Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, October 30, 2023

Online terrorism against Jews at Cornell: an analysis

From JTA:

Police at Cornell University were called to the school’s kosher dining hall, and the campus Hillel warned students to stay away from it, after anonymous antisemitic posts on a Greek life website that included threats to “shoot up” the building and kill and rape Jewish students.

The posts, whose text has circulated widely on social media, were published Saturday and Sunday under pseudonyms including “hamas,” “jew evil,” “jew jenocide,” “hamas warrior” and “kill jews.” The posts have titles such as “jewish people need to be killed,” “eliminate jewish living from cornell campus” and “gonna shoot up 104 west,” the name of the kosher dining hall.

The posts were made on Greekrank, a site that students at the Ivy League school and others use to rate fraternities and sororities. “If i see a pig male jew i will stab you and slit your throat,” read another post by a user called “hamas” that was viewed directly by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “If i see another pig female jew i will drag you away and ràpe you and throw you off a cliff. if i see another pig baby jew i will behead you in front of your parents.”

Looking at the Greekrank site, it is fairly clear that the person posting chose that venue because it allows completely anonymous posting without even the pretense of verification. Anyone from around the world can post literally anything with any Internet handle as often as they want with impunity. As long as they use a service that hides their IP address, it is very difficult to find them, especially if they are posting from an address that is physically overseas.

The specific posts refer to the name of the kosher dining hall, "104West!" - it is not an address - and indicates a familiarity with the campus. The "Allahu Akbar" strikes me as an attempt to misdirect suspicion on Muslims on campus, which seems unlikely as the rest of the messages do not fit a typical Islamist antisemite. In fact,the poster hits on all the themes of left-wing, right-wing and Arab antisemitism which makes me think that while the poster is indeed an antisemite, it is also someone who wanted to push all the buttons he (almost certainly a male) could to not only frighten Jews on campus but also to get lots of attention nationwide.

The only philosophy this person actually has is to feel important and relevant. Blatant antisemitism is a surefire way to achieve that.

Greekrank allows anyone to pretend to be anyone, and the reward is to get the campus police and FBI involved with the additional bonus of making lots of Jews fearful.

This is terrorism. Death threats are crimes, and "criminal acts intended or calculated to provoke a state of terror in the general public, a group of persons or particular persons for political purposes"are terrorist by definition.

This particular brand of terrorism that has the lowest risk/reward ratio possible. It costs nothing, it is nearly impossible to track, and it is just as effective in terrifying the Jewish population as a hand grenade tossed into the dining hall would have been. The (probable) incel who wrote this gets a huge psychic reward for doing something that causes so many people so much fear and prompts national attention and the use of law enforcement resources.

Even though the actual physical threat from this poster is probably nil - this person is almost certainly not the type to actually do anything - it helps normalize and justify antisemitism and it could encourage others to act. Death threats like this cannot and must not be ignored.

The most immediate thing that must be done is to force the Greekrank site administrators (and any other similar site) to add email verification, and since its entire audience is for and by people on campus, it should only allow people with campus email addresses (.edu) to post. It can still allow people to post anonymously but the records as to who they are should be available. This will make it much more difficult for losers to feel important for a day or two by threatening Jews.

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!

On October 11, anti-Israel "Palestinian solidarity groups" at Columbia University issued a statement pretending to care about dead Israelis but blaming their deaths on Israel:

The loss of a human life is a deeply painful and heartbreaking experience for loved ones, regardless of one's affiliation. We extend our heartfelt condolences to the individuals and communities at Columbia University affected by the tragic losses experienced by both Palestinians and Israelis. The sting of tears, the weight on our hearts, and the profound sense of loss are universal emotions that connect us all in grief and unify us by experience. As we mourn the loss of lives, let us come together as a Columbia community and fervently advocate for the universal human right to live in peace and seek justice. We also affirm that there can be no future of safety and freedom for all Israelis and Palestinians without holding the Israeli occupation accountable for its actions and putting an end to the untenable status quo of Israel's apartheid and colonial system.

We cannot view the recent actions of Palestinian fighters in isolation. Gaza is an open-air prison...

The rest of the statement was completely anti-Israel and then even implied that the slaughter, rape and kidnapping of Israelis is legal under international law:

[W]e remind Columbia students that the Palestinian struggle for freedom is rooted in international law, under which occupied peoples have the right to resist the occupation of their land. If every political avenue available to Palestinians is blocked, we should not be surprised when resistance and violence break out.

This is stomach turning stuff. But it was written by groups that are anti-Israel by definition, who lie as easily as they tear down "kidnapped" signs, and who have no concept of reality, history or international law. It is revolting but not surprising from these groups.

However, a large number of Columbia faculty issued an open letter of their own defending this statement - and in some ways, going beyond it:

As scholars who are committed to robust inquiry about the most challenging matters of our time, we feel compelled to respond to those who label our students anti-Semitic if they express empathy for the lives and dignity of Palestinians, and/or if they signed on to a student-written statement that situated the military action begun on October 7th within the larger context of the occupation of Palestine by Israel. ...
The student statement begins with language that should satisfy any measure of decency: “The loss of a human life is a deeply painful and heartbreaking experience for loved ones, regardless of one's affiliation. We extend our heartfelt condolences to the individuals and communities at Columbia University affected by the tragic losses experienced by both Palestinians and Israelis.” ...
In our view, the student statement aims to recontextualize the events of October 7, 2023, pointing out that military operations and state violence did not begin that day, but rather it represented a military response by a people who had endured crushing and unrelenting state violence from an occupying power over many years. One could regard the events of October 7th as just one salvo in an ongoing war between an occupying state and the people it occupies, or as an occupied people exercising a right to resist violent and illegal occupation, something anticipated by international humanitarian law in the Second Geneva Protocol. In either case armed resistance by an occupied people must conform to the laws of war, which include a prohibition against the intentional targeting of civilians. The statement reflects and endorses this legal framework, including a condemnation of the killing of civilians.

Any "recontextualization" of the pogrom is, by definition, an attempt to minimize it. That's what the student statement did and that's what these faculty members are doing. Their calling the deliberate slaughter of civilians, gang rapes of women and burning babies alive a mere "loss of human life" as if it was an auto accident is perverted and, yes, antisemitic. Their refusal to ascribe any responsibility to the Palestinian terrorists for their actions is sick. Their calling these attacks that targeted the elderly, women and children "military action," "military operations" and a "military response" is giving Hamas legitimacy instead of contempt. Calling the worst attack on Jewish civilians since Auschwitz "just one salvo in an ongoing war" is nothing less than a dismissal of the seriousness of the murderous orgy that was planned and executed by Hamas.

Moreover, the original statement did not condemn the killing of Israeli civilians at all as this letter claimed.

The faculty statement was even worse than the statement of the anti-Israel groups. And the fact that this was done by those who are entrusted to teach all students at Columbia shows that Columbia itself is an immoral institution that blames victims for their own deaths.

