Hades, October 18- The infernal official who oversees the postmortem punishment of unrepentant sinners voiced his continued exasperation today upon the registration of a new batch of Palestinian terrorists that Israeli forces killed over the last several days, as he lamented his mistaken assumption that he had already completed handling of Nazis in large numbers almost eighty years ago, and was not pleased to discover them still operating on Earth.
The Devil told numerous demons today for at least the fifth time in the last twenty-four hours that he had had quite enough of Nazis as of 1945 already, and that the incoming waves of their ideological successors in the form of Hamas terrorists and their abettors have reopened a chapter in the history of Perdition that the Prince of Darkness would rather leave behind.
"These guys again?" Satan was heard to remark. "I thought I was finished with groups of them when the Second World War ended. But they keep showing up here all these decades later. You have to be kidding me."
Denizens of the netherworld recalled an upset Lucifer telephoning the LORD for clarification, then slamming down the receiver when the Almighty informed him of the ongoing Hamas-Israel conflict.
"Bastards," he whispered. "Goddamn bastards."
The Devil shook his head clear. "Time to get to work," he barked at various minions, who began shoveling burning feces into every orifice of the terrified ex-Hamas operatives, as their own little-girl shrieks of horror and pain were played back in their ears at 130 decibels and all their humiliating moments shown on big screens, to the delighted jeers of demons who looked exactly like the people the new arrivals hated most while alive.
Even as the work on the new arrivals proceeded, Satan ordered the drafting of a communique to God, inquiring as to any forecasted end to the distasteful work of handling and processing Nazi-Hamas personnel, and beseeching the Creator for some respite.
"As You know, even I have a limited capacity for this kind of work," the Devil dictated to a demon. "I cannot and do not refuse to do even an iota of the sacred assignment with which You have entrusted me. But I nevertheless wish to express my dismay and frustration that the darkest, most intense period of my reign here in Hell comes to an end not with the large-scale deaths of Nazis many years ago, but at some unknown future date, when Hamas, its allies, and sponsors finally meet their ends. Please take into consideration my feelings in Your administration of mortal affairs so that the date in question comes sooner, rather than later."
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I’m not surprised that every single Israeli action in response to the massacre has been billed by all the self-appointed experts as “violations of international law.” There has never been a single Israeli military action in my lifetime that wasn’t described this way. Concepts in international law generally have two usages: the standard one and the one applied to Israel. Forcible transfer, proportionality, blockade, targeting of civilians, occupation. The latter was suddenly redefined in 2005 to cover armies that aren’t actually occupying any land so that Israel could still be blamed for occupying Gaza, and this was just accepted by all the human rights organizations as Truth. It’s not surprising that in the years after that there was a concerted campaign to redefine “apartheid” to apply especially to Israel, and for years I have been warning everyone that the next one on the agenda was “genocide.”
And that’s why I wasn’t surprised when panels of experts began issuing urgent documents this week about “warning signs” that Israel was about to commit a genocide. This just days after actual Einsatzgruppen stormed into Israel and murdered over 1000 people, ideologically committed, by the actual official charter of the organization which sent them, to genocide.
I wasn’t surprised that campus radicals and assorted far left groups in the West cheered the massacre (nor was I surprised that some backtracked when it started interfering with their plans to join prestigious law firms and brokerage houses). The notion that Israelis are a unique and essential evil has been an article of faith in far-left theology for a long time. You don’t need to wait for violence to encounter it. People might oppose other countries’ policies. They might have more general critiques of another culture or way of life. But there is no other nation whose food, for example, is routinely described as some kind of crime. No other people whose language could be described as somehow illegitimate, as was the case in a leading left-wing journal a few months back.
And I wasn’t surprised at the anguish of the proud-to-be-ashamed crowd of Oedipal Jews who were shocked to discover their ideological comrades reveling in the murder of hundreds of Jews on an autumnal Saturday morning. Their inability to correctly assess the motivations of the anti-Israel obsessives they had partnered with at home matched only their inability to correctly assess the motivations of the terrorist group they were always lecturing us had actually moderated.
For all their furrowed brows and trendy glasses, this group never had a serious grasp on the situation in the middle east and were never really asked to. What they did have was two things that were the foundation of their entire con. First, an unquenchable need to be liked by the cool kids of the radical left, and second a distended feeling of superiority toward the Jewish community they came from.
The disappointment they felt could have been an opportunity to face the difficult questions of how they got it all so wrong. But true to form, the agonizing threads about left “losing its values” or just not being able to “handle” the discussion focused only on their feelings and not on the events that happened, the ideologies that motivated them, or how people who fashion themselves as pinnacles of sophistication could be so blindsided by reality in both southern Israel and Williamsburg.
