Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, November 20, 2023

11/20 Links Pt2: Israeli women and girls were raped during Hamas attack. Where’s the outcry?; The Red Cross’s Gaza Scandal; Jihadi Journalism- an exposé

From Ian:

Israeli women and girls were raped during Hamas attack. Where’s the outcry?

Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy took a deep breath after warning the audience about the graphic horrors she was about to relate. Then she described just some of the overwhelming visual evidence that has emerged of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel: a young concert-goer, stripped from the waist down, frozen by rigor mortis into a spread-eagle position, her body partially burned. A young woman, similarly exposed in death, torn underwear hanging off one naked leg. Rape victims paraded through the streets of Gaza, blood gushing from between their legs.

The list went on. And on. Compiled from various sources — Hamas footage, first responders, workers who handle corpses, survivor accounts — these testimonials formed the basis of a webinar this week entitled, “The Unspeakable Terror: Gender-Based Violence on Oct. 7.” Organized by Jewish students at Harvard Medical, Dental, Law, and Business schools, it accrued more than 4,500 registrants and, in the days after, more than 20,000 viewers.

Why such great interest in the horrors perpetrated by Hamas against women and girls on Oct. 7? We believe it reflects the relative lack of attention until now to the brutal sexual and gender-based violence that took place as part of Hamas’s assaults.

Despite the circulation of the evidence Dr. Elkayam-Levy shared, worldwide organizations dedicated to women’s and human rights have stayed largely silent.

“The evidence is undeniable, yet we find ourselves fighting a dual battle,” said Elkayam-Levy, chair of the Israeli Civil Commission on Oct. 7th Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children. “One against these atrocities and another against global silence. And we see the same mechanism of denial that we recognize from individual rape.”

Others share her concern, and a petition calling on UN Women to address the crimes against Israeli women is taking on momentum, with more than 180,000 signatures; the hashtag #MeToo_UNless_UR_a_Jew has been trending on X.

As a Harvard School of Dental Medicine student who helped organize the event, and a Harvard Medical School associate professor of medicine and psychiatry who moderated that panel, we found hope in some of the experts’ reports: The act of rape, once widely accepted as part of the “spoils of war,” is now recognized as a prosecutable war crime, even a crime against humanity when it is perpetrated systematically.

But other statements were heartbreaking, including that most or all of Oct. 7 rape victims were either killed or abducted, and are thus not able to tell their stories to the world. Webinar participants said that the forensic evidence shows extreme sexual violence, including genital mutilation and assaults brutal enough to break pelvic bones. Some accounts describe abject sadism like cutting off a woman’s breast and tossing it as a plaything.

Seth Mandel: The Red Cross’s Gaza Scandal

Meanwhile, the ICRC had no qualms about portraying Israeli troops as a constant threat to medical personnel or would-be butchers, or going on Al Jazeera to remind the IDF of its obligations to the hospitals that Hamas was already misusing.

Indeed, the ICRC’s partnership with Shifa is a point of pride for the organization. In July, as Hamas was planning its Oct. 7 massacre, officials boasted of improvements to the hospital “implemented by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in partnership with the Ministry of Health in Gaza,” i.e. Hamas. “Hospitals stand at the heart of communities, and Al-Shifa Medical Complex Emergency Department is now beating strong and steady for Gaza,” crowed William Schomburg, a top ICRC Gaza official.

Back in that 2015 speech, Maurer faulted his organization for not balancing its private efforts with public pronunciations. But one difference between the Red Cross’s work in World War II and the current Gaza conflict is that in WWII, the ICRC’s record was mixed. Yes, it failed Jewish prisoners repeatedly. But it also facilitated communication to and from those prisoners, provided medical care to some of them, and was involved in prisoner exchanges—all actions for which it was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1944. The Nobel committee acknowledges now that the ICRC knew more about Nazi atrocities than it let on at the time, suggesting that the Red Cross’s full wartime record might not be deserving of such an award.

This time, it has let down the hostages in every way imaginable. At the end of its note on the 1944 Nobel Peace Prize, the committee writes: “The Red Cross has since expressed regret for this suppression of the facts.”

How long will it take them to come clean this time, and what will it require to ensure there is no repeat of the ICRC’s Gaza disaster?

Brendan O'Neill: Al-Shifa Hospital and the pathological distrust of Israel

Where did these crimes take place? Al-Shifa. Hamas used the hospital, ‘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 centre’, said Amnesty. Got that? The exact thing Israel accuses Hamas of doing was already discovered by Amnesty years ago. A former Fatah official who was ‘seriously assaulted’ in his home by Hamas’s henchmen told Amnesty he refused to go to al-Shifa for treatment because ‘any member of Fatah or the [Palestinian Authority] going there would end up with worse injuries’. We know our woke elites won’t listen to Israelis, but maybe they’ll listen to Palestinians, many of whom have known for years that al-Shifa isn’t safe.

Or maybe they’ll believe PBS, the esteemed broadcaster in the US. In 2009, PBS spoke with a senior doctor at al-Shifa who said Hamas terrorists are ‘hiding either in the basement or in a separate underground area underneath the hospital’, and they are ‘aware that they are putting civilians in harm’s way’. Or perhaps they’ll believe the huge numbers of al-Shifa’s doctors who went on strike for a month in 2007 to protest against Hamas’s grotesque persecution of Fatah-aligned medics. The striking doctors were calling on Hamas to ‘leave politics out of the health system’ and to ‘stop using its armed forces against medical personnel’. Does that sound like a movement that respects the sanctity of medical spaces?

The proof of Hamas’s criminal misuse of al-Shifa as a base for torture, murder and warmongering is abundant. Palestinian dissidents have pointed to it. Amnesty has documented the Room 101-style horrors committed by Hamas’s ‘Internal Security officers’ there. Israel has shown us weapons, trucks, tunnels, hostages. Anyone still saying ‘Hmm’ following almost two decades’ worth of proof that Hamas exploits al-Shifa has clearly left the realm of reason and entered the hell of dogma. This is not scepticism, it’s denialism. It is not a noble hunt for ‘the truth’ of war – it’s the sickness of post-truth thinking, where nothing as trifling as evidence can ever be allowed to interfere with one’s ideological bias. Which in this case is that Israel is evil and always lies.

It isn’t hard to work out why so many in the woke elites, from CNN to the influencer left, are clinging for dear life to the lie that al-Shifa was a normal hospital. It’s because they have staked so much on this battle in the Israel-Hamas war. Israel’s conquering of al-Shifa is, in their eyes, the ‘war crime’ that proves beyond doubt that Israel is uniquely malevolent among the nations of Earth, and that they, in contrast, are righteous for opposing it. Every piece of evidence that points to the true war crime being Hamas’s, this fascistic movement that is even willing to hide lethal weaponry among the sick and the newborn and elderly, is a blow not just to their infantile narrative about Israel-Palestine, but also to their own moral prestige, their own cultural authority to determine what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. They experience Israel’s assault on Hamas’s base at al-Shifa as an assault on their own reputations – and they are right to.

