Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, October 22, 2024

.@UNICEF continues to fabricate 6,000 imaginary dead children in Gaza based on nothing but Hamas press releases

As we reported in June, UNICEF's home page still claims that 14,000 children were killed in Gaza even after the Gaza health ministry changed its story and said at the time that there were less than 8,000 children killed - a number that UN OCHA had already been publishing.

One would think that UNICEF would have corrected their figures to be in line with other UN agencies over the past four months.

Oh, who are we kidding? UNICEF does fundraising based on the number of children it can claim Israel attacked, so it has no incentive to bother telling the truth.

Egypt's Youm7 interviewed UNICEF spokesman Kazem Abu Khalaf who said, “There is a deliberate targeting of children, whether by killing or wounding them. The estimates so far are that the number is close to 17,000, but there is a need for further updates.”

Where did he get the 17,000 figure from? It wasn't the Gaza health ministry. It wasn't UN-OCHA whose own count is at about 11,000.

The only source for the 17,000 figure is Hamas.

UNICEF gets its statistics straight from Hamas. Not the health ministry, not OCHA, not a trusted NGO - no, UNICEF trusts a terror group to have accurate figures.

Perhaps some reporter can do their job and, you know, ask them.

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10/21 Links Pt2: How to end the hundred years war on Israel?; How Terrorist Cutouts Colonize the Campus; The Liberal Jew in 2024

From Ian:

Andrew Pessin: How to end the hundred years war on Israel?

After several decades of a successful legal career, David Friedman became the U.S. ambassador to Israel in 2017 under then-President Donald Trump and orchestrated major diplomatic advances, including moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights and helping to broker the 2020 Abraham Accords. In his new book, One Jewish State, Friedman presents ongoing challenges and obstacles, which has already inspired a new party vying for seats in the upcoming World Zionist Congress elections aptly named One Jewish State.

Friedman challenges “the most widely accepted but fatally flawed concept in Middle Eastern diplomacy: the two-state solution.” Though the two-state appeal from a certain perspective is clear, the case against it, from the pro-Israel perspective, is compelling. The Palestinians just don’t want it. They never have. The Palestinian leadership and most Palestinians do not accept the existence of a Jewish state in any borders. Any state given to them will only advance their agenda of destroying the Jewish state. If that wasn’t clear before the massacre in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, it is indisputably clear now. Israel gifted them Gaza, and Hamas used it to produce mass murder. That is what they did with their proto-“state” and what they say they will do with any future state.

For anyone who supports Israel and the right of Jews to live in this region in safety, a Palestinian state should be a non-starter.

So, what’s left if we jettison the two-state solution? Basically “one state.”

One Palestinian state “from the river to the sea” is obviously off the table for the pro-Israel side. Friedman does not consider a “binational state,” but one can speculate why: That is not a Jewish state, and his starting point is that there must be a Jewish state. That leaves, then, the “one Jewish state.” The basic idea is that Israel must exert its sovereignty over Judea and Samaria. (Gaza is a separate and difficult case, as Friedman acknowledges in a chapter devoted to it, which we shall not treat here.)

In addition to the main negative argument above, there are positive arguments for the idea. These boil down to this: Only under Israeli sovereignty will Palestinians be able to lead full lives of dignity and prosperity, ultimately producing a peaceful outcome for all. Israel is a vibrant democracy “with a track record of respecting the civil, religious and human rights of its minority population, almost all of which is Arab.” Most Arab-Israeli citizens “patriotically support living in their country,” where their standard of living, opportunities and prosperity are orders of magnitude greater than that of their Arab neighbors in surrounding countries, including in the territories administered by Palestinians themselves. The idea is to extend the same situation—i.e., Israeli sovereignty, to the Palestinian Arabs in Judea and Samaria.

With one essential difference. Israeli Arabs are full citizens of Israel with equal rights. Palestinians in Judea and Samaria cannot be. A secure Jewish state cannot swap the security risk posed by Palestinians in Judea and Samaria for the demographic risk of making them full citizens. They may become “residents” of Israel but cannot become full citizens.

Here we reach the point at which critics will explode, “Apartheid!”

Friedman addresses this through a deep dive into the case of Puerto Rico, which he sees as a possible model for the “One Jewish State.” Roughly, Puerto Ricans stand to the United States as Palestinians in Judea and Samaria might stand to Israel. The United States has sovereignty while Puerto Ricans have extensive rights of self-government but not collective national rights to vote in U.S. elections. Why does it work? Because Puerto Ricans live better than they would if they were entirely independent. They derive political, economic and civil benefits, and enjoy all the same basic civil rights as any U.S. citizen but pay less in federal taxes in exchange for not being full citizens. With Israeli sovereignty, Palestinians would have the civil rights guaranteed by Israel’s Basic Law on Human Dignity without the collective right to self-determination; they would pay less Israeli taxes; and they would not vote in national elections.

Friedman also asks which is a better option for Palestinians: Creating a Palestinian state that is likely both to fail by every metric and be overrun by terrorists and thus reproducing Gaza or absorbing those living in Judea and Samaria under Israeli sovereignty and providing them resident status?

How a year of hatred sparked a Jewish renaissance

When it came to attending the March Against Antisemitism in November, Rollinson was initially “nervous. I had an intrinsic fear that something would happen, but having felt isolated at times, I wanted to be around people who understood. It was an amazing feeling.” Since October 7, she has also started wearing a Star of David around her neck for the first time.

Here, Rollinson is in good company. Actress Felicity Kendall has worn hers every day too. She recently explained that soon after the massacre she was walking through a London park when a Jewish woman approached her and thanked her for wearing a Star of David around her neck. “I was quite taken aback. Would people say anything like that to someone wearing a cross or a turban? It made me think, right, I am wearing this all the time now, and I do,” she said in a July interview. She also attends synagogue weekly. A year on, she tells the Telegraph: “It gives me peace and a routine of meditative thinking.’’

Across the UK, Jews are seeking solace – and not just in their social lives. Anti-Semitism in the workplace has emerged as a new issue over the past year. Dave Rich is head of policy at the Community Security Trust, which protects British Jews from anti-Semitism and related threats. “Lots of workplaces and employment sectors now have new Jewish WhatsApp networks that emerged after October 7. Jewish employees need a space to discuss everything that has been happening,” he says.

Ruth* recently set up a group in her company. “Immediately after October 7, I felt really uneasy about going into the office,” she says. “Everybody there knows I’m Jewish and a Zionist, so I felt very self-conscious.” Her colleagues were going on pro-Palestinian marches and although they never said it outright, she felt there was a feeling amongst them that the Hamas attacks were somehow justified, which she found deeply offensive. “My boss was very understanding, but said there wasn’t anything she could do, and that I could work from home when and if I needed to.”