Certainly absent from any of the indulgent online self-help was a reckoning with their own role in the intellectual ecosystem that produced the voices they came to be so shocked by. Most of them followed the same path from the Ivy League to a stint at the Haaretz English edition for some in-country cred to a sinecure at an anti-Israel foundation needing an expert with a Jewish-sounding name to churn out regular reports connecting any and all political developments to Israeli racism, or alternatively to one of the fashionable lefty journals who need a monthly feature on either Israel’s fallen morality or how powerful Americans who claim to care about antisemitism are actually up to something.
An entire generation of Israelis will begin their political consciousness from the morning roving bands of marauders raped, tortured, kidnapped, and murdered more than 1000 people in more than a dozen villages and towns. A politics that begins from the no doubt harrowing experience of being lied to at summer camp doesn’t merit being taken seriously anymore — and probably never did.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken ordered his Office of Palestinian Affairs to delete the statement as soon as journalists began calling. “Terror and violence solve nothing,” it read. It was the usual State Department pabulum. Most statements nowadays are empty and formulaic, as easily written by a computer algorithm as a diplomat.
The notion that terrorism never works is a nice sentiment. The problem is it is not true. Indeed, Blinken later telephoned his Turkish counterpart Hakan Fidan to discuss a ceasefire. Given how Fidan was the mastermind behind the Turkey-Hamas nexus, this was akin to asking the arsonist to lead firefighting efforts. Blinken’s gut reaction was to reward terror.
Frankly, Blinken is not alone.
President Jimmy Carter rewarded Iranian revolutionaries with the Algiers Accords, a humiliating agreement not only to release funds to the hostage-takers but also to promise to remain aloof from Iran’s internal revolutionary politics.
Ronald Reagan criticized Carter without mercy during his 1980 campaign, but once in office, he was little better. His decision to withdraw Marine peacekeepers from Beirut in the face of Hezbollah terrorism not only handed Iran a huge victory on the shores of the Mediterranean but also inspired al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden.
President Bill Clinton normalized rewarding terror. Under Clinton, Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, the front man for the Irish Republican Army terror group, became the foreign politician to visit the White House most frequently. Clinton not only rewarded Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat with normalization, but he also pumped billions of dollars into Arafat’s coffers, even as intelligence flowed in showing the Palestinian “former” terrorist’s corruption and insincerity. It was under Clinton that terrorists embraced the formula: Terror plus patience will equal political concession and cash beyond our cause’s wildest imagination.
And so it continued under President George W. Bush. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice greenlighted Palestinian elections but did nothing to precondition them on the decommissioning of militias and terrorist groups. The message she sent: Ballot boxes bring legitimacy, but terrorism works if unable to persuade voters. Bush may have launched a war on terror, but Rice opened direct talks with Iran, allowing that rogue regime to leverage terror into concession. President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry simply took her opening and ran with it, adding billions of dollars in hostage ransoms and sanctions relief along the way, in effect making Iran’s decadeslong investment in terrorism and nuclear proliferation profitable.
Every dead Palestinian is useful for Hamas. Just consider the explosion at the al-Alhi Arab hospital earlier this week. This was immediately held up by Hamas spokespeople as proof of Israeli war crimes. They claimed that 500 innocent people had died in the blast. Yet it now seems likely that Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another Islamist terror group, was responsible. All too often, rockets fired at Israel fall short of their targets and end up killing Gazans instead. But this is of no concern to Hamas, which can exploit and weaponise these deaths to its own abhorrent ends.
There is no question that Gazans have suffered greatly over the past two decades. But their oppression and exploitation has only benefitted Hamas’s leaders. They have happily reaped the rewards of their reign of terror, growing rich on their control of the Gazan black market, the largesse of their regional backers and no doubt some of the billions of dollars Gaza receives in international aid. Long-time Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh pledged to live on ‘olive oil and dried herbs’ after he led Hamas to victory at the 2006 Palestinian elections. In 2019, he shook off his asceticism and left Gaza to go on what Hamas announced was a ‘foreign tour’. He has never returned. The multibillionaire now lives in luxury in Qatar. As does some-time chairman of Hamas, Khaled Meshal. Meshal and his family, estimated to be worth something in the region of $2.5 billion, own a Doha real-estate firm, four residential towers and a 20-story mall. And all the while, the vast majority of Gazans live in extreme poverty.
Hamas is clearly corrupt, brutal and nasty. Yet we rarely hear much about just how vicious a regime Hamas runs, because Hamas also arrests, tortures and detains journalists. It is eager for the local and international press to carry stories and images of Gazans’ deaths at the hands of an Israeli missile. But less keen for the media to carry stories and images of its own treatment of Gazans.
That Hamas can treat Gazans so callously and brutally should not surprise us. Formed by the Muslim Brotherhood in 1987, Hamas does not share the interests of the Palestinian people. It is not concerned with establishing some form of Palestinian statehood, or securing rights and freedoms. No, its goals are near-enough apocalyptic – and genocidal.