Scepticism? Please. In instantly disbelieving everything Israel says, these people implicitly buy everything Hamas says. Their Israelophobia translates into a tangible, objective acceptance of Hamas’s own lies about Hamas’s own horrors. The woke love to call themselves anti-fascists, but it’s a strange anti-fascist that gives moral succour to fascists.

LT. COL. Richard Hecht: We Tried to Tell Them About Shifa Hospital

What We’ve Discovered (So Far)
On November 14th, the first IDF soldiers entered the Shifa hospital complex. We went in slowly and methodically, not wanting to disturb ongoing medical care, as I mentioned in my Saturday newsletter. These first forces included medical teams and Arabic speakers, who had specified training to prepare for this complex and sensitive environment.

The mission was in keeping with our goals in this war - dismantling Hamas’ capabilities and bringing our hostages home.

But the cost was high.

It meant giving up on the element of surprise. It meant giving up some serious military edges, like our aerial superiority. Most importantly - and perhaps most misunderstood - is that we never thought there would be a smoking gun as soon as we entered the hospital complex.

Hamas had weeks to bury the evidence.

We are - carefully - unearthing the evidence of Hamas’ abuse. Finding the closed-circuit video cameras proving that hostages were brought to the hospital by men wielding guns and machetes. Exploring the underground tunnel - over 50 meters (164 feet) and counting, fortified with explosion proof doors. Finding proof that CPL Noa Marciano was taken to the hospital…and murdered.

But this takes time.

We’ve revealed a lot of information but unearthing two decades of buildup and three weeks of coverups takes time. As we reveal more and more, I’m increasingly asking a question that I remember Adam Grant asking:
A sign of intellect is the ability to change your mind in the face of new facts. A mark of wisdom is refusing to let the fear of admitting you were wrong stop you from getting it right.

How’s this for changing opinion?

The Lesson Going Forward
Honestly, this is an easy one.

It’s increasingly clear that our assertion that Hamas uses hospitals as civilians shields - not just Shifa - is true. As more countries around the world face terrorists that don’t share our values, don’t share the sacredness with which we hold hospitals, and are willing to exploit those values, we must remember a few things:

1. Same-sideness doesn’t always work. Israel is a liberal democracy. Hamas is a recognized terrorist organization. Giving equal weight to claims from both sides - one with a functional check and balance systems and another that knowingly butchers children in a surprise attack - is just plain wrong.

2, Evidence takes time. Court cases drag on for months or years because the burden of evidence is exactly that - a burden. Terrorist organizations flatly deny news in seconds; militaries with integrity take time. The media must adapt to this new reality. Otherwise the terrorists will win every single time, laughing at our values as they do.

River, Sea Quite Comfortable Under Israeli Control, Thank You (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook page.

Jordan River, November 20 - The two geographical features that "pro-Palestine" activists most frequently invoke in proclaiming their aim to displace the Jewish State disclosed today that they actually prefer to remain the boundaries of that sovereign Jewish entity, and expressed indignation at the presumptuousness of those who speak for them to advocate for removal of that sovereignty from the features.

The Jordan River and The Mediterranean Sea held a joint press conference today to set the record straight on their own desires, for too long drowned out by cries of "From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free!"

"That's not what we're about at all," the River stressed, nodding to the Sea, who returned the gesture. "Under Israeli control we enjoy conservation, care, and responsible stewardship. That would not be the case were we to fall under the control of a 'Palestinian' entity. Just look at the way they treat the natural resources in areas they do control: over-draining of aquifers, sewage dumped untreated right into the sea, arson everywhere... we will continue to flourish under Israeli control, thank you."

"It's more than a little offensive when 'Palestinians' speak for us," added the Sea. "They didn't ask us. It never occurred to them, in their narcissistic, childish Weltanschauung, that our sensibilities might differ from their genocidal ambitions. Fat chance getting us on their side now."

The Mediterranean lauded Israeli restrictions on Gaza fishing boats. "If I had the necessary precision, I'd crush the Gaza Strip with a single rogue wave," she stated. "As it is, the place floods every time any significant rain falls, because the 'government' there prioritizes violence and rejectionism over the welfare of its constituents, and refuses to invest in basic drainage and runoff infrastructure like normal, moral human beings in positions of national leadership. And I have to deal with their crap, literal and figurative. You think I relish the idea of Palestinians controlling even more territory near me? The Turks, Greeks and French are bad enough."

She acknowledged a soft spot for Israel's use of marine life to conduct espionage and other operations against Gaza. "Those spy-dolphins and coastal-defense shark squadrons are just adorable," the Mediterranean gushed. "The way the Hamas frogmen cower from them! The octopodes are also a sweet bunch, and they have the advantage of natural camouflage and signaling their handlers, or other marine life, what they've seen and heard. So. Cute."

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!

The One Simple Question That Determines Everything: "Is it acceptable to slaughter, rape, behead and burn people in pursuit of a political aim?" (Part 1) (Andrew Pessin)

(Guest post by Andrew Pessin, professor of philosophy at Connecticut College.)

The One Simple Question That Determines Everything

Andrew Pessin

apessin@conncoll.edu

1. Yes or No

It’s a simple yes or no question. Much follows from how one answers the question, but we’ll start with just the question.

(Q) “Is it acceptable to slit babies’ throats, rape little girls, chop off of the hands and feet of teenagers, gouge out eyes, murder children in front of their parents, murder parents in front of their children then kidnap the children, bind entire families together then burn them alive, and livestream all the above including posting videos of their murders to the victims’ own social media accounts—and worse—on a mass scale—in the pursuit of some political aim?”

I’ve been asking question (Q) of various faculty members at my institution and elsewhere, people whom I previously thought to be quite decent with serious commitments to ideals such as diversity, inclusion, toleration, and anti-racism, in the form of asking them to publicly name the perpetrators of the October 7 massacre and condemn the atrocities, full stop.

They have overwhelmingly refused to respond.

Based on what I have seen, out of some 200+ faculty members at my institution only four are willing to publicly condemn the brutal, sadistic, barbaric slaughter by Hamas of some 1200 mostly Jewish civilians, including many babies, children, teenagers, disabled people, and grandmothers, full stop.

If any other identity group had experienced a mass slaughter like this, or even a far smaller one, or even an abstract harm of some sort, does anyone doubt these faculty members would erupt, loudly and for days? Not a hypothetical, at least here: not only was there much outraged chatter after (for example) the Pulse nightclub massacre in 2016 or the George Floyd matter in 2020, but this past spring our now former President scheduled an event at a venue that had had discriminatory policies fifty years ago, and the faculty here exploded in weeks of outrage, departmental statements of solidarity with harmed students, with cancelled classes and then a cancelled President.

