Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

A single word in the US 2024 Threat Assessment Report should ring alarm bells about politicizing intelligence: "Islamophobic"

Intelligence assessments must be based on both excellent ability to gather raw data and the ability to judge that data objectively, understanding what is important and what is not. Political considerations, personal and organizational egos and other subjective factors have no place in good intel reports.

I have great respect for US intelligence capabilities and assessments. So when I saw this New York Times headline "Netanyahu’s Coalition ‘May Be in Jeopardy,’ Intelligence Report Says - The document predicted that Israel would struggle to achieve its goal of destroying Hamas in Gaza" I was concerned that perhaps there was something in the report that would show a crack in the intelligence community's objectivity.

There is, but not in the way the NYT reports it.

The report does make both those points amongst hundreds of others. And no one disagrees.

The Netanyahu coalition has always been precarious even before the war but no one has been able to put together an alternative that has more support. Anger at the Israeli intelligence failure that led to so many deaths is widespread in Israel. And no one says destroying Hamas completely would not be a struggle, especially because of its tunnel infrastructure. The report says nothing that would be out of place in any Israeli newspaper every day.

In short, the assessment is reasonable, but the NYT is trying to make it frame it like a prophecy. That is not how intelligence works. The 2023 report did not mention Hamas as a threat at all, and neither did the reports from 2022 or 2021. It isn't a crystal ball. It prepares the US for possibilities and probabilities.

However, one word in this section of the report does point to a crack in the US intelligence community's objectivity:

Both al-Qa‘ida and ISIS, inspired by the HAMAS attack against Israel, have directed their supporters to conduct attacks against Israeli and U.S. interests. The HAMAS attack is encouraging individuals to conduct acts of antisemitic and Islamophobic terror worldwide and is galvanizing individuals to leverage the Palestinian plight for recruitment and inspiration to conduct attacks. The Nordic Resistance Movement—a transnational neo-Nazi organization—publicly praised the attack, illustrating the conflict’s appeal to a range of threat actors.

Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, repeated this almost verbatim to a hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee yesterday. "We have seen how [Hamas] is inspiring individuals to conduct acts of antisemitism and Islamophobic terror worldwide,” she said.

Who is conducting acts of Islamophobic terror? Where? When? Who are these vigilante terror gangs targeting Muslims in response to Hamas? Israel does not exactly have Houthi-style allies that engage in terror attacks against Muslims in solidarity with Kibbutz Be'eri.

Perhaps they are referring to attacks by hot-headed Israeli "settlers" but those are not Islamophobic and they are not worldwide. The man accused of shooting three Palestinians in Vermont is mentally ill and sympathetic to Hamas, not Israel. There are always a small number of incidents against Muslims, and they did increase somewhat after 10/7, but terror attacks?

In recent years, there has been a tendency to routinely and unthinkingly add the word "Islamophobia" after the word "antisemitism" in every context, as if the two are equivalent. They aren't. In this case, the US intelligence heads are saying that the Hamas war is inspiring terrorist acts against Muslims - and it isn't.

This reflexive addition of "Islamophobia" with every mention of antisemitism is dangerous to Jews. Antisemitism is a unique kind of hate and not a specific example of more generalized bigotry. Conflating it with Islamophobia waters down antisemitism, Jew-hatred cannot be combatted using the same tools and methods to fight racism or other kinds of hate. Putting it in the same bucket as Islamophobia helps empower antisemites.

Adding in "Islamophobia" in this assessment is politics, not intelligence. It has no place in this report. Anyone who admires the US intelligence community should be very concerned that this indicates a direction away from objectivity that could lead to disaster.

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!

From Farooq Taifour in Algerian newspaper El Hiwar:

International Zionism has been able to spread gigantic myths and lies to establish its entity and has begun to harness all tools and means and use all capabilities and positions of influence in the countries it has infiltrated or blackmailed their rulers and elites. These myths and lies have become an accepted reality and facts that cannot be denied or refuted, which requires us to know the sources from which it takes and borrows these beliefs, as Zionism derives its thought and beliefs, as stated in many documents and sources, from the holy books that were distorted by the Jews.

Zionism formulated its thought in the record of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, where Zionism considers all the Jews of the world to be members of one nationality, which is the Israeli nationality. It aims for Jewish control over the world, as promised to them by their God, Jehovah, and the starting point for this is the establishment of their government in the Promised Land, which extends from the Nile River to the Euphrates River.

They also believe that the Jews are the excellent element that should prevail, and all other peoples are their servants. They believe that the best way to rule the world is on the basis of intimidation and violence. They call for harnessing political freedom in order to control the masses, and they say: "We must know how to offer them the bait that will trap them in our nets." They say: "The era in which power was in religion has ended, and power today belongs to gold alone, so we must collect it in our grip by every means, to facilitate our control over the world."

They believe that politics is the opposite of morality, and that it requires deceit and hypocrisy, while virtues and honesty are vices according to the custom of politics.

To establish these beliefs and policies, it has falsified history, distorted documents, and used events and crises to benefit its project and achieve its cancerous goals that must be exposed and the method used to embody them known, as mentioned in some documents, as follows:

1 - Arousing religious enthusiasm among Jewish individuals around the world for their return to the alleged Promised Land.

2 - Demolishing religions to promote Talmudic Judaism.

3 - Urging all Jews to adhere to religious teachings, worship, and Jewish rituals, and to abide by the provisions of Jewish law.

4 - Arousing the fighting spirit and religious and national fanaticism among the Jews to confront other religions, nations, and peoples.

5 - Falsifying history to claim the promise of Palestine.

6 - The destruction of man through the theories of Freud in ethics, Marx in money, Durkheim in society, and Sartre in the literature of dissolution and loss.

7 - Imposing materialism on human thought.

8 - Attempting to Judaize Palestine, by encouraging immigration from all countries of the world to Palestine.

9 - Internationalizing the Israeli entity globally, by extracting recognition from most countries in the world of the existence of the State of Israel in Palestine.

10 - Follow up and implement global Jewish political and economic plans step by step, and develop the means to quickly and accurately implement these plans, then prepare for them in the media, finance them economically, and support them politically.

11 - Unifying and organizing the efforts of Jews around the world, whether individuals, groups or institutions, and mobilizing agents and hired servants when needed to serve the Jews and achieve their interests and plans.

12 - Development of the Hebrew language and Hebrew culture.

