Wednesday, December 27, 2023
From Ian:
Qanta Ahmed: I Saw the Children Hamas Beheaded With My Own Eyes. Shame on Queen Rania
Qanta Ahmed: I Saw the Children Hamas Beheaded With My Own Eyes. Shame on Queen Rania
Back in New York City, Israeli criminal prosecutor Ayelet Razin Bet Or shared with me evidence compiled in Israel's ongoing investigation into Hamas' crimes. Michal Yaniv, Head of Foreign Affairs on Israel's National Security Council, provided me testimonies recorded by Israeli security officials.The world’s foremost rabbinic authority on declaring death grapples with Oct. 7 horrors
One account, far from unusual, is especially harrowing: A woman who survived the Nova music festival in Re'im witnessed a young woman encircled by Hamas, stripped naked, violated, and manhandled by multiple Hamas terrorists as they gang raped her, repositioning her by the waist and hips, moving from one rapist to the other.
Shuddering at the memory, covering her face, with difficulty, the eyewitness continued: One terrorist pulled the woman's long hair, forcibly arching her neck backwards, fully exposing her naked torso, only to sever both her breasts from her chest with his commando knife. Her entire torso fell backwards, slackened in agony. She may have fainted, though she lived through the mutilation. The disembodied breasts fell to the ground, where terrorists casually played with them.
Sergeant Major Natah Katz from the IDF Rabbinical Unit at the Shura base near Ramle described to me cadavers he received with breasts and genitals hacked off, one with a knife impaled directly into the vagina. The mutilation of sexual organs and breasts, "seemed to be an obsession," he recalled. Dr. Chen Kugel, head of Israel's National Forensic Center has confirmed to me the same.
Indeed, Hamas arrived with orders to mass rape: Phrasebooks belonging to Hamas found in the Re'im area listed phonetic Hebrew commands in Arabic "Take your clothes off!"; " Spread your legs!'; "Get down!" Terabytes of their own video data confirm Hamas raped, amputated breasts, mutilated women's genitals, and committed systematic sexual crimes on both the living and the dead. Necrophilia has been explicitly reported.
Despite all of this, almost two months would pass before the U.N. denounced the October 7 sexual violence during hearings. Congressional and Senate Hearings must urgently follow.
Silence ensures Islamist antisemitism overrides human morality. Silence also grants open season for Hamas to continue these obscene crimes with impunity, as they likely still do this hour upon the remaining 129 hostages in captivity.
Genocidal rape has no context. Contextualization is contemptibly antisemitic and pure misogyny, if not open Islamist sympathy.
Repudiation must reverberate globally. In the meantime, I will not rest until Congress, the Senate, and the U.N. speak in unison on the international humanitarian values protecting women, for only then can the decapitated screams of the tiny girl in Abu Kabir can at last be granted silence.
Rabbi Yaakov Ruzah’s eyes are privy to unspeakable horrors. Horrors that can shake even a man like Ruzah, the world’s foremost rabbinic authority on the laws of death and mourning.Denying Israel’s right to exist condemns Palestinians to another generation of suffering
“What I saw after October 7, I haven’t seen in my entire career,” says Ruzah as he sits at his living room table in Bat Yam, a city just south of Tel Aviv, where he serves pro bono as chief rabbi.
“You saw how they purposely desecrated bodies, you saw bodies of babies… you never see babies like this… It is very difficult. I am managing to hold on, but there are people around me who are not able to deal with it,” he says.
As the supreme halachic authority on death, Ruzah wears two hats, one civilian and one military. During his five-decade military career, he has risen to the rank of colonel and serves as the IDF chief rabbi’s adviser on matters related to death and body identification.
As chairman of the Chief Rabbinate’s Dignity of the Deceased Council and as former rabbi of Abu Kabir’s National Center for Forensic Medicine, he is responsible for all non-military personnel murdered in the October 7 massacre.
Judaism has developed a robust and intricate legal system for determining death, even when there is no corpse. A Jewish people that is no stranger to horror and the hostility of host nations — pagan, Christian or Muslim — has seen pogroms, blood libels, the Crusades, auto-da-fés, and the Holocaust. Throughout this bloody history, sages have generated hundreds of legal precedents codifying responses to nearly every imaginable atrocity.
Yet even this rich legal tradition, developed over the ages in exile under repressive and extreme conditions, has come up short, says Ruzah.
“The slaughter of October 7 revived halachic rulings dormant for centuries. And some of the cases that arose were totally unprecedented” in the corpus of Jewish law, he says.
What should be done, for instance, with the cars in which dozens of victims were shot to death? Judaism’s unique sensitivities surrounding the bodies of deceased people dictated that all remains should be removed from the cars.
But for Ruzah that was not enough.
“Even if we manage to remove all of the remains, there is something not right about selling cars in which Jews were massacred for scrap metal so that the insurance companies could get back some of their money.”
Ruzah’s halachic ruling, still pending Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi David Lau’s affirmation, is to bury the cars. The resulting mound would become a monument to the victims.
How can you expect calls for a ceasefire to be heard if you do not recognize the right to exist of those doing the fighting? Peace depends on the hope of coexistence. It's logical to conclude that the repeated failures of Palestinian leaders to reach a deal for their own state are inextricably linked to a refusal to consider true coexistence. Accepting a two-state solution means accepting Israel, and for some that cannot happen.
The two-state solution is little more than wispy Western fantasy that Israel no longer believes in and Palestinians never believed in. Undermining Israel's right to exist means it has no right to defend itself, which renders everything it does an act of evil.
The implications of this are profound, not least because what happens over there has a measurable aftershock around the world. In my part of London, social media mums lead calls for mass walkouts by primary school children in support of Palestine. Jewish children open their atlases to find Israel has been scribbled out by their classmates. Inculcating political militancy in nine-year-olds will lead to more and more antisemitism. To pretend otherwise is gross deceit.
Some of the pro-Palestinian movement is motivated by a desire for peace and to protect the rights of Palestinians, yet this fervor does not extend to any other conflict or region anywhere else on the planet. Why would this be?
"From the river to the sea" is not merely an expression of solidarity. It is a call for the obliteration of Israel and its inhabitants. Israel can hardly be expected to listen to, let alone negotiate with, another party that plots its destruction. Spare us the moral and intellectual hypocrisy of calling for the protection of one people and the destruction of another. It's not a peace movement if what you really want is war with a different result.
