Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, November 13, 2023

11/13 Links Pt1: UN fails again. It gives cover to Hamas while abandoning Israel; Hamas planned to push October 7 massacre to the West Bank border

From Ian:

Aviva Klompas: United Nations fails again. It gives cover to Hamas while abandoning Israel.

The Oct. 7 slaughter of more than 1,200 Israelis was the single-largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust and the second-largest terrorist attack since 9/11.

Antisemitism is an unending plague:My father, Elie Wiesel, survived Auschwitz. He'd ask these questions about Israel-Hamas war.

Since that horrific day, the U.N. has called numerous emergency sessions, held hours of debate, drafted hundreds of pages of draft resolutions – all of which amount to very little.

It has not passed a single resolution to condemn Hamas’ savagery, even though terrorists wore GoPros to document themselves slaughtering, raping and torturing civilians. Similarly, the U.N. has not called for the release of more than 200 hostages, including babies, children and the elderly. The walls of the old city of Jerusalem feature projected pictures of Israelis abducted by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7, 2023, and are currently held hostage in the Gaza Strip.

Instead, the U.N. has set its focus on conditions in Gaza, blaming Israel even as Hamas hides behind the civilian population and continues to fire rockets at Israel’s civilian centers.

U.N. officials are pressing for a cease-fire, knowing full well it would give Hamas the chance to regroup, rearm and renew its attacks. Back in 2014, there were a series of short-lived cease-fires, which Hamas breached.

The United Nations was founded in the wake of World War II to maintain peace and security and prevent atrocities like the Holocaust. It is failing to live up to that mission.

'We will kill you':I was held hostage in a war zone. Years later, the trauma remains.

UN provides cover for terrorists
Eight decades later, the U.N. is a clubhouse for dictators and a den of moral equivocation. It is a home for corrupt tyrants to stand in judgment of free democracies, where warmongers like Russia wield a veto and notorious human rights abusers like Iran get tapped to lead human rights forums.

By cultivating the appearance of a virtuous global body, the U.N. dangerously telegraphs to terror organizations and their state sponsors that there will never truly be a price to pay for committing atrocities. Worse, the U.N. gives them cover.

Jewish students are being vilified.Will our allies stand up to antisemitism?

After Oct. 7, the international outcry shifted from horror for Israel to horror at Israel in less than a week. While it is reasonable to expect Israel to abide by the laws of war, it is entirely unreasonable to expect nothing from Hamas.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told the Security Council that the deadly Hamas attack on southern Israel “did not happen in a vacuum.” These six words were all the world needed to hear to decide that Hamas, genocidal in its intent and brutal in its action, was justified on Oct 7.

In one way, Guterres is right: The attacks didn't happen in a vacuum. Since Hamas took over the Gaza Strip in 2007, the U.N. has watched the terrorist group steal billions of dollars in international aid, build command centers inside hospitals and store rockets in schools operated by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency.

On the U.N. watch, Gaza has become what the Israeli ambassador to the United States calls “the biggest terror complex in the world” – and Hamas has learned repeatedly that they can get away with murder.

Hamas, Israel and the Victimhood Ploy

Since the brutal attacks by Hamas on innocent civilians in southern Israel, photo evidence has come to light detailing the atrocities, including infants burned to death. Amidst the ensuing war, much of the world has turned from their brief moment of recognizing Hamas’s brutality to rounding on Israel over its retaliation – the precise reaction Hamas sought by attacking in the first place.

Misled once again by the idea that Israel seeks to commit genocide in Gaza despite consistent population growth, the United States, Israel’s long-time ally, has seen antisemitic acts rise by 400% in under a month. Unlike in previous wars with Hamas, these strikes by Israel came in response to 242 Israeli and foreign hostages still held in the Gaza Strip as well as the usual ongoing rocket attacks. Yet, thanks to Hamas’s victim complex and collective post-colonial guilt in the West, the image of Israel as the aggressor prevails.

As a result, civilian casualties reported by Hamas in Gaza, horrific as they are, have all but eclipsed the October 7 attacks. While this turn of events often stems from a higher death count in Gaza, another element seems at play here – the refusal of the world to recognize cause and effect. Since Hamas’s violent rule prompted the Israeli security blockade in 2007, Hamas has insisted that their alleged oppression justifies any atrocities committed against Israeli Jews. The political entity continues to use human shields for the sympathy ploy, knowing that onlookers will focus on Gazan fatalities over still-trapped hostages and murder of Israeli civilians.

Indeed, much of the international community – many of them nations that haven’t experienced on-soil war in decades — sees the death toll in Gaza and wonders why Israel has turned the Strip into a “prison,” either with no knowledge of or regard for Hamas’s role in the situation. Perhaps unique to the war beginning on October 7, Gazans’ impeded escape south to Egypt has been largely blamed only on Israel, despite Egypt’s reluctance to open its borders to refugees due to security concerns. Ironically, the Arab need for security hasn’t been questioned much at all. Moreover, thanks to this view of the militants as “freedom fighters,” silence remains on Hamas ordering Gazans to stay put despite Israeli calls to evacuate days in advance.

Posited from a Western standpoint by American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington as the “Clash of Civilizations” and from a non-Western perspective by Palestinian-American academic Edward Said as “Orientalism,” a conflict of ideologies has arisen between alleged racist perpetrator and racialized victim. When applied to Israel and Palestine, Israel as the “powerful Western oppressor” and Palestine as the “brave non-white victim” have captured the hearts and minds of many esteemed institutions. This oppressor/victim binary tends to dismiss any reference to the culpability of any Palestinian entity in events preceding Israeli retaliation. This bias appears in the popular view of Israel as an occupying power, an occupation resulting from several wars in which the Arab coalition attacked Israel despite Israeli land concessions.

Israel’s founding by Jewish refugees from Europe and support by a powerhouse like America might seem to justify the Jewish state’s reputation as “white” and “Western.” Notwithstanding, all Jews originate in the Middle East, a fact that many progressive Jews today either deny or minimize out of a guilt-ridden need to uphold the pro-Palestine (unfortunately coming to mean pro-Hamas) narrative.

Indeed, armed with the view that antisemitism is a form of opposing unjust power or “punching up,” many Jews in the West view themselves as the white privileged oppressors. This self-flagellation emboldens the narrative spread by those who oppose Israel in any fashion, including the right to defend and rescue its civilians. Some of these Jews even hold Israel’s very existence as the root cause of the October 7 attacks.

On October 7, as news came in about the massacre of Jews, a Mauritanian news site published several poems expressing joy at the murders.

Yes, poems.

Here's one of them (translated by ChatGPT, corrected by Ibn Boutros:)

Speak to me of the beautiful morning, Of a Jihad flavored with the impossible.
Of veiled men who are noble, With no equals in our time.
Feed Ashqalan (Ashkelon) with the bread of bullets, And pour over it a cup of gunpowder.
See the Jews, the uncouth, fleeing, chained, or killed
What a moment of glory, it revived every dead, and delighted every generation
It is the triumph, so fill the universe with praise, And admiration for the majestic and beautiful.
Do not cease speaking, for my longing, For the talk of jihad is boundless.
Indeed, it is a joy that has descended my land, And my people, all of them, and my tribe.
And my religion and my nation, I see it as a day of celebration for every family and child.