But Ruth didn’t want to shy away. In the end, she and a colleague set up a dedicated Jewish network. “It gives us a feeling of solidarity, despite the pervading unfriendly atmosphere amongst some of my colleagues,” she says.

So affected was former bookshop-owner Joanna De Guia by the relationship with colleagues in her industry, that she changed careers entirely. “I was hurt and angry by the silence of my friends who worked in publishing,” she says. “After October 7, I waited for my “allies” – such as those in the gay community – to jump in and support me. I have hundreds of people in my social circle, but barely 10 contacted me. So I either left my comfortable spaces, or felt pushed out.”

Rewind to September last year and De Guia, a married mother of one, lived a similar way to many Jews in Britain. “I was Left-leaning and barely celebrated the Jewish festivals,” she says. Nor – like many Jews in this country – did de Guia think very much about Israel. “I’d been for a couple of beach holidays in my late teens,” she says. “But I didn’t feel particularly politically aligned with the country.” October 7 changed that.

De Guia eventually sold her business and now works full-time at the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, combating anti-Semitism on university campuses. “Our goal is to change the weather in British universities,” she says. Universities in particular have been a difficult arena for young Jews, with pro-Gaza encampments hollering against “genocide”, and demanding their administrations cut ties with Zionists. In the meantime students have found comfort in university Jewish societies. President of the Union of Jewish Students Sami Berkoff explains: “Students have needed somewhere to join with other Jewish students and just be. Jewish students have as much of a right as any other to have the full student experience.”

Rabbi Naftali Schiff, the founder and executive director of Jewish Futures, a family of 10 educational and social organisations dedicated to engaging young Jewish people in a positive way, has also found that engagement has been unprecedented. “Over the past year, we’ve arranged dozens of Friday night meals for students on campuses across the country and events for young professionals,” he says.

“Like many people, I was shocked at the level of vitriolic hate that punctuated some elements of the demonstrations in the streets and on the campuses after October 7,” he says. “Let’s just say it’s been a trip down the memory lane of anti-Semitism. Young Jews have felt targeted, experiencing disconcerting levels of concern, especially on campuses. For the first time in my own life, when waiting at an airport with my beard and a yarmulke [skullcap], I found myself looking over my shoulder with a genuine sense of anxiety.”

However, Rabbi Schiff strongly feels that “the UK is a wonderful place to live as Jews. It’s easy to look at the darkness, however the authorities by and large have been very sympathetic to our concerns and I am confident we shall turn this corner.’’

Since October he has kept two treasured items in his pocket: “A cigarette case, which my grandfather received when demobbed from national service in the First World War, and my father’s dog tags from the Second World War.” Both are symbols of his British pride. Rabbi Schiff adds: “It’s a reminder that we are privileged to live in a liberal democracy and a reminder to be appreciative that in Britain we can live freely as Jewish people, contributing to society as we go. I feel grateful to live in a country like Britain.”

Seth Mandel: How Terrorist Cutouts Colonize the Campus

In other words, all the relevant information about Samidoun was known. That’s why, in fact, Columbia suspended four students associated with the “Resistance 101” event on campus and evicted them from university housing facilities. (They had been warned in advance multiple times not to host the event.)

Samidoun, then, is part of a much larger problem. These types of organizations, whether officially designated as terrorist entities or not, have the same aims and the same general practices and certainly the same worldview—and get cash from the same sources and through the same progressive dark-money-donor clearinghouses. Samidoun itself will get taken off the donee list now (one hopes), but it will be replaced by an identical organization. There’s a whack-a-mole element to the pro-Palestinian cutouts in the West, and it enables groups like the PFLP to stay one step ahead of the very governments that have already banned them but can’t seem to stop them from raising money.

For legal purposes, of course, the terrorism designation means everything. But from the standpoint of basic societal decency, the designation changes nothing. The progressive protest movement and America’s elite universities are full of well-funded extremist groups going on recruiting sprees.

In May, the Wall Street Journal reported that the “wave of pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses came on suddenly and shocked people across the nation. But the political tactics underlying some of the demonstrations were the result of months of training, planning and encouragement by longtime activists and left-wing groups.”

Samidoun was but one of those groups—albeit one unconcerned with subtlety. “There is nothing wrong with being a member of Hamas, being a leader of Hamas, being a fighter in Hamas,” Kates said. “These are the people that are on the front lines defending Palestine.” She added that America’s university students and activists must “build an international popular cradle of the resistance.”

Among the other groups helping plan and train the future resistors of America were the national Students for Justice in Palestine, whose individual chapters have been among the most brazenly anti-Semitic and pro-violence participants in the tentifada.

At UCLA’s pro-Hamas encampment, members of Faculty for Justice in Palestine “had organized self-defense teams on the front lines.” One of the affiliated professors compared the current generation of goonish anti-Zionist trainees favorably to his own: “We had a lot of affect and feeling. But there’s a different kind of rigor to these students that is really striking.”

The triumph of terrorist front groups in recruiting and training and fund-raising is a success story to some and a cautionary tale to others. American institutions are increasingly treating it as the former.

10/21 Links Pt1: How Israel Got Its Mojo Back; Poetic justice for the Satan of Oct. 7; Former UN peacekeeper: 'We were completely at Hezbollah's mercy,'

From Ian:

Jonathan Schanzer: How Israel Got Its Mojo Back

After months of watching Israel struggle to gain the upper hand, supporters of the Jewish state became euphoric, heartened by Israel’s stunning achievements. But this is not a time to celebrate. Wars are not linear. Isolated victories in battle do not lead inexorably to winning in a wider war.

Israel remains small and vulnerable to attack. The Iranian regime still arms and directs proxies across the Middle East. Its “ring of fire” still surrounds Israel and continues to darken its skies with drones, missiles, and rockets.

Israeli ground forces are now fighting another tactical battle, this time in Lebanon, against a Hezbollah terrorist army that is better trained and equipped than perhaps any other foe they have encountered since the founding of the state. Terror attacks launched against Israel inside its borders and on the West Bank continue to be carried out by Iran’s Palestinian proxies. These battles will claim lives, erode morale, and sap the country’s resources. In other words, a brutal war continues.

Then again, Iran’s proxies are weakening. The soldiers of the IDF understand the stakes, and they are fighting accordingly. The Islamic Republic, meanwhile, lacks a competent air force, and it has not seen a war on its on soil since the Iran-Iraq War, which was fought from 1980 to 1988 and concluded only when that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini chose to “drink from the poison chalice” and end a war he knew he could not win.

The Israelis, through capabilities and innovations developed with painstaking patience and mastery over decades in anticipation of this moment, now aim to neutralize the Iranian regime’s long war launched on October 7. Some in Israel merely seek to get Supreme Leader Ali Khameini to drink from Khomeini’s chalice. Others seek nothing less than the downfall of the Islamic Republic. Whatever surprises the Israelis have in store to achieve that ambitious end are unknowable to us. But one thing we do know: Israel has gotten its mojo back.

Col. Kemp: Harris doesn’t know how to defeat Hamas. Israel should press the advantage

With Hamas’s hard-line leader out of the picture, is it now time for Israel to sue for peace? Both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris think so and have together fired the starting gun for what will no doubt be another round of intensive pressure on Israel to end the war.

In both cases their judgement so far in this war has not been unimpeachable. For example, Biden and Harris demanded that the IDF should not enter Rafah earlier this year and threatened “consequences” if it did. Prime Minister Netanyahu was having none of that and, in the face of domestic political and military opposition as well, ordered an offensive against Hamas inside Rafah. With minimal civilian casualties, that move destroyed the rump Hamas military formations in the city and severed the terrorist lifeline beneath the Egyptian border.

It also led directly to the death of Sinwar. Immediately after that both Biden and Harris tried to claim some of the credit for the terrorist leader’s elimination but the reality is that if they’d had their way Sinwar would still be alive today.

The priority for President and Vice President, though, is not victory for Israel in an existential war, but victory for Harris at the polls, which they calculate a supposed peace deal would help secure.

But now is certainly not the time for Israel to give even lip-service to the exhortations of the miscalculating Biden and Harris. As in the past their demands that Israel stop fighting rather than calling for Hamas’s surrender give hope and strength to the terrorists, and to their Iranian masters, and help prolong the bloodshed. Instead, with Hamas reeling, now is the time to intensify the fight and drive home the advantage.

Netanyahu’s policy of attrition against the terror armies while eliminating their leadership, whether in Gaza, Lebanon or Iran, is certainly working. What would not work in any of these places is the Western obsession with ceasefires, peace deals and de-escalation. Against jihadist enemies, all such appeasement of those dedicated to your annihilation can at best only store up the same threat for another day, or an even greater one. We only have to look at the nightmare of Afghanistan, now a haven for global terrorist gangs after Biden catastrophically ceded the country to the Taliban.

In any case, Hamas doesn’t seem to want to play ball with the Biden-Harris desire for a peace deal. In the wake of Sinwar’s death, senior terrorist Khalil al Hayya made clear that Hamas will not free the hostages until the IDF has completely withdrawn from Gaza and released Palestinian terrorists from custody. That was of course Sinwar’s position and it’s not clear why Biden and Harris should think whoever takes over from him will be any less hard-line. Optimism is not a strategy.

Brendan O'Neill: The tragedy of Palestine

The category error of these garment-renders is to view Hamas as a ‘national liberation movement’. In truth, Hamas aspires not to ‘free Palestine’ but to subjugate it to the unforgiving dominion of Islamist diktat. Hamas’s aim is not the creation of a democratic, independent Palestine but the ruthless subsumption of all Palestinian territory – and Israel, of course – into the ideology of the Caliphate. By its own confession, Hamas longs to enforce not the rule of the Palestinian people but the rule of God. Until the ‘sovereignty of Islam’ is imposed ‘in this region’, it decrees, there will be ‘nothing but carnage, displacement and terror’. So it’s Islamism or death, bowing down to Allah or butchery – does that sound like liberation to you?

As I argue in my book, After the Pogrom, Hamas is ‘as far from an anti-colonial movement as it is possible to get’. Where past national liberation movements aspired, at least, to represent ‘the people’, Hamas conceives of itself as a narrow instrument of God. Where those old movements dreamed of creating a nation, Hamas dreams of subjecting a nation to God’s will – we will ‘raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine’, it promises (my italics). It wants to impose on Palestine the ‘sovereignty of Islam’ – the sovereignty of the edicts of Sharia with their blind intolerance of manmade law, women’s rights and democracy itself.

The current war is a direct consequence of the Islamist delusions of the hysterics of Hamas. In their eyes, Gaza is not a terrestrial plane that ought to enjoy self-governance – it’s another front in the cosmic showdown between the ‘sovereignty of Islam’ and the ‘Jews’ usurpation of Palestine’. And the people of Gaza are not individuals deserving of life and respect – they’re mere martyrs-in-the-making, fleshy fodder for Hamas’s fanatical war on the Jews. In the words of Article 8 of the Hamas Covenant, ‘death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of [our] wishes’. Sinwar himself updated this deathly creed following the outbreak of war between Hamas and Israel when he said dead Gazans are ‘necessary sacrifices’ to get ‘the Israelis right where we want them’.

Hamas is not a liberation movement – it’s a death cult. This is the central difference between the old armies of national liberation and Hamas’s army of God: where the former believed their people had a right to live freely, the latter thinks their people should embrace death happily. Statehood is no longer the ‘loftiest’ of goals – death is. Gazans are promised not democracy, but martyrdom; not independence, but oblivion. In declaring a religious war on Israel, in slaughtering 1,200 Jews on 7 October, Hamas brought war to Gaza and reduced an aspiring nation to a theatre of holy warfare, and its people to bit-part players in the Hamas psychosis, underlings of fundamentalism, whose highest duty is to die.

Hamas is not alone in subjugating Palestine to its own lethal narcissism. Its Islamist hijacking of the Palestine issue is more than matched by the woke hijacking of it by the lost elites of the West. They, too, bend Palestine to their vain agendas. Palestine has become the omnicause of our cultural establishments. It’s the issue through which they express their self-absorbed angst with the West itself, with modernity, with this thing we call ‘civilisation’. On our campuses, in our streets, in the media world and art world, ‘Palestine’ has become a vessel for the fashionable anxieties of the privileged. Like Hamas, these ostentatious pitiers of the Palestinians turn Palestine from a real place with real people into an abstract moral landscape in which what really matters is my hang-ups, not their aspirations.

This is the fate of the Palestinians, then: physical fodder for the holy warmongering of Hamas and moral fodder for the virtue-signalling of the West’s elites. Playthings of both the Islamist theocracy and the cultural aristocracy. And thus do those who claim to be on the side of Palestinians dehumanise them far more than Israel does, turning them into a stage army for fundamentalism, whether of the Islamist variety or the woke variety. It is hard to see where the Palestinians go from here. The dream of a Palestinian state – or even a two-state solution – has been broken on the wheel of nihilism.

Gazaflation: Now Gaza doctors are claiming 62,000 Gazans have starved to death! (Real number according to Hamas: 37.)

Earlier this month, World Beyond War published an article claiming that the death count from the Hamas-run sources was vastly underestimated.

Palestinian Fatalities in Gaza 41,615
Palestinians Missing/Estimated Dead Under the Rubble 10,000
Estimated Deaths from Starvation: 62,413
Estimated Deaths from Lack of Access to Care for Chronic Diseases: 5,000
Estimated Deaths from Infectious Diseases, Maternal/Neonatal Deaths, and Others: ?

We've looked at the bogus "10,000 under rubble" statistic before. But where do they get the 62,413 estimated to have died of starvation?

Following the links, it comes from a "Costs of War" article, which took it from a letter to Joe Biden by Gaza physicians, which included it in an appendix.

Here's what the appendix said:

The fact that Palestinians in Gaza are so hungry that many have died, or that this is the
result of deliberate Israeli policy, is not in dispute. However, the scale of this starvation is
not widely appreciated.

The IPC released reports on Gaza in January, March, and July 2024. Death from starvation of course takes time, and it is not clear how many people in Gaza have died from starvation and its complications or how many will die in the future. Still, according to the IPC technical manual: in the catastrophe phase of food insecurity the crude death rate rises to at least 2 deaths per 10,000 people per day, and in the emergency phase the crude death rate rises to 1-2 deaths per 10,000 people per day. The IPC data is summarized in the table below:

In total it is likely that 62,413 people have died of starvation and its compilations in Gaza from October 7, 2023 to September 30, 2024. Most of these will have been young children.

So they are estimating the number of people starved based on IPC projections which were never true, which were in turn based on faulty data!

Hamas, which has every incentive to exaggerate the number of people who starved to death, still claims only 37 deaths from starvation since October 7. That is a far cry from 62,413.

No one seems to be asking where, exactly, these 62,000 people are buried, or how many are children, or where the photos of thousands of starving children with distended stomachs are like we see in real famines, or why Al Jazeera isn't creating lists of thousands of dead, starved children since they have full access to Gaza hospitals.

No, the methodology of these "professionals" is to find any source claiming high fatalities, no matter how absurd, and make it look official by reproducing it in a respected venue from where it can be in turn republished and laundered as if it came from a more reliable source than the original just making up numbers out of thin air. (Yes, the article also quoted the debunked Lancet letter claiming 186,000 deaths in Gaza inJuly.)

And let me be perfectly clear: The supposed medical professionals who claim the 62,000 number literally just made it up based on a probably purposeful misunderstanding of how the IPC classification system works.

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!

An op-ed in Lebanon's L'Orient Today is understandably upset at Israel for bombing their country:

We have every reason to oppose the ongoing Israeli offensive and even more to the prospect of a possible occupation of our territory by a foreign force. Israel is bombing Lebanon, erasing entire villages, and invading its lands, and this cannot in any case — regardless of what one thinks of Hezbollah — be tolerated, let alone approved.

But, unusually, it then lays partial blame on Lebanon's woes on the Lebanese tolerating Hezbollah taking over their country for Iran.

However, for decades, we have tolerated and even ended up normalizing a totally absurd situation that grants a foreign country the right to decide on war or peace on our territory. Admittedly, we did not have the means to escape an Iranian grip imposed by force, but nothing obligated us to offer it institutional and popular cover. To say that the issue of Hezbollah could not be resolved at the Lebanese level is one thing; to accept this ‘fait accompli’ while waiting for the regional situation to evolve is another. The attacks, coups, and threats of civil war have contributed to making the unacceptable acceptable.

But the fault does not lie only with Iran and Hezbollah, who at least deserve credit for having had a clear project and for having done everything to implement it. It falls on us, the Lebanese people, across all backgrounds, for having succumbed to fear, relativism and especially opportunism. This war may be that ‘of others,’ but we are indeed the primary responsible parties!

The immediate priority is to silence the weapons. We have no leverage over Israel or the United States, and therefore our only chance to achieve this as Lebanese is to convince Hezbollah to accept its defeat. The likelihood that this will work is infinitesimal, but we at least have a duty to try.

Only in a second phase, once a cease-fire is established, will we need to engage in a great dialogue to rethink the Lebanese formula with the aim of laying the foundations for a viable state. A state that protects and unites all communities and that can present itself as a credible alternative to the militia party. Because one of the outcomes of this national dialogue, if it ever takes place, must be the disarmament of Hezbollah and Lebanon's departure from the Iranian sphere of influence.

The Lebanese people have more power than they realize.

As I have argued for months, Hezbollah is sensitive to Lebanese public opinion, because they claim that they are the "resistance" protecting Lebanon from Israel. Hezbollah's "honor" does not allow them to back down from war because of Israeli airstrikes, but that same honor can be utilized to do what the Lebanese people demand from it.

Since then, the facade that Hezbollah built that it was defending Lebanon has been torn down, and it is obvious to everyone that Iran is calling the shots. But Hezbollah still maintains the fiction that it is a Lebanese party dedicated to Lebanese interests. That is its entire claim to legitimacy.

Hezbollah has taken advantage of Lebanese fears of another civil war and used that fear to take over the country. Yet there doesn't have to be another civil war: the Lebanese people simply need to take to the streets to tell Hezbollah to stop shooting at an Israel that they cannot possibly defeat. The people need to show anger at Hezbollah for holding them hostage.

Articles like this are still rare in Lebanese media. Most Arabic media are still pretending that Hezbollah is winning, by highlighting and amplifying stories like how Haifa's shopowners are losing business from rocket warnings.

The Lebanese have turned timid in the wake of years of internal strife. But the entire world will benefit if they regain their pride and tell Hezbollah that its "resistance" is not wanted and that they do not want to be an Iranian satellite. Hezbollah won't give up, but it could stop the fighting now and give the Lebanese a chance to take back their 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!

JVP's disgusting and absurd attempts to subvert Sukkot - and trivialize antisemitism

This photo of a "sukkah" at Columbia University made the rounds yesterday:

People immediately pointed out that the "sukkah" was built under a tree, invalidating it - a sukkah must be under the sky.

Others noted that there was apparently no "schach" roof covering, but this photo was taken while it was being constructed. They did build a roof - but it wouldn't be valid either since it doesn't cover the required percentage of area.

The students from JVP and other organizations pretended that they were doing this for religious purposes. “With Columbia’s chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace still unjustly suspended by the University, anti-Zionist students struggle to access space for Shabbat services and other religious programming,” they said. Building a non-kosher sukkah sort of proves that this is all a lie.

And they freely admit that they are twisting religion for political purposes. They handed out flyers with a prominent quote from Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, saying “Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and to ruin the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehoods." However, in that same 1969 essay, Heschel said,

A great mystery has become a reality in our own days, as God’s response to a people’s prayer. After nearly two thousand years the city of David, the city of Jerusalem, is now restored to the people of Israel. This marvellous event proclaims a call for the renewal of worship, for the revival of prayer. We did not enter the city of Jerusalem on our own in 1967. Streams of endless craving, endless praying, clinging, dreaming, day and night, midnights, years, decades, centuries, millenia, streams of tears, pledging, waiting—from all over the world, from all comers of the earth, carried us of this generation to the Wall, to the city of Jerusalem.

I don't think they will be quoting those words.

Sukkot is a pilgrimage festival where Jews would travel to the Temple in Jerusalem. You simply cannot separate Sukkot from the Jewish people's deep attachment to Israel.

Similarly, they placed pictures of the seven species on the "sukkah" - seven species of the Land of Israel.

While it is humorous to see such ignorance and hypocrisy, the haters' blatant attempts to subvert Jewish rituals to attack basic Jewish concepts is thoroughly offensive and disgusting.

But at Northwestern University, they made it even worse.

The university repeatedly warned JVP that the sukkah they planned to build was a violation of policy, since JVP is not a registered student group and the sukkah did not adhere to their display guidelines. They built it anyway. When the university took it down, the hypocrites claimed that the university was antisemitic!

By pretending that this was an antisemitic attack on their beliefs, JVP is attempting to trivialize the actual antisemitism happening on campus for Jewish students who really cannot freely walk around campus without being harassed by these fake Jews and their pro-terrorist partners.

Their false claims that they are simply wanting to perform Jewish rituals endangers real Jews doing real Jewish rituals. There have been hundreds of instances where synagogues and other Jewish spaces have been protested and targeted - including violently - throughout the world over the past year.

By pretending that they are the victims, not the perpetrators, of antisemitism, they are deliberately creating an environment where antisemitism can flourish and where real Jews are afraid.

Which is the entire point.

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!

Hitler, Saddam, Zarqawi, Bin Laden and Sinwar: Palestinian Arabs supported all of them at their height

Time magazine this week is putting Yahya Sinwar on their cover, with a red X across his face, something they have only done four previous times: Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein, Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi and Osama bin Laden.

What do they have in common?

Palestinian Arabs supported all of them when they were at their most murderous.

For Hitler, I'm not only talking about the infamous Nazi corroborator the Mufti of Jerusalem. Palestinian Arabs helped Nazi parachutists in Palestine and they demanded the British free them when they were captured. And in 1945, for V-E day, the Palestinian Arab regiment joined the march of celebration - but displayed the swastika and a picture of the Mufti, much to the embarrassment of the British.

Saddam? Palestinians loved him, and he loved them back. Palestinians overwhelmingly supported Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, resulting in their being ethnically cleansed from that country.

Palestinians also supported Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. The earliest poll I can find is 2003, when a far higher percentage of Palestinians - 72% - said they had confidence in Bin Laden than any other Arab group.

And of course Palestinians have shown great love for Yahya Sinwar. Last December, Sinwar had an approval rating of 69%, it only went down to 65% in June.

Palestinians consistently support the world's most notorious monsters.

This isn't exactly what the "right side of history" looks like.

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10/20 Links: Sinwar Planned Israel's Annihilation; Amnesty comms director behind official BDS campaign; Ireland has become a hostile environment for Jews

From Ian:

Supporting Palestinians Has Turned into Normalizing Terrorism

The West opposes violence to achieve political aims. The international community always drew a clear line between advocating for a Palestinian state and supporting Palestinian terrorism.

But Palestinians never rejected terrorism, and therefore, they never achieved a state.

The Palestinian Authority, a governing body created with world support when it pledged to oppose and actively stop terrorism from its people, has instead actively supported and incentivized Palestinian terrorism with its "pay to slay" program of stipends for Palestinian terrorists.

It has yet to condemn the Oct. 7 terror attacks, and many of its leading officials publicly praised them.

While most Palestinian supporters in the West won't directly say they support Palestinian terrorism, they use words that effectively mean the same thing to Palestinian ears.

In demonstrations around the world, Hizbullah and Hamas flags are proudly raised, and chants for the death of Jews and supporting resistance by any means are regularly heard on the streets of Western cities.

Bassam Tawil: The Biden-Harris Administration Owes Israel's Netanyahu An Apology

"Again and again we see that Israel absolutely made the right call in not heeding the Biden administration and the rest of the world's insistence that the IDF not invade Rafah." — Lahav Harkov, Israeli journalist, X, October 17, 2024.

"Pretty rich after a year of undermining Netanyahu, saying he MUST go to a ceasefire, MUST deescalate, trying to stop Israel from going into Rafah WHERE SINWAR WAS KILLED, and Kamala boycotting his joint address to Congress - now Biden & Harris have the nerve to congratulate him for setting the path to peace. I'm sure the phone call sounds something like 'You were right Bibi [Netanyahu], we apologize,'" — US Rep. Mike Waltz, X, October 18, 2024

Israel's killing Sinwar and destroying Hamas's military infrastructure in Rafah sadly show how steadfastly the Biden-Harris administration was trying to prevent Israel from achieving victory over the Iran-backed Islamist murderers and rapists responsible for the deadliest attack against Jews since the Holocaust.

Netanyahu deserves credit for ignoring the warnings and threats by Biden and his senior officials. Thanks to Netanyahu, Hamas has been significantly debilitated and Sinwar has been eliminated, making the Middle East a safer place. It now remains to be seen whether the Biden-Harris administration will reconsider its failed foreign policies and apologize to the Israeli prime minister for attempting to undermine his efforts to combat terrorism and bring more security and stability not only to Israel, but the entire Middle East as well.

Israel Fights Alone, Carrying by Itself a Catatonically Suicidal West

Little Israel is showing the world how to win again – and saving civilization and a free way of life into the bargain .... let Israel keep winning!

The problem with the JCPOA was, of course, its "sunset clauses." They assured Iran that it could legitimately have as many nuclear weapons as it can produce in just a few short years.

The West has left Israel to fight a war that should never have been Israel's alone. The Western nations, through diplomatic miscalculations, the need for votes, cowardice and a fear of conflict, have essentially outsourced their responsibilities for maintaining global peace to Israel, watching from the sidelines as the conflict ramps up.

If the West is too fearful or reluctant to engage directly in the fight against injustice, terror, and tyranny, the very least it can do is stand with Israel and stop trying to sabotage it at every turn. Support should not be limited to words but include political, diplomatic and military backing. By failing to support Israel fully, the West is empowering exactly those countries working to revise the world order -- from one of freedom to one of tyranny -- by displacing the West.

It is a grotesque reflection on the international community, particularly the Biden-Harris administration and the European Union, not to be offering unequivocal support. Israel's struggle is not just for its own survival but for the security and peace of the Free World. The West, through its passivity, is failing not only Israel, it is hollowing out its own survival.

Islamic Jihad celebrates 2,932 terror attacks since October 7, 2023

Here is a poster issued by Islamic Jihad's Palestine Today news outlet on October 6 celebrating their count of terror attacks from the West Bank over the year.

