Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, October 11, 2023

10/11 Links Pt2: When People Tell You Who They Are, Believe Them; Mainstream media sanitizes Hamas terror attacks; The women-hating women who support Hamas

From Ian:

Bari Weiss: When People Tell You Who They Are, Believe Them

At the end of the Second World War, it took the Allies months, if not years, to uncover the full scale of Germany’s war crimes. That’s because the Nazis tried to hide them.

In October 2023, Hamas broadcast what they did—what they are doing—in real time.

They took horrific videos to document and share it all. Videos of naked women; of a captured six-year-old-boy; of beheaded soldiers.

This young woman—her name is Mor—learned that her grandmother had been slaughtered because a terrorist took her grandmother’s cell phone, filmed her murder, and then uploaded the video to the grandmother’s own Facebook page, ensuring her family would see it.

Now they are threatening to execute the hostages they have captured on live television. Parents across the country have been told to delete apps like Instagram from their children’s phones so they do not see the carnage.

It’s as if the Cossacks had TikTok.

On the one hand I think: surely this will be sufficient. Surely this amount of blood will be enough to shake the world awake. Surely no one can equivocate or justify this. As my friend Sarah Haider wrote, “How easy is it to simply condemn targeted violence against civilians? Can there be a lower bar?”

And yet, across the world, people have sunk below it.

The Moral Challenge of the Current War

Natan Sharansky, who played a role in founding Human Rights Watch when it was involved in noble causes like defending Soviet dissidents, recalls realizing decades ago that this once-great organization had “become an aid to dictators and terrorists.” And that recollection brings Sharansky to the dangers of moral confusion, and the moral issue at the heart of the present war:

Israel has no choice but to wage a war for its survival. . . . Today, the world seems to understand this. World leaders have denounced Hamas’s barbarism and affirmed the legitimacy of Israel’s right to self-defense. But what about tomorrow? What will happen as the Palestinian death toll rises? At that point, I fear, the same leaders will forget that Israel and Hamas are fighting on radically different terms and focus their efforts on restraining Israel instead of condemning Hamas.

The reason this will happen—as it always does—is that Hamas has a powerful unconventional weapon, one far more sophisticated and effective than missiles and drones: Palestinian civilians, used as human shields. The more Palestinians who die because Hamas terrorists cynically hide behind them, the more the free world will turn against Israel.

It is only a matter of weeks, or days, or even hours, until articles will appear in major publications depicting the Israeli government as indiscriminately targeting innocent Palestinians. Human Rights Watch will yet again vilify Israel as an international outlaw, and the United Nations will pass resolutions demanding that we cease our war of self-defense.

The only way to help neutralize this despicable unconventional weapon in the coming days would be for leaders of Western democracies and responsible Arab rulers to make this message absolutely clear: every innocent Palestinian killed in this conflagration is the victim of Hamas.

Stephen Miller: Mainstream media sanitizes Hamas terror attacks

What began as breaking news reporting by American outlets quickly shifted to the default position of sympathizing with Palestinians, and focusing almost solely on Israel’s retaliation, as has usually been the case with this conflict. National news outlets such as CBS and NBC have already decided on language that presents this as a Palestinian humanitarian crisis enacted by Israel’s overbearing and heavy-handed response.

They’ve defaulted to language such as “Hamas militants,” “conflict,” “crisis,” “escalation” and “both sides.” You might even surmise from early coverage that our media believes there are “very fine people on both sides.” Many of the actual events from this weekend’s mass terror attack have been sanitized out of mainstream outlets who are ignoring the brutal details of Hamas rocket attacks into civilian neighborhoods, or roaming death squads going door to door to kidnap or execute in summary fashion.

Pro-Hamas rallies this week were framed as “small rallies” by NBC, who also defaulted to images and stories of Palestinians grieving their own losses. A Stop Antisemitism organization on Twitter/X obtained what they call a leaked email with specific sanitization of language concerning Hamas and the attack, directing employees to remove the word terrorist, among other things.

The tone of the coverage thus far has been so blatantly one-sided that Anti-Defamation League president Jonathan Greenblatt ripped MSNBC while appearing on the network’s flagship program Morning Joe, while Al Sharpton of all people looked on. “Who is writing the scripts?… The people who did this are not fighters… they are not militants… they are terrorists.” Greenblatt asserted. Later on that same network, a guest suggested Israel make concessions by redrawing its borders to receive hostages back.

This is how the national media coverage of this attack will proceed. The nature of the original terror attack, the innocent music festival goers massacred and sexually assaulted, the hostages — will all be sterilized out of the coverage, and the onus will then be put on Israel’s response. This, of course, only empowers Hamas to continue their attacks and threats on civilians. It will be the fault, in the eyes of the news media, of Israel for escalating a response, and not for Hamas terrorists perpetrating the conflict to begin with.

This is the kind of “both sidesism” our journalists and media critics have decried over the years when it has come to the topic of former president Donald Trump, that Trump is a destabilizing threat to our institutions and the very Republic itself, and therefore must be presented that way at all costs. Now, with a cause they sympathize with, they are struggling to rationalize the brutality of Hamas’s actions, and instead are attempting to justify them away.

Phyllis Chesler: The women-hating women who support Hamas

Interestingly, the ISIS women continued to terrorize and torture other Muslim women, mainly Syrians and Iraqis, in the al-Hol refugee camp.

Hamas is ISIS on steroids.

