Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, October 09, 2024

The US has averaged over eleven anti-Israel protests A DAY since 10/7/23 - second only to Yemen(!)

The INSS has this interesting infographic:

It shows that through mid-August, there were 3,452 anti-Israel protests in the US - the second highest in the world, behind Yemen's insane 5,484 protests.

Third place is Morocco with 2,788, followed by Turkey and Iran.

Morocco is surprising because the protests in Yemen, Turkey and Iran are run by and promoted by their governments; Morocco (like other countries Israel is at peace with) has not been doing that at all to my knowledge. This is quite concerning.

The US is not in the most prestigious company.

But there are plenty of anti-Israel protests in the rest of the Western world as well.

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!

The big news from yesterday:

BEIRUT, Oct 8 (Reuters) - Hezbollah deputy leader Naim Qassem said in comments broadcast on Tuesday that his movement supports efforts to reach a ceasefire for Lebanon, but for the first time omitted any mention of a Gaza truce deal as a pre-condition to halting the group's fire on Israel.

Qassem said Hezbollah supported efforts by Speaker of Parliament Nabih Berri, a Hezbollah ally, to secure a halt to fighting, which has escalated in recent weeks with Israeli ground incursions and the killing of some of Hezbollah's top leaders, including secretary general Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah.

"We support the political activity being led by Berri under the title of a ceasefire," Qassem said in a 30-minute televised address.

Berri is a Hezbollah lackey, so it is Hezbollah that is implicitly decoupling Hezbollah actions from Gaza, not the Lebanese government. Qassem wants to save Hezbollah, and his own life.

But for an entire year Hezbollah has been claiming that it is only shooting towards Israel to support Gaza. How can it now say that it wants a separate ceasefire when there is none in Gaza?

By rewriting history!

Qassem said in his speech:

This Israeli entity has proven to be a danger to humanity, Lebanon and the region. We announced the support front from Lebanon to achieve two goals: the first is to help in the confrontation to relieve Gaza and help it win this battle, and the second implicit goal is to defend Lebanon and its people.

This is the first time Hezbollah claimed that its attacks on Israel were meant to defend Lebanon.

It is such an absurd and transparent lie that only an Arab leader could say it with a straight face. But it is the only way Hezbollah can climb down from its tree - by now claiming that it must accept a ceasefire for the good of the very Lebanese people that it has turned into its own human shields.

It doesn't only reflect Hezbollah's panic, but Iran's too. Reports say that the instructions to consider a separate cease fire comes from Iran. They are hoping to avert a major Israeli response to its ballistic missile attack, and suddenly supporting Gaza is no longer so important to Iran.

How much more proof does the world need that strength is what is necessary for peace, not weakness? Israel's position has improved vastly in the past few weeks, and it is all because it took the offensive and signaled that it will not stop until it reaches its goals. It never articulated a goal to destroy Hezbollah or Iran, but its moves in that direction can help it achieve its goals of destroying Hamas, returning Israeli citizens to their homes, and hopefully to get the hostages back.

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!

One doesn't have to look hard to find people willing to say that every single Israeli or Zionist deserves to be killed, imprisoned or banished because by definition they are criminals.

Or this Wikipedia editor who makes up his own international law definitions to say that there are practically no Israeli civilians, and that since Hamas is a military it cannot murder anyone, and anyone it kidnaps is not a hostage but a prisoner of war.

Or this graffiti on a Jewish-owned Manny's cafe in San Francisco this week shown above calling for all "Zionists" to be expelled from the city and calling for their deaths.

Finally we have this example, where someone commenting on the idea that there are no innocent Israelis or Zionists, even says the quiet part out loud: he said there are no innocent Jews.

Abdul may not realize it but he is echoing his Nazi forebears.

From AP, October 26, 1938:

The Nazis said there are no innocent Jews. Today's Nazis say there are no innocent Israelis and no innocent Zionists.

The hate is identical. The stereotyping is identical. The language is practically identical.

They both are openly advocating a Final Solution.

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!

10/08 Links Pt2: Dara Horn: October 7 Created a Permission Structure for Anti-Semitism; The 7 October deniers; The West has turned its back on Jews

From Ian:

Dara Horn: October 7 Created a Permission Structure for Anti-Semitism

The consequences for Jews of this hatred are obvious. Indeed, many American Jews have changed their behavior, hiding outward signs of Jewish identity and thinking twice before sharing their identity with colleagues and acquaintances. But its consequences for non-Jews are incalculable—not because of the often inaccurate Holocaust-education claim that Jews are the canary-in-the-coal-mine whose persecution indicates that other groups will later be persecuted, but because this permission structure devours human potential.

Imagine how many intelligent people in the 19th and early 20th centuries devoted their talents to justifying “scientific” anti-Semitism instead of doing actual science, or how many years of oppression have been endured by populations duped into thinking that their enemy was “Zionism” instead of their Soviet-sponsored dictatorships or fundamentalist regimes. Human-rights activists have appropriately raised awareness of very real injustices committed by Israel. But the enormous investment in exposing primarily Jewish perfidy—the United Nations Human Rights Council has passed more resolutions condemning Israel than any other nation in the world—has left fewer resources to address rampant human-rights abuses elsewhere. Meanwhile, any Israeli government is less likely to consider legitimate criticism from outsiders, because the supply of such criticism has been so thoroughly poisoned by those who want Jews dead. Blood, treasure, and talent in the Muslim world have been horrifically wasted in war after war against Israel.

Palestinian Arabs have borne the brunt of their leaders’ and manipulators’ anti-Jewish obsession, winding up subjected to autocratic rule, used as human pawns, and deprived of multiple opportunities for statehood, collaboration, prosperity, and peace. Like Israeli Jews, they aren’t going anywhere; they, too, deserve freedom and dignity, and must build a future with their neighbors. For people in all of these societies, the costs of this fixation are high.

American institutions that cave to this hatred will also face these costs. Schools and universities lose their credibility and their ability to teach when educators let lies undermine learning. The same is true for other sectors of American life. A literary world where conformity is the price of entry is unworthy of the name. A prejudiced therapist is a contradiction in terms, rendering therapy itself impossible. Patients suffer when ideology derails doctors’ training. When swaths of colleagues are blacklisted and ostracized, untold possibilities for research and innovation are blithely destroyed.

The permission structure is here, alive and vivid. It always is. Thousands of years of Jewish experience suggest that we will continue on this course. But Jewish experience is not universal. One revolutionary idea in Jewish tradition, articulated everywhere from the Torah to the Israeli national anthem, is hope: Nothing is inevitable; people can change. Hope and a vision for the future of Israelis and Palestinians will have to come from Israelis and Palestinians themselves. But the future that we choose here in America is up to us.

