Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, December 01, 2023

12/01 Links Pt2: Douglas Murray: Europe's clash of cultures — and antisemitism — is coming to America; The 7 October denialists

From Ian:

Douglas Murray: Europe's clash of cultures — and antisemitism — is coming to America

Well, the war on Christmas certainly started early this year. On the streets of New York. And in the ugliest way possible.

By now, everybody will have seen the footage of anti-Israel activists and pro-Palestinian extremists trying to disrupt the Christmas tree-lighting at Rockefeller Center.

Let’s ignore for a moment that one of the crowd was carrying a swastika and that the general mood of the crowd was more of a mob than a demonstration.

What did they think they were doing?

Perhaps these thugs had been emboldened by managing to interrupt the Macy´s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

But what had Macy’s ever done to them? And why attack a Christmas tree-lighting ceremony? Who do these people think they are?

The answer is that they are fanatics, and fanatics who have whipped themselves up into a huge lie.

The idiots trying to stop the Christmas tree-lighting on Wednesday night kept chanting for an “end to genocide.”

But if any of these people had ever left their college dorm rooms, they might have discovered that there is no genocide going on in Gaza.

In fact, in the 18 years since the Israelis left Gaza (forcibly removing every last Jewish resident), the population of Gaza has boomed.

In the last 18 years, the population of Gaza has gone from 1,299,000 to around 2.05 million people.

In other words, the population of Gaza has grown by almost a million people since the Israelis left.

Which is one reason why you hear so much about the youthful population of Gaza.

Perhaps if any of the members the forward operating unit of the anti-Christmas tree brigade were capable of thinking, they could answer an obvious question:

Where is the genocide? Is it not happening? Or are the Israelis trying to commit genocide against the people of Gaza yet are so bad at committing genocide that the population actually grows while they´re trying to kill everyone? I’d love to hear the answer.

Editor's Notes: Where are our allies?

Many Jews, who have long prided themselves on standing with other groups and communities in their time of need, have been left wondering: Where are our allies?

Indeed, in the weeks since the October 7 massacre, a slew of Jewish activists – many of whom have long identified with the progressive left – have written heart-wrenching essays and social media posts expressing their sense of pain and abandonment. “It is horrifying that people who profess that their life is all about the humanity of others – that maybe that humanity doesn’t extend to Jews,” one such activist, Jonathan Rosen, told the Financial Times. Rabbi Sharon Brous, a popular progressive Jewish leader in Los Angeles, described feeling “existential loneliness.”

And yet, not everything is bleak. Many prominent figures from communities with which American Jews have long aligned themselves have stood up for Israel and the Jewish community in recent weeks. House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries – one of the most senior elected officials in America and a longtime member of the Congressional Black Caucus – was front and center at the massive March for Israel in Washington two weeks ago, where he spoke powerfully about the need to support Israel and Jews around the world at this time. The Congressional Hispanic Leadership Institute has the text, “CHLI mourns for the victims of the heinous attack on our friends, the people of Israel. This is a time for solidarity with the State of Israel,” emblazoned across its website’s homepage. Scores of leaders from the African American, Asian American, Latino, and LGTBQ communities have expressed their revulsion at Hamas’s atrocities and have condemned the recent explosion of Jew hatred across America and around the world.

In a conversation he and I had earlier this week, Congressman Ritchie Torres of New York made his position plain.

“I’m commonly asked why, as a gay Afro-Latino from the Bronx, am I so outspoken against antisemitism, and people are asking me the wrong question,” he told me. “The right question is not why I have chosen to be outspoken. The right question is why others have chosen silence in the face of the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.”

Allyship should not be transactional. We support one another not because we expect to get something in return, but rather because it is the right thing to do.

And yet, at the same time, allyship, if it is genuine, should be mutual and bidirectional: We feel your pain. We stand with you, we march alongside you, and we speak out for you when you need us. Is it too much to ask that you do the same?

That is the question that many Jews are asking at this fateful moment. The answer we receive will echo for years to come.

Stop Psychoanalyzing Israel

Upon his arrival in Israel last month, President Biden advised, "While you feel that rage, don't be consumed by it." The notion that if Israel hits hard at terrorists, it must be acting out of some kind of irrational emotion is inaccurate and insulting.

In the years before there was an Israel, there were those who dismissed Jewish concerns about Nazism as a kind of emotional rage from which Jews just needed to calm down. The false diagnoses of "Jewish rage" assumes that all Jews think alike and act alike. Therefore, since some Jews were persecuted in the past, their descendants today must be acting out some hidden psychological problem if they cry out or fight back.

The absurdity of that argument is obvious from Israel's demographic makeup. Most Israelis today are not children or grandchildren of Holocaust survivors - because their parents and grandparents did not come from Europe. Certainly Israelis are deeply interested in the history of the Holocaust. And they may justifiably view the Nazi genocide, and the world's reaction to it, as a cautionary tale. But that is a far cry from being traumatized or mentally unbalanced as a result of what happened to previous generations.

When Israelis look at Hamas, they don't see Nazis. They see Palestinian Arab terrorists who, just weeks ago, perpetrated mass murder, torture, rape, and beheadings of Jews. Israel's response to them is not rage against imaginary enemies. It's self-defense against real enemies.

By Forest Rain

Why do horrible things happen to good people?

Some things are so horrific that they can only be called evil. The Holocaust. The Hamas Massacre of October 7^th, the new Holocaust. There aren’t enough words to convey the full extent of the horror. Words like “atrocity” are just too small and the question arises: where was God when these unspeakable events occurred?

Many people mistakenly assume that the trail of God by Jews in Auschwitz is an allegory rather than an actual event.

Elie Wiesel once declared: "I was there when God was put on trial. It happened at night; there were just three people. At the end of the trial, they used the word chayav, rather than ‘guilty'. It means ‘He owes us something'. Then we went to pray."

Then we went to pray.

Fast forward to the Holocaust of October 7^th. Head of the Southern district of ZAKA, Yossi Landau, described their own “trial”, in the devastated Kibbutz Be’eri.

ZAKA, Israel’s "Disaster Victim Identification" experts are volunteers who collect bodies in cases from car accidents to terror attacks. They are motivated by the belief that the dead deserve sacred respect. Burying them whole and with dignity honors the soul of the departed and recognizes the sacred spark of God that gives life to every human being.