But when it’s Jewish babies and children, raped, tortured, dismembered, decapitated, there is silence.

And these are the decent people.

Many others across many campuses clearly think the answer to (Q) is “yes.” Cornell professor Russell Rickford found the October 7 bloodshed positively “exhilarating”; Columbia professor Joseph Massad was filled with “jubilation and awe,” finding the massacre “astounding.” And Marc Lamont Hill of CUNY answered (Q) more or less explicitly when he wrote, “So many university academics who insist upon doing performative, virtue signaling ‘land acknowledgements’ at every public event are eerily silent as real liberation struggles are happening. Guess decolonization really is a metaphor for some folk…” He clearly derides those who are all talk and no action, so for him, at least, the answer appears to be “yes,” at least in the pursuit of “decolonization.”

Nor are these professors alone in their sentiments. Lamont Hill’s remark also came after ten days of massive campus rallies openly celebrating the “resistance,” the sanitized word for the mass torture and slaughter of Jewish civilians. Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), the leading campus group with some 200 chapters, immediately endorsed and defended the massacre by openly proclaiming that “decolonization is a call to … actions that go beyond … rhetoric,” including “resistance … in all forms,” including “armed struggle,” and illustrated their social media with images of homicidal hang gliders in case we missed the point. Most tellingly, they declared that they “are PART of this movement, not [merely] in solidarity”—the movement, that is, that guns down unarmed dancing teenagers.

So Rickford, Massad, and Lamont Hill have a lot of fellow travelers in the affirmative camp, faculty and students, people for whom all that gore is apparently fine if it’s for “decolonization,” at least when the victims are Jews.

I have many thoughts about how academics (and then their students) become so gripped by ideology that they lose sight of basic moral truths, to the point where they see the mass sadistic murder of children as the moral high ground. The people just above are at least open about who they are so you know who you are dealing with, but, frankly, the “decent” ones, the silent ones, are ultimately no different. October 7 at least brings the benefit of clarity and sharp lines into matters often featuring obscurity and nuance. In my view any academic who cannot simply answer “no” to question (Q) above is literally in the same ideological position as the Nazis, for whom there were no moral limits to their extermination campaign, just possessed of some marginally different ideology, as we’ll see below.

For now maybe a few simple thoughts will do.

Speaking of land acknowledgements: In the lobby of a central building on my campus there is an enormous posterboard proclaiming that “You are on Pequot and Mohegan homeland,” noting that the college “celebrates Indigenous People’s Day.”

By the decolonization rationale above, our local Native Americans would be within their rights to invade our campus and mercilessly slaughter every single one of us. Indeed those who support indigenous rights and decolonization ought to be the first to offer their throats to avoid that vapid virtue signaling that Lamont Hill derides and actually live (and die) by what they believe.

Do our professors really support the Mohegans’ right to come in and gouge our eyes out, cut off our hands and feet, tie us up and burn us alive, and rape us while they are at it?

Or do they only support such when the alleged colonizers are Jews? (One suspects that when they learn that it’s the Jews who are actually the original indigenous inhabitants of the land and the Arabs the colonialist conquerors, they will be less enthusiastic about the slaughter of babies and children. More on this below.)

In fact in the very same tract declaring themselves “part of” the “armed struggle” movement for decolonization, SJP acknowledges that their chapters are on “occupied Turtle Island,” and further admit that they are themselves Palestinians “in exile,” i.e. not indigenous here. So by their own logic they should be the first to offer their throats to their local Native Americans; or since they’re keen to be a “part of” the violent decolonization movement, they probably should just eliminate themselves.

Note too that these same folk see themselves in “exile” and demand the “right of return” to their homeland in literally the same breath as they reject the Jews’ right to return from their own exile to their own homeland. And when Jews in fact did just that, these people endorse slaughtering them en masse; so again by parity of reasoning they should be offering their throats to the local Native Americans in the name of “decolonization”—not to mention slaughtering all non-indigenous people everywhere, which would include all immigrants and refugees in every country around the world.

Of course all this is absurd, outrageously so.

There’s actually a word for violence targeting civilians for political aims: it’s terrorism. And anyone incapable of identifying and condemning October 7 as such is pro-terror, pure and simple, no matter what the alleged grievances are that allegedly led to the violence. If you can’t answer “no” to (Q) above, full stop, then you are pro-terror, period.

This actually isn’t difficult. You don’t need to know anything about the conflict to know that that mass terror attack was abominable. Who watches babies having their throats slit and little girls raped and then dismembered alive (yes) and says, “Well, I need to learn more before making a judgment”? Who watches a mother and a father and their three small children tied up together and then burned alive (yes) and says, “Well I need to hear the other side before I make up my mind”? It simply doesn’t matter what preceded these events. By my lights, all decent people everywhere should recognize that there are moral limits to what people can do even in response to their alleged “oppression,” and that it is never, under any circumstances, acceptable to target civilians, particularly in that sadistic, barbaric, inhuman way—even if they are Jews.

This is not about politics. It doesn’t require you to be “pro-Israel.”

This is about humanity.

It’s either yes or an unqualified, full-stop “no”—because the second you add a “but” or “it’s complicated” or “look at the context,” you are turning your alleged “no” into a “yes.”

If your ideology endorses the mass extermination of a people, it’s time to rethink your ideology.

And, perhaps, to be removed from campus.

2. The True Nature Of Palestinianism

Let’s now see what follows from the “no” answer—from acknowledging that October 7 was a mass terror attack.

First and foremost, the “no” answer reveals something that was actually never hidden, except to those who have long chosen not to see it. Since such atrocities are never justifiable by any recognizable moral norms, the “no” answer reveals that the people perpetrating them do not respect those norms. And that in turn means that the movement in question is not what its Western progressive allies like to pretend it is.

The Islamic Resistance Movement, known by its acronym Hamas, has never made any secret of its views. From its 1988 founding charter—which literally endorses the murder of every Jew on earth, and quotes repeatedly, and “factually,” from the antisemitic Nazi-worshipped forgery Protocols of the Elders of Zion in order to support its genocidal program—to nearly every action and every statement in the 35 years since, it has been telling us exactly what it thinks. A week after the massacre their leaders did so again, calling on every Muslim on earth to bring the Jihad against Jews to everywhere on earth. Another week after that they declared their intention to repeat the October 7 massacre time and again, until all the Jews are gone.

Hamas, in other words, is not a liberation movement, not a decolonization movement, not about peace, negotiation, Palestinian self-determination much less “two states,” not concerned about “justice” as Westerners understand it nor even about the welfare, well-being, or betterment of the lives of its Palestinian civilians or subjects, all the things that should rightly matter to genuine campus progressives. It is not responding or objecting to any particular Israeli policy or practice, or alleged offense, such as an “occupation.”