This disgusting letter puts Jews at risk. Because if "resistance" is a human right and even praiseworthy, and if slaughtering civilians is merely a "military operation" and a minor "salvo" in a much longer war, then who defines what "resistance" is acceptable? Why shouldn't Palestinians on campus attack Zionist Jews on campus in the name of this "resistance' whose legality and acceptance magically expands to anything Palestinians do, with no apparent limit?

If these are the people teaching students at Columbia, and there is no pushback from the administration or from a much larger number of other faculty, then Columbia is not a university as much as it is an antisemitic hellhole.

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!

Socialists admit that "by any means necessary" includes rape, beheading, burning babies alive

In the anti-Israel rally in Brooklyn yesterday, this sign was featured:

It is a slogan we've been seeing for years, and in plain English it means that there is no limit to what may be done in order to destroy Israel - including suicide bombs, raping women, beheading children and burning babies alive.

But do the people who chant these slogans really believe that?

One prominent socialist website says, of course they do.

The Socialist Workers Party of the UK published an article a week after the pogrom in Israel fully justifying everything that was done, insisting that the slogan " by any means necessary" is meant quite literally:

Free Palestine: Why we say by any means necessary
Following the assault on Israelis by the Palestinian resistance, there are those who say a violent fightback is never justified. Isabel Ringrose explains that the oppressed have a right to take up arms against their colonisers

Uprisings against colonial rule are violent because violence is an inherent part of imperialism and colonialism.

That’s why the resistance by Palestinians against the racist Israeli terror state is wholly justified. All the deaths, horrors and destruction—all of them—are rooted in violent Israeli occupation and dispossession. And this is the case not just in Palestine. Wherever imperialism has gone, violence has followed.

So literally anything goes in the name of being anti-imperialist.

It isn't rhetoric: the same logic that justifies raping Jewish women in Israel can justify raping Jewish women in the West because they are "Zionist." If the Tree of Life shooter had been Arab, they would support that as well.

This article was republished in an Australian socialist site 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!

10/29 Links: How Oct 7 Has Reignited Jewish Peoplehood; Czech DM calls to exit UN for supporting Hamas, warns Holocaust is back

From Ian:

David Suissa: How October 7 Has Reignited Jewish Peoplehood

This existential anxiety has also touched and united the Jews of the Diaspora. We’re seeing the faces of the haters, ripping down posters of hostages and brazenly calling for the end of the Jewish state. We’re seeing the triumphant body language. We’re seeing how these haters and Hamas supporters also smell blood.

It’s not only disgust, then, that is uniting Diaspora Jewry—it’s also an existential dread. It’s a realization that the weakness Israel showed on October 7 has triggered a dangerous, long-dormant dream among our enemies that “maybe now we can get them.”

If this kind of shared menace doesn’t unite Jews, nothing will.

In all the darkness, though, there is an upside to this unity– it is the rekindling of Jewish peoplehood.

Jewish identity has always been multi-faceted. Judaism is a religion, a culture, a nation, a civilization, a people. By bringing Jews of all stripes together, the existential crisis coming out of October 7 has reminded us that we are, above all, a people.

Yes, we seem to always wait for danger to unite us. But so what? We’re only human. This is how humans react.

Perhaps because of the unprecedented horrors of October 7, the solidarity this time may be more sticky. We can only hope that our renewed sense of peoplehood will outlast this most painful of moments in our modern history. It would certainly make us stronger and less vulnerable.

If our enemy treats us as one, who are we to disagree?

Jeff Jacoby: Why they rip down the ‘Kidnapped from Israel’ fliers

A core principle of antisemites in all times and places is that Jews are not fully human and are never innocent. A thousand years ago, Jews were slaughtered by Crusaders for being satanic Christ-killers who consumed the blood of children; a century ago Hitler preached that they were subhumans who polluted the racial purity of Aryan Europe. Today the Jewish state is accused of committing the demonic crimes of genocide and apartheid. The poison never changes, only the vial it comes in.

The “Kidnapped” fliers are intolerable to the haters because they so urgently challenge the antisemitic paradigm. They make it vividly clear that in the war between barbarism and civilization, between oppressor and oppressed, it is Jews who are under attack. That infuriates those whose worldview revolves around the certainty that Israel and its supporters are the victimizers. The outpouring of sympathy for Jews kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists — and the moral force of that sympathy — is anathema to them.

That explains as well why the atrocities committed on Oct. 7 immediately triggered so many vehement public demonstrations in support of the Palestinians. Precisely because the massacre and abductions had been so unspeakably horrific, it was necessary to reinforce the narrative of Jewish villainy. At times, denunciations of Israel gave way to naked antisemitsm. At a pro-Palestinian rally in Sydney, a chorus of voices chanted “Gas the Jews! F*** the Jews!” Others expressed their hatred by rejoicing in the slaughter of Israelis. A professor at Cornell, for example, told a crowd he was “exhilarated” by what Hamas had done.

In the wake of terrible mass shootings like the one that took at least 18 lives and convulsed Lewiston, Maine, on Wednesday, grieving family and friends often display pictures of their loved ones. It is a way of reinforcing the humanity of the victims and of evoking compassion from passersby. Who, seeing such a display, would destroy or vandalize it? Some norms are so ingrained as to be all but inviolable. When someone puts up an image of a missing or murdered child, no decent person rips it down.

But antisemitism has the power to override every norm and decent impulse.

On Reddit last week, a commenter explained that coming across a “Kidnapped” flier made him feel not empathy with the hostage, but “the exact opposite.” It filled him with “white hot rage,” he wrote, and he decided that “ripping it down and tearing it to shreds is the only thing I can do.”

The ripped-up fliers are one more indication of the rising tide of antisemitism in America and the West. A “white hot rage” is building. I, for one, cannot shake the conviction that Jews are at graver risk than they have been in decades, and not only in southern Israel.

Jon Gabriel: On Israel and ‘Root Causes’

According to today’s Hamasophiles, Gaza’s leadership is justified in their terror attacks against Israel because “Zionists stole their land.” Before that, the British “stole their land,” which they seem to forget.

Of course, the Brits stole the land from the Ottoman Empire in the first world war. Well, kind of. The sultan decided the region wasn’t populated enough, so he imported Arab Muslims from other regions, such as Yemen and Syria, creating many of today’s “Palestinians.” In other words, Gaza’s ancestors stole it from the Arabs, Jews, and Christians who already lived in the region.

The Ottomans stole it from the Egyptian Mamluks, who inherited it from Egypt’s Ayyubids, who had stolen it from Frankish Crusaders. Those short-lived Christian rulers had stolen it from Fatimid Caliphate, which was preceded by several other caliphates. Which had stolen it from the Byzantine/Roman Empire.

Before that, Rome stole it from the Jews, who stole it from the Greeks, who stole it from the Jews, who were given it by the Neo-Babylonians, who had stolen it from the Assyrians, who had stolen it from the Jews.

People who rely on root causes always stop the historiography the second they discover a group they don’t like. Funny how that works.

