rape victims paraded through the streets of Gaza, blood gushing from between their legs.

The list went on. And on. Compiled from various sources — Hamas footage, first responders, workers who handle corpses, survivor accounts — these testimonials formed the basis of a webinar this week entitled, “The Unspeakable Terror: Gender-Based Violence on Oct. 7.” Organized by Jewish students at Harvard Medical, Dental, Law, and Business schools, it accrued more than 4,500 registrants and, in the days after, more than 20,000 viewers.

Why such great interest in the horrors perpetrated by Hamas against women and girls on Oct. 7? We believe it reflects the relative lack of attention until now to the brutal sexual and gender-based violence that took place as part of Hamas’s assaults.

Despite the circulation of the evidence Dr. Elkayam-Levy shared, worldwide organizations dedicated to women’s and human rights have stayed largely silent.

“The evidence is undeniable, yet we find ourselves fighting a dual battle,” said Elkayam-Levy, chair of the Israeli Civil Commission on Oct. 7th Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children. “One against these atrocities and another against global silence. And we see the same mechanism of denial that we recognize from individual rape.”

Others share her concern, and a petition calling on UN Women to address the crimes against Israeli women is taking on momentum, with more than 180,000 signatures; the hashtag #MeToo_UNless_UR_a_Jew has been trending on X.

As a Harvard School of Dental Medicine student who helped organize the event, and a Harvard Medical School associate professor of medicine and psychiatry who moderated that panel, we found hope in some of the experts’ reports: The act of rape, once widely accepted as part of the “spoils of war,” is now recognized as a prosecutable war crime, even a crime against humanity when it is perpetrated systematically.

But other statements were heartbreaking, including that most or all of Oct. 7 rape victims were either killed or abducted, and are thus not able to tell their stories to the world. Webinar participants said that the forensic evidence shows extreme sexual violence, including genital mutilation and assaults brutal enough to break pelvic bones. Some accounts describe abject sadism like cutting off a woman’s breast and tossing it as a plaything.
Seth Mandel: The Red Cross’s Gaza Scandal
Meanwhile, the ICRC had no qualms about portraying Israeli troops as a constant threat to medical personnel or would-be butchers, or going on Al Jazeera to remind the IDF of its obligations to the hospitals that Hamas was already misusing.

Indeed, the ICRC’s partnership with Shifa is a point of pride for the organization. In July, as Hamas was planning its Oct. 7 massacre, officials boasted of improvements to the hospital “implemented by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in partnership with the Ministry of Health in Gaza,” i.e. Hamas. “Hospitals stand at the heart of communities, and Al-Shifa Medical Complex Emergency Department is now beating strong and steady for Gaza,” crowed William Schomburg, a top ICRC Gaza official.

Back in that 2015 speech, Maurer faulted his organization for not balancing its private efforts with public pronunciations. But one difference between the Red Cross’s work in World War II and the current Gaza conflict is that in WWII, the ICRC’s record was mixed. Yes, it failed Jewish prisoners repeatedly. But it also facilitated communication to and from those prisoners, provided medical care to some of them, and was involved in prisoner exchanges—all actions for which it was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1944. The Nobel committee acknowledges now that the ICRC knew more about Nazi atrocities than it let on at the time, suggesting that the Red Cross’s full wartime record might not be deserving of such an award.

This time, it has let down the hostages in every way imaginable. At the end of its note on the 1944 Nobel Peace Prize, the committee writes: “The Red Cross has since expressed regret for this suppression of the facts.”

How long will it take them to come clean this time, and what will it require to ensure there is no repeat of the ICRC’s Gaza disaster?
Brendan O'Neill: Al-Shifa Hospital and the pathological distrust of Israel
Where did these crimes take place? Al-Shifa. Hamas used the hospital, ‘including the outpatients’ clinic area’, to ‘detain, interrogate, torture and otherwise ill-treat suspects, even as other parts of the hospital continued to function as a medical centre’, said Amnesty. Got that? The exact thing Israel accuses Hamas of doing was already discovered by Amnesty years ago. A former Fatah official who was ‘seriously assaulted’ in his home by Hamas’s henchmen told Amnesty he refused to go to al-Shifa for treatment because ‘any member of Fatah or the [Palestinian Authority] going there would end up with worse injuries’. We know our woke elites won’t listen to Israelis, but maybe they’ll listen to Palestinians, many of whom have known for years that al-Shifa isn’t safe.

Or maybe they’ll believe PBS, the esteemed broadcaster in the US. In 2009, PBS spoke with a senior doctor at al-Shifa who said Hamas terrorists are ‘hiding either in the basement or in a separate underground area underneath the hospital’, and they are ‘aware that they are putting civilians in harm’s way’. Or perhaps they’ll believe the huge numbers of al-Shifa’s doctors who went on strike for a month in 2007 to protest against Hamas’s grotesque persecution of Fatah-aligned medics. The striking doctors were calling on Hamas to ‘leave politics out of the health system’ and to ‘stop using its armed forces against medical personnel’. Does that sound like a movement that respects the sanctity of medical spaces?

The proof of Hamas’s criminal misuse of al-Shifa as a base for torture, murder and warmongering is abundant. Palestinian dissidents have pointed to it. Amnesty has documented the Room 101-style horrors committed by Hamas’s ‘Internal Security officers’ there. Israel has shown us weapons, trucks, tunnels, hostages. Anyone still saying ‘Hmm’ following almost two decades’ worth of proof that Hamas exploits al-Shifa has clearly left the realm of reason and entered the hell of dogma. This is not scepticism, it’s denialism. It is not a noble hunt for ‘the truth’ of war – it’s the sickness of post-truth thinking, where nothing as trifling as evidence can ever be allowed to interfere with one’s ideological bias. Which in this case is that Israel is evil and always lies.