American Holocaust educators often ask me what they should be teaching as the “lessons of the Holocaust.” The question itself is absurd. As one of my readers once put it, Auschwitz was not a university, and most Jews who arrived there were immediately gassed and incinerated, making it difficult for them to produce coursework in ethics for the rest of the world to enjoy.

But there is indeed something we can learn from the long history of anti-Semitism and the societies it has destroyed: We’ve fallen for this before. After this terrifying year, I hope we can find the courage to say, Never again.

The 7 October deniers

The toxic cynicism that has met reports of Hamas’s depravity has nothing to do with a desire for accuracy and evidence. There is no amount of evidence that will satisfy these people. From the off, there were horrifying indications that women had been a key target of Hamas that day. Footage emerged of kidnapped women with bloodied crotches. Murdered women were found, hands tied and stripped from the waist down. Later on, deeply researched reports by the BBC, the Guardian and the New York Times – drawing on eyewitnesses, official accounts and video evidence – detailed rape, sexual torture and genital mutilation (Hamas seemed to extract a particular, perverse thrill from stabbing, shooting and driving nails into women’s vaginas). Even the UN – whose institutional bias against Israel is a running joke – concluded, in a report published in March, that ‘there are reasonable grounds to believe that multiple incidents of rape, including gang rape, occurred’ on 7 October. ‘There are further accounts of individuals who witnessed at least two incidents of rape of corpses of women’, it added. There is reason to believe the rape was systematic, too; documents were found in the possession of Hamas terrorists, explaining how to say ‘Take off your pants’ in Hebrew. But even a year on, with a mountain of evidence beneath us, mention the rape of Israeli women to the apologists and you will get an eye roll.

Where the hardliners deny, the more mainstream sow doubt. The anti-Israel types seem to have come up with an entirely new, Israel-specific standard of journalistic proof. Apparently, unless they are presented with a hi-def snuff movie of the specific alleged crime in question, they cannot possibly assess its truthfulness. No amount of eyewitness testimonies or evidence will suffice, it seems. I suppose we should also free all of the convicted murderers, apart from those who were dumb enough to be caught killing on camera. This led Israel to reluctantly publish images of slain babies, and to hold screenings of footage of Hamas’s crimes, edited to protect the dignity of the dead and defiled. But it didn’t make the blindest bit of difference. Pro-Palestine activists even staged a protest outside of a screening in Los Angeles, denouncing the film as ‘propaganda’.

There are different motivations for this denialism. There are those who simply cannot accept how wrong they were about Israel and Hamas. For many years, Israel’s defences had protected not just Israeli civilians from harm, but also Western woke leftists from the consequences of their luxury beliefs. So long as the Islamist killers were kept at bay, Corbynistas could pretend that Hamas is a group of anti-imperialist resistance fighters – that it didn’t mean all that stuff in its founding covenant about murdering Jews. The pogrom confronted them with the grisly reality. But rather than admit they got this badly wrong, many leftists chose denial instead. They insisted that Our Hamas would never do something like that, even as they were presented with copious evidence to the contrary.

Then there is the anti-Semitism – the unvarnished Jew hatred that drives many of the fantastical and cynical claims about 7 October. This is Holocaust denial redux. For when people deny or downplay the Holocaust they aren’t just dabbling in a deeply offensive and suspect form of revisionist history. Holocaust denial is anti-Semitism – relying, as it does, on age-old anti-Semitic tropes. Namely, that Jews lie and that they exert some kind of hypnotic sway over Western governments and media. Naturally, this has over recent decades become bound up with anti-Israel agitation too, as the more conspiratorial anti-Semites argue that the Shoah was essentially a hoax designed to guilt trip the West into supporting the founding of Israel. It was grimly predictable that 7 October – the deadliest assault on Jews since the Holocaust – would be denied too; used to demonise Israel as a lying, bloodthirsty nation, just as Jews have been demonised as lying and bloodthirsty for millennia.

7 October wasn’t the first Islamist atrocity to be given the tinfoil-hat treatment. More than 20 years on from 9/11, an alarmingly large number of Americans – let alone people in other parts of the world, who have borne the brunt of the American military misadventures that followed – still refuse to believe the ‘official narrative’ about the murderous assault on the World Trade Center. And yet it’s telling that, in 9/11 too, many conspiracy theorists see the secret hand of the Jews. It was ordered by Mossad, they splutter, in league with Jewish American neocons, desperate to invade the Middle East.

Here we see that the world’s oldest hatred is also the world’s most enduring conspiracy theory – ascribing Jews the role of killers, oppressors and master manipulators. Debunking the 7 October denialists is essential, but it sadly won’t be enough, until we can confront the conspiratorial bigotry that sees lying Jews everywhere.

The West has turned its back on Jews

Over time, it’s highly likely that the Democratic Party, despite the resistance of figures like Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, will become ever more anti-Israel. The nine congresspeople who voted against supporting Israel in the immediate aftermath of the 7 October pogrom were all Democrats. Hamas supporters even succeeded in partially shutting down the California Democratic Party convention this year. In contrast, the strongest support for Israel now comes from Republicans.

Yet it seems like American Jews are not quite ready to jump ship en masse. Instead, some Jewish Democrats have waged targeted campaigns against the most radical anti-Zionists in Congress. By pouring funds into selected races, they have succeeded in eliminating two members of ‘the Squad’ – Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush – and have been active as well at the more local level. From ascendancy to self-defence

In the longer run, these triumphs could prove to be fleeting. One in five younger Americans believes the Holocaust is a myth, while half think Israel should be ‘ended’ and handed to Palestinians. Particularly troubling is the influence of social media. According to Pew, about one in three Latino teenagers says they are ‘constantly’ on the largely pro-Hamas, CCP-controlled TikTok. Overall, in the US, a country where most still support Israel and express positive views of Jews, blacks, Latinos and even Asians express more negative sentiments, particularly among the younger generations.

These tensions make life difficult even in cities historically friendly to Jews. In southern California, where I live, pro-Hamas demonstrations have forced at least one local synagogue to relocate its services, others have been vandalised, while demonstrators halted traffic in the traditionally Jewish Fairfax District. The home owned by Michael Tuchin, president of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), was recently attacked with smoke bombs and spattered with fake blood. Jews in London, Paris, Berlin, Brooklyn and San Francisco have experienced similar attacks.