Other poems (only ChatGPT translated so it may have errors) had verses like:

Delight your heart with this victory at times,
For the Jews are but a mirage when we confront them.

They fell as slain, captured, and as spoils on their Sabbath,
When the army of truth advanced with anger.

A poem called "An Exceptional Morning" says:

They scatter like a flock of locusts; the storm sweeps them away, As if they were bubbles in its currents.
Allah is great, and upon their backs, lava flows, Feeding on skulls and scattered limbs.

Another:

The ink inscribed by the Qassam Brigades,
A noble declaration of glory and honor.

Stars arose with dignity and nobility,
Defying the roar of the barking aggressor.

A night from the heights, its morning radiant,
With the sorrow of the Jews and the glory of Islam.

This isn't "anti-Zionism." These are paeans to a holy war of Islam attacking 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!

Why is it so difficult for media to report that Gazans have to lie to them to avoid being murdered by Hamas?

The New York Times has this headline:

Israel says there are Hamas tunnels under Shifa, and Hamas denies it.

So both sides must be given equal weight, right?

The article isn't terrible once you read it to the end, past all the denials and stories of patient suffering. The evidence for Hamas terrorists at the hospital is overwhelming:

Israel has long maintained that Al Shifa is among the most egregious examples, and its military has pushed its claims hard since the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas. It has shown reporters what it says is a 3-D representation of the complex, released audio recordings that purport to show Hamas fighters discussing the tunnels under Al Shifa and released two videos of interrogations in which captured militants discuss the tunnels.

A former senior official at Shin Bet, Israeli’s internal security service, said both Hamas and Israeli intelligence referred to the network as “the Metro” and compared the compound under Al Shifa to a major station of the New York subway system.

The former Shin Bet official and two other Israeli officials said the compound included several floors with designated spaces for meetings, living quarters and storage facilities. It can hold at least several hundred people, they said.

Israeli military intelligence said in a statement provided to The New York Times that “there are several underground complexes used by the leaders of the terrorist organization Hamas to direct their activities.” The complex relies in part on electricity diverted from Al Shifa, the statement said, and there are multiple entrances to it in and around the hospital.

Senior Israeli intelligence officials allowed The Times to review photographs that purported to show secret entrances to the compound from inside the hospital. Signs identifying the location as Al Shifa were clearly visible in the photographs, though their authenticity could not be independently verified.

American officials, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose sensitive intelligence, said they are confident that Hamas has used tunnel networks under hospitals, in particular Al Shifa, for command and control areas as well as for weapons storage.

The practice by Hamas has been longstanding, they said, adding that the United States and Israel have independently developed intelligence about Hamas’ use of the tunnel network under Al Shifa Hospital.

There are other accounts of Hamas using Al Shifa, as well. In 2008, armed Hamas fighters in civilian clothing were seen roving the hospital during a three-week war between the militants and Israel, according to New York Times reporting in Gaza at the time. The militants claimed to be security guards, but were seen killing alleged Israeli collaborators.

Six years later, during the next round of fighting between Israel and Hamas, the militants routinely held news conferences on the hospital grounds and used them as a safe meeting place for Hamas officials to speak with journalists, though these activities do not constitute military use.

After the war, Amnesty International said in a report that Hamas was using abandoned areas of Al Shifa, “including the outpatients’ clinic area, to detain, interrogate, torture and otherwise ill-treat suspects, even as other parts of the hospital continued to function as a medical center.”

The most famous tunnel in Gaza City is Al-Wahda Street, which Israel bombed in previous wars. You can clearly see the telltale sinkholes from the collapsed tunnels underneath:

Al-Wahda street goes straight to Shifa Hospital:

But the New York Times reports, "The hospital’s director, Dr. Mohammed Abu Salmiya, flatly described the Israeli allegations as 'untrue' in an interview on Friday."

Why would they, and so many other doctors, lie to the august newspaper?

In 2014, Radjaa Abu Dagga , a journalist for France's Libération,was interrogated at Shifa:

A few meters from the emergency room where the injured from bombings are constantly flowing, in the outpatient department, he was received in "a small section of the hospital used as administration" by a band of young fighters. They were all well dressed, which surprised Radjaa, "in civilian clothing with a gun under one's shirt and some had walkie-talkies " . He was ordered to empty his pockets, removing his shoes and his belt then was taken to a hospital room "which served that day as the command office of three people."

A man begins his interrogation: "Who are you? Who do you call? What are you doing?" "I was very surprised by the procedure," admits Radjaa, who showed him his press card in response. Questions came. They asked if he speaks Hebrew, he has relations with Ramallah. Young Hamas supporters insistently ask the question: "Are you a correspondent for Israel?" Radjaa repeated that only works for French media and a chain of Algerian radio.

It was then that the three men deliveed this message: "This is yours to choose. We are an executive administration. We will carry the message of Qassams. You have to stay at home and give us your papers. " Stunned to be covered by the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, Radjaa tried to defend himself and especially to understand why such a decision was taken against him. In vain. "It is impossible to communicate with these people," laments the journalist.

Libération then removed the article at Abu Dagga's request, because he was worried for his parents who live in Gaza.

He is not the first nor last journalist threatened by Hamas for reporting something the terror group didn't like.

Now, if journalists are afraid to report the truth about Gaza, all the more so are those who have to work with Hamas day in and day out - like the doctors at Shifa - have to worry about their and their families' lives.

Reuters quotes another doctor:

“The tanks are in front of the hospital. We are under full blockade. It’s a totally civilian area. Only hospital facility, hospital patients, doctors and other civilians staying in the hospital. Someone should stop this," a surgeon at the hospital, Dr Ahmed El Mokhallalati, said by telephone.

But Israel has said that the east side of the hospital is open for people to escape. The doctor is lying. He is forced to say what Hamas wants him to say.

Reuters doesn't bother reporting that.

The New York Times, and Reuters, and NBC News and everyone else knows this. But they still report "both sides" as if the denials of an organization that would murder their own people in a moment are equivalent to years of intelligence and direct evidence.

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!

More Israeli Arabs feel a part of the State of Israel than ever before

The latest Israel Democracy Institute survey had one very interesting chart:

The text is even more interesting:

In both the Jewish and Arab samples, this survey found the highest percentage of respondents who feel part of the state since we began asking this question in 2003. In both groups, but especially among Arabs, there has been a very sharp increase relative to the measurement taken in June 2023.

Within the Arab sample, the share of Christians and Druze who feel part of the State of Israel (84%) is markedly higher than that of Muslims (66%), but this share still constitutes a sizable majority in all religious groups. A breakdown by age finds that the largest increase in feeling part of the State of Israel and its problems is among the youngest cohort, aged 18–24 (June, 44%; November, 70%).

Furthermore, of those Arab respondents who feel part of the State of Israel and its problems, 35% are optimistic about the future of the country, compared with just 4% of those who do not feel part of the state.

Israeli Arabs were apparently aghast at Hamas' pogrom, far more so than Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank, who generally cheered the attack.