Honestly with Bari Weiss: How Hamas Executed a Massacre, and How One Israeli with Nine Bullets Fought Back

It’s been almost three weeks since Hamas attacked Israel. And there are three questions that, despite having reported on it so much over the last 20 days, many people are still asking. The first is what exactly happened that day, minute by minute, and what were the battles across the south of Israel like? There are so many accounts of civilians waiting in safe-rooms for hours on end for the IDF to arrive—what happened? The second is how did it happen? How did thousands of terrorists cross a border wall that cost more than a billion dollars to carry out the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust? And the third question is what comes next in this already horrific war?

Over the next two episodes of Honestly, we will answer those three questions by talking to three different people. You’ll first hear from Nimrod, a special forces reservist, who fought Hamas at several locations in the south of Israel on the morning of October 7—not because he was called by his unit to go there (he wasn't), but because he knew he needed to go save innocent civilians. His account helps paint a picture of what happened that day in Israel along the Gaza border, from a person who saw it up close and took the brutal fighting into his own hands before the army even arrived.

Then you’ll hear from Avi Issacharoff, a prominent Israeli journalist who’s also one of the creators of the hit TV series Fauda, which is based on his own experience as a member of an elite undercover counterterrorism unit of the IDF. My conversation with Avi helps explain how the most fortified and militarily sophisticated country in the world could have been overtaken in the most horrific way by thousands of Hamas terrorists.

Palestinian civilians are being screwed by their leaders, and being told it is for their own good. Again.

In the early 1950s, when UNRWA was still trying to actually help Palestinian refugees from 1948 to rebuild their lives in the countries they fled to, self-appointed "leaders" of the Palestinians resisted all plans that would help the people. They refused any plans that would give them citizenship, they protested any building of more permanent shelters, they objected to works programs that would help the refugees become self-sufficient.

These "leaders" justified their refusal by saying that they wanted to keep Palestinian identity alive. Left unsaid was that they considered keeping them miserable was an integral part of their plan to maintain this identity.

All of these decisions were made without the refugees themselves having any say in the matter. And the refugees who actually tried to take advantage of these UNRWA initiatives were threatened.

Similarly, when Israel tried to move Gazans out of their camps and into permanent homes in the 1970s, the PLO was against the plan - even though thousands of Gazans eagerly wanted to take advantage of it - and they got two UN resolutions against the voluntary resettlement of Gazans into decent housing.

Palestinian misery was justified as being the best thing for Palestinians, with the decisions being made by people who live in mansions.

Now, the PLO Executive Committee has met and again decided that Palestinian misery is in their own best interest.

In a meeting yesterday, as reported by Wafa, "The Executive Committee also affirmed its firm rejection of the forced displacement of our people, whether in the Gaza Strip or outside it, ....as this displacement that the occupation is trying to promote aims to create a new nakba for our people. Therefore, our people will remain steadfast on their land. They have the right to resist and struggle for their freedom and independence."

That means that the PLO is saying that the Gazans must not leave their homes even if Israel drops leaflets telling them where to go to stay safe. And they are also saying that Gazans must not be allowed to leave Gaza to save their families.

And again, they are justifying endangering the live of their own people as being for their own good.

From their boardroom in Ramallah.

Without asking a single person in Gaza what they would prefer to do.

Notice they are also not demanding that the Gazans be allowed to go to the West Bank, still within the borders of British Mandate Palestine, in areas fully under Palestinian control, to save their lives.

It isn't only Hamas who use Gazans as pawns. The PLO - who claim to be the only true representative of the Palestinian people - are willing to publicly screw them as well.

And the world doesn't even blink.

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!

Shifa hospital workers just became VOLUNTARY human shields for Hamas. Does that make them legitimate targets?

Israel released evidence this weekend showing that Shifa Hospital in Gaza was a Hamas headquarters.

This was not exactly a secret. Reporters have known this for at least 15 years.

But one thing happened on Saturday which has implications for international law.

Workers at Shifa sang a song saying, "We will not leave."

Meaning, they are saying that even if Israel tells them to leave in order to attack the Hamas targets in the lower levels, they are saying that they would prefer to be human shields for Hamas.

Does this change their civilian status under international law?

One of the giants of international law in war is Yoram Dinstein, and he is quoted in an ICRC monograph by legal scholar Jean-Francois Queguiner as saying "civilians who act as voluntary human shields can be regarded as directly participating in hostilities, with the result that they are deprived of immunity against direct attack and have no effect whatsoever on a commander’s assessment of proportionality."

Israel's' High Court agrees, saying in 1 2006 case that ‘if they do so of their own free will, out of support for the terrorist organization, they should be seen as persons taking direct part in the hostilities.'

Another legal scholar, Michael N. Schmitt, agrees that voluntary human shields are to be regarded as taking direct part in hostilities, and they lose their protection as civilians, but practically speaking they cannot be directly attacked. However, ‘voluntary shields … are excluded in the estimation of incidental injury when assessing proportionality.’

Other scholars say that the voluntary nature of their human shielding can affect the attacker's calculation of proportionality. In other words, the attacker must ensure that the civilian cost is proportional to the military benefit gained by the attack, and to many legal experts, the value, so to speak, of the voluntary human shields is lower than that of involuntary human shields (or what some call "proximate human shields") of wholly innocent civilians who happen to be between the attacker and the target. And according to some, their value is zero - Israel does not need to worry about killing them once they make clear that they are putting their bodies on the line for Hamas.

Meaning that by singing this song, to a small extent, these workers just made the hospital a little more likely to be attacked by Israel because their value as potential civilian casualties may be discounted.

Obviously, this doesn't apply to the involuntary human shields - patients or workers who did not participate in this little song. It doesn't make much of a difference in reality. If Israel decides that the hospital is a hugely important component of Hamas' military operations and sufficiently important Hamas members are under the hospital, it may very well decide to bomb the hospital after repeated warnings.

But these doctors and workers just cheapened their own lives under international law and they made such an attack a little more, not less, likely.

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!

Since the many protests recently are calling Israel immoral, let's talk about morality.

A nation's highest obligation is to protect the lives of its citizens. That is the contract that every citizen has with his or her nation: pledge allegiance in exchange for protection.

Even though Hamas has made its genocidal intentions clear from its founding, up until this month Israel treated the de facto rulers of Gaza with the assumption that they are also interested to some extent in their own wellbeing and that of those under its rule, and that Hamas could be managed by a combination of carrots and sticks - carrots in loosening up imports, exports, travel and work permits, sticks in the occasional limited military action that was meant to teach Hamas what it could lose if it shot rockets or engaged in terror.

That was a fatal error.

On October 7, Israel - and the world, if it was paying attention - learned that Hamas' highest aspiration was to slaughter Israelis, even at the expense of its own people, whose lives had been steadily improving over the past couple of years by every metric.

Hamas showed that its genocidal charter was not lip service, but the actual core of its existence.