Like the larger Islamist movement of which it is part, Hamas wants to wage war – perhaps the final war – against the Jews. It wants to destroy Israel, to cleanse the land of Jews ‘From the river to the sea’, as the slogan goes. ‘Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious’, reads one of the opening lines of Hamas’s 1988 founding charter. Hamas, it says, ‘is but one squadron that should be supported by more and more squadrons from this vast Arab and Islamic world, until the enemy [Israel] is vanquished and Allah’s victory is realised’.
This genocidal anti-Semitism doesn’t just pose a danger to Jews in Israel – it also makes any sort of political resolution of the Palestinian question near impossible. After all, how can Israelis be expected to make accommodations with a group that openly calls for their extinction? Meanwhile, the lives of the Palestinians are treated as mere fodder in this obscene, racist campaign.
And yet there are still many Western leftists proudly celebrating Hamas right now. There are many ‘radical’ academics cheering on Hamas’s pogrom of Jewish civilians as an act of resistance. And there are many poseurs flooding social media with Hamas-style anti-Zionism. These are not friends of the Gazans. They are friends of Hamas. And that makes them the enemies of the Palestinian people.
Last year, American Jews again faced far more hate crimes than members of other religions, according to a report by the FBI.
There were 1,305 offenses committed against Jews in 2022, the FBI reported in its tally Monday of national crime statistics, far outnumbering the second-largest category, anti-Muslim crimes, of which there were 205.
That disparity is consistent with years of hate crimes reporting showing that Jewish victims far outnumber other religious targets.
The article notes a large jump in 2022 of antisemitic crimes, but adds a caveat:
Last year’s report showed a tally of 817 anti-Jewish criminal offenses, but the national increase in anti-Jewish hate crimes year over year is harder to pin down, because the FBI said the participation of local law enforcement in reporting the crimes to the FBI’s database had “significantly increased” in 2022.
If that is true, one would expect that other hate anti-religion crimes would have increased as well. But here is a chart based on these FBI statistics comparing anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim hate crimes since 2010:
Anti-Muslim hate crimes hit a peak in 2017 and then went back down to roughly the rate it has been at since the 2000s. The changes in FBI data gathering did not affect the number of Muslim hate crimes; indeed, if they have better reporting, that means that anti-Muslim hate crimes decreased.
But anti-Jewish hate crimes tallied are the highest they've ever been since at least 2004. The ADL, using a slightly different FBI statistic, says "Reported single-bias anti-Jewish hate crime incidents in the country sharply rose by more than 37%, reaching 1,122 incidents, the highest number recorded in almost three decades and the second-highest number on record."
I don't think that the FBI counts anti-Zionist hate crimes as anti-Jewish, which means that the actual number is probably much higher.
Chances are, the 2023 numbers will be worse yet.
Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!
Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.
EU High Representative/Vice-President Josep Borrell gave a speech at the EP Plenary Session on Wednesday.
We have all condemned the indescribable horror of the attacks suffered by Israel. Those attacks against the civilian population have left so many dead, affecting so many defenceless people at a time when they were celebrating life, but instead they found themselves facing death.
Once again we condemn those attacks. And let us also say that Israel – of course – has the right to defend itself. It has always had this right, and anyone attacked in such a brutal way would have the right to defend themselves. But I think we can all agree that the right to defend oneself, as with all rights, has its limits. And, in this case, the limits are those set by international law and, in particular, international humanitarian law. All this is obvious and we can say it again, but repeating it will not help us move forward to make that necessary reflection, which will guide our actions.
Yes, we condemn those terrible terrorist attacks, but we must also condemn the civilian deaths – the civilian victims – in Gaza, which now stand at 3 000. Because speaking out against one tragedy should not prevent us from speaking out against another. Extending our sympathy to the dead, the victims of terrorist attacks, should not – and does not – prevent us from also expressing our sympathy for other victims.
He's correct that Israel has every right to defend itself.
He's correct that everyone should sympathize with the deaths of innocent civilians, including in Gaza.
But when Borrell condemns the deaths in Gaza, he is implying something that is sinister and immoral - that Israel does not really have the right to destroy Hamas. It does not really have the right to do what is necessary to stop the next horrific attack against civilians.
And he is also implying that Israel is violating international law in how it is waging the war, a false claim.
International law says that Hamas' use of Gaza civilians as (involuntary) human shields does not make Hamas targets immune from attack. As one top expert on international law writes,
It has traditionally been grasped that, should civilian casualties ensue from
an illegal attempt to shield a military objective, their blood will be on the hands of the belligerent party that abused them as human shields. The long and the short
of it is that a belligerent party is not vested by the law of international armed conflict with the power to block an otherwise lawful attack against military objectives
by deliberately placing civilians in harm's way.
