Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, October 18, 2023

Better Question: What Does International Law Require The Rest of The World To Do About Hamas? (Daled Amos)

By Daled Amos

These days, when people talk about what International Humanitarian Law requires in the aftermath of the Hamas massacre of Israeli citizens, the discussion falls first on what limitations need to be placed on Israel. Almost as an afterthought do a few people ask what international law requires of Hamas.

That in itself demonstrates an odd sense of priorities among the global community.

But a third topic in international law is being ignored, namely: what are the obligations of the international community in the face of this terrorist attack. By merely sitting back and focusing on Israel's obligations, the nations of the world run the risk of themselves violating international law.

First of all there is the Genocide Convention. It was approved for ratification by the UN General Assembly in 1948 and went into effect in 1951. According to Article I:

The Contracting Parties confirm that whether committed in time of peace or of war, genocide is a crime under international law which nations are obligated to prevent and to punish.

The convention addresses an act committed with the intent to destroy, even in part, a

o national
o  ethnical
o  racial or
o  religious group

Genocide includes -- among other things -- killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm and deliberately inflicting conditions with the intent to cause the group's physical destruction in whole or in part. In addition to being directly involved in the genocide, this law also applies to conspiracy, incitement, complicity and even the mere attempt to commit genocide. In addition, the convention not only rulers but also public officials and private individuals liable for punishment.

Then there is UN Security Council Resolution 1373 (2001), which was passed in response to the jihadist attack on 9/11, making this resolution especially relevant to the current situation, given the obvious similarities. It was passed under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter, making it binding on all UN members, unlike other UN resolutions.

According to Article 2, All States shall:

(a) Refrain from providing any form of support, active or passive, to entities or persons involved in terrorist acts, including by suppressing recruitment of members of terrorist groups and eliminating the supply of weapons to terrorists;

(c) Deny safe haven to those who finance, plan, support, or commit terrorist acts, or provide safe havens;

(e) Ensure that any person who participates in the financing, planning, preparation or perpetration of terrorist acts or in supporting terrorist acts is brought to justice and ensure that, in addition to any other measures against them, such terrorist acts are established as serious criminal offences in domestic laws and regulations and that the punishment duly reflects the seriousness of such terrorist acts;

According to Article 3, All States shall:

(f) Take appropriate measures in conformity with the relevant provisions of national and international law, including international standards of human rights, before granting refugee status, for the purpose of ensuring that the asylum seeker has not planned, facilitated or participated in the commission of terrorist acts;

(g) Ensure, in conformity with international law, that refugee status is not abused by the perpetrators, organizers or facilitators of terrorist acts, and that claims of political motivation are not recognized as grounds for refusing requests for the extradition of alleged terrorists;

Furthermore the resolution

5. Declares that acts, methods, and practices of terrorism are contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations and that knowingly financing, planning and inciting terrorist acts are also contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations;

On Sunday, Caroline Glick spoke with Professor Avi Bell -- an expert in International Law -- about the legal obligations of the rest of the world in response to the Hamas terrorist attack, and how nations are violating those obligations. Some of his insights are summarized in a JNS article published yesterday.

Bell makes reference to UN Security Council Resolution 1373, and illustrates how some of its requirements are being violated. For instance:

Resolution 1373 stipulates that all U.N. member nations must “Refrain from providing any form of support, active or passive, to entities or persons involved in terrorist acts.”

Any provision of any aid to Gaza, which is completely controlled by Hamas, is of course either “active or passive” assistance to Hamas, and hence illegal.

This puts the claims of the obligation to provide humanitarian aid to Gazans in a different light, considering how Hamas terrorists are sure to take - and have taken - the aid for themselves.

Professor Bell also points out how Qatar's involvement, supported by the Biden administration, is also in violation of Resolution 1373:

Resolution 1373 also requires all U.N. member states to “Deny safe haven to those who finance, plan, support or commit terrorist acts, or provide safe havens.”

Following Blinken’s visit to Israel last Thursday, he traveled to Qatar. Qatar houses Hamas’s top terror masters. They planned their atrocities from Qatar. Iran’s cash and arms are funneled to Hamas through Qatar. Qatar’s Al Jazeera satellite channel is an integral component of Hamas’s terror machine. On Monday morning, the IDF announced that Al Jazeera reporters are transferring information about IDF troop placements and numbers to Hamas both directly and through their broadcasts...

By embracing Qatar as an ally rather than punishing it for its central role at all levels of Hamas’s terror infrastructure, the administration is breaching international law, yet again. It is also betraying Israel.

Like Resolution 1373, article VII of the Genocide Convention also addresses the issue of extradition:

Genocide and the other acts enumerated in article III shall not be considered as political crimes for the purpose of extradition.

The Contracting Parties pledge themselves in such cases to grant extradition in accordance with their laws and treaties in force.

This becomes relevant because CDR David Levy writes about Hamas Leadership and America’s Extradition Option for The Begin-Sadat Center For Strategic Studies:

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Hamas has conducted the most devastating terror attack in Israel’s history, demonstrating humanity’s worst depravity. The attack led to the tragic loss of over 1,200 lives, including at least 22 Americans, with many more individuals held hostage. The US has a responsibility to its citizens to demand the extradition of Hamas leadership to face trial in the US. Drawing upon precedent and previous successful extraditions of international terrorists, the US can leverage diplomatic relationships and military assets to actively pursue their extradition from Qatar, Lebanon, or other locations where they may reside. [emphasis added]

Levy writes that the fact that the US does not have an extradition treaty with Qatar does not have to make it impossible to get that country to hand over the terrorist leaders:

The US does not have extradition agreements with Qatar or Lebanon, but it has leverage. In requesting extradition from Qatar, Washington has some influence over Doha. Initially, Doha will almost certainly not accept. However, the US can orchestrate the desired outcome with a well-constructed “carrot and stick” approach. The US has a significant military presence in Qatar, including the Al Udeid Air Base, a crucial regional strategic asset. The future of this base and broader military cooperation, such as access to military sales, could be used as a bargaining chip. Economic levers could offer incentives like future trade deals or impose targeted sanctions against individuals or entities. Also, the US can endeavor to work with other allies, like Saudi Arabia and Turkey, to influence Qatar.

