RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.aol.com/american-mom-67-spent-her-081059283.html

HEFAYIM KIBBUTZ, Israel − They exchanged text messages and emojis. Brief status updates with words of encouragement. A picture of the beloved family dog, Tutsi.

Until no more messages came.

And then, Cindy Flash, an American, and her Israeli husband, Igal, vanished into the violence, presumed kidnapped by Hamas.

Four days after Hamas attacked Israel, more than 100 Israelis and possibly dozens of foreign nationals are thought to be held captive in the Gaza Strip. At least 14 U.S. citizens have been killed and an unknown number are still unaccounted for.

Flash, 67, originally from St. Paul, Minnesota, is one of them. She lives in Kfar Aza, a kibbutz in southern Israel near Gaza, where some of the most harrowing and grisly stories have been emerging over the past few days.

“They are breaking down the safe room door,” Flash said in one of her final messages to her daughter Keren, 34. “We need someone to come by the house right now.” Keren had been communicating with her parents from a few houses away.

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/israel-hamas-attack-us-backlash-ff5f25e8

Across U.S. universities, workplaces and halls of power, a swift backlash is meeting those who denounce Israel in the wake of Hamas’s deadly attack on Saturday.

On social media and beyond, some groups and individuals sympathetic to the Palestinian cause effectively placed blame for the attack on Israel, alleging that the nation’s policies have left Palestinians little choice but to lash out with violence. Some of that commentary came over the weekend, as reports of atrocities committed by Hamas were beginning to emerge.

Many of those statements have since been met with fierce resistance from a variety of voices, including Jewish groups and university heads. Some corporate leaders have also entered the fray, with some threatening not to hire students who blamed Israel for the attack.

That pushback has prompted some progressive politicians and left-leaning student organizations to walk back statements blaming the Jewish state for the violence that began over the weekend or remove their names from petitions condemning Israel.

The tension has ensnared the likes of Harvard President Claudine Gay, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and college students who faulted Israel for creating the conditions that they said led to the attacks. 

On Tuesday, the law firm Winston & Strawn rescinded a job offer to a summer associate studying at the New York University School of Law after the student wrote in a newsletter that “Israel bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/10/11/trump-vs-biden-on-israel-explained-in-one-post/

Editor’s note: We saw this post on X (formerly known as Twitter) and thought it worth reprinting here because it is an excellent summation of why elections matter and why those who think Donald Trump was the worst president ever might want to rethink that.

This was posted by Robert Greenway, who was the principal architect of the historic Abraham Accords under the Trump administration. Remember that every step he describes that Trump took was met with horror and anguish by elites and leftists alike who said it would lead to conflict.

We moved our embassy to Jerusalem. No war.

We withdrew from the JCPOA. No war.

We undertook the maximum economic pressure campaign and crippling, historic sanctions on Iran. No war and they stayed below 4% enrichment.

We recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. No war.

We eliminated Qassem Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al Muhandis (and Abu Bakr al Baghdadi). No war.

The results? Iran isolated under crippling sanctions reducing their capacity to threaten the region, and historic peace brokered between Israel and its neighbors via the Abraham Accords.

Two years after Biden took office Iran is enriching over 60%, they’re two weeks from sufficient material for a nuclear weapon, Sudan fell into a civil war, and Israel just experienced the greatest loss of life in a single day since the holocaust. In seeking to avoid conflict, it is upon us.

By embracing our enemy and spurning our friends it will not be easily contained.

This should never have happened.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/will-israel-do-what-it-takes-to-secure-peace/

The joint aerial bombing by the British and the United States of Dresden, Germany between February 12-15, 1945, killed up to 25,000 people. They were mostly civilians. The bombings had a devastating effect on Hitler’s Germany and played a key role in Germany’s surrender in the Second World War on May 8, 1945.

On August 6th and 9th of that same year, the United States of America detonated two atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The explosions killed between 129, 000 and 226,000 people. Less than a month later, the Japanese surrendered, thereby ending World War II and Japanese imperialism.

Unlike most trained ethicists, I have no agonistic hand-wringing moments regarding the scope and breadth of these acts of war against enemy combatants. The moral purpose of war is to totally vanquish the enemy. Attritional warfare is the military strategy that best achieves this goal. Military scholars often quibble over what constitutes attritional warfare; nevertheless, we may surmise that any war in which the agents attempt to win by consistently and mercilessly wearing down the enemy to the point of collapse through loss of human life and military resources by any means, is an attritional war. Sometimes critics of attritional war will refer to them as wars of “mass destruction.”