It has to be this way, because otherwise any terrorist can avoid retaliation by simply placing himself and his weapons among, behind and underneath civilians. Which is Hamas' exact strategy.
To be blunt, for Israel to defend itself, Gaza children must die - because Hamas is using them as human shields. The only party that should be condemned is Hamas and their blood is on Hamas' hands.
Borrell is not saying this. While he isn't explicitly condemning Israel, his words makes it clear that he is certainly not condemning Hamas for its use of human shields.
I don't think that the EU ever condemned the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians in the Iraq War. The humanitarian conditions over years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan were at least as bad as in Gaza today. But condemnations were muted or silenced - because Western militaries were doing the best they can. They understood that when you are fighting to utterly defeat, not just to degrade, the enemy, large numbers of civilian casualties are an unfortunate side effect - and the fault all lies with the terrorists.
To the EU, however, Israel is assumed at the outset of this war to be reckless and unlawful, even though the IDF is at least as professional and far more sensitive to civilian deaths than the coalition of troops in Iraq ever were.
Which means that when Borrell says Israel has the right to defend itself, he doesn't really mean it. He means they have the right to build walls, to use Iron Dome, to stop Hamas at the Gaza border - but not beyond, unless it is a perfect shot that doesn't damage anything else but Hamas.
It is equivalent to telling the US after 9/11 that it only has the right to place anti-aircraft batteries next to all tall buildings and nothing more.
International law gives far more latitude to an army than NGOs and the EU claim. But they are trying as hard as they can to handcuff Israel so it really cannot fully defend itself - and saying that Israel must allow Hamas and other terror groups to survive and strengthen indefinitely, as long as they hide behind civilians.
(h/t Irene)
Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!
Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.
Earlier this week, Egyptians in Port Said showed how much they support Palestinians - but not too much.
They support them enough to put up a 7 meter flag on the side of a building.
The head of the Port Said Bar Association, Safwat Abdel Hamid, described in stirring terms both how much Egyptians care about Palestinians and how much they do not want a single one to enter their country.
See if you can follow the logic:
We will not forget Palestine, and we will not forget Al-Aqsa. This battle is an eternal battle to establish the State of Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital. We declare frankly and clearly that we are one people under the umbrella of the Egyptian Armed Forces, which is capable of protecting the borders from all machinations and plots - capable of protecting Sinai, preventing mass displacement meant to eliminate the Palestinian people, or displacing the land of Sinai, and Egypt will remain independent while preserving its rights, as long as the Egyptian army is able to protect the borders, preventing forced displacement to the Sinai Peninsula.
We are able to support the Palestinian cause within its territories until it establishes its state. Palestine is a national cause par excellence that we defend, and we refuse to be a hosting place for anyone. From here, from Egypt, the strong country with the most powerful armed forces, we are able, by God’s command, to support the Palestinian cause within its territories until It establishes its independent state.
This usurping enemy, which claims to be God’s chosen people, is being defeated and suffering losses. They say that Allah's hand is tied. This statement has fallen and will fall forever at the hands of the Egyptian army and the Palestinian resistance. We do not defend Egypt alone, but rather we defend Palestine, our land, which once made it difficult for the Zionist enemy. We are ready for October in all the coming wars. Our land is sacred land, sovereign land, protected by the Egyptian people and army, and we will not allow the Zionist entity to force anyone into Egyptian territory.
The occupying entity state does not want to take Gaza alone, but rather wants to establish its Zionist state from the Nile to the Euphrates. We are alert and interested in this issue, and we will not allow the Zionist entity in any form to force anyone into Egyptian lands.
We stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people and with the Palestinian resistance with all its factions.
Decades of antisemitic brainwashing has convinced Egyptians that Israel wants to expel all Palestinians from Gaza and take it over, on the way to grabbing all the land of "Greater Israel" from the Nile to the Euphrates.
This has become mainstream Arab thinking. Here's an antisemitic cartoon that illustrates this: the missile/Torah has the words "Displacement Scheme."
And Egypt will resist those plots - by keeping Palestinians in the open-air prison that Egypt established for them in Gaza in the late 1940s, when they forced all Palestinians in Egypt to move to Gaza.
There is some deja vu here. For 75 years, Arabs have been telling Palestinians to stay in miserable conditions - for their own good. They claimed that Palestinians didn't want to become citizens of other Arab countries to keep their own cause alive, yet when loopholes opened in Egyptian and Lebanese laws allowing some to become citizens, they eagerly lined up to become citizens (and then the Egyptians took away that citizenship a few years later.)
Never do any of these Arab "brethren" ask Palestinians what they want. They tell them what they are allowed to want.
But I'm sure the Palestinians stuck in Gaza are very happy about that seven meter flag.
Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!
Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.
Some of the most vehement current supporters of the Hamas death squads were immigrants to America from the Middle East.
Oddly, they apparently had fled just such illiberal Middle East regimes to reach a tolerant, democratic, and secure United States.