The massacre occurred under the cover of a missile bombardment from Gaza. The search for survivors and the collection of bodies began before the massacre was over, while soldiers were still fighting the terrorists, while missiles were raining down on Israeli communities.

In one of the homes Yossi Landau, described an unfathomable scene.

The family’s dining table was in the middle of the room. On one side of the room, they found the bodies of a father and the mother. They were kneeling on the floor, their hands tied behind their backs. On the other side, as if in a mirror image, a little girl and boy approximately six and seven years old.

The father had an eye gouged out. The mother had one of her breasts cut off. The boy had several of his fingers chopped off. The little girl, they chopped off her foot.

And after all that the terrorists sat at the table and ate the food the family had prepared for their holiday meal.

Yossi Landau explains that he feels as if the bodies speak to him, telling the story of their death. Although highly experienced in dealing with death but the joyous cruelty evident in this scene was overwhelming to him and his team.

The horror of what this family experienced was so evil, it was like a wall that could not be passed and yet, it needed to be passed in order to grant these souls the dignity of a proper burial.

Yossi Landau described this scene in many interviews. Only in a few did he describe how they dealt with this horror.

He collected himself and told his team to hold hands. They walked into the room. There was blood everywhere. They sat down in the middle, with the bodies and the table with the remains of the meal and they sang a Jewish song:

“I believe
With complete faith
In the coming of the Messiah.

And even though he may tarry,
With all this, I will still wait for him.
I will wait for him every day
May he come.”

And then they got up and began attending to the bodies.

This was just one of the first houses, there were many more to check and no way to know what they would find there.

Where was God amidst this evil?

In Judaism there is a concept of God “hiding His face”, as if stepping out of the story. That doesn’t mean that God is gone or stops caring, it means that we can’t feel the connection to Him. It is perhaps like a parent who steps out of the room to see how the children work out their problems by themselves.

The Jews in Auschwitz judged God and found him “owing” – and then they went to pray.
The Jews in Be’eri sat down in the blood of our tortured family – and sang their faith in the coming of the Messiah.

This is the unfathomable faith of the Jewish People in the face of horror. It is the strength of a People broken, yet still standing – the mysterious factor that leads to deep confusion about Jews.

Who are these people, victimized yet refusing to be victims?

Many conclude that the evil we face must not be so bad – because who could get up again after that?!

Broken yet still standing. God, not guilty but “owing”. We are still here and even in the midst of the blood of our tortured family members, can sing of faith in the coming of the Messiah – not here but with hope for a better future.

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!

12/01 Links Pt1: Israelis will not feel safe until Hamas is eradicated; IDF resumes combat in Gaza after Hamas violates ceasefire; Israeli hostages recount beatings, death threats

From Ian:

JPost Editorial: Israelis will not feel safe until Hamas is eradicated

Three people were savagely murdered and five others were wounded in a shooting attack in Jerusalem on Thursday morning.

The terrorists, two residents of east Jerusalem, came carrying an M16 rifle and a handgun to the Givat Shaul junction at the entrance to the capital, where they opened fire at people gathered at a bus stop. They were shot and killed at the scene by security forces and a civilian.

Hours later, Hamas took credit for the attack.

The man murdered in the attack was 73-year-old Rabbi Elimelech Wasserman, who served as a rabbinical judge in Ashdod.

One of the women murdered in the attack was 67-year-old Chana Ifergan, the principal of a Beis Yaakov school in Beit Shemesh.

Livia Dickman, 24, a resident of Har Nof, was named as the third fatality.

On October 7, there was a rush to move away from locations where terrorist attacks might occur as a continuation of the massacre. This, at the time, included Jerusalem, which was targeted by some rockets but remained relatively calm. Israelis feared that they, too, would be targeted, and their families victimized.

But it was the northern and southern borders that bore the brunt of the attack, and the Tel Aviv area that has seen the heaviest rocket barrages, while the Jerusalem area has remained comparatively calm.

Terror attack incites fear throughout the city
After yesterday’s attack, however, Jerusalem social media groups were aflame with people afraid to leave their homes, scared to catch a bus, and fearful of getting in their cars. At that moment, Jerusalemites knew what it feels like to live along the Gaza or Lebanon borders at this time and were reminded of previous waves of terrorism.

Gaza border communities and Lebanon border towns were ordered to evacuate the day after the war broke out, in concern over possible additional attacks.

Some residents have since been told that they may return home, but many are concerned and angry.

During the current pause in hostilities, relative peace has been maintained on the northern border. With the exception of a few minor attacks, the northern front has been relatively quiet.

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, upon completing a situation assessment in the area last week, said that the successes of the IDF along the border will be “translated” into a situation that will allow the gradual return of northern residents.

Israeli who helped thwart J’lem terror attack dies of wounds

An Israeli civilian who fired on two Palestinian terrorists during a Thursday morning shooting attack died of his injuries.

Yuval Doron Castleman, a 37-year-old attorney was at a bus stop at the entrance to Jerusalem when two Palestinians arrived in a vehicle and began shooting at rush-hour commuters.

Castleman, who was armed with his personal weapon, and two off-duty soldiers engaged and killed the terrorists, but the attorney was wounded. The soldiers apparently mistook Castleman for a terrorist.

His death brings the death toll from the attack to four.

Also killed were 73-year-old Rabbi Elimelech Wasserman, who was a judge in the rabbinical court in Ashdod; Hanna Ifergan, a 67-year-old principal of a girl’s school in Beit Shemesh; and 24-year-old Livia Dickman of Jerusalem. Five other victims are hospitalized.

The two terrorists, both in their 30s, were identified as Murad Nemer and his brother, Ibrahim, of eastern Jerusalem. The brothers were associated with Hamas, and had previously been imprisoned for terror activities. The Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) said that Murad was jailed from 2010 to 2020 for planning attacks under the direction of terror commanders in Gaza.

Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement posted on Telegram.

Police officials said on Friday morning that the Nemers’ home had been mapped out for demolition. Police added that they are increasing patrols in the city with the renewal of fighting in the Gaza Strip.

Minister-without-Portfolio Benny Gantz, a member of the War Cabinet, said that the attack strengthened Israel’s resolve to continue waging war against Hamas in Gaza.