And yet, these American (and European) women are cheering for the rape, torture, public humiliation and murder of Israeli women, children and the elderly by Islamist terrorists and for the murder and kidnapping of Israeli male civilians of all ages.

There is absolutely no moral equivalence between Hamas terrorists who purposely target innocent civilians and the Israel army that now needs to utterly destroy, once and for all, Hamas’s rule over Gazan civilians, whom they’ve used as human shields, just as they’ve embedded their bombs, rockets and command posts in mosques, hospitals, ambulances, schools and residential buildings as so much potential civilian fodder for the sake of propaganda.

And the world media and other elites keep falling for it.

These Western women demonstrators—and their many left-wing feminist allies—have been carefully indoctrinated into believing Very Big Lies: Namely, that Israel is a Nazi, apartheid state of “colonial settlers” who have stolen the land and imprisoned an indigenous people. This is the mantra that is meant to justify the destruction of the Jewish state.

This must never happen. Israel must do whatever it takes, no matter the cost, to rid both Israel and non-Hamas Palestinians of Hamas.

How can women, presumably the more compassionate sex, support such cruelty, such ferocious barbarism?

As the author of Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman, internalized sexism among women and female-female cruelty does not surprise me. In tribal cultures, women murder their daughters-in-law, try to murder their co-wives, support and carry out the genital mutilation and the honor killing of their daughters. Some women in the West vote for “macho” male tyrants, compete viciously against other women, steal their jobs and their spouses.

Most women do not automatically embrace freedom and truth any more than most men do.

Moloch statue from Giovanni Pastrone's Cabiria (1914), National Museum of Cinema (Turin)

Disclaimer: the views expressed here are solely those of the author, weekly Judean Rose columnist Varda Meyers Epstein.

Hamas is going to rue the day it decided to rain down pogroms on Israel. Israel is going to obliterate every trace of Hamas from the face of God’s earth, and when these two-legged beasts arrive in Hell, they will discover no brown-eyed virgins waiting for them, but only searing heat and fire that will scald and burn their ugly flesh without surcease for an eternity. I am already preparing popcorn to snack on as I watch the sick mothers of these Moloch terrorists weep and wail over the mutilated remains of their twisted terrorist children. The people who democratically elected Hamas to lead them should be begging Egypt to lift its blockade NOW, and let them in, because Israel is so going to carpet bomb Gaza and retake it for its rightful owners, the Jews.

The entrance to the Temple of Moloch in Carthage in Cabiria (1914)

Similarly, the two-legged beasts who rule Iran will die, painfully, at the hands of the Jews. As they well know, God favors the Jews, and will strengthen the hands of His people as we inflict the worst pain imaginable on Khameini, far worse than that of the 40 Jewish babies his Hamas employees murdered and beheaded. Hashem was there to receive and comfort those babies, because they are Jews and God therefore loves them. But beware His wrath, for all those who raise a hand toward His people will die hard deaths, hard! And all of the evil ones will die a thousand deaths by the hands of Israeli heroes, JEWISH heroes, made strong like iron by the God of the Jews whom you erroneously refer to as “Allah.”

Offering to Molech (illustration from the 1897 Bible Pictures and What They Teach Us by Charles Foster). The illustration shows a typical depiction of Moloch in 19th century illustrations.

Does a similar fate await Joe Biden, who incentivized the pogroms that stole Jewish lives with his $6b gift to Iran? Despite his administration’s repeated assurances that the money didn’t go to Hamas, everyone knows these billions served as a green light to attack the Jews. America’s handout told Iran that America supports its foolish, evil campaign to ethnically cleanse the world of Jews. Whether or not Joe meant to give Iran incentive to murder Jews matters little, if at all. Iran has repeatedly and publicly stated its intentions in this regard, and as everyone knows and many American officials have stated, money is fungible.


"The idol Moloch with seven chambers or chapels," from Johann Lund's Die Alten Jüdischen Heiligthümer (1711, 1738), showing elements derived from the medieval rabbinical tradition

Before Joe (and perhaps the man sitting behind the curtain in the Oval Office) was Barry O with his pallets of cash in exchange for . . . nothing. Barry likely thinks the Iran crocodile will eat him last. What he doesn’t know, and Joe doesn’t know (because Joe doesn’t know much of anything now, including how to walk) is that the crocodile will eat them NEXT and good riddance to them, too. Those who fund evil, are evil. Those who voted for this man, are also culpable, because the Jews told them this would happen, and they didn’t listen, and Jews themselves, those who vote in American elections, overwhelmingly voted Democrat.

They didn’t listen when we told them. Instead, they praised themselves for giving Israel Iron Dome, which Obama gave Israel not as a kindness, but as a means of preventing the Jews from taking care of the mess in Gaza in the first place. As a result, pogroms were deliberately perpetrated on the Jewish people on a Jewish holiday. Those Americans who are now grumbling about their tax dollars aiding people far away, when they themselves are suffering terrible inflation, have no idea that they funded pogroms, and now their leaders are compelled to pay blood money on their behalf.

This and the following are memes I saw on the evening of October 10, Day 4 of the war. The memes describe taxpayer grumbling at being expected to send aid to Israel.

Why must Biden now pay blood money to Israel from taxpayer dollars? Because otherwise, it looks really, really bad for this administration. There were pogroms. And things are already looking bad for Biden what with his coke-addicted pervert son; the naked selfies of his brother; his refusal to acknowledge his grandchild; and his creepy predilection for nuzzling and sniffing children.