Yet they now endorse the Hamas butchering of Jewish civilians. Its savagery is aimed at executing, raping, and beheading Jews, and then mutilating their bodies.
Hamas apparently hopes to shock the Israeli government into voluntarily committing suicide—in line with the ancient Hamas agenda to destroy the Jewish state.
In a strange way, this reign of death has become a touchstone, an acid test of sorts that has revealed the utter amorality of enemies abroad and quite dangerous people at home.
It is past time that Americans deal with the medieval world that was revealed this week rather than keep dreaming in the fantasy world of our government.
Americans need to stop illegal immigration and restore their southern border, while ceasing all immigration from unhinged, hostile nations.
The military must return to its deterrent role and fire its woke commissariat.
Our leaders must accept that in the last three years of the Biden administration, serial American appeasement abroad, disunity at home, and social chaos have encouraged an entire host of enemies —China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Middle East illiberal regimes, and former friends like Turkey and Qatar.
And our enemies dream of doing to us what we just saw in Israel.
In the evening (Israel local time) of Tuesday, October 17, the Hamas-run Ministry of Health in Gaza claimed that an Israeli airstrike hit Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital, killing hundreds of civilians. An initial response from the IDF stated that the incident was under review; later, the IDF shared videos, images, and intelligence materials demonstrating that an Islamic Jihad rocket had failed to launch properly (i.e. target Israeli civilians) and instead hit the hospital parking lot. President Biden acknowledged this conclusion.
Many NGOs immediately adopted the Hamas narrative of Israeli culpability, even though there was no evidence to support it. Certainly, the NGO statements came too quickly to have conducted even a rudimentary investigation and without any attempt to verify the circumstances surrounding the incident. No NGO called into question the veracity of a claim, from a genocidal terror-run institution, that it would be possible within minutes of the night-time incident to document that hundreds had been killed.
The irresponsible responses reflect three central dimensions of the NGO role in armed conflicts involving Israel. First, as part of their wider anti-Israel campaigns, NGOs constantly seek opportunities to demonize Israel and promote Palestinian victimization myths. Attaching a horrific mass casualty incident to Israel – regardless of proof – would be a major advance in their obsessive political war against the Jewish state.
Second, the UN and other international actors rely extensively on NGOs to reinforce narratives and provide ostensible evidence and testimonies regarding events. As with numerous previous incidents featuring misreporting by the same network of NGOs, the statements on the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital demonstrate their lack of credibility. To be sure, this will not stop the UN from impugning its own reports by copying the NGOs.
Third, this incident reflects the abject failure of the humanitarian aid framework in Gaza and the need for a systematic independent investigation. For years, UN agencies and humanitarian NGOs turned a blind eye to terror actors’ diversion of humanitarian aid to produce rockets, build terror tunnels and other instruments, and to personally enrich themselves at the expense of ordinary Gazans. The UN and NGO community have ignored, and in many cases, openly covered up the embedding and co-locating of Hamas weaponry within civilian infrastructure like schools, mosques, and hospitals. Their complicity in crimes against humanity is immoral, has entrenched the conflict, and further endangered millions of Palestinians and Israelis.
Black Americans know the pains and the agony of being terrorized. Celebrating it is an outrage, and an insult—to us.
On the morning of Saturday, Oct. 7, I woke early. I had a flight to catch out of a small town in Washington where I had given a talk, and I was making my way through the airport when I saw a television screen tuned to CNN. It was showing the gruesome images from Hamas’ attack on Israel, making it very clear that the assault was still ongoing.
Immediately, it reminded me of a feeling I had hoped I would never feel again. It was the feeling I felt on Sept. 11, 2001, when I was getting ready for work, watching the morning news and seeing a plane fly into the Twin Towers.
It was the feeling I felt when I watched George Floyd, violently pinned to the ground and hollering out for his mother.
Immediately, I felt a sense of pain, a sense of anguish. Immediately, I felt a sense of fear for my brothers and my sisters in the Jewish community. And the reason why I felt it was because I knew how I felt about seeing George Floyd, and how that reminded me of a time that I thought was far gone, the days of Jim Crow, the days of ancient slavery. Watching George Floyd’s murder, I couldn’t believe I was witnessing the sort of brutality against Black Americans I thought had passed from the world. Watching innocent Jewish men, women, and children being slaughtered just for being Jews made me think of days I thought had passed from the world with the Holocaust.
And yet, here I was, watching evil unfold before my very eyes. And it hit my soul.
I wanted to call every single one of my Jewish friends, but it was Shabbat, and a holiday to boot, and I knew that none of them would pick up the phone. So I did the only other thing I could think of: I said a prayer and asked God to intervene, to provide the shelter he promised in Psalm 46—to be our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.