The article details examples of the US "holding those responsible for the deaths of its citizens accountable" and Levy brags that this is part of a long-standing US tradition. The article would be more convincing if we had not seen the failure of multiple administrations to apply the necessary leverage to get Jordan to hand over the mastermind of the Sbarro massacre, responsible for 16 deaths, including 2 Americans.

If a country like the US will not apply international law for itself, what are the odds we will see any country apply international law for others?

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!

10/18 Links Pt1: Peace and Terror Cannot Coexist; IDF confirms Islamic Jihad rocket caused Gaza hospital blast; Hamas weaponizes sympathy for civilians they help kill

From Ian:

Richard Epstein: Peace and Terror Cannot Coexist

I cannot locate a single Palestinian figure who has given an outright condemnation of the wanton slaughter as an impermissible means to achieve the destruction of Israel. And this signals a lasting change in geopolitical considerations. There was once a time when Israel sought to achieve, as David Brooks recounts in the New York Times, a two-state solution that gave the Palestinians complete control over Gaza and extensive control over the West Bank. “Dec. 23, 2000,” he writes. “That was the day the Palestinians were offered a path to having their own nation on roughly 95 percent of the land in the West Bank and 100 percent of the land in the Gaza Strip”—only for Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to refuse his final consent. Today that two-state solution is a nonstarter because it would allow any new Palestinian state to mass Iranian troops on two of Israel’s borders, which could easily lead to the strangulation of Israel.

So, the new normal is to abandon all hope of a two-state solution. The only protection for Palestinians will come from Israel, which is able to tamp down on the frequent brutality of Hamas towards its own people and help Palestinians avoid the corruption that has been the hallmark of Fatah (the Palestinian entity now in its nineteenth year of Mahmoud Abbas’s four-year presidency). There is no partner with whom Israel could negotiate in the long term. Regrettably, the only long-term solution for Israel’s safety is to destroy Hamas root and branch. Earlier cease-fires with Hamas were always matters of strategic convenience, which left Hamas with the option to rearm, regroup, and attack again. The stunning success of Hamas’s surprise attack makes clear that it is sheer folly to think that a cease-fire is feasible without unconditional surrender.

It should always be recalled that the Allies’ success pacifying both Germany and Japan after World War II required such a total housecleaning. It will be more difficult to obtain in the current conflict. The covenant of Hamas, conceived in 1988 and revised in 2017, enshrines the goal of “obliterating” Israel so that Palestine becomes an “exclusive” Muslim area. They mean every word of it.

None of the options is pretty for Israel. But either Israel makes Hamas pay the ultimate price, or Israel will remain in existential peril.

Bassem Eid: I'm a Palestinian in the West Bank. Hamas Alone Is Responsible for Any Bloodshed in Gaza

For nearly two decades, Hamas has allowed its people to live in squalor, using the humanitarian aid it is given from the international community to stockpile ammunition and deliberately turn severe poverty and deprivation in Gaza into hatred of Israel.

Now, Hamas uses my brothers and sisters in Gaza as human shields, hiding their weapons in hospitals, schools and mosques, and embedding their terror fighters among women, children, the elderly and families. This is all by design. They don't want peace; they want Gazans to die in a propaganda victory over Israel.

Hamas showed us that it truly knows no bounds when it murdered over 1,400 Israelis—rape and torture have been detected in 80 percent of the bodies, including children. It injured another 4,000, and took 200 captives to Gaza last week. These unprovoked attacks all took place in peaceful communities that are part of Israel proper, not areas in question for my people like settlements.

Hamas's attack set my people and those of us pushing for peace back decades. And now Hamas is putting its own people at grave risk.

Hamas can best be understood as the Taliban, al Qaeda, and ISIS combined. It is like the Taliban in that it runs a piece of territory as a brutal Islamic dictatorship, where LGBTQ+ people and those who do not live a strict Islamic lifestyle are executed. It is like al Qaeda in that it frequently engages in suicide bombings and just perpetrated Israel's 9/11. And it's like ISIS, which butchered the non-Muslim Yezidi ethnic group and took their women as sex slaves or "concubines."

The Palestinian people of Gaza deserve liberation from Hamas. If Israel ends the unjust rule of the terror gang, it will be doing my brothers and sisters in Gaza a life-changing favor.

The facts are simple: Hamas is responsible for all the blood that has been shed and will continue to be shed during this war, full stop. Palestinians like me and my neighbors want peace; Hamas does not.

From Jerusalem to Kyiv, It's All One War

President Biden's visit to Israel is an opportunity to rectify the past. To gain back lost ground, he must resist the temptation to treat the wars against Russia and Hamas as discrete. He must recognize that Ukrainians and Israelis alike man distant ramparts in a war for the civilized world. And he must act accordingly.

For starters, he must allow Israel to destroy Hamas as a political and military force. That means he cannot stand athwart a sustained ground campaign that denies the terrorist organization its most precious resource—territory and control of a population.

Nor can Biden pretend that Hamas's patrons in Qatar and in Iran are exempt from penalties. He must bring pressure on the emir of Qatar, where U.S. forces are stationed, to disavow Hamas and to extradite or expel its political leadership. He must abandon his government's efforts to "engage" with Iran. And he must swiftly impose crushing sanctions on the regime. If Biden is true to his word that Hamas must be disposed of like ISIS, then he will treat any friend of Hamas as an enemy of the United States.