It is the very existence of a Jewish state to which Hamas objects—because Hamas is an openly anti-Jewish genocidal movement that aims to establish its version of Islam over the entire globe, including murdering every single Jew on earth, starting with those in Israel. (They also are interested in destroying the United States and global Christianity, but the Jews are the first priority.)

That the animus is not restricted to Israeli Jews is also clear by the global reaction. Mass rallies in major cities around the globe celebrated the October 7 slaughter, called to “Globalize the Intifada!,” and attacked local Jews and Jewish institutions. Within days of October 7 antisemitic incidents had skyrocketed across the world, and by early November there had been hundreds of incidents of harassment of Jews including many incidents of physical assaults, including at least one murder in Los Angeles and possibly another in Detroit, and with uncountable incidents of vandalism against synagogues, Hillel and Chabad Houses, Jewish stores and the like. And on our campuses: as noted above, SJP openly declared its support for Hamas with social media celebrating the mass slaughter of Jews (which they call “resistance”), then launched a campaign to “bring the resistance” to every campus in order to “dismantle” Zionism everywhere. Lovely words—except when “resistance” openly means “slaughter Jews,” when “dismantling Zionism” means removing, “by any means necessary,” anyone on campus who believes that Jews have human rights too, and when they illustrate their campaign with a celebratory image of the homicidal hang glider about to gun down every unarmed dancing teenager in his sight.

This is open endorsement of, and incitement to, mass homicidal violence—occurring on, and directed towards, not only Israel and Israelis but every Jew everywhere, including on our campuses.

“We are all Hamas!” one excited young woman at the University of North Carolina screamed exuberantly, part of a massive crowd of evidently like-minded individuals.

Nor are Hamas and its campus supporters alone in this platform. Hamas’s main internal rival, the Palestinian Authority, led by “moderate” dictator Mahmoud Abbas, is entirely on the same page, as seen from its long-running “pay-to-slay” policy incentivizing murdering Israeli Jews to its recent proclamation requiring all its mosques to preach that exterminating Jews is a Muslim imperative, to openly just announcing that its main party, Fatah, actually took part in the massacre. The mosque sermons weren’t about “Israeli” Jews, mind you, but “Jews,” full stop—like the full stop that should accompany the “no” answer to question (Q) above.

And it’s not just the Palestinians. Hezbollah in Lebanon has been actively involved in firing on Israel from the start, as have the Houthis in Yemen, as have some Syrian groups, all of whom are backed and directed by Iran. The Algerian parliament declared war on Israel. The most prestigious Islamic university in the world issued a fatwa declaring that no Israeli Jews are civilians, including babies and grandmothers, thus legitimizing violence against them. (This is the same university that previously issued special fatwas sanctioning suicide bombing against Jews, despite the general Islamic prohibition on suicide.) Another Muslim body issued a fatwa calling on all Arab states to join the war against Israel. Both Al-Qaeda and ISIS have called on their followers to strike Israeli, U.S., and Jewish targets around the world. Based on the massive rallies in Arab and Muslim countries around the globe celebrating October 7, it appears that what we are seeing is, in fact, a global Islamist war against the Jews.

This is what the “no” answer to (Q) reveals to us.

What Israel, and world Jewry, have been dealing with for years is in fact a war of global Islam against every Jew on the planet (and ultimately against Christianity and the West too). Those piles of mutilated Jewish bodies strewn all over the ground and the internet—that is the Palestinian movement, now understood as merely the leading front in the Islamist war against the Jews and the West.

That is what is being celebrated and supported around the world, including on our campuses.

Once you understand this then nearly everything about the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” looks different. First, that name is oversimplified and misleading: it should be called at least the Israeli-Palestinian-Jewish-Arab-Muslim-Iran Conflict. More importantly, it’s not in fact about Israelis allegedly oppressing disenfranchised Palestinians but about Jews defending their lives from a global genocidal Islamist movement. So understood, you’ll need to reorient yourself about who, exactly, is the oppressor, and who is the underdog. Opponents of Israel like to show maps of “big” strong Israel dominating little, fractured, vulnerable “Palestine.” But a more accurate perspective is given by something like this map, with that tiny sliver of Israel, 32 of which would fit inside the state of Texas, dwarfed by the surrounding Arab and Muslim nations who openly seek to destroy it. Look at that map and sincerely ask yourself: who exactly is the oppressor and who is the oppressed here? Who in fact is the colonialist, the imperialist, and who is the one resisting that colonial imperialism? Ask yourself seriously, which party actually seeks coexistence and which one seeks the extermination of the other?

The answer to that last one might be given by answering another question: Where in the Middle East and North Africa do Jews and Arabs in fact coexist, and where in that same region are there essentially no Jews?

October 7 reveals the true nature of the Palestinian movement, now impossible not to see even for those who have long chosen not to see it. (Q) is a yes or no question; and if “progressives” truly are opposed to oppression, on the side of the oppressed, against colonialism, and for coexistence and peace, then the “no” answer to (Q) dictates which side they should be on here.

Part 2

Part 3

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!

11/20 Links Pt1: Why Hamas can rightly be compared to Nazis; Putting the UN in charge of Gaza would be a sick joke; On World Children’s Day call to free kids held in Gaza

From Ian:

Why Hamas can rightly be compared to Nazis: The similarities are undeniable

Scholars emphasize the role of “eliminationist” antisemitic ideology, the kind of genocidal thinking prevalent in the media and schools of Nazi Germany — and in the media and schools run by Hamas and the Palestinian Authority in our own time.

Dehumanizing Nazi propaganda depicted Jews as rats, spiders or lice.

The only solution to this “Jewish problem,” according to the Nazis, was the “final solution”: death. The Palestinian Authority’s ruling faction, Fatah, celebrated the Oct. 7 pogrom by posting a video showing a boot with the colors of the Palestinian flag squashing a rat on an Israeli flag.

Portrayals of Jews as rodents, insects, and various predatory creatures in need of eradication are staples of Palestinian Arab popular culture.

The Hamas killers echoed the Nazis in another significant way: By photographing their atrocities.

Nazi storm troopers amused themselves by posing for photos as they slashed the beards of their Jewish captives or forced them to grovel.

Death camp commandants delighted in assembling photo albums that included scenes of Jewish men, women and children being selected for the gas chambers.

The album belonging to Treblinka commandant Kurt Franz bore the title “The Good Old Days.”

Today’s technology is new, but the mindset isn’t.

Hamas pogromists used social media platforms to broadcast themselves kidnapping, torturing, and sexually assaulting their Israeli victims.

Some uploaded their gruesome “trophy videos” to social media in order to torment their distraught families. Such content was even livestreamed on Facebook.

The use of sexual violence as a weapon on Oct. 7 had its antecedents both in earlier Arab pogroms and during the Holocaust.