So it pained me, greatly, to see, not long afterward, several chapters of Black Lives Matter come out in support not of the victims but of the terrorist group Hamas. Celebrating any form of terrorism is disgusting and should be condemned, especially as we Black Americans, of all people, know the pains and the agony of being terrorized. We know what it feels like. We know what it feels like to be gunned down, to be chased, to be mutilated, to be kidnapped.We know what it’s like for our women to be raped, for our children to be killed. And for anyone to align themselves with an agenda that celebrates any terrorist group or any act of terrorism is an insult to where we’ve come from and could unravel the works of support and healing that we are so feverishly working toward.
Disclaimer: the views expressed here are solely those of the author, weekly Judean Rose columnist Varda Meyers Epstein.
We hear a lot about the “innocent” civilian of Gaza, and how
the “vast majority” of them are peace-loving and do not support Hamas. But what
is the basis for this pronouncement of mass Gazan innocence by world leaders,
celebrities, and other talking heads? The facts and statistics say the
opposite: there is overwhelming support for Hamas and “armed resistance” in
Gaza. Which makes a lot of right-thinking Israelis wonder why our army takes
such pains not to kill them.
If there are statistics that prove this population is
innocent, why don’t they show them to us? Instead, they offer empty words,
devoid of reality. “The humanitarian crisis in Gaza — innocent
Palestinian families and the vast majority that have nothing to do with
Hamas — they’re being used as human shields. We have to reject hate in every
form,” said President Biden.
Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said the same thing in
not so many words. Speaking in Egypt about his trip to the region to
discuss the war, Blinken said, “What I’ve heard from virtually every partner
was a determination, a shared view that we have to do everything possible to
make sure this doesn’t spread to other places; a shared view to safeguard innocent
lives; a shared view to get assistance to Palestinians in Gaza who need it,
and we’re working very much on that.”
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz also rushed to defend the “innocent”
civilians of Gaza. This time after an errant Islamic Jihad rocket took out a
hospital in Gaza.
“I am horrified by the images of the explosion in a hospital
in Gaza. Innocent civilians were injured and killed. Our thoughts are with the
families of the victims.”
Ich bin entsetzt über die Bilder, die uns von der Explosion in einem Krankenhaus in Gaza erreichen. Unschuldige wurden verletzt und getötet. Unsere Gedanken sind bei den Angehörigen der Opfer.
Es ist wichtig, dass dieser Vorfall sehr genau aufgeklärt wird.
Scholz, like the rest of the Israel-hating world, rushed to
judgement: the judgment he preferred: Gazans=innocent, Israelis=guilty. Soon scads
of evidence would prove him wrong. Including a recorded conversation between
Hamas operatives clearly attributing the attack to Islamic Jihad.
The hospital explosion, of course, catalyzed the entire
world to damn Israel for “killing hundreds of innocent civilians.” Which of
course, was not true. But like Scholz, none of them were waiting for confirmation
of what they wanted to believe about Israel to somehow excuse the atrocities,
while Jewish bodies are still being processed.
In the Arab world, the state news agency for Kuwait not
surprisingly, “strongly condemned and denounced the Israeli occupation forces'
barbaric airstrike on the Baptist Al-Ahli Hospital in the Gaza Strip, where
hundreds of innocent civilians were killed.”
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan also rushed to blame
Israel. “Hitting a hospital containing women, children and innocent civilians
is the latest example of Israel's attacks devoid of the most basic human
values. I invite all humanity to take action to stop this unprecedented
brutality in Gaza.”
İçerisinde kadınların, çocukların, masum sivillerin olduğu bir hastaneyi vurmak, İsrail’in en temel insani değerlerden yoksun saldırılarının son örneğidir.
Gazze’de yaşanan ve tarihte benzeri olmayan bu vahşeti durdurmak için tüm insanlığı harekete geçmeye davet ediyorum.
No less than a major in the IDF reserves, Nir Avishai Cohen,
repeatedly called the Gazan people “innocent” in his emotional little leftist
self-congratulatory op-ed in the New
York Times.
For 56 years Israel has been subjecting Palestinians to
oppressive military rule. In my book “Love Israel, Support Palestine,” I wrote:
“Israeli society has to ask itself very important questions about where and why
the blood of its sons and daughters was spilled. A Messianic religious minority
has dragged us into a muddy swamp, and we are following them as if it were the
piper from Hamelin.” When I wrote these words last year, I didn’t realize how
deep in the mud we were, and how much more blood could be shed in so little
time.
I am now going to defend my country against enemies who want
to kill my people. Our enemies are the deadly terrorist organizations that are
being controlled by Islamic extremists.
Palestinians aren’t the enemy. The millions of Palestinians
who live right here next to us, between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan, are
not our enemy. Just like the majority of Israelis want to live a calm, peaceful
and dignified life, so do Palestinians. Israelis and Palestinians alike have
been in the grip of a religious minority for decades. On both sides, the
intractable positions of a small group have dragged us into violence. It
doesn’t matter who is more cruel or more ruthless. The ideologies of both have
fueled this conflict, leading to the deaths of too many innocent civilians.