“This terror attack is further proof of our obligation to continue to fight with strength and determination against murderous terrorism, which threatens our citizens. In Jerusalem, Gaza, in Judea and Samaria, and everywhere,” said Gantz.

IDF resumes combat in Gaza after Hamas violates ceasefire

The Israel Defense Forces resumed combat operations in the Gaza Strip on Friday morning after Hamas broke a week-long ceasefire by firing rockets at the Jewish state.

The military said it was conducting a wave of airstrikes across the coastal enclave.

“Hamas violated the operational pause, and in addition, fired toward Israeli territory. The IDF has resumed combat against the Hamas terrorist organization in Gaza,” the military said.

Terrorists fired a rocket from Gaza at about 6 a.m., which was intercepted by the Iron Dome air-defense system.

An hour later, several projectiles were again fired at the Jewish state, setting off sirens in Kibbutz Holit. The rockets landed in open areas, causing no injuries or damages.

Alarms continued to blare across southern Israel throughout the morning.

Five IDF soldiers were wounded by a mortar that struck near the southern community of Nirim, according to Israeli media. Three of the soldiers were in moderate condition, while the others were lightly hurt.

Another rocket launched from Gaza caused property damage in Kibbutz Mefalsim, local authorities said. There were no injuries reported.

Communities along the Gaza border have largely been evacuated due to the conflict.

The IDF on Friday published a map splitting Gaza into scores of small areas, which will be used to notify Palestinian civilians of active combat zones.

“The IDF is operating forcefully against terror organizations, while making great efforts to protect civilians,” the military said in a message to Gaza residents.

“The people of Gaza are not our enemies. For this reason, the IDF is leading controlled and specific evacuations in order to remove them as much as possible from areas of combat,” it added.

I have been having a hard time finding any Arabs in Arab countries denouncing the October 7 pogrom in Arabic. But French magazine Le Point did publish this unequivocal condemnation of the attacks by Moroccan Muslim intellectual Tahar Ben Jelloun several days after the attacks:

As a Moroccan Arab and Muslim by birth, culture and traditional education, I cannot find the words to say how horrified I am by what the Hamas militants did to the Jews . Brutality, when it attacks women and children, becomes barbaric and has no excuse or justification.

I am horrified because the images I saw touched me to the depths of my humanity.

I believe that we can resist an occupation, fight against colonization, but not with these acts of great savagery.

The Palestinian cause died on October 7, 2023, assassinated by fanaticized elements, mired in an Islamist ideology of the worst kind.

Hamas is the enemy, not only of the Israeli people, but also of the Palestinian people. A cruel enemy without any political sense, manipulated by a country where young opponents are hanged for not wearing a veil on their heads.

The taking of hostages and the blackmail of their execution only exacerbates the anger of all of us.

This brutality comes from far away. Certainly from the occupation and humiliations suffered by youth without a future, quickly taken over by an Islamist movement dependent on the goodwill of Iran.

After the massacre, whatever the number of deaths on both sides, barbarism has permeated our imagination and it is difficult today to believe that these men did this to “liberate” a territory. No, war is fought between soldiers. Not by killing innocent civilians.

No, there is no reason to excuse what they did in homes, in camps, wherever they could seize young people partying.

The horror is human, I mean animals would never have done what Hamas did. A minister in Netanyahu's government [Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant] called Gazans "animals." No, there are men without conscience, without morality, without humanity who perpetrated the massacres, then there is a population which suffers, which is neither armed nor barbaric.

Do not confuse Hamas with the population (2.5 million people), who live under occupation and embargo .

I say it, but my voice is alone.

I, in my solitude, in my sadness and my shame as a human being, my disgust at this humanity to which I refuse to belong, I say, no, this is a fight that does not honor their cause. No, to these applause in certain Arab capitals. No, to this bloody triumph over the innocent. No, to the blindness of those who pull the strings of a tragedy where, sooner or later, it will be the Palestinian population who will pay this heavy bill.

We will carry this tragedy in our memory as an injury to all humanity. A wound, never closed, never forgotten.

Morocco's Hespress wrote that other Moroccan intellectuals were "almost unanimous" in denouncing Ben Jelloun.

Moroccan writer Aziz Lazraq said that this article was filled with "hasty and emotional statements that are not part of his language or nature, and devoid of any meaning."

Another writer, Montaser Hamadeh, accused Ben Jalloun of adopting the French position towards Israel instead of the Moroccan one.

Both he and writer Abdel Samad Belkabir explained that Ben Jallun lacked proper "context" in condemning Hamas without seeing that everything is really Israel's fault, and Hamas' murders and kidnappings and rapes are mere "mistakes."

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!

Haaretz reports:

[Dr. Cochav] Elkayam-Levy, of the department of international relations at Hebrew University, really does want to reduce interest in her personally, but the truth is that during the past weeks she has been playing a key role in directing attention to one of the especially nightmarish chapters of the nightmare of October 7. The Civil Commission on October 7 Crimes by Hamas against Women and Children, which she founded, is casting a spotlight on the acts of rape and other sex crimes committed by the terrorists under the “aegis” of the attack on the south.

During these past weeks, the women of the nongovernmental commission have been hard at work gathering testimony and documentary materials related to the day of the massacre, with the aim of putting together a database of crimes against women and children. They are assembling one account after another, one piece of evidence after another, and gradually putting together all the pieces of the puzzle. The aggregation of the evidence presents a horrifying picture that leaves no room for doubt: Under cover of the massacre, Hamas carried out a campaign of rape and sexual abuse at many of the communities adjacent to the Gaza Strip that it attacked.

Elkayam-Levy is a lawyer and scholar of international law, gender and human rights – a combination that seems to have prepared her in advance to head such a commission. Nonetheless, she says, “I never thought my work in international law and feminist theory would intersect in such a shocking way,” she says.

... Last month, when Elkayam-Levy was invited to speak on a panel organized by several different Jewish student groups at Harvard University, she felt that the time was right to present some of the evidence to the world.

When her turn to speak came, she delivered a detailed warning about the difficult things she was about to describe, took a deep breath and began a horrifying survey. She recounted a long list of evidence about acts of rape, including gang rape, disfigurement and other acts of abuse. She described a number of videos that Hamas distributed in which naked women are seen, with signs on them that leave little room for doubt. In one case, the victim was taken to Gaza with no clothes on and unconscious, and displayed before a cheering crowd. Pictures that had come into her hands showed other victims of sex crimes. She also read out several chilling descriptions by eyewitnesses of acts of rape.