With this knowledge that Israel had badly misestimated Hamas' true nature, there is no higher moral purpose than to eradicate Hamas and its terrorist allies, from the jihadist Islamic Jihad to the socialist PFLP and DFLP, all of whom participated and supported Hamas' bloodbath.

And the goal of destroying Hamas is not just a moral and ethical imperative, but one supported by international law. Utterly defeating a genocidal enemy is fully supported by the Geneva Conventions and every other instrument.

What about civilians?

While civilians must be protected as much as possible, if there is no way to get them out of the way, their being on the battlefield does not stop Israel (or any combatant) from attacking the enemy. This is also both moral and international law. It has to be this way; otherwise the enemy can simply use the civilians to act with impunity - to shoot rockets from behind them, to build their weapons caches underneath them, to convert mosques and hospitals into military headquarters.

Which, as we know, Hamas does routinely.

If Israel can attack the target effectively while warning the civilians - and the terrorists - to get out of the way, ut must do that. If the terrorists themselves are the target, then it cannot give warnings, because that would give Hamas a "military advantage" that Israel is under no obligation to give in wartime.

Of course Israel must try to minimize civilian casualties. But every single one is Hamas' fault. Every person Hamas tells not to move, everyone scared off by Hamas (yes, Hamas) bombing the exit routes to go to the South, all of their deaths are Hamas' responsibility both morally and under international law.

To put it bluntly, if (God forbid) Israel's destruction of Hamas means killing every single Gazan because of Hamas' policies of using them as pawns and human shields, it does not detract from Israel's obligation to destroy Hamas one bit.

In the final analysis, Israel has every right to do whatever it takes to destroy Hamas. Even though Hamas is said to have four months of supplies underground, Israel is allowed to block all aid (if iit chooses) to starve out Hamas, even if it also starves the Gaza civilians, if there is a likelihood that Hamas will steal the aid supplies and use it for war rather than for its civilians. (Even the US Army laws of war manual says this, explicitly.) It sounds unbelievably harsh - and this is why Israel is trying to divide Gaza to allow civilians to flee to the South and allow aid only there, at least for the first stages of the war - but the overriding imperative to destroy Hamas means that any Gazans who starve because Hamas steals their food and fuel is the responsibility of Hamas, not Israel.

Moreover, Egypt's decision not to allow any Gazans to flee to the relative safety of their neighbor is its own responsibility. I am unaware of any nation ever hermetically sealing its border from neighboring civilians taking refuge during war. Egypt has allowed hundreds of thousands of other refugees into its borders over the years. It is astounding that no Western nation is condemning Egypt for blocking the most likely path to safety for Gazans in mortal danger.

Where are all those who scream for the rights of refugees to flee war zones and find safety elsewhere?

Of course, Gazans who don't want to flee can choose to stay. Israel doesn't want to annex Gaza and it is not trying to "repeat the nakba" as those pretending to defend Egypt's immoral decision say. At any rate, let Gazans make their own decisions as to what is best for them; it is not for Egypt or Jordan to tell them that their being stuck in Gaza is for their own good.

Israel doesn't have an option. It has the moral obligation to destroy an entity whose only goal is the destroy Israel. All of this is backed by international law. And the responsibility for the civilians is solely Hamas's, as well as the Arab countries that refuse to save the lives of any Palestinians while blaming Israel for doing what it must.

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!

10/28 Links: 'Never again is now' says Netanyahu as war on Hamas escalates; Why is the West confused about backing Israel?; I See the Hostages in My Children’s Faces

From Ian:

Why is the West confused about backing Israel?

There is a bitter irony to all of this. The progressive left claims to be fighting colonialism. And yet it is so uninterested in the reality of non-western countries that it winds up blindly imposing conceptual categories that were forged in the context of American history and society on the rest of the world. The identity synthesis may be dressed up in postcolonial clothes; but it is itself a neo-colonial enterprise.

There is one final factor in how these moral errors could come to be so influential: the concept of intersectionality. Ori`ginally coined by the academic and campaigner Kimberlé Crenshaw, the idea of “intersectionality” says that various forms of disadvantage can reinforce each other: that, for instance, the discrimination suffered by black women can, in some contexts, be more than the arithmetic sum of the discrimination suffered by white women on the one hand, and black men on the other.

That is true so far as it goes. But Crenshaw’s theory quickly took on a life of its own. If people can face disadvantage based on belonging to more than one identity group, activists claimed, then the only way to liberate them would be to fight against all those forms of disadvantage at the same time. These activists came to see every type of oppression as linked — and to demand that anyone who cares about one kind of injustice must simultaneously fight against all other kinds.

Many people have, in the past weeks, been surprised by how many protests held banners like “Queers for Palestine.” After all, Israel has an excellent record at respecting gay rights, while the authorities in Gaza heavily penalize homosexuality. But the logic of intersectionality helps to explain why, at a sufficiently high level of abstraction, these causes can appear to be at one with each other. Since they see both sexual minorities and Palestinians as oppressed, intersectional activists posit that the fates of both groups must be inextricably linked.

As a broader and bloodier conflict looms on the horizon in the Middle East, it is time for a simple willingness to recognize the messiness of the real world. The idea that all supposed victims of oppression do, or should, see each other as allies is fanciful. Neither Israelis or Palestinians have a monopoly on moral virtue. It is not possible to press them into a simple schema of white or black, colonizer or colonized, good or evil. The murder of 1,400 innocents in Israel has already provoked a broader conflict in which a lot more innocents are likely to perish.

It is not possible, either, to expect any state to tolerate the cold-blooded murder of so many citizens without doing what it takes to re-establish its security. Nor would any other state accept talk of a ceasefire while hundreds of its people remain in the clutches of a brutal terrorist group. But that does not mean that it would be wise for Israel to stumble into a wider regional war — nor does it absolve the country from its moral responsibility to do what it can to protect the lives of civilians on the “other” side. How to balance these imperatives without abandoning any of them is a fiendishly difficult task. While the future of the conflict remains unclear, its first weeks do already offer one clear lesson. Nobody, neither Israeli or Palestinian, forfeits their humanity by virtue of the group into which they are born. And an ideology that is incapable of recognizing that basic fact loses any claim to moral superiority.

PodCast: The IDF Approach to Protecting Civilians in Urban Warfare - Modern War Institute

Almost immediately after Hamas launched its brutal set of terrorist attacks in Israel on October 7, it became clear that the Israel Defense Forces would respond militarily. Initially that response came in the form of airstrikes, but it appears likely that a ground campaign will follow. In either case, however, the heavily urban terrain poses major challenges for the Israel Defense Forces. In such areas, compliance with the law of armed conflict and international humanitarian law is paramount.

To understand both those challenges and the specific measures Israeli forces have adopted to ensure their operations maximize protection of civilian populations, John Spencer is joined on this episode of the Urban Warfare Project Podcast by Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Conricus. A spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces, he describes these measures—including steps unique to the Israeli military—and the broader effort to minimize incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, and damage to civilian property in urban warfare.

