Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, October 09, 2024

10/09 Links Pt1: Those Darned Disobedient Israelis; Iran's attack was aggressive, our response will be a deadly surprise; Sinwar resurfaces, seeks guarantees for his life

From Ian:

Israel at war: democracy in action

This idea might come as a surprise to those who get their news about the Middle East solely from the mainstream media. The only Israelis who ever appear on the TV news here, in between the constant coverage of suffering Palestinians, are those protesting against the Israeli government and demanding an end to the war.

The mainstream-media narrative is basically that this is ‘Bibi’s war’, only kept going by Israel’s unpopular prime minister, ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu, as a cynical ploy to save his own political skin, postponing his fall from power and possible imprisonment. They want to reduce Israel’s war to the level of just another sordid government scandal. But that could hardly be further from the truth.

It is certainly true that Netanyahu has many opponents at home. Prior to the Hamas massacres of 7 October, Israeli society was politically deeply divided. In the immediate aftermath of the pogrom, Netanyahu was bitterly criticised for leaving Israel open to attack. Those divisions have not gone away, and even Netanyahu has acknowledged that his government will be called to account.

Yet those issues have not undermined the consistently widespread public support for Israel’s counter-attacks against Hamas and Hezbollah. The one thing that most Israelis agree upon, apart from the urgent desire to return all of the hostages taken by Hamas, is the need to defeat Islamist terror. Indeed, in the wake of the recent attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon, in response to the indiscriminate shelling of Israeli civilians, Netanyahu and his Likud party have enjoyed a resurgence of support in the opinion polls. Away from party politics, every poll shows strikingly high levels of public support and admiration for the IDF.

Israelis support the war because they appreciate that what’s at stake is the survival of their democratic state. Most are dismissive of the naive talk in the US and Europe of a two-state solution; they know that the Islamists are not really fighting to create a Palestinian state, but to wipe the sovereign Israel off the map – ‘From the river to the sea’ – and to drive the Jews into the Mediterranean.

In one remarkable recent poll by the Jerusalem Centre for Security and Foreign Affairs, 68 per cent of Israelis said they supported a direct attack on Iran if its Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, continues launching rockets at Israel. More than two-thirds of respondents opposed the notion of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict after 7 October. And 92 per cent thought the Palestinian Authority that governs the West Bank – the Western powers’ preferred partner in a future Palestinian state – could not be trusted to prevent a repeat of the 7 October massacres. That is hardly surprising, given that some PA officials openly celebrated the attacks, while the leadership tried to blame Israel for staging the pogrom against its own citizens.

The anti-Israeli crusade in Europe and America has brought together all that is worst within our democracies, from the Western elites’ self-loathing to the merger of old-fashioned Islamic anti-Semitism with the new version of that prejudice spread by woke identity politics. Deserting Israel now means abandoning our own society’s democratic values, and siding with barbarism against civilisation.

By contrast, Israel at war is democracy in action, a beacon for us all. The people of Israel had to fight to establish the Jewish state in 1948 and have been fighting to defend it ever since. As citizens with an historic, hard-fought stake in their society, they have risen to the challenge despite their deep divisions. It is the common cause which the Israeli people have made in this war that has given the IDF the will to fight on, with more military success than many experts expected.

The link between popular engagement with a war and military success has been a feature of history, ever since the poor sailors of Ancient Athens, the ‘birthplace of democracy’, defeated the mighty Persian Empire at the naval Battle of Salamis in 480 BC. The Israelis are showing it once more. Reports suggest that many younger Israelis, of the peace-seeking generation that was dancing at the Nova music festival when Hamas murderers attacked, have since come round to the view that Israel must defeat its mortal enemies to survive.

Behind their empty words of sympathy for the 7 October victims, Western rulers’ retreat from fully supporting Israel in its wars against Hamas and Hezbollah reflects the elites’ loss of faith in fighting for national sovereignty and democracy at home. Those of us who want to stand up for our democratic civilisation, warts and all, should stand foursquare with the Israelis. To paraphrase the scriptural words Netanyahu used in his speech at the United Nations two weeks ago: Israel is a blessing, not a curse, in the war to defend Western democracy.

Seth Mandel: Those Darned Disobedient Israelis

Today’s New York Times carries a long reflection on Biden’s inability to control events in the Middle East over the past year, framing the problem as one of “influence” and its limits. “Even as the United States has continued to arm Israel, the administration has been repeatedly thwarted in reining in Mr. Netanyahu, who has sidestepped or dismissed entreaties from the White House to de-escalate the conflict and leave room for a postwar creation of a Palestinian state,” writes reporter Michael Shear. “And with Israel now poised to carry out retaliatory strikes against Iran, the wider war that Mr. Biden sought to avert is at hand.”

Apparently Biden and Bibi haven’t spoken since Aug. 21. The president feels defeated by his inability to solve two riddles, according to Shear: “How do you pressure an ally facing a threat to its existence? How far should you go if that ally ignores your advice?”

Biden, Shear writes, didn’t fulfill his intent to get all the hostages home. His humanitarian interventions in Gaza flopped. He told Israel not to give in to a rage similar to America’s own after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, and yet “decisions by Mr. Netanyahu and his cabinet mirrored those of the post-9/11 American politicians who felt that only war would ensure long-term security.”

But there’s one specific category of failure that, if Biden looks closely enough at, he will discern the root cause of all the others. Shear writes: “Mr. Biden’s message then included a blunt warning to Iran and others in the Middle East not to use the fighting in Gaza as an excuse to attack Israel… In the year since, those warnings have proved ineffective. Iran has twice launched missile attacks directly against Israel, including last week, and Mr. Netanyahu is now weighing options for retaliatory strikes. Hezbollah’s near-constant barrage of attacks from Lebanon over Israel’s northern border has triggered a vast Israeli military response over the past several weeks, including the killing of Hezbollah’s leader.”

Biden’s problem, it turns out, isn’t Israel’s defiance—it’s Iran’s defiance. Israel resisted going into Gaza until Hamas got tired of waiting and invaded Israel instead. Israel didn’t go into Lebanon until Iran made clear that it would be the only way to return displaced Israelis to their homes in the north. Iran-backed attacks have continued also from Iraq and Yemen, as well as from Iran itself.

Nobody has been asking Biden or Harris why the Iranians don’t listen to them, perhaps because, outside of sanctions relief, we aren’t supplying them with foreign aid. But that doesn’t explain why these questions aren’t asked just as pointedly about Qatar. The U.S. is Qatar’s largest foreign investor and largest source of imports. In 2022, Biden designated Qatar a Major Non-NATO Ally, a status that brings with it economic benefits, usually in the areas of trade and loans.

It does not explain why these questions aren’t asked of Egypt, a recipient of U.S. aid that enabled this war in the first place by allowing Hamas to connect Gaza to Egyptian territory via underground tunnels and which has mostly declined to play any number of humanitarian roles in the past year.

Turkey is a recipient of US aid and a member of NATO. Does it take marching orders from Washington? How about the Palestinian Authority? Does the US have no sway over anybody? A major obstacle to getting an answer to the question about US influence is that we only seem to ask it about the one country under assault and surrounded by genocidal enemies: Israel.

WSJ Editorial: The Defeat of Hamas and the Iranian Axis Is the Real Peace Plan

Hamas's massacre last Oct. 7 has taught the West forgotten lessons about deterrence, political will, and the illusions of a liberal, peaceful world. The world should never forget the videos of Hamas's atrocities. The terrorists livestreamed as they slaughtered the defenseless. They killed 1,200 people and took 251 hostages, 101 of whom remain in captivity. Hamas is proud of this handiwork and would repeat it if it could.

The reply of respectable liberalism has been to urge de-escalation, ceasefires and a two-state solution, and to blame Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu when they don't materialize. It's as if Hamas, Hizbullah and their patron in Iran don't exist.

As long as Iran pursues war, Israel must defend itself aggressively to survive. Hizbullah fired on Israel for 11 months. After a week of Israeli success in response, Mr. Biden called for a ceasefire there too. But if Hizbullah remains entrenched in southern Lebanon, how can there be peace?

Israel's best option is to degrade the Iranian axis's capabilities and deny it safe havens. Israel will have a better chance at a durable ceasefire when its enemies know they will suffer more than Israel does when they attack. The only path to a ceasefire, and a broader Middle East peace, is an Israeli victory over Iran and its terror network. Iran is bent on America's destruction as much as it is on Israel's. The Jewish state is the frontline of the West, and we can't let it lose.

Disclaimer: the views expressed here are solely those of the author, weekly Judean Rose columnist Varda Meyers Epstein.

Joe Biden could not have chosen to end his statement commemorating the first anniversary of October 7 in a more inappropriate manner. “I believe that history will also remember October 7th as a dark day for the Palestinian people because of the conflict that Hamas unleashed that day.”

A dark day for the Palestinian people? Really Joe? Really??

Of all the things to say on a day marking pogroms against the Jewish people so depraved and vicious it is an obscenity to describe them. October 7^th didn’t happen to just any people and it certainly didn’t happen to the “Palestinian” people. The events that took place on October 7^th happened to the Jews.* It was arguably the single darkest day in Jewish history, the darkest day the Jewish people have ever known.

But it seems Jewish tragedy is fair game for a crooked hack like Joe Biden to exploit for his own gain and/or nefarious pleasure. Because one thing cannot be in doubt. If we know the facts, Joe Biden knows them too.

And the facts are this: On that “dark day,” regular “Palestinian people” stormed the fence and came flooding into Israel just like the “real” terrorists, killing, raping, maiming, and burning Jews alive.

The Free Beacon’s Andrew Tobin wrote of this massive civilian assist to the terrorists on October 24, 17 days after that “dark day for the Palestinian people” occurred (emphasis added):

As Hamas terrorists carried out a highly choreographed massacre in Israel on Oct. 7, they received a source of support that amplified the horror that took place that day. A mob of ordinary Palestinians spontaneously joined in what became the deadliest pogrom against Jews since the Holocaust, according to videos, eyewitness accounts, and the Israel Defense Forces.

Whereas the Hamas terrorists wore uniforms and carried military-grade weapons, the Gazans who followed them into the Jewish state were dressed as civilians and mostly unarmed, two officials from Israel's devastated Gaza border region said. Young men with knives, overweight dads, and at least one elderly man on crutches were among those who exploited Hamas's rampage to create a second wave of carnage that rivaled the barbarism of the professional terrorists.

The IDF declined to provide details about non-Hamas Gazans’s involvement in the Oct. 7 attack. But IDF spokesman Jonathan Conricus confirmed to the Washington Free Beacon that large numbers of Gazans who were not members of any terrorist group entered Israel and participated in the atrocities.

"They did what you say they did," Conricus said.

Gadi Yarkoni, mayor of the Eshkol Regional Council, which serves most of the Gaza border communities, told Tobin that there was no difference between the Gaza civilians who raped, burned, and murdered Jews and their Hamas “terrorist” counterparts (emphasis added):

"The second wave of Arabs who came into the country were just as cruel as the terrorists of the first wave. We saw that it was not only Hamas who came to slaughter us. It was all the residents of Gaza, including people who worked in our kibbutzim.

"I saw a scene where a Gazan civilian chopped off a man's head. It took him several attempts to detach the head from the body," said Yarkoni.

There is ample footage of these “ordinary” Gazans looting, killing, and assisting the “terrorists” in kidnapping Israeli civilians including women and children.

Security footage from 7/10 shows ordinary Gaza citizens entering Be'eri and mass looting the Kibbutz. pic.twitter.com/lvgaC05uxJ
— The Mossad: Satirical and Awesome (@TheMossadIL) October 16, 2023

These “not terrorist” Gazans, including their “not terrorist” children, cheered, jeered, and praised Allah as Jews were brutalized and defiled in ways not seen before. They, the “not terrorists,” burned Jewish homes. “Not terrorists” kicked the dead bodies of the murdered Jews, and “not terrorists” spat on Jewish hostages as they were driven through the streets of Gaza.

If you can stomach it, take a look. (This is actually milder than much of what is out there.)

Tobin also spoke with an eye witness to the bestial acts of “Palestinian people” that day. (emphasis added):

Raz Cohen, a 24-year-old former Israeli commando, saw both Hamas terrorists and ordinary Gazans kill and rape revelers at the Supernova music festival in Re'im, where at least 260 people were slaughtered. After escaping the Hamas terrorists, Cohen hid in a bush with a group of friends for almost seven hours. He watched as a gang of Gazan civilians—men wearing Adidas and armed only with knives and axes—raped and murdered a young Jewish woman.
"While they were raping and killing, they always laughed. I can't forget how they laughed," Cohen told the Free Beacon.
Several members of Cohen's group later ran from the bush and were caught by the same gang of Gazans. He said he heard his friends' screams as they were tortured and stabbed to death.

"You know when you hear the screams of someone who is dying," said Cohen, who was eventually rescued by Israeli soldiers.

We’ve looked at the first part of Joe Biden’s appalling reference to October 7 as a tragedy shared by Jews and “Palestinians.” Now let us examine the rest. Here is the “dark day” comment again, this time with the emphasis on the second part of the sentence:

“I believe that history will also remember October 7th as a dark day for the Palestinian people because of the conflict that Hamas unleashed that day.”

Joe calls the natural response to what happened that day as a “conflict,” as if there were parity between Israeli Jews and Hamas terrorists, Israeli Jews and Gazans. But the IDF is not targeting the “Palestinian” people. The IDF is not doing to the “Palestinian” people what the “Palestinians” did to the Jews on October 7th. Jews and “Palestinians” are not two kids in the sandbox who won’t stop fighting, and who share equal blame for the death and destruction. The Jews are not the aggressors, here.

Joes tries to distract from these facts, by using the word “unleashed.” Translated, Biden blames Israel for making Gaza pay for what Hamas started. It was Hamas that unleashed the violence.

But that’s not true, is it? The horrors unleashed on October 7 were unleashed on Jews by Hamas terrorists and ordinary Gazans alike. To compare the suffering of Jewish Israelis to the subsequent suffering of Gazans is therefore nauseating. The Gazan people support Hamas. They elected Hamas. They raped Jews and burned babies with and alongside Hamas on October 7. They are culpable.

Anyone who wanted to could and did take part in the barbaric cruelty of the “dark day” that was October 7 and that is exactly what the “Palestinian” people did, relishing every dark evil moment.

This is how Biden gives license to a Jew-hating world to hold the Jews responsible for Gazan suffering; to believe that it is somehow unfair for the Gazan people to be forced to bear the onus for the October 7 atrocities.

This is neither a fair nor true characterization of events as Biden well knows. No matter. His comments are all now nicely recorded for posterity.

On the one-year anniversary of October 7, and in the waning days of his demented presidency, Joe Biden still has enough cussed meanness in him to call October 7^th, a “dark day” for the “Palestinian people,” though the ordinary citizens of Gaza stood shoulder to shoulder with the terrorists and attacked the Jews with gusto.

Which leaves us with the question: Who is a terrorist if everyone is a terrorist?

From a moral standpoint, the answer is obvious. It makes no difference if the attackers are Hamas operatives or just plain old, regular “Palestinians.” Terror is terror. And the “Palestinian” people are now reaping the natural consequences of what they sowed on that very dark day for the Jewish people.

*As we know, there are a significant number of migrant workers who were also savaged and or kidnapped on October 7^th. Perhaps in the frenzy, the October 7^th rapists and killers got to a point where they didn’t care who they brutalized. Or perhaps these workers were considered tainted by association with Jews. None of this changes the fact that this day belongs squarely within the confines of Jewish history, alone.

Turkish media remains obsessed over Jews - and the thought that Israel will invade Turkey

A common theme in Turkish media is the absolute conviction that Israel is planning to attack and try to take over Turkey.

I had found two separate "proofs" of this:

1. A wacky Christian who hung around with Herzl suggested to him that the northern border of the Jewish state should be "the mountains facing Cappadocia." There is no indication that Herzl took him seriously.

2. The Torah mentions that Israel conquered the Hittites in Canaan, and some people in Turkey think that since at their height the Hittite empire reached parts of Turkey, Israel wants them..

Now, I found a third.

Abraham and his father lived in Haran before God told him to go to Canaan. Most people identify Harran with a town in southeast Turkey with that name. So, we are confidently told, "Harran is as important to Jews as Jerusalem."

To get to Harran, Israel has to take over Lebanon and Syria.

See? It all makes sense!

(I always thought Harran was Hauran in Syria, but it isn't - that is spelled differently in Ezekiel.)

Meanwhile, in another Turkish paper, the Quran Verse of the Day is one that is interpreted as saying that Jews "will be humiliated wherever they are, and they will incur Allah’s wrath and will be condemned to humiliation. This is because they denied the revelations of Allah and killed the prophets without cause.

This is because they rebelled and transgressed."

And just in case that wasn't explicit enough, they add a graphic quote from Necip Fazıl Kısakürek, a

Turkish poet and novelist:

The translation is, "Did you say Jews? They are the cursed ones who do not hesitate to set the world on fire to fry their eggs."

Turkish media is obsessed with Jews, and with inciting against Jews. I sure wouldn't schedule any flights through that country.

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 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.

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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!

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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)

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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.

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