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Friday, November 24, 2023

11/24 Links Pt2: Andrew Roberts: What Makes Hamas Worse Than the Nazis; There Is No Peacetime Hamas; All the anti-Israel bias fit to print; HRW took millions from Qatar

From Ian:

Andrew Roberts: What Makes Hamas Worse Than the Nazis
In Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Daniel Goldhagen notes how "Hitler opted for genocide at the first moment that the policy became practical. The moment that the opportunity existed for the only Final Solution that was final, Hitler seized the opportunity to bring about his ideal of a world forever freed of Jewry and made the leap to genocide." This came in 1941 when both Poland and the western USSR were under his control. (Over half of all Europe’s Jews lived in the Soviet Union then.) "Demonological racial antisemitism was the motive force of the eliminationist program," Goldhagen adds, "pushing it to its logical genocidal conclusion once German military prowess succeeded in creating appropriate conditions."

Yet Hamas embarked on its genocidal attack when it only had southern Israel under its control for a few hours, and thus when it knew that the Israeli response would be instantaneous and devastating. Unlike the Nazis, who hoped that their murders could be hidden by the fog of war and complete territorial domination, Hamas grasped at their window of opportunity in the full knowledge that they would be punished for it, and soon. Whereas the Nazis assumed they would win the war and thus would never have to face retribution for their crimes, Hamas knew it was only a matter of hours away, yet still they launched their attack, caring nothing for the effect on ordinary Gazans. Their lust for torturing and murdering Jews was therefore even more powerful than the Nazis’, who waited until the front line had pushed forward before sending in the Einsatzkommando to wipe out Polish and Russian Jewish communities.

Toward the end of the war, senior Nazis like Heinrich Himmler and Ernst Kaltenbrunner tried to exchange Jews for cash, exposing how fundamentally cynical and corrupt they were, but also how they were willing to put greed over the killing impulse. Hamas, by contrast, was doing well out of the relative hiatus in military activity before October 7, with thousands of Gazans being issued work permits to earn more in Israel than they ever could in Gaza. Unlike even the heinous anti-Semites Himmler and Kaltenbrunner, therefore, Hamas has not put its greed for cash over its one true love: killing Jews.

"Very many, probably most, Germans were opposed to the Jews during the Third Reich," writes Ian Kershaw in his book Hitler, The Germans and the Final Solution, "welcomed their exclusion from the economy and society, and saw them as natural outsiders to the German ‘National Community,’ a dangerous minority against whom it was legitimate to discriminate. Most would have drawn the line at physical maltreatment. The very secrecy of the Final Solution demonstrates more clearly than anything else the fact that the Nazi leadership felt it could not rely on popular backing for its exterminationist policy."

Here, too, the contrast with Hamas is obvious. The elimination of Jews is openly promised in the Hamas constitution, as it tacitly is in the "From the river to the sea" chant so beloved of today’s demonstrators in the West. Gazans voted for Hamas in 2005 in far greater proportions than Germans voted for the Nazis in 1932, and a good proportion of them celebrated wildly when Hamas paraded its hostages through the streets of Gaza on the afternoon of October 7.

Kershaw writes of how "The Final Solution would not have been possible without the … depersonalization and debasement of the figure of the Jew." In both Gaza and the West Bank, printed educational textbooks present Jews as despicable, worthless, and sinister figures, utterly depersonalized and debased. This is a recipe for further generational conflict. Kershaw argues that in Nazi Germany, ordinary Germans’ "‘mild’ anti-Semitism was clearly quite incapable of containing the progressive radical dynamism of the racial fanatics and the deadly bureaucratization of the doctrine of race-hatred." This is still more true of Gaza today.