It isn’t hard to work out why so many in the woke elites, from CNN to the influencer left, are clinging for dear life to the lie that al-Shifa was a normal hospital. It’s because they have staked so much on this battle in the Israel-Hamas war. Israel’s conquering of al-Shifa is, in their eyes, the ‘war crime’ that proves beyond doubt that Israel is uniquely malevolent among the nations of Earth, and that they, in contrast, are righteous for opposing it. Every piece of evidence that points to the true war crime being Hamas’s, this fascistic movement that is even willing to hide lethal weaponry among the sick and the newborn and elderly, is a blow not just to their infantile narrative about Israel-Palestine, but also to their own moral prestige, their own cultural authority to determine what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. They experience Israel’s assault on Hamas’s base at al-Shifa as an assault on their own reputations – and they are right to.

Scepticism? Please. In instantly disbelieving everything Israel says, these people implicitly buy everything Hamas says. Their Israelophobia translates into a tangible, objective acceptance of Hamas’s own lies about Hamas’s own horrors. The woke love to call themselves anti-fascists, but it’s a strange anti-fascist that gives moral succour to fascists.
LT. COL. Richard Hecht: We Tried to Tell Them About Shifa Hospital
What We’ve Discovered (So Far)
On November 14th, the first IDF soldiers entered the Shifa hospital complex. We went in slowly and methodically, not wanting to disturb ongoing medical care, as I mentioned in my Saturday newsletter. These first forces included medical teams and Arabic speakers, who had specified training to prepare for this complex and sensitive environment.

The mission was in keeping with our goals in this war - dismantling Hamas’ capabilities and bringing our hostages home.

But the cost was high.

It meant giving up on the element of surprise. It meant giving up some serious military edges, like our aerial superiority. Most importantly - and perhaps most misunderstood - is that we never thought there would be a smoking gun as soon as we entered the hospital complex.

Hamas had weeks to bury the evidence.

We are - carefully - unearthing the evidence of Hamas’ abuse. Finding the closed-circuit video cameras proving that hostages were brought to the hospital by men wielding guns and machetes. Exploring the underground tunnel - over 50 meters (164 feet) and counting, fortified with explosion proof doors. Finding proof that CPL Noa Marciano was taken to the hospital…and murdered.

But this takes time.

We’ve revealed a lot of information but unearthing two decades of buildup and three weeks of coverups takes time. As we reveal more and more, I’m increasingly asking a question that I remember Adam Grant asking:
A sign of intellect is the ability to change your mind in the face of new facts. A mark of wisdom is refusing to let the fear of admitting you were wrong stop you from getting it right.

How’s this for changing opinion?

The Lesson Going Forward
Honestly, this is an easy one.

It’s increasingly clear that our assertion that Hamas uses hospitals as civilians shields - not just Shifa - is true. As more countries around the world face terrorists that don’t share our values, don’t share the sacredness with which we hold hospitals, and are willing to exploit those values, we must remember a few things:

1. Same-sideness doesn’t always work. Israel is a liberal democracy. Hamas is a recognized terrorist organization. Giving equal weight to claims from both sides - one with a functional check and balance systems and another that knowingly butchers children in a surprise attack - is just plain wrong.

2, Evidence takes time. Court cases drag on for months or years because the burden of evidence is exactly that - a burden. Terrorist organizations flatly deny news in seconds; militaries with integrity take time. The media must adapt to this new reality. Otherwise the terrorists will win every single time, laughing at our values as they do.


Prof. Richard Landes: Jihadi Journalism- an exposé
Right at the beginning of the Oslo Jihad (so far, a 23-year long war), a BBC correspondent, Fayad abu Shamala, proclaimed at a Hamas rally in Gaza on May 6, 2001—that is five months into the horrific suicide terror campaign—that “journalists and media organizations [are] waging the campaign shoulder-to-shoulder together with the Palestinian people.” When the Israeli government showed the tape to the BBC, they responded: “Fayad’s remarks were made in a private capacity. His reports have always matched the best standards of balance required by the BBC.” Some years later, evidence emerged that abu Shamala was a member of Hamas. Were the BBC aware of the humiliating irony in their statement, a reflection not of abu Shamala’s high standards but their abysmally low ones? Or did they believe their own PR?

In the meantime, the Western press corps, especially in coverage of what was narrowly declared the “Israel-Palestine conflict,” took in large numbers of journalists whose Arab or Islamic media agenda overruled any commitment to ethical or professional standards. Even minimal ones. For them, as for their apologists in the West, this is all “a means of communication… the weapons of the weak.”

Al Jazeera embodies this combination of high technical production standards and “patriotic” war-propaganda-as-news. Despite its strong agenda in favor of the Muslim Brotherhood and its Palestinian Arab branch Hamas, the watchdog Media Bias/Fact Check described them having a “slight to moderate liberal [sic] bias… [their] straight news reporting… a minimal bias.” And yet, in 2008, when Israel released Samir Kuntar, imprisoned in 1985 for the Nahariya massacre in which he smashed the head of a four-year-old Israeli girl against a rock, he not only received a hero’s welcome in Lebanon, but Al Jazeera “journalists” in their Beirut office held a birthday party for him. Hamas gave them an award for their “highly professional coverage of Gaza,” for “demonstrat[ing] their belonging to the cause of the oppressed Palestinian people” and their “high level of nationalism.” When Israel threatened to expel Al Jazeera for their widely knownviolations of professional journalism, the guardians of press freedom objected.

Indeed, in the early years of the Oslo Jihad (2000–2002), there was a systemic partisanship in Palestinian Arab ournalism that insiders knew about but kept from their audiences—a “public secret.” Everyone in the news media world knew it, but they would never say it publicly.

I was let in on this secret for a moment, sitting with Charles Enderlin and watching the uncut rushes that he got from his cameraman of 12 years, Talal abu Rahmah, that ended with the 59 seconds capturing the “death” sequence of Muhammad al-Durah (“le petit Mohamed”) on September 30, 2000. Enderlin, a French-Israeli senior correspondent for France2, had edited those last 59 seconds to put together his famous broadcast: “the child, target of fire coming from the Israeli position… is dead.”

What we saw were repeated efforts to stage a plausible scene that the Western news agencies could use as background to the tale of Palestinian Arab valiance and victimhood they tirelessly recited. At one particularly obvious fake (which Enderlin later cut before showing the footage to the court), I asked Enderlin, “Why so much faking?” “Oh, they do that all the time. It’s a cultural thing.” When I asked him then, how did he know they didn’t fake the al-Durah story, he responded, “Oh, they couldn’t fool me.”