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!

Israel, and the world, facing an artillery round shortage

Canada's CBC reported:

A leading NATO official and Canada's top military commander have both warned allies within the past week that their ammunition shortages have reached a crisis state, and are calling for urgent action to boost production of critical artillery rounds.

Gen. Wayne Eyre, chief of the defence staff, recently told a House of Commons committee that if Canadian troops were called upon to fire their big guns at the same rate as Ukrainian troops fighting to repel the Russian invasion, their supply of shells would last for only a few days.

At the Warsaw Security Forum this week, Admiral Rob Bauer, the head of NATO's military council, warned that "the bottom of the barrel is now visible" in terms of how much ammunition the alliance has available to transfer to Ukraine.

That was published October 6, the day before the current war in Gaza.

There have been conflicting reports about whether some of the artillery shells meant for Ukraine were diverted to Israel, but either way, it looks like the rate that both Ukraine and Israel are using the shells is making what was already considered a major worldwide shortage even worse.

The US is ramping up its production of 155mm shells, but it will take many months to get them to production.

Last summer, Israel signed a contract with Elbit - which had been the IDF's exclusive manufacturer of artillery shells - a $60 million contract for tens of thousands of M107-A3 artillery shells, anticipating them for use in a potential Lebanon war. They are not supposed to be delivered until some time in 2024.

This is a very concerning issue, especially if a second front opens in Lebanon.

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!

11/12 Links: Hamas is seen as representative of the Palestinians; Netanyahu: ‘Could be’ deal to free hostages; The Scandal of Robert Malley

From Ian:

Israeli society has shown enormous resilience in response to Hamas massacre

Increasing circles of grief
The amount of grief and trauma caused by the loss of life, the horror of kidnapped loved ones and those who still don’t know the fate of family members is on a scale never seen before. Even the Yom Kippur War did not have such an immediate and dramatic impact as we have seen in the first few days of the conflict.

The devastation has left entire communities in the shock of collective trauma requiring some form of national recovery and rehabilitation which will include physical, emotional, and communal needs. It goes without saying, that there is also a massive breach of trust within the country and the powers that be, militarily and politically. This too will be a huge concern as time unfolds. This community will form an important driver of social change. Morally it will be hard to ignore their voice.

The aftermath of 1973
Many have already compared the events of October 2023 to those of October 1973. Most obviously this is due to the surprise attack and to the intelligence and military failure. One can assume that there will be other similarities. As in 1973, there is an understanding that people’s basic assumptions about Israeli life will change. This will not be limited to military or security aspects, nor even the political map (although of course it will include both).

Post-1973 there were enormous social changes. In 1974, Gush Emunim was founded and became the dominant force in building new settlements in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. In 1976, a new political party emerged that altered the face of Israeli politics forever. Middle-class voters, sick of the Labor Party, both due to corruption and also the handling of the Yom Kippur War, founded Dash (Democratic Movement for Change), which helped reshape the politics in Israel.

The movement of Israelis becoming more religious also gained momentum the following year with many disillusioned secular Israelis finding their way into the Haredi community while a steady stream of Israelis left the country. All of these changes, and more, had a deep and lasting effect on Israeli society.

We know that we don’t know
We can be confident that Israeli society will be dramatically different after October 7. What we cannot know is what change is going to look like. The generation that is heroically defending the country, and the generation that is recreating civic society, will likely lead to new movements and ideas as the country faces economic, physical, emotional, and spiritual renewal. The hundreds, if not thousands of bereaved families and uprooted communities, along with the families of the hostages, will likely be a powerful social force for change, and not necessarily along the traditional political or religious lines.

Israeli society has shown enormous resilience in response to the terrible events of Simchat Torah, and we cannot know where that will lead us. If this tragedy generates a new confidence and optimism with a shift from the cynical politics of our era, then the future of Israeli society may be brighter than it currently feels. If Generation V becomes Israel’s Greatest Generation then we have much to look forward to.

Hamas is seen as representative of the Palestinians

Tragically, Abbas and the Fatah party put themselves firmly behind Hamas and its atrocities, celebrating the massacres and even laughing at the victims. One video posted by Fatah on Telegram mocked the Israeli victims by portraying them in an illustration as a dead rat, lying on its back on an Israeli flag and with its feet in the air, about to be trampled by a boot the colors of the Palestinian flag. [Fatah’s Bethlehem Telegram, Oct. 8, 2023]

Even when pressed by the international community and in particular by the United States to condemn the atrocities, Abbas refused. He finally issued a mild statement – not condemning Hamas, but merely saying that “Hamas’s policy and actions do not represent the Palestinian people.” But after giving it a second thought, even that mild statement was too much for Abbas. A few hours later, his statement was removed and replaced by a general statement that “the PLO is… the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.” Abbas has a decision to make

Abbas had to decide whether to be true to the PA ideology of supporting and rewarding the murder of Israelis or to give in to international pressure and condemn the worst atrocities against the Jews since the Holocaust. In past situations like this, Abbas at times had given in to international pressure to ensure that international funding would continue. This time, Abbas wavered but, in the end, remained true to PA principles: A Palestinian can never be defined as a terrorist and can never be condemned for killing an Israeli.

WITH SUPPORT for Hamas crossing the political divisions, it is no wonder that one week into the fighting, Palestinians marched through the streets of Hebron, Nablus, and even in the PA seat of government, Ramallah, chanting: “The people want the [Hamas’] Al-Qassam Brigades!” As the fighting increases, public support for Hamas increases. This past week, videos of large marches all across the West Bank supporting Hamas were being posted on social media. In one, hundreds of young schoolgirls marched and chanted, “We are the daughters of [Hamas leader] Muhammad Deif… Allahu Akbar, blow up the Zionist’s head… strike Tel Aviv… strike Ashkelon… Jihad is our path… the Quran is our savior… Death for Allah is our sublime wish…” [Quds New Network (Hamas), Twitter, Oct. 29, 2023]

By refusing to offer Palestinians an alternative to even unspeakable atrocities and by supporting the “heroic” slaughter, Fatah and Abbas have sent a clear message to Palestinians: Hamas is doing the right job and clearly doing it better than PA/Fatah.

Ironically, Abbas’s public response to the atrocities, including his repetition of the slogan that “the PLO is the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people,” has turned that slogan into an irrelevant anachronism. The PA and Fatah, with their own actions, have handed the loyalty of the West Bank on a silver platter to Hamas, which must now be recognized as the uncontested representative – not only of the Palestinian people, but also of Fatah and Abbas himself.

Eli Lake: The Scandal of Robert Malley

After Biden won the 2020 election, Malley was perfectly positioned to guide U.S. policy toward Iran. He was close friends with Antony Blinken, who would become Biden’s secretary of state. Malley and Blinken attended the same high school in Paris and worked on the yearbook together. In Washington, they played on a recreational soccer team. To some, this might suggest that the current investigation into Malley is so serious that even his old and powerful friend could not save him from it.