George Weidenfeld was therefore correct back in 2015, and the events of October 7 have confirmed it. Hamas is—while taking into account the wild disparity in the sheer geographical and numerical extent of their crimes—qualitatively even more anti-Semitic than the Nazis were. One thing in which they are exactly equal, however, is that Nazi barbarism had to be utterly extirpated, and that goes for Hamas too.
Seth Mandel: There Is No Peacetime Hamas
Hamas and its patrons want the war to end here, with Hamas still in power, if severely weakened. But its methods for doing so are demonstrating precisely why it cannot be permitted to endure. Don’t look away—watch as Hamas marches civilians into the line of fire in a last desperate attempt to cling to power. Watch as Hamas holds on to child hostages just to make them and their families suffer. Hamas isn’t just about raw violence; it represents the disfigurement of human society. It wants man to be capable of previously unimaginable degeneracy.

A ceasefire provides no pause in the violence Hamas brings. There is no peacetime Hamas. When they are not shooting at Israelis they are arranging the deaths of any and all Palestinians they can get their hands on.

And we’re watching it in real time. Because Hamas terrorists want us to. Because they are proud of their barbarism. Because they think the world will save them from the fate they deserve rather than save the civilian Palestinian population they oppress and the Israeli children they snatch from their beds.

It’s all happening in front of us. So don’t look away.
Time to take a stand against the new Jew hatred
Meanwhile, the woke establishment – the columnists and professional activists, the self-appointed keepers of the anti-racist, anti-fascist flame – are happily marching alongside the Islamists and anti-Semites.

Some on the woke left openly celebrated 7 October, welcoming this racist slaughter as an act of ‘resistance’. I’m sure many more felt the same way, but were savvy enough to keep it to themselves.

Clearly, we cannot rely on the elites to stand up to the new anti-Semitism. But, in a sense, nor should we. In the end, this menace cannot be tackled through pious words from on-high. And certainly not through censorship. We cannot ban this problem away.

Now, as ever, it falls to members of the public to take a stand themselves – for gentiles to stand in solidarity with Jews as they fight this tide of hatred.

On this front, Brits have a rich tradition to draw on.

The Battle of Cable Street in 1936 – where East End leftists and Jews faced down Oswald Mosley’s fascist Blackshirts – still looms large in our collective memory, among Jews and non-Jews alike.

A year earlier, football fans also took a stand at White Hart Lane, home to Tottenham Hotspur and its large Jewish fanbase, which had been chosen to host an England match against Nazi Germany.

An anti-Nazi demonstration descended on Tottenham before the game. While, inside the ground, the German team and fans did Nazi salutes, left-wing protesters clashed with cops and Nazi sympathisers outside.

A swastika flew over the Lane, until Ernie Wooley, a 24-year-old turner from Shoreditch, climbed up on to the stand and cut the flag down. Wooley was arrested and fined for doing so, but he reportedly received his punishment with a smile on his face. ‘That Nazi flag is hated in this country’, he said.

That’s what solidarity looks like. And we need more of it today. On that front, this weekend’s March Against Anti-Semitism is a great place to start.

So, if you can, get yourself to London on Sunday. The march will set off from the Royal Courts of Justice at 1.30pm. You can register for updates with the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism here.

The spiked team will be marching alongside our friends from the October Declaration.
All the anti-Israel bias fit to print
A month ago, there was hope that there might be some contrition. That those who had published, as fact, false reports from a terrorist organisation -- which inflamed the Middle East and endangered Jewish lives, might engage in some serious soul searching.

How capable of self-reflection would the journalists at the New York Times and other US media organisations be? They had credulously swallowed whole the Hamas press release stating that Israel was behind a Gaza hospital blast that killed 471 people. Israeli, US and western intelligence services said, in fact, it was a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket and estimated far fewer had died in the 17 October explosion.

Briefly, there was a change. To every story that quoted the Gaza Health Ministry, the NYTimes in common with others, added the caveat “which is run by Hamas”.

But even that vestige of objectivity has now been forgotten.

Headlines and stories contain huge numbers of deaths, again, taken straight from the Hamas press office.

In fact, more often you will only find caveats in place on statements from the Israeli military and government.

This came into sharp focus last Sunday when the NY Times reported on a video released by the IDF showing two hostages being taken into Al-Shifa hospital.