Translation:

Since October 7, 2023, there have been 2,932 qualitative resistance operations in the West Bank that killed 50 "Israelis" and injured 377 others.

1797 Shooting operations

856 Explosive devices

23 car ramming operations

40 stabbing operations

I don't think these numbers are accurate (I count about 23 killed from West Bank attacks) but the very existence of this poster shows the depravity of the terrorists that the world wants to legitimize. They literally cheer murdering Jewish civilians and every elderly man or child they kill is something they brag about.

If there is any justification for continuing a war to destroy them, it is their own actions and words.

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There are lots of "experts" who are substituting wishful thinking for decent analysis in the wake of Yahya Sinwar's death. Let's look at what Hamas is likely to do, and what will happen next, a bit more dispassionately.

Right now, Hamas is suffering a leadership vacuum. Even before Israel killed Hamas' "political leader" Ismail Haniyeh, Sinwar was really the real leader of Hamas, since he was the one on the ground in Gaza and only his decisions mattered. No matter what Hamas in Qatar or elsewhere decided, Sinwar was the one who held all the cards. He decided what the military strategy would be, what the negotiating strategy would be and what would happen to the hostages.

The idea that Hamas will simply replace Sinwar and everything will be the way it was, the way they have done in the past when Israel assassinated Hamas leaders, is fantasy fueled by Hamas propaganda. Israel has already killed most of the major figures in Gaza so there are very few who can step into his bloody shoes.

Again, anyone outside Gaza is irrelevant.

This means that either Sinwar will be replaced by a unifying figure in Gaza or by some sort of committee.

The vacuum created by Hassan Nasrallah's assassination in Hezbollah has seemingly been filled by Iranian officials, but this does not seem as likely for Hamas. Iran will need to approve any replacement but it cannot provide one.

Either way, the honor/shame mentality that the "experts" consistently ignore or downplay is, as always, the most important factor in what Hamas will do next.

The most likely single candidate appears to be Sinwar's younger brother Mohammed, who is equally ruthless. Whether he has the same leadership skills is an open question but he appears to be competent and just as much of a hardliner. He is not likely to want to show more flexibility in negotiations than his dead older brother did.

If a committee takes over, that also does not mean any realistic chance for leadership that would be pragmatic. The most extreme member of the committee would likely be the veto vote over any potential deal, and no one wants to be known as the person who knuckled under to Israel.

In either scenario, Hamas is not likely to surrender, or to negotiate seriously for the hostages, unless they have a guarantee of survival as Gaza's leaders, and Israel will never accept that.

As it is today, Hamas is no longer an army. It is back to being mostly a guerilla group. As such, it is not going to be destroyed anytime soon. But as long as Gazans are still afraid of Hamas, Hamas has effective control of Gaza even in skeleton form.

In short, Hamas has to be defeated in a way that no one can deny. Which means it needs to be not just defeated, but replaced.

That is the real problem.

For Hamas to be defeated in the minds of Gazans, someone has to fill the gap of day to day governance - and no one really wants to do that.

The PA would love to take over Gaza but it needs Hamas to be completely destroyed first. It will do everything to avoid fighting Hamas' guerilla remnants because it is afraid of appearing to be doing what Israel wants.

A multinational force, preferably led by Arab countries at peace with Israel, is a possibility but that is remote as well.

I always felt that letting the UAE take over Gaza would be the best solution, and I still do, but no matter the benefits to making Gaza an emirate, they don't want to be put in that position.

As long as that question is not settled, Hamas remains the de facto government of Gaza, no matter how dysfunctional and weak it is. NGOs can take up a small amount of the government functions like delivering aid but any real replacement has to be willing to fight Hamas for that title, and no one is willing to do that.

It appears to me that the main factors for Hamas maintaining its grip on power are whether Hamas leaders still have effective communications with their operatives in the field, whether the rank and file of Hamas are still dedicated to risk their lives for the organization, and whether they can still assert an iron fist rule over the people of Gaza while still fighting Israel. If any of those three are broken, Hamas is no longer nearly as much of a threat and can perhaps be replaced with an entity that is willing to tke over. But, again, someone has to be willing to step in.

Contrary to what the US and the West claim, Israel has little control over how Gaza will look in a post-Hamas world unless Israel wants to directly re-occupy Gaza and take over the governmental and security functions itself. That is not something anyone wants to see. The IDF itself would have to dedicate many tens of thousands of people indefinitely for a project like that, and most Israelis don't want that. This may be the least of all evils but no one is likely to support it.

So the obstacle for peace is not Israel but that no one wants to seriously challenge Hamas for ruling Gaza. They still fear Hamas. Israel can deal with any leadership that is not dedicated to destroying Israel - but who could that be?

Until those questions are answered, Israel needs to prioritize the cognitive war to make sure that the Arab world sees Hamas is defeated and impotent. Of course, it has to simultaneously continue to degrade Hamas' political and military abilities. If possible, Hamas should look like a joke to the Arab world. Because the weaker it looks, more more likely a substitute can be found.

Without a substitute, peace is simply not possible and Gazans are the ones who will suffer the most.

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The Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization issued a statement which said, in part:

The Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization mourns to the sons of our Palestinian people and all national action factions the martyrdom of the great national leader Yahya Sinwar, head of the political bureau of Hamas .

The Executive Committee extends its deepest condolences to the brothers in the Hamas leadership and cadres and to the family of the martyr Yahya Sinwar, calling for moving forward to strengthen our national unity within the framework of our sole legitimate representative, the Palestine Liberation Organization, so that we may be one front to thwart the Israeli plan aimed at displacing our people from their homeland, whether in the Gaza Strip or the West Bank...

The Executive Committee has 16 members. Its chairman is none other than Mahmoud Abbas.

The statement pretends that Sinwar, the architect of October 7 massacre, was merely the head of the "political bureau" of Hamas.

The official Palestinian Wafa news agency published this statement - but only in its Arabic site, not its English site.

The PLO website also published the statement of the minor Arab Liberation Front, which has not done anything of note for decades and does not even have a current webpage, to add to its mourning for Sinwar. The only possible reason to publish this statement from the ALF is if the PLO agrees with it.

With great sadness and pain, the Arab Liberation Front mourns the great national martyr Yahya Sinwar, head of the Political Bureau of the Islamic Resistance Movement Hamas, who ascended to glory as a martyr following an armed clash with the Zionist occupation soldiers in the Tel al-Sultan neighborhood in the city of Rafah on the afternoon of Thursday, October 17, 2024. The Front, led by its Secretary-General Rakad Salem Abu Mahmoud, offered its condolences and sympathy to the brothers in the Political Bureau of the Islamic Resistance Movement Hamas, to the family of the martyr, and to all the sons of our steadfast people.