Trust God on this, if you helped in this, you will get what is coming to you. Harm one hair on the head of a Jew—even by proxy—and God will make sure you pay, all the more so when atrocities are inflicted on His beloved nation.

Illustration of the interior of the temple of Moloch from Gustav Flaubert's Salammbô by Georges-Antoine Rochegrosse (c. 1900)

Europe, too, funded these Iran/Hamas/et al crimes against humanity, against the Jews. We are not impressed with your light displays of Israeli flags on your buildings. We are not impressed when you tell us we have the right to defend ourselves, as if this were somehow in doubt. We see it all—how you allowed a Holocaust to occur, and then, to assuage your guilt, helped fund the creation of the Jewish State, thus reserving the right to a future, more successful attempt at ethnic cleansing, this time with the Jews conveniently concentrated in a single space.

Stelaes from the tophet in Carthage, where Moloch sacrifices or rituals are attested via inscription

Tombs in the Valley of Hinnom, the location of the tophet where Moloch rituals were performed according to 2 Kings 23:10. Deror Avi

Be assured that it is the Jews, who will once again arise victorious to outlive the evildoers. The bad guys are doomed to vanish from the face of God’s earth. Just like the other occupiers of Jewish land. Like those before you, you failed to learn an important lesson: History repeats.

As a result, all will now witness the valor and strength of God’s Chosen People, the Jewish people. None will succeed in their campaign to demoralize us or steal our land. If you try, you will die horrible deaths, and God will not save you. The Nation of Israel lives all Am Yisrael chai in your face!

And it is this [covenant] that has stood for our Forefathers and us. For not just one enemy has stood against us to wipe us out. But in every generation there have been those who have stood against us to wipe us out, and the Holy One Blessed Be He saves us from their hands.

If you would like to do something to help Israel, here is one way to do so: Help feed Israeli soldiers through Project Giveback, created in order to give back to soldiers and first responders in Israel.

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!

Hamas Exploits Mosques The Same Way They Exploit Children (Daled Amos)

By Daled Amos

As part of its retaliation against the Hamas terrorists for its massacre of Israeli men, women and children, Israel has been responsible for the destruction of mosques.

What is Israel up to?

Better question -- what is Hamas up to?

Historically, Hamas has used mosques for storing weapons. An article from the Washington Post in 2014 asked the question Why Hamas stores its weapons inside hospitals, mosques and schools and went about why there is a need to ask the question in the first place.

The article gives an example from a brief cease-fire:

During the lull, a group of men at a mosque in northern Gaza said they had returned to clean up the green glass from windows shattered in the previous day’s bombardment. But they could be seen moving small rockets into the mosque.

Israel was not surprised by this; it has noted this other use of mosques before:

The Washington Post article also describes how schools and hospitals are put to the same use, storing weapons -- in total disregard of the lives of Gazan civilians put at risk.

But let's stick to the mosques -- and other examples of mosques being destroyed by other Muslims. I wrote about this in 2012:

In Aleppo, Syria, Muslims badly damaged a landmark mosque:
A landmark mosque in Aleppo was burned, scarred by bullets and trashed — the latest casualty of Syria's civil war — and President Bashar Assad on Monday ordered immediate repairs to try to stem Muslim outrage at the desecration of the 12th century site.
According to one of those interviewed, the Syrian army was stationed inside the mosque "because of its strategic location in the Old City".

Of course, the simpler answer could be that the Syrian army used the mosque because the mosque itself was a strategic location.

After all, what Muslim would attack and destroy a mosque?

Quite a few actually -- for example:
In August 2011, the New York Times reported that 28 Are Killed in Bombing at a Mosque in Baghdad

In October 2010 in Afghanistan, The Taliban murdered the head of Kunduz province, along with 14 other people, in a mosque bombing in Tahkar. The governor had been outspoken in his opposition to the Taliban and allied terror groups operating in the north.

There's the mosque burned during the arson attack on the Crazy Water Park in Gaza in September 2010 as reported by The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights

There was the mosque destroyed in Lebanon during a fight between Hezbollah and a rival group in August 2010

And then there's the Turkish general who admitted to destroying a mosque on purpose back in 1974 in order to psyche out the enemy:
In remarks published in the Haber Türk daily yesterday as part of an interview with Gen. Sabri Yirmibeşoğlu, who led the Special War Department in 1971 and also worked to mobilize civilian resistance during Turkey's military intervention on Cyprus in 1974, said: “In Special War, certain acts of sabotage are staged and blamed on the enemy to increase public resistance. We did this on Cyprus; we even burnt down a mosque.” In response to the surprised correspondent's incredulous look the general said, “I am giving an example,” in an attempt to clear things up.

So not only have mosques been deliberately targeted by Muslims, the destruction of those mosques has been exploited for PR against the enemy -- much in the same way that Hamas has manipulated its own people in Gaza, putting them in danger, in order to reap the PR benefits.

The Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center produced a report in 2010, Hamas and the Terrorist Threat from the Gaza Strip, which examined the military use of mosques.

The footnote at the end of the paragraph points to a separate article from 2009, The use of mosques for military and political purposes by Hamas and other terrorist organizations and Islamic groups

The point is that other Arab countries use mosques for military purposes as well. Here is an example from Iraq:

The point is that Hamas has a history of using mosques for military purposes and other Muslim countries have done it as well. In addition there is the PR value of forcing Israel to destroy the mosque and broadcasting to the world what Israel has done.