The newspaper could not bring itself to call the two men one frogmarched at gunpoint, the other guarded by gunmen on a hospital bed hostages, but only what Israel “described as hostages”.

However, it had no such qualms about quoting verbatim a press release from Gaza’s Health Ministry, which is run by Hamas, without qualification.

“Given what the Israeli occupation reported, this confirms that the hospitals of the Ministry of Health provide their medical services to everyone who deserves them, regardless of their gender and race,” it said.
Israel-Hamas war: Top 10 times the media got it wrong on Gaza
Nov. 8: CNN, AP fire photographer after expose
HonestReporting made headlines around the world by questioning how Gazan photographers came into Israel relatively early into the events of October 7. Pictures by photographers who infiltrated from Gaza were published around the world thanks to AP and Reuters. CNN and AP both fired photographer Hassan Eslaiah, who took photos of a burning Israeli tank, and then captured infiltrators entering Kibbutz Kfar Aza.

But they should not have hired Eslaiah, whose strong support for Hamas killing Jews could have easily been discovered with simple vetting of his social media posts. A photo surfaced showing Eslaiah with Hamas leader and massacre mastermind Yahya Sinwar.

Marwat Al-Azza, who was employed by NBC, was arrested on November 16 in Jerusalem on suspicion of inciting terrorism and identifying with a terrorist organization following Facebook posts praising the massacre.

Nov. 15: BBC says sorry twice
The British Broadcasting Corporation is usually a tough nut to crack when attempting to obtain apologies for even the most egregious errors. That is why November 15 was such a historic day. The BBC apologized for its incorrect Israel-related coverage not once, but twice. After initially reporting that “medical teams and Arabic speakers were being targeted” by the IDF at Gaza’s Shifa Hospital, the BBC corrected the error and admitted that the actual facts were that IDF forces who entered Shifa included medical teams and Arabic speakers to ease tension.

“This error fell below our usual editorial standards,” the presenter said.

Hours later, a BBC report that said the Washington, DC, pro-Israel rally was attended by 10,000 people was also changed after it was pointed out that the number was actually 290,000.

Nov. 18: ‘Haaretz’ blames IDF for massacre
A military helicopter firing at terrorists at the Nova music festival near Kibbutz Re’im harmed Jews, Haaretz claimed in a report that it said was based on a police investigation. The report was picked up around the world, boosting Hamas claims that Israelis had actually killed themselves on October 7. The police quickly refuted the report, saying: “No indication was given of any harm to civilians caused by aerial activity at the Nova music festival.”


Human Rights Watch under fire for allegedly accepting millions in Qatar funds
Middle East Media Research Institute on Tuesday published a leaked Qatari government document claiming Qatar’s regime paid 3 million euros to HRW

The New York-based Human Rights Watch is facing another financing scandal involving donations, this time from Qatar—a Gulf country that was urged by one expert in a recent US congressional hearing to be classified as a state-sponsor of terrorism.

The Washington D.C.-based Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) on Tuesday published a leaked Qatari government document claiming Qatar’s regime paid 3 million euros to HRW.

MEMRI translated the Qatari Prime Minister’s Office document that declares the matter is “confidential and urgent.”

According to MEMRI’s translation, Abdullah Bin Khalaf Hattab Al Ka'bi, director of Qatar's Office of the Prime Minister, wrote to Finance Minister Ali Sharif Al-Emadi in January 2018, stating: “His Excellency the Prime Minister has agreed to provide monetary support of 3 million euros to the organization Human Rights Watch, under the Humanitarian Aid section, and that it should be distributed with the knowledge of the Embassy of Qatar in London so that it can be aware of it and take the necessary [steps] with regard to it.”

The subject of the letter notes “providing additional monetary support to the organization Human Rights Watch.”

MEMRI wrote that the translation of a document in Arabic was leaked as part of Project Raven.

Executive director of the organization UN Watch, Hillel Neuer, told i24NEWS on Thursday: “These reports are very disturbing. They need to be fully investigated. There are strong reasons to fear that this may be true. We would need accountability. The money would have to be returned.”