The Arab Liberation Front confirmed that the martyrdom of the leader Yahya Sinwar and before him the martyr leaders Yasser Arafat, Abu Ali Mustafa, Ahmed Yassin, Khalil Al-Wazir and other martyred leaders of the revolution will only increase the strength and steadfastness of our people in confronting this arrogant Zionist enemy.

The PLO, and Abbas, support Hamas. They might disagree with Hamas as to who should control the Palestinians politically but they far prefer Hamas to peace.

The proof is in every Fatah, PLO and Palestinian Authority statement. And every time a Western leader says "two state solution." they are insisting that this Hamas-supporting Palestinian leadership control a Palestinian state that Israel is supposed to welcome - for its own security.

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10/19 Links: Death of a fascist; Israel's attack plan on Iran leaked; Hezbollah drone targets Netanyahu’s home; UN Peacekeepers Are Hizbullah's Best Friend

From Ian:

Brendan O'Neill: Death of a fascist

This is a man who deserved to die. His crimes against the Jews were legion. He took the postwar cry of ‘Never Again’ and stomped it into the dirt. ‘Again, again’ was his preferred slogan. His violent disregard for Jewish life was a function of his deep-seated anti-Semitism – you don’t get to be leader of a terror group whose founding covenant committed it to an apocalyptic war on the Jews without being a Jew-hater yourself. Yet he was horrendously cavalier about Palestinian life, too. He let Hamas’s war with Israel drag on because he believed the ‘spiralling civilian death toll in Gaza’ would drum up global hate for Israel and global pity for Hamas. He sacrificed Jews to his racist ideology, and Palestinians to his grotesque vanity.

So Gazans also benefit from the demise of this monster. They are a step closer to liberation from the tyrannical rule of the death-mongers of Hamas. Humankind benefits, too. For Israel’s righteous slaying of Yahya Sinwar is more than justice for 7 October. It is more than a brilliant and targeted strike in a now year-long war on terrorism. It is also a message to the world. It says this: you cannot kill Jews with impunity anymore. It reminds us that those days are gone. It reminds us it isn’t the Middle Ages anymore, when the Church would reward your Jew-hunting, or the 20th century, when pogroms had the blessing of governments. No, there are consequences now to singling out Jews for special opprobrium and wicked violence. Do that today and you might very well die. Do that now and you might get your head caved in, as Sinwar did.

And here’s the chilling thing, the thing that should truly unsettle those of us who live in the West: we needed this message. Our nations needed this reminder. Our young in particular needed to be told that fascist violence is intolerable and killing Jews will be rightfully avenged. For across America and Europe in the aftermath of 7 October, unreason reigned. On our campuses, our streets, in our art world and media world, the sympathies of the privileged went not to the victims of Hamas’s pogrom, but to Hamas. Israel was offered not support but condemnation – and the most shrill, hypocritical and borderline bigoted condemnation you could imagine. ‘You had it coming’ was the subtext of the Israelophobic insanity that swept our cities after the pogrom.

We found ourselves in the horrific situation where many of our fellow citizens were seemingly content to see Jews once again loaded into trucks, burnt to a cinder and killed on account of their ethnicity. This spoke to more than a failure of sense and solidarity. It spoke to how determinedly our societies had turned their backs on the values of the Enlightenment and the virtues of civilisation, and could thus find greater common cause with the anti-Jewish, anti-modernity hysterics of Hamas than with the democratic state of Israel.

So yes, we needed to hear it. We needed to hear that the murder of Jews will be met with the severest of consequences in the 21st century. The killing of Sinwar puts flesh on the bones of the cry of ‘Never Again’ that had come to be so weakened and withered in recent years. Jew-killers everywhere will tremble now, making this not a day of death, but a day of hope.

JPost Editorial: With Sinwar gone, Israel's next move must be decisive

Hamas and Hezbollah have both suffered heavy losses over the last year, but Israel did what many thought was impossible and took down those responsible for October 7. At long last, all the ringleaders are down and out – for good.

Decisions will need to be made about what to do next, and this war is still not over. Hezbollah remains a well-armed threat against Israel and continues to regularly fire rockets, drones, and missiles into the Jewish state. Hamas still has men under arms and rockets at their disposal, and 101 hostages still remain in their possession. The Houthis in Yemen are still a threat that could strike at any moment, boasting an arsenal of ballistic missiles and drones, and their leadership remains intact. And then there is the ever-looming threat of Iran, a well-equipped nation who backs all the aforementioned actors and hosts a formidably large army of its own.

What's next?

So what comes next? Will Israel be able to start returning evacuees to their homes? Will they press for another hostage deal on favorable terms? Will the IDF turn its focus to Iran or the Houthis?

Those questions will need to be answered very soon, and it remains to be seen how Israel’s allies such as the US will want the Jewish state to proceed. But for now, we can take solace in the fact that at the very least, Israel’s archenemy over the past year is dead, and that some measure of justice has been achieved for all the people who have lost and suffered since October 7. Zman simchateinu indeed.

Abe Greenwald: Sinwar Is Gone, Hamas Isn’t Far Behind

All of this also means that Hamas’s remnants might find themselves without the Iranian funds they’d have used to try to reconstitute the organization in the future. The regime in Iran has spent billions of dollars on its terrorist proxies. This was a good investment for decades, enabling Tehran to project power abroad and attack Israel without Iran sticking its neck out. But the mullahs can’t be happy looking at the present state of Hamas (and increasingly of Hezbollah). Iran’s return on its investment in proxy armies is vanishing fast. And with Israel about to take the fight straight to the regime, Iran needs to reallocate its resources.

So who wants to fill Sinwar’s shoes now? Israel took out Hamas leader Ismael Haniyeh in July. The crown then fell to Sinwar, and now he’s dead. The list of senior Hamas members killed by Israel is long and growing longer by the day. The same, rather suddenly, applies to the senior ranks of Hezbollah. There aren’t many takers for the job of next mole to be whacked. Especially if it means getting whacked for a crumbling cause with a spare and ruined fighting force. It’s not going to be easy recruiting new members to what’s left of Hamas.

But what about Hamas’s supporters over here in the U.S.? Are they still “exhilarated” by the October 7 attack? Do they still think that it was a “gift to Allah from the world”? That “Palestine has never been as within reach”? Are they satisfied with what Hamas has wrought for the people of Gaza? And do they still think they’re on the winning side against Israel? Even if they now recognize Hamas’s strategic failure, they undoubtedly still support its aims. And they’re the kind of enemy that’s truly hard to defeat because you can’t destroy moral imbecility. On October 7, 2023, Sinwar ensured his own demise and that of his monstrous organization. But the woke jihadists of the West will live to tweet another day.