Hamas is as much at ease hiding weapons in a mosque as they are in hiding behind children.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

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10/11 Links Pt1: President Herzog: History Will Judge Those Who Fail to Stand Against Hamas; May God Avenge Their Blood; Fears of large-scale aerial infiltration in northern Israel

From Ian:

President Isaac Herzog: History Will Judge Those Who Fail to Stand Against Hamas

Not since the Holocaust have more Jews been murdered on one day. Not since the Holocaust have we seen such images of innocent Jewish mothers and children, teenagers and old women loaded into trucks and taken away into captivity. Hamas has imported, adopted, and replicated the savagery of ISIS.

Whole families have been wiped out. Mothers and fathers, with babes in arms, murdered in cold blood. Massacred. A young couple, Tamar and Yonatan, murdered in their home along with their 6-year-old twin daughters Shachar and Arbel, and 4-year-old son Omer. A wheelchair-bound Holocaust survivor in her 80s who was taken into captivity by Hamas terrorists. Israel will act firmly and with full force to defend its people and eliminate this threat. This is our solemn duty. However, the international community also has a duty to fulfill here.

For too long, when Israel has faced incursions or rockets from Gaza, elements of the international community have sought to justify Hamas' actions, swallowing their lies. Over the next days and weeks, Israel will be doing all it can to secure its borders, to remove the threat posed by Hamas, and to return its captive civilians and soldiers. It will demand the support of the international community.

History will judge Hamas for its crimes against humanity, along with all those who fail to stand against them.

Israel Agrees to Unity Government To Wage War on Hamas

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense chief and centrist opposition party leader Benny Gantz have agreed to form an emergency government, a joint statement from Gantz's National Unity party said on Wednesday.

Terrorists from Islamist group Hamas invaded Israel from the Gaza Strip on Saturday in a surprise assault that killed at least 1,200 people, the deadliest Palestinian militant attack in Israeli history.

Israel has responded with a massive bombardment of Gaza that has killed 1,055, and deployed thousands of troops around the enclave amid growing expectations it will launch a ground invasion to destroy Hamas.

The sides agreed to form a war cabinet comprising Netanyahu, Gantz, and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, the statement said, and during the fighting with Hamas in Gaza will not promote any unrelated policy or laws.

Opposition leader Yair Lapid was not expected to join the emergency government at this stage.

John Podhoretz: President Biden’s Magnificent Statement

Give credit where credit is due: This afternoon, Joe Biden gave what might be the most powerful statement in support of Israel ever delivered by any president. There were no qualifications. There was no evocation of root causes. No effort was made to hold out an olive branch or to suggest to Hamas, or to its fellow Iranian vassal Hezbollah, or their paymaster in Tehran that their future cooperation might lead to better days. The president said Hamas exists to destroy Israel and to kill Jews, and pledged this country’s full support in Israel’s effort against its enemy. He did not shy away from mentioning the atrocities that have made all people whose moral sense has not withered into a bilious pool (i.e., Rep. Rashida Tlaib, hanging a Hamas flag in your office in tribute to monsters who beheaded babies, may history spit your name from its lips as a curse) rear in horror and revulsion. He did not even begin with the customary “good afternoon.” He simply said, “There are moments in this life when pure, unadulterated evil is unleashed on the world. The people of Israel lived through one such moment this weekend.” And the words that followed never wavered.

Thank you, Mr. President.

Biden: Israel "Has a Duty to Respond" to Hamas Massacre

President Joe Biden said Tuesday: "There are moments in this life - and I mean this literally - when pure, unadulterated evil is unleashed on this world. The people of Israel lived through one such moment this weekend. The bloody hands of the terrorist organization Hamas - a group whose stated purpose for being is to kill Jews. This was an act of sheer evil. More than 1,000 civilians slaughtered - not just killed, slaughtered - in Israel. Among them, at least 14 American citizens killed."

"Parents butchered using their bodies to try to protect their children. Stomach-turning reports of babies being killed. Entire families slain. Young people massacred while attending a musical festival to celebrate peace. Women raped, assaulted, paraded as trophies. Families hid in fear for hours and hours, desperately trying to keep their children quiet to avoid drawing attention. And thousands of wounded, alive but carrying with them the bullet holes and the shrapnel wounds and the memory of what they endured. You all know these traumas never go away."

"The brutality of Hamas - this bloodthirstiness - brings to mind the worst rampages of ISIS....So, in this moment, we must be crystal clear: We stand with Israel....Like every nation in the world, Israel has the right to respond - indeed has a duty to respond - to these vicious attacks.... Our hearts may be broken, but our resolve is clear....Let there be no doubt: The United States has Israel's back."

Here is an amazing interview at Sky News on Monday between reporter Mark Austin and Basem Naim, director of Hamas’s international relations.

At the beginning of the segment, Naim denied that Hamas killed any civilians, and that it was all Israeli propaganda, as Austin incredulously asked him how he could lie so brazenly.

But one part of the interview revealed a truth that is not often reported.

When Naim was asked what Hamas' main achievement from the Saturday massacre was, his very first answer was, "We have been neglected because of the conflict between America and China, between Ukraine and Russia and our suffering for 75 years is coming out for discussion."

As I have noted for years, Palestinians fear irrelevance more than anything else. Palestinians as a group act like three year olds who cannot stand not being the center of attention. They hijack every cause they can. Whatever is in the headlines, they try to make it about them. And then they claim that the world ignores them when they receive far more attention, and more international aid, than any other nation on Earth per capita.

