Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, October 12, 2023

The media - and the world - has been excusing Hamas for a long time

In 2009, Amnesty International wrote a report on the Gaza war of 2008-9 called "Operation 'Cast Lead': 22 days of death and destruction.". It summarized the war this way:

At 11.30am on 27 December 2008, without warning, Israeli forces began a devastating bombing campaign on the Gaza Strip codenamed Operation “Cast Lead”. Its stated aim was to end rocket attacks into Israel by armed groups affiliated with Hamas and other Palestinian factions.

What it doesn't mention is that Hamas had a different name for the war - calling it "Operation Oil Slick." And that Hamas declared that war three days before Israel's response, with a salvo of rockets and mortars sent to Israel on December 24. It wasn't a 22-day war started by Israel, but a 25-day war started by Hamas.

This has been how NGOs and the media have been writing about Hamas for over a decade - downplaying its terror, ignoring its own actions, not reporting its public threats to murder Israeli civilians, erasing its genocidal nature. Instead, Hamas is portrayed as merely reacting to Israeli actions.

Excusing Hamas in the West is standard operating procedure. And Hamas has taken full advantage of that - by manipulating Western analysts to believe that it is a pragmatic ruler in Gaza, it wants peace and that it really isn't antisemitic anymore.

In 2011, the New York Times had a scoop: Hamas accepted a two state solution!

But if one reads what Meshal actually said, he did not in any way accept Israel's existence. He said he would accept a Palestinian state in the territories, but not a word about stopping there and ending terror attacks to take over the rest of Israel.

Meshal didn't lie. He just knew that the reporter was too enamored with interviewing him that he could lead him to report things he never said. And it worked like a charm - throughout the 2010s, the tantalizing idea that Hamas accepted a two state solution kept popping up when they said no such thing - and explicitly denied accepting two states in Arabic..

Unless, of course, that second state is also Arab.

Hamas' main PR problem in the 2010s was that Hamas' charter was antisemitic and that fact was slowly becoming known thanks to Israelis mentioning it in TV interviews. The charter explicitly calls for the genocide of Jews, quoting a hadith, "The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him." It has lots of incitement to kill Jews, such as

We should not forget to remind every Moslem that when the Jews conquered the Holy City in 1967, they stood on the threshold of the Aqsa Mosque and proclaimed that "Mohammed is dead, and his descendants are all women."

Israel, Judaism and Jews challenge Islam and the Moslem people. "May the cowards never sleep."

To counter this, in 2017 Hamas fooled the entire Western world into claiming that it has changed. It announced with fanfare a new manifesto that didn't have the same explicit antisemitism as the charter.

And they knew that the media, wanting to give them the benefit of the doubt, would misinterpret this document as a replacement for the antisemitic, genocidal Hamas charter .

There was only one problem: Hamas never claimed that this "political document" replaced the charter, this was all wishful thinking by Western "experts." It didn't need to lie - the clueless Western media was happy to fill in the blanks with their wishful thinking.

In Arabic, Hamas explicitly said that the charter - and its antisemitism - was still its legal covenant. And if you carefully read the new political document you can see that it doesn't contradict the charter.

And in Gaza, Hamas still held explicitly antisemitic events, like this 2014 rally:

Hamas knows how badly Westerners want to believe that it was moderating. it was a masterful manipulation of "experts" because wishful thinking about Hamas trumped sober analysis.

Hamas has never said one word that indicates that it has changed its positions since the charter was written. Yet pundits, professors, world leaders and the media have wanted to see a two state solution for so long, and wanted so much for the Hamas obstacle to such a solution to be removed, that they deluded themselves into thinking that Hamas has changed from the organization that proudly blew up Jewish children during the 1990s and 2000s.

Wishful thinking is no substitute for reality. I don't think there will be anyone apologizing for getting Hamas so wrong for so long, though.

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!

Why Israel must wage all-out war

Normal Westerners try to find win-win solutions, and are expected to respond to goodwill with goodwill of their own.

Palestinians look at everything as a zero-sum game and look at any goodwill gestures as proof of weakness, and an opportunity to double down on demands.

The biggest single mistake that Westerners make is thinking that everyone thinks and acts like we do. As a result, for decades, the West has gotten this conflict spectacularly and fatally wrong.

This is why they pressure Israel to always make more concessions, as the stronger party in the conflict. But it doesn't work unless your partner shares the same basic mindset. But the Palestinians and much of the Arab and Muslim world do not.