Rape and mutilation were a notorious part of Palestinian Arab atrocities against Jews in Hebron in 1929, according to survivors’ accounts.

Arab soldiers and Palestinian Arab terrorist forces decapitated and sexually mutilated Jews during the 1948 Arab war against the newborn state of Israel, according to numerous mainstream historians.

Likewise in the Kristallnacht rampage in Germany in 1938 — and throughout the Holocaust years that followed— there were numerous instances of Nazis raping Jewish women.

The Shoah Foundation’s oral history archive contains more than 1,700 testimonies by survivors detailing sexual violence.

In other ways, too, one can detect similarities between then and now.

Again, not identical—but worth noting.

Consider the prevailing attitudes at many American colleges.

In the 1930s, universities such as Harvard and Columbia built friendly relationships with Nazi Germany, invited Nazi representatives to their campuses, and organized student exchanges with Nazi-controlled German schools.

Today, many universities are looking the other way as Hamas supporters intimidate Jewish students; US schools such as Bard College, George Washington University, and William Paterson University have even participated in joint programs with Palestinian Arab universities where student branches of Hamas operate freely.

Or consider the phenomenon of Holocaust-denial.

Today’s equivalent, Oct. 7 denial, is already emerging.

Queen Rania of Jordan recently told CNN that “It hasn’t been independently verified . . . that Israeli children [were] found butchered in an Israeli kibbutz.” Officials of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a leading Muslim advocacy group, have claimed that the reports of beheadings are “unverified” and “war propaganda.”

Fortunately, the Jewish people today are not in the same position of powerlessness and vulnerability as European Jews in the 1940s.

Today there is a sovereign Jewish state and a powerful Jewish army.

But when it comes to the behavior of the enemies of the Jews, have either the mindset or the tactics changed very much?

The discovery of an Arabic-language copy of Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” in a Gaza apartment last week helps provide the answer.

The children’s room, where the book was found,had been taken over by Hamas as a base for their operations.

The copy’s margins held notes written by the terrorist who had been studying it.

Nearly a century after its release, Hitler’s manifesto of antisemitism and violence, is still being used to kill Jews as effectively as ever.

When Neutrality is Immoral: Israel, Hamas, and the Problem of Moral Equivalence

While many the world over had the integrity to condemn "the hideous crime, naming its perpetrators and acknowledging Israel's basic right to defend itself against the atrocity," the Patriarchs and Heads of Churches were unable to muster up such moral clarity.

While the IDF goes out of its way to minimize civilian casualties, Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups do their utmost to maximize them — not only by indiscriminately murdering Israelis, but also by hiding among their own civilian population and using them as human shields, resulting in disproportionately high numbers of Palestinian casualties, caused -- deliberately -- by Hamas.

If there is an "occupation" problem in Gaza, the occupier is Hamas, not Israel.

In this war, Christians — and all of us — have a moral responsibility to support a civilized nation's fight against barbarism. Israel must eradicate a terrorist group, Hamas, just as we confronted ISIS. Then all of us need to contain the real mastermind behind such groups, the genocidal regime of Iran. Unfortunately, there is no other viable solution if we wish to preserve the West.

Eugene Kontorovich: No go, Joe: Putting the UN in charge of Gaza would be a sick joke

The Biden administration is pressuring Israel to define its plan for “the day after.”

This is a bit like demanding America have a plan for postwar Japan weeks after Pearl Harbor.

But worse, Washington insists the end goal of Israel’s war be the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Understanding how unlikely Israel is to accept this suicidal proposal, Secretary of State Antony Blinken suggests it turn Gaza over to a United Nations peacekeeping force or other multinational presence.

President Biden just called for the “international community” to provide “interim security measures.”

The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon literally has “interim” in its name and has been failing at its job since 1978.

The idea of international forces in Gaza repeats decades of mistakes.

In every single case, UN forces and agencies failed to provide Israel any security and were coopted and used by its enemies.

After 1956’s Suez War, the Security Council created the United Nations Emergency Force to keep the peace on Israel’s border with Egypt.

Right before the Six-Day War a decade later, Egypt demanded the peacekeepers leave — and they obliged.

The UN Truce Supervision Organization, a Jerusalem-based force, fled when the Jordanians attacked Israel during that war, but the mission remains today, publishing reports critical of Israel and using its diplomatic plates to gum up parking in Jerusalem.

The UN Disengagement Observer Force was created after 1973’s Yom Kippur War to keep the Syrian front quiet.

When Islamist militias moved into the demilitarized zone during the Syrian Civil War, the international forces predictably responded by pulling their troops out.

Then there’s that United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, which did nothing to prevent the Palestine Liberation Organization’s and then Hezbollah’s innumerable attacks on Israel, leading to two wars.

After 2006’s Second Lebanon War, it was used again as diplomatic fig leaf to bring about an Israeli withdrawal.

Netanyahu: Israel Did Not Enter Gaza to Hand It Over to the Palestinian Authority

Israel has no intention of handing Gaza over to the PA once the war is over, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Saturday night as he rebuffed U.S. pressure to do so. "The Palestinian Authority in its current form is not able to take responsibility for Gaza," Netanyahu said. "After we fought and did all this, how could we hand it over to them?"

He noted that PA President Mahmoud Abbas has yet to condemn the Oct. 7 massacre, which sparked the Gaza war, adding that there are Palestinian ministers who are celebrating the event. Moreover, the PA has a policy of paying monthly stipends to terrorists and their families, Netanyahu said, adding that it also educates its children to hate Jews.

Netanyahu recalled that after the IDF withdrew from Gaza in 2005, it handed it over to the PA, which was then ousted by Hamas in a violent coup in 2007. "They [the PA] were already there, they were given Gaza and what happened? They were destroyed and chased out of there in less than a year....It is impossible to put in Gaza an authority that supports terror, abets terror, and pays terrorists."

"There is another condition that I set for the day after: the IDF will have complete freedom of action in Gaza against any threat. Only in this way will we guarantee the demilitarization of Gaza." He added that Israel would only agree to a temporary ceasefire in exchange for the return of all the hostages.

Once again, fake "Jews" do everything they can to foster antisemitism

"Jewish Voice for Peace" celebrated a huge victory yesterday.

They blocked all access to the popular Space Needle tourist site in Seattle.

Look how self-congratulatory they are - they "put their bodies on the line" to stop tourists from having a nice day in Seattle.

The Space Needle has no connection with Israel. Their entire protest has one aim: to inconvenience as many people as possible.

And to tell the hapless tourists that the people they should blame for their ruined day are the Jews.

Ironically, many of their T-shirts say "Not In Our Name." Yet they claim that "Jews" support the aims of genocidal, antisemitic Hamas and their Palestinian supporters.