As a major in the reserves, it is important to me to make it
clear that in this already unstoppable new war, we cannot allow the massacre of
innocent Israelis to result in the massacre of innocent Palestinians.
Israel must remember that there are more than two million people living in the
Gaza Strip. The vast majority of them are innocent. Israel must
do everything in its power to avoid killing innocent people and to focus
on destroying the militant army of Hamas.
There is a pattern here, of making a distinction between members
of Hamas and the Gazan people. But it is also here critical to note something that people either don't know or don't like to talk about; the people of Gaza, in democratic elections, elected Hamas to rule them. From the Guardian:
Figures from Palestinian officials tonight confirmed Hamas's
shock win in the Palestinian parliamentary election over the once-dominant
Fatah party.
Polls had predicted a coalition between the two parties as
the most likely outcome of the vote, but a surprise surge in support for the
Islamists took a party that calls for the destruction of the state of Israel
into power.
The preliminary count put Hamas on 76 seats to Fatah's 43 in
the 132 seat chamber. The result could complicate hopes of a peace deal between
Israel and the Palestinians. George Bush said the United States would not deal
with a Hamas-led government unless the party recognised Israel's right to
exist.
As the scale of the Fatah defeat became apparent, its
officials conceded defeat and the Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qureia, and
his cabinet submitted their resignations. "This is the choice of the
people. It should be respected," Mr Qureia told reporters . . .
. . . Mr Bush said a
party that advocated the destruction of Israel would never be partner for
peace, but also hailed the result as an example of democracy in action.
"If there are people unhappy with the status quo
they'll let you know. What was positive is that it is a wakeup call to the
leadership," he told a White House press conference.
"People are demanding honest government ... people want
services; they want to raise their children in a decent environment."
Everywhere you read about the 2006 Gaza election, you will see the word "democracy" in its various forms and usages. In 2008, Vanity Fairran
a piece about a US plot to remove the democratically elected Hamas-led
government from power with the help of Muhammad Dahlan, a Mahmoud
Abbas rival:
Vanity Fair has obtained confidential documents, since
corroborated by sources in the U.S. and Palestine, which lay bare a covert
initiative, approved by Bush and implemented by Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams, to provoke a
Palestinian civil war. The plan was for forces led by Dahlan, and armed with
new weapons supplied at America’s behest, to give Fatah the muscle it needed to
remove the democratically elected Hamas-led government from power. (The
State Department declined to comment.)
Palestinians may soon be heading to the polls for the first
time in 15 years. For some, this will be their first taste of electoral
politics and democratic participation. Yet it will not be Palestine’s first
democratic experiment. Long before the advent of the Arab uprisings,
Palestine held free and fair elections to choose a president and a
parliament. In hindsight, these elections, held in 2005 and 2006 respectively,
marked the high point of Palestinian democracy.
The European Union and the United States were initially
strong advocates of Palestinian democracy, and were a driving force
behind the last elections, urging the main political rivals – the Islamist
Hamas and the secular Fatah – to engage constructively in the process. The EU
and the US proved less comfortable when the democratic outcome went
against their interests following Hamas’s victory in the 2006 legislative
election and the group’s refusal to endorse international demands such as
recognising Israel. Subsequent efforts by the EU and the US to boycott and
undermine the democratically elected government led by Hamas
significantly damaged the Palestinian democratic and state-building project.
This stoked Palestinian political tensions and helped provoke a short civil war
in June 2007 that left Hamas in control of Gaza and President Mahmoud Abbas,
leader of Fatah, in control of the West Bank. These events reverberate to this
day.
Many will try to convince you that the Gazan people were coerced into voting for Hamas. But they were not. The elections were democratic. They were pleased with their choice and showed it, by celebrating when their party won. Al
Jazeerahad the story:
Hamas wins huge majority
Hamas supporters streamed into the streets to celebrate.
In the southern Gaza town of Rafah, supporters shot in the
air and handed out candy. Others honked horns and waved Hamas flags from car
windows.
The elections were, demonstrably, and by all accounts, free and fair and democratic.
So why would anyone call the “civilians” of Gaza “innocent?” All of them
supported Hamas.
A new poll released Tuesday finds a dramatic surge in
Palestinian support for Hamas following last month’s Gaza war, with around three
quarters viewing the Islamic militants as victors in a battle against Israel to
defend Jerusalem and its holy sites.
The scientific poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and
Survey Research also found plummeting support for President Mahmoud Abbas, who
was sidelined by the war but is seen internationally as a partner for reviving
the long-defunct peace process.