Niall Ferguson: What irony! The deranged defence of Hamas on campuses across the West is fuelling a counter-revolution that could finally loosen the stranglehold of wokeism

If that strikes you as outrageous, you have clearly missed the fact that such thinking is rife throughout the Anglosphere academy.

'Wokeism' covers a multitude of sins. The academic Left is a much more complex coalition nowadays than it was back in the 1930s, when Cambridge had its covert cadre of card-carrying Communists, or the 1980s, when Oxford snubbed Margaret Thatcher by refusing her an honorary degree.

Although Marxist socialism is still part of the package, class warfare and anti-imperialism co-exist (at times uneasily) with a variety of other ideologies based on alternative forms of identity, such as race ('critical race theory' or 'anti-racism') and gender (the ever-growing abbreviation LGBTQIA+ now stands for 'lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual, and others').

'Woke' originated as African-American slang, but is now defined in the dictionaries as 'aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)'.

Like all cults and sects, the woke have their own idiosyncratic language and rituals. These include stating one's 'preferred pronouns' at every opportunity and acknowledging whenever possible that one is meeting on land expropriated from indigenous peoples.

In marked contrast to conventional scientific understanding, race is an essential, unalterable attribute (you're either BIPOC — black, indigenous, and other people of colour — or you're incurably white), but gender is almost infinitely fluid. In each case, there is a hierarchy, determined mainly by the extent to which your assigned minority were 'victimised' and 'marginalised' by the white, cisgender colonisers.

This 'intersectionality' produces some very strange bedfellows. 'Free Palestine is a Feminist Issue', according to a meme I saw last week; 'it's a Reprodutive [sic] Rights Issue, it's an Indigenous Rights Issue, it's a Climate Justice Issue, it's a Queer Rights Issue, it's an Abolitionist issue'. Quite how queer rights activists would fare if they travelled to Gaza to join in the fight for freedom is unclear, given Hamas's implacable commitment to sharia law.

But the woke have never worried much about the difficulty of aligning themselves with Islamists. After all, words and silence can both be violence in their world, but terrorism is just 'what oppressed fighting the oppressor looks like' — and the constraints of logic must be just another manifestation of white supremacy.

There are four reasons this confused ideology has established itself in so many universities.

First, an older generation of soggy liberal professors could not resist appointing and promoting younger radicals, naively equating their illiberal outlook with their own youthful idealism.

Second, various policies of affirmative action — designed to increase the proportion of female and non-white students and teachers in universities — had the unintended consequence of reducing intellectual diversity.

Third, as universities institutionalised policies such as the promotion of equity, diversity and inclusion and the decolonisation of this or that curriculum, bureaucracies sprang up that were swiftly staffed by woke believers.

Finally, a coalition formed between woke students, professors and administrators, who discovered there were almost no limits on the methods they could use to attack the surviving conservatives in their institutions.

Anonymous letters of denunciation, cancellation campaigns on social media, the bearing of false witness, public mobbings, and extra-legal investigations — I have seen all of these used against professors who dared to resist the woke cultural revolution.

Simon Sebag Montefiore: The Decolonization Narrative Is Dangerous and False

Hamas is a diabolical killing sect that hides among civilians, whom it sacrifices on the altar of resistance—as moderate Arab voices have openly stated in recent days, and much more harshly than Hamas’s apologists in the West. “I categorically condemn Hamas’s targeting of civilians,” the Saudi veteran statesman Prince Turki bin Faisal movingly declared last week. “I also condemn Hamas for giving the higher moral ground to an Israeli government that is universally shunned even by half of the Israeli public … I condemn Hamas for sabotaging the attempt of Saudi Arabia to reach a peaceful resolution to the plight of the Palestinian people.” In an interview with Khaled Meshaal, a member of the Hamas politburo, the Arab journalist Rasha Nabil highlighted Hamas’s sacrifice of its own people for its political interests. Meshaal argued that this was just the cost of resistance: “Thirty million Russians died to defeat Germany,” he said.

Nabil stands as an example to Western journalists who scarcely dare challenge Hamas and its massacres. Nothing is more patronizing and even Orientalist than the romanticization of Hamas’s butchers, whom many Arabs despise. The denial of their atrocities by so many in the West is an attempt to fashion acceptable heroes out of an organization that dismembers babies and defiles the bodies of murdered girls. This is an attempt to save Hamas from itself. Perhaps the West’s Hamas apologists should listen to moderate Arab voices instead of a fundamentalist terror sect.

Hamas’s atrocities place it, like the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, as an abomination beyond tolerance. Israel, like any state, has the right to defend itself, but it must do so with great care and minimal civilian loss, and it will be hard even with a full military incursion to destroy Hamas. Meanwhile, Israel must curb its injustices in the West Bank—or risk destroying itself—because ultimately it must negotiate with moderate Palestinians.

So the war unfolds tragically. As I write this, the pounding of Gaza is killing Palestinian children every day, and that is unbearable. As Israel still grieves its losses and buries its children, we deplore the killing of Israeli civilians just as we deplore the killing of Palestinian civilians. We reject Hamas, evil and unfit to govern, but we do not mistake Hamas for the Palestinian people, whose losses we mourn as we mourn the death of all innocents.

In the wider span of history, sometimes terrible events can shake fortified positions: Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin made peace after the Yom Kippur War; Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat made peace after the Intifada. The diabolical crimes of October 7 will never be forgotten, but perhaps, in the years to come, after the scattering of Hamas, after Netanyahuism is just a catastrophic memory, Israelis and Palestinians will draw the borders of their states, tempered by 75 years of killing and stunned by one weekend’s Hamas butchery, into mutual recognition. There is no other way.

The dangers of ‘decolonisation’

The roots of decolonisation as a theory lie in the tumultuous world of French philosophy during the 1960s and 1970s. The work of philosopher Michel Foucault was particularly influential on what would become decolonisation theory, complete with its perverse romanticisation of an anti-modern, reactionary politics. Although openly homosexual, Foucault eulogised the less than gay-friendly Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979. He saw it as a radical challenge to Western forms of rationality and modernity. Even the Ayatollah Khomeini’s systematic liquidation of the revolution’s former left-wing allies did not stop Foucault from penning articles in support of Iran’s theocratic regime. He saw the Islamic Republic of Iran as an attempt to liberate humanity from the grip of materialism and capitalism.

Frantz Fanon also played a central role in the development of decolonisation theory. The Wretched of the Earth, first published in 1961, was one of the first significant works to draw out the intersection between an anti-colonial politics antithetical to the West and an emergent identity politics. For Fanon, the Third World anti-colonial movements of the postwar era were challenging both imperialism and racism. He presented violence against Europeans as the self-realisation of the nations of the global South. To ‘shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone’, wrote Jean Paul-Sartre in his foreword to The Wretched of the Earth. It makes it possible to ‘destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses simultaneously: there remain a dead man and a free man’.