JVP organizer Michael Grant said, "We’re here at the Space Needle as an iconic Washington landmark to say that there cannot be any business as usual, there cannot be visiting tourist attractions while our tax dollars are going to fund the murders of innocent Palestinians.”

Grant is a typical hypocrite when it comes to Judaism. He tweeted against some random non-Jewish guy blowing a ram's horn at a MAGA event in 2020:

But his own JVP Seattle group routinely blows shofars, as Jews, at their own events protesting Israel defending itself!

No heebie jeebies there, right, Michael?

JVP Seattle is so reprehensible, so antisemitic, that their only reaction to the October 7 massacre was to immediately announce a rally to support Hamas terrorism ("Resistance until Return!")

It would be bad enough if they merely used their pretense of being Jews to fight against Jewish safety and security. But these people are actively trying to make ordinary Americans hate Jews.

The only people who admire them are the haters who share this desire to turn all American antisemitic.

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!

Between 200,000 and 250,000 Israelis have been forced to move out of their homes near the Gaza and Lebanese borders over the past six weeks.Legally, these would be referred to as "internally displaced persons," which essentially means refugees who have not left the borders of their country.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs doesn't mention any of them in their statistics about the war.

Hezbollah has attacked and murdered civilians in Israel and threatened to attack more.

There hasn't been a word of reproach, let alone condemnation, by Amnesty and Human Rights Watch on these attacks. In fact, the only condemnation from so-called human rights groups concerning Lebanon was against Israel for allegedly using a legal weapon which didn't injure a single person, while ignoring Hezbollah's murders and threats.

Houthis in Yemen have shot cruise missiles, drones, and even a ballistic missile towards civilian targets in Israel. They also hijacked a civilian ship they consider to be Israeli in the Red Sea.

But "human rights" groups have not tweeted a word about these incidents.

Protesters throughout the world have been screaming for a "ceasefire."

Yet they are only demanding that ceasefire from one side. There are no signs or banners or speeches calling for Iran or Hezbollah or Ansar Allah or Islamic Jihad or the Al Aqsa Brigades or Hamas to stop shooting rockets at Israel.

All these organizations claim to be objective and to be using the same standards in all situations. Their silence about attacks on Israeli civilians prove that it is all a sham.

The consistent message over decades from these self-proclaimed avatars of human rights is that human rights simply do not apply when the victims are 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!

The Palestinians do not have any competent leaders. Supporting a Palestinian state at this time is irresponsible and enables terror.

The Western world is unanimous: the Palestinian Authority must succeed Hamas in Gaza.

They choose to be willfully blind to a number of issues:

1. The PA is a dictatorship in every sense of the word, with Mahmoud Abbas controlling every branch of government outside of Gaza.

2. The PA has failed to create the trappings of a state, even 30 years after Oslo, with massive amounts of aid and technical help.

3. The Palestinian hate the PA. They know it is corrupt.

4. Three decades after Oslo, an entire generation of Palestinians have been taught not peace, but hate. PA education has prompted the vast majority of West Bank Palestinians to fully support terror attacks.

5. During and after the 10/7 massacre, the PA has solidly backed Hamas.

6. Abbas has not set up any real succession plan, and the likely candidates to replace him have no backing among the people. In the chaos that follows his death, the most likely successor will be a terrorist.

And it even became more crazy, with the news that the PA Ministry of Foreign Affairs has latched onto the latest conspiracy theory and treats it as fact.

The preliminary investigation by the Israeli police reveals the falsity of the media materials fabricated by the occupation to justify its aggression against the Gaza Strip.
According to the Hebrew media, the preliminary investigation by the Israeli police proved that Israeli helicopters bombed Israeli civilians on October 7th who had participated in the nature festival, which
means that the Israeli warplanes caused great destruction in the region and part of the settlements after the so-called “Hannibal Protocol” was activated, which... The occupation police and army can kill
everyone.
Accordingly, the Ministry considers that the result of this investigation casts doubt on the Israeli accounts regarding the destruction and killing that occurred in that area, especially with regard to the photos and videos that reflect the destruction and fires that broke out in many homes as a result of this
bombing.
The Ministry calls on all media outlets, UN officials, and country leaders to follow up on this issue, pay attention to what the Hebrew media published about it, and review their positions in light of that.

11/19/2023

The post, which seems to have been removed, claims that the Israelis massacred on October 7 were really killed by Israel. This has become a popular rumor in the past couple of days, twisting a Haaretz article that already was refuted by Israel's police.

Advocating for a Palestinian Authority-led state that eagerly pounces on and expands on the most outrageous lies - and demands that the world believes them! - is insanity.

Yes, all the other alternatives are bad. Israel doesn't want to re-occupy Gaza, nor does it want to govern the West Bank. Jordan sure doesn't want the West Bank and Egypt does not want Gaza. (Funny how most nations always want to expand, but Palestinians are so troublesome that everyone wants to stay away as far as possible.)

But the Palestinian Authority has proven that it cannot be trusted to run a daycare center, let alone a nation. And as much as they claim that it would be terrible if Palestinians would emigrate to other Arab countries, allowing millions of Palestinians who want to leave to become citizens of other Arab countries would be the best possible move, and one that should be the top priority - if the world really wants to do something to reduce terrorism.

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!

Infant photos at Shifa are not believable

Over the past couple of days, we've seen photos like these out of Shifa hospital:

The caption from Reuters says, "Newborn babies in al-Shifa hospital are swaddled and laid down seven or eight to a bed in a desperate effort to keep them warm and alive."

But if you want to keep the babies warm without an incubator, you would swaddle all of them - not leave some naked. You would cover their heads with the knit caps some of us are familiar with.Or, ideally, you would find people to hold them - preferably their mothers - and give them skin to skin contact to keep them warm.

You don't just lie them on a bed, some of them without clothes, one of them (who does not look premature or sickly at all) with their face pushed up against the sharp corner of a box.

This is not treating premature babies. This is abusing them for a photo-op.

Another photo of babies from Shifa hospital shows something interesting:

There is equipment and lights in the background that is clearly running on - electricity.

In 1991, Kuwait was trying to get US public opinion to go against Saddam Hussein. And they used the best prop they could find: babies forced out of incubators to die.

In his urgent arguments during the fall and winter of 1990 for military action against Saddam Hussein, President Bush made much of the Iraqi leader's cruelty toward the Kuwaiti people. Mr. Bush's allegations of atrocities by Iraqi forces generally went unchallenged. Mr. Hussein's violent disposal of dissident Iraqis was a matter of record, so few politicians, journalists or human rights investigators were prepared to question the President's campaign to paint his opponent as Adolf Hitler reborn.

Some claims were no doubt true, but the most sensational one -- that Iraqi soldiers removed hundreds of Kuwaiti babies from incubators and left them to die on hospital floors -- was shown to be almost certainly false by an ABC reporter, John Martin, in March 1991, directly after the liberation of Kuwait. He interviewed hospital doctors who stayed in Kuwait throughout the occupation.

