RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21011/resistance-or-terror-the-importance-of-dosage

However, it is hard to see how the October 7 attack could be categorized as an act of resistance by freedom-fighters… For Hamas, October 7 was a war of choice, not a war of necessity, and its goal wasn’t just to terrorize a real or imaginary foe but to murder as many non-combatants as possible.

Terror is used to persuade or force an adversary into doing something you want or stop doing something you don’t want and sadly, in many instances it works. However, if an act of terror transcends certain boundaries, it could produce the opposite of what the terrorist hoped for. In other words, it is all a matter of dosage.

Without the “Al-Aqsa Storm” raid, no Israeli prime minister, let alone Benjamin Netanyahu, who happened to have hit the nadir of unpopularity, would have dared to launch a total war aimed at flushing Hamas out of Gaza and Hezbollah out of Lebanon.

Sinwar isn’t the first victim of unintended consequences and won’t be the last either.

In hindsight, it seems that the late leader of the Lebanese Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, understood the importance of dosage in terror and/or resistance.

This is why initially, to the surprise of some, Nasrallah refused to enter the danse-macabre opened by Sinwar.

We may never know what persuaded or forced Nasrallah to abandon his usual caution and join an adventure beyond his control. My guess is that he didn’t jump, but was pushed. Your guess as to who pushed him.

These days, my two favorite bookshops in Paris and London are devoting a full shelf to books on or inspired by Hamas’s “Al-Aqsa Storm” October 7 invasion of Israel.

Some of these books offer various accounts of what happened on that day and could be classed as extended reportages of the kind news magazines offered in the good old days of print journalism. The most interesting of these, Trey Yingst’s Black Saturday, which broadens its scope to offer a portrayal of the subsequent war in Gaza. Because the author is a television reporter, his fast-paced reportage often resembles a newsreel. That, however, does not prevent him from offering often deep insights into the mind-sets of the two adversaries.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21008/betraying-the-free-world

The only country in the Middle East consistently pressured to make concessions “to avoid escalation” was the victim of October 7, Israel.

The rapacity of Iran’s regime, which apparently feels free to launch attacks on U.S. troops at will — especially after enjoying massive amounts of US generosity — is breathtaking.

The Biden-Harris administration also infused the regime with “closer to $60 billion” — which most likely funded its militias; its terrorist proxy organizations, such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis; its expansionist agenda as far away as Venezuela, and its oppressive domestic policies, to which, for decade, the U.S. has turned a blind eye. When widespread protests take place in Iran, citizens bravely rise up against the regime, only to be brutally crushed — without so much as a glance from the U.S.

Iran, taking its cue from the Biden-Harris administration’s road-siding of Israel, proceeded, not surprisingly, to escalate its campaign against it. If there are no serious consequences, why stop?

Israel now finds itself fighting for its survival on multiple fronts. Thanks to the seeming lack of support from the Biden administration, Israel alone must fend off Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, the UN, much of Europe, the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, professionally whipped-up Western university campuses and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The dangerous reality that unfolds when a once-reliable ally is abandoned, is that enemies can become increasingly aggressive so long as no one stops them.

The message being sent is that allies will be left to fend for themselves, and enemies of freedom and democracy can go ahead and demolish them with impunity.

The Free World, once a beacon of security, is left vulnerable, isolated and under siege.

An ally, a true friend, is someone upon whom you can depend in times of crisis, especially when under attack. Throughout history, alliances have been formed on the basis of mutual support and protection. Yet, one could strongly argue that no administration in the history of the United States has left its allies in such a vulnerable position as the Biden-Harris administration.

Iran, no longer content to merely act through its proxies, has taken direct and aggressive action against America’s long-term ally, Israel, by attacking not only Israel but, through its proxies and militias, U.S. troops in the region more than 160 times just since October 2023 — whenever it deems fit. Iran-backed Hamas terrorists murdered 43 Americans in their October 7, 2023 invasion of Israel.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/10/08/israel-at-war-democracy-in-action/

How does Israel do it? When the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) assassinated the head terrorist of Hezbollah two weeks ago, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the world that ‘We are winning’. And he was right.

A year after the darkness of 7 October, the message from Israel is: let there be light! The IDF has crushed Hamas in Gaza, delivered hammer blows to Hezbollah in Lebanon and shaken the terrorists’ sponsor, the Islamic Republic of Iran, to its tyrannical roots.

So how has Israel – a small state of fewer than 10million people, surrounded, as Daniel Ben-Ami analysed on spiked, by genocidal Islamist enemies and isolated on the international stage as never before – had such military success?

No doubt superior military technology, both imported and homemade, has played its part, alongside the sort of intelligence and chutzpah required to blow up personal pagers in terrorists’ pockets.

The most important factor, however, is surely the active commitment of a large part of the Israeli population to the war effort. It is a people’s war, supported by millions who identify with and have a stake in the Jewish State, and view its existential struggle against the Islamists as a fight for their own heritage and future.