The Palestinians considered the Abraham Accords to be catastrophic - because it punctured their narrative that they are the most important issue in the Middle East, and it ended their control over the Arab League with veto power over any agreement between Israel and Arab states.

The Arabs don't care about them anymore. The West has started pushing back against the UN obsession with Israel. Even their terror wave of the past two years has not generated much international attention.

But slaughtering a thousand Jews - that is guaranteed to be covered by the media that they consider controlled by the Jews.

The Hamas leader is speaking for all Palestinians when he says that he is very happy that the world is now focused on Palestinians again, even if it is to report that they are monsters or support monsters. As any parent knows, negative attention is still a reward for toddlers. And Palestinians, after decades of being told that the world revolves around them, that they alone among all peoples deserve unlimited aid, free medical services, free schooling and free residences forever, have had no incentive to grow the hell up.

Beheading children and raping girls is a sure way to get airtime - airtime that will be itself hijacked (as Naim himself tries to do) to redirect world anger against Israel.

Giving a gun to a child is not a good idea. And neither is giving billions of dollars to emotionally retarded people whose top priority is spending it on weapons, whether the cash is coming from the US, the EU or Iran. Palestinians have never been held responsible for their actions by the world, as NGOs coddle them and the EU remains committed to financially supporting them. That is why they have stayed in their mental state of the world owing them everything. When they are no longer the center of attention, they consider that a violation of their rights.

Saeb Erekat said in 2016:

Our struggle is not religious but political, and therefore we say to the world, if you really wanted to fight terrorism and defeat Daash [ISIS], be aware that it will not be in isolation from draining the swamp of the Israeli occupation and establishing an independent Palestinian state on the '67 borders and Jerusalem as its capital.

If you want to stop Islamists from beheading people, give Palestinians a state, Jerusalem, release murderers from prison and all their other demands including destroying Israel via "return." . That was the message in 2016 from the "moderate" Palestinian spokesman, and it is the same message from Hamas today. It is a threat that as long as they don't get their demands met they will continue to terrorize the world, directly or indirectly.

Terror is the only thing that makes them relevant.

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

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Every time a war breaks out in Gaza, the media gets it wrong. Spectacularly wrong.

I described many of them in 2022; here is an updated version of that post.

A large percentage of Gaza rockets fall in Gaza, and many Gazans are killed because of them. I've documented this for years. I've shown how Hamas' own videos show rockets falling short. And there is evidence that sometimes Hamas fires weapons deliberately towards its own people!

This year, even with a dearth of coverage inside Gaza, I identified one likely victim of a jihadist rocket: Yusra Husni Salha, a 67-year old women from Gaza, who was almost certainly killed by a terror rocket that fell short in the yard of the Indonesian Hospital on Saturday, October 7.

And yes, Hamas often keeps weapons in mosques. And schools. And reporters have known for years that Hamas maintains a headquarters in the basement of Shifa Hospital, which happens to be at the hub of major Hamas underground tunnels.

When a family is killed in Gaza, it is very rare that it is an IDF mistake. Most of the time it is because a terrorist operative is in the house - either because he is a member of the family, sometimes it seems because he is using them as human shields. Other times it is because of Hamas rockets falling short. Sometimes it is because the IDF targeted a legitimate target that had a larger cache of explosives than was thought and it caused far more collateral damage than expected.

In the beginning of every war, this one included, Hamas and Islamic Jihad hides the names of most of those killed. They do this to make it look like a larger percentage of the dead are civilians. NGOs like PCHR follow Hamas' instructions and do not list the names of terrorists killed until they are told they may. (No one seems to worry that an NGO that hides the truth might not be exactly reliable.)

Speaking of, the Gaza Health Ministry and the "human rights" NGOs in Gaza (PCHR and Al Mezan) downplay any mention of terrorist casualties and often call terrorists "civilians" when they report the circumstances of those who have died. (Amnesty's obscenely dishonest "Gaza Platform" with statistics from the 2014 war relied on PCHR's initial reports, and as a result it lists more "civilians" than even the UN does. They know they are lying, I've let them know enough times, and they refuse to correct it.)

The media still has no idea what "proportionality" means in the context of international law. They make scorecards of how many have been killed on both sides as if the results are supposed to be "fair," implying that if only more Jews would be killed, then they can all be happy. They haven't done it yet because more Jews have been killed so far, but as soon as things turn around, the game will begin.

The media has never reported that Hamas' interior ministry instructs Gazans to lie to the media, giving detailed instructions.

The media (and human rights groups) also don't understand the principle of distinction, pretending that it means that Israel cannot bomb a high value target if there are civilians around. It can, under proper circumstances.

Then again, the media is also part of the problem. Hamas has almost complete control over the media in Gaza. Citizens who speak freely to media know that they will be punished. Everyone sticks to the Hamas-approved script. International reporters know that they will be kicked out if they say anything not to Hamas' liking. Yet the media hardly ever mentions this, giving a false impression that their reporting is objective.

The media will also ignore most of Hamas' war crimes. Outside the massacre that sparked this war, the media ignores Hamas using ambulances or "press" credentials to transport weapons, using Gazans as human shields, using mosques as weapons depots, shooting from schools- - I once counted 19 different war crimes that Hamas has done in the Gaza wars, but "human rights groups" somehow only notice and denounce one.