Neuer added, “Qatar is a human rights abusing regime. They enslave migrant workers…caused thousands of them to die. They support the Taliban. They support Hamas. They support terrorism. They have an egregious human rights record.”

He continued “If it’s true, this would be shameful but not inconsistent with their [HRW] actions in the past. We have seen, because of their anti-Western ideology and anti-Israel ideology, that they will often cozy up to Islamist regimes, whether it’s Hamas or Hezbollah. There is a corrupt and twisted culture at Human Rights Watch and that needs to be fixed.”


Four children released as more than 30 remain in Gaza
This evening, four of the nearly 40 children who have been held hostage since October 7 in underground tunnels in Gaza were released back to their homes in Israel.

Among them were Emilia Aloni, 5, from Yavneh; Ohad Mundar, 9, from Nir Oz; Raz Katz, 4, from Nir Oz; and Aviv Katz, 2, from Nir Oz.

They were released as part of a group of 13 Israeli women and children in exchange for 39 convicted Palestinian prisoners. An IDF statement confirmed that the 13 hostages have safely made it into Israeli territory, where they have undergone an initial medical assessment.

Accompanied by IDF soldiers, they are reportedly on their way to Israeli hospitals where they will be reunited with their families.

The following children are still being held hostage in Gaza:
Emily Hand, 9
Hila Rotem-Shoshani, 13
Yahel Korngold, 3
Yagil Yaakov, 13
Kfir Bibas, 9 months
Sahar Kalderon, 16
Liri Albag, 18
Mia Leimberg, 17
Nave Shoham, 8
Noam Avigdori, 12
Noga Weiss, 18
Ofir Engel, turned 18 in captivity
Ofri Brodutch, 10
Uriya Brodetz, 5
Or Yaakov, 16
Tal Goldstein-Almog, 9
Yuval Brodetz, 8
Yuval Engel, 11
Agam Goldstein-Almog, 17
Ariel Kfir, 4
Avigail Idan, 3
Alma Or, 13
Dafna Eyakim, 15
Amit Shani, 16
Noam Or, 17
Eitan Yaholomi, 12
Ella Elyakim, 8
Emma Cunio, 3 and her twin, Yulie, both 3
Gal Goldstein-Almog, 11
Erez Kalderon, 12
Mika Engel, 18
Liam Or, 18
Aisha al-Zayadna, 17
Gali Tarshansky, 13


Who are the 39 Palestinian prisoners released from Israeli prisons?
The first group of Palestinian prisoners have been released by Israel under the terms of a ceasefire agreement with Hamas.

Shortly after 4pm on Friday, the Israeli Prison Service released 39 prisoners, which include 24 women and 15 minors.

All 39 will be transferred to the Beitunia checkpoint close to Ramallah after being held at Ofer Prison in the West Bank since 12pm on Friday.

Under the terms of the agreement, the released Palestinians will be allowed to return to their previous residences.

While some of the Palestinians aren’t associated with any specific terrorist group, many are affiliated with Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Under the terms of the ceasefire agreement, 150 Palestinian security prisoners and 50 Israeli hostages – primarily women and children – will be released in stages over a four-day period.

Israeli victims of terrorism have a 24-hour window to file petitions against the prisoner releases to the High Court of Justice.

Meanwhile, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has instructed police to employ “an iron fist” against attempts to celebrate the expected release of Palestinian terrorists.

“My instructions are clear: There are to be no expressions of joy,” Ben-Gvir told Israel Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai and Israel Prison Service Commissioner Katy Perry.

“Expressions of joy are equivalent to backing terrorism; victory celebrations give backing to those human scum, for those Nazis,” he added.
The terror rockets are drying up - but how badly damaged is Hamas?
More than ten of Hamas’s battalions in Gaza have sustained significant degradation since the start of the war on October 7, a senior Israel Defense Forces officer said on Monday.

The battalion is the main Hamas army unit, and approximately 1,000 terrorists operate in each, the officer said.

Hamas battalion commanders dispatched terrorists to conduct the October 7 terrorist attacks.

