Sunday, December 17, 2023
From Ian:
Andrew Roberts: ‘A war for Middle East stability’: Israeli President Isaac Herzog on what’s at stake in the conflict with Hamas
Andrew Roberts: ‘A war for Middle East stability’: Israeli President Isaac Herzog on what’s at stake in the conflict with Hamas
President Isaac ‘Bougie’ Herzog is Israeli aristocracy. His father, Chaim Herzog, was the sixth president, serving between 1983 and 1993; his grandfather Yitzhak Herzog was chief rabbi; his maternal uncle was Abba Eban, the most famous of the country’s foreign ministers. After leading the Israeli Labor party and the parliamentary opposition in the Knesset between 2013 and 2017, Isaac became Israel’s 11th president in July 2021. He is the first to be born in Israel since the Declaration of Independence 75 years ago. My first question rather asks itself: how is the war going? ‘Depends on what you mean by war,’ Herzog quickly replies, before turning the discussion away from Gaza to ‘the grand picture’. He believes worries about whether the battle against Hamas might morph into a larger regional conflict are already out of date. ‘It’s regional already,’ he says. ‘Unfortunately, it is regional because elements that emanate constantly from Tehran and its proxies are carrying out this war, whether it’s attacks from Lebanon, from Iraq, from Syria and, of course, from Gaza, which was the original perpetrator of this heinous atrocity.’ He points to the recent Houthis’ piracy in capturing the Galaxy Leader, an Israeli-owned ship in the southern Red Sea, as merely the latest manifestation of the phenomenon.JPost Editorial: Israel-Hamas War: The stories of humanity, bravery the news misses
Continuing in this vein, I ask about the disturbing claim that a Hamas terrorist had been found with instructions on how to launch chemical warfare in southern Israel. ‘Yes, [it is] true, including how to create a cyanide-deploying device and how to use it,’ he says. ‘Way beyond the horrible atrocities that we have seen; atrocities that humanity hasn’t seen in generations.’
Herzog, 63, who was a lawyer before his political career, believes that everybody should watch the footage that Hamas terrorists filmed themselves of the 7 October attack. ‘It is simply inconceivable,’ he says. ‘For all of us who believe in the family of nations, and the rules of liberty, and the dignity of human beings, seeing the Gazan people, not only from Hamas, [but] Gazan civilians, celebrate in the middle of Gaza’s streets over a body – a mutilated body of a young girl who simply went to a dance festival with her friends – is horrifically shocking.’
I ask why he thinks some Ivy League universities – including his alma mater, Cornell in New York – and so many liberal western elites have turned away from supporting Israel to embrace the Palestinian cause? There is even a director of a Canadian women’s group who has denied Israeli women were raped by Hamas terrorists. What is it about western civilisation today that means people can’t accept the things we have seen?
‘Because they are afraid to look in the mirror which has shattered before their eyes,’ he replies. ‘Unfortunately, I find rust: rust in the establishment, and rust in the temples of learning that we all admired and adored. They grew sclerotic in the way they looked at things, rather than judging the truth as it is, meaning there are cruel people in this world and sometimes it is very difficult to make peace with a culture that glorifies such attacks which have been going on for years.
‘And there are those who still do not understand that there is something called a war between good and evil. It somewhat reminds me of the way the approach was [in the 1930s] until Winston Churchill took over and explained the reality to the British people and the rest of the world. It takes time. It’s difficult. People don’t like to change their views so quickly, but we have to understand this is the culture we’re faced with.
‘There are evil forces who believe in jihad, which means none of us are eligible to live in this world because there will be another empire, an empire of evil which wants the infidels out. This is the real story. You can see it when they behead a teacher in France, or kill people on the Underground in Britain, or when they carry out 9/11, or when they chop the heads off babies in Israel.’
Swept up in the bad news frenzy that comes with war – which can hit everyone personally, directly affecting individuals, their family and friends, as well as communally and nationally – the soft stories of humanity tend to escape us: both those of us working in the journalism realm, as well as all of us on the consumer side of it.We Were Taught to Hate Jews
In the whirlwind of all this, many journalists fall short in their responsibility of telling the stories of individuals.