That said, it’s too early to know the nature of the probe into Malley’s mishandling of state secrets. There has always been a tension between the State Department and the FBI when it comes to rogue regimes. The job of a diplomat is to engage with foreign officials. One hazard of this work is that sometimes a piece of classified information may slip into a conversation. For example, Henry Kissinger, in a meeting with his Soviet counterpart, famously shared the fact that America was reading Egyptian cable traffic. Or consider the case of Martin Indyk, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel. His clearance was suspended in 2000 after it was learned he had been sending classified emails from the Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv. No evidence ever emerged that Indyk or Kissinger was a spy.

A better way to understand the scandal around Malley is to look at the people he himself hired and mentored in recent years. These include Ali Vaez, who is currently an analyst at the International Crisis Group. The emails disclosed in the Iran International and Semafor investigations show Vaez seeking approval from his contact at Iran’s foreign ministry for op-eds he would later publish in Western outlets. In an October 2, 2014, missive to Iran’s foreign minister, Vaez wrote, “As an Iranian, based on my national and patriotic duty, I have not hesitated to help you in any way.”

Malley tried to bring Vaez into the Biden administration, but Vaez could not get a security clearance. Malley did hire Ariane Tabatabai as an adviser. According to Semafor and Iran International, Tabatabai actually asked for guidance from her Iranian foreign-ministry contact on whether she should visit Saudi Arabia and Israel.

Tabatabai is now chief of staff to Christopher Maier, assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict. Last month, Maier testified before the Senate that the Pentagon is investigating “whether all law and policy was properly followed in granting my chief of staff top-secret special compartmented information.” In October, the Pentagon announced that Tabatabai would keep her security clearance after the investigation.

Says Gerecht, “If you’ve known Malley’s position on Iran, it makes perfect sense he would hire these people. The fact that these individuals were apparently acting somewhat obsequiously toward Iranian officials is a separate issue.”

This cuts to the heart of the Rob Malley scandal. He is not an interloper and neither are his protégés. They are instead implementers of a worldview that pretends fanatics and terrorists can be tamed through negotiations and that acts of savagery can be explained away by root causes. And we have just seen and are now living through the response to the greatest challenge in our time to the idea that such people can somehow be treated as anything but the monsters they are.

In his 2008 lecture, Rob Malley acknowledged the tragedy and failure of the secular radicalism his father embraced. “And how ingloriously it all ended,” he wrote. “No last brave stand for fight to the finish. Instead a muted, slow, nondescript decline. As early as the 1980s, the illusions had all but expired.”

But Malley never learned the lessons of his father’s expired illusions—the bizarre fantasy that revolutionary violence would liberate the Third World. He has instead himself succumbed to the dangerous fantasy that engaging violent revolutionaries will persuade them to renounce their illusions. His security clearance may yet be restored and his name cleared, but Robert Malley should not be allowed inside the corridors of power ever again.

The Palestinian Authority health minister in Ramallah is apparently jealous at all the attention being given by world media to her Hamas counterpart in Gaza City.

So she started making up her own lurid stories about IDF atrocities.

Palestinian Minister of Health Mai Al-Kaila said that the occupation forces are committing atrocities in hospitals in the Gaza Strip, especially Al-Shifa Medical Complex, in light of the ongoing Israeli aggression for the 37th day.

Minister Al-Kaila added, in a press statement on Sunday, that the Israeli occupation army does not evacuate hospitals, but rather throws the wounded and sick into the street to certain death, and “this is not an evacuation but an expulsion at gunpoint.”

She continued: Another danger that threatens the lives of patients and threatens the occurrence of a health catastrophe, which is the inability of medical teams to bury 100 martyrs whose bodies began to decompose in the hospital courtyard, and that stray dogs mauled some of them, according to the testimonies of the medical staff present there...

People on the ground in Gaza aren't even claiming this. It is complete fiction.

The IDF isn't even in Shifa Hospital. Al-Kaila is literally making things up, because she knows that Al Jazeera and other media will either repeat her outrageous lies as truth without any question - or, in the case of Western media, they will ignore it because publicizing obvious lies from the "moderate"Palestinian Authority means that they look like fools for believing Hamas lies.

As long as the media swallows or downplays the lies, the world does not know how much lying is a part of the Palestinian culture. This is a government official - of the government that the White House and Western Europe wants to see take over Gaza.

Mai al-Kaila is not an anomaly - she is a minister of the government, whose pronouncements during Covid were eagerly followed by the press.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Hamas doesn't even pretend to adhere to any laws of war

The Al Qassam Brigades website had been down for a couple of weeks, but they found an Internet host and have come back.

The photos on the site shows their members fighting and posing with weapons.

All or nearly all of the photos show that they are in civilian clothing.

International law states that "combatants have an obligation to distinguish themselves from the civilian population and this can be achieved by wearing a uniform." (A headband or visible armband would be adequate as well.)

The reason is obvious: since one of the cornerstones of the laws of armed conflict is the principle of distinction between civilian and military objects, fighters dressed in civilian clothing are meant to make it possible for the attacker to make that distinction and not attack civilians.

This video shows that people in medic uniforms in Gaza are acting as combatants. Notice the "medic" not helping the injured fighter but taking his weapon to give to another fighter (both of whom are also in civilian clothing.)

I cannot see the logo on the "medic's" vest, but if it is that of a recognized sign like the Red Crescent, this is a separate war crime, perfidy.

One could argue that when hiding among civilians and purposely using the protected status of hospitals, schools, mosques and other civilian objects and uniforms as a some of the key strategies of war , it affects the calculation of proportionality when planning an attack, at least when the people in the area are men of fighting age as in this video.

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!

Israel's deal for Gilad Shalit may have paved the way for October 7

In 2011, there was intense debate in Israel about the wisdom of a swap of roughly 1000 convicted Palestinian prisoners for Gilad Shalit.

There were two main lines of argument. One is that such a lopsided swap would result in more kidnap attempts. The other is that the released terrorists would be likely to kill more Israelis in the future.

I myself argued that the swap should happen, before we knew the identity of the released prisoners:

Yes, statistically there is a good chance that there will be future attacks involving some of the terrorists in this swap. But chances are the attacks would occur anyway with different people. Brainless terror drones are a dime a dozen in the territories.

The organizers who actually dream up new ways of killing should not be released. But most of the terrorists in the swap, from what I can tell, do not fit that description.

However, Israel didn't only trade low level terrorists as I had thought.

The most senior terrorist released in the Shalit deal was none other that Yahya Sinwar, the top leader of Hamas in Gaza today. Deif, along with Al Qassam Brigades leader Mohammed Deif, was (according to reports) the person most responsible for the October 7 massacre.

Sinwar was not the only major terrorist released in 2011. No fewer than 30 of those released had been sentence to at least one life term for murder.

Sinwar gave an eerie promise that seemingly predicted the pogrom within a week of his release in 2011:

Yahya Sinwar pledged “to take serious action” to free all the prisoners, “whatever the cost” (www.dakahla.com). In a statement made at a welcoming reception in the Gaza Strip on October 18, Yahya Sinwar said he prefers to live as a fighter and die as a fighter. He stressed that the warning issued by the Israeli PM to the released prisoners not to return to the “resistance” will not make them stop operating.