It was this experience that inspired the term “Pallywood.”
Andrew Pessin: Silence is Indeed Complicity
Is there any other identity group about which it would be acceptable to justify their mass slaughter by providing “context,” insisting on “nuance,” wanting to see the “other side”?

Academics are supposed to be in the subtlety and nuance business, and indeed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is complex, but that is not what’s going on here. The issue at hand really is simple: either those raped and murdered babies and families and grandmothers deserved that fate, or they did not. Any “but,” any “explanation,” any “context,” any “complication,” any “both sides,” any “all lives matter” (as many of those tepid university statements exhibited) blames the victim for their slaughter and amounts to saying they deserved it—because, in the end, because no other explanation is possible, they must believe that every Jew is evil, and that the medieval Christians and modern Nazis and contemporary Hamasniks have it right.

Anything less than outright unqualified condemnation of this act is a signal to your Jewish colleagues, peers, and students, that in fact their lives do not matter. The tepidity and the silence may be marginally better than the “Intifada!” and “Resistance by any means necessary!” and “Death to the Jews!” chants heard on all too many campuses, but they signify exactly the same thing.

Here is one other neat trick, pointing again to the same conclusion. Many instantly responded to the onset of the Israeli response by calling for de-escalation and ceasefire, by condemning genocide. Beautiful, but here’s the problem. Wasn’t Hamas’s mass sadistic slaughter just a little bit of an escalation? And part of an explicit campaign of genocide? How does one come out for de-escalation and ceasefire only after the Jew-slaughterers have finished their slaughter, and without even acknowledging that slaughter? How does one come out against genocide only after the openly genocidal group has finished its round of genocidal activity, and do so without even acknowledging that genocidal activity? Think about the message that sends to Jewish community members: we have no objection when you are attacked, but we condemn you when you respond. Or maybe: genocide is dreadful, except when it’s perpetrated against Jews.

Not to mention that there is a whole other mode of de-escalation and genocide prevention that these folks entirely overlook. They could demand that Hamas return all the hostages immediately and surrender, and then the war is over, instantly.

Make that condemnation of the Hamas slaughter, full stop, unconditional—anything else and the conclusion is inescapable: they just want Jews dead.

Hamas and their fans, I obviously believe, are profoundly evil, but again they at least tell you who they are. But the academics—the professors, the administrators, now a full generation of students and young alumni—the people who justify that violence, who create entire ideologies that fertilize the ground by painting the victim as the evil one, deserving of this extermination, are at least equally evil. They may not pull the trigger but they create the conditions that make the trigger pulling justifiable and therefore feasible, and do so in a massively deceptive way. The entire “Anti-Zionism” campaign of the past two decades was just that, a wolf in sheep’s clothing: take the eternal hatred of the Jew and wrap it up as “political critique,” or “human rights activism,” so that it will be allowed to enter the academic arena, where it will seep into the brains of unsuspecting students. In the past decade the “wokeness” and “diversity” program added fuel to this fire, turning Western Jews into privileged white supremacist oppressors of people of color while their Israeli Jewish siblings oppress the Palestinians of color, so that in the name of all the higher virtues it became acceptable and then obligatory to hate the Jews, all of the Jews, who now represent the ultimate evil in their 21st-century eyes. That is precisely what the medieval Christians and the modern Nazis did, and what those academic “progressives” and “Anti-Zionists” who have been propagating these vicious lies for many years under their various jargony names have been doing.

There is no evil like the academic who provides the ideological foundation for the extermination of a people and insists that you call that program “virtue.”

“Death to the Jews!” at least has the decency to be explicit.

But the tepidity, and the silence from administration, from the diversity administrators, from the faculty, on so many other campuses—says the same thing.

They really want us dead.
Why are young people sympathising with Hamas?
This is not just down to poor history teaching. When young people are confronted with facts about the Holocaust, many appear to be suspicious and question whether what they are hearing is true. It emerged last week that an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor, who had been using TikTok to inform young people about the horrors he experienced, quit the platform after being bombarded with anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.

Some hold social-media platforms responsible for the rise in anti-Semitism, with TikTok coming in for particular blame recently. Last week, comedian Sacha Baron Cohen accused TikTok of ‘creating the biggest anti-Semitic movement since the Nazis’. There are now growing calls for it to be banned. But social media only reflects and amplifies the existing prejudices of users. Rather than simply calling for censorship, we need to ask why so many young people seem happy to remain ignorant about the Holocaust or turn abusive when confronted with the facts of what happened. Why is it that TikTok has become a force for promoting anti-Semitism, rather than opposition to Hamas?

The pernicious influence of identity politics, with its simplistic (and often false) racialisation of Jewish people as ‘white’ and therefore privileged, is now widely recognised as a serious problem. This is often combined with an erroneous reading of history that treats Palestinians as ‘colonised’ victims and Hamas as an anti-imperialist resistance movement whose actions should never be criticised.

Why have so many young people embraced this dangerous, identitarian worldview? Why is it that rather than feeling loyalty to their nation, or to a Judeo-Christian tradition more broadly, young people seem more likely to express profound contempt for Western history and society in the present? The current resurgence of interest in Osama bin Laden’s ‘Letter to America’ provides horrible evidence of Gen Z’s alienation from Western values.

Over recent decades, older generations have failed to inspire in children a positive vision of the West. Worse, education has often actively cultivated feelings of shame towards nations such as the UK, the US and Australia. Take the teaching of history. Far from promoting a positive account of the past – or even an objective or balanced account of the past – children today are often taught that everything that happened in the past was sinful. Both the school curriculum and popular children’s television programmes damn British history as an unbroken story of slavery, colonialism and countless other acts of barbarism. This is a story without heroes or acts of redemption.

Western societies have created a generation of young people who are antagonistic to their own national history and profoundly alienated from Judeo-Christian culture. Many are willfully ignorant of the Holocaust and some even prefer to side with terrorists over slaughtered Israeli citizens. We need to be far more concerned about the numbers of young people happy to don a keffiyeh and turn a blind eye to anti-Semitism.
Phyllis Chesler: We are all hostages
Every Jew, both inside and outside of Israel, has been held hostage for 40 days. In the Holy Land, Israelis—Jews, Christians, Muslims and Druze—have been bombed, kidnapped, tortured, murdered, forced into bomb shelters and cast into internal exile.