Anybody who supports democracy and freedom should be unequivocally on Israel’s side. As the sole democracy in the Middle East, and the sworn enemy of Islamist terrorists, Israel is on the frontline of the global struggle between civilisation and barbarism.

Even more than that, Israel is an example to us all of what can be achieved if you fight for what you believe in and take the people with you. The support of the Israeli demos – the people – means that Israel is not only fighting for democracy. Its war effort is real democracy in action.

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

https://www.frontpagemag.com/why-israel-is-innocent-of-the-accusation-of-genocide-in-gaza/

Talk of Israel’s crime of genocide in the war against Hamas in Gaza is ubiquitous. It is treated as an axiom; to question the tenability of Israeli genocide is to act as if one is questioning an invariable law of nature. South Africa has even brought charges of genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice. College protests and global public outrage at the deaths of Palestinian civilians—with the irrelevant special citation of women and children—are fueled by a misconception about the nature of genocide itself, a crime of which the Jewish state is innocent.

(I say the deaths of women and children are irrelevant in the citation of the alleged genocide because it is a surreptitious way of imputing greater moral value to the lives of women and children than to men. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. The death of a man in war regardless of his age is just as tragic as the death of a child. All human lives regardless of sex have intrinsic moral value.)

The word genocide was first coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer, to describe the systematic extermination policies of Nazi Germany during World War II. Genocide has been defined as acts committed with the intent to destroy in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. It involves preventing births within the group, and forcibly transferring children to another group.

As an historical fact, it is worth noting that in the years following the re-establishment of Israel in 1948, the Arab population of what many refer to as historic Palestine more than quintupled from 1.3 million to about 7.5 million. The Palestinian population in Judea and Samaria has continued to rise from 3.6 million in 2006, to 5.4 million in 2023. One has to point out that when there are far higher death tolls in the Middle East, say, in 2011 where up to 600,000 people have been killed in Syria’s civil war—a number which many writers state is ten times higher than have died in the Arab-Israeli conflict since 1948—such war outcomes are never labeled as genocides.

There are some important points to be made here. Israel has never had a genocidal policy towards its Arab populations which have grown exponentially in Israel and in Judea and Samaria (also part of Israel). It cannot be accused of genocide in its current war against Hamas in Gaza for several reasons. There is no intent to annihilate the Palestinians in Gaza. The responsibility for the war lies with Hamas, which invaded Israel on October 7, 2023. No rational war can be fought when an attacked nation is asked to be morally responsible for the civilians of the aggressor region or country. Hamas bears full responsibility for any death toll of its citizens on two fronts.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/10/10/try-a-little-honesty-about-israel-2/

Both the Harris-Walz presidential ticket and now lame-duck President Joe Biden keep insisting that they are Israel’s best friend.

A snarly Biden recently bragged at a contentious press conference, “No administration has helped Israel more than I have. None, none, none. And I think [Netanyahu] should remember that.”

Yet the thin-skinned and triggered Biden’s prickliness poorly hid—or perhaps revealed—the truth: this current administration knows that it is responsible for the current explosion of the Middle East and the particular dilemmas of Israel.

Biden further revealed his blame-gaming of the Israeli government when asked another loaded question about purported Netanyahu election interference, saying, “Whether he’s trying to influence the election, I don’t know.”

Election interference?

Biden apparently forgot who just flew Ukrainian President Zelensky into swing state Pennsylvania, just as early and mail-in voting there began, to lobby for more aid even as he trashed candidates Trump and Vance to a left-wing magazine.

Recently, Democratic candidate Vice President Kamala Harris refused to say whether the Netanyahu administration is even an ally of the United States.

Her Democrat running mate, Governor Tim Walz, could not state whether the Democratic ticket would approve of an Israeli response—by either targeting the Iranian nuclear bomb program or its oil fields and exporting facilities—to some 500 Iranian missiles and rockets that hit the Jewish state.

Another Bob Woodward racy and gossipy tell-all book just appeared. It alleges that Biden despised Netanyahu and has reportedly smeared him to aides: “That son of a bitch, Bibi Netanyahu, he’s a bad guy. He’s a bad f**king guy!”

What are we to make of this Biden-Harris-Walz mess?

It is an election year and one of the closest races in modern memory. Biden and his successors, Harris-Walz, know that support for Israel is a bipartisan cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy and critical for Democratic unity.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21005/israel-in-danger

“[Hamas leader Yahya] Sinwar wants everyone to be a martyr—except for him.” Now he appears to want to have discussions again on the condition that the Israelis will not try to kill him during the negotiations on a deal. — David Greenfield, CEO and executive director of Met Council, August 28, 2024.

When Israelis clamor for the release of their hostages, they are, unfortunately, just letting Hamas know what a valuable bargaining chip it has – so the price goes up. For Hamas, if the families of the hostages succeed in getting Netanyahu pushed out of office, so much the better: he will likely be replaced by a “peace” coalition who will grant massive concessions to Hamas and allow it to stay in power.