Questions of "what if" cannot be answered definitively, but from what we know today, it sure looks like the October 7 Black Shabbat would not have been as deadly, and may not have happened altogether, without Yahya Sinwar as the leader of Hamas in Gaza.

Which means the deal to save Gilad Shalit very possibly led to the deaths of 1200 Israelis.

There is a large amount of rabbinic literature about what monetary price to pay to release Jewish captives. It is generally acknowledged that the community does not have to pay an exorbitant price because of fears that this will lead to more abductions. It seems that a price of potential future deaths would be considered all the more so important in making such a calculation.

In retrospect, the Shalit deal seems to have been a horrible miscalculation. Israel must never make that mistake again.

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

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Read all about it here!

11/11 Links: The passionate intensity of the know-nothing protester; Dershowitz calls out Obama's 'deep hatred of Israel'; Has the IDF finally learned to do PR?

From Ian:

The passionate intensity of the know-nothing protester

Of course the events of 7 October did happen. This is the bare minimum one should know before going on protests against Israel in its war with Hamas. But this conflict is a multi-volume history, and very few of us have mastered the complete set. Indeed, the past 75 years of Arab-Israeli conflict is a lifetime’s study and then some.

There are the wars, the personae, the negotiations, the demographic changes. There are the changes in the global power balance, the coming and going of the Cold War. There is the fall of Arab nationalism and the rise of Islamism, especially after the Iranian Revolution in 1979. And there are the changing calculations within the Arab world, such as the rising enmity between Saudi Arabia and Iran. And all that is before one gets into historical Zionism, into Theodor Herzl and Chaim Weizmann, and the Balfour Declaration…

Be realistic. No student could be expected to get to grips with all of that before taking a stance on the current conflict. But still the question remains: why have so many young people seemingly forgotten or chosen to doubt the horrors visited on Israeli civilians, only a month ago, and swung so decisively behind their murderous tormentors?

Some have attempted to explain this phenomenon by pointing to the influence of critical race theory and ideas of ‘decolonisation’. After all, various academic currents suggest that the darker skin in any conflict is a reliable proxy for virtue. And that the better-funded military and the smoother-running democracy is always suspect. Wokeness always favours the weak.

But getting properly into CRT and theories of decolonisation also involves some heavy reading, and we have long been a post-literate culture. No, the visual images of suffering in Gaza are vastly more persuasive and immediate.

And these are not the only images that young people are subjected to. They have also been exposed to powerful messaging from Hollywood for decades. They have repeatedly seen tales of brave and noble partisans fighting back against highly militarised, colonising forces, from Star Wars to Avatar to Dune.

But the more powerful, the better resourced, are not always in the wrong, despite what the movies say. And this is an important lesson that I do not think we take the time to teach: to not always believe that strength and resolve is cruelty, that might is necessarily wrong.

The most-quoted poem to describe the world we live in has for some years now been WB Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’. And especially the line, ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.’ Let us at least teach our children not to mistake one for the other. Especially when, on a rare occasion, the best display some conviction after all.

Snowflakes for Hamas

After the Oct. 7 attacks, over a hundred thousand people approved of a tweet, by a writer who’s not worth naming, which read: “What did y’all think decolonization meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays? Losers.” This way of framing the issue is telling for a number of reasons. First, there is this notion of “decolonization,” with which it’s assumed we’re all familiar. But there’s apparently been some sort of misunderstanding: Some people might get the idea that decolonization is simply something to discuss in “papers” and “essays,” meaning that it’s something we might take seriously in an academic context, but only as far as that context goes. These people are, according to the tweet, wrong: Decolonization is really about (one assumes) killing; such killing is (again, according to the tweet) good, and only losers can’t stomach it. This is the flip side of the injunction to “abolish whiteness,” which is sometimes excused as a matter of technical terminology in the sociology of race. Here a seemingly anodyne, scholarly term turns out to have violent resonances when applied to everything from statues, to private property, to people.

It is therefore no surprise that the same academy that protects scholars who speculate on whether it might be politically acceptable or even necessary to murder white people will have a lot of trouble motivating itself to care about widespread approval of the murder of Jews. My friend Liam Bright, a philosophy professor at the London School of Economics, wrote a paper about the culture wars called “White Psychodrama.” His thesis was that much of the culture wars can be understood as white people’s divergent strategies of processing various feelings of guilt, shame, cognitive dissonance, and so on, regarding the racial situation in the United States and in the West more broadly. I had a few objections to this, one of which was that much culture war discourse takes places among us Jews (or half-Jews, in my case). Of course, we have differences of principle, and sometimes different opinions about the facts on the ground when it comes to political issues. But there is a different kind of dispute that seems to simmer beneath the surface of Jewish political disagreement: Who is most likely to actually try to kill us? Is it “white supremacists,” in whatever guise, or the people who talk about “ending white supremacy”?

The stakes of this debate were clear in the run-up to and aftermath of the 2016 election. Trump drew some support from the feeling that Islamist terror was on the rise, especially in Europe, and such terror was often antisemitic; for instance, an Islamist terrorist slaughtered four people at the Jewish Museum of Belgium in 2014. Videos of street attacks against Jewish men began to go viral, and commentators discussed the slow exodus of Jews from countries like France and Germany. On the other hand, Trump himself was associated, rightly or not, with the burgeoning alt-right movement, many of whose enthusiasts believed in antisemitic conspiracy theories (“Jews will not replace us!”). The gunman in the 2018 Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue massacre was an alt-rightist. Antisemitic incidents were often accompanied by a kind of anxiety about which team of extremists would turn out to be ultimately responsible. Fervor about threats against Jewish centers and cemeteries in 2017 took a strange turn: The two people jailed for making such threats turned out to be Juan M. Thompson, a Vassar College dropout and failed progressive journalist who was trying to frame a former lover, and Michael Ron David Kadar, an Israeli American with no clear motive.

I don’t mean to suggest that the debate this undercurrent represents has been resolved one way or another, at the level of who is more likely to walk into a synagogue with an AK-47 and start murdering congregants. But if the letters and statements from Jewish donors to college presidents are any sign, many Jews—however they feel about Israel or the alt-right—have plenty of concerns about the American left, which they might not have had even a month ago. These concerns center on the idea of Jews being made out to be “white,” among—but almost exclusively among—the very people who see whiteness as the proper object of ethnic essentialism, conspiracy theorizing, and collective hatred.

It is therefore hard to avoid the perception that “white people,” when the term is used to express vitriol and racism, typically means Jews.

11/10 Links Pt2: Israel’s Blueprint for a Revival of the West; The Mindset of Our Anti-Semites; Yale Law Students for Hamas; Columbia Uni suspends SJP, JVP

From Ian:

Saul Singer and Dan Senor: Israel’s Blueprint for a Revival of the West

Israelis are not lonely, and this probably goes far in explaining an extraordinary anomaly: according to the last UN World Happiness Report, Israel is the fourth happiest country in the world.

In perhaps the greatest sign of confidence in the future, Israelis have by far more children than any other wealthy democracy. It is an iron law of demography that as countries become more economically productive, they become less reproductive. There are no exceptions. Every other wealthy democracy is well below the replacement fertility rate of 2.1—the OECD average is 1.6 children per woman.

But Israel has been at about 3.0 for the last 25 years. And it is not just because of the ultra-orthodox. Having three children is about the norm in secular Tel Aviv, and having four is not uncommon. One television report even claimed that “four is the new three.” (Compare this to Japan, the world’s oldest country, where more adult diapers than baby diapers are sold each year.)

Israelis not only have larger families but closer ones. While short distances help—you can drive all of Israel, top to bottom, in seven hours—it is not the only reason that three generations of families get together nearly every week on Shabbat. While the world is plagued with a loneliness epidemic and “deaths of despair”—that is, deaths from suicide, alcohol, and drug abuse—Israel has one of the lowest levels of such deaths in the OECD.

Meaning over Materialism
“The incredible thing is that the tech CEOs—if they were not drafted themselves— not only personally dropped everything to join the war effort, but also encouraged all their employees to do so,” said Adi Soffer Teeni, the head of Facebook’s Israel development center.

Over 24 hours, beginning the morning of October 7, a team of 20 people from different tech companies built a system using AI and facial recognition to identify missing people—many of them kidnapped—from videos posted by Hamas on social media. It would have been impossible for the military or the government to have built such a system so quickly.

Tech volunteers also built an app with a “rescue me” button, following the national trauma of thousands of people trapped in safe rooms or hiding in fields waiting for 18 hours or more to be saved. They created the equivalent of an Airbnb system to keep track of empty hotel rooms around the country that could be used by evacuees in need, and a volunteer-powered personalized delivery service to get people across the country their meals and medicines.

Some of the top tech CEOs in Israel joined the effort full time. Eynat Guez, the founder and CEO of the hot start-up Papaya Global, was put in charge of creating an airlift of military supplies, such as ceramic flak jackets. Michal Beinisch, another founder, headed up procurement, sourcing supplies from various countries. “Our people were ten times overqualified for what they were doing. If you asked me if it were possible to build a start-up this fast, I would have said no way,” Israeli venture capitalist Gigi Levy-Weiss told us. Imagine if America went to war. Would Silicon Valley’s start-up founders offer themselves up in this way?

Israel is a changed country after October 7. But one of the changes is in the way that these values now permeate even parts of society that had seemed immune to them.

As the Israeli public intellectual Micah Goodman put it, “We’re not supporting the government. We’re not waiting for the government. We’re not waiting for Israel. We are Israel.”

The war reporter Sebastian Junger writes that “Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.” The exception to this is modern Israel, where Israelis feel necessary. They take ownership of their fate. They feel they have a personal responsibility in building—and now rebuilding—their country.

While Israel may at this moment look like the last place other countries should emulate, look closer. In Israel’s hidden societal strength lie not only the seeds of Israel’s revival, but a possible blueprint for the revival of the West.

Yisrael Medad: Jews supporting the ideology of elimination

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee published a position paper on Aug. 15, 1967 in reaction to the Six-Day War, in which they wrote of the “Zionists … illegal takeover of Palestine” and that “the United Nations partition plan … was not legal under the Charter of the United Nations and was never approved by any African, Asian or Middle-Eastern country.” In fact, already in the June-July 1967 issue of the SNCC newsletter, one can find a semblance of the current theme of intersectionality in the explanation of the editors that African-Americans must know and understand what “our brothers are doing in their homelands” in Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

Furthermore, the SNCC asserted in August that “Israel is and always has been the tool and foot-hold for American and British exploitation.” In addition to referring to a conspiracy theory about the Rothschilds, the statement ends:

“America has worked with and used powerful organized Zionist movement to take over another people’s home and to replace these people with a partner who has well served America’s purpose … to exploit and control the nations of Africa, the Middle East and Africa.”

By 1973, as a result of Maxime Rodinson’s treatise that originally appeared in French in 1967 (having been written in 1966) titled “Israel: A Colonial-Settler State?”, the portrayal of Zionism and Israel as illegitimate and representing the worst example of what the New Left opposed was well entrenched. The foundations for today’s thought framework were being constructed already then.

Thus, in 2018, one could read at the OpenDemocracy website, in total falsification, that: “The first European Jews landed on the shores of Palestine and established early settlements in the 19th century. In 1948, Zionist forces systematically took over land. … The foundations of Israel are rooted in a colonial project that has modernized its face but continues to subject Palestinians … .” And slowly, but surely, this framework of the conflict settled into the minds of academics and then into university teaching staff and then into the minds of the students.

But what was required was a specific Jewish twist to this process, an obversion of the simple truth. This was provided by the neo-Marxist progressive camp that was developing.

Its eventual formulation was provided by journalist Peter Beinart, writing in The New York Times on Oct. 23 that “Jews in the United States, and even Israel, were beginning to see Palestinian liberation as a form of Jewish liberation as well.” An earlier version of this catchphrase was that of sociologist Na’ama Carlin, dual Israeli-Australian citizen, who penned “No liberation until Palestinian liberation” in Eureka Street on April 16, 2018. In July of that year, marchers of IfNotNow carried a banner, seen in New York magazine, which read “The Jewish Future Demands Palestinian Freedom.” The fates of the two peoples were being intertwined, although there was no value equivalency—historical, cultural, literary, religious or legal in any way.

Victor Davis Hanson: The Mindset of Our Anti-Semites

Civilian casualties
Campus activists scream that Israel has slaughtered “civilians” and is careless about “collateral damage.” They equate retaliating against mass murderers who use civilians to shield them from injury, while warning any Gazans in the region of the targeted response to leave, as the moral equivalent of deliberately butchering civilians in a surprise attack.

So did protestors mass in the second term of Barrack Obama when he focused on Predator drone missions inside Somalia, Pakistan, and Yemen to go after Islamic terrorists who deliberately target civilians?

At the time, the hard-left New York Times found the ensuing “collateral damage” in civilian deaths merely “troubling.” No matter—Obama persisted, insisting as he put it, “Let’s kill the people who are trying to kill us.” Note Obama did not expressly say the terrorists in Pakistan or Yemen were killing Americans, but “trying” to kill Americans. For him, that was, quite properly, enough reason “to kill” the potential assassins of Americans.

What would the Harvard President today say of Benjamin Netanyahu saying just that about Hamas?

We have no idea how many women, children, and elderly were in the general vicinity of a targeted terrorist in Pakistan or Yemen when an American drone missile struck. Then CIA Director John Brennan later admitted that he had lied under oath (with zero repercussions), when he testified to Congress that there was no collateral damage in drone targeted assassinations.

Obama was proud of his preemptive assassination program. Indeed, in lighthearted fashion he joked at the White House Correspondence Dinner about his preference for lethal drone missions, when he “warned” celebrities not to date his daughters: “But boys, don’t get any ideas. I have two words for you, ‘predator drones.’ You will never see it coming. You think I’m joking.”

Did the campuses erupt and scream “Not in my name” when their president laughed about his assassination program? After all, Obama had also admitted, “There is no doubt that civilians were killed who shouldn’t have been.” Did he then stop the targeted killings due to collateral damage—as critics now demand a cease fire from Israel?

“Genocide”
Genocide is now the most popular charge in the general damnation of Israel, a false smear aimed at calling off the Israeli response to Hamas, burrowed beneath civilians in Gaza City.