Nothing less is acceptable. And much more is required. The administration is preparing to send to Congress a supplemental spending bill that will include funds for Israel, Ukraine, Taiwan, and elsewhere. Congress must pass it. Then Biden must tell Congress that this money is a down payment. The next step is a much larger appropriation. America must commit to a conventional and strategic arms buildup that will instill fear in Moscow, Tehran, Pyongyang, and Beijing.

Domestic critics will say that we can't afford it. They will have missed the point. Global security has deteriorated to such an extent that America has left the realm of "can" and "should." We have entered the zone of "need" and "must." Weapons must be produced in such quantity that Ukraine can reclaim territory, Israel can defeat Hamas, Taiwan can deter China, and America can lead the world to peace.

Deterrence is not only a matter of capability. It is also a function of will. Biden's greatest test will arrive when the Arab street, European capitals, and the American Left turn against him. The calls to abandon Israel will mount, and the world will wait to see if Biden can demonstrate strength in defense of right.

To survive the perilous hour, he will have to abandon his desire to revive Franklin D. Roosevelt's domestic policy. He will have to embrace Franklin D. Roosevelt's foreign policy of global leadership and the arsenal of democracy instead. And he must do it for real. In this war—this one war for freedom, self-government, and the rule of law—there is no room for error.

On Hamas lies and media complicity

This line from Simon and Garfunkel's "The Boxer" keeps popping up in my head:

"Still a man hears what he wants to hear/And disregards the rest"

The coverage by the media and statements by world leaders and pundits to the Gaza war is a Rorschach test. Most of them assume Israel's guilt, and trust Hamas' lies, ab initio - giving more weight to a terror group whose founding document instructs them to literally engage in genocide over the words of a mature democracy with multiple layers of checks and balances and a vigorous internal opposition that is free to object.

Yesterday's hospital incident was literally made up by Hamas. The hospital itself wasn't hit, they knew it was one of their own side's rockets immediately, and within minutes they made up the accusation against Israel and pulled out the "500 deaths" statistic out of thin air without pointing to a single shred of evidence. Scenes of horrors on the ground were all they needed, and they relied on the world's nascent antisemitism to fill in the rest of the picture, and reflexively blame Israel.

Now, Israel is partially at fault. It has not emphasized enough to the media the huge number of people - lawyers, senior military leaders, people who decide on the size of the munitions, the latitude given to pilots to abort a mission if they see unexpected civilians, and more - involved in every real airstrike.

But the information is out there, and the media shows little interest in mentioning it. At best, they play a game of "he says, she says" and give equal weight between the stories of the people who plan to massacre civilians and the ones who do everything humanly possible to avoid hurting them.

That is not objectivity. That is laziness and subconscious antisemitism.

Check out the New York Times current headline (after hours of only headlining Hamas claims) on the rocket incident:

This was written after the smoke has cleared. Israel provided large amounts of evidence as to what happened. Hamas has not provided a crumb, and in fact has proven it lies by claiming the hospital itself was struck when it wasn't and 500 casualties which it plucked out of thin air.

But the New York Times gives them exactly equal weight.

Being even-handed is not journalism. In this case, it is saying that Jews are just as reliable as proud rapists and mass murderers.

Even worse, MSNBC afternoon show host Ayman Mohyeldin tweeted uncritically the original claim by Hamas, and then cautioned his followers not to believe the IDF version of the story:

The IDF track record of telling the truth and of transparency is orders of magnitude better than that of the "Gaza Health Ministry" controlled by a group that eagerly films and brags about its atrocities. Pretending that the two sides are equally credible is not journalism - it is stupidity. Pretending that the Hamas side is credible and the Israeli side is suspect is nothing less than antisemitism.

Yet that stupidity and bigotry is the raw material cited as "proof" that is then spread by modern slander artists - politicians, NGOs, social media influencers - who have even less regard for the facts than the journalists.

That reflects their own bias. And that bias - the eagerness to blame Israel - is certainly based on Jew-hatred, which is obvious when you see them using words like "genocide" against the people were the first victims for whom the term was invented.

When finally confronted with incontrovertible facts, these same antisemites then zoom out and say "well, we need to look at the bigger picture" and find a way to blame Israel no matter what it, or what the real genocidal murderers, do or say.

The Al Ahli Hospital incident tells us a lot about how little the terrorists and their corrupt government care about the people of Gaza and about the truth. It is just one of many lies that the Hamas Health Ministry issue every day.

But the incident tells us far more about everyone who jumped on the bandwagon, enthusiastically using it to spread lies - and to ultimately incite hate against Jews. Lies like "Israel attacked the Al Ahli hospital" directly leads to antisemitic attacks worldwide.

And the media automatically assuming Israel's guilt based on statements from proven liars makes them complicit.

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!

Today's insane antisemitism in Arab media

The Islamic Jihad rocket that slammed into the Al Ahli hospital in Gaza City has unleashed a torrent of antisemitic reactions from Arab leaders.

Egyptian businessman Alaa Mubarak, the former president's son, wrote to his two million followers that the bombing of the hospital in Gaza is a "genocide" and a "Holocaust" - words that would never be used for anyone else but Israelis.

Algerian newspaper El Khabar both cast doubt on real Holocaust and then claimed that the Jews are performing a holocaust on Palestinians: "If the world was divided over the fact that the so-called 'Holocaust' or 'Jewish Holocaust' occurred, then today we are witnessing a real Palestinian Holocaust taking place in besieged Gaza, carried out by Zionist hands."

Egyptian site Beshara offered a prayer for Muslims to say, which included,

O God, your oppressed servants in Gaza, whom you force upon the cursed Jews and the hateful hypocrites, O God, grant them victory over their enemies, relieve their distress, and have mercy on them, O God, who will protect them but You and who will have mercy on them? In You, O God, we trust and in Your strength we believe. O God, expel the Jews and the hypocrites and strengthen Your power over them. O God, scatter them and make their plans destroy them. O God... O God, O Possessor of power and the kingdom, we have no god but You, O refuge of the oppressed, destroy the Zionists and their machines, and do not leave any of them and those who help them, O Powerful, O Mighty, Glory be to You. Accept our prayers from us, protect our honor, make our feet firm, and give us victory over the Palestinian Mujahideen against the unbelieving people... and the accursed Jews... O God, destroy the Jews completely.

Jordan's Johina News describes reasons why Jews have no rights to Palestine (the usual - Palestinians magically become Canaanites when it is convenient for them) and then the article repeats the popular Arab lie that there is no evidence of the Jewish Temples on the Temple Mount. Temple denial is an acceptable form of Arab antisemitism.

Moroccan site Rassd has an article, "The Jews And Their View Of Human Rights," with the photo shown here, where they extensively create fake Talmudic quotes:

Anyone who thinks that the Jews believe in human rights or even animal rights is a fool. We say to the normalized and the non-naturalized and to those of us who cry over the Zionists, know that the Jews do not consider you to be anything more than their donkeys, and you have an explanation of that in the Talmud - which is a book written by the Jewish rabbis -: “The gentiles are donkeys and God created them to be ridden by God’s chosen people."

It says: “There is no kinship between the nations outside the Jews because they are more like donkeys. The Jews consider the homes of other nations to be animal pens.”

Also in the Talmud: “...Whoever slaps a Jew is like someone who slaps God. It is permissible for Israel to usurp anyone's property. The property of a non-Jew is like abandoned money, and a Jew has the right to own it."

As for women, they are just animals to them, and it says: “A Jew does not sin if he rapes a foreign woman; Because every marriage contract with foreigners is invalid; Because a non-Jewish woman is considered an animal, and the contract does not exist between animals.”

The Talmud also says, “Whoever sheds the blood of an infidel (a Gentile), will offer an offering to God.” ‏

It says: "Whoever kills a Christian, a foreigner, or a pagan will be rewarded with eternity in Paradise and sitting there in the Fourth Palace. "

And as always, there is no pushback in any Arabic media against articles like these that are explicitly and proudly antisemitic. Even though plenty of them insist that the Arab world has nothing against Jews.

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!

IDF evidence that Islamic Jihad fired the rocket near the hospital

Here is the text of the briefing by IDF Spokesperson, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari about the deadly explosion at the Al Ahli Baptist Hospital yesterday:

_______________________________________

The IDF has concluded an After Action Review and can confirm that the Islamic Jihad was responsible for the strike on the hospital in Gaza City.

We did an immediate review with all relevant branches of the IDF. This is what took place on Tuesday October 17th:

At 6:15PM, a barrage of rockets was fired by Hamas at Israel.

At 6:59PM a barrage of around 10 rockets was fired by Islamic Jihad from a nearby cemetery.

It was at the time, 6:59PM — when there were reports of an explosion at the hospital in Gaza City.

According to our intelligence, Hamas checked the reports, understood it was an Islamic Jihad rocket that had misfired — and decided to launch a global media campaign to hide what really happened. They went as far as inflating the number of casualties.

They understood, with absolute certainty, that it was a rocket misfired by Islamic Jihad — that damaged the hospital.

Analysis of our aerial footage confirms that there was no direct hit of the hospital itself. The only location damaged is outside the hospital in the parking lot where we can see signs of burning,

no cratering and no structural damage to nearby buildings, as opposed to the damage caused by any aerial munition which would have been of a different nature: We would have seen craters and structural damage to buildings, both of which haven’t been identified in this incident.

The size of the damage we see here is due to the warhead of the Islamic Jihad rocket, but most of the rockets propellent is still evident due to the short flight of the rocket (because the launch failed).

The following visual evidence shows infra-red imagery of the parking lot. You can see central locations of fires and some debree on the rooftops. No craters can be identified. And all walls of the surrounding buildings are intact.

We also have examples of what air-to-ground munition craters look like. As you can see, they do not exist in this instance.

Many media outlets immediately reported the unverified claims by Hamas. Those were lies spread by Hamas.

I want to make something clear: It is impossible to know what happened as quickly as Hamas claimed they knew. That should have been an initial warning sign for many.

Unlike Hamas, the IDF launched an immediate examination, which was overseen at the very highest levels of command. This professional review was based on intelligence, operational systems, and aerial footage, all of which we cross-checked.

The evidence — which we are sharing with you all — confirms that the explosion at the hospital in Gaza was caused by an Islamic Jihad rocket that misfired.

Here are the four main parts of our examination process:

1) First, we confirmed that there was no IDF fire – by land, sea or air – that hit the hospital.

2) Second, our radar systems tracked rockets fired by terrorists from within Gaza at the time of the explosion. The trajectory analysis from the barrage of rockets, confirms that the rockets were fired in close proximity to the hospital.

In addition, there are two independent videos which show the failure of the rocket launch and the continuation of the rocket flight towards the ground, within the Gaza strip — falling in the hospital compound.

3) Third, we have intelligence — some that will be shared here — of ccommunication between terrorists talking about the rocket misfiring. The terrorists realized that a rocket had misfired and made specific reference to the hospital.

We have cross-checked this intercept with other intelligence sources to confirm its accuracy.

It is common for rockets that are fired at Israel, to land short and fall inside Gaza.These rockets fall short of Israel and have caused Palestinian casualties.During this war, we have counted approximately 450 rockets that misfired and fell inside Gaza. Palestinian civilians pay the price.

(I believe these are the locations of the launches, not the landings - EoZ)

We are also sharing this information with our partners, first and foremost the United States. We want maximum transparency, because we take any incident involving civilians very seriously. Unfortunately, many in the media immediately reported the statements coming out of Hamas- controlled Gaza, which blamed Israel.

Instead of waiting for the examination of credible information from the IDF, some media outlets ran with Hamas’ lies. Some of those headlines are still up and have not been corrected.

I understand the desire to break news, but I hope you will all agree that accuracy and credible information comes before speed.