One of the sensitive and fundamental issues that should be exposed and defamed is that these goals have become provisions in international agreements and references in educational curricula at all levels, and they have media institutions, study centers, experts, writers, media figures, intellectuals, and analysts working in them and spreading poison throughout the body. The identity and the Israelis that these people spread and promote through their various tools in the text of these episodes, it is necessary to deepen consideration of some of the myths that founded the entity and the issues with which it distorted the Palestinian cause, and at the forefront of these historical, religious, political and intellectual myths and lies: the myth of God’s chosen people, the myth of the Promised Land, the myth of a land without a people, and the myth of six million murdered in the Holocaust, the myth of antisemitism, the myth of naming the state Israel, the myth of the entity’s love for peace, and the myth of the alleged Temple, are narratives and lies built on cunning and malicious Zionist delusion.

It's interesting how each of these "scholarly" antisemites add their own spin to age-old anti-Jewish myths. The "Protocols" forgery certainly didn't encourage religious practice, nor did they call for moving to Israel, but this author has his own psychological issues and makes up his own protocols to mirror his own hate.

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!

03/11 Links Pt2: Feeding Their Fellow Jews to the Crocodile; McClatchy Sites Delete False Story About NJ Synagogue ‘Sale’ of ‘Palestinian Land

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Feeding Their Fellow Jews to the Crocodile

Then on Sunday, we got a pretty rough preview of what was to come. As Hollywood stars were deciding how to accessorize their outfits for the Oscars that evening, many chose—stick with me here—a bloody hand celebrating the lynching of two Jews. Mark Ruffalo, Billie Eilish, Ava DuVernay, and Ramy Youssef were among the actors who wore a pin of a bloody hand, modeled after a particularly grisly episode. In 2000, two Jews wandered into Ramallah. They were taken into Palestinian police custody, presumably to protect them from the shrieking mob trying to rip them limb from limb with their bare hands. But the mob stormed the building and did its thing, as Kamala Harris might say. One of the killers showed off his blood-drenched hands to cheers from his compatriots outside. The pin is known as the Palestinian “hand of resistance.”

Now, the defense of these fiends is that they didn’t know what the pin meant. On some level, that is believable: Eilish is 22 years old, and rose to music fame during her teen years, so it is possible that she doesn’t know much of anything.

But even in Eilish’s case, it is unlikely. As some have pointed out, a bloody red hand is pretty universal. You would not be surprised to learn that Billie Eilish Baird O’Connell comes from an Irish family, who surely are familiar with the Red Hand of Ulster. The well read among the public probably recognizes the red right hand from Milton’s Paradise Lost, in which it signifies God’s vengeance.

The bloody hand pin did not seem to bother anyone, and I suppose in that atmosphere—one in which feted industry leaders were parading around alongside a celebration of lynching Jews—Glazer’s weak-kneed grand finale was almost inevitable.

Glazer was awarded an Oscar for his film Zone of Interest, which is about a man who, as I mentioned last night, attains professional success thanks to his ability to ignore the suffering of the Jews around him. It is not, however, autobiographical. The film is about Rudolph Hess living as a Nazi commandant next to Auschwitz. Though after last night, it’s unclear whether he’s meant to be the villain or the hero of Glazer’s film.

Hess is actually a perfect subject for a discussion about Jew-devouring crocodiles, and Glazer should know why. The Nazis demonstrated their efficiency and ingenuity by devising a system in which the crocodile actually could eat all the Jews last—or at least at once. In Hess’s world, the world Glazer was rewarded for depicting, there was no need for the crocodile to take it one at a time.

John Podhoretz: I Refute His Oscar

One could say The Zone of Interest win was the Oscar way in 2024 to punch the Holocaust card, and boy did Glazer punch it. Standing aside his two producers (one of them a Russian oligarch named Len Blavatnik), and visibly trembling with what appeared to be terror, he took out a piece of paper and read out:

"Our film shows where dehumanization leads, at its worst. It shaped all of our past and present. Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?"

We can, if we wish, debate the meaning of this poorly written set of sentences for a couple of seconds, or until there’s another anti-Semitic attack somewhere that is the direct result of October 7th, whichever comes first—and guess which will come first. Any way you look at it, it’s disgusting.

First, let’s take it literally and take it to mean Glazer and his producers "refute their Jewishness." Obviously this is bad, because they are refuting their Jewishness as they accept an award for a movie about the effort made 80 years ago to destroy all Jewishness. Anti-Semites are falling all over themselves to defend Glazer from the charge that he has "refuted his Jewishness." Rather, they say, he refutes that Jewishness offers a defense for Israeli actions after October 7, or for the "occupation," or for whatever argle-bargle these putrid preachers of self-satisfied vanity decide is the "root cause" of things they don’t like.

His defenders include such notable champions of Zion as the former Bernie Sanders aide cum Koch-funded scholar Matt Duss once pictured posing in a Hamas tunnel, Mehdi Hasan, the recently axed MSNBC host and Hamas apologist, the Democratic strategist Waleed Shahid, and MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, a onetime radical magazine journalist who turned out to be winsome on TV, to his immense good fortune. One of his qualities is that he loathes Israel almost as much as he loves his $5 million salary paid by the Robertses, the Jewish family that owns Comcast. It’s blood money, Chris! Give it back! Otherwise it might get into the hands of occupiers!

Hayes should know to stay out of this. Like, don’t opine on what is and what isn’t anti-Semitic, smart boy, especially after hosting Al Sharpton for years on your show, whose contributions to Jewish refutation have included rallying people against a business in Harlem that was then set on fire by one of Sharpton’s fan boys, killing seven people while Sharpton continued to skate through life by scaring Democratic politicians and eating their souls rather than the fatty foods that used to define his rotund shape.

Not to mention you can refute your Jewishness all you like, Glazer, but if a terrorist arrived at a Golders Green synagogue where your nephew was becoming bar mitzvah and decided to bomb the place, you’d be as dead as you would have been had you not "refuted" it. This is the problem: They want to kill Jews. You’re a Jew. They want to kill you. Your refutation is immaterial.

Which is to say, the issue is not whether Glazer is comfortable with his status as a Jew but rather that he is living a life of existential risk after October 7 because of it. And he should know this all better than anyone, since his movie is about how merely to be a Jew is to be subject to efforts at mass extermination.

It is the story of Jewry since the very beginning: Can this small tribe survive the world’s efforts to do it in? And how are we to understand the unimaginable miracle that it has not only survived but has returned to its homeland and turned a subsistence-level desert life into the world’s 27th wealthiest nation?

Ah, but there’s the rub for Jonathan Glazer. He doesn’t like that country, apparently. It’s a country of "occupation," and it "dehumanizes" the other apparently just as the Nazis dehumanized the Jews. Forget for the thousandth time that Israel hasn’t "occupied" Gaza since 2005, and what it’s doing now is not an "occupation"—it’s a war in which it is hunting down the enemy army of Hamas in order to destroy it.