But how strange a charge! Pro-Hamas demonstrators the world over chant “From the River to the Sea,” unambiguously calling for the utter destruction of Israel and its 9 million population. Are the Hamas supporters then “genocidal?”

Is genocide the aim of Hamas that launched over 7,000 rockets into Israeli cities without warning? What is the purpose of the purportedly 120,000 rockets in the hands of Hezbollah if not to target Israeli noncombatants? Is all that a genocidal impulse?

Do Hamas and Hezbollah drop leaflets to civilians, as does Israel, to flee the area of a planned missile attack—or is that against their respective charters?

Hamas leaders in Qatar and Beirut continue to give interviews bragging about their October 7 surprise mass murdering of civilians. They even promise more such missions that likewise will be aimed at beheading, torturing, executing, incinerating, and desecrating the bodies of hundreds of Jewish civilians, perhaps again in the early morning during a holiday and a time of peace.

Is that planned continuation of mass killing genocidal? Does the amoral UN recall any other mass murdering spree when the killers beheaded infants, cooked them in ovens, and raped the dead?

Perhaps students at Harvard, Yale, Cornell, and Stanford will protest the real genocide in Darfur where some half-million black African Sudanese have been slaughtered by mostly Muslim Arab Sudanese. Did the Cornell professor who claimed he was “exhilarated” on news of beheaded Jewish babies protest the slaughter of the Sudanese? Did the current campus protestors ever assemble to scream about the Islamists who slaughtered the indigenous Africans of Sudan?

Are professors at Stanford organizing to refuse all grants and donations that originate from communist China? Remember, the Chinese communist Party has never apologized for the party’s genocidal murder of some 60-80 millions of its own during the Maoist Cultural Revolution, much less its systematic efforts to eliminate the Uyghur Muslim population?

These examples could easily be expanded. But they suffice to remind us that the Middle-East and Western leftist attacks on Israel for responding to the October 7 mass murdering are neither based on any consistent moral logic nor similarly extended to other nations who really do practice apartheid, genocide, and kill without much worry about collateral damage.

So why does the world apply a special standard to Israel?

To the leftist and Islamist, Israel is guilty of being:
1) Jewish;
2) Too prosperous, secure, and free;
3) Sufficiently Western to meet the boilerplate smears of colonialist, imperialist, and blah, blah, blah.

Yale Law Students for Hamas

In its own telling, Yale Law School's Schell Center for International Human Rights seeks to "equip lawyers and other professionals with the knowledge and skills needed to advance the cause of international human rights."

It has educated students and human rights professionals on atrocities large and small, issuing a detailed report last year on ethnic cleansing in Myanmar and proposing a framework in mid-September to moderate "indirect hate speech online"—whatever that means.

But six days after Hamas's Oct. 7 massacre and kidnapping of over 1,600 Israelis, the center was silent.

On Oct. 13, a Jewish law student implored the center to speak out.

"Don't stay silent in the face of this genocide," the student wrote in an email—reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon and the Free Press—to James Silk, a Yale Law School professor and the co-director of the Schell Center. "Be a leader for human rights."

Silk replied that the center was still deciding whether to address the massacre. The situation, he said, was "complex."

"We at the Schell Center are trying very hard and earnestly to do what is … in some calculation, best for our responsibilities and our community," Silk wrote. "That is more complex than people hurt so directly by last week's atrocities in Israel might feel."

The need to appreciate the complexity of human rights atrocities—and the idea that those experiencing them secondhand can't see the larger picture—seems to be a recent development. Last year, the Schell Center sponsored an event on Israeli "apartheid" with Omar Shakir, a pro-Palestinian activist, as its sole speaker. "There is consensus today in the global human rights movement, spanning the major Israeli, Palestinian and international organizations, that Israeli authorities are committing the crime against humanity of apartheid against millions of Palestinians," materials advertising the event read.

In fact, the relationship between Israel and the West Bank is considerably more "complex" than the Oct. 7 massacre, which has been condemned as a war crime by all major human rights groups, including those critical of Israel. The Schell Center's willingness to address one issue but not the other rankled some Jewish students, who slammed the double standard in an open letter to alumni of Yale Law School.

"What kind of 'Center for International Human Rights' would refuse to host an event condemning the largest pogrom since the Holocaust," the students wrote on Oct. 20. "Does the Schell Center not think that Israelis are entitled to human rights, too? Or is it perhaps because they were Jewish?"

Minds OK With Muhammad's Flying Horse Unable To Grasp Notion Of Jewish Self-Defense (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

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Cairo, November 9 - Religious thinkers whose cognitive abilities can incorporate the wondrous truth of Muhammad the Prophet conducting a Night Journey to what is now a shrine in Jerusalem, leaving his mighty steed's hoofprint in the rock, and returning to Arabia before dawn, have also found difficulty accepting that Jews have a right to take steps not to be harmed, even by those who believe the flying horse story.

Islamic - and many Christian - theologians and scholars continued to struggle of late with notions of Jewish self-defense, let alone Jewish sovereignty, concepts at odds with everything the scholars understand about the world, very much unlike, for example, the not-ridiculous idea of thousands of years of documented religious tradition being a big corruption suddenly corrected by the ramblings of an illiterate seventh-century desert tribesman from half-remembered tales overheard from Jewish neighbors.

"That's not an acceptable thing," insisted a leading scholar of religions at Cairo University. "You need to think straight and not give credence to absurdities," referring, presumably, not to a non-corporeal God deciding to impregnate a human virgin with Himself so He could take human form, violating His own explicit teachings about His infinite formlessness, with the intention of having that human form get killed to save humanity from damnation that He ordained in the first place, but to any consideration that Jews control their own security and affairs instead of remaining at the mercy of host populations who force them to pay for "protection" and only sometimes get it.

"Please stop holding such ridiculous thoughts in your head," he added.

His colleagues, who accept that either seventy-two virgins, or seventy-two white grapes, depending on how one interprets the Prophet's terminology, the importance of determining which should be of some importance, you might think, go in Paradise to to those who die in holy war, confessed that they cannot wrap their heads around Jews being able to defend themselves. "Defend themselves? From whom? When has anyone ever mistreated Jews?"

"What an absurd belief."

Thinkers who represent a tradition in which the mainstream framing of its principles demanded for many centuries that Jews bear collective, eternal guilt for the death of God incarnate, who died to atone for the sins of all of humanity, in which case, the Jews did everyone a favor by engineering that atonement, expressed confusion at the thought that Jews might enjoy the right to prevent or defend against rhetorical or violent attempts by followers of those principles to harm Jews.

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

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Read all about it here!

11/10 Links Pt1: Douglas Murray: I have seen the horror that the world must never forget; David Collier: Southern Israel – my journey into hell

From Ian:

Fred Maroun: Letter from a left-wing atheist Arab to Jewish enablers of Hamas

Claim to believe in Jewish values
You included many references to your “Jewish values” and how important they are to you, but it is obvious that you believe none of it.

Unless, of course, Jewish values consist of misleading the public to enable terrorists to continue having the ability to massacre Jews.