This year, according to UN-OCHA figures, the supposed "siege" of Gaza effectively ended. Western media didn't report it, but Israel has been loosening restrictions on Gaza for years to the point that the amount of goods and people crossing the borders with Israel are at higher levels since before the Hamas takeover of the area. Israel has given work permits to many thousands of Gaza workers - a couple of years ago it was zero. They have allowed more "dual use" items. August was a record month for Gaza imports of goods. The number of people entering and exiting also have been higher than before 2007. There have been no restrictions on fuel, no restrictions on medicine, no restrictions on food in over a decade (except during wars.) Gaza has luxury car dealerships, high-end hotels and resorts, glittering jewelry stores. Life wasn't wonderful - unemployment was still very high, for example - but things were getting better for average Gazans under every metric.

To Western thinking, this should result in Hamas reacting in kind - or at least wanting the improvements to continue.

Hamas knows the difference in the mindsets between themselves and Israelis - and took advantage. They didn't participate in the Islamic Jihad mini-war earlier this year. They kept rockets mostly quiet. They pretended that they were acting in a western way, and trading the effective end of the closure of Gaza for calm with Israel. A win-win for all.

But all that time while life has been improving in Gaza they were planning this mega-attack on Jews.

Some of the workers Israel allowed in gave intelligence to Hamas to maximize the number of Jews to be murdered. Some of the residents in the towns and kibbutzim attacked recognized the terrorists as people who worked there every day. They murdered their employers and the Jews who considered them friends and co-workers.

Before Saturday, the thinking was that Hamas wants calm and doesn't want to upset the people it rules. The previous military operations in Gaza were waged with a carrot and stick approach, thinking that reminding Hamas they have something to lose would keep things calm and following up with further moves to make the lives of Gazans better.

It was a fatal miscalculation. Hamas never intended for long term calm. It wanted (with its Iranian masters) to take advantage of what they think of as a weak, stupid Western mentality. Arabic media, especially that aligned with Iran (from Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, Syria, and Yemen) have been filled with articles about how Israel is as weak as a spider web. This intentional slaughter of ordinary Israelis is regarded by Hamas and most Palestinians (yes, most) as the paradigm of regaining honor and dignity and as only the first salvo in the war to ultimately destroy Israel.

There is not even a hint in Palestinian media - whether Fatah or Hamas or independent - that looking into the eyes of a frightened Jewish baby and then slaughtering her is something to be ashamed of. Right now, the Hamas baby killers are more popular than ever. Mahmoud Abbas and PA prime minister Mohamed Shtayyeh didn't make even a pretense of a condemnation of their political rivals this time - they called the murder and rape of innocents "defending the land."

That's why this war has to be different from the previous ones. A limited war that leaves the murderers and rapists in power, and an Iranian-controlled statelet mere meters from Jewish communities, is no longer acceptable or even thinkable The evil cannot be allowed to stay. Israel has to adopt the Hamas mentality of eradicating the enemy, and treat the terrorists like Hamas wants to treat every Israeli man, woman and child.

Israel has to wipe out Hamas and the other terror groups. No matter the cost.

Hamas is embedded in houses, buildings, tunnels, bunkers, all in populated areas. Israel needs to take them all out, not some. It needs to kill or imprison all the terror leaders, not some. It cannot tolerate having these monsters living freely next door.

Being nice was repaid with the worst day in Jewish history since Auschwitz. Israel's entire purpose is to protect Jews. It must eradicate the terror organizations completely and ruthlessly - no matter the cost.

Doing anything less would be immoral.

(This is an expansion on an essay I wrote on X/Twitter.)

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!

Major terror groups always avoid mentioning their "martyrs" at the start of any war, trying to give the impression that Israel is only killing civilians.

But smaller terror groups cannot exactly hide when their top person is killed.

From the Nasser Salah al-Din Brigades of the Popular Resistance Movement:

We mourn the companion of the path, the martyr, Commander Abu Al-Abd Abu Hilal, the leader of the Al-Nasser Brigades, and the martyr Umm Raafat Abu Hilal, ... killed in a cowardly assassination operation at dawn today, Monday 10/09/2023 AD, after a bombing of the house they was in.

Given that they share the same last name, it appears that the woman was a relative who was a human shield.

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!

10/11 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.

Read all about it here!

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.

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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.

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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.)

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