That’s not "dehumanizing." It’s something else. It’s no more dehumanizing than the destruction of Germany to get rid of the Nazis, which I assume Jonathan Glazer supports in theory, as without it, he wouldn’t have the Oscar he can shove right up his ass forever.

Oh, it’s good Oppenheimer won, even though the real Oppenheimer was a Communist.

Jonathan Tobin: ‘As a Jew’ Oscar moment shows how woke antisemitism works

It is no small irony that the only way the mass murderers who are depicted in “The Zone of Interest” were defeated and brought to justice was by Allied soldiers and airmen who were presented with the same dilemma faced today by Israel. In 1945, as American, British and Soviet troops closed in on the last Nazi strongholds, the Germans refused to acknowledge their inevitable defeat and fought to the bitter end. As they did elsewhere, they made the Red Army fight for every street and house in Berlin. Two million German civilians were killed in Allied bombing campaigns and the conquest of the Third Reich, and as many as 125,000 were killed in the last weeks of the war in Berlin alone.

As horrible as those numbers may sound, decent people everywhere understood that the future of civilization required the defeat of the Nazis, and if that meant German civilians must die, then so be it. They knew that massive civilian casualties—far outstripping even the dubious figures supplied by Hamas of those killed in the current war—were the price that the German nation had to pay for allowing itself to be led by a genocidal movement that most of its citizens had supported so long as the Nazis were winning the war.

The Palestinians and Hamas are in a similar position today. Their ideology of hatred for Jews is hardly different from that of the Nazis depicted in Glazer’s movie. Their crimes on Oct. 7 were committed with a shameless embrace of barbarism that those who administered Auschwitz actually sought to conceal from the world. But because woke ideology deems the Palestinians to be intersectional victims and Israelis as their oppressors, fashionable opinion is adamant that the war to eradicate Hamas must stop and the Jews must be subjected to more atrocities in the future, if not killed and robbed of their homeland “from the river to the sea” as the pro-terror mobs demand.

Sadly, in 2024, there was no proud Jew who would refute and denounce Glazer later in the ceremony as Chayefsky did to Redgrave in 1978. Steven Spielberg had the chance to say something but chose to stick to his script. In contemporary Hollywood, complaints that Jews are being erased by the woke catechism that is inextricably linked to antisemitism in the new Oscar “diversity” rules going into effect for next year’s awards are ignored. It is the “as a Jew” celebrities who have the bully pulpit and those who would speak for the justice of Israel’s cause who are marginalized.

Those, like Glazer, whose efforts are aimed at helping contemporary practitioners of Jewish genocide survive and win—and do so “as Jews”—are a disgrace and deserve to be remembered throughout history with opprobrium along with the worst examples of those who betrayed their own people. They also illustrate the moral depravity of artists and intellectuals who have been captured by an ideology that enables a virulent form of antisemitism that masquerades as advocacy for human rights.

The Independent reported:

The US State Department has denied responsibility for an airdrop that reportedly killed five civilians – including two young boys – in Gaza.

A spokesperson for the department said that “every reasonable precaution” was taken with airdrops to ensure the safety of the public.

The incident reportedly occurred on Friday in the Al Shati camp west of Gaza City, according to a journalist on the scene, per CNN. At least five people were killed and 10 others injured when airdropped aid packages fell on them.

It is believed the chutes on the packages did not open properly. Muhammad Al-Sheikh, Head of Emergency Care Department at Al Shifa Medical Complex in Gaza City confirmed to CNN that five people were killed in the incident.

“We express our condolences to the families of those who were killed,” a spokesperson for the State Department said in a statement shared with media outlets. “Our understanding is that this was not a US airdrop.”

The statement continued: “As we said earlier this week, these are complex and tough missions to do because so many parameters have to be exactly right. We always learn from these incidents and try to improve.

“We take every reasonable precaution to avoid injuries, including limiting the weight of the pallets, identifying drop-zones in less-populated areas, and the sending of safety messages to the population prior to the air drop.”

There is a big difference between how this story was reported and how Israeli airstrikes that kill civilians are reported.

The basic assumption is that those dropping aid care about the lives of civilians, and Israel doesn't. Which is the fundamental blood libel of this war.

At the very least, this was a situation that showed gross negligence on the part of the aircraft that dropped the pallets. Yet no one is following up to find out who is responsible. No one is calling for an independent investigation.

There are no reporters trying to find out the names of the reported victims, or interviewing their survivors, or interviewing the injured, or interviewing witnesses. No one is asking whether the Ministry of Health is counting these people as being killed by Israel.

Interest in the story evaporated hours after it happened. The State Department statement on the difficulty of airdrops is not challenged.

No one cares when Palestinian kids are killed by anyone but Israel.

From the outset, the assumption is that Israel is acting maliciously towards civilians and everyone else is acting nobly.

Dropping bombs in populated areas and minimizing civilian damage is an order of magnitude more difficult than dropping food packages on sparsely populated areas. But unlike these airdrops, no one bothers asking the IDF to describe what they do in detail - their policies and procedures refined over years to determine the minimum payload to achieve a goal but minimize collateral damage, the skill involved in pinpoint operations, the reasons that larger bombs are sometimes used and the intended targets.

The irony goes deeper. This accident was obviously a mistake, so there should be no stigma for taking responsibility or announcing an investigation.

Yet unlike those doing the aid airdrops, Israel takes responsibility for its mistakes. Israel undertakes investigations under trying circumstances and reports back as soon as humanly possible.

Everyone assumes Israel is lying when they say they aren't responsible for an event in Gaza that killed civilians. Everyone also assumes Israel is lying even when they admit that they made a tragic mistake, because they think Israel maliciously attacks civilians.

The world should insist that whoever killed those people take responsibility and fix the mistakes that were made. No one cares. Let it happen again - so what?

Because dead Palestinians don't matter when Jews cannot be blamed. \

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!

President Biden's Ramadan message this year was all about Gaza.

It was entirely in line with what Hamas would have wanted him to say.

The sacred month is a time for reflection and renewal. This year, it comes at a moment of immense pain. The war in Gaza has inflicted terrible suffering on the Palestinian people. More than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, most of them civilians, including thousands of children. Some are family members of American Muslims, who are deeply grieving their lost loved ones today. Nearly two million Palestinians have been displaced by the war; many are in urgent need of food, water, medicine, and shelter. As Muslims gather around the world over the coming days and weeks to break their fast, the suffering of the Palestinian people will be front of mind for many. It is front of mind for me.