Because Israel has dared to fight back, Jews around the world are being “punished” for Israel’s alleged “crimes.” Jews everywhere are being verbally harassed, demonized, threatened, physically attacked and sometimes murdered. Visibly Jewish students no longer feel safe in their classrooms, at gatherings or on the street in Europe, the United States, Canada and beyond.

The Jewish state was created to protect Jews from their 2,000-year-old vulnerability to pogroms and genocide while in exile. The existence of that very state is now being used as the excuse for a monstrous “intifada” against all Jews in the West. It is driven by the lethal propaganda against Israel that has been disseminated for at least 60 years. It may take that long to drain this swamp of lies.

But, as ever, this is far bigger than the Jews.

Right now, more than one billion Westerners are being surrounded on their streets and in the media by the war cries of “Allahu Akbar.” Everyone, everywhere has been held psychologically and often physically hostage by the “globalized jihad.”

Traffic has been stalled. Visible Jews have been physically attacked. Anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian rallies, marchers and random ranting individuals have frightened or attacked passengers on buses and trains with their aggressive propaganda.

When will the West wake up to the fact that we and our way of life are under siege?

From both a jihadist and Western leftist point of view, killing the Jews will redeem the West’s sins of racism, imperialism, colonialism and slavery. Indoctrinated Westerners refuse to acknowledge that the West is not the only or even the major sinner in world history.
Amid documented sexual violence, a new civil commission aims to hold Oct. 7 perpetrators responsible
As the Israel Police sifts through the massive quantity of evidence from Hamas’ massacre of Israelis last month, it’s working to build the case for charges of rape against many of the terrorists. Meanwhile, the founders of the Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas Against Women, outraged at the silence from international women’s and humanitarian organizations, are documenting cases of Hamas’ use of sexual violence as a weapon against Israelis.

A compilation of footage of Hamas atrocities committed on Oct. 7 shown to journalists by the Israeli government includes extensive indications of sexual violence: Shani Louk sprawled, wearing only underwear, her legs bent at unnatural angles, across the back of a pickup truck. Naama Levy, a 19-year-old IDF soldier, pulled out of the trunk of a car in Gaza, with a large bloodstain across the seat of her sweatpants, her hands zip-tied behind her back, as men whoop and shout, “Allahu Akbar.” A woman on the ground, naked from the waist down, legs splayed, bullet holes in her head. Another dead woman with her underwear around her ankles. The face of a woman, her eyes open but seeing nothing, her face charred, gagged by what appeared to be underwear.

A woman identified by Israeli Police officers only as S, who survived the massacre at the Nova Festival by pretending to be dead in a pile of corpses, described witnessing the gang rape and torture of a woman in testimony viewed by Jewish Insider.

“They bent a woman over and I understand he’s raping her, and then passing her to someone else,” S said. “She was alive. She was standing on her feet and bleeding from the back. I saw the situation. He pulled her by the hair – she had long hair. She wasn’t dressed.”

“He sliced off her breast and played with it,” S recounted.

Then, she said, “someone really penetrated her, and shot her in the head…He didn’t pick up his pants. He shot while he was still inside.”

Oz Davidian, a farmer who rescued about 120 partygoers from the Nova festival, where Hamas terrorists killed hundreds, also witnessed instances of sexual assault during the hours he drove between the festival area and safety, saying, “They shot in every direction. One was raping, the other shooting, continuing to attack, protecting him, continuing to shoot and watching his friend rape.”

A ZAKA volunteer found the body of a woman with “a knife stuck in her vagina and all her internal organs removed” in Kibbutz Be’eri, and at the Nova party, he found “piles of women. Their clothing was torn on the upper part, but their bottoms were completely naked…When you look closer at their heads, you saw a single shot to the brain of each.”

Shari, a volunteer helping identify bodies at the IDF’s Shura morgue, said she saw that “women have been raped, children through elderly women have been raped, forcible entry to the point that bones were broken.”

This is only a fraction of the evidence of mass sexual violence by Hamas being gathered by both police and the civil commission.

“In over 38 years in Israel’s security forces, I never ever saw such cruelty,” Israel Police Chief Kobi Shabtai said in a press briefing this week. “There were sadistic sexual acts, cutting off limbs…A woman’s stomach was cut open and her baby taken out. I could not believe such things would happen in our time.”

After Oct. 7, most of the authorities’ focus was on collecting and identifying the bodies in the mass casualty event, and crime scene investigation protocols could not be used in most cases.

Rape kits were not administered in most cases, because they can only be used to take DNA evidence within 48 hours, and at that point, the western Negev was “still an active combat zone,” Israel Police international spokesman Dean Elsdunne explained at the briefing.
United Nations slammed for silence over Hamas rapes, mutilation and murder of Israeli women, critics say
Women’s rights groups and officials in Israel who have been working tirelessly for the past six weeks to document cases of rape and gender-based atrocities carried out by Hamas terrorists during their mass, brutal terror attack in Israel on Oct. 7., say the United Nations is ignoring them.

They say they have also shared much of this evidence, some of it horrifyingly graphic and all of it extremely intimate, with the United Nations and groups that protect and empower women.

The response: Silence.

"We’ve sent letters and shared graphic documentation," Sarah Weiss Maudi, a senior diplomat and legal adviser in Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told Fox News Digital. "Their silence is so deafening that it’s sickening," she said.

Weiss Maudi, who last year became the first Israeli representative to serve as a senior adviser to the president of the 77th Session of the U.N. General Assembly in New York, said that U.N. bodies, particularly U.N. Women, whose specific mandate is to champion the rights of women regardless of race or ethnicity, have simply refused to acknowledge that atrocities were committed against Israeli women – and young girls – despite much of it filmed by Hamas, and other Palestinian terrorists from Gaza, themselves.

More than 1,200 people were killed in the mass terror attack, which took place in more than 20 Israeli communities, army bases, and a mass music festival. A further 240 individuals, including women and young children, were kidnapped back to Gaza. While no victims of sexual crimes have yet to come forward directly – mainly because they were murdered, kidnapped, or are still reeling from the trauma, the Israel Police said last week that it had collected some 60,000 videos, including footage from the terrorists, victims, first responders, and CCTV, showing these gruesome crimes. Some disturbing eyewitness testimonies of gang rapes and other sexual acts have also been documented, the police said.

"What I don’t understand is that we provided very graphic and descriptive evidence of rapes, including gang rapes and the remains of semen on young girls, it was not good enough for the U.N.," said Weiss Maudi. "Yet data provided by the Hamas Ministry of Health is accepted and quoted without any verification at all," she added.

On the U.N. Women’s website, the only reference to Israel since the Oct. 7 massacre deals with the "devastating impact of the crisis in Gaza on women and girls," where Hamas’ Ministry of Health estimates that more than 11,200 people have been killed, of whom some 4,506 are said to be children and 3,027 women.
The dangers behind the UN's silence toward Israel
The United Nations' double standard toward Israel has never been more dangerous.

The guidelines for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), which reports on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, "state that human suffering must be addressed wherever it is found." That is why their silence in response to Hamas' devastating attack on Israel is so concerning.

The OCHA's office for the "Occupied Palestinian Territories (OCHA-OPT)" claims to provide "information management services to the humanitarian community." What the international community doesn't know is that the OCHA-OPT continually underreports and ignores Palestinian violence against Israelis. They refuse to hold Hamas accountable for violence against Israelis. The OCHA-OPT's record is even more concerning because of the volume of reports they produce.

A brief glance at the front page of the OCHA-OPT website makes their bias obvious. The source that OCHA-OPT uses for Palestinians' deaths is Gaza's Ministry of Health, which is controlled by Hamas and historically unreliable. Even more egregious, they include the barbaric terrorists that committed pogroms on Israeli soil among the Palestinian casualties, briefly referring to the terrorists, in small text, as "people involved in the 7 October attack."

These are not isolated occurrences. UN reports in recent years showed that violent attacks by Palestinian civilians against Israelis in the West Bank were consistently higher than attacks by Israeli civilians against Palestinians. Perhaps that is why the UN stopped including attacks against Israeli civilians in their reports to the security council after June 2022, while continuing to present the number of attacks against Palestinians. It is likely not a coincidence that a wave of terrorist attacks against Israelis began in March 2022.

After Israel was attacked on October 7, it rightfully decided that Hamas' rule must come to an end. Since Hamas took power in Gaza in 2007, Israel has been subjected to repeated attacks, which have been ignored or downplayed by the OCHA-OPT. When Israel responded with aerial bombardment and limited ground invasions, all aimed at Hamas targets, the OCHA-OPT was quick to supply reports without context, and containing blatant misinformation. They have continued to do so since October 7. It is clear that the OCHA-OPT has no interest in preventing Hamas from taking lives.

Since the massacre on October 7, OCHA-OPT has not published a single report or statement detailing the horrors perpetrated against Israelis. They have instead launched a misguided and harmful campaign detailing the war in Gaza without any context. Israel's pleas for Palestinians to leave the conflict zone have been condemned, while reports that Hamas has prevented civilians who want to leave from doing so have been ignored.


The sinister rise of the Islamo-left
Is Hamas a terrorist group? This was the question posed to former UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn by Piers Morgan on his Monday evening TalkTV show. It wasn’t a difficult question. Corbyn was being invited to condemn a group that had raped, tortured and slaughtered hundreds upon hundreds of Israelis just over a month ago, on 7 October.

Yet Corbyn couldn’t do it. Morgan asked the same question no fewer than 15 times. Each time, Corbyn, growing ever more irascible, avoided answering. He preferred instead to witter on about needing to ‘start a process that leads to a ceasefire’. His programming just wouldn’t allow him to respond. He was in the grip of the political equivalent of ‘computer says no’. (To be fair, Corbyn has now referred to Hamas as a ‘terrorist group’ in an article for Tribune, a full four days after refusing to do so on TalkTV, and a full seven years after referring to the group as ‘friends‘ at a public meeting.)

Corbyn’s shocking reluctance, when challenged by Morgan, to call out Hamas for what it is – a violently repressive Islamist group committed to the annihilation of Israel and Jews – is not just a personal failing. It is also the failing of much of what passes for the left in general today, from Labour’s Corbynista fringe to bourgeois academic ‘theorists’ to the hard-left activists organising those interminable ‘pro-Palestine’ demos. They all labour under the same delusion as Corbyn – namely, that Islamist groups like Hamas are at the vanguard of the global resistance to the West. And that Israel and its Western allies are inherently evil.

This is what needs to be interrogated here. Not Corbyn’s absurdist performance on Piers Morgan Uncensored. But the broader leftist milieu that enabled Corbyn’s performance. A milieu that now cleaves so closely to Islamism that it actually sees its regressive, violent antipathy to modernity as progressive. Indeed, a milieu among which there have even been some willing to hail Hamas’s pogrom and declare 7 October a ‘day of celebration’.

The roots of this moral and political degeneration run deep. Most of the blame lies with the left’s abandonment of class politics in favour of identity politics. This wasn’t deliberate exactly. It was primarily a response to the political defeats endured by the British working class in the 1980s, followed by the collapse of Communism abroad. By the 1990s, some on the left, disoriented and disillusioned, were turning away from – and increasingly turning against – the working class. In its place, they were starting to champion particular identity groups and to campaign around identitarian issues.

It was at this point in the 1990s that the seeds of today’s unholy alliance between sections of the left and Islamism were sown. From the 1970s onwards, the British state’s multicultural policies, which gave cash and power to self-proclaimed ‘community representatives’, had already started to politicise Islam as a distinct ethno-religious identity. Faith, hitherto a private and personal affair, was effectively being turned into a principal form of public and political self-definition. This incipient Muslim identity politics was given a shot in the arm by the Iranian revolution in 1979 before it fully exploded, a decade later, during the Salman Rushdie affair.