But before the war, the incubator story seriously distorted the American debate about whether to support military action. Amnesty International believed the tale, and its ill-considered validation of the charges likely influenced the seven U.S. Senators who cited the story in speeches supporting the Jan. 12 resolution authorizing war. Since the resolution passed the Senate by only six votes, the question of how the incubator story escaped scrutiny -- when it really mattered -- is all the more important. (Amnesty International later retracted its support of the story.)

A little reportorial investigation would have done a great service to the democratic process. Americans would have been interested to know the identity of "Nayirah," the 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl who shocked the Congressional Human Rights Caucus on Oct. 10, 1990, when she tearfully asserted that she had watched 15 infants being taken from incubators in Al-Adan Hospital in Kuwait City by Iraqi soldiers who "left the babies on the cold floor to die." The chairmen of the Congressional group, Tom Lantos, a California Democrat, and John Edward Porter, an Illinois Republican, explained that Nayirah's identify would be kept secret to protect her family from reprisals in occupied Kuwait.

There was a better reason to protect her from exposure: Nayirah, her real name, is the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the U.S., Saud Nasir al-Sabah. Such a pertinent fact might have led to impertinent demands for proof of Nayirah's whereabouts in August and September of 1990, when she said she witnessed the atrocities, as well as corroboration of her charges. The Kuwaiti Embassy has rebuffed my efforts to reach Nayirah.

Saddam was no saint, but the story was a hoax. Americans, picturing the cruelty of babies forced out of their incubators to die in the cold, - a story amplified by an American public relations firm - solidly backed the war.

We know that many doctors at Al Shifa are fans of Hamas. Others are afraid of Hamas. We know there was plenty of quite public Hamas activity around Shifa Hospital on October 7 that hospital workers witnessed and stayed silent about. Their testimony and staged photos are not anything to be relied upon.

But the media believed them, and still believes them, no matter how ridiculous their lies are.

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!

11/19 Links: Biden’s dangerous Palestinian state fantasy; International media and the Hamas supporting Doctors of Shifa; IDF footage of Hamas’s tunnels under Shifa Hospital

From Ian:

Caroline Glick: What do the Palestinians want?

If there is any ray of hope emanating from the data, it comes in the disparity between the positions of Palestinians in Gaza, and those in Judea and Samaria. Whereas 88% of Palestinians in Judea and Samaria support Hamas, only 60% of Gazans do.

The reason undoubtedly owes to the Israel Defense Forces’ combined forces operation in Gaza. It works out that seeing their homes destroyed and being forced to evacuate dampens somewhat the Gazans’ support for genocide and its perpetrators. The operational and strategic implications for today and into the future from this disparity of views are fairly obvious. The only way to shake their genocidal attitudes is to punish them. The only way to dampen their desire to annihilate the Jewish state is to deny them all hope that genocide will pay.

It is this insight that needs to drive Israeli policy and our society.

Eighty-seven percent of Palestinians said that their belief in peaceful coexistence with Israel decreased after Oct. 7.

Seventy-one percent said that the events of that day increased their support for the utter annihilation of Israel and a Palestine “from the river to the sea.”

Ninety-eight percent said that they are proud to be Palestinians.

All the answers indicate that the Oct. 7 Holocaust convinced them that they were defeating Israel and wouldn’t have to peacefully coexist with it.

To change these attitudes, Israel’s policy shouldn’t be geared towards giving them hope for a state but rather causing them to fear punishment. This, to be sure, is what the much-maligned Israeli right has been arguing all along.

The Palestinians were asked what they thought Hamas’s motivation was for invading Israel and conducting its sadistic slaughter. The answers are notable. A plurality of Palestinians—35%—said the reason for the attack was to “stop violations of Al-Aqsa.” Another 29% said it was to “free Palestine.” And 21% said it was to “break the siege of Gaza.”

“Stop violations of Al-Aqsa” mosque on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem is another way of saying “jihad.” Under Islam, there is only justification for temporarily stopping a jihad. A temporary, 10-year hudna, or ceasefire, can be reached if the forces of jihad are too weak to prosecute it. The ceasefire can be extended for additional decades if the weakness is protracted. It may be breached at any time if the jihadists gather the required strength to proceed forward.

When Westerners approach the Palestinians, they do so through the prisms of their own preferences and values, and with a drop (or an ocean) of hostility towards the Jewish state.

Westerners assume that the Palestinians seek a future of prosperity and freedom and peace because that is what they aspire to preserve for themselves. But this isn’t the case—or at least not in the way that Westerners think. The Palestinians want a better life. But their conception of a better life is a life of jihad, of killing infidels. What motivates them is not prosperity but genocide. And this is why their hope needs to be extinguished.

Israelis took the measure of the Palestinians on Oct. 7, and opinions have shifted sharply towards the positions that the Israeli right has advocated on behalf of for more than a generation. The world as a whole would do well to take their measure as well. Actions don’t lie, and neither does the data. The Palestinians are a society unified by their common goal of annihilating Israel. That is who they are. That is what they want.

Biden calls for ‘revitalized PA’ control of Gaza after war

U.S. President Joe Biden outlined on Saturday his administration’s long-term goal of ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict “forever,” which includes a “revitalized” Palestinian Authority assuming control of the Gaza Strip after the war and a redoubling of the international community’s efforts towards a two-state solution.

In a Washington Post op-ed titled, “The U.S. won’t back down from the challenge of Putin and Hamas,” Biden emphasized that the “goal should not be simply to stop the [Israel-Hamas] war for today—it should be to end the war forever, break the cycle of unceasing violence, and build something stronger in Gaza and across the Middle East so that history does not keep repeating itself.”

To this end, Biden reiterated his administration’s commitment to a two-state solution, which is “the only way to ensure the long-term security of both the Israeli and Palestinian people. Though right now it may seem like that future has never been further away, this crisis has made it more imperative than ever.”

The U.S. president insisted that “Gaza must never again be used as a platform for terrorism,” and outlined his post-war vision for the enclave and Judea and Samaria.

“There must be no forcible displacement of Palestinians from Gaza, no reoccupation, no siege or blockade, and no reduction in territory. And after this war is over, the voices of Palestinian people and their aspirations must be at the center of post-crisis governance in Gaza….

“As we strive for peace, Gaza and the West Bank should be reunited under a single governance structure, ultimately under a revitalized Palestinian Authority, as we all work toward a two-state solution,” wrote Biden.

In the short term, the American leader stressed his opposition to a ceasefire.

“As Hamas clings to its ideology of destruction, a ceasefire is not peace. To Hamas’s members, every ceasefire is time they exploit to rebuild their stockpile of rockets, reposition fighters and restart the killing by attacking innocents again. An outcome that leaves Hamas in control of Gaza would once more perpetuate its hate and deny Palestinian civilians the chance to build something better for themselves,” he wrote.

