Saturday, January 13, 2024
From Ian:
Hamas sacrifices Gaza children, and UNRWA is complicit
Hamas sacrifices Gaza children, and UNRWA is complicit
The Israel-Hamas war has revealed many instances of Hamas’ misconduct toward Gaza’s children. On several occasions during its ground operation in Gaza, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has found Hamas’ military equipment hidden in schools, entrance hatches to Hamas tunnels under baby cribs, and rocket launchers placed in areas that children frequent. Various reports have also been published addressing the anti-Israel and antisemitic indoctrination and hate taught to Gaza’s children in their education system. For more stories from The Media Line go to themedialine.orgJohn Spencer: A Lesson on Human Suffering from a Kibbutz
The UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, oversees a big part of Gaza’s education system, and its teaching curriculum and the behavior of its staff since Oct. 7 have shown that incitement against Jews and Israel is a large part of their activities.
UN Watch, a Geneva-based organization that monitors the UN, published a report on Wednesday exposing how Hamas’ Oct. 7 atrocities were extensively celebrated in a 3000-member Telegram group composed of UNRWA’s staff. In November, an Israeli organization called IMPACT-SE also published an extensive report detailing the connection between education received in UNRWA schools in the Gaza Strip and the Oct. 7 massacres carried out by Hamas.
Dina Rovner, Legal Advisor at UN Watch, told The Media Line that this is a long-standing issue. She explained that since 2015, UN Watch has exposed more than 150 UNRWA staff Facebook pages that incite antisemitism and jihadi terrorism. “We have always maintained that the Facebook posts are just a symptom of a much more systemic problem—the fact that UNRWA hires antisemitic and terror-supporting staff in the first place,” said Rovner.
“These are not just a few bad apples as UNRWA likes to claim,” she continued, noting that the Telegram group “shows that when UNRWA teachers think nobody is watching them, they openly promote Hamas terrorism, glorify the terrorists as ‘martyrs’ and ‘heroes,’ and believe this is a wonderful path for Palestinian children to follow,” she added.
Education system gave Hamas a 'golden opportunity' to indoctrinate kids
Dr. Michael Barak, a senior researcher at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism at Reichman University in Herzliya, said that the indoctrination of children is a core tactic used by Hamas. “When Hamas got to power in 2007, it got a golden chance to have open access to also funding and to the school system to indoctrinate those kids from a young age,” he told The Media Line.
In addition to the curriculum of the UNRWA schools and the ones operated by Hamas, Barak noted that there are many other techniques used by the terror organization for this end.
Barak cited the case of a magazine used by Hamas called Al-Fateh. “There is an interesting section in this magazine, called ‘Wills of the Martyr.’ In this section are published the stories of Hamas martyrs to glorify the image of martyrs and stress why it is so important for the children to follow the Palestinian martyrs who sacrifice their own lives for the liberation of Palestine,” he added.
Furthermore, Hamas also has special summer schools where it trains children to use rifles and to do physical exercises and simulations to kill Israeli soldiers. Video games simulating killing soldiers are also part of this indoctrination system, according to Barak.
However, Hamas’ child abuse is not only limited to incorporating hate into the children’s education. Kids are also used as human shields by terror organizations as weapons are stored in institutions that children attend and frequent, including the rocket launchers used to attack Israeli towns.
Kfar Aza was the site of a pre-planned, pre-meditated slaughter of an entire village. It was not, as I had seen in the dumpsters of social media, civilians accidentally caught in Hamas’ crossfire, as they attacked military sites.Seth Mandel: Why the Houthis Matter
Bullet holes are seen in a window where militants attacked during the October 7th massacre on January 04, 2024 in Kfar Aza, Israel. Noam Galai-Getty Images
At the U.S. Army’s elite Ranger School, I taught soldiers how to conduct sophisticated raids and pull off ambushes with clock-like precision. What I saw at Kfar Aza was a highly planned and executed attack.
The first Hamas terrorists arrived by paraglider. A few dozen at first, then more, quickly moved to seal the village’s perimeter. Snipers moved to support by fire positions on key high ground to cut the armory in the village off from the men in the village.
Another platoon of Hamas fighters edged their way deeper into Israel to establish ambushes along key roads to Kfar Aza where any outside military support would come.