In their very different ways, both Foucault and Fanon romanticised the anti-colonial movements of the mid-to-late 20th century, projecting their anti-Western, anti-modern visions on to the likes of Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution. In the decades since, purportedly liberal institutions across the Anglophone world have become increasingly sympathetic to Fanon and Foucault’s anti-Western, anti-capitalist worldview. Indeed, many have given this worldview, expressed in the caricatured form of decolonisation theory, their seal of approval. Nowhere has this been more apparent than within British universities, especially since the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. As part of a post-BLM ‘liberatory agenda’, decolonisation has become a new orthodoxy.

On campus, decolonisation has largely been pursued culturally. Its advocates have sought to ‘free’ their higher-education institutions from the putative effects of ‘colonisation’, usually by purging reading lists of too many dead white Europeans. In doing so, decolonisation activists, like good Foucault scholars, have tended to reject notions of reason, civilisation and modernity as Western impositions.

10/27 Links Pt2: An open letter to the UN secretary-general; The west’s monster within; Sharansky: We Should Not Take the Existence of Israel for Granted

From Ian:

An open letter to the UN secretary-general

To United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres,

I heard your speech on Tuesday in which you expressed understanding for the perpetration of crimes against humanity against innocent Israeli civilians because the Palestinians are under Israeli occupation.

I was horrified by what you said.

There is never justification for murder, rape, burning, beheading, and the killing of a baby in its mother’s stomach. Terrorism can never be rationalized, or put into “context,” and anyone who attempts to do so indirectly supports it.

The events of Saturday, October 7 exposed the brutal truth about Hamas. Gaza is not controlled by Israel, as the UN tries to portray it, but by a murderous terrorist organization, Hamas.

It is true, unfortunately, that over the years, because of the failure to reach a permanent agreement with the Palestinian Authority, which opposed generous offers from previous Israeli governments, Israel has mistakenly nurtured the reality in which Gaza has been ruled independently by a murderous terror organization.

The enlightened world – you – chose to continue calling for a two-state solution even when it was clear that there is no real feasibility for this to happen as long as Hamas is in control of Gaza.

With Gaza independent, unconnected, and hostile to the PA, Hamas has consistently used it as a launching pad for terrorist activities, including the indiscriminate firing of rockets toward Israeli civilian populations, against international law. Blurring the lines to violate the rules of war

Hamas chose to blur the lines between civilians and its fighters. The laws of war establish the principle of distinction between combatants and civilians. After years of controlling the local population, Hamas has succeeded in blurring the distinction both internally and externally, encouraging civilians to support and even take part in terrorist activity.

All of these, you have chosen to ignore. Instead, you continue to preach to Israel, blindly and unilaterally, about using legally its right to self-defense.

UNGA calls for Gaza ceasefire, fails to condemn Hamas

Erdan shows UNGA video of Hamas decapitation at ceasefire debate

Melanie Phillips: The West’s monster within

Islamic radicalism, they all claimed, was confined to a tiny fringe element. Ludicrously, they maintained that it had nothing to do with Islam. Clearly, many Western Muslims are genuinely signed up to Western values. But a frighteningly large proportion are not.

This has been ignored, downplayed and denied. Mass immigration of Muslims has continued, as has liberal pressure to admit thousands of people from Muslim countries claiming refugee status.

Anyone who objects is denounced as racist and Islamophobic. Under threat of terrorist attack, the media have routinely censored pictures of Muhammad and any proper discussion of Islam’s theology of holy war.

In both Britain and America, Iran has been steadily disseminating its ideology and increasing its influence in Shia mosques. Nine U.S. House representatives recently sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines warning about Iran’s influence in at least four American mosques and Islamic centers.

Over the past two years, the police and intelligence service in Britain have foiled 15 plots masterminded by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). The Jewish Chronicle has revealed widespread IRGC infiltration of British institutions and universities. Yet successive British governments have refused to ban the IRGC or the Muslim Brotherhood.

In a recent lecture, Robin Simcox, the British government’s independent adviser on extremism, said there had been a “normalization” of both anti-Israel extremism and antisemitism, which he blamed on a “failed policy of mass migration and multiculturalism.”

Multiculturalism remains an untouchable shibboleth, while Muslim antisemitism has been totally ignored. In Britain, the Jewish community leadership has not only been silent on Muslim antisemitism but has denounced as Islamophobic anyone who raises the issue.

Through interfaith initiatives, rabbis have been bending over backwards to reach out to Muslim clerics. Now that those clerics have been attacking Israel rather than Hamas, these naive rabbis feel betrayed.

Britain’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has surprised many by his robust support of Israel’s right to defend itself and his forthright condemnation of the morally debauched reaction to the Hamas pogrom. Many, though, think it is now too late. There are simply too many in the U.K. whose minds have been poisoned.

The terrible paradox of a liberal society is that it refuses to take the illiberal measures that may become unavoidable in defense of liberal values. As a result, liberal society contains the seeds of its own destruction. That is what now stands revealed to a horrified West.

Why My Generation Hates Jews

I am 21 years old and Jewish. Apparently, 48 percent of my peers want people like me dead.

As of October 23, 64 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds think what happened on October 7 was a terrorist attack. Seventy-seven percent of us think “it’s true that Hamas terrorists killed 1,200 Israeli civilians by shooting them, raping and beheading people including whole families, kids and babies.” But when asked, “in this conflict do you side more with Israel or Hamas?”

Forty-eight percent said Hamas.

I am not surprised.

In high school, my homeroom had an exercise where we made a T-chart dividing various ethnicities, religions, and other identities into the categories of “oppressor” and “oppressed.” Women: oppressed. Straight people: oppressor. Black people: oppressed. Then we reached the “Jew” category. And we paused. This being a high school in Los Angeles, many of my classmates were Jewish. I recall we skipped it altogether. But the T-chart stayed on the whiteboard.

If there were fewer Jews in that room, I’m confident that “Jews” would’ve gone squarely in the “oppressor” column.

Social justice theory became part of everything. My senior English class was not about great literature, but about readings in critical theory, mostly about race and gender. I had a nonacademic weekly homeroom class in which we learned that every white person is racist, and all men are evil. It took me a long time to shake off a hatred of men. It wasn’t socially acceptable to disagree, and no one really tried.

My high school got a dean of gender studies and feminism. At the time, one of her roles was to help seniors write their college applications. In answer to the question “What is the most significant challenge that society faces today?” I wrote it was identity politics. She gave me a note saying that meant I was rejecting the advances of the civil rights movement. I changed it.

I see the biggest part of growing up to be the acceptance of gray areas. But Gen Z worships these identity categories and the distinction of oppressor/oppressed. I know that’s true—I am submerged in it every day. The oppressor is always wrong, and the oppressed are always right. Since high school, we’ve been trained to identify and slot people based on their identities alone.

That’s intersectionality for you.

The cheering of Hamas among people my age on college campuses in the U.S. might seem shocking to older people. But it doesn’t shock me. For most of my peers, social issues are unanimous. At my college campus, the tiny group of people who publicly celebrated the overturning of Roe v. Wade were mocked mercilessly.

And so, even a terrorist group’s mass murder of innocent Jews—babies, grandmothers, entire families—cannot defeat my generation’s Manichean belief system. Jews are the worst, and October 7 is about justifiable revenge.

Michael Oren: A War Against the Jews

It wasn't the chants of "gas the Jews." Nor was it the glorification of Hamas paragliders by the Chicago branch of Black Lives Matter or, in New York and London, the tearing down of posters with the faces of Israeli children held hostage by Hamas. Not even the off-the-charts uptick in antisemitic incidents in Germany (240%), the U.S. (400%), and London (1,353%) convinced me. It was, rather, one of those realizations that so many generations of Jews before me have experienced. This war is not simply between Hamas terrorists and Israelis. It is a war against the Jews.

It wasn't the press' insistence on calling mass murderers "militants" or citing Hamas and its "Health Ministry" as a reliable source. I've long known that the terrorists are "militants" solely because their victims are Jews, and only in a conflict with Israel are terrorists considered credible.

Instead, it was the media's predictable switch from an Israel-empathetic to an Israel-demonizing narrative as the image of Palestinian suffering supplanted that of Israelis beheaded, dismembered, and burnt. It was the gnawing awareness that dead Jews buy us only so much sympathy. 1,400 butchered Jews bought us a little less than two weeks' worth of positive coverage.

Hamas opposed the Oslo process and every subsequent peace initiative. Hamas assassinated not only Jews but also Palestinians who supported the two-state solution. The reason most Israelis now oppose that solution is because they know that Hamas would take over the nascent Palestinian state in a day. I tell this to journalists but they are seldom, if ever, convinced. Much of the press, I've learned, has internalized the ultimate antisemitic myth: that Jews just have it coming.

Incontestably now, anti-Zionism is antisemitism. Hatred of the Jewish nation-state cannot be distinguished from hatred of the Jewish people. The war between Hamas and Israel, involving the largest and cruelest loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust, is a war against Jews everywhere.

Lampooning Western intellectual tacit support of Hamas

One of the best analysts out there is Hussein Aboubakr Mansour.

Here he channels Western academics as a probable response to Palestinians chanting another genocidal threat to Jews in Ramallah today.

"Whoever has a rifle, either go shoot a Jew or give it to Hamas." -A chant in a demonstration in Ramallah from earlier today.

A Western social science professor will record these as indigenous protest folk songs that attempt to re-humanize the colonized through the lyrical act of murdering the colonizer. This imaginative murder then dissolves the colonized and dehumanized essence of the subaltern and restores to it a state of equality with the dead colonizer. Thus, the rifle stops being an instrument of war and becomes a bridge to liberation, the symbol of the lost humanity that needs to be restored.

Here, the decolonial subjectivity is pursuing its humanity of the antiracist emancipatory praxis through the act of murder, which is made to challenge, to interrogate, to haunt, and to deconstruct Western knowledge which is deeply penetrated by the all-econpmassing colonial subjectivity. This compromised and deeply colonized Western knowledge imposes the arbitrary and oppressive dichotomy of the peaceful and the violent, both imperialist social constructs, as part of its arsenal of weapons of discursive coercion meant to disarm the colonized and prevent them from resistance.

The rifle then doesn't just murder the colonizer, but also the Western coloniality of representation which attempts to monopolize and homogenize the decolonial struggles, acting as a castrating agent for capitalist modernity. This discursive act of resistance is a harbinger of the humanism that was hijacked and distorted by Western coloniaty, an ideology of psychotics who live in an entirely subjective temporality of oppression and dehumanization.

I've read academic papers, and this is hardly an exaggeration. After all, some 1700 sociologists signed an anti-Israel letter that said its campaign against Hamas, whom they don't mention, is "genocide." (Israeli sociologists wrote a rebuttal.)

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!

10/27 Links Pt1: Deterring but Not Defeating Hamas Allowed It to Grow Stronger; Hamas is a plague hiding in a hospital; The Evil of "Queers For Palestine"

From Ian:

Deterring but Not Defeating Hamas Allowed It to Grow Stronger

In order to limit civilian loss of life in Gaza, a lot of well-meaning people in the West are calling for a cease-fire or suggesting that Israel should limit its response to Hamas to precision airstrikes and commando raids to take out high-level Hamas operatives and to free hostages. That advice is well-intended but ultimately misguided and futile. If Israel were to declare a cease-fire now, that would be tantamount to rewarding aggression and inviting more of it in the future.

A narrowly focused counterterrorism strategy is being pushed by analysts who warn that Israel should avoid the kind of quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan that the U.S. found itself in after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. But there is a big difference in scale between Hamas now and al-Qaeda then. Al-Qaeda in 2001 had only 170 members, according to terrorism expert Peter Bergen. A few thousand other jihadists, who were not formal members, had been trained in its camps in Afghanistan. The 9/11 "planes operation" itself was carried out by 19 terrorists.

The Oct. 7 assault on Israel, by contrast, involved an estimated 1,200 Hamas militants. The organization has 15,000-40,000 fighters in Gaza, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad might have 15,000 more. That makes Hamas closer to a conventional military force than a terrorist cell. It can't be destroyed by a small number of special operations forces, no matter how skilled. Nor can it be defeated from the air: There is no history of air operations proving decisive in warfare absent a ground component.

If Israel were to rely on special operations raids and airstrikes, it would be reverting to the "mowing the lawn" strategy it followed for years of trying to degrade and deter, but not defeat, Hamas. The Oct. 7 attack revealed that policy's failure by showing that Hamas actually grew stronger and bolder after previous Israeli assaults.

Prof. Alan Johnson: Israeli Military Action to Defeat Hamas Is Proportionate to the Threat from Hamas

What is meant by "proportionality" in war? The goal pursued by military action must be proportionate to the ongoing threat faced. Israel's goal of the removal of Hamas as the controlling political and military power in Gaza is proportionate because 7 October made clear that Hamas now poses an existential threat to Israel.

Israel's goal is proportionate to the revelation that the mass slaughter of all the Jews of Israel will be attempted again and again by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad until successful, under the guiding hand and financial support of a nuclear threshold state religiously committed to Israel's destruction, Iran. Although Hamas has declared this eliminationist goal openly, again and again, Western liberal opinion refused to take it seriously. ("No, they can't mean that! No one can mean that!")

7 October 2023 should have brought an end to the games that Westerners play with genocidal Hamas statements, to their clever-clever "translating" of them into mere "rhetoric." But Israel's neighborhood is a bit different from the Modern Languages Association annual conference. In that region, when someone says they intend to kill you, they really intend to kill you. All of you.