What made Muslim identity politics particularly appealing to certain sections of a disoriented left was that it seemed to map on to their historic support for Palestinians’ right to self-determination. As a result, it didn’t take much for some leftists to start to seek common cause with Islamism, the most radical form of Muslim identity politics. So, as the 1990s progressed, many leftists were increasingly prepared to overlook the dark, reactionary heart of Islamism in the interests of the global struggle against Western imperialism.
Michael R. Bloomberg: Hamas' Barbarity Heightens the Crisis in Higher Education
The barbaric attack by Hamas against Israel - the intentional slaughter of defenseless civilians, including children and babies, and the taking of hostages - should have been a unifying moment for America. Shamefully, it has become a wake-up call about a crisis in higher education.

It has been painful to watch students at elite colleges implicitly or explicitly endorse Hamas' attack. It's clear they never learned the lesson of 9/11: Intentionally targeting civilians for slaughter is inexcusable no matter the political circumstances. One can support the Palestinian people and still denounce the intentional slaughter of civilians.

For years, college presidents have allowed their campuses to become bastions of intolerance, by permitting students to shout down the voices of others. They have condoned "trigger warnings" that shield students from difficult ideas. And they have created "safe spaces" that discourage or exclude opposing views. College presidents have also allowed campuses to become institutions of conformity. It is no surprise that support for terrorism, dressed in the language of social justice, has emerged from this environment.

No student should ever feel physically intimidated or unsafe going to or speaking in class, as many Jewish students have lately. Students can chant slogans, exposing their inability to communicate in ways that college students should be capable of, but they can't issue violent threats or disrupt others' studies. Any student who runs afoul of those basic principles should be thrown out of school.
The way out of the campus conundrum
Legally, schools do not have to wait for a disruption to occur: they can ban potentially disruptive expression if they can “reasonably forecast” that the speech in question would disrupt school discipline or operation, or if it would violate the rights of other students. In Melton v. Young, for instance, the court ruled in favor of school officials who prohibited the wearing of a Confederate flag jacket because it was reasonable to assume that it would be disruptive in an environment of heightened racial tension. Cheering on the slaughter as victims’ bodies are still being recovered — announcing solidarity with this “resistance” movement, who uses rape and torture and murder as “legitimate” tools in an “armed struggle” — is certainly no less likely to cause a disruption than a jacket.

It is also worth recalling that under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, any university that receives federal funding (the overwhelming majority of them do) has an affirmative legal obligation to protect their Jewish students — even from other student groups. Per the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights’ guidance, speech crosses over from protected territory into harassing verbal conduct (i.e. outside of the First Amendment) when it is “sufficiently severe, pervasive, or persistent so as to interfere with or limit the ability of an individual to participate in or benefit from the services, activities, or privileges provided by a [university].”

Universities can protect speech, even hateful speech, but use both common sense and the relevant case law to know where to draw the line. This is the standard practice that donors, advocates, students and alumni should demand.

As a model for what this might look like, Brandeis University recently became the first school in the country to demonstrate real leadership and throw Students for Justice in Palestine off campus. The administration noted that the decision was not made lightly and cited numerous categories of verbal conduct mentioned above that fall outside of protected First Amendment expression and are “otherwise directly incompatible with the functioning of the University.” As President Ronald D. Liebowitz explained, “In no way does this violate higher education’s deep and enduring commitment to free speech. With the focus on creating an environment for exchanging ideas freely for the purposes of challenging one’s limited views, freedom of speech rightly understood demands also the responsibility to uphold community standards against the incitement of violence and harassment, and free of intimidation.”

Other presidents need the legal and moral clarity to follow Liebowitz’s lead. Those calling for change should articulate what that change is, and institutions changing their policies should be clear on how this new formula protects, rather than punishes, actual protected free speech.

Congratulations to Brandeis for leading by example, and may many other schools follow suit.
The Legal Justification for the Raid on Shifa Hospital
Hospitals are granted "special protection" under the laws of war due to their humanitarian role. This special protection may be removed if a party to the conflict makes use of medical assets outside of their humanitarian function and exploits them for combat purposes.

This includes situations in which a hospital is used as a headquarters, a hiding place for fighters, a base for launching attacks, an observation post to transmit information of military value, or an ammunition repository - all uses attributed to Hamas in Shifa Hospital. As a result, Shifa lost its immunity and became a legitimate military target for attack.

To remove the special protection of a hospital, the laws of war require the attacking party to provide due warning to stop the misuse and a reasonable time for the warning to be heeded. In recent weeks, Israel has publicly warned against the misuse by Hamas of Shifa hospital and enabled ample time to stop this misuse. In addition, Israel provided medical equipment and other supplies, including incubators, baby food, oxygen, and fuel, as well as means to evacuate patients.

Unfortunately, the international community's response plays into the hands of Hamas, which seeks to pressure Israel to cease its attacks and thus limit Israel's ability to dismantle the Hamas military infrastructure. As such, it provides Hamas with an incentive to continue operating out of hospitals and use civilians as human shields, while turning the laws of war into weapons against those who respect them. This undermines the primary aim of these laws - to protect civilians during war.
The World Must Recognize Antisemites for What They Are
Underlying the anti-Israel Palestinian propaganda that is now thriving around the world is espousal of the ethnic cleansing of Jews from this region. It's not about a return to the 1967 lines, but the annihilation of the Jewish national home and the expulsion of Jews from this place.

Anyone who doesn't recognize that the Jewish people everywhere are under a racist attack; or who looks for underlying reasons for the heinous crimes committed by Hamas; or who tries to minimize or even outright deny some of the horrors of Oct. 7, is collaborating, consciously or unwittingly, with an antisemitic assault. Anyone refusing to see Hamas as a barbaric organization that committed crimes against humankind itself is collaborating with an antisemitic attack.

Anyone denying the right of a nation to defend itself after an attack, the cruelty of which cannot be expressed in words, with the people who perpetrated it vowing to repeat it at the first opportunity; anyone who fails to distinguish between the way the IDF conducts itself in Gaza and the way Hamas treated its victims, is collaborating with an antisemitic attack.

There is an unconscious racist expectation in the West that Palestinians are not bound by what is expected of any human being, to recoil with horror from a sadistic massacre and come out forcefully against a murderous and barbaric culture.
What Comes "the Day After"?
As we have been told over and over since the war began, "something has changed" in Israel. What the residents of the Gaza envelope communities need more than anything is a renewed feeling of confidence in their country, built on the assurance of personal safety and security.