And here’s a thought for the Biden administration. The U.S. has recently threatened to withhold arms shipments to Israel over concerns about humanitarian aid getting into Gaza. The greatest gift of humanitarian aid ever received by the people of Gaza was Israel’s killing of Yahya Sinwar. His death, and the destruction of Hamas, don’t by any means guarantee that the Palestinians will one day be able to thrive in freedom. But so long as he was in charge, that would have remained a certain impossibility. And if Israel had heeded the Biden administration’s calls for a ceasefire, this massive aid package would never have been delivered. Take the win, Mr. President.

10/16 Links Pt2: Churchill would have stood behind Israel. We must too; Hamasticide: Apocalyptic barbarians at the gates of Israel; Antisemitism has made life in Ireland unbearable

From Ian:

Andrew Roberts: Churchill would have stood behind Israel. We must too

Although the USSR and USA were not fighting the Second World War beside Britain in 1940, and only came into the war as a result of Hitler’s decisions rather than their own in 1941, the British were supported stalwartly by Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India and other possessions and dependencies around the globe.

By total contrast, much of the world has shunned Israel as she fights its battles against Islamist tyranny and terrorism, ultimately for them as well as for herself.

The recent scene in the United Nations where delegates filed out of the General Assembly room rather than even listen to Bibi Netanyahu sums up the situation.

Meanwhile, South Africa has tried to divert attention from the corruption of its own government by making unfounded charges against Israel at the International Criminal Court.

At least the neutral nations in 1940-41 were privately hoping that civilisation would destroy barbarism: today they cannot even be counted on to do that.

What Churchill said about Britain’s ability “to ride out the storm of war” has powerful echoes in modern-day Israel.

The performance of the IDF was woeful on October 7 itself but since then it has fought with superb professionalism in destroying and degrading Hamas in Gaza, although of course we still eagerly await the moment when Yahya Sinwar meets the same fate as the Führer in the Reich Chancellery on April 30, 1945. Similarly, the failures of the hitherto-much-vaunted Israeli intelligence were apparent for all to see on October 7, yet since then it has carried out the flawless supply-chain “grim beeper” attacks that have done so much to cripple Hezbollah. Churchill would recognise the phenomenon of these early humiliations – with hardly a significant victory from 1939 to El Alamein in 1942, except for the Battle of Britain – turning into later triumphs. The IDF’s steep but highly successful learning curve in Gaza and now southern Lebanon has been impressive, just as it was for the Allied armies in the Second World War.

To paraphrase Churchill in his and his country’s finest hour, Israel is proving herself yet again able to defend her home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone. At any rate, that is what she is going to try to do. It is the solemn duty of everyone who cares about the defeat of barbarism to stand beside her.

Hamasticide: Apocalyptic barbarians at the gates of Israel

Hamas senior leader Yahya Sinwar used his imagination well, ordering the tearing of children from their mothers’ arms and the killing of mothers in front of their children, inventing every possible way to make the terror more horrendous than that of ISIS, to exterminate in the cruelest manner possible. Sinwar commanded his men to kill babies; to brutally rape women of any age, whether alive or dead; to castrate men and boys; to decapitate; to burn entire families alive along with the symbols of their lives. Thus, he forever epitomized the savagery of his movement, making him the absolute leader of contemporary hatred.

Sinwar placed Hamas at the head of a worldwide movement for the deconstruction of history that legitimizes rage as the emblem of life. That believes that it must take this action against all of civilization. This movement has decided that the contemporary outcome of history and religion, including the Jewish-Christian civilization and the human rights culture, is advantageous only for those who created [it], and so it is a tool of oppression to be ripped to pieces. The diabolical choice to tear down this civilization permits any means to destroy the “colonialists,” the “imperialists,” the “racists,” the rich, the white men, and above all, of course, the Jews. This concept finds consensus far from Gaza, first in the Muslim world, which places the “Islamophobes” among the oppressors, and along with the students, the LGTBQ movements, the ecological movements that think the Earth will be destroyed by capitalist interests and the Jews.

The United Nations, the Palestinian Authority, and even the Ivy League universities have still not condemned Sinwar’s atrocities. It is a crime whose “context” is what counts, and nobody expected that after a massacre like Oct. 7, the destruction of contemporary civilization would piggyback on an antisemitic atrocity. The plan, unlike that of the Nazis in their time, was to destroy the Jews by publicizing as widely as possible the resolve to make them suffer one by one. Hamas leaders repeated the promise: “We did it, and we will do it again and again and again.”

Once the barbarians entered Israel, they roared down the roads by the hundreds in white pickup trucks and on motorbikes, shooting everyone they encountered, pedestrians and drivers, in the head and chasing those who tried to escape. They were divided into units, some assigned to close public roads, while others headed for the countryside and the kibbutzim. They were systematic, coming back to seize anyone who might have escaped them. They opened the doors of the cars abandoned at the sides of the roads to make sure everyone was dead and finish off the wounded. Then they came together to shout for joy over the bodies of the dead: Itbah el Yehud! Allah hu Akbar! They all shouted with the index finger raised, indicating their blasphemous oneness of God, the primal call of jihadism: “Allah is great.” By cutting off the head of a baby, the murderer was fulfilling the mission of reconquering the land occupied by the Jews, purifying it of the Western and democratic culture.

Jonathan Tobin: Jewish anti-Zionists can’t be part of our ‘big tent’ community

Historical memory lies at the heart of most Jewish holiday commemorations. During Sukkot, for example, Jews daily welcome ushpizin—“guests” or ancestors, including the patriarchs of Judaism—into their sukkahs, which themselves are a remembrance of the post-Exodus wanderings of the Jewish people in the desert. It is just one example of how identification with the past is very much part of the present. It also emphasizes the collective fate of a people on their way to their homeland, where shelter would hopefully no longer be a function of impermanent huts open to the stars. On Sukkot, we not only invite guests into our homes; it is a way we connect ourselves with that journey to Israel.

But for a small though noisy minority of contemporary American Jews, the fate of other Jews and Israel is no longer a matter with which they concern themselves. As a consequence, it is now more imperative than ever for Jews to stop pretending that one can join those chanting “from the river to the sea” and “globalize the intifada”—slogans that justify and encourage the genocide of the Jews of Israel—and still be considered part of the Jewish community.

Anti-Zionists may be considered Jewish according to religious law as well as mainstream by The New York Times. But in the post-Oct. 7 world, it should no longer be possible to pretend to speak for Jewish values or tradition, or to be part of the Jewish world, while opposing the right of the one Jewish state on the planet to exist and defend itself. That is true whether those who take that position explicitly—as do Jews who join the pro-Hamas demonstrators in America’s streets and on college campuses—or who merely rationalize their efforts from the sidelines or on the platforms provided to them by the liberal mainstream media.