The IDF acts in accordance with international law.

In conclusion, this incident shows how allegations — in this case, false and baseless allegations made by terrorists — against Israel can spread and inflame tensions in the region.

(h/t Daled Amos)

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!

10/17 Links Pt2: Why won’t the Jews just let themselves be killed?; Silence of the tenured lambs; 'Antiracist' Intellectual Blames Israel for Hamas Atrocities

From Ian:

Brendan O'Neill: Why won’t the Jews just let themselves be killed?

There is something really grim in the marshalling of the rules of war to shame Israel. Many of these rules – the Geneva Conventions, human-rights law – were introduced in the aftermath of the Second World War and the Nazis’ attempted destruction of the Jews. And yet now it is the Jewish State more than any other – more than the warmongers of the Saudi regime, the bomb-happy Turks, the destructive imperial powers of America, Britain and France – that has these postwar rules barked in its face. ‘We will protect you from genocide’, the Western world said to Jews, yet now it wags its postwar officious finger in Jews’ faces because they dare to hunt down men who committed an act of genocidal terrorism against them. The cant and perfidy of the postwar order have rarely been so starkly exposed. There is a concerted effort to quasi-criminalise Israel’s desire to protect its people from racist torment and murder.

The West’s anti-Israel elites seem utterly bereft of the essentials of morality. Consider their insistence on moral equivalence between Israel and Hamas. Israel kills children too, they say, so is it really any better than Hamas? The moral infantilism of such hollow platitudes is difficult to comprehend. If you cannot tell the difference between people killed as a consequence of war and people killed because they are Jews, then you are beyond help. Everyone – including Israel – regrets the collateral damage of the war in Gaza, especially if the victims are children. But such tragedy cannot be compared to Hamas’s murder of children in southern Israel for being Jewish. That is of an entirely different order to war. It is the conscious, willing destruction of innocent life from the standpoint of venomous racial hatred. To kill a child on account of its race is the most unconscionable act a society can commit. It is an act of unforgiving eugenicism that brings shame on our species. Nothing – including the accidental deaths of civilians in conflict – comes close to the mindset that would erase a child as an expression of its deeper desire to erase a people.

It is horrendous that children in Gaza have died. Which is why some of us believe the US, the UK and the UN should be putting enormous pressure on their tyrannical allies in Egypt right now to construct well-resourced, Red Cross-approved refugee camps in the Sinai to which Gazans might flee. However, it is a warning sign to civilisation itself that Jewish children have been killed for being Jewish children. That in this new millennium the genocidal execution of Jews has returned. The Western world fails to recognise at its peril what a vast moral challenge this poses to the enlightened values we claim to hold dear.

Israel’s Western haters cannot see what is at stake. This is about more than the Middle East. It is about whether we are willing to stand against the forces of unreason and anti-Semitism, and for the values of liberty and decency. Are you for civilisation or barbarism – that is what the horrific events of last Saturday demanded of us all. Far too many are giving the wrong answer.

Hamas invaded Israel to murder Jews, not for Palestinian statehood

The connection between the horrors of the Holocaust and of the massacre in Israel are clear. The Nazis hated Jews because they were Jews. They murdered Jews because they were Jews. And Hamas did too. They hate Jews and they hate the fact that Jewish people have a sovereign country of their own.

It was the dehumanizing effect of antisemitism that motivated Hamas terrorists to murder babies, to execute elderly couples, to abuse corpses, and to rape women.

Antisemitism is also the reason Hamas supporters across the world are celebrating this week. It is the cause for the rise in attacks on Jews across Europe, it is the cause for speakers at rallies extolling the virtues of those who carried out unspeakable acts of barbarism. Those people on the streets of London or New York cover themselves in progress labels but they are racists, nothing more, nothing less.

Israel will defeat Hamas. It will recover from the devastating events and use its military might to ensure that what happened last Saturday can never happen again. That is the right and responsibility of any country toward its citizens.

For the rest of us, there is another mission, a parallel one. That is to wage a no less committed and concerted campaign to defeat antisemitism. It won’t be with military force but it should be with all the tools we have at our disposal. Through education, through legislation, through the media, and by calling out antisemitism wherever we see it.

In 1945, the world promised “Never Again.” But it did happen again. This past week, not for the first time we were reminded exactly where antisemitism always leads. We were reminded that the fight against antisemitism is a fight to save Jewish lives. It is a fight we have no choice but to win.

Jonathan Greenblatt: Let’s Be Honest About the Hate That Drove the Hamas Attack

The Third Reich constructed a vast edifice of empire predicated on the core idea of answering the “Jewish Question.” It expanded into all spheres, not just military, but arts, industry, faith, and more, instrumentalizing these sectors to pursue their objective of eradicating the world of the Jewish people. For years, their neighbors in Europe ignored the facts or underestimated their ambition or dismissed their stated goals. It took the combined forces of the Allied powers and the horrifying, singular discovery of the concentration camps, to awaken the conscience of the West, or at least force it to reckon with the price of its inertia and ignorance.

Few thought such an egregious moral failure could replicate itself. No one imagined it might be possible for the world to miss such a moment once again. I know what I would do, ordinary people have told themselves, trying to appease their consciences.

Think again.

And yet, even with the sight of brutalized, raped women being paraded across Gaza by gleeful militants and hooted at by cheering crowds, we see rallies across America and in European capitals extolling the resistance and denying the inhumanity so obvious that it boggles the mind and chills the soul. We see students at our most prestigious and famous university, Harvard, blaming Israel for the massacre of its own citizens. At ADL, we are tracking dozens of demonstrations and countless op-eds blaming Israel for this massacre of its own people at the hands of hooligans with automatic weapons, men funded and trained in the dark arts of death by the Islamic Republic of Iran.

If we are to move forward and address such moral corruption, it will not be achieved after a single military maneuver in Gaza. As we saw in the wake of the World War II, we need a philosophical and psychological reckoning, a wholesale cleansing of the ideology of antisemitism and hate that leads people to ridicule life and applaud death.

We need a modern day “de-Nazification” that seeks to find a political solution to the Israeli-Palestinian impasse. It must address the absolute moral rot at the core of the anti-Zionism that fueled the Hamas massacre, that fills the sermons of countless imams across the Muslim world, that informs the college students praising the massacre as “decolonization,” that tells activists that it’s reasonable to pull up swastikas on their cellphones when they see a Jewish person.

This is the real and long-term fight. In the short term, the difficult challenge for the Israeli military will be targeting the Hamas infrastructure—operation centers, where they store their materiel, where their Gaza leadership is hiding out—while making all efforts to limit civilian casualties. But it will take decades to rid the world of the disease of antizionism that has settled in like a permanent plague.

The process must start now.

Latest Gaza memes, posters and cartoons

Previous ones here.

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!

Here is a great summary of the international law issues with the Gaza war by Eugene Kontorovich that shows not only what is legal, but why it has to be legal, or else terrorists could take advantage and ensure they never lose simply by hiding among civilians.

From the Wall Street Journal (paywalled):

Most victims of the Oct. 7 massacre in Israel weren’t yet buried when some prominent international voices—including U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, the nonprofit Human Rights Watch, and Josep Borell, the European Union’s top diplomat—suggested that Israel’s first efforts to defend itself are war crimes. This raises an important question: Does international law require a nation to choose between committing war crimes and having war crimes committed against it?

The answer is no. One of the great tragedies of war is that civilians often become victims. That is why countries like Israel resort to war only as self-defense, which, according to the United Nations Charter, is every nation’s inherent right. But if even unintentional harm to civilians constitutes illegal “collective punishment,” as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has called Israel’s operations in Gaza, even defensive war is effectively precluded.

The law of war prohibits directly targeting civilians. Israel has made clear that its objectives are only military. “The IDF will destroy Hamas,” Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Thursday, “and we will hunt down every last man with the blood of our children on his hands.”

But military targets can be attacked even when doing so may result in the loss of civilian life. International humanitarian law requires that civilian casualties from a particular action be balanced against “anticipated military advantage,” a rule known as proportionality. In practice, as this rule is understood by Western countries, even significant civilian casualties don’t necessarily make strikes on legitimate targets illegal.

Hamas has violated international law by hiding among civilians. But international law doesn’t reward the use of human shields. Instead, it makes clear that “the presence of civilians within or near military objectives does not render such objectives immune from attack.” Israel’s critics want it to fight in a way that would have made it impossible for democracies to wage war in every conflict from World War II to the U.S.-led campaign against ISIS, which killed about 10,000 civilians by some estimates.

A legal analysis of Israel’s response must take into account the barbarity and scale of Hamas’s attack. Israel now knows that Hamas’s goal is the annihilation of the Jewish people and the Jewish state. Defeating Hamas isn’t simply a tactical military goal but an existential national one—a military objective of the highest order. There is no basis on which to bar Israel ex ante from a generally lawful means of warfare such as siege, or maneuver in urban areas.

Israel’s critics will denounce any significant measure the country deploys as a war crime. Israel has laid siege to Gaza, prompting the usual array of EU-funded organizations to accuse it of starving civilians and violating the law of war. But siege is a “legitimate” and ordinary part of lawful war, in the words of the U.S. Defense Department law-of-war manual. As West Point law professor Sean Watts put it in 2022, “Siege—or encirclement as military doctrine refers to it—is an essential aspect of modern military operations. . . . Only starvation directed specifically at civilians is prohibited.”

This should be obvious: An army need not help its enemy obtain provisions during a conflict. When military objectives and civilians are intermingled, siege aimed at the former also will affect the latter. As with other situations of collateral damage to civilians, international law permits a siege as long as it isn’t “for the purpose of denying sustenance to the civilian population.”

There is no indication that Israel has any strategy of starving out civilians. Nor could it. Gaza has a long border with Egypt, which has long been used by Hamas to smuggle supplies. The evacuation of civilians is a standard measure to avoid humanitarian crises. Israel has moved tens of thousands of its own citizens away from the area along the Gaza border. Hamas, by contrast, has ordered its civilians to stay put, presumably to increase the tally of civilian deaths for propaganda purposes.

Egypt is cruelly denying entry to those fleeing the war zone. Israel’s critics clearly aren’t interested in saving civilian lives, because they aren’t offering to take in Gaza’s civilians. Nobody says refugees from Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan should be trapped in conflict zones. European countries consider it a virtue to accept them as refugees. But to Hamas’s human shields, the world says: “Don’t go anywhere, we want you right where you are.”

It is unclear whether such voices are merely naive or wish to leave Israel perpetually exposed to genocide. What is clear is that if these voices prevail, the commitment of modern international law will have changed from “Never again” to “Whenever they want.”

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!

10/17 Links Pt1: Hamas’s Strategy of Human Sacrifice; It's Only a War Crime if Israel Is Doing It; Why Are So Few Talking About the Hostages?

From Ian:

Hamas’s Strategy of Human Sacrifice

This is not simply a human-shield strategy, where the aim is to deter an attack by using innocent lives as a barrier. Hamas is doing something far more insidious: it’s ensuring the mass death of Palestinians. Here is Hamas official Ali Baraka summing up the difference between the two worldviews: “The Israelis are known to love life. We, on the other hand, sacrifice ourselves. We consider our dead to be martyrs.”

When Hamas fires rockets at Israel and kills, captures, and rapes civilians there, they know Israel will retaliate. Hamas leaders put their assets in civilian buildings not in hopes that Israel will hold fire, but in a cold calculation that the retaliation will do terrible harm to Palestinian civilians—despite the extraordinary efforts Israel’s army makes to avoid it. Hamas is working to maximize, not minimize, that harm. This is to generate international pressure on Israel to end its retaliation—and to strengthen Israel’s enemies in their depiction of the Jewish state as a villain.

Israel has moral and practical reasons for avoiding harm to Palestinian civilians. Israelis pride themselves on acting humanely, even in war. Their military officers—like those in the U.S. military—distinguish between civilian and military sites and never purposefully target the former. Even when attacking senior terrorist leaders, Israel tries to avoid harming their family members, let alone unrelated civilians. To avert collateral damage, Israel routinely provides warnings of attacks, even though they increase risk to Israelis and decrease an attack’s chances of success. In the current war, Israel has notified Gazans in various neighborhoods that there would soon be attacks there and they should hasten to designated safe areas.

Hamas’s strategy is innovative in the worst way. For everyone who aspires to strengthen moral constraints on warfare, it is a huge step backward. It is savage, cynical, and unnatural—but what’s worse, it’s effective. That is why it’s being used.

Innocent Palestinians deserve sympathy. But when Americans, Europeans, and others misdirect their outrage at Israel, failing to grasp Hamas’s responsibility, they are encouraging the very cruelty they intend to condemn.

Blame for the purposeful sacrificing of innocent Palestinians goes first and foremost to Hamas, to be sure, but also to those of us in the outside world duped by this strategy.

Schools, hospitals, and mosques will be bombed in the coming days. This is what Hamas wants, what it has made sure will happen. Those, however well-intentioned, who blame Israel are complicit in Hamas’s war crimes.

It’s time to place the blame rightly and stop incentivizing Hamas’s crimes against the Palestinians (let alone against the Israelis). For the sake of both Palestinians and Israelis, and to honor basic decency and law, it is the least we can do.

All those who question the sickening violence of the Hamas attack against Israel must read the words of these forensic scientists struggling to identify the 297 bodies that were so brutalised as to be unrecognisable

The charred remains were so disfigured that at first they did not realise it was two people.

But when pathologists gently began to examine, they could see the bodies were those of an adult and a child. And they were hugging tightly.

That is how it had ended for them, trapped in a room as Hamas terrorists set fire to their home. As the horror of burning to death came to them, the adult had nothing left to offer but to hold that terrified child in their arms.

And as unbearable as that is, it is by no means an isolated case here at Israel's National Centre of Forensic Medicine, where the bodies of the victims of the Hamas attack are being identified. Scientists charged with this grim task told me it is common to have to carefully separate the fused remains of two helpless people who, in their final moments, had found all they could do was embrace in death.

No wonder several professional pathologists broke down in tears yesterday as they tried to explain their vital work to me.

This is the real-life version of Silent Witness, the television drama about pathology experts piecing together forensic clues to solve a case.

Of the 959 bodies so far brought to the Shura military base, the ones that are hardest to identify are taken to the forensics centre here in Tel Aviv, where teams of scientists are working around the clock to find out who they are.

They are acutely aware that the tormented families of the missing are beyond desperate – they just need to know.

The work itself could scarcely be more upsetting. Some victims were shot then set on fire, others trussed up with wire cords and condemned to a burning hell.

As of yesterday, there were 297 bodies so hideously brutalised as to be unrecognisable to anyone. It is the wretched job of these pathologists to try to work it out.

Sometimes, all they have to go on are a few fragments of bone. That is literally all that is left of someone.

Foreign media given unprecedented access to forensic institute to witness atrocities

For the first time since it opened in 1954, on Monday Israel’s National Center of Forensic Medicine (Abu Kabir) in Jaffa allowed reporters to see and photograph the dead bodies inside.

The stench of death and putrefaction was overwhelming on Abu Kabir’s bottom floor where bodies that await specialized examination and bone fragments are unloaded for DNA extraction or study by anthropologists.

Some of the journalists couldn’t stomach viewing the horrific scenes in the autopsy rooms as the center’s teams worked reverently and professionally, burying their emotions for the moment.

Despite how intensively Abu Kabir’s staff are working as they try to establish the identity of the most degraded remains of the mass-murderous Hamas attack on southern Israeli communities on October 7, it was felt important to make room in their tight quarters for journalists to document these atrocities for the world to see.

There are still hundreds of unidentified bodies, and forensic experts at Abu Kabir and from the IDF and police are working around the clock to provide definitive answers for the victim’s families.

Dr. Hagar Mizrahi told the journalists that as of Monday morning, 959 body bags containing remains in various states had arrived at the IDF’s Shura base near Ramle and 504 victims had been positively identified. There were still 297 bodies or bags of remains unidentified, most of which were expected to be transferred to Abu Kabir for advanced forensic examination.

At least 1,300 Israelis — the majority of them civilians — have been killed and at least 199 have been taken hostage by Hamas in Gaza (Hamas claims an additional 50 Israelis are being held by other groups).

Times of Israel reports:

Jordanian King Abdullah II says that neither his country nor Egypt will accept Palestinian refugees, declaring it a “red line.”

At a press conference held after meeting German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Berlin, Abdullah says that “some of the usual suspects are trying to create facts on the ground,” according to Sky News Arabia.

“There will be no refugees in Jordan and no refugees in Egypt.”

Why not, exactly?

Jordan took in 1.3 million refugees from Syria. About half are in camps and the rest live in the cities. It wasn't happy about the situation, but Abdullah certainly didn't draw a "red line" against them.

Egypt, similarly, has taken in - equally reluctantly - hundreds of thousands of refugees from Sudan, Syria, and elsewhere.

But even though both those countries accepted Syrian refugees, they didn't treat them all the same.

Jordan turned away many Syrian refugees - if they were of Palestinian origin. It didn't allow the ones who came earlier to live in the same refugee camps that they set up By policy, Palestinian Syrians were treated like garbage.

Egypt gave rights to Syrian refugees - but not if they were considered Palestinian. Palestinians who arrived via air were immediately sent back to Syria.