One criterion that may be used to justify what may also be called “wars of total annihilation,” for which the bombings of Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki would qualify, is the following: When the arc of the entire moral infrastructure of a nation, or its political combatants, is predicated on the destruction and annihilation of another nation or state and, further, when the citizens of such nations/states or regions or governing units support the infrastructure and its architects, a war of total annihilation can be ethically defended.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvard-shrugs-at-jew-hatred-hamas-attack-israel-civilian-murder-torture-rape-68f53256?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

Hamas’s attack on Israel was a small-scale Holocaust, a moment no Jew alive with the tiniest speck of communal feeling will ever forget. As a Jewish student, I was similarly chilled by the reactions at Harvard.

The university’s “Palestine Solidarity Groups,” a collection of some 30 student groups, issued a statement exculpating the terrorists for their acts of murder, rape, kidnapping and mayhem. “We, the undersigned student organizations,” it began, “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” The signatories—groups such as the Harvard Islamic Society and Harvard Law School Justice for Palestine—made clear that they stand shoulder-to-shoulder with this “resistance,” fashionable doublespeak for those feverishly working to wipe Jews off the face of the earth. Harvard isn’t alone: Some 50 student organizations at the University of California, Berkeley declared their “unwavering support for the resistance in Gaza.”

Most Jewish students have harbored mixed feelings toward pro-Palestinian groups on our campuses. Some sympathize with their cause; others see them as hostile; most ignore them. By and large, we have been happy to regard members of such groups as fellow travelers on the journey of learning and discovery, with whom we share spaces and engage in respectful classroom discussion. But during a moment of stunning moral clarity—such as the live-streaming of masked terrorists gleefully machine-gunning Jewish families—one would expect fellow students of all political persuasions to unite in horror and condemnation. The deepest political differences can be tolerated if we all abide by a basic framework of decency.

Not only have our fellow students failed to condemn this proto-genocide; they have justified and celebrated it. The authors and signatories of this statement, men and women with whom we share dormitories and libraries, have exposed themselves as worse than common anti-Semites. They are enthusiastic proponents of our slaughter, a vanguard of apologists for those who seek the extermination of the Jewish people.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/israeli-victory-is-critical-to-american-interests-7da1a3f6?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

The outbreak of war in the Middle East means the Biden administration has to manage a complex strategic crisis. American objectives must be to ensure Israeli freedom of action for the next six months while deterring any Russian responses in the Middle East and beyond. A burst of U.S. support followed by insistence on “restraint” won’t do. The Eurasian rimland has been set alight. The war begun in Ukraine will spread absent prudent, decisive action.

Hamas is the most virulent and politically savvy of Israel’s terrorist enemies. The complexity of the operation it staged on Saturday and Sunday raises questions about Israeli competence. This isn’t simply an intelligence failure—although intelligence is part of the problem, since warning signs of this confrontation have been apparent for months. The Iran-Saudi deal cleared the way for a direct attack. Hamas and Iran have solidified ties with Russia to ensure some sort of great-power support. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps stepped up activities in the West Bank, and undoubtedly in Gaza, in preparation. Yet the issue here is strategic, rather than operational. Israel, and presumably the U.S., was caught completely by surprise, suggesting that those responsible for strategic forecasting made an error on par with Pearl Harbor, 9/11 or the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

Hamas is a full-fledged member of the axis of resistance, the alliance of proxies and terrorist groups constructed by Iran’s foremost strategist, the now-deceased IRGC Gen. Qasem Soleimani, during the late 2000s and 2010s. The axis’ objective is the destruction of Israel. It sees that Israel’s greatest assets are its high-tech military and its alliance with the U.S. By drawing the U.S. into the ill-conceived Iran deal—and, as per recent revelations, cultivating an intelligence and subversion network inside the U.S. government—Tehran has weakened the U.S.-Israel relationship.

The Hamas offensive constitutes the first step of a broader campaign against an increasingly isolated Israel. The Jewish state maintains an effective conscript military with significant offensive potential. But Israel is a nation of only nine million. Total mobilization can’t be sustained for more than a few months. Israel is also highly sensitive to casualties as a small liberal democracy, making it harder to fight a long war.

The current campaign is therefore designed to draw Israel into a three-front struggle. Hamas’s barbarity demands an operation into Gaza that will require 30,000 combat troops at least, and will take weeks, perhaps months. The Israeli government can resist pressure to move into Gaza immediately, and instead cordon off the Palestinian pseudo-statelet, but this will trigger hand-wringing in Europe and at the United Nations.

Meanwhile, another intifada seems all but guaranteed, with potential for spillover into Israeli Arab communities akin to the unrest of 2021. This will demand more military deployments and put more societal stress on Israel. Finally, Iran’s most powerful partners, Lebanese Hezbollah and the Syrian Fourth and Fifth divisions, menace Israel from the north. Hezbollah has already threatened to rain rockets on Israel if it moves into Gaza, raising the possibility of a Third Lebanon War.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/western-lecturing-and-israeli-restraint-failed-gaza-hamas-5cd59eb2?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

“Too long have I lived among men who hate peace,” says Psalm 120, recited by Jews around the world for safety in Israel. “I am for peace; but whenever I speak of it, they are for war.” Israelis know the feeling. They awoke Saturday to a jihadist invasion that may shatter as many illusions as it has lives.

How can it be, Israelis have begun to ask, that they allowed a genocidal terrorist group to reign for so long in Gaza, the fiefdom next door? There was no mystery about Hamas’s intentions. It seeks to kill Israel’s Jews any way it can.

Crazy as it now seems, Israelis learned to live with that. They took a series of defensive measures: a blockade to keep weapons out, a missile-defense system to shoot down cheap rockets, and, when those rockets got out of hand, brief campaigns of targeted strikes to quiet Hamas down. But Hamas never had to worry about Israel sweeping it from power.

To force out Hamas, Israel might have had to govern Gaza itself, and the usual suspects in the safe Western democracies—diplomats, reporters, human-rights groups and prize-seeking politicians—would have screamed bloody murder. Our cautious eminences would have deemed it “bad for peace.” But as the Jewish tradition teaches, whoever is kind to the cruel will end up being cruel to the kind.

A perverse alternative reality was constructed in which every Israeli response to the threat from Hamas was illegal, immoral and disproportionate, a war crime if not sadistic outright. Gaza, which Israel gave up in 2005, is still called “Israeli-occupied” by the U.N., a claim Western media parroted. Never mind the territory’s dictatorial rulers sworn to Israel’s violent destruction. The terrorists themselves—the ones live-streaming their slaughter and mutilation of defenseless Jewish civilians to shouts of “Allahu akbar”—were politely termed “militants,” their savagery usually excused as a Newtonian reaction to Israeli security measures.

Israel was even condemned for using force to stop Hamas’s previous attempts to rush the border. Gullible Western media described those would-be infiltrators as “protesters.” Did Israel really need to shoot?

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20039/gaza-iran

There should be little doubt that the war that began when Hamas terrorists attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, actually originated in Iran. The multi-pronged, highly coordinated and murderous attacks could not have happened without Iranian government assistance and approval.

Leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah, according to the Wall Street Journal, have acknowledged that the Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has been working with Hamas since August in planning these attacks.

The pattern of actions is clear: the Iranian regime, now funded by the Biden administration — who carefully looked the other way while Iran acquired $60 billion by evading US sanctions, then threw in an additional fungible $6 billion on top of that — has been, and continues to be, a state actor sponsoring terrorists, terrorist organizations and terrorist attacks.

The Hamas attacks on Israel were sanctioned by Tehran to help fuel tension in the region, probably to disrupt the possibility of an Abraham Accords-style normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Such an agreement would have had a seismic positive impact on the geopolitics of the Middle East. It appears, at least for the moment, any agreement between Israel and the Saudis is tabled. Ironically, after seeing the Israeli Defense Force in action, the Saudis might wish to have Israel as an ally more than ever.

Canceling this transfer makes even more sense in light of the Iranian president bragging that Iran would spend the funds as it saw fit, and not just for humanitarian purposes as the Biden administration disingenuously insists it will. Having a line of credit simply means taking funding already allocated for humanitarian purposes and re-purposing it for terrorism and the nuclear weapons program.

Iran, while still advocating “Death to America,” is not only exporting its military hardware but also its battle-tested military tactics, techniques and procedures, including to Latin America.

Will the Biden administration really continue to do everything possible — as it has with inflation, the fentanyl crisis and migrants pouring over America’s southern border — to avoid saying that what everyone can see in plain sight is not so?