The 30,000 number is only from Hamas. Biden's acceptance of it without any reservation is shameful.

The United States will continue to lead international efforts to get more humanitarian assistance into Gaza by land, air, and sea. Earlier this week, I directed our military to lead an emergency mission to establish a temporary pier on the coast of Gaza that can receive large shipments of aid. We are carrying out airdrops of aid, in coordination with our international partners, including Jordan. And we’ll continue to work with Israel to expand deliveries by land, insisting that it facilitate more routes and open more crossings to get more aid to more people.

Open more crossings? Kerem Shalom was enough to supply Gaza for many years. This is a Palestinian demand in order to facilitate terror attacks, not a necessity for aid delivery, which is a logistics problem and not a border problem. Biden is clueless - but again, parroting Hamas talking points.

While we get more life-saving aid to Gaza, the United States will continue working non-stop to establish an immediate and sustained ceasefire for at least six weeks as part of a deal that releases hostages.

The US didn't use the word "ceasefire" for most of the war, instead saying it supports a truce or a pause. "Ceasefire" is the word that anti-Israel protester use, and now Biden has adopted it, quite deliberately, because their threats and bullying is working.

And we will continue building toward a long-term future of stability, security, and peace. That includes a two-state solution to ensure Palestinians and Israelis share equal measures of freedom, dignity, security, and prosperity. That is the only path toward an enduring peace.

This is rewarding Hamas terror. And it is stupid.

Does any sane person really think that if there were a Palestinian state, even in every inch of the territories and Jerusalem, Hamas wouldn't be mounting terror attacks in Israel?

Look at Hezbollah. Israel withdrew from every inch of southern Lebanon - certified by the UN - but it kept the issue alive claiming there were a few square meters that belonged to them. They used that excuse to build a militia more powerful than the Lebanese army.

Hate for Israel is not based on claims of land, or "return," or "settlements," or "occupation" or "justice." It is based on pure Jew hatred and the idea that Jews having any land in the region is an affront to the honor of Arabs and Muslims worldwide.

The root cause of the conflict is, and always has been, antisemitism. And everyone knows this, because the Arabs were attacking Jand murdering Jews before "occupation" and before 1948.

Anyone who thinks that two states would bring peace, whether they are CodePink or Joe Biden, is a complete fool.

But we are not allowed to talk about Muslim antisemitism. Instead, Biden talks about...Islamophobia.

Here at home, we have seen an appalling resurgence of hate and violence toward Muslim Americans. Islamophobia has absolutely no place in the United States, a country founded on freedom of worship and built on the contributions of immigrants, including Muslim immigrants. My Administration is developing the first-ever National Strategy to Counter Islamophobia and Related Forms of Bias and Discrimination, to take on hate against Muslim, Sikh, South Asian, and Arab American communities, wherever it occurs. No one should ever fear being targeted at school, at work, on the street, or in their community because of their background or beliefs.

The only reason this "national strategy" is being drafted is because Muslims were upset at the National Strategy to Combat Antisemitism, and wanted to pretend that Islamophobia is on par with antisemitism as a threat. It isn't even close. In New York City in 2023, there were 325 antisemitic incidents counted by the NYPD - and only 26 anti-Muslim incidents, about the same as anti-transgender and much less than anti-Asian. The statistics in Chicago are similar.

That National Strategy to Combat Antisemitism pays lip service to calling delegitimizing Israel antisemitic, but none of the actions it recommends mentions Israel at all.

This message goes against what most Israelis want. And they have a lot more skin in the game than Biden does. It is utter disrespect for Israeli democracy and Israeli self-determination.

But Israelis aren't the only ones insulted by this statement.

In all three previous Ramadan messages, Biden specifically called out the persecution against Uyghurs in China and Rohingya in what he still calls Burma. He would also mention other areas in the world where Muslims were suffering, whether from war or natural disasters.

But they were not mentioned this year.

Because people hating Israel take all the oxygen away from real human rights crises around the world. And this Ramadan message shows it very clearly.

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!

03/11 Links Pt1: Sinwar's Ramadan Jihad Dream: Will the "Al Aqsa Flood" Reach Jerusalem?; U.S. Gaza Aid Policy Prolongs the Return of Israeli Captives

From Ian:

Israel destroying Hamas amid international fury and skepticism

In his State of the Union address Thursday, President Joe Biden spent 90 seconds supporting Israel and blaming Hamas for the atrocities it committed on Oct. 7 as well as for the war that followed. "Israel has a right to go after Hamas," Biden said.

But then he spent 180 seconds focusing on Palestinians "under bombardment" or experiencing "displacement," and the need for a two-state solution.

He failed to mention the hundreds of thousands of Israelis under bombardment and the tens of thousands who have been displaced as a result of ongoing Hamas and Hizbullah attacks.

While Israel is under pressure to ensure humanitarian aid delivery to Palestinians, it is plowing forward in its war against Hamas.

Jacob Olidort, director of research for the Gemunder Center for Defense & Strategy at JINSA, said that skepticism regarding Israel's military operation to eliminate Hamas "ignores the visceral commitment Israel has, in light of the horrors of Oct. 7, not only to eliminate the terrorists and their infrastructure in Gaza, but also to institute long-overdue deradicalization efforts" with regard to both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.

Former Israeli National Security Adviser Meir Ben-Shabbat explained that Israel "cannot compromise on achieving the goals it defined for this war in full, since any failure to do so could expose Israel to an existential threat from its enemies."

"The results of the war are the only thing that can prevent this. The deterrence that crashed on Oct. 7 will not be restored if it can be argued that Israel failed to achieve its goals."

As for the day after Israel destroys Hamas, Ben-Shabbat said, "The young people of Gaza, who make up half of the population, were born into the reality of Hamas, were educated on its ideas, absorbed it in schools, mosques, squares and through its media. The young terrorists fighting us today are the same children who spent time in Hamas summer camps."

Contrary to what some in the West believe, Hamas didn't "kidnap the population" but rather won broad political support and backing from Gaza's Palestinian public, he said.

He emphasized that Israel must ensure that the demilitarization of Gaza and freedom of action for the IDF there are basic conditions in any future reality.

The Day After the Gaza War - in Israel

Since Hamas' Oct. 7 attack, Israel has found itself in a multifront war for the first time in nearly 60 years. It is fighting in Gaza, countering armed groups in the West Bank, and facing missile strikes from Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen.

Moreover, Israel must also take more far-reaching steps to avoid another Oct. 7. It must ramp up defense spending and reinforce its borders. Any arrangement for governing Palestinian areas will have to include strong provisions to prevent the emergence of a remilitarized Palestinian territory. The longer-term objective of a two-state solution is currently perceived as unfeasible and even detached from reality by most Israelis.

After five months of fighting in Gaza, the Israel Defense Forces have made impressive progress. The territory is one of the most complex combat zones in the world, with an intricate urban landscape and an enemy that is operating within the civilian population, using an extensive network of tunnels and underground facilities. Nonetheless, IDF forces have been able to dismantle the nerve centers and organizational structures of Hamas in Gaza City and Khan Yunis and significantly degrade terrorist infrastructure in other areas.

They have also established a security buffer zone between Gaza and Israeli territory to largely neutralize the immediate ground threat to the towns and villages near Gaza, allowing residents to return to their homes.

Realizing these objectives has come at a high cost to the population of Gaza, and the humanitarian situation has raised pressure on Israel to limit its operations. Yet, calls for Israel to stand down are premature. Israel cannot bring an end to the conflict in Gaza as long as Israeli hostages are held captive there.

Israel has no interest in occupying or assuming full responsibility for Gaza. But as long as Gaza remains militarized and attacks against Israeli territory persist, Israel will be compelled to maintain overriding security control. Israel's efforts to dismantle Hamas will require a long-term commitment.

WSJ Editorial: Biden Draws an Odd "Red Line" for Israel

President Biden beat up Israel's leaders in his State of the Union speech and has criticized its war strategy in Gaza with regularity. Biden wants fewer civilian casualties in Gaza, but so does Israel since the diplomatic consequences fall on the Jewish state, not on Hamas. That's why Israel has held off on its Rafah campaign until it can put together a plan to let civilians find refuge to the city's north.

Israel can't avoid a Rafah campaign if it wants to achieve its war aim of destroying Hamas. Surely Biden knows this. The U.S. didn't let ISIS retain its stronghold in Mosul in Iraq, and the siege of that city also had unintended civilian casualties.

There are costs to this White House strategy toward Israel - not least its message to Hamas and its backers in Iran that their strategy of putting civilians in harm's way is working politically. Why agree to a hostage swap if their current strategy is driving a wedge between Israel and the U.S.?

Biden's red-line threats don't help Israel or his political standing at home. The best way he can help himself politically is to let Israel win the war as rapidly as possible.

U.S. Gaza Aid Policy Prolongs the Return of Israeli Captives

The airdropping of aid to Gaza - and soon, also the special pier - will not advance the release of the Israeli captives. It will only make their release that much harder. Increasing civilian aid to Gaza provides more and more oxygen to Hamas, delays a real uprising of the residents there against Hamas, and achieves the opposite of what Biden says he desires. From Hamas' perspective, the aid gives more legitimacy for the continuation of its existence as the ruling power in Gaza and a toughening of its stance on the captives issue.

If the U.S. had a Middle Eastern mindset rather than a Western one, it would make clear that the condition for "saving the starving residents of Gaza" is the swift end of Hamas, both militarily and in civilian life, and the release of all captives. Instead, Biden puts the well-being of Gaza's residents, many of whom have been involved in terrorism over the years, before the well-being of the captives. This encourages Hamas to raise the price for their release ever higher.

In World War II against the Nazis, the Allies did not consider airdropping humanitarian aid to the German population. These are new standards set specifically for Israel, and a distortion of any logic aimed at defeating an enemy like Hamas. The U.S. itself has never acted this way in its wars.

The same flawed Western logic applies to the issue of the month of Ramadan and Israel's entry into Rafah. Instead of making it clear that Israel, with American backing, will not hesitate to turn Ramadan from the "glorious month of Islamic victories" into the month of its defeat, the U.S. has opted to be considerate of Muslim sensitivities.

Many Lebanese hate Hezbollah. They need to get louder.

People who claim to want a ceasefire in Gaza are silent about a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah. There are no rallies in the West, and few if any op-eds. The "peace" crowd doesn;'t seem to care much about peace in Lebanon and Israel.

This is despite the fact that a full war would be far more devastating to both sides than the five months of the Gaza war has been.

It is almost as if they really don't care about peace.

But there are people who do: the citizens of Lebanon, who most emphatically do not want to be sucked into a war between Hezbollah and Israel.

Last month, I wrote that the only way to avoid a war between Israel and Lebanon is if the Lebanese people loudly and publicly protest against Hezbollah.

Hezbollah is sensitive to public opinion and pretends that it is "defending Lebanon." If the people reject that argument and demand that it stops putting the entire country in danger, that is how Hezbollah can de-escalate and still maintain its "honor" which is what is driving its attacks on Israel.

The Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center has compiled a list of statements by prominent Lebanese politicians as well as social media activists opposing Hezbollah's actions since October 7:

Gebran Bassil, the chairman of the Free National Movement in Lebanon, said his party opposed Lebanon’s being responsible for the “liberation of Palestine” because that was the Palestinians’ responsibility. ...He also stated that his party opposed the use of Lebanon as a base from which to attack Israel, and that by itself Lebanon was unable to pay the price of obtaining the Palestinians’ rights on behalf of all Arabs.

Samir Geagea, head of the Lebanese Forces Party, said Hezbollah’s highest national interest concerned Iran, not Lebanon (Lebanese Forces X account, January 26, 2024). The Lebanese Forces Party said in an official statement that ...Hezbollah’s real goal in fighting was not to destroy Israel, but to fully control Lebanon (Lebanese Forces Party Facebook page, February 22, 2024).

On February 20, 2024, The Phalanges, a party headed by Samy Gemayel, published a statement accusing Hezbollah of giving Israel reasons to attack in south Lebanon. Moreover, Hezbollah’s theory, that attacks from Lebanon would divert Israel from its activities in the Gaza Strip, had borne no fruit and harmed Lebanon.

Lebanese civilians living in the towns and villages near the border were quoted as criticizing Hezbollah for attacking Israel from within their communities. They claimed attacks near their homes put them in danger, pushing them to abandon their homes and leave the area free for Hezbollah. Some of the residents claimed that some of the rockets that hit the villages in south Lebanon were actually launched by Hezbollah.

One social media personality juxtaposed photos of Gaza today with Lebanon in 2006, sarcastically saying "both Hamas and Hezbollah claimed victory."

But this criticism has not made it into the mainstream media. And that is how Hezbollah wants it.

Only a public demonstration in Beirut or preferably in the south, a demonstration that cannot be ignored, will move Hezbollah to act, in the name of doing what the Lebanese demand.

Hezbollah doesn't fear Israel. Like all Islamist groups, it doesn't care about how much damage a war would do to Lebanon as long as they can kill Jews and claim victory. But it does fear the Lebanese people who can expose its hypocrisy in claiming to defend them.

The people do not want a war. They need to realize, after decades of Hezbollah effectively ruling them, that they have the power to stop a war.

And the international media that also claims to want to avoid war must step up with publicizing the Lebanese people's desires to stop Hezbollah from its military escalations.

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To the @NYTimes, rioting in the Temple Mount isn't "provocative." But security measures to stop violence are.

In The New York Times, Raja Abdulrahim writes about Israel's keeping the Temple Mount safe for all people during Ramadan, which she characterizes as "restrictions."

This one sentence that volumes.

Some of the most provocative episodes have been raids into the Aqsa compound by baton-wielding police forces firing tear gas and sponge-tipped bullets who have clashed with Palestinians throwing stones and setting off fireworks.

Which started first, the raids or the rioting?

Last year, it was young Palestinian men who refused to leave the compound according to an agreement signed by the Waqf. They specifically stayed there overnight in order to block Jews from visiting the site. They stockpiled banks of fireworks and stones and blockaded doors.

The New York Times never reported about the agreement. It has a theme that all violence is initiated and planned by Israeli security, and it will ignore any facts that disagree with that theme.

The anti-Israel bias suffuses this article. For example, the Muslim claims about the site are accepted as true, the Jewish claims are just claims:

Every Friday, Yousef visits Jerusalem’s Old City to pray at Al Aqsa, the third holiest site for Muslims and part of the compound sacred to Jewish people, who call it the Temple Mount.

...Many Palestinians say their access to Al Aqsa compound has become increasingly restricted in favor of Jews, who consider the Temple Mount the most sacred place in Judaism.

Al Aqsa is claimed, as established fact, to be the third holiest place for all Muslims - even though Shiites have traditionally seen Karbala and Najaf as pilgrimage sites ahead of Jerusalem in importance. (Some also believe that the Al Aqsa mosque mentioned in the Quran is in the heavens, not Jerusalem.

But Jews only "consider" the Temple Mount to be the holiest place in Judaism.

Beyond that, security measures at holy sites are only considered onerous when Jews are involved.

Seth Frantzman once compared the security measures in place between the Temple Mount and other religious holy sites. The Kaaba in Mecca has "5,000 CCTV cameras and over 100,000 people employed to provide security during the annual Hajj" as well as electronic screening devices around all of Mecca, where every non-Muslim is banned. St. Peters Square in Rome, which used to be open, now has thousands of police, checkpoints and metal detectors, and even nuns can be searched. He found similar security measures in Buddhist and Sikh holy places.

And all of them are in place because of specific fears of Muslim terrorism.

Here's the NYT photo of Muslims who could not enter the Temple Mount on Friday and prayed on a sidewalk outside the walls instead.

All young men. And no harassment from police for an unauthorized gathering in a public street blocking pedestrian traffic.

Freedom to pray is important, but it is not more important than security. Framing the very reasonable and universal requirement for safety and security as being anti-Muslim restrictions by Jews is false and slanderous.

It is Muslim terrorism and Muslim rioting that prompt these security measures to begin with, not Islamophobia nor Jewish supremacism.

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NPR has what is meant to be a heartwarming, inspirational story:

ANAS BABA, BYLINE: Ibrahim Abuhani is a professional baker with shops across Gaza, but he did not plan on making cakes during this war. He had to flee his home, like most people in Gaza, and opened his cake shop just to the people in order to charge their phones. And it was for free. There is no electricity now in Gaza, and his bakery runs on solar power. But a month ago, a man walked into the shop and asked for a cake.

ABUHANI: (Speaking Arabic).

BABA: The man said that his own son got injured in the war. And when he woke up from the anesthesia, he said, where is the birthday cake you promised me? The baker hesitated but agreed to take his order. As he was baking the cake, someone else walked in. He said his little daughter was scared by the war, and he wanted to throw her a little party. Little by little, Abuhani was baking again, and he was shocked by the demand for cake.

Some other anecdotes of customers begging for cakes which Abuhani claims to sell at no profit come next.

Then NPR offhandedly mentions this:

Abuhani struggles to find ingredients. Supplies are so low in Gaza, sugar and eggs cost a fortune, so he's not making a profit. He says he feels bad buying flour on the black market - flour that belongs to the United Nations to give away as aid - but he says it's worth it to see the joy in his customers' eyes.

Hold on a second.

He's buying flour that was meant to be given away for free by the UN?

Who, exactly, is selling this flour to him? Who is making the profit on the flour?

There aren't too many stories on the Gaza black market in English. Al Hurra had a detailed report in January in Arabic, where Hamas was not accused directly of stealing aid by Gazans, but it sems pretty clear that is who is referred to:

A Palestinian journalist said, in statements to Al-Hurra website on the condition that her identity not be revealed, that there is “major corruption in the distribution of humanitarian aid,” and claimed that there were “thefts of it,” without accusing any party of that.

She added: "The aid is stolen immediately after entering (the Strip) or from the warehouses, by those responsible for distributing it, and not from the people."

In this context, a Gazan resident in Egypt, whose family is still in the Gaza Strip, spoke to Al-Hurra website, on the condition that her identity not be disclosed in order to preserve the safety of her family, that “a lot of support does not go to those who deserve it.”

She continued: "There are those who distribute aid to their relatives and do not give it to those who deserve it. Therefore, some have a surplus of support that they do not need. On the other hand, some do not have food to eat."

The black market isn't only for staples like flour, but even for necessities like tents that are being stolen!

[Another journalist said] "an Emirati tent is sold for 3,000 shekels (about 800 dollars) and a Qatari tent for 2,500 shekels (669 dollars)," noting that these tents "should go to the refugees who fled the northern Gaza Strip."

In this regard, Al-Ghazia, who lives in Egypt, said: “Tents that arrive in the Gaza Strip are sold as aid, and the prices vary according to the country that sent them, and they are supposed to be bought by people who have nothing.”

It is noteworthy that there are spread on social media what resemble advertisements for the sale of tents in the Gaza Strip, in which the tents are classified according to the country of origin.

The black market seems to be not only Hamas, but also gangs who are stealing the aid off of trucks. Hamas, however, wants a monopoly on the black market. Al Jazeera glowingly reports about a new Hamas-linked gang of masked, armed men called the People’s Protection Force who go to the markets, identify those who are selling goods at way above the market prices, warn them to reduce the prices, and if they refuse - Hamas confiscates the items and claims to sell them for the official market prices.

And if you believe that one, I have a pier in Gaza to sell you.