For decades, the Arab world pretended that they cared about Palestinians, but when it came to actual living Palestinians, they not only refused to help - they actively worked to deny them help.

They always wanted Palestinians to be cannon fodder against Israel and nothing more.

Clueless world leaders and diplomats never even commented on this official discrimination against Palestinians. The Arab leaders would say how central the Palestinian issue was to them while they mistreated the ones under their control.

Now, it is happening again, in broad daylight: Arab leaders refuse to save Palestinian lives, because they have great propaganda value when they are dead, but they are merely an expense when they are alive.

If you look at Jordan's reporting of the meeting, Abdullah adds something interesting:

His Majesty reaffirmed rejection of attempts to forcibly displace the Palestinians and cause their internal displacement, stressing that such attempts would plunge the region into another disaster and a new cycle of violence and destruction.

"Internal displacement" includes moving them to the West Bank.

Israel has always resisted moving Gazans to the West Bank, but I haven't seen anyone talk about this option today. Certainly there has been no word from the Palestinian Authority offering to save some Gazans for the duration of the war - even though they wouldn't become refugees, they would still be in "Palestine," and there is a lot more room in Areas A and B than in Gaza.

But here too, the example of Syria is instructive. Because Abbas had the opportunity to save some Palestinian Syrians, and he said he'd rather see them dead because Israel would ask them to renounce "return."

These examples prove as much as possible that the entire purpose of the Palestinian cause is not to help Palestinians but to use them as a weapon against Israel. They have been pawns for 75 years of the Arab leaders, including their own leaders, with no one actually caring about them even as they insisted that they were the most important issue.

The cynicism is obvious to anyone who bothers to look. But the world media and the Western world simply doesn't want to accept that Palestinians are hated so much by their own Arab brethren and by their own leaders.

If there is another explanation for why Palestinians have been singled out and treated worse than every other Arab, refugee or otherwise, by Arab leaders, I sure haven't seen it.

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!

Cartoon by Peter Brookes, Times of London, 2014

There have been a number of stories about Gaza City's Shifa Hospital and how it is trying to cope with the number of injured

But Shifa isn't only famous for being the biggest hospital in Gaza.

It is known for being the headquarters of Hamas. And this has been well known since at least 2009.

As Tablet wrote in 2014:

The idea that one of Hamas’ main command bunkers is located beneath Shifa Hospital in Gaza City is one of the worst-kept secrets of the Gaza war. ...The location is so un-secret that Hamas regularly meets with reporters there. On July 15, for example, William Booth of the Washington Post wrote that the hospital “has become a de facto headquarters for Hamas leaders, who can be seen in the hallways and offices.” Back in 2006, PBS even aired a documentary showing how gunmen roam the halls of the hospital, intimidate the staff, and deny them access to protected locations within the building—where the camera crew was obviously prohibited from filming.

What Hamas wants is for reporters to use ... photos of Palestinians killed and wounded by Israelis, which make Palestinians look like innocent victims of wanton Israeli brutality.

To that end, the rules of reporting from Shifa Hospital are easy for any newbie reporter to understand: No pictures of members of Hamas with their weapons inside the hospital, and don’t go anywhere near the bunkers, or the operating rooms where members of Hamas are treated.

...What Hamas has done, therefore, is to turn Shifa Hospital into a Hollywood sound-stage filled with real, live war victims who are used to score propaganda points, while the terrorists inside the hospital itself are erased from photographs and news accounts through a combination of pressure and threats, in order to produce the stories that Hamas wants.

Judging from the coverage in this round, the reporters are sticking to the Hamas playbook perfectly.

Hamas doesn't only hold meetings, treat its members separately, and use the hospital as a command and control center. It has also used it as a launching pad for rockets - something else reporters only rarely would mention out of fear. A Finnish reporter bravely said that she witnessed a rocket launch from there. in 2014: "At two o'clock in the morning from the parking lot located behind the hospital, a rocket was launched. This really happened right here, and the sound was very loud."

She's one of the few exceptions that prove the rule.

When Israel bombed the tunnels under Al Wehda street in 2021, reporters didn't mention that Shifa Hospital is right at the end of the street - meaning, it is a hub or terminal for Hamas' extensive tunnel system, and a bomb aimed at that tunnel could collapse the hospital over the heads of the patients. (Israel actually built the underground bunker at the hospital in 1983 to be a secure location for operating rooms.)

A report by Amnesty International in 2015 said Hamas used a section of the hospital “to detain, interrogate, torture and otherwise ill-treat suspects, even as other parts of the hospital continued to function as a medical centre.”

Shifa Hospital is the paradigm of how Hamas uses human shields and how it endangers civilians. But because Hamas doesn't want reporters to mention that....they almost never do.

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!

There was a meeting in Beirut Monday between Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine discussing "the historical and distinguished relationship between the Jihad and the Front, the ways of cooperation and coordination, and the emphasis on bilateral relations and joint work."

Hating Jews makes the oddest couples, bringing people together who would hate each other in any other context. Islamic Jihad is an extremist Islamist group and the PFLP is a socialist hard Left organization - but they routinely cooperate with each other and with Hamas. And they happily pose together.

Egypt-based Fath News, a Salafi newspaper, hates the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, which is an offshoot. But Dr. Yasser Borhami, Vice President of the Salafist Call, said, "We disagree with them on major methodological issues, but when it comes to defending the most marginalized and oppressed of the people of Palestine, we do not disagree with them, but rather agree....Therefore, we will pray for them, 'May God grant you success. O God, grant them victory with a mighty and sustaining victory. O God, the sender of the Book, the one who moves the clouds, and the destroyer of parties, quick to reckon. Defeat the Jews and those who support them, and shake them, and give us victory over them.”

The Salafists don't even try to pretend that they are against "Zionist," with articles saying thing like "Jews are people of treachery, lying, betrayal, procrastination, and breaking promises."

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!