Here are some other must-read background info that will make you more knowledgeable than the most prestigious journalists from the New York Times, the BBC and CNN:

* Israel's success in keeping civilian casualties to a minimum in an urban war zone where the military targets are purposefully placed among civilians is unparalleled.

* The decisions as to what Israel targets in Gaza is detailed, lengthy and adheres to international law. The media and Israel haters portray Israel as a spoiled baby who lashes out at anything that moves and I've never seen a serious mainstream media article that describes anything close to the reality that military experts understand.

If the media would miss one or two of these topics, there wouldn't be a problem. They are in the job of simplifying things for readers. But they consistently get basic things wrong, and always in the direction of making Israel look bad.

It is no accident.

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

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The Gaza Electricity Distribution Company issued a statement on Saturday morning, a few hours after Hamas invaded Israel, saying, "The company confirms that all lines and feeders from inside the Green Line [Israel] have been disrupted since Saturday morning due to the current security situation, "

This means that either Hamas deliberately cut the electricity lines or that their massive rocket barrage to the South damaged every single electricity line from Israel. It was not an Israeli decision.

This was two days before Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said that he has ordered a “complete siege” of the Gaza Strip, including electricity.

Many used Gallant's statement to claim that Israel is violating international law by inflicting collective punishment on all Gazans based on the actions of Hamas. But at least in the context of electricity, it appears that Gallant was more posturing than stating a policy.

Because international law does not require Israeli engineers to risk their lives to fix the lines that Hamas cut while Hamas is still shooting thousands of rockets towards them.

Hamas cut the lines and Hamas is ensuring that the lines cannot be repaired on the Israeli side.

(CORRECTION: An earlier version misunderstood another graphic from the Gaza electricity FB page.)

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!

10/10 Links Pt2: A community forged in pain; The Hamas Einsatzgruppen Attack; Biden vows assistance to Israel, warns others not become involved in fighting

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: A community forged in pain

I am in Israel, where the sense of collective grief, horror and anxiety is off the scale. The situation that unfolded last Saturday is beyond the worst Israeli nightmare.

As thousands of missiles were fired into Israel from Gaza, around one thousand Hamas terrorists stormed across the border fence and attacked communities in towns, villages and kibbutzim across the south of the country.

Their aim was the mass murder of Israeli civilians. They went from house to house slaughtering the occupants and burning down their homes.

They gunned people down in their cars; they killed elderly men and women and small children; they hacked one Israeli to death with an axe. At an open-air music festival, armed paragliders mowed down at least 260 young people who were raked with gunfire as they ran for their lives.

Women were raped and burned alive; the bodies of murdered Israelis paraded around Gaza were stripped naked, spat upon and desecrated; babies were slaughtered in front of their parents; mothers with children in their arms were abducted and swallowed up with others in Gaza’s subterranean infrastructure of terror tunnels to be used as hostages. Their likely fate is unthinkable.

Heartbreaking images are now seared forever into the mind: an elderly, terrified Holocaust survivor being abducted into Gaza without the medication needed to keep her alive; a small Jewish child, alone and bewildered, being tormented on a Gaza street by Palestinian children who are all taught to hate and murder Jews.

Israel has been at war many times. It has experienced many terrorist atrocities and many thousands of rocket attacks.

This was something different. Barbarism and depravity against Jews on this scale hasn’t been experienced since the Holocaust.

MEMRI: A Statement By The President And Founder Of MEMRI On The Hamas Einsatzgruppen Attack

At this bitter hour of loss and calamity there are countless matters that need our attention, but I wish to address only the most crucial and important issue – namely, our loved ones, who have been murdered, wounded, abducted, or who are missing.

The most pressing issue right now is to put forward a practical offer on the table. I, Yigal Carmon, a former Colonel in the IDF Intelligence Corps and a former counterterrorism advisor to two Israeli Prime Ministers – Shamir and Rabin – who in late August published a report on MEMRI's website, the Middle East Research Media Institute, warning of the danger of a looming war in September-October – a report that nobody heeded – I propose to approach all international bodies as well as all Arab countries that speak to us – Jordan, Egypt, Morocco, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and make the following offer:

Hamas demands the release of all the Palestinian prisoners incarcerated in Israeli jails. We say yes. In fact, we are the ones offering it ourselves. We are willing to release them all, without delay, without precondition, without exception, in return for all our loved ones who have been taken hostage, who are missing, who have been murdered, injured, dead, alive. In return for all, we will immediately release all of the prisoners to any destination they choose, including Gaza, including Egypt and Jordan. This is our bargaining chip, and we offer it all.

It is crucial that the families and all Israeli citizens know that we offered everything – everything – in return for our loved ones, and if Hamas refuses this offer, the entire world, as well as the citizens of Israel and their families, will know that there is no choice but to continue pulverizing Hamas. The families of the Palestinian prisoners will understand this as well.

Now to another matter. The Hamas attack cannot be compared to the '73 war, which is a war that we now miss. Not even to the massacres of the Islamic State. The comparison to animals made by Israel Defense Minister Gallant is also not appropriate, since no animal commits murder out of sheer cruelty. The only appropriate comparison is to the Einsatzgruppen, the paramilitary death squads of the SS of the Nazi Germany, who were attached to the 4th Wehrmacht Army groups that invaded Poland and Russia in the outbreak of World War II. Their one and only mission was to murder Jews wherever they found them. That is the only relevant comparison, and I propose to anyone that has a heart to stick to this comparison.