The poll found that 53% of Palestinians believe Hamas is
“most deserving of representing and leading the Palestinian people,”
The poll found that 77% of Palestinians believe Hamas
emerged as a winner, with nearly as many saying that it fought the war to
defend Jerusalem and its holy sites, rather than as part of an internal
struggle with Abbas’ Fatah party.
Note that while President Biden, in 2023,
asserts that the “innocent people of Gaza” are somehow distinct from the party they elected, he knows they are not. In fact, after Hamas won the 2006 election, Joe
Biden led a push to cut off US aid to Hamas for winning, and
to the Palestinian Authority for losing:
After Hamas won democratic elections in Gaza, Joe
Biden called for the U.S. to cut off aid to the Palestinian Authority.
When Hamas, which the U.S. government had designated a
terrorist organization, won a resounding victory in Gaza, it sent shockwaves
through Washington. Biden called the results “sobering” and declared, “Israel
cannot be expected to negotiate with a party that calls for its destruction.”
Biden said President George W. Bush was “dead right” in his denunciation of the
election results. Within days, Biden began suggesting that the U.S. and Europe
should sanction Hamas and cut off aid to the Palestinian Authority. “The fact
of the matter is, you cannot pour millions and hundreds of millions of dollars
into a group that, in fact, calls for the destruction of an ally, or for any
country, for that matter,” Biden said. As the Bush administration called on
other nations to adopt this stance, Biden said, “Unless they change their
stripes, unless they recognize Israel, unless they change their charter, I
think we do exactly what the president says.”
In a Senate hearing a month after Hamas’s victory, Biden
offered a twisted logic on the importance of elections. “Elections a
democracy don’t make,” he said, pointing specifically to Hamas’s success at the
ballot. “Democracies cannot come to fruition without elections, but you need
the infrastructure for a democracy, and we’ve not done all that well in the
elections being held.” By March, Biden had signed onto a bill that called on
Bush to “direct the United States Executive Director at each international
financial institution to use the voice, vote, and influence of the United States
to prohibit assistance to the Palestinian Authority.”
Joe Biden understood, though he pretended he did not, with his
“twisted logic” that democratic elections are somehow not really democratic,
because um, other things. Biden knows that the people of Gaza are not innocent.
They voted for terror, death, and destruction. And they got it.
The innocence of the people of Gaza is in reality, a legend propagated
and perpetuated by Hamas. Hamas does not distinguish between terrorists and “innocents.”
Why should we? Why would the leaders of the world, including Joe Biden? From MEMRI:
The Hamas interior ministry website included the following
text along with its instructional video: "The Information Department of
the Ministry of the Interior and National Security has instructed activists on
social media websites, particularly Facebook, to correct some of the commonly
used terms as they cover the aggression taking place in the Gaza Strip. The
following Information Department video calls on all activists to use the proper
terminology, in order to play their part in strengthening the home front and in
properly conveying information worldwide."
Hamas Social Media Rules: Describe Terrorists as Innocent Civilians
The interior ministry’s “Be Aware – Social Media Activist
Awareness Campaign” centers around an instructional video and posters published
on the ministry’s Facebook and Twitter pages. Gazans are taught, first and
foremost, to refer to all terrorists as innocent civilians.
“Anyone killed or martyred is to be called a civilian from
Gaza or Palestine, before we talk about his status in jihad or his military
rank,” the guidelines state. “Don’t forget to always add ‘innocent civilian’ or
‘innocent citizen’ in your description of those killed in Israeli attacks on
Gaza.”
Screenshot of Hamas Facebook post, telling Gazans to use the word "innocent" in referring to terrorists.
Bearing final mention here is the Ben Shapiro video on the
number of radical Muslims in the world. To be a radical Muslim means, of
course, to support and/or engage in terror. The “innocent civilians of Gaza”
have proven that they number themselves among the “vast majority” who share
their sentiments.
In spite of knowing all of this, President Biden took a moment
to inform us that the “overwhelming majority of Palestinians had nothing to do with
Hamas’s [sic] appalling attacks.” Even when he knows damned well that no such
thing is true.
We must not lose sight of the fact that the overwhelming majority of Palestinians had nothing to do with Hamas’s appalling attacks, and are suffering as a result of them.
Joe Biden is well aware that the “innocent” people of Gaza are
the ones who put the terrorists in charge, and he knows that they like it like
that. Are their children innocent? Does it matter? The parents of the children of Gaza sacrificed them before they were born,
on the altar of their Jew-hatred. Had these children lived, they would have
been reared and educated in UNWRA schools to murder Jews and steal their land. They start them young.
There is no doubt that there is much suffering going on
right now in Gaza. The people who are suffering, are the same people who rejoiced when their leaders massacred Jews. Now they are suffering, but they are not innocent, and I for
one, will not weep. For it is a suffering of their own creation.
Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!
Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.
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;
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For 20 years and 40,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I've written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going.
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Thursday, October 19, 2023
Elder of Ziyon