Progressive, anti-Zionist Jews are a diminishing force and have little future. They now make up roughly 10 to 15 per cent of the campus Jewish population, according to Hersh’s research. Indeed, for many Jews, 7 October spelled the demise of the whole logic of progressive Judaism – the ‘heal the world’ mantra of Reform and liberal Jews. Such heady notions lose their lustre when Jews’ very survival is at stake. Ultimately, Hersh suggests that most anti-Zionist students, being from secular backgrounds and disproportionately ‘nonbinary’, are unlikely to remain deeply attached to the broader community or produce much of the next generation.

Orthodox Jews already largely segregate themselves in selected neighbourhoods and send their children to religious schools. One recent study suggests that, as a percentage of the American Jewish diaspora, the Orthodox community will likely more than double in size by 2063 – reflecting the below-replacement birth rates among non-Orthodox American Jews. On college campuses it’s the Orthodox Chabad, the ministry of the Lubavitcher movement, that is most present.

Of course, most Jews may remain Reform or non-aligned. But in the current circumstance, even left-of-centre Jews cannot be too picky about allies, such as Christian evangelicals or Hindu fundamentalists, who have generally supported Israel and a Jewish presence in the West.

Author Joseph Epstein suggests that the time has come for Jews to practise some ‘self-segregation’, much as in the past. This new inward-looking turn can be seen in the growth of groups like Hatzolah, which provides free security and emergency services in heavily Jewish parts of New York and Los Angeles. Some of the volunteers come from the ranks of the US military as well as the Israel Defence Forces. Throughout the diaspora, Jewish schools and institutions are paying for elaborate security systems.

Jewish geography is also changing. In a remarkable shift, Jewish students are beginning to migrate away from big cities, ditching Ivy League colleges and their equivalents for more tolerant schools in, of all places, the deep South, which tends to be less hostile to Israel and Jews in general. An exodus of Jewish talent and genius – not yet extinct – could now benefit these red states much as America benefited from the Nazi-induced migrations in the 1930s.

Although some Jews, facing a harsh environment, will choose to hide their identity, there are signs that many are coming together across sectarian lines. On some campuses, such as mine at Chapman University and my daughter’s at ultra-leftist Sarah Lawrence College, students – both Orthodox and Reform – are collaborating to present Israel’s side of the story, and to defend their rights on campus.

This is the new reality of a Jewish community that is both more assertive and less progressive. At a time when the diaspora’s glory days have passed, a shift to pragmatic politics and self-defence has become urgent. It marks a return to attitudes and approaches that have allowed for Jewish survival for the past three millenia.

10/08 Links Pt1: The fight for civilisation is only just beginning; Some 80% of Gaza fatalities are Hamas or family members; Ben Shapiro: The 7 Lessons Of October 7

From Ian:

Brendan O'Neill: The fight for civilisation is only just beginning

Even I could not have imagined that left-wingers in my own country would describe Hamas’s Jew-slaying spree as a ‘day of celebration’. Even I did not foresee mobs of upper-middle-class youths on our streets cheering the Houthis, a violently racist movement whose flag grotesquely issues ‘A Curse Upon the Jews’. Even I could not have foretold mobs of Israel-haters assembling outside the Sydney Opera House to chant ‘Fuck the Jews!’, and, worse, the left saying nothing about it. A left that spent the past decade damning everything it dislikes as ‘fascism’ – Trump, Brexit, gender-critical feminism – staying shamefully silent in the face of actual fascism. In the face of the slaughter of Jews, and the rank apologism for it in our own cities. Reprehensible doesn’t cover it.

The West’s moral failures in the aftermath of 7 October were of an entirely new order. They exceeded even my grim fears. They shone a harsh, inescapable light on the retreat from reason and abandonment of Enlightenment many of us have warned of for years. In the hours and days after the pogrom, a dawning, chilling realisation came: the West’s activist class and its educated elites were sympathising more with the pogromists than with the pogrom’s victims. They went from saying ‘Never Again’ to saying ‘All Right Then, One More Time’. The delirium of our post-civilisational era emerged into broad daylight. It was undeniable now: the West is in the stranglehold of a profound moral crisis.

And it continues to this day, the first-year anniversary of that wicked intrusion into Israel. Think about this: today is the anniversary of the worst act of racist violence of modern times, and yet so-called anti-racists will not be marking it. They won’t be putting a black square on their Instagram pages. They won’t hold any vigils. Not one tear will touch their cheeks for the thousand human beings murdered by racists a year ago today. No ‘anti-fascist’ will decry this fascism. On the contrary, they will spend today doing what they always do: feverishly hating on Israel, puking yet more wordy bile on to the Jewish State. They will hijack this day of Jewish remembrance to further their defamatory hatreds of the Jewish nation.

What we have seen over the past year is that when the young in particular are invited to reject Western civilisation, they might very well be tempted into the arms of its opposite: barbarism. When you educate a new generation to be wary of the West, to view our claim to be enlightened as just so much white man’s arrogance and bluster, you might just push them towards the West’s enemies. When you depict Western society as fallen, racist, phobic, shit – as so much fashionable thought does right now – you make anti-Westernism, even violent anti-Westernism, seem exotic, enticing. The sympathy for Hamas on our campuses and streets is fundamentally an extension of the West’s own crisis of meaning, of our denial of our own insights, of our betrayal of our history.

A war for the soul of humanity must now be fought. On two fronts. On the physical front of Israel’s borders, where some of the most regressive movements on Earth, sponsored by the Islamic Republic of Iran, openly lust and agitate for the destruction of the world’s only Jewish nation. And on the intellectual front here at home. In the academy, in politics, in hearts and minds. Only a full-throated defence of the virtues and wonders of Western civilisation might see off the moral derangement of our times and the Jew hatred it has nurtured. We owe it to the dead of 7 October to stand by Israel and repair our own broken societies.

The Failed Concepts That Brought Israel to October 7

One year ago today, an armed force of at least 3,000 men managed to penetrate a hostile border, overrun fixed and mobile defenses, commandeer army bases, and occupy for long hours a broad swath of Israeli territory in which they went house by house and village by village killing, burning, mutilating, raping, and abducting. For Israel, this was both an intelligence failure and a combat failure. A plot involving so many fighters and such careful and rehearsed action should not have been missed by military intelligence, and a territorial invasion, even with the element of surprise, should have been successfully resisted by a standing army well before the horrors of that Saturday reached their unfathomable nadir.