My institute, MEMRI, is currently establishing a Telegram account in the spirit of Yad Vashem, to document the murders, including of Holocaust survivors, that Hamas committed on that day, October 7. This is a project that should have been undertaken by the Israeli government, but nothing can be expected of this government. We must document everything. These Einsatzgruppen murderers have committed the same kind of murders that their predecessors did. So that the world will know, and so that Israeli children will learn about October 7, 2023 in schools. So that the world doesn't forget and is not allowed to forget.

I ask anyone who has in his possession relevant videos of these atrocities to send them to MEMRI.org. We will post them in the appropriate manner, since we have to keep in mind that they are not suitable for any viewer, just as materials to be documented as acts of horror, like in the Holocaust. Even the horrors of the Holocaust no one can watch. But still, we created Yad Vashem to document the Holocaust.

MEMRI: The Hamas Einsatzgruppen Attack – October 7, 2023

I personally warned about the likelihood of war in my August 31, 2023 essay on MEMRI.org, titled Signs Of Possible War In September-October. While Iran's Islamist terrorist regime provides Hamas with military and strategic support, and training, the real power that enabled this operation was the Aal Thani family that rules Qatar.

The Aal Thani family is Hamas's enabler. In fact, its support of Hamas constitutes a direct attack on the state of Israel. Qatar funded the building of Hamas's military empire in Gaza: a huge underground city with military headquarters and connecting tunnels; a massive missile arsenal; and 30,000 killers and the munitions required for a long war – in short, everything that was needed for the October 7 attack.

The tragic answer is: It was a policy for over a decade under Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that gave Qatar a free hand to send $1.5 billion to Hamas, which enabled Hamas to build its military empire.

The explanation for this anti-Israel policy was the presumption that the Israeli government is so wise that it is buying Hamas, and quiet from Hamas, with other parties' money. But this never happened. Instead, Netanyahu sold out our lives and our security for a reckless illusion. And the deal with Qatar may have served Netanyahu in other areas.

Hamas is not the only Islamist organizations that Qatar has supported over the years. The Aal Thani family supported the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. As Richard Clarke, counterterrorism advisor to Presidents Clinton and H.W. Bush, wrote, "Had the Qataris handed [KSM] over to us as requested in 1996, the world might have been a very different place." As of this writing, Qatar finances terrorists who live in Doha, according to David Cohen, former U.S. Treasury undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, and according to the records of the United Nations Office of Counter-Terrorism (UNOCT).

Qatar also supports the Taliban, ISIS, and the Al-Qaeda-linked Nusra Front. Currently, lawsuits are underway against Qatar's financing of terrorism across Europe and in the U.S.

Qatar is a state sponsor of terrorism, and should be proscribed as a terrorist state on all international sanctions lists. The Aal Thani family has managed to conceal its crime of supporting Islamist terrorist organizations thanks to its tremendous wealth, which they have used as a tool for many years – even though its crimes included responsibility for 9/11.

Qatar's latest support for the Hamas Einsatzgruppen attack in Israel was also evident on its television channel Al-Jazeera, which is placed at the service of Hamas's leaders – commander Muhammad Deif and "military spokesman" Abu Ubaida – whose statements they have aired numerous times, just as they did with Osama bin Laden's speeches both before and after 9/11. To the shame of the Israeli government, Al-Jazeera has not been stopped by either administrative or legal means. With the Hamas Einsatzgruppen attack and with the killing of Holocaust survivors, they have gone one step too far. The game is now over.

This is something that neither U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who is the stepson of the late American Polish-born Holocaust survivor Dr. Samuel Pisar, UNESCO Honorary Ambassador and Special Envoy for Holocaust Education, nor President Biden will never forgive, unless they have lost all moral consideration

Brendan O'Neill: After the slaughter, the victim-blaming

We can now see the double racism in pseudo-progressive politics. There’s the racism of hating Israel above all other nations. And there’s the racism of viewing Palestinian Arabs as so childlike, so fundamentally lacking in agency, that they can never be held meaningfully responsible for what they do. Make no mistake: when radicals say Israel is ‘the only one to blame’ for the atrocities it experienced on Saturday, they aren’t only demonising Israel – they’re also infantilising Palestine. They’re reducing the Arabs of Gaza to a kind of pre-human species capable of nothing more than reacting to stimuli. In this case, the stimuli of Israeli policy. Israel acts and these people – these curious, blameless people – respond in a Pavlovian fashion. That’s what they’re saying.

It’s a bigoted lie. At every stage of their barbarous assault on Israeli civilians, the Hamas terrorists were making a choice. They chose to plan the attack. They chose to load their guns. They chose to fire them at elderly people waiting for a bus and twentysomethings dancing at a festival. They chose to kidnap grandmothers. They chose to parade distressed or dead women before the mob. And at every stage they could have chosen not to do those things. In claiming Israel is wholly responsible for what Hamas did, the racial paternalists of the supposedly pro-Palestine woke left dehumanise Arabs to a staggering degree. They make Israel the only adult in the Middle East, the only entity with agency, the only nation mature enough to enjoy criminal responsibility, while its attackers are reduced to the naïfs of world affairs.

This is racist. There is no other word for it. We are witnessing the rise of a neo-Orientalism. The great Palestinian writer Edward Said described Orientalism as a Eurocentric prejudice against Arab peoples that tended to view them as deviant and lascivious. It was a mix of curiosity and contempt for the Arab world, he said. Under the neo-Orientalism of today’s army of upper-middle-class Palestine pitiers, Arabs are innocents, not deviants; blameless, not cruel. Of course it is racist to depict all Arabs as evil – but it is equally racist to depict them as being incapable of evil. To imply that they lack the free will to choose between good and bad that is enjoyed by us white Westerners, and also by the Jews of Israel. The woke elites might be enemies of Israel, but with their ironically imperious absolution of Palestinians of the burdens of agency and adulthood, they’re no friends of Palestine.

Some are referring to the attack on Israel as ‘Israel’s 9/11’. In fact it’s another 9/11 for us all. It’s a turning-point event for humankind. As with the apocalyptic barbarism visited on the United States on 11 September 2001, it raises the question: are we going to stand against the regressive forces of anti-Westernism, anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism, all of which are varieties of anti-humanism, or are we not? America was likewise held responsible for its suffering in September 2001. ‘They can’t see why they are hated’, said a nauseating headline in the Guardian two days after that slaughter of 3,000 people. Many failed the moral test 9/11 presented us with. They turned against America, turned against Western values, said we had it coming, cosied up to radical Islam, disappeared down the rabbit hole of identity politics. Let’s not allow that to happen again.

October 10 marks the birthday of my late son, Danny, who would have been 60 today. A diehard humanist who wanted to believe that man is not a predator to other men. We hoped that his brutal murder would mark a turning point in the history of man inhumanity to man. Saturday's…
— Judea Pearl (@yudapearl) October 10, 2023

If you ask the Palestinians, their Muslim and socialist friends how they can justify heinous war crimes like kidnap, murdering civilians in cold blood, rape and beheading children, they will give a litany of reasons like Gaza is an open-air prison, they have no freedom, they are living in crowded conditions, they are desperate and hopeless, and they have no choice.

Here is an article by James Baster of the UN, describing Gaza in the 1950s, under Egyptian rule, from the Middle East Journal Vol. 9, No. 3 (Summer, 1955):

[In] 1947 Gaza was a rather prosperous market town functioning as a collecting and forwarding center for the citrus, wheat, barley, and durra crops of the Gaza and Beersheba districts. About one-fifth of the whole Palestinian citrus crop and 150,000 tons of cereals were annually collected here and sent north, partly for export from Jaffa. There were small local industries and occasionally a stray tourist, fresh from the glories of the pyramids of Egypt, braved the discomforts of the railway journey across the desert from Cairo and visited Samson's tomb. The population of what is now known as the Gaza Strip, including the town of Gaza in the center, was then about 70,000. For this population, communications with the outside world were good. Both a tarmac road and the standard-gauge railway line from Egypt to Haifa and Beirut ran through Gaza. There was no port worth the name, but 40 or 50 small sailing vessels might be expected to call at Gaza during the late summer when the winds were safe. There was a small jetty for lighters at the end of the beach road two miles from the town.

Since 1947, the situation has changed indeed. The visit to Samson's tomb would now embarrass the pious, since it was continuously occupied for several years by 14 refugees. The road and railway line to Jaffa and the north is blocked by the armistice boundary south of Majdal, and the road to Beersheba by the armistice boundary skirting the eastern edge of Gaza town. The only remaining land link with the outside world is along the road and railway which run across some 200 miles of desert into Egypt. But since the Gaza Strip is under military occupation by the Egyptian army, the desert is not the only obstacle to movement across this southern frontier into Egypt.

In this small area are concentrated 219,000 refugees in addition to the original population, now increased to a further 90,000. The population density of some 3,000 per square mile is about seven times that of the United Kingdom. Since about half the area consists of uninhabitable sand dunes, the population per square mile of inhabitable land is 6,000, or about seven times the population density of Belgium.

The refugees, almost all Muslims, came mainly from the north, large numbers arriving from the Jaffa area in small boats during 1948-49. Six thousand were added when the remaining inhabitants of the Kantara refugee camp in Egypt were transferred into the Gaza Strip in September 1949. Many of the refugees live in enormous camps, of which two contain over 20,000 people each.

The population has been largely isolated since 1949, as it has always been difficult to get entry and exit permits from the Egyptian authorities. ...For all practical purposes it would be true to say that for the last six years in Gaza over 300,000 poverty stricken people have been physically confined to an area the size of a large city park.

.... Under present conditions, with access to the outer world barred by the armistice frontiers when it is not obstructed by the Sinai desert, it is doubtful whether the Strip would support by its own resources even 10,000 people at a tolerable standard of life..

High population density. Occupation by another nation. Severe restrictions on travel and goods. An open-air prison (Egypt shipped all its Palestinian refugees to Gaza in 1949.) No economic prospects. A population time bomb in the making.

In short, every single excuse people use to justify Palestinian violence against Jews existed 70 years ago under Egyptian rule - and more, since the Egyptians didn't allow Gaza to have any sort of self-government outside a puppet regime. And Gaza had no outside NGOs helping them.

So if terrorism is a "natural response" to living in an "open air prison," where was the violence by Palestinians against their jailers?

No, the only Palestinian violence in the 1950s was against, of course, the Jews. In the 1950s, Palestinian "fedayeen" murdered hundreds of Jews who lived near Gaza - without Israeli "occupation" as an excuse.

Sound familiar?

If you know a little history of continuous Palestinian attacks on Jewish civilians - many just as heinous as October 7, if not as huge - for well over century, you can easily see that the excuses given for Palestinian terror are nothing but lies.

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