Prof. Cary Nelson: If Hamas' Crimes Are Allowed to Stand Unanswered, They Will Be Repeated

Two to three thousand members of highly organized murder squads cross an international border and set about murdering civilians in as gruesome and indiscriminate a manner imaginable. With that barbaric mission completed in a day, some in the international community immediately begin calling for a ceasefire. A ceasefire keeps Hamas in power.

Those urging a ceasefire stand behind what appears to be the most basic humanitarian motive: prevent further loss of life. Meanwhile, no reprisals for murdering men, women, and children are to follow. No sanctions. No punishments. No accountability. We are all to accept what happened and move on. Except that if the crimes are allowed to stand unanswered, they will be repeated or horrifically reinvented within a few years at most.

If Israel fails to demonstrate that organized, wanton, antisemitic murder sprees will not be tolerated, these new forms of Hamas butchery will become Israel's new normal. The Hamas pogrom presents Israel with what really is this time an existential threat. It has to be treated that way. There will need to be a definitive material difference in the status of Hamas if Israelis are to feel safe again. Deterrence regarding Hamas has lost its credibility.

Decades of wishful thinking must come to an end. Hamas is not and never will be a partner for peace. Its charter's call to kill Jews by any means possible has only one meaning: the literal one.

Dennis Ross: I Might Have Once Favored a Cease-Fire With Hamas, but Not Now

For 35 years, I’ve devoted my professional life to U.S. peacemaking policy and conflict resolution and planning — whether in the former Soviet Union, a reunified Germany or postwar Iraq. But nothing has preoccupied me like finding a peaceful and lasting solution between Israel and the Palestinians.

In the past, I might have favored a cease-fire with Hamas during a conflict with Israel. But today it is clear to me that peace is not going to be possible now or in the future as long as Hamas remains intact and in control of Gaza. Hamas’s power and ability to threaten Israel — and subject Gazan civilians to ever more rounds of violence — must end.

After Oct. 7, there are many Israelis who believe their survival as a state is at stake. That may sound like an exaggeration, but to them, it’s not. If Hamas persists as a military force and is still running Gaza after this war is over, it will attack Israel again. And whether or not Hezbollah opens a true second front from Lebanon during this conflict, it, too, will attack Israel in the future. The aim of these groups, both of which are backed by Iran, is to make Israel unlivable and drive Israelis to leave: While Iran has denied involvement in the Hamas attack, Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, has long talked about Israel not surviving for another 25 years, and his strategy has been to use these militant proxies to achieve that goal.

Given the strength of Israel’s military — by far the most powerful in the region — the aims of Iran and its collaborators seemed implausible until a few weeks ago. But the events of Oct. 7 changed everything. As one commander in the Israeli military said, “If we do not defeat Hamas, we cannot survive here.”

Israel is not alone in believing it must defeat Hamas. Over the past two weeks, when I talked to Arab officials throughout the region whom I have long known, every single one told me that Hamas must be destroyed in Gaza. They made clear that if Hamas is perceived as winning, it will validate the group’s ideology of rejection, give leverage and momentum to Iran and its collaborators and put their own governments on the defensive.

"Palestinian youth": A story in two photos

Israeli media has been stretched thin so it is difficult to know details of any Israeli security activities in the West Bank.

But sometimes, the Arab media is enough to figure it out.

From Quds News Network:

A poor, innocent, smiling (balding, bearded) youth!

Ma'an shows a picture of him from his funeral:

Oh, a poor innocent youth who was a member of Hamas' Al Qassam Brigades!

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

From Naharnet:

A senior Hamas official has told The Associated Press that the Palestinian militant group had expected stronger intervention from Hezbollah in its war with Israel, in a rare public appeal to its allies in the region.

Ghazi Hamad, a member of Hamas' decision-making political bureau, said in an interview that "we need more" from allies, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, in light of an Israeli air campaign that Palestinian health officials say has killed more than 7,000 people, mostly civilians, in the besieged Gaza Strip.

"Hezbollah now is working against the occupation," Hamad said at the Hamas office in Beirut Thursday. "We appreciate this. But … we need more in order to stop the aggression on Gaza … We expect more."

Hamad also said:

Our philosophy and vision is to open all fronts. We want all parties to participate in the resistance against the occupation. This is the duty of all Muslims and Arabs in the region to support our people. We want to struggle against the occupation, the Lebanese front, the Jordanian front, the Arab front all and everywhere. ... In general, I think we are asking anyone, any group, any faction, now, if they are able to participate in the confrontation, to come and do what they can do. The door is open, but we are asking all of them to come, and participate with us In the fight against the occupation.

Naharnet also reports that there was relative calm on Thursday at the Lebanese border, although Israel apparently killed three Hezbollah members planning to shoot an anti-tank weapon:

And it also reports this interesting news:

Hezbollah’s leadership has decided to change the military tactics related to the firing of anti-tank missiles from Lebanon at Israeli military posts, a media report said on Friday.

From now on, only two Hezbollah fighters instead of several would carry out any anti-tank missile attack on the Israelis, Radio Voice of Lebanon (93.3) quoted pro-Hezbollah sources as saying.

“Although the leadership has informed the resistance fighters that every member of the anti-armor unit is a potential martyr, disputes have erupted within the resistance fighters in this unit due to competition over who wants to go strike the enemy,” the sources said.

“All of them want to go to the front lines to target the resistance’s weapons at the enemy, although they know that they might not come back or even that they might return shredded,” the sources added.

Around 50 Hezbollah members have been killed by Israeli fire since the eruption of hostilities on October 8.

I'm not sure if the Hezbollah members are really fighting each other to go on suicide missions.

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!

Benjamin Netanyahu gave a speech to Israel on Wednesday night about the war with Hamas, but one section of the speech that was mostly ignored in mainstream media has been seized upon by others.

Starting around 6:00, Netanyahu quoted Isaiah 60:18, which translated to English is "You will no longer hear the word 'violence' (or 'stealing') in your land....And you shall name your walls 'Victory' and your gates 'Renown.'

The Christian Post seized upon this as meaning that Bibi was referring to, um, Jesus:

In that same chapter, just two verses prior to the one quoted by Netanyahu, is what most scholars believe is an Old Testament reference to the Lord Jesus Christ: “You shall suck the milk of nations; you shall nurse at the breast of kings; and you shall know that I, the Lord, am your Savior and your Redeemer, the Mighty One of Jacob.” (Isaiah 60:16)

The Daily Beast also assumed Bibi was invoking some sort messianic prophecy because Isaiah has lots of that.

Arab media further interpreted this to mean that Netanyahu was calling for an apocalyptic war to bring about the "Second Coming" according to Christian faith.

What they all missed was that Bibi was making a pun, one familiar to many Jews from last week's Torah portion.

The verse starts with "You will no longer hear the word 'hamas' in your land",לֹא־יִשָּׁמַ֨ע ע֤וֹד חָמָס֙ בְּאַרְצֵ֔ךְ, where 'hamas' means theft or violence. Netanyahu was using the verse to say that Israel will wipe out Hamas and emerge victorious. It was not meant at all to elicit a messianic message.

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!