This essay will not look at either the intelligence or the combat failures. Lesson-learning in both of those domains should be straightforward enough. Beyond those limited tactical failures, however, are larger conceptual frameworks that were vigorously held onto in the years leading up to October 7 and that have not yet been entirely abandoned. These mental models weren’t just products of ignorance or applications of prejudice. They were comprehensive conceptual toolkits for assimilating new information and processing policy dilemmas. On October 7, they failed completely. An honest appraisal of them is crucial for any postwar policymaking.

Tactical lesson-learning is relatively easy because it doesn’t require us to abandon cognitive conceptions that we might have a heavy moral investment in. There might be a personnel investment, but personnel can be replaced, especially following a crisis. Bad ideas are different. Dislodging them often involves parting from something central to ourselves.

Even calling them “bad ideas” is an injustice. The failed concepts covered in this essay didn’t lead to disaster because they were obviously bad, but rather because they seemed to work, or at least presented a reassuring front to those who wanted to believe they were working, for so long.

Until the moment they collapsed.

In this essay, I’ll review four interrelated categories of flawed thinking in four expanding circles of blunder. The obvious starting point is Israel’s long-serving prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. He cannot escape responsibility for Israel’s biggest security fiasco ever. But his failings are only part of the story. It is impossible to understand them without understanding the ideological aspect of his governments’ miscalculations about Gaza, especially the way that a particular right-wing religious ideology has distorted Israel’s policy priorities over the last fifteen years or more—and above all in the last two.

Ending the dissection of conceptual dead-ends there would be ideologically appealing to some and ideologically appalling to others, but it would be analytically inadequate. For neither Netanyahu the man nor messianic settler Zionism can tell the whole story. A third set of concepts has characterized the approach to Arab-Israeli conflict resolution of the people and ideas we have come to call the “peace processors.” These ideas—divorced from centuries of accepted practice in conflict mediation—are beloved by establishment liberals in the West who see themselves as genuine friends of Israel and the Jewish people, and whose repeated failures seem to have no effect on these ideas’ shelf life.

But the delusions of the peace processors can’t by themselves satisfactorily explain the failure that has brought the Middle East to such a catastrophic war this past year. For that we need to look at a fourth set of failed conceptions, those of the broader international community, from the UN to all the various self-styled humanitarian organizations, which have focused their efforts in the Arab-Israeli arena on methods that exacerbate conflict rather than mitigate it and that incentivize violence rather than reduce it. The combined result of the international community’s efforts is the creation of a unique form of governance, a veritable new category of constitution, that exists only around Israel’s borders, where non-state militias exercise a kind of sovereignty that leaves them in control of arms but without any institutional responsibility for welfare, education, food, or public utilities and without any moral responsibility not to kill their neighbors or even to protect the lives of their own citizens.

Jonathan Schanzer: The October 8th War

An unfathomable number of keystrokes (we don’t talk about spilling ink because that’s no longer a thing) was devoted yesterday to the anniversary of the October 7 massacre. Appropriately so. That attack by the Hamas terrorist organization kicked off a seven-front war that has now dragged on for a year. However, when historians look back on this conflict, October 8 may be viewed as a more significant marker.

October 8, 2023, was the day that Hezbollah, Iran’s more powerful proxy, began firing at Israel from Lebanon. The volume of fire that Israel has sustained since then is not well understood. Hezbollah has launched an estimated 10,000 rockets, missiles and drones at Israel since the fighting began. Entire swaths of Israel’s northern territory have been evacuated. The damage has yet to be assessed.

This war is still evolving. The Israelis are hammering Hezbollah relentlessly right now, with a combination of lethal air strikes and limited ground maneuvers in southern Lebanon. But this was not the case for nearly eleven months. The way the war evolved in the north was downright bizarre.

Even as Israelis sustained blow after blow from the Iranian proxy, they limited their responses to tit-for-tat, commensurate strikes. This remarkable restraint was encouraged—perhaps ordered—by the Biden White House. Under any other circumstances, the Israelis would have flattened Dahiyeh, Hezbollah’s stronghold in Beirut, long ago. They would have carried out a massive campaign in southern Lebanon to remove the threat along their northern border.

But they didn’t. The Biden White House was petrified of a Lebanon war. The Israelis didn’t want one either. And for good reason. Hezbollah is perhaps the most deadly foe Israel has faced in its entire history. Israeli security officials believe the group’s military capabilities are on par with a mid-size European military (think Czech Republic or similar). The group has (or at least it had) an estimated 200,000 projectiles. It has precision-guided munitions. It has a fleet of underwater and aerial drones. And its fighters have trained alongside the Russia and Iranian militaries.

The Israelis have spent years trying to prevent advanced Iranian weapons from reaching Hezbollah. This was the thrust of the “Campaign Between the Wars” that Israel waged for roughly a decade before the current war erupted. The goal was to delay the inevitable. But that clock ran out on October 8.

Given the gravity of the threat and given that Hezbollah had clearly joined the war less than 24 hours after the Hamas pogrom in southern Israel, there were many in the Israeli security establishment who were inclined to head north to fight Hezbollah immediately after 10/7. Biden said don’t. He set the Israelis on the path of war with Hamas in Gaza, and that postponed the inevitable for a time.

The Gaza famine predicted by September 2024 never occurred. How could the experts have been so wrong?

Back in June, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification said that 342,000 Gazans were in Phase 5 - meaning famine conditions.

They also predicted that the number would increase to nearly 500,000 by the end of September.

Here is their definition of classifying an area with a solid or reasonable evidence of famine:

By their criteria, they believe that hundreds of thousands of people in areas in Gaza definitely have starvation and acute malnutrition, and therefore their experts can assume that the third factor, mortality, is occurring.

If the IPC assumptions are correct, even using the lower June figures, at least 2 people per 10,000 people should be dying every day - either 70 adults of 10 children, every day since June. The total for the past 100 days would be between 7,000 and 14,000 deaths from starvation.

Hamas itself publishes the number of people it says have starved to death in Gaza as part of its daily propaganda posts on Telegram.

On June 15, they claimed 33 deaths from famine.

Today, they claim 38.

Five is a significantly lower number than the 10,000 or so that IPC expected by now, according to their experts.

The lack of deaths of famine indicate that the other numbers they have been receiving on extreme lack of food and acute malnutrition have not been true either, because if they were true, then we would be seeing thousands more deaths than we are.

Meaning that there is a good chance Hamas is even manipulating the medical data in Gaza as a weapon against Israel, perhaps by instructing doctors what they must find in order to help the "resistance."

I don't think the IPC is corrupt. Their methodology is sound. But they never expected that they would be lied to. And when the emotionally charged accusation of famine makes headlines around the world, one can guarantee that Hamas would attempt to do everything possible to put the lie out in public - and they know that the journalists won't look too carefully at data that gets laundered through the objective lens of the IPC.

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!

How the @NYTimes censors calls to violence (and actual violence) at anti-Israel protests

The New York Times reported on the Gaza protests in Manhattan yesterday.

The photo caption says, "Demonstrators blocked streets in Lower Manhattan to call for a cease-fire in Gaza on the first anniversary of the Hamas-led attacks on Israel." The "Cease Fire Now" sign is prominently highlighted as the main photo of the article.

The New York Daily News also shows that same sign. But they show it as it was seen for most of the march - behind several other much larger banners that led the demonstration.

Those banners included:

* Justification of Hamas murders, rapes and kidnappings "by any means necessary."

* Calls to "Globalize the Intifada," a direct call for worldwide violence against Jews and others.

* Calls for "resisting the nakba," another keyword they (and Hamas) use for terrorism.

The NYT didn't even allude to the explicit messages of hate and terror that were forced on thousands of Jewish New Yorkers working in Manhattan yesterday.

It gets even worse. The antisemites harassed Jews mourning the victims of 10/7 by explicitly praising the rapists.

It somehow missed this graffiti at Baruch College saying "October 7 Forever."

The "newspaper of record" says "The protests across the city remained peaceful. " Tell that to Democratic Majority for Israel official Todd Richman who was assaulted and bloodied by a mob of "peaceful protesters."

The NYT pretends that the anti-Israel protestors call for peace and an end to war. But Within Our Lifetime and other protesters want war. They want violence. They want another intifada. They justify and call for more Hamas terrorism. They want more October 7ths. They say that as clearly as possible.

They just don't want Israel to defend herself.

It takes effort to highlight the sign the Times want their readers to see and to crop out the ones that disprove their thesis that the protests were for an end to war. It takes effort to avoid reporting on what is right in front of their faces. The NYT went through all that effort.

Because they are reporting propaganda, not the truth.

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!

Hamas lies about Gaza deaths. The Gaza Health Ministry lies about Gaza deaths. And @NPR lies about Gaza deaths, too.

NPR reports:

Since the start of Israel's military response, the country's attacks have killed at least 41,000 Palestinians in Gaza, including 16,500 children, according to Gaza's Health Ministry.

Really? Because the last time the Gaza health ministry reported on the number of children killed, at the end of August, it said there were 11,355, not 16,500.

Here's its English language poster from its Telegram channel:

Unless 5,000 kids were somehow killed in the past month, NPR is lying.

It isn't the health ministry that makes up the statistics of 5,000 fake dead kids. It is from Hamas' media office, meaning its propaganda arm - and that is who NPR is quoting, not the slightly more reliable health ministry.

Hamas posted Monday:

A whole year and the occupation has killed more than 16,000 Palestinian children, including 171 infants who were born and martyred during the genocidal war, as well as killing more than 11,400 female martyrs.

Let's do some math, for the innumerate NPR editors.

Hamas claims 41,800 total dead, of whom 16,000 are children and 11,400 are women. That adds up to 27,400 women and children.

The MoH counts 34,344 total as of August 31, of whom 17,652 are women and children.

That means Hamas counts 9,748 more women and children than the MoH did - but Hamas counts only 7,456 more total deaths than the MoH.

In other words, if every single person killed between August 31 and October 7 was a woman or child, Hamas would still be claiming 2,292 more women and children deaths than are mathematically possible.

In short, Hamas is provably lying. And NPR not only accepts the lies, but it claims that they came from the ministry of health and not some anonymous guy wearing a keffiyeh who literally makes up numbers from a bunker with Internet and a Telegram account.

------

Not that the health ministry is above lying. While according to its August 31 numbers, women and children make up 51% of the total deaths, in its October 7 post it claimed "the number of martyrs reached 41,909, more than 60% of whom were children and women."

Time for some more math. If this is true, it means that over the past five weeks, they verified the gender and age of 7,565 more deaths - of whom about 7,490 were women and children (60% of 41,909.)

That's 99% of all the new deaths being women and children. It is statistically impossible for the women and children death rate to be 51% for a year and then 99% in five weeks.

So the ministry of health is not exactly trustworthy, either, and we see it from their own posts being impossible to reconcile with each other.

Yet the media is uninterested in doing what I just did in five minutes with a spreadsheet.

Because the media isn't interested in the truth. They are interested in a narrative of Israeli evil, and the Hamas propaganda institutions are convenient ways to fulfill that desire.

The numbers are simply too good to check.

(h/t Irene)

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Drama in Lebanese Reddit groups

Reddit has at least two Lebanese groups. One is r/lebanon and the other is r/lebanese.

The Lebanon group is surprisingly sane. It seems to allow Israelis into its discussions and it has plenty of people who, while certainly no fans of Israel, hate Hezbollah and how it has put them all at risk.

The Lebanese group, and similar groups like r/lebanesememes, are essentially pro-Hezbollah mouthpieces and they do not allow a civil conversation with Israelis or even Lebanese who hate Hezbollah.. They believe and repeat whatever conspiracy theories they can find; they are convinced Hezbollah is destroying the IDF and they think Israel staged October 7 for some weird political gain no one can quite describe.

People in the Lebanon group have decent conversations on such topics as

Serious question: How would a permanent peace treaty with Israel be detrimental to Lebanon?

If Hezb gets wiped out, what's next for Lebanon?

Why were they [Hamas] in Lebanon? Ffs we need peace. Don't involve us in your wars.

People in the other group (and other Arab groups) complain about the Lebanon group as having been taken over by hasbara. They even make antisemitic jokes about it:

It is considered bad form on Reddit for non-members of a country to hijack a country subreddit. I don't see Israelis doing that but they do seem to participate respectfully.

There is one subreddit where Israelis and Lebanese are equally welcome: r/ForbiddenBromance. Discussions about the Palestinian issue are banned to keep things civil. And they give instructions for Lebanese to use the group safely - technically it is a violation of Lebanese law to talk with an Israeli altogether! Reading that group gives one hope for peace one day.

But then going sand reading r/Lebanese makes that optimism dry up very quickly.

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!

10/07 Links Pt2: Israel is surrounded by genocidal enemies; It's Been a Year of Failure for 'Pro-Palestine' Activism Following October 7

From Ian:

Israel is surrounded by genocidal enemies

These are not isolated statements. Time and again, the leaders of these Islamist movements express their overt anti-Semitism and their desire to see the annihilation of Israel. This is completely in line with a core tenet of Islamist doctrine which holds that Jews are inherently wicked and bent on Islam’s destruction.

Islamism is a thoroughly reactionary political outlook. As Syrian-born German political scientist Bassam Tibi has argued, Islamism aims to make the world subservient to God’s will. That makes it uncompromisingly hostile to notions of democracy, individual rights and popular sovereignty. Islamism also has little regard for the nation state. It aims instead for the creation of a nizam Islami, that is, a new global Islamic order.

According to this totalitarian outlook, the Jews represent evil. Israel has to be destroyed and the power of the Jews crushed as a precondition for Islamism to achieve its goals. This helps explain why such a diverse range of Islamist movements – from Sunni Hamas to Shia Hezbollah – put so much emphasis on attacking Israel.

It also helps us to understand Hamas’s motives on 7 October. Hamas does not define itself as a Palestinian movement, but as the Palestinian arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, an international Islamist movement based in Egypt. It sees the destruction of Israel and the slaughtering of Jews as necessary for the realisation of its broader Islamist aims.

Indeed, Hamas’s Islamism helps to explain its callous indifference to actual Palestinian lives. After all, it launched its murderous pogrom on southern Israel knowing that it would provoke a massive response from the Israeli army. Hamas had spent many years preparing the battlefield for precisely this Israeli counter-attack. Central to this preparation was the creation of a truly huge tunnel complex in which Hamas could hide itself below the Gazan population. As I noted back in March:

‘The scale of Gaza’s tunnel complex is monumental. London has a population of about nine million people, who are served by a Tube network of about 250 miles, of which about half is in tunnels, with the rest above ground. In contrast, Gaza has a population of just over two million people. But it is estimated to have about 300 miles of tunnels. So Gaza has about a quarter of London’s population, but about two and a half times the length of its tunnels.’

Notably, civilians are not allowed to shelter in these tunnels. Despite what Hamas apologists claim, it is happy to use ordinary Palestinians as human shields on a massive scale.

Hamas could have stopped the war at any time if only it had surrendered and released the hostages it captured on 7 October. Instead, Hamas leaders have kept going in the knowledge that they have a degree of personal protection. They also know there is a significant audience in the West receptive to the poisonous claim that Israel is engaged in a genocide.

This is a grisly inversion of the truth. Over the past year, it is clear that there’s only one side intent on annihilating a whole people. And that’s the alliance of violent Islamists menacing Israel at every turn. They must not win.

It's Been a Year of Failure for 'Pro-Palestine' Activism Following October 7

To add to the series of disastrous mistakes, non-Palestinian "allies" joined this unhelpful discourse, inflaming tensions and empowering extremist voices within the "pro-Palestine" movement. These groups and individuals often adopted contradictory ideologies and political beliefs, including leftists, Islamists, and even white nationalists. They were all strangely united in using Gaza as a vehicle to grow their platforms and posture as allies of the Palestinian people.

Not all pro-Palestine activism is pro-Hamas; the problem is that extremists have gone unchallenged by most pro-Palestine Arab and Muslim organizations and voices. This dereliction of duty by people and institutions is a dangerous abdication of the movement to a radical minority that has hijacked the Palestinian cause. Pragmatism, mutual humanity, and empathy are often considered treasonous or cowardly. Anyone who deviates from the script dictated by this pro "resistance" crowd is immediately attacked and delegitimized as a "Zionist sell-out," instilling fear in many to keep quiet lest they face the onslaught of threats, attacks, and risks to their safety.

The harassment and threats I have received in the past year are something that most people could not withstand. However, the more I am attacked, the more I am determined to speak out and never back down—because I love my people and believe in the justice and urgency of the Palestinian cause.

It should not be controversial to condemn an Islamist terror organization that has tortured its people, and criticism of Hamas should not be equated to supporting the Israeli war in Gaza or siding with Israeli policies.

Empathy for Israeli victims of terrorism does not take away from the horror taking place in Gaza. Numerous Israelis and diaspora Jews have been steadfast and sincere allies throughout this past year, especially when I lost dozens of my family members in Israeli airstrikes.

There is still time to adjust course and build bridges with diverse communities to achieve a pragmatic outcome that serves the Palestinian people while acknowledging Jewish and Israeli rights and grievances.

It's time for a new way that breaks the entrenchment of the two sides' narratives and cuts across the divisive rhetoric that has destroyed this discourse.

Palestinians are tired of being perpetual victims.

Tehran’s Tactical Knockout: Weaponized Pharmaceutical-Based Agents

As early as the 1980s, the U.S. intelligence community documented the ways in which Iran deployed chemical weapons for tactical delivery on the battlefield. Nearly 40 years later, U.S. officials formally assessed that Iran was in non-compliance with its Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) obligations, pointing specifically to Tehran’s development of pharmaceutical-based agents (PBAs) that attack a person’s central nervous system as part of a chemical weapons program. Over time, concern about this program has increased, with reports to the Organisation for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), statements by multilateral groups such as the G7, and a variety of U.S. government reports and sanctions. Today, with Iran’s proxies wreaking havoc throughout the region, officials worry Tehran may have already provided weaponized PBAs to several of its partners and proxies. Such a capability, tactically deployed on the battlefield, could enable further October 7-style cross-border raids or kidnapping operations. With the region on edge following the targeted killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, followed by an Israeli ground campaign targeting Hezbollah infrastructure along the border, and the Iranian ballistic missile attack on Israel, concern about the use of such tactical chemical weapons is high.

Since at least 2005, U.S. authorities contend, Iran has conducted extensive research and development of pharmaceutical-based chemical agents (PBAs), primarily anesthetics used to incapacitate victims by targeting the central nervous system, in violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention.1 While Tehran contends its PBA program is allowed under an exception for developing crowd control tools for law enforcement, Iran has been called out—along with Russia and Syria—for developing these dual-use chemical agents by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).2 While the issue has received scant public attention, the U.S. State,3 Treasury,4 and Defense5 departments, as well as the Office of the Director of National Intelligence6 and the G7,7 have highlighted the issue and begun taking action against Iranian entities tied to this activity.