...After eight minutes of stomach-churning monologue, she asked to stop. “Never in my life had I imagined I would face my colleagues to talk about gender-based war crimes and crimes against humanity carried out against Israeli women and children on such a large scale,” she says, “and we are assuming that many more cases will surface in the future.”

“We connected one testimony to the next,” Elkayam-Levy says. “Suddenly seeing the big picture, how systematic it was, the extent of the violence – it was a punch in the stomach.”

Elkayam-Levy's frustration at how the international community and media are treating this topic is palpable:

“All kinds of vague statements are beginning to come out,” she notes, “calling upon both sides to ‘show restraint,’ and simply making October 7 vanish from the timeline. A parallel universe. The terrible betrayal we have felt has developed into a feeling that we are now the victims of wild incitement directed at us. At very early stages of the war, those organizations began running campaigns about the genocide Israel is carrying out in Gaza. I am very uncomfortable saying this, but those organizations have shown themselves to be antisemitic bodies.

“The moment those organizations keep silent, or do not report the truth, we have a problem,” she continues. “It is untenable that experts who are supposed to responsive to women’s distress everywhere are subordinating themselves to political considerations, and are not reporting what happened in a disaster of this magnitude. It is incomprehensible that agencies of the UN that are responsible for [promoting and safeguarding] women’s rights are ignoring the Israeli women who were taken hostage, or were murdered and raped by Hamas.”

In Elkayam-Levy’s view, this is a replication of those same denial mechanisms often applied concerning individual cases of rape. “When a woman is raped, the discourse immediately revolves around evidentiary questions – is there or is there not evidence of rape? Doubt is cast on the woman, her reliability is questioned, and a question mark is posed as to whether it did or did not happen. This casting of doubt is now directed against us at the collective level.

“Questions are asked like: Is there or isn’t there semen? Was there or wasn’t there a rape kit? Those same female jurists with international reputations who are conducting this discussion apparently do not have a basic understanding of international law. International law does not talk the language of the individual case. My call to them is to look beyond those denial mechanisms. You are facing a bunch of respected women and telling them that shocking crimes were committed here. Am I the one who needs to provide the evidence for the terrorists’ deeds? What kind of travesty is it that they are imposing the burden of proof on me?

...“There are journalists who contact me and ask: Did it [a particular rape] really happen? It’s like, what are we even talking about? This is about the most documented set of horrors humanity has known. There are innumerable videos that have already been released – just go into the Hamas Telegram groups. You are journalists, do your work. Don’t ask me what happened and how it happened. It is hard enough that I need to go through those groups myself to extract information from them.”

Dr. Elkayam-Levy appears on this very hard to watch video of a press conference on this topic two weeks ago.

She describes [59:23] how her commission gathered evidence about the story that came out in the first days after October 7, of a pregnant woman whose child was cut out of her body - a story that was immediately ignored or doubted by commenters and the media. Yet as time went on, the commission gathered more and more evidence that, yes, it really happened, and it was even worse than first reported:

I want to bring one one example we've heard from the in the first week of the war of a pregnant woman found slaughtered. It was broadcast in international media in the second weekend. We were shocked we're like 'could it be that they took a baby out of a woman's womb?'

The second week of the war we've heard about it from the rescue teams; we got a report that the rescue team collected a body of a woman and the baby. And the third week or a few days afterwards we got the information from Shua from treating the body of of this woman.

And the most terrible thing is that last week we got the video of this woman..

Now I didn't know what really happened to her, we could only imagine, but to see the video - I didn't see it, I had a person next to me describing exactly what it is, I couldn't watch - it was alive. I didn't imagine that she was alive, I don't know, I just imagined that she was dead while they did it, but that she was alive, she had her mouth covered with something, her breasts were cut while she was screaming and tortured, the baby they cut it up, they cut open her belly. I couldn't really understand that this has happened.

Her anguish comes through in the video. She notes that for every case like this where the evidence came out and was clear, there are plenty where there is no video, no smoking gun.

But when the known evidence is examined and verified, it is undeniable that Hamas used sexual violence as a weapon of terror. It is sick that the media is asking for specific evidence in other cases. There is not going to be video for every woman without underwear who was bleeding from between her legs showing that she was raped - but the way the media and pundits are framing this, without a rape kit and video then we must assume Hamas is innocent.

All while they believe the most ludicrous anti-Israel claims with no evidence whatsoever.

The sexual abuse stories are a double crime - not only Hamas' physical attacks on these women, but the world's refusal to believe the victims. As Elyakam-Levy points out, the skeptical treatment of Israeli testimony is directly analogous to how individual rape victims are not believed or expected to bring high levels of evidence for their trauma.

This is todays' antisemitism.

(h/t Irene)

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!

Muslims boycotting other Muslims because of Israel

If you go to the McDonald's Pakistan webpage, you see a pop-up:

Short version: "Please don't boycott us! We aren't Jewish!"

Early in the war, McDonald's Israel said it would donate thousands of meals to soldiers. As a result, Israel-haters worldwide are boycotting McDonald's - and only hurting their own locally owned franchises.

McDonald's Pakistan has slashed prices, some by over half their normal prices, to stay afloat.

McDonald's Malaysia is similarly begging customers not to leave, saying that they are 100% Muslim.

And they donated $214,000 to a Palestinian Humanitarian Fund.

McDonald's Jordan similarly announced it is 100% Jordanian and they gave money to a Gaza fund as well.

All these boycotts only hurting the neighbors and friends of the boycotters.

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!

11/30 Links Pt2: Rejection of the UN Partition Plan in 1947 Was a Prequel to the October 7 Massacre; The depravity of the Islamo-left

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Even now, the threat to British Jews is not being taken seriously

Classical antisemitism isn’t just prejudice or hatred. It’s based upon defaming Jewish people with the murderous lie that they are the source of all evil in the world.

If Israel (as implied by Cameron and Blinken) recklessly and needlessly kills huge numbers of Palestinian innocents, its behaviour is so abhorrent it doesn’t deserve to exist. If the Jewish state doesn’t deserve to exist, then Jews don’t deserve to exist. So there’s a direct line between defamation of Israel and attacks on Jews.