“More than 10 out of these 24 battalions damaged significantly. In some battalions, we eliminated hundreds of Hamas terrorists,” said the source, who estimated that thousands of terrorists have been killed.

Most of the battalions in question are in the northern Gaza Strip.

A very high number of Hamas commanders have been killed, he said, with some battalions seeing more than 50 per cent of their commanders slain. “They can’t be replaced during a war,” said the officer.

Hamas's Northern Gaza Brigade saw two battalions lose over 50 per cent of their commanders, and the Gaza City Brigade saw four battalions also lose more than 50 per cent of their commanders, said the source.

“In Hamas, command and control is a very important issue. Muhammed Deif has been the leader of the Hamas army for many years, and as a leader and commander, his orders are important. In the last month, we haven't seen Deif going out in public saying things he said before,” said the military official.

As a result, in many cases Hamas has found it has no field commanders to direct terror operatives on the ground, harming its ability to counter-attack, he added.

“This dismantles the ability of Hamas to fight right now and also to rehabilitate military power after the war. We won’t accept Hamas remaining with its military power.”
Has Israel Achieved Its War Aims in Gaza?
Even after six weeks of fighting in which it has occupied northern Gaza and wrought unprecedented destruction there, Israel is a long way from achieving its military objectives.

"It's fair to assume that the firepower and infrastructures of Hamas have been significantly degraded, much more than in any previous [Israeli] campaign," said Jean-Loup Samaan, senior research fellow at the Middle East Institute of the National University of Singapore. "But because the objective was the total destruction of the [Hamas] movement, including its leadership, the campaign is far from achieving it."

Since sending troops into Gaza on Oct. 27, a senior Israeli military official said the assault had "significantly hurt" 10 of Hamas' 24 battalions, which before the war each had about 1,000 soldiers. Including the 1,000 killed in Israel after Hamas launched the Oct. 7 attack, Israeli officials estimate that 5,000 of Hamas' 25,000 fighters have now been killed. "It's not 10,000, but it's not 1,000," the Israeli official said.

The invasion has also had a big impact on Hamas' ability to fire rockets at Israel. The fire has become more sporadic and less precise. "The center of gravity for [Hamas' rocket-launching capabilities] was the Gaza City metropolitan area," said Brig.-Gen. (res.) Zvika Haimovich, former commander of the Israel Air Defense Forces. "Today we are talking about a salvo of four or five rockets every three days. In the first two weeks, it was a salvo every four or five hours. It's a huge difference."

Former officials say the Israeli advance has brought better intelligence on Hamas' tunnel network and paths for advancing deeper into the area that are less laden with explosive devices and booby traps. "To defend against a force that is coming from new routes that were not the ones expected is going to be hard for Hamas," said Brig.-Gen. (res.) Amir Avivi, former deputy commander of the Gaza Division.
Son of former Iranian Shah talks Israel’s war on Hamas
Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran's last shah and exiled crown prince, speaks with i24NEWS about Israel’s war against Hamas and Iran’s role in regional instability


Meet the Iranian-born Biden military aide reportedly under investigation for major influence campaign: ‘Clear and present danger’
Not only is Tabatabai the chief-of-staff to the Pentagon’s assistant secretary of defense for special operations, Christopher Maier, but, according to Navy sources, she recently became a US reserve naval intelligence officer.

Tabatabai has completed her five-month training at the Center for Information Dominance in Dam Neck, Va., according to a fellow officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity and expressed concern that Tabatabai retains her security clearance, despite the counterintelligence investigation.

The officer says Tabatabai would receive access in her reservist intelligence role to such sensitive information as staff rosters and movements of US ships and submarines in the Persian Gulf, all of which is clearly of interest to Iran amid the current Gaza conflict.

“The Navy has been actively training her to be an intelligence officer and giving her access to, not just what she has in her civilian job, but access to all the need-to-know information that a reserve unit has,” says the officer.

“This naval reserve [role] gives her more clearance and access. Everyone she has contact with in the Navy intelligence realm is now potentially outed.”