(h/t Irene)

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It took Hamas 22 months to admit Israel was right in how many terrorists were killed in Operation Cast Lead

A lot of Hamas apologists try to claim that Hamas has a track record of telling the truth in its casualty claims in previous wars. But that is not true.

Hamas didn't lie much about things it could not get away with, like total deaths, because there were NGOs on the ground counting. But they did lie about everything they could.

From Al Arabiya, January 19, 2009:

Hamas's armed wing said on Monday it lost only 48 fighters during Israel's 22-day operation in Gaza and vowed to fight on unless the Jewish state withdrew its forces from the Palestinian enclave.

"We announce to our people the martyrdom of 48 Qassam fighters,," Abu Obeida, spokesman for the Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades, said in a televised press conference.

Abu Obeida also claimed that Israel lost "at least 80 soldiers" in the fighting. The Jewish state listed 10 soldiers killed.

Israel had failed to achieve "any of the objectives it had set for the war ... and only killed hundreds of children, women and old people," [Abu Obeida said.]

It took 22 months for Hamas to admit Israel's numbers were correct. From Haaretz, November 9. 2010:

Hamas admitted last week that between 600 and 700 of its militants were killed during Operation Cast Lead – a figure consistent with that reported by the Israel Defense Forces.

The figure is several times higher than the previous number of fatalities that Hamas claimed it sustained during the operation.

Hamas military wing had previously claimed that only 49 of its militants were killed during the three-week operation that the IDF launched in December 2008. Israel had put the figure at 709.

As of a month ago, Israel says that it has killed some 12,000 terrorists so far. Hamas claims that 72% of those killed are women and children and very few are Hamas members. (They denied and denounced one Hamas spokesperson admitting to a news agency 6,000 Hamas members were killed.)

The current Al Qassam Brigades spokesman is the very same Abu Obeida!

Who has a better track record of telling the truth? And given this track record, why on Earth do reporters and NGOs still believe anything Hamas says and do everything but call Israel liars?

Because they choose to.

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03/10 Links: The Left shows its chilling true face by refusing to accept Jews feel intimidated; Mossad: Hamas ‘striving to ignite the region during Ramadan’

From Ian:

The Left shows its chilling true face by refusing to accept Jews feel intimidated

If it wasn’t bad enough that some on the Left have questioned whether the rapes, murders, beheadings and child killings of October 7 actually happened, now Jewish people who have said that they feel too intimidated to go into central London at the weekend during the pro-Palestinian protests are being similarly gaslit.

This week, the counter-extremism tsar Robin Simcox raised his own concerns about the effect of the marches on Jewish people, saying the demonstrations had turned London “into a no-go zone for Jews every weekend”.

Blaming the UK for developing a “permissive environment for radicalisation” which has seen extremism become “normalised,” he wrote in The Telegraph: “[Extremist] groups have gone unchallenged for too long, and have used their time well. They are now embedded and influential among communities.”

Simcox should know: he’s the Home Office’s independent adviser on counter-extremism. But if you don’t believe him, you only have to look at the results of surveys conducted since October 7, which reveal that Jewish people feel far less safe than they used to. We’ve heard from Jews who no longer feel comfortable wearing a Star of David in public and others who actively avoid London when the marches are on.

Five ways Israelis have changed, after 5 months of war

Five months after the surprise Hamas assault on Israel on Oct. 7, and Israel's punishing military response in Gaza, Israeli and Palestinian lives have been immeasurably changed.

The catastrophic conditions worsening daily in Gaza often overshadow the profound transformation Israelis have undergone.

The state of Israel's society is crucial to understanding where the conflict might lead. Here are five ways Israel has been transformed in the last five months of war.

1. Israelis' lives are on hold
Israelis remain in a state of suspended animation.

Following the Oct. 7 attack, 94,000 Israelis are still displaced, evacuated from their homes near the restive Gaza and Lebanon borders. Some 32,000 of them are still being put up in hotels across Israel, according to data from an internal Israeli government database provided to NPR.

It was only two weeks ago that Avidor Schwartzman, a survivor of the Oct. 7 attack, finally moved with his family from a room at the Shefayim Hotel, a resort north of Tel Aviv, to a new trailer park set up behind the hotel.

"It doesn't feel like home, but it feels a lot more like a home," he says.

Schwartzman's trailer is one of eight prefab homes lined up in two rows, built on sand, housing broken families from the same devastated kibbutz, Kfar Aza. They include a young woman whose father was killed on Oct. 7; a family with a hostage still held in Gaza; and Schwartzman, whose in-laws were killed.

"I wish I could just, you know, erase it from my mind," he says about the attack. "Not to wallow in everything, because there is so much sadness here, and so much grief."

New homes are being built for the displaced residents of Kfar Aza, at another kibbutz near their old home. But Schwartzman says some families refuse to leave this trailer park of sadness until Israel strikes a deal with Hamas to free its remaining captives, around 130 Israelis, many believed to be alive.

It is not just the evacuated, the survivors and the hostages whose lives are on hold.

"On Oct. 7, something cracked, or maybe broke, in the Israeli psyche," Schwartzman says. "Even those that weren't there, just saw it on TV, they are still there."

2. Israelis believe the world has turned its back on them
As global attention has turned to Israel's military campaign in Gaza, many Israelis are on a parallel warpath: to convince the world they are victims, not aggressors.

Israel's foreign minister accuses the United Nations of minimizing the accounts of sexual violence deployed during the Oct. 7 attacks, and has recalled Israel's U.N. ambassador in protest.

Young Israeli influencers are on the offensive on the social media battlefield. Shiraz Shukrun, 25, an Instagram promoter of shampoo, Vaseline and beer to more than half a million followers on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, volunteers with the Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, posting videos about Oct. 7.

"I find that I'm way angrier than before. I feel like so many people are against us," she says, referring to #FreePalestine hashtags and social media posts justifying the Hamas attack. "Only Israelis know how other Israelis feel. No one will never know how we feel."

"Many Still Had Expressions of Pain on Their Faces"

Sheri Mendez is part of a volunteer unit within the Military Rabbinate. "In 2010, the IDF decided, as more women joined combat units, to establish a small female unit for the eventuality, God forbid, that a female soldier is killed," she said. "They accompany the identification process and burial preparations." She received an emergency call-up order on Oct. 7. Arriving at the Camp Shura base, she said, "The initial shock was from the quantity. Body bags lined both sides of the corridor, whole trucks arrived with more bodies. We couldn't believe the numbers. The second shock was from the level of brutality and horrors we saw." "We were with those young women in the room preparing them for burial. Our goal was to give them their last respects. We opened the body bags....It was a special room for women by women....Some of the bodies arrived in very poor condition, but we took our time to handle them in a way that honored them. We knew we were likely the last people to be with these women. It was deeply sad; they could have been our daughters, brutally murdered."