Iran’s weaponization of PBAs, however, is no longer just a matter of research and development. Beyond its R&D program, Iran now appears to have produced fentanyl-based or other types of weaponized PBAs and provided these to partners and proxy groups that may have already used them in several cases in Iraq and Syria.8 At home, Iranian journalists have investigated the poisoning of thousands of school-aged girls with some suspecting the symptoms displayed suggest the involvement of PBAs (some believe this was an Iranian government response to a protest movement, while the Iranian government claims it was an attack by unspecified ‘enemies’).9 Now, after a year of near-daily rocket fire by Hezbollah into northern Israel, Israeli authorities fear Hezbollah may attempt an October 7-style cross border raid into Israel from Lebanon in which the group could use Iranian-manufactured PBAs to incapacitate and kidnap Israeli soldiers deployed along the border, and enable fighters to penetrate farther into Israel to attack civilian communities.10 In the post-October 7 security environment, U.S. officials have prioritized the issue of Iran’s weaponization of PBAs in their diplomatic engagement at multinational fora like the OPCW and in bilateral engagements with allies around the world. The stakes are now higher still after the targeted killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and the Israeli military maneuvers in southern Lebanon aimed at rooting out Hezbollah military infrastructure there.

This article briefly explains what pharmaceutical-based agents are, and explores the dangers posed by weaponized PBA’s as tactical battlefield weapons developed by Iran. Based on declassified CIA reports, the article explores the history of Iraq’s use of chemical weapons against Iran, Iran’s own development and deployment of chemical weapons, and concerns that Iran has provided weaponized PBAs to its partners and proxies. This led the United States to take a leading role calling out Iran’s weaponized PBA program, which became a more immediate national security concern for Israeli in particular in light of Lebanese Hezbollah’s ‘Plan to Conquer the Galilee.’ This year, the U.S. intelligence community inserted a warning about Iran’s chemical weapons program, including incapacitating agents, in its 2024 annual threat assessment. All of which means far more multilateral and national-level actions are needed to counter Iran’s development of PBAs and its transfer of these dangerous agents to partners and proxies.

10/07 Links Pt1: After the October 7 pogrom; We expected Hamas to kill Jews. We didn’t expect Americans to celebrate it.

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: After the October 7 pogrom

Writing the Jews out of their own unique suffering like this — and even blaming them for it — is another ancient trope of Jew-hatred. But O’Neill doesn’t stop there. He probes yet more profoundly into the sickness — and discovers a truth that few have identified. This is that antisemitism causes jealousy.

I have myself written about this — that people complain “the Jews have sucked up all the victimhood in the world and left none for anyone else”. Crazy, or what? But as I wrote, faced with the Nazi genocide of the Jews and the complicity or indifference of the west in enabling it to happen, there are people who respond by wanting what, in their warped view, the Jews were given in response — an apparent shield, provided by the charge of antisemitism, against being blamed for anything bad they actually do.

These Jew-haters believe that antisemitism lets the Jews get away with it.

Get away with what, precisely? Well, all the things that antisemites believe about the Jews but aren’t allowed to say and, they believe, are true — for example, that the Jews hurt others in their own interests but hide it behind the charge of antisemitism. The Jew-haters (who purport merely to hate Israel) want that get-out-of-jail-free card for themselves. In other words, as I concluded, rampant Jew-hatred isn’t just an outcome of intersectional victim culture. It squats at its very core.

O’Neill writes:
We are living in an era of Holocaust envy. The ascendancy of the politics of victimhood has nurtured a palpable hostility towards the idea that the Holocaust was uniquely barbarous. In an era in which victimhood confers moral authority, when the way you secure both social sympathy and state resources is by claiming to suffer “structural oppression”, it simply won’t do that the Jews have a singular claim over the gravest instance of victimisation in history. And so their claim on the Holocaust must be questioned, weakened, loosened. What about the other victims of Nazi murder? What about other genocides? Challenging the distinctive nature of the Holocaust, even demoting the Holocaust further down the pecking order of human agony, is the grim inevitable consequence of a cult of competitive grievance in which accruing ever-more tales of pain is the way you move ahead.

There’s much else in O’Neill’s savage analysis of the west’s reaction to the October 7 pogrom — the betrayal of feminism by the refusal to acknowledge the rapes of the female Israeli victims, the cult of “keffiyeh chic” as the ultimate cultural appropriation, and the genocidal streak of the student “snowflakes” who preposterously claim they endure trauma from “micro-aggressions” such as the failure to use their preferred pronouns.

O’Neill views the moral obscenity of the reaction to October 7 as the confluence of Islamist and radical western thought — an alliance between one of the most barbarous and reactionary creeds on the planet with the ideologies of “decolonisation” and critical race theory to seek the destruction of the Jewish state as the forward salient of a war against civilisation and humanity itself.

Brendan O’Neill hasn’t just provided a valuable analysis of the west’s cultural meltdown. He is in himself a health-giving antidote to the poison coursing through the cultural elites of Britain and the west. Bravo.

Seth Mandel: Defining October 7

What was October 7, 2023?

In a sane world, the question would be unnecessary. Unfortunately, we live in a world in which Amnesty International—one of the leading “human rights for everyone but the Jews” organizations around the globe—marked the first anniversary of the Hamas attacks with a video that is perhaps the best single example of why we are in a battle to define the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust.

In the video, a woman who’s speaking for a group of marching anti-Israel protesters says: “Don’t let anyone tell you this all started on the seventh of October 2023.”

What is “this”? Believe it or not, she never says. Rather, she launches into a diatribe against Israel’s founding 76 years ago and its continued existence. Later, she says: “And when there is no accountability, there is no reason to change, or to stop. And that’s why, one year on, Israel has escalated its attacks on Lebanon leading to more devastation and death.”

One year on from what, exactly? Where did Lebanon come into the mix? Again, she never says. And on some level, we understand: Her implicit defense of the barbarism of that day is genuinely evil, but as long as she doesn’t say it explicitly she can still look herself in the mirror.

The coopting of Oct. 7 by Hamas’s supporters around the world is why we have to say, and keep saying, what exactly happened that day. It’s what motivates one of the many worthwhile documentaries about Oct. 7, 2023, Pierre Rehov’s Pogrom(s).

Rehov’s documentary is a worthy expression of the horror and the sorrow and the devastation because its premise is also that none of “this” began on Oct. 7, 2023. Hence the title of the film, which not only describes the horrors but attempts to name them.

In the film, Richard Rossin, the former head of Doctors Without Borders, tells the viewer that Oct. 7 was far more than a terror attack. Dalia Ziada, a prominent pro-democracy activist in Egypt during the Arab Spring turmoil, offers: “What happened on October 7 was a genocide attack.”

Perhaps the film’s best attempt to categorize that day comes from Sarah-Masha Fainberg of Tel Aviv University: “Hamas operatives intentionally chose the modus operandi of the pogromists of tsarist Russia and of the Einsatzgruppen during World War II, to reactivate a deep sense of Jewish vulnerability.”