In many ways, Fatah and the PA it dominates are ideological clones of Hamas. Both have rejected and denied Jewish history, both continue to claim title to the entire Land of Israel, both glorify and celebrate the murder of Israelis, and both turn a blind eye to a culture of hate based on teaching children that violence is an acceptable means of "liberation." Palestinian children are still educated to reject Israel's existence and to honor and glorify terrorists. The U.S. apparently wants the PA that underwrites this educational system to govern a post-war Gaza.

Many Israelis now see who their neighbors are, what those neighbors have been taught, what they believe and what they are prepared to do to realize their dream of "freeing" Palestine "from the river to the sea." For many Israelis, the PA does not need to be "revitalized" and brought back to life. It needs to be dismantled and replaced.
The Soviet roots of Abbas's long record of Holocaust denial
Mahmoud Abbas's long record of Holocaust denial & distortion relies on age-old tropes. Yet the conspiracy's modern day iteration, where 'Jew' is swapped for 'Zionist,' hails from Soviet Russia, couched in a language progressives find irresistible, historian Izabella Tabarovsky tells i24NEWS' Laura Cellier.


Bassam Tawil: Palestinians: 'Extreme' Support for Terrorist Group Hamas, Israel's Destruction
A public opinion poll published on November 14 showed that 75% of Palestinians support Hamas's murder spree, including rape and beheadings, as opposed to only 13% who disapprove.

Surprisingly, the poll found that support for Hamas and its "military operation" is even higher in the West Bank, where Abbas's Palestinian Authority is based, than in the Gaza Strip.

If such a large number of Palestinians in the West Bank support the murder of Israelis and Hamas, it is safe to assume that a new "Palestinian state" would be controlled by Hamas or another genocidal, antisemitic terror group.

Another, but less-surprising, result of the poll is that 80% of the Palestinians reject both the "one-state" and "two-state" solutions, and instead demand all the territory, between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea – in short, the entire State of Israel within any borders.

That a majority of Palestinians want to replace Israel with an Iran-backed terror state also shows that the Biden administration and most European governments are engaging in extreme self-deception when they talk about the need to promote the concept of a "two-state solution."

How can any rational person talk about a "two-state solution" when a majority of Palestinians believe there is nothing wrong with burning, beheading and raping Jews, or baking a Jewish baby to death in an oven?

The results of the poll confirm what most Arabs and Muslims already know: that the only solution most Palestinians are willing to accept is one that leads to the murder of all Jews and the destruction of Israel. It remains to be seen whether the latest Palestinian slaughter of Jews serves to awaken the Biden administration and the Europeans to this inconvenient, uncomfortable fact.
Palestinians from Gaza who escaped to Europe condemn horrors of life under Hamas

Israel recalls envoy to South Africa after Pretoria calls for Netanyahu arrest warrant

Jewish Lawmakers Slam 'Unsafe' California Dem Convention After Anti-Israel Protesters Shut Down Events

Fresh Off Anti-Semitism Censure, Tlaib Speaks at Pro-Hamas Ceasefire Rally

PreOccupiedTerritory: Man Whose Politics Overlap With Fringe Jewish Group Decides Only They Practice REAL Judaism (satire) Newly Elected Argentine President Javier Milei Says He Will Visit Israel in Advance of Inauguration

100 Jewish young men and women make ‘aliyah’ to enlist in IDF

Israel moves to strip Hamas affiliates’ residency status

MEMRI: Hamas Threatens To Repeat October 7 Attack In Or From West Bank

PMW: PA calls for unity with Hamas: “Our arms and hearts are open” to Hamas

PLO official: “No Palestinian will condemn” massacre of Israel on Oct. 7, Hamas and Fatah “together in struggle until [Israel] disappears”
Official PA TV host: “[Israeli PM Netanyahu] said that there will be no PA [ruling Gaza] whose President didn’t condemn what happened to the Israelis. That’s what Netanyahu said regarding Oct. 7 [2023] (i.e., Hamas’ massacre of Israelis).”

Head of the PLO Political and National Guidance Commission and PA Security Forces Spokesperson Talal Dweikat: “Not just His Honor President Mahmoud Abbas. They will not find [one] Palestinian who will make a decision like this and condemn what happened on Oct. 7… Currently the [Hamas-Fatah] rift in the Palestinian mindset is already behind us. Today we are all united against this [Israeli] aggression, and the occupation and all those attempting to break the Palestinian unity will be unable to succeed with these plans… We will continue together in our struggle at all levels until this occupation disappears, and until a Palestinian boy and girl wave the flag of Palestine from the minarets, walls, and churches in Jerusalem.”
[Official PA TV, Nov. 12, 2023]


Israel - “the occupation” of “75 years” “will come to an end”
Official PA TV host: “We have sacrificed hundreds of thousands of Martyrs, wounded, and prisoners on this path that is adorned with all kinds of resolve and adherence to the Palestinian land for more than 75 years. This occupation, Israel, will come to an end, regardless of how long it takes.”
[Official PA TV, Nov. 13, 2023]

Hamas war on Israel October 2023 - At least 1,200 Israelis, including over 1,000 civilians, were murdered and over 4,800 wounded, in addition to at least 244 (including 5 later released or liberated, 1 born in captivity, and 2 found murdered) who were abducted into the Gaza Strip, in a Hamas terror war that began when approximately 3,000 Hamas terrorists broke through Israel's security fence at the Gaza Strip border and launched a surprise attack, taking control of several Israeli towns and attacking a music festival on the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, which fell on the Sabbath, Oct. 7, 2023. During the massacre the terrorists tortured, raped, shot, beheaded, and burned their victims alive, murdering entire families and leaving at least 21 children without parents. Hamas terrorists also fired at least 5,000 rockets at Israeli population centers. In response, Israel launched Operation Iron Swords to counter the Hamas terror threat. Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon joined Hamas' terror war starting from the following day, attacking Israel from the north. Occasional rocket launches and shootings continued from Lebanon throughout the war.