Jonathan Tobin: Biden’s dangerous Palestinian state fantasy

It may be hard for many in the West and for liberal Jews to accept, but the incontrovertible evidence of the last century of history has shown that Palestinian nationalism is inextricably tied to a war on Zionism that will not allow any of their leaders to accept even the most favorable two-state solution. The reason is because it involves their having to accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state. That is something that generations of Palestinians have refused to do, no matter where the borders of that Jewish state might be drawn.

Nor have the events of the last six weeks changed any of that. Biden and Friedman’s plans are predicated on an almost religious belief that the Palestinians want peace even though they have rejected it at every point in the last century. It is also a matter of faith in the administration that most Palestinians have nothing to do with Hamas. Yet as a new poll conducted by the Arab World for Research and Development has shown, the residents of the West Bank still support Hamas, even after its atrocities and the calamities it has brought down on its own people. Slightly more than three-quarters of them have a positive view of Hamas, and approximately the same number approve of the terrorist crimes committed on Oct. 7. If Abbas has refused to hold another election in the West Bank since 2005, it is because he believes that Hamas will win. And that belief is backed up by this and virtually every other poll of Palestinian opinion.

Common sense dictates that there is no alternative to Israeli security control in Gaza. Alternatives such as a joint force put together by the Arab nations is a fantasy, as those countries understandably want no part of having to deal with the Palestinians and their intransigent refusal to give up their dream of eradicating Israel. Nor is the United States or any Western nation going to go down that rabbit hole. The only choices are a return to the pre-Oct. 6 situation in which the terrorists run Gaza and have free reign to make good on their promises to repeat their Oct. 7 carnage again and again, or Israeli control.

That might not be what Biden, the foreign-policy establishment and the corporate media that has helped mainstream antisemitism or international opinion want to hear. But it’s the stark truth.

Sadly, there is no “solution” to the conflict between Jews and Arabs over the tiny strip of land between “the river and the sea.” As long as the Arabs are behind Hamas’s mad genocidal war to eliminate Israel, the only answer for the Jewish state is to be strong, defend itself and await a future in which a sea change in Palestinian political culture that will lead them to give up their dream of a Jew-free Palestine achieved by a second Holocaust. Anyone who cares about avoiding more terrorist atrocities and wars must stand behind Israel and against the dangerous delusions of a two-state solution.

The New York Times published a guest essay from Omer Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University. The article is entitled, "What I Believe as a Historian of Genocide."

While he doesn't quite accuse Israel of genocide in Gaza, he claims that Israel's intent to commit genocide is clear, quoting statements by Israeli officials:

My greatest concern watching the Israel-Gaza war unfold is that there is genocidal intent, which can easily tip into genocidal action. On Oct. 7, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Gazans would pay a “huge price” for the actions of Hamas and that the Israel Defense Forces, or I.D.F., would turn parts of Gaza’s densely populated urban centers “into rubble.” On Oct. 28, he added, citing Deuteronomy, “You must remember what Amalek did to you.” As many Israelis know, in revenge for the attack by Amalek, the Bible calls to “kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings.”

Yet in that same speech, notably not linked, Netanyahu said, "Whoever dares to accuse our soldiers of war crimes are hypocritical liars who lack so much as one drop of morality. The IDF is the most moral army in the world. The IDF does everything to avoid harming non-combatants. I again call on the civilian population to evacuate to a safe area in the southern Gaza Strip."

Intent is a necessary component of determining genocide. Bartov cherry picks a Biblical quote to hint at genocidal intent, and ignores the explicit statement in the same speech that shows that there is absolutely no intent to harm civilians.

That is a pretty damning indictment of a professor who is pretending to prove a point.

He brings other "evidence" that is just s bogus:

The deeply alarming language does not end there. On Oct. 9, Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, said, “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly,” a statement indicating dehumanization, which has genocidal echoes.

Gallant is clearly talking about Hamas and other terror groups, since that's who Israel is fighting.

The next day, the head of the Israeli Army’s coordinator of government activities in the territories, Maj. Gen. Ghassan Alian, addressed the population of Gaza in Arabic: “Human animals must be treated as such,” he said, adding: “There will be no electricity and no water. There will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell.”

Right before that, Alian said, "Kidnapping, torturing and murdering children, women and the elderly isn't human." It is clear that his "human animals" statement is referring to Hamas, not all Gazans.

This historian of genocide sure doesn't check his sources. Or he does, and is purposefully lying. Either way, this should discredit him as any sort of scholar.

And the New York Times proves once again that it doesn't do even a basic fact check when publishing anti-Israel pieces. Bartov links to secondary sources for each of his supposedly damning statements - and he does this on purpose, because the primary sources all prove otherwise. As a scholar, he knows this.

It isn't as if he is the only Holocaust scholar in the world. The NYT published a very short rebuttal of Bartov's article as a letter to the editor:

To the Editor:

Re “What I Believe as a Historian of Genocide,” by Omer Bartov (Opinion guest essay, nytimes.com, Nov. 10):

Mr. Bartov, a Holocaust scholar, warns that Israel is very likely committing war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza that can devolve into genocide. To show “genocidal intent,” he cites furious Israeli statements made immediately after Oct. 7.

But these do not reflect actual Israeli policies toward civilians. Israel’s targets are military: Hamas’s soldiers, tunnels, headquarters and weapons stocks. By placing military targets in and under civilian structures, it is Hamas that violates laws of war.

The 1948 U.N. Genocide Convention mentions demonstrable intent to destroy a national, racial or religious group. Mr. Bartov is mute about Israel’s hundreds of phone calls to Gazans warning them to leave buildings in which Hamas fighters were located. Israel has urged civilians to evacuate to the south to escape battle. A government intent on genocide would do the opposite.

A cease-fire now would leave Hamas’s leadership and its massive tunnel structures intact. Hamas would declare victory and prepare for the next round of killing. Mr. Bartov’s article and the demonstrations around the world accusing Israel of genocide would, intentionally or not, have the effect of consigning Israel to live next to a terrorist state committed to its destruction. No state in the world would accept such a situation.

Norman J.W. Goda
Jeffrey Herf
Mr. Goda is a professor of Holocaust studies at the Center for Jewish Studies, University of Florida. Mr. Herf is professor emeritus of history at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Just as we see with "Jewish Voice for Peace" and other groups, Jews who do not represent the vast majority of Jews get outsized attention. And the same goes for people like Bartov, who has accused Israel of "apartheid" multiple times - something that indicates his bias against Israel outside his field of study. The Times would never publish an entire op-ed by a genocide scholar who supports Israel.

NYT editors relish finding and promoting Jews who hate Israel, and give them more deference and coverage than they do to the vast majority of 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!