It’s true, Oct. 7 didn’t begin on Oct. 7, 2023. But as Fainberg notes, it also didn’t start in 1948 with Israel’s rebirth. It was the continuation of the long march of the oldest hatred.

In that sense, there is something almost mystical about it. In every generation they rise up to destroy us, and here they are rising up again. Still, Rehov’s film warns against taking that too far and thus removing from the Palestinians their agency. Rehov interviews Yuval Bitton, the former intelligence head of Israel’s prison service and a man who has spent many hours in that capacity with Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar, who masterminded Oct. 7. Bitton was also one of the Israeli doctors who helped save Sinwar’s life while he was in an Israeli prison.

“Whoever defines [Sinwar] as a psychopath gives him a gift,” Bitton says. “That’s basically saying that he didn’t know what he was doing.” But that, Bitton says, is plainly untrue. “Sinwar is not a psychopath. Sinwar knew exactly what he was doing. This is part of their worldview.”

By “this,” Bitton means: The wanton murder, by hand, of 1,200 innocents and the kidnapping of over 200 more men, women, and children. By “this” he means what another captured Hamas operative says when asked what the terror group had planned to do with women captives: “To whore them. To rape them.” By “this” he means the killing spree so savage that emergency responders found teeth and scalps at the kibbutzim that came under attack, kindergartens covered in blood, charred human remains and piles of ashes.

Bari Weiss: A Year of Revelations ‘We expected Hamas to kill Jews. We didn’t expect Americans to celebrate it.’

Someone asked me the other day how I planned to commemorate October 7. I found myself speechless, befuddled by the question.

How do you offer an elegy when the war is not yet over—and 101 hostages, those still alive and the bodies of the murdered, are not yet home? How do you remember a catastrophe when it is still unfolding? How do you mark a past event that feels as though it was a prelude to a much deeper darkness, whose dimensions we are still discovering? How do you look at something with a sense of distance when it has revealed so much, so close to home?

The genocidal war launched by Iran and its proxies a year ago this morning began with rocket fire and a ground invasion by Hamas battalions who carried maps of every kibbutz and village. These maps, made by Palestinians who worked inside Israel, told them where the daycare centers were, where the weapons were stored, which families owned a dog. After several thousand terrorists, targeting civilians, had raped, murdered, and kidnapped, they were followed by waves of ordinary Gazans—to borrow Chris Browning’s phrase—who played their role in a day of slaughter with millennia-old echoes in Jewish history.

Just look at the terror on the face of Shiri Bibas, clinging to her nine-month-old baby Kfir and her four-year-old son Ariel—an image that flashes across my eyes when I put our children to sleep.

I do not mean to say that the more than 1,200 human beings murdered by Hamas terrorists on that day—at a music festival, in their beds, in shelters where they sought safety—are symbols of history or politics. Only that what happened on that day—what Hamas did—was exactly what they had always said they would do in their founding charter, which calls for the genocide of the Jewish people. In stealing the Bibas family, and in butchering and maiming and raping and burning their neighbors, the terror group was doing exactly what it promised.

The promise of America was to give “bigotry no sanction,” as our first president wrote in 1790 to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island. “May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

But on October 7, 2023, the enemies of Washington’s vision—of America’s founding impulse—began to reveal themselves.

As news of the scope of the slaughter was still registering, and the tally of hostages still being made—the final count: 240 people from 40 countries carried off like barbaric spoils of war—progressive groups here at home and across the West began to celebrate.

More than 30 student clubs at Harvard put out a letter holding Israel “entirely responsible” for the massacre. Israel. Not Hamas. Israel. This was on October 8, as Hamas terrorists were still roaming Israel’s south, and Hezbollah began its assault on Israel’s north from Lebanon.

Surely it had to be some terrible mistake, a sick prank. But the statement was sincere. And it wasn’t an anomaly.

October 7: A Year of Free Press Stories

A Year Ago Today, Terrorists Stole My Son

There are two videos that capture seconds of the terror my son experienced that day.

In the first one, terrorists are seen outside the shelter, throwing grenades into it one after another, while shouting at someone sitting on the ground outside. Gunshots can be heard in the background. The Hamas men throw grenade after grenade at the young men and women hiding in the shelter, but they are thrown back out—though in the video you cannot see who is deflecting them.

Another horrific video shows Alon being dragged by his hair across the ground outside the shelter by a terrorist in plainclothes. Another, wearing camo fatigues and a green Hamas headband, helps him lift my son into a white Toyota pickup truck. A third terrorist joins in to hit him before two of the terrorists raise their guns and point them at Alon, before the camera pans back toward the shelter. There is blood on him—on his face and on his shirt—but it is hard to make out his face.

For a time, that was all we knew. Later we learned the name of the hero who deflected those grenades. He was Aner Shapiro, and he was 22 years old. He was able to throw seven grenades out of the shelter, but died when the eighth exploded in his hands. He had come to the festival with his dear friend, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who Hamas murdered after 325 days in captivity.

Was my son Alon kept with Hersh in the tunnels? Is he with Or Levy and Eliya Cohen right now? I have no idea. And I try desperately not to think of his gruesome abduction, or how he has spent the past 365 days.

Instead I try to think about his beautiful blond hair and his green eyes. I think about how funny he is and how much he loves people. I think about how excited he would get about things, and how he would just light up—like with cars, which he’s been obsessed with since he was two years old. Or about cooking and surfing, and of course, music. I think about how I played Beethoven and Mozart for him while he was in my womb.

I think about how, after he finished his army service and saved up some money working at a luxury hotel in the south, he decided to travel to Asia, a common destination for young Israelis. But unlike most of his friends, he did it alone. He told me, “I want to see how I can be with myself, and cope with myself.” He loved it—he did a trek in Nepal and traveled around the south of India and Sri Lanka. He met up with so many people there, new friends and old. He had a big appetite for life, and an ability to find beauty in every experience. It’s hard to find a picture of him where he’s not laughing.

Two months after my son was stolen, a few of his friends arrived at my house to give us a key to their new apartment. That’s where his room is, waiting for him. The last time I saw him, at around eleven o’clock on the night of October 6, Alon played his piano for us a bit before leaving for the festival. He played a cover of Yehudit Ravitz’s “Song Without a Name.” It was beautiful. He left the piano open and it’s been open ever since, waiting.

After a year of the terrible, terrible conditions he has suffered, I don’t know if he will want to continue living as he did before. But if he does, it’s all waiting for him when he comes home.