Moreover, this war against the Jews has been facilitated by the fantasies of western governments. The US and Britain deny the truth of the Palestinians’ war of extermination against Israel, because such a war requires not a “two-state solution” but the defeat of the Palestinians whom they refuse to acknowledge as aggressors. Similarly, the US and Britain have catastrophically appeased Iran in the inane belief that it could be tamed by extending the hand of friendship. Denying that Islamic extremism is rooted in an interpretation of Islam currently dominant in the Muslim world, the British government still refuses to outlaw Hizb ut-Tahrir, seen on the streets of London these past few weeks screaming for jihad, or ban the seditious and insurrectionary Muslim Brotherhood.

The more the Palestinians and the Iranian regime have waged war and terrorism again Israel, the more America and Britain have pressured Israel to compromise its security. The more extreme the violence perpetrated by Islamists against the west, the more the west fell over backwards to avoid any challenge to the Muslim world.

The result has been 100 years of Arab war against Israel, the empowerment of genocidal Iran, the progressive Islamisation of the west, the re-emergence of violent antisemitism and, exacerbated by Israel’s own catastrophic errors of judgment, the Hamas pogrom of October 7.

Those (of whom I am one) who have warned for years about these trends have been ignored, demonised and vilified as “right-wing,” “extremist” and “Islamophobic”, by Britain’s Jewish leadership no less than the wider establishment. And they still don’t get it.

The result is what we are now seeing playing out in front of our horrified eyes.

Howard Jacobson: Jews don’t need the cult of woke – it doesn’t care for us

Students of my work – supposing there to be any – will not, until today, have found a single reference to the phenomenon of “woke”. It’s not a word I care to use and the arguments it has incited are not such as I have wanted to join. Woke is the Softer Side of Radical Left Politics for Dummies and so all too easy to mock. Of course Gender Neutral Lavatories are nonsensical, especially when you’re in a hurry. Of course we snort when we get an email from someone advising us of his/her/their pronouns of choice. And of course we cannot contain our contempt when some fragile Bristolian tells us that having to pass a statue of a colonist make her/him/them cry. Try being a Jew having to negotiate a dozen churches every day, each a memorial to your infamy, each reminding you of who you were reported to have killed and what the consequences still are. But do we ask for them to be pulled down?

There’s a further compelling reason for Jews to shy away from woke. We don’t need to be given lessons in how to treat the poor, the repressed, the alien, the easily wounded, the neglected and the incoherent. Moses handed us a comprehensive ethical code we call the Ten Commandments, hot from the mouth of God, several thousand years ago. And we were given a sense of humour a thousand or so years before that. When a full-woke Minnesota librarian says we should stop teaching Shakespeare because his ‘works are full of problematic, outdated ideas, with plenty of misogyny, racism, homophobia, classism, anti-Semitism and misogynoir,’ we laugh not only because what makes writers problematic is precisely what we read them for, but because of the way woke invariably spirals into grievances most of us have never heard of. Misogynoir! What does Moses have to say about hating black women? Ask the black woman he married.

So why am I invoking what we neither need nor respect? Because woke doesn’t respect us. Because woke will trammel us in its nets if we are not careful.

Only think of the sorrow for Israelis and rage against Hamas we expected after October 7. Weren’t the woke so many snowflakes who fainted if someone made a cutting remark in their presence and didn’t dare go to the theatre for fear someone might die on stage? How would they survive the images of Hamas murdering babies? Well, here’s a surprise. They not only loved them, they called for more.

Stephen L. Miller: Chuck Schumer—Name the Antisemites in Your Party or Sit Down

So while I applaud Schumer's speech, he is approaching antisemitism as though it is a Never Ending Story-style black cloud of nothingness, driven by mysterious, unseen forces, and happening in random odd places. It is not. It is being driven and funded by the Democratic Party apparatus in this country—in government, activism, media and academia. It's being driven by people whose names Chuck Schumer well knows.

Dark money groups of his own party sponsoring activists like disgraced Women's March Director Linda Sarsour as well as Democratic House Members like Ilhan Omar, who has been admonished in the past for her antisemitic remarks, went nameless in Schumer's remarks. So did Congresswoman Tlaib. Even as Schumer made specific references to incidents like the Jewish teacher in Queens who was forced to hide from her own students, Schumer neglected to accept responsibility that this is happening in his own state. Queens, New York is not MAGA Country.

Until Schumer is willing to call out these elements stemming from his own state and jurisdiction and members of his own donor base and Democratic colleagues, he cannot simply be praised for doing the bare minimum. The closest Schumer came to admonishing his own party for their role in promoting and endorsing antisemitism was a passive reference to "people that most liberal Jewish Americans felt previously were their ideological fellow travelers."

Without standing up and naming names for fear of intra-party backlash and a "Dems in Disarray" media news cycle, Schumer's words, while eloquent, remain politically hollow.

Jewish Americans deserve real leadership

Seth Mandel: U.S. Support for Israel Is Based on the Facts

Public opinion on Israel’s conduct in its war with Gaza is split in ways both encouraging and dispiriting. But easily the most underappreciated is that Americans clearly support Israel when considering the category of information we’ll call Things We Know Are True.

Here’s what I mean. Overall, Americans support Israel over the Palestinians (in this case, Hamas). As David Leonhardt, who analyzed the various polls on this issue, notes this morning, “This finding holds across polls.” A Marist poll has Israel with double the support of the Palestinians; YouGov finds Israel with triple the support; and an NBC poll had Israel’s approval near 50 percent and Hamas’s at 1 percent.

Here’s part of the reason why: “Most people blame Hamas for starting the war — that is, they see the Oct. 7 killing and kidnapping of Israelis as the central cause.… In a Quinnipiac poll that asked Americans who was ‘more responsible for the outbreak of violence,’ 69 percent chose Hamas and 15 percent chose Israel.”

What we know about Oct. 7, we know. We don’t suspect, or feel, or assume, or hypothesize. We know. It’s on video. After a Senate screening of footage from the Hamas attacks, some of which Hamas filmed and publicized themselves, JTA’s Ron Kampeas found the U.S. senators “barely able to shape their mouths into a single word.” The most common response reporters got was to be waved away by senators with tears in their eyes.

Americans also know Hamas’s intentions. This is not mind-reading. Hamas’s charter calls for wiping Israel off the map, and its officials reiterate that goal whenever and wherever they can find a microphone and camera. During the course of the war itself, Hamas officials have been clear about this: Their aim is to kill all the Jews. It’s not complicated.

Where things get murkier, public opinion stutters a bit. Leonhardt points out that the Ipsos poll finds 76 percent agreeing with the sentence: “Israel is doing what any country would do in response to a terror attack and the taking of civilian hostages.” The same poll finds 68 percent support for the following: “Israel should call a cease-fire and try to negotiate.”

Leonhardt says readers should “avoid the temptation to focus on only one of these two patterns — the support for a cease-fire or for Israel’s military actions — and to ignore the other one.”

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Hamas Promises Free Apartment Rubble To Anyone Who Fights Israel (PreOccupied Teritory)

Hamas Promises Free Apartment Rubble To Anyone Who Fights Israel

Gaza City, December 3 - Leaders of the Islamist terrorist organization that governs most of the Gaza Strip urged residents of the territory to resist the ongoing Israeli incursion by all means possible, and as a reward, the movement undertakes to provide each such volunteer, free of charge, pieces of the ruins that would have been a new home if not for the war.

Hamas officials called again for the Palestinians of Gaza not to use the humanitarian corridors that Israel has provided for noncombatants to flee conflict zones, but to take up arms and fight the Zionists. Anyone who participates in resisting the Israeli operation to eliminate Hamas, the organization vowed, will received the ruins of what once was a beautiful new apartment before Hamas used it as a fighting position, armament-storage facility, or other military purpose, for which the IDF targeted and destroyed it.

"All who join the glorious resistance against the usurper-occupier Zionist pig-dogs will be rewarded," declared Abu Obeida, the organization's unofficial spokesman. "When the fighting ends and the ape-Jew invader is defeated and exterminated, your leadership will grant each adult, or his family if he does not survive, the mess of concrete, steel, glass, and other materials that used to be a home until it wasn't."

If Hamas remains in power after the war - which began when the organization invaded southern Israel in an orgy of murder, rape, mutilation, torture, and abduction on October 7 - it will have vast swaths of Gaza City rubble to allocate to those who helped resist Israel. In addition to the pieces and skeletons of destroyed buildings, the ruins include hundreds of miles of reinforced-concrete tunnels beneath those former buildings - meaning that the rubble available to reward those who remained loyal to Hamas and took an active part in fighting Israel actually exceeds the volume of rubble from destroyed apartments.

The incentive represents an adaptation of an earlier offer by Hamas to Palestinians civilians who participated in the pogrom of October 7: a free apartment. IDF operations with the declared aim of destroying Hamas have rendered impracticable the same policy vis-à-vis the ongoing battle withing the Gaza Strip now that Israel has taken the fight to the enemy and landed numerous destructive blows.

Aides to Mr. Obeida acknowledged that while numerous apartments remain available in the southern section of the Gaza Strip, and Israel's operations on the ground have concentrated so far in the north, most observers anticipate that Israel will shift to the south once it hits all of its targets in the north.

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11/30 Links Pt1: Douglas Murray: Wartime Diary; Israel ‘cannot claim self-defense,’ Abbas says; ‘Oct. 7 was just a rehearsal,’ warns Sinwar

From Ian:

Douglas Murray: Wartime Diary

Gaza itself is a blown-out wasteland. I was there within the first week, embedded with the IDF and traveling in Israeli vehicles through the border opening that the terrorists had broken through. As well as a feeling of trepidation, there is a sense of victory in going through that crossing. Hamas had come for the Israelis. And now the IDF was coming back for the people who’d done this.

In Gaza itself, anything can happen. The Israelis were still bombing the north, where I was, and up from the al-Shifa hospital I watched the streams of Palestinians making their journey south. It was a pitiful sight, and a reminder of what Hamas has wrought on the people under its control.

While I was there, the IDF found a Hamas tunnel and blew it up in front of me. The earth shook. But the earth shook a lot that day. Machine-gun fire kept breaking out, as well as the rockets and air strikes. People often ask what it’s like in a live conflict zone. The truth is, absolutely anything can happen. You just have to hope that it doesn’t.

At one point, right in the middle of Gaza, I spoke to a senior IDF commander and asked if he had been here before.

“Yes,” he replied.

“When were you last here?” I asked.

“In 2005,” he said, “when I pulled family friends out of their houses. Now eighteen years later, here I am, back again.”

It is a reminder of the insolubility of the Gaza situation. Nobody has an answer to it. But why has this impossible problem been given to the Israelis to solve? Get someone else to resolve it. If the outside world thinks it knows what to do with a whole generation Hamas has indoctrinated into hate, then be my guest. Any takers? Any?

For now, the war is still on hold. The IDF is trained to go. But currently they sit around, like everyone, waiting and watching and wondering how long this suspension can continue. The pause strengthens Hamas and weakens Israel. Some people say that Israelis should be less sentimental. But when you see footage of a child running back into his father’s arms, you think again. And then you have to think of both these things at once.

The jihadists say they will win because they love death more than we love life. I think they are wrong. Israel will win precisely because they—we—love life. The Jews are ordered by God to “choose life” and even in the face of death, they do. The enemy can’t stop the great surge for life that comes up everywhere here in Israel, even in these days. The units I visit have unity and morale of a kind you would barely think possible. Because everybody now knows what the alternative to war is. The alternative is constant massacre.

Watching the sun go down tonight I think of Fallaci again, and when she returned from Vietnam, how she answered the little girl’s question, “What is life?”

What did Fallaci say to her?

“Life is something you’ve got to fill up well, without wasting any time. Even if you break it by filling it too full.”

Victor Davis Hanson: What Were the Hamas Monsters Thinking?

For all the boasts about loving death, it was Hamas who cowardly murdered the unarmed, scampered back to the safety of their tunnels, and used their own kindred Gazans to shield them from death—delivered to them by supposed nerds who love life too much.

Europeans also have had it with unlimited immigration from the Middle East. Restrictionist politicians throughout Europe are ascending as never before, in Greece, Ireland, Italy, Germany, Holland, Spain, and Sweden.

They all reflect growing public anger that Europeans are hated by the very people who seek them out and wish to destroy their Enlightenment institutions by manipulating and discrediting them. The thousands who hit the streets to cheer on October 7 and damn their hosts only confirm a growing global consensus—in the West, Latin America, Asia, and even throughout the Middle East—that admitting migrants from Palestine or Gaza, or their supporters, is a veritable death wish.

Pro-Hamas protestors calling Joe Biden “Genocide Joe” and boasting about the Arab or Muslim vote in Michigan is incoherent. Not only do harassing Thanksgiving shoppers and parades, disrupting iconic American holidays and events, swarming highways and bridges, and preying on Jews alienate Americans. But also taking credit for ensuring Biden’s defeat will only distance the Democratic establishment, such as it is, from its embarrassing, loud, but ultimately relatively impotent Islamic constituency.

Shouting for mass death “From the River to the Sea” does not endear the pro-Hamas crowd to half of their fellow Democrats, much less unabashedly strutting their anti-Semitism. The current overt support for Hamas, in other words, has revealed to the nation the bankruptcy of the entire pro-Hamas/DEI base of the Democratic Party and will do much to ensure a conservative president in 2024.

And that president will likely deport anyone on a green card or student visa promoting Hamas terrorism, or violating U.S. law, while ensuring a travel ban from terrorist supporting regimes in the Middle East. Such measures will win overwhelming public support, despite media and academic outrage.

Strategically, Iran, Hamas, and the Palestinians may seem to have flummoxed Israel into endless concessions by metering out hostages for serial pauses. But again, no Israel government can retain power by allowing the mass murdering Hamas to survive and so it will not.

Despite all the blood-curdling rhetoric of Hezbollah and Iran, neither will attack Israel or U.S. assets in force, given no American president could afford not to retaliate disproportionately. And “disproportionately” would mean rendering Iran’s military and Hezbollah to something akin to the current status of Hamas.

So for now, Hamas and its American-residing apologists are full of themselves and feel they are leveraging and manipulating the West. But such haughtiness may be a delusion. Hamas in the Middle East and its enablers in Europe and America have done more to harm the Palestinian cause and the idea of Middle Eastern immigration to the West than at any time since 9/11.

It is hard to anger Westerners, but continue the death chants, the violent demonstrations, the creepy anti-Semitism, and the proud support for the Hamas bloodwork of October 7, and they will be surprised at the growing anger of otherwise postmodern Europeans and distracted Americans.

Just as Israel realizes that there is no living with Hamas killers, so the West is learning that it can no longer sustain universities that despise the culture that nourishes it or Middle Eastern immigrants, visiting students, and residents that use the gift of freedom and tolerance to promote their abhorrent anti-Semitism, violence, intolerance—and, yes, hatred of their generous hosts.

‘They Can Go to Hell and Hide There’

A day after scores of civilians died in an Israeli air strike on a market in Gaza’s Jabaliya refugee camp, we spoke with an eyewitness to the tragedy. While Hamas and its allies persist in charging that Israel targets innocents, our interviewee explains that Gazans pin their own survival strategy on the understanding that innocents serve Hamas as human shields.

“To stop Hamas members from walking in our narrow streets,” he explains, “[my neighbors] blocked the streets off with sheet metal, so no one could get in at night.” He goes on, “We know it’s Hamas that makes the problems. They’re the ones who hide among us. . . though it still doesn’t justify killing civilians.”

Fears have grown that this misery will needlessly be prolonged by Westerners who strive, in effect, to perpetuate Hamas rule, according to one Gazan woman.

Addressing protesters who have taken to the streets to demand a cease-fire on behalf of Palestinians, she calls on them to make a choice: “Either support the Palestinian people or the Hamas regime that oppresses them.” If protesters harbor a humanitarian motive, she asks, “Why don’t we see them demonstrating against Hamas?”

If the war ends with Hamas in power, the woman predicts, then they will repeat the October 7 scenario, but within Gaza: “They’ll brutalize everybody who didn’t stand with them in the war.”

In Episode Nine, a speaker in Jabaliya critiques a particular strand within the protest movement: Palestinian diaspora figures who have supported Hamas for years. They watch the conflict “with tea and popcorn, as if we’re a TV series,” he says, and cheer Hamas leaders without regard for the suffering they cause regular Gazans.

He points out Tamim Al-Barghouti, a U.S.-based activist whom The New Yorker described as “a spoken-word rock star.” Barghouti’s post–October 7 tweets include praise for the apparent rape and kidnapping of an Israeli woman and call for “Death to the Palestinian ’National’ Authority.”

“He hasn’t seen anything that happened in Gaza for 18 years,” the Jabaliya resident says.

All of the above bring us back to the patient at al-Shifa Hospital who Al Jazeera cut off mid-sentence.

For a sense of what he might have told viewers if he had been allowed, we reached another patient there—and gave her the space to say her piece. “Every Palestinian knows Shifa hospital is full of [Hamas fighters],” she explains, “but nobody can talk: death by the Jews is better than death by ISIS.” She also echoes a sentiment we have encountered repeatedly in interviews with Gazans post–October 7: “Hamas is the destruction of the Palestinian people. We’ve had enough. They need to be wiped out—because if they remain, the people will be wiped out.”

This conviction is the darker half of a Gazan worldview that, though prevalent, has been largely filtered out of most international coverage of the conflict. Its brighter half—the vision of a different future—is encapsulated here by a young woman who spoke with us in Gaza City last year.

Zaher Jabarin, who is Hamas' official in charge of prisoners in Israel, went on Turkey's TRT yesterday.

According to the Meir Amit ITIC, he said that Israeli hostages will be held until all estimated 8,500 Palestinian prisoners are released. He said the number of abductees held by the “resistance” was large enough that it could impose all its conditions.

That means that the 3-1 ratio of prisoners for hostages will end very soon.

As I've mentioned before, the women and children and foreign hostages are a headache for Hamas, and they lose nothing by releasing them. They always intended to hold onto men and soldiers, remembering the absurd 1000-1 trade of prisoners for Gilad Shalit, and hoping Israelis will keep pressure on the government to keep releasing prisoners.

At what point would the price become too high?

Clearly domestic politics and Israeli pressure is part of the equation. It is less costly and risky to keep a ceasefire going and get 10 hostages a day than to attempt to rescue them.

But at some point Israel has to draw a bright red line: for example, no prisoners who were convicted of murder. No prisoners who were ringleaders of attacks should ever be released. No one with a life sentence.

If Israel hadn't released Yahya Sinwar in the Shalit deal, 10/7 may never have happened. Every life is precious, but Shalit's life in 2011 was not worth 1,200 dead Israelis in 2023.

Hindsight is 20/20 but it can help predict the future, too. Prisoners who have any chance of leading future terror attacks must be off the table.

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Jewish women don't matter to the UN: @UNWomen tries to bury Hamas rapes. UN Office @EndRapeInWar has not said a word about October 7 rapes.

JTA reports:

Nearly 50 days after Hamas’ attack on Israel left 1,200 dead, and after weeks of criticism over its silence about allegations of sexual violence during the attack, the women’s rights group UN Women issued a statement condemning the terror group on Friday.

Then it deleted the post.

“We condemn the brutal attacks by Hamas on October 7 and continue to call for the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages,” read the initial statement, posted on UN Women’s instagram page. It was soon replaced with a statement that dropped the condemnation of Hamas and only called for the release of the hostages.

Reached for comment, UN Women told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the Instagram post had been scheduled in advance and was deleted because the message in it no longer reflected where the organization wanted to put its main focus.

Here is the initial post and what replaced it.

It is pretty obvious that the real reason they took down the post condemning Hamas is that there are a lot of Hamas fans in the UN that were upset..

CNN anchor Bianna Golodryga asked UN Women Deputy Executive Director Sarah Hendriks why they couldn't specifically call out Hamas atrocities. Her response was a word salad about independent investigations that didn't come close to answering the question.

This is all a way to say that UN Women doesn't care about Israeli women victims of war. And it isn't only from October 7 - Hamas sent thousands of rockets all over Israel and women were the targets of those attacks as well. Today there was a terror attack that murdered two women in Jerusalem. Where is UN Women?

UN Women has published about 16 posts on Instagram specifically calling to protect Gazans without mentioning or even hinting at Israeli victims. It cannot be bothered to call out Israeli victims or to condemn Hamas.

But perhaps there is a UN organ that is even worse.

The UN has an Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict. It's X account is named @EndRapeInWar. If any UN organization should condemn the brutal rapes and sexual assaults against Israeli women on October 7, this should be the one.

It hasn't said a word.

The message is clear: Israeli and Jewish women are not a concern to the UN. On the contrary: it actively tries to hide and obfuscate the violence that is aimed specifically at them by Palestinian terror groups.

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Hamas official or "human rights leader"? They sound the same

Who said this?

The Zionist entity knows no mercy and violates all humanitarian laws by killing children.

The Zionist entity does not abide by any international laws, and it seems that this entity came in contravention of international laws and built the state on crimes and blood.

The occupying entity does not know the language of peace, negotiations, and laws, and only knows killing, blood, and committing massacres against civilians.

Sounds like Hamas, doesn't it?

But it is actually a quote from Dr. Haitham Abu Saeed, Permanent Special Representative of the International Human Rights Commission to the United Nations in Geneva, speaking on the Arabic DMC channel.

When "human rights" NGO statements are indistinguishable from those of international terror organizations, there is something seriously wrong. with this world.

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11/29 Links Pt2: Brendan O'Neill: We mustn’t let the left erase the truth of 7 October; Hostages held in homes of UNRWA employees; What Yale Has in Common With Hamas

From Ian:

John Podhoretz: Israel Is Reevaluating

A 32 year-old Israeli who had been pursuing agriculture went into the reserves here after October 7 and in the weeks that immediately followed came to realize his true calling was in serving the nation’s security and the security of others—felt a sense of purpose and belonging vitally important to him—and believes he will be changing his career path once this war is over. A young religious man who has been studying in yeshiva for a very long time and believed he would continue to do so is instead planning on joining the military to join in the fight.

Everywhere you turn here in Israel, people are reevaluating. They are reevaluating everything.

They are reevaluating their political stances. Leftists are expressing regret for what they now see as a kind of foolish utopianism in their view of Gaza and the Palestinians. Rightists who believed the Left could not be trusted with the nation’s security speak of their sense of betrayal and dismay, because the parties and leaders they voted for and worked to elect—parties and leaders who promised they were the only ones in the country who could deal with Israel’s safety from a position of strength—failed utterly to fulfill this first and most significant promise.

They are reevaluating their cultural stances. Anti-Zionist or non-Zionist haredim (the ne plus ultra of the ultra-Orthodox) are abandoning the separation from the state that has been their guiding political philosophy for seven decades and signing up by the thousands to join the military—which they need not do, as they have been exempted from service since the beginning.

Germany is in danger of betraying Israel

Time and again, German chancellor Olaf Scholz has appeared incapable of sticking up for his support for Israel. Indeed, he often seems more concerned with appeasing Israel’s critics.

This became painfully apparent earlier this month during Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s trip to Berlin for a meeting with Scholz. In their joint press conference, Erdoğan claimed that Germany was stuck in a ‘psychology of guilt’ when it comes to Israel. With Scholz standing stoney-faced next to him, Erdoğan said that, because Turkey did not share Germany’s Holocaust history, it had no debt to Israel.

This should have been a chance for Scholz to reject the pernicious idea that Germany only supports Israel because of a deep-seated feeling of historical guilt. Yet Scholz failed to rise to the challenge. He merely said Germany and Turkey had ‘very different perspectives on the conflict’.

It was a profound mistake for Scholz to duck this challenge. After all, it’s not just Erdoğan who thinks that Germany’s support for Israel is born of historical guilt. This view is increasingly widespread among Islamists and the Islamist-adjacent in Germany itself. ‘Free Palestine from German guilt’ was heard at the controversial, borderline anti-Semitic Documenta Fifteen art exhibition in Kassel last year, and it’s now a popular slogan at the many pro-Palestine demonstrations.

Scholz had an opportunity to challenge this mistaken perception of Germany’s relationship with Israel. He had a chance to point out that standing with the Jewish State against the barbarism of the 7 October attacks has nothing to do with historical guilt. It is simply the right thing to do.