PMW: Hamas’ threats to “cut off heads,” slit throats,” and “slaughter every Jew on the planet” in 2019 were ignored

“The Israelis need to return to the lands they came from… Israel is a foreign element"
Official PA TV commentator Iyad Abu Zneit: “We [Palestinians] are first of all Canaanites, and therefore we have been in this land for many years... The Israelis are the ones who need to return to the lands they came from, lands throughout the world. Israel by its very nature is a foreign element. They established a state and afterwards brought residents to it.”
[Official PA TV, Nov. 14, 2023]


Top PA official: Hamas are the PA’s “brothers” according to “rule of Palestinian unity”
Head of Civil Affairs in the PA Hussein Al-Sheikh: “Currently, when [spilling] Palestinian blood is deemed permissible, brothers should not be angry at each other. This is a basic rule of Palestinian unity, cohesion, and mutual support... Yes, we had contacts with the brothers in the Hamas Movement before Oct. 7, [2023] (i.e., Hamas’ massacre of Israel) and after Oct. 7… We must reach an agreement, and we have tried again and again over many years to convene all the Palestinians under the flag of the PLO, its political fundamentals, and its vision regarding managing the conflict with Israel and [mobilizing] the international community to the side of our people’ struggle, until the occupation (i.e., Israel) is removed from our land and our homeland. Therefore, our arms are still open [to Hamas], and our hearts are open to all dialogue that will lead in the end to the unity of the Palestinian people and its forces.”
[Al-Arabiya TV (Saudi Arabia), X (Twitter) account, Nov. 12, 2023]

Hussein Al-Sheikh also serves as PLO Executive Committee Secretary, Head of the PLO Negotiations Affairs Department, and Fatah Central Committee member.


Fatah official in Holland proud of Hamas terrorists
Fatah Secretary in Holland Zaid Tyam: “Our people in the Gaza Strip and our people in Palestine made our heads touch the clouds. I tell you, this blood is not spilled in vain. Greetings to the prisoners, and with Allah’s help, freedom is near Allah willing…. Greetings to every Palestinian mother, to every mother of a Martyr, to every Martyr. We all bow in honor and appreciation to this lofty people,”
[Official PA TV, Nov. 7, 2023]

Hamas war on Israel October 2023 - At least 1,200 Israelis, including over 1,000 civilians, were murdered and over 4,800 wounded, in addition to at least 243 Israelis (including 5 later released or liberated) who were abducted into the Gaza Strip, in a Hamas terror war that began when approximately 3,000 Hamas terrorists broke through Israel's security fence at the Gaza Strip border and launched a surprise attack, taking control of several Israeli towns and attacking a music festival on the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, which fell on the Sabbath, Oct. 7, 2023. During the massacre the terrorists tortured, raped, shot, beheaded, and burned their victims alive, murdering entire families and leaving at least 21 children without parents. Hamas terrorists also fired at least 5,000 rockets at Israeli population centers. In response, Israel launched Operation Iron Swords to counter the Hamas terror threat. Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon joined Hamas' terror war starting from the following day, attacking Israel from the north. Occasional rocket launches and shootings continued from Lebanon throughout the war.




You can’t beat anti-Semitism with ‘diversity’ training

'This Was In Fact a Victory': Inside an Ivy League Student Group's Private Response to Hamas's October Attack

UNC Professor Doubles Down, Continues to Explain and Justify Hamas Massacre

US Jewish students hiding their identity amid safety fears reaches 37%

'Glaring hypocrisy': Cornell Jewish student testifies on college

Poster-tearing reminiscent of time when universities shook hands with Nazis

USC suspends professor who called for Hamas ‘murderers’ to be killed



2019: Study shows most supporters of ‘Palestine’ at UC Berkeley can’t find it on a map

Congress probes Princeton University over professor's alleged ties to Iranian regime

No, Bin Laden did not strike America to free Palestine

Open Letter From Artists Calls For Release Of All Palestinian Terrorists From Israeli Jails & Denies Israel’s Right to Exist

BBC is 'institutionally antisemitic', says corporation's former director of television

BBC’S FACT CHECK DEPARTMENT ROOTS FOR HAMAS CASUALTY FIGURES

DAMN THE EVIDENCE: AP’S HUSHED TONES ON HAMAS

Washington Post Turns Israel Into #1 Child Killer Based on Faulty Statistics

SKY NEWS JOURNO SPREADS LIE ABOUT ALL ‘AL-SHIFA ICU PATIENTS DYING’

SKY NEWS OMITS HAMAS AFFILIATION OF SLAIN PALESTINIAN TEEN

WHERE DID THE BBC’S BOWEN GET HIS ‘SECURITY GUARDS AND KALASHNIKOVS’ CLAIM?

Rehashing Discredited Theory, Le Devoir Column Claims Jews Don't Originate In Israel

Articles In Dawson College Newspaper Whitewash Hamas & Accept The Group’s Claims

PreOccupiedTerritory: Aid Orgs Warn Of Low Supply Of ‘PRESS’ Vests For Hamas Personnel (satire)

MEMRI: Documents Allegedly Reveal 2010 Agreement Between Then French President Sarkozy And Then Qatari Crown Prince Tamim Bin Hamad, In Which Qatar Pledged To Pay Sarkozy 300 Million Euros

MEMRI: Deputy Secretary-General Of Hizbullah Sheikh Naim Qassem: Advance Knowledge Of The October 7 Attack Wasn't Important To Us; Hizbullah’s Participation Is An Integral Part Of The Second Stage Of The War

Iran Unveils New Fattah II Hypersonic Missile

50 US mayors commit to a 10-point plan to combat antisemitism

Michigan home of Rahm Emanuel vandalized with antisemitic graffiti

YouTuber targeted antisemitic abuse at Jewish woman during livestream

Germany arrests suspected antisemite who threatened to murder Jews

NBA Star Kyrie Irving Wears Palestinian Keffiyeh in Post-Game Press Conference Artists aim to raise awareness about hostages in Gaza
i24NEWS' Erica Jackson takes us behind the scenes to speak to the artists responsible for this initiative and their hopes of meeting the hostages in person when they return.




Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!
 

 

at