The officer says Tabatabai’s security access has been a source of ongoing concern among colleagues, especially as “the investigation has been going on for so long.”

“It’s a clear and present danger in that even if [the investigation] affords her the right to due process, her clearance still should be on hold, and she should not have any access to go into the Pentagon or any other military installation.”

The FBI reportedly has been shut out of the Tabatabai probe, and it is not known which agency is in charge.
500 German police raid properties of Hamas supporters throughout the country

Antisemitic Ireland Needs to Shake Off the Imbecility
Since the bloody pogrom of Oct. 7, which drew Israel into a last-straw determination to smash the Hamas terror infrastructure in Gaza entirely, the Irish legislature came 16 votes away from approving a motion to expel the Israeli ambassador and 10 votes away from approving a motion to haul Israel before the International Criminal Court.

Ireland is an EU outlier on the matter of Israel. Irish politicians like to claim that it's because of Ireland's history of dispossession, occupation and resistance to colonialism - three virtues fashionably attributable nowadays to the Palestinians. But there's something else in the Irish psyche that's impolite to mention. Not a few of Ireland's celebrated champions of the underdog, its heroes of Irish freedom, were vulgar antisemites and Nazi collaborators.

Mary Lou McDonald assumed the reins of Sinn Fein party in 2018. As a social justice activist in Dublin, she spoke at a commemoration for Sean Russell, a 1930s-era IRA chief of staff who spent time in Nazi Germany training in the use of explosives. Russell died of a perforated ulcer in a Nazi submarine that was returning him to Ireland to lay the groundwork for an IRA sabotage campaign to assist a planned Nazi invasion of British-controlled Ulster.

Today's proud Irish "pro-Palestine" shouters would rather forget that Ze'ev Jabotinsky, founder of the Zionist Irgun organization in British Mandate Palestine, wrote to IRA leader and later Irish president Eamon de Valera asking to learn about Ireland's guerrilla war against the British. De Valera invited Jabotinsky to Ireland, where he stayed for several weeks.

It's fair enough to empathize with the Palestinians. But there is a difference between the IRA at its worst and savage moments, and Hamas in its routine conduct. The IRA never vowed to slaughter every British loyalist on the island of Ireland and hunt every Englishman to the ends of the Earth, to the ends of time. That's what Hamas has in mind for the Jews. The Irish should remember that.


Ireland's 'lack of Jewish influence' helps support for Palestine - former envoy

Dem Rep. Carson_ Israel Is 'Antagonistic' and 'We're Seeing What Happens When Folks Aren't Listened to'

Anti-Semitic hate speech is investigated at four mosques around Britain after footage of preachers calling for Jews to be killed and for Israel to be destroyed emerges

Seth Frantzman: Israel-Hamas war: How quickly can Hamas recover from Gaza defeat? - analysis

American cowboys work the Israeli heartland

Hamas's Haniyeh amid ceasefire: Palestinian martyrs are price of freedom ‘Palestine is ours, ours, ours’: PA schools celebrate Oct. 7

Iran's Khamenei warns in Hebrew that war in Gaza won't go unanswered

BBC RADIO 4 PLATFORMS PERNICIOUS PARITY FROM MUSTAFA BARGHOUTI

‘BBC’: Not impartial to rally vs. Jew-hatred, Palestinian flag on Macy’s parade float

Col Richard Kemp: Sky News's Kay Burley pushes anti Israel messaging

"Is Sky News’s Kay Burley a Complete Idiot? You Be the Judge"

Fresh impartiality row at the BBC as its own journalists accuse broadcaster of favouring Israel in its war coverage - after it came under fire for refusing to call Hamas a terror group

BBC NEWS WEBSITE REPORTING ON THE DEATHS OF JOURNALISTS

‘I Am Not Taking You, Dirty Jew’: Paris Cab Driver Charged With Discrimination, Violent Threats

Israelis celebrate return of hostage Yaffa Adar, 85, whose stoicism ’embodies Zionism’



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