From the moment Hamas’s brutal cross-border infiltration attack began on October 7, those accounts began flowing in at a sickly speed, along with everything else that day. The stories of bravery and humanity during Hamas's massacre
On that disastrous Saturday morning, IDF St.-Sgt. (res.) D. managed to get to Kibbutz Be’eri, which bore one of the larger brunts of violence on that tragic day. Upon arrival, he saw a house with flames licking up its side. He inched closer to see if there was anyone trapped in the house, and saw an elderly couple; he helped them out and brought them to safety, the IDF said.
Rami Davidian, from Moshav Patish in the northern Negev region, received a phone call early Saturday morning from someone begging him to help the friend of a friend stuck at the Supernova music festival in Re’im.
“By about 11 a.m., I understood the full picture of what was going on,” he said. The friend at the party sent him a GPS location for pickup. On the way, he said, he saw more young party-goers attempting to escape – some injured, which significantly slowed them down – among the trees and in the fields. “I picked them up as well,” Davidian said.
From that point on, he said, it became a race against time to try to save as many people as possible. He set up a system with a few friends to spread out as far as they could to rescue the injured. All of this under constant fire both from the Hamas terrorists and the IDF, because it was a chaotic situation where communication was cut, and he had no protection for himself.
The following five ex-Muslims grew up in Canada, Europe, and the Middle East, but they were all indoctrinated, they say, with the same views on Jews and Israel. They remember a childhood shot through with antisemitic moments ranging from the mundane (one woman recalls her aunt claiming Jews put cancer in her vegetables at the market) to the deadly (a former extremist went as far as to pick a location in London for a terrorist attack he planned to carry out at 17).
These hateful ideas, repeated by their family members, religious leaders, and teachers, are part and parcel of the same animus, they say, that fueled Hamas’s attacks on October 7.
Some of the people you will hear from below have received death threats for speaking out on issues like antisemitism and sexism in the Muslim world. One uses a pen name to protect herself and her daughter from her terrorist ex-husband, who is currently jailed in Egypt. All of them came to reject their loathing for Jewish people and the West, and have rebuilt their lives in the wake of their realizations. Here are their stories, which you can read or click to listen to each author recite in the audio recordings below.
Darya Safai, 48, is a member of the Chamber of Representatives of Belgium. She was born in Tehran, Iran and lives in Belgium.
When I was born, Iran was still free. You could drink and dance, and women could wear whatever they wanted. I’ll never forget my first day of school after the Islamic Revolution. I was six, and my mother entered my room with a long, dark, and formless manteau and a piece of fabric for my hair and neck.
“My darling,” she said, “this is your uniform.”
I didn’t understand. I pointed to my closet and said, “But I have so many other beautiful dresses.”
She explained that I had to wear it if I wanted to become educated. I remember seeing the boy next door walk out his front door. He wore the same clothes he always did. I knew, but couldn’t accept, that my life would change, and his wouldn’t.
At my school in Tehran, in my new shapeless uniform, we read the Quran every morning and repeated sayings like, “Down with the USA, down with Israel.” To enter our classroom, we had to step on a painting of the Israeli flag on the ground. There are still universities in Iran that have painted American and Israeli flags on the ground, but most students walk around them.
The Iranian people and the Israelis are victims of the same monster—Islamists. In 1999, I was imprisoned under Ayatollah Khamenei for speaking out against the marginalization of women. I was 24. I was afraid that they wanted to execute me in jail, but instead they released me in the hopes that I would lead them to my husband, who was one of the leaders organizing protests against the Iranian regime. Luckily, a friend smuggled me in the back of his car to reunite with my husband in secret. We lived in Turkey for six months before moving to Belgium and have been married for 26 years.
When I saw the problems that we face in Belgium regarding radical Islam today, I began to write opinion pieces on the subject and eventually entered politics. I was elected to the Belgian Federal Parliament in 2019.
Islamists have ruined Iran, and they have destroyed the Middle East. Do we want to wait until this atrocity ruins everything in our Western countries too? As an elected official here in Belgium, I try to be the eyes and ears of some of the people who are sleeping.