"Many still had expressions of pain on their faces. Their fists were clenched, their mouths sometimes open, and some were missing body parts. We saw women shot in the head, shot in the torso. It was horrifying to witness. You could tell these women did not die an easy death."

Five months later, the horrors do not fade for Mendez. However, what pains her most is the world's denial of the massacre and the atrocities of Oct. 7. "I am a daughter of Holocaust survivors, raised on the testimonies of what happened to most of our family....The world doubts something we all saw with our own eyes....These women can't speak; only those of us who saw it can speak for them....That's why I continue to talk about what happened there, in those days, for them."

UN deliberately laundering its Gaza casualty statistics to make them appear to not come from Hamas

In January, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs stopped reporting the Hamas claims that 70% of casualties in Gaza were women and children. It had been relying on Hamas' Ministry of Health statistics, and that ministry had stopped reporting on women and children allegedly killed in December.

On Friday, UN-OCHA resumed its claims of the number of women and children killed. And it proves beyond any doubt that it cannot be trusted to report anything.

Here is the graphic from its latest report:

It says the source for 13,000 children killed is "GMO," which sounds a lot like an acronym for a respected international organization.

It isn't.

It stands for "Gaza Media Office," meaning a Hamas Telegram channel with zero accountability and zero credibility. It comes from terrorists who celebrate the murders of Israeli women and children.

But its source for women killed is even more deceptive.

It says the source is UN Women, I found the UN Women report that said that, as of March 1, over 9,000 women had been killed in Gaza.

An estimated 9,000 women have been reportedly killed by Israeli forces in Gaza to date. This figure is likely an underestimate, as many more women are reported to be dead under the rubble[2].

Footnote 2?

[2] Source: UN Women’s calculation estimates are based on OCHA reported numbers.

So OCHA's source is UN Women, and UN Women's source is...OCHA!

This gives an idea of how deceptive the UN is when it comes to finding ways to accuse Israel of crimes.

In the end, both of those numbers originally come from the same Gaza Media Office.

What about the "7,000 reported missing or under the rubble"?

That number has been tossed around since November. Its source?

Again, the Hamas Gaza Media Office!

Is it even remotely plausible that none of the 7,000 bodies supposedly under the rubble have been recovered? Moreover, is it plausible that Hamas even has a means to calculate the number of missing people to begin with?

Hamas makes up the numbers out of thin air. It has no evidence, no proof, no methodology, nothing to back up these numbers, not even a human being who reporters can question. The statistics are as fictional as the "471" people Hamas claims were killed at Al Ahli Hospital in October.

The UN is laundering its casualty statistics to make them appear not to have originated with a murderous, rapist terror group. World media and other NGOs now can say that statistics that have been literally made up by Hamas are verified by the UN.

And a Hamas blood libel now has the imprimatur of the UN, not to mention the President of the United States.

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Amnesty has been silent on October 7 sexual assaults, while HRW doesn't quite believe them

It's been over five months since the horrific October 7 attacks. The two leading human rights organizations, In those five months, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have not admitted or condemned any reports of rape or sexual assault.

Amnesty hasn't said a single word on the topic.

It wrote about the October 7 attacks on the day itself, condemning both Hamas and Israel equally, and saying that the "root causes" of the "escalation" were all from Israel.

Five days later, it issued its only report on the massacre so far which again mentioned "Israeli war crimes" nearly as prominently as the details of the Hamas attack.

Almost unbelievably, at the end of that sole report saying Haams committed war crimes,, Amnesty adds an italicized postscript to assure readers - don't worry, we haven't become pro-Israel, and we'll be publishing lots of anti-Israel reports to come:

Amnesty International is an impartial human rights organization and seeks to ensure that all parties to an armed conflict comply with international humanitarian law and international human rights law. Accordingly, in future briefings, Amnesty International will be investigating Israel’s military action in the Gaza Strip to determine whether it is complying with the rules of international humanitarian law, including by taking necessary precautions to minimize harm to civilians and civilian objects and refraining from unlawful attacks and from collective punishment of the civilian population, as required under international law. Amnesty International will also continue to monitor the activities of Hamas and Palestinian armed groups.

I could not find this kind of caveat at the end of any other Amnesty report among thousands on its site.

That was over 150 days ago, and we have not heard a word since then on these further "investigations" they promised in October on Hamas. Meanwhile, Amnesty has published dozens of press releases condemning Israel.

Not once has it even hinted that it is researching rapes and sexual assaults by Hamas and other armed groups on October 7.

Human Rights Watch did mention the reports of sexual assault, peripherally, in an interview with an HRW researcher who visited Israel for three weeks following the attacks about gathering evidence. That report says:

There have been harrowing reports of sexual violence and other forms of gender-based violence committed during the attacks. Were you able to verify those?

It’s vitally important to investigate sexual violence, and in doing so, we also need to work carefully to avoid causing further harm. Around the world, Human Rights Watch adopts an approach that centers on the needs and rights of survivors, witnesses, and the families of victims, and attempts as best we can to avoid retraumatization. That’s one of the complexities we deal with in all of our work, and it is especially critical when documenting sexual violence.

We have reviewed statements from people who say they witnessed cases of rape and other forms of gender-based violence. And some first responders we spoke to described seeing women’s bodies in conditions or circumstances that could be consistent with sexual violence.

However, there is a lack of forensic evidence that makes it much harder to know the scale and nature of the abuses. We have not interviewed anyone who is a survivor of sexual violence committed during the attacks on October 7.

We are still monitoring and assessing any information that’s being reported. There may be sexual violence victims who were killed, and, as it is often the case with sexual violence, survivors who may not be ready or may have chosen not to divulge information about their experiences for reasons that could include trauma and stigma. In the past month, news media have published interviews in which several survivors of the attacks described witnessing rape. A careful, independent, survivor-centered, and credible investigation of all reports of sexual violence – and other forms of gender-based and other violence – on October 7 is urgently needed. Sexual and gender-based violence during armed conflict are war crimes.

In short, HRW is discounting all the evidence that exists - including a New York Times report published a month before this interview and tons of evidence from rescue workers and pathologists - and saying that it has not verified the information.

If you would get all your news from Amnesty and HRW, you would barely know that anything happened on October 7, and at any rate, whatever happened was clearly trivial compared to what Israel did before and afterwards. And you would think that any reports of sexual assault are either lies or unverified rumors.

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