But even you must know that this is not a Jewish value. If Jews were this malicious and self-defeating, they would not have survived as a tiny minority for over three millennia.

You claim instead to believe in the “Jewish values of justice, peace, and compassion”, but you clearly do not believe in these values.

If you believed in justice, you would not support a ceasefire that would allow Hamas to survive so that it can attempt more and more massacres in the future, as it said that it would.

If you believed in peace, you would want Hamas destroyed because you know very well that Israel left Gaza in 2005 but there has been no peace with Israel since Hamas took over control of Gaza shortly after that.

If you believed in compassion, you would not avoid using the word “massacre” to describe what Hamas did on October 7, and you certainly would not ignore the 240 hostages that Hamas holds.

Misinformation works but not this time
Even though you know that you spread misinformation, and even though I and others publicly expose you, you will continue to do it anyway. The reason is simple: it works, especially when coming from people who claim to be Jews.

You are not promoting “Jewish values”. You are instead knowingly enabling Hamas. But that is exactly what you aim to do, so you will continue doing it. You are not “Jews of conscience” as you claim to be.

But let’s be crystal clear. You are not a significant threat to Israel. Despite your misinformation, Israel will prevail. Israel will destroy Hamas, and Gaza Palestinians will have a brighter future, despite your objections.

While you have no faith in Jews other than your own terrorist-enabling tiny minority, and while you certainly have no faith in Israel, I do. I also have faith that Arabs, including Palestinians, can live in peace and can strive if terrorists do not stand in their way. I also have faith in the leadership of President Joe Biden and in the solid bi-partisan support behind him.

Israel will win this war, for its own benefit, for the benefit of the Palestinians, and for the benefit of everyone who cares about peace and justice.

Sincerely,
A left-wing atheist Arab

Ed Husain: The Theology of Hamas

Hamas isn’t only a terrorist group, and it isn’t a Palestinian nationalist movement. It is a religious organization, incubated by the Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood, founded in 1928, departed from Islamic tradition and created Islamism, a totalitarian ideology to resist the pluralist West.

Its worldview, as French political scientist Gilles Kepel has documented, arose in the same intellectual firmament as German Nazism and Italian fascism. The Brotherhood developed a new declaration of faith for its members: “God is our objective. The Prophet is our political leader. The Quran is our constitution. Jihad is our method. Martyrdom is our aspiration.” No Muslim before the 20th century would have belittled his faith’s sacred text by regarding it as a political manifesto.

When Ahmed Yassin left Al-Azhar University in Cairo and founded Hamas in Gaza in 1987, the group’s members placed their hands on the Quran and declared: “I promise to be a good Muslim in defending Islam and the lost land of Palestine.” Theology is central to Hamas’s charter, which declares that “Islam will destroy Israel” and that because “Palestine is an Islamic land,” it is the “individual duty of every Muslim” to liberate it. Hamas calls “the land of Palestine” a waqf, an Islamic endowment. These teachings would have been alien to Muslims who coexisted with Jews for 12 centuries.

Hamas envisages a future Palestine that is judenrein, or cleansed of Jews. Article 7 of its charter declares: “The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say, ‘O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’ ” That animus stems in part from its considering the Jews to be European colonialists, ignoring that they’re native to the land and that Islamic armies successfully colonized the Levant. Christians, whom Hamas views as part of the local Arab population, are treated less violently, but they don’t enjoy unfettered religious liberty.

Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahhar has said that Palestine is only a “toothbrush in our pocket.” Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood aspire to create a regionwide Shariah state, a more anti-Western confrontational caliphate in line with Iran’s political model than that of moderate Arab nations in the neighborhood. That intention has led several Arab nations—Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt—to ban both groups from organizing within their borders. In 1979 Egyptian President Anwar Sadat signed a peace agreement with Israel. Two years later Islamists assassinated him.

David Collier: Southern Israel – my journey into hell

As part of a small group I was taken under army supervision through an active military zone. Before entry I was kitted up with a helmet and some body armour. We were also given plenty of instruction before the group was allowed to continue. This included strict advice about only taking photos in places in which the families had given permission. The army was everywhere I went, and our trip was constantly moulded around the active battlefield. At times I found myself standing inside a burnt-out house just across from where IDF artillery was pounding at Gaza.

I promised no shocking images – and there won’t be any – but I still have a story to tell. The image below shows the key point at which the terrorists broke through to attack Kfar Aza. The part of the kibbutz immediately behind me as I took this photo was the site of an unspeakable massacre. The built up area in the background is Gaza – this is how close Gaza is to the idyllic community the terrorists came to destroy.

All of us have been affected by what took place on October 7. But as I walked through the devastation, what broke me was not the physical damage – it was the signs of humanity that still remained. For example, in one house – that was completely burnt out, a few playing cards lay scattered on the floor. Everything was gone, much of it consumed by fire – but somehow the playing cards had survived.

Or this one. This house like many was not burnt – but the insides had been brutally ripped apart along with the family who had live there. And on the wall – a sign of optimism and love – and a poignant reminder that life is short.

Here is another one. From the house of another family that had visibly experienced a living nightmare. The scenes inside are never to be forgotten. But this sign was by the front door. It simply reads ‘how fantastic – how great that you came to visit – it is so long since we saw you – where have you been – welcome’.

These are the images that stopped me in my tracks. How can a welcome sign in a house that saw such devastation from unwanted intruders do anything but destroy you inside.

And in every house – the clock had been ticking – and normal life was taking place – until it all stopped. So in one – a place in which the living area looked like a war zone – the kitchen looked virtually untouched. The most obvious result of deliberate destruction of human life. They destroyed the living area – because that is where the people were. An empty kitchen? Of no interest. And there sitting on a kitchen top were sweets waiting for the children to eat them. Given what happened in this particular area – it is unlikely those children survived.

I went inside dozens of homes such as this. Scrawled on some walls outside are warning signs about ‘bodyparts’ that may still exist inside – with instructions not to touch anything. In truth they refer to fragments – potential DNA samples – and this is part of Israel’s search for the remains of several dozen people they have yet to find. Endless, unspeakable, tragedy. And every single home I saw, was once an entire family.

Away from the residential areas – and onto the site of the biggest single massacre of the day. The 100s of young people who had gone to enjoy a rave and never returned home. Much of the clear up has been done – but not all. The mess that is still visible on the ground, along with picnic chairs and coolers is all circled by the signs that still mark the campsite. In this place the signs of massacre have already gone – it looks as if the kids just left a mess (behind me).

Finally I went to Sderot and saw an empty lot where the police station had once stood. Residents who are still there (most have left temporarily) recounted the horror that unfolded on that day. But by this point I was emotionally and physically exhausted. I had no questions left to ask. I remain glad I did it – but there are scars which will take time to heal – and this is from someone who only saw what was left – what about all those who actually survived it.

It is morning now and I have spent the night writing this at Kibbutz Bror Hail. All evening I have been listening to a relentless attack from air and from land. There is a not a single minute when a ‘boom’ is not heard and felt. The IDF are pounding Hamas into hell. After what I had seen earlier in the week in those Kibbutzim, I admit to finding it somewhat therapeutic.