They acted methodically and with a level of care that would make any commander envious. They planted anti-tank and anti-personnel mines to established a deliberate defense of the village’s perimeter. They brought pint-size medical kits to care for their wounded, including morphine. They packed their own food—dates and figs, mostly.
Once isolated, they went house to house, methodically killing, mutilating, and kidnapping. Their tools were the familiar stuff of asymmetric warzones: AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), a variety of grenades, kidnapping kits of plastic flex cuffs. They even had specially designed incendiary grenades (to burn houses).Less familiar to modern warzones was the large butcher knives they left behind.
Many of the terrorists were reportedly high on the drug captagon, an amphetamine like speed with hallucinogenic features. Each of the death squads had its own guidebook including instructions like —take the tires from the Israelis’ vehicles, light the tires on fire and throw them into the houses, it will kill and burn them at the same time. There was little thought given on which house to burn first. The randomness of evil is part of its sickness.
As I walked through the village, I saw scene after scene of this evil sickness—children’s rooms riddled with bullets, blood splattered LEGOs. Entire families slaughter and their bodies burned clutching each other. The most awful were the safe rooms.
Every house in the kibbutz has what, in effect, resembles a bomb shelter. Many turned into nurseries or kids rooms. They had windows and thin doors that could not lock. When the alarms sounded, most civilians entered these underground bunkers thinking they were safe. Yet they became the scenes of some of the most horrific acts.
I heard stories of parents clutching the door shut by hand, as bullets strayed by. A terrorist appeared suddenly at the window—like something out of a bad horror film. A father or mother full of bullet holes holding the door closed with their last breaths as the terrorist yanked it open.
They sprayed the bunkers with bullets or tossed in a grenade, smoke from burning tires filled the room. All life was soon exterminated.
The killing continued for hours. Over time what appeared to be non-Hamas Gazans arrived and scavenged the houses for loot, stepping over dead women, children, elderly. Some spirited Israelis back into Gaza.
The last house I entered was a house of a slain young couple that were due to be married very soon. Instead, flies, a splattering of blood, and the smell of death. The celling was riddled with holes from a terrorist grenade.
When I left the house, I was confronted by the parents of a young man who died in the house. I was not ready for that. As a parent, what do you say to a parent who’s lost a piece of themselves in this way? I froze up.
The Houthis are what you get when you combine slavery and colonialism, two things we are routinely told progressives are against. Their supporters are possibly the most morally blinkered humans on this or any other planet.
Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, who makes no secret of his desire to be secretary of state (still holding out hope for a Bernie Sanders presidency, apparently), has led the effort in Congress to protect the Houthis from being added back to the list of foreign terrorist organizations. The Houthis were removed from the list by President Biden in a decision that has aged like milk. The move was rewarded with Houthi attacks on Americans. Re-listing them is a no-brainer, though it does not appear to be under consideration.
This is the third front in the region where Iranian troops have attacked Americans or American allies The other two are Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in south Lebanon. In each case, the response from progressive lawmakers has been to criticize the American coalition. On Tuesday, a U.S. ship and its naval escorts were attacked. Of course the U.S. returned fire.
What does all this tell us? That the U.S. coalition is up against two specific ideological currents among Americans and that these ideologies are etched in stone thanks to negative partisanship. The first is among the “progressive street,” as I referred to them yesterday. This cohort is in perpetual protest mode, with violence and vandalism as its twin dialects. Its adherents have shown us that they will rally the crowds for the very worst people in the world, so long as those evil regimes hate America or the Jews. They are like windup toys: When some foreign autocrat wants to rev them up, he will do so, and on they’ll march.
The second ideological group consists of the members of Congress who took Iran’s side against Saudi Arabia and seem to have superglued their hands in place. The Saudis and Tehran took major steps toward easing tensions and negotiating over a possible truce in Yemen thanks to Chinese intervention. This is to say nothing of the fact that the Saudis have facilitated historic breakthroughs between the Arab states and Israel that have massively strengthened the U.S.-led alliance and its position on the global stage. Yet these lawmakers’ instinctive backing of Iran has become impervious to any external factors. Which means there is no foreseeable development in Yemen that will change their posture toward the Houthis.
So there is an entrenched, not-insignificant part of the president’s own party sitting in permanent objection to specific U.S. foreign-policy goals, and there is a protest movement that can be set to destabilize domestic politics at almost any time.
The Houthis are, in some ways, the least of our problems. But they are key to understanding most of the others.