As far as the Biden-Harris administration is concerned, a new Israeli prime minister it hand-picks to replace Netanyahu would presumably agree to US demands to let the Palestinians in Gaza set up a sovereign terrorist state on Israel’s border, from which to continue attacking Israel until it is destroyed. A new prime minister installed by the Biden-Harris administration would also agree to Iran having as many nuclear weapons as it likes. Iran, after finishing off Israel, which Iran’s former President Ali Akhbar Hashemi Rafsanjani called a “one-bomb country,” could then resume trying to take over its oil-rich neighbors, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

The Biden-Harris administration also appears to want Hamas to stay in power because that is what Hamas’s patrons, Iran and Qatar (America’s supposed ally) want.

Meanwhile, back in Gaza, the Associated Press reports, “Sinwar wants to end the war — but only on his terms.” These terms include a complete Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, including the “Philadelphi Corridor” border between Egypt and Gaza. That is where immense cross-border underground tunnels are located, allowing the resumption of unlimited supplies of new weapons to be smuggled to Hamas in Gaza, as well as the ideal gateway for Hamas leader Sinwar to escape to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula — with the remaining Israeli hostages in tow.

For Hamas and Sinwar, the bottom line for is to stay in power to be able to attack Israel “time and again until it is annihilated,” as one of its officials, Ghazi Hamad, straightforwardly said.

Israel’s opposition political leaders, journalists, trade unionists, and many senior security officials all appear to be walking into a trap that Hamas has laid out for them: having Israeli anti-government demonstrators demand new elections to force Netanyahu out and a US puppet — agreeable to terrorist Palestinian state, Hamas’s continued rule in Gaza, and a nuclear-armed Iran — in.

Hamas, remember, never offered to release all the hostages, only a few, alive or dead. Sinwar will undoubtedly try to string out the negotiations as long as he can – refusing to provide hostage names again, and so on. His job will be to keep as many hostages as long as possible, to buy time for Hamas to resupply and regroup.

For months, Hamas has rejected any agreement, and blamed Netanyahu. They have, of course, been helped by the Biden-Harris administration, which snubbed Netanyahu at the airport in Washington DC in July as well as at his address to the United States Congress. The snubs evidently only succeeded in giving Hamas the impression that the US was done with Netanyahu, that a Hamas victory was in the bank, and that all Iran and its proxies had to do was sit back and wait.

For months, Hamas has rejected every agreement: its leaders apparently think that the pressure on Netanyahu and his government by the Biden-Harris administration would win their war for them. Hamas has now seen that murdering hostages results in even more pressure for Israel to surrender.

“We’re asked to make concessions? What message does this send Hamas? It says, ‘Kill more hostages, murder more hostages! You’ll get more concessions! The pressure internationally must be directed at these killers, at Hamas, not at Israel.” — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to the protestors demonstrating against him, September 2, 2024.

The Biden-Harris administration has, in fact, been funding Israel’s anti-government protests since Netanyahu was elected two years ago, to try to oust him. Shortly after the October 7, 2023 invasion by Hamas, the Biden-Harris administration continually pressured Israel to make concessions and withheld or slow-walked weapons shipments, but never applied even the slightest pressure on Hamas, Iran, or the major funder of all Islamic terrorist groups, Qatar.

In the meantime, Iran appears to be gearing up to take over Sudan. Such an acquisition would complete the regime’s “ring of fire” — a multi-front war encircling Israel.

“Iran is trying to establish an eastern terrorist front against Israel in the West Bank by smuggling weapons from Jordan and financing terrorists.” — Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz, August 29, 2024.

Worse, this week the Biden-Harris administration announced that it is sending Lebanon an additional $157 million – for “humanitarian relief.” In Hezbollah-speak, that means funding for more weapons to attack Israel. Does anyone really think that the battered Lebanese people will see a cent? This bounty brings the Biden-Harris administration’s prize money for Hezbollah’s war machine to $385 million — all of which will most certainly be diverted to attacking Israel.

Vice President Kamala Harris has repeatedly called for a rapid ceasefire in Gaza – meaning the survival of Hamas – and said that a “two-state solution is the only path forward” — meaning, undoubtedly, a terrorist Palestinian state.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) recently announced that it “needed more time” to find human rights violations in Israel’s “most moral army in history.” The ICJ seems to be hoping that if they wait long enough, a few violations might turn up.

As Israel turns to the existential danger presented by Iran, it will need all the support it can get, both from its own people and other nations. If they are smart, they will give it.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/well-whaddya-know-hezbollah-wants-a-cease-fire/

Hezbollah’s No. 2 — who, as I noted earlier, is not exactly tripping over himself to be proclaimed Hezbollah’s new No. 1 — has asserted that the terrorist organization supports the efforts of “Lebanon” to establish a truce with Israel.

Of course, Lebanon’s government is run by Hezbollah, which is run by Iran.

The Jerusalem Post reports that, with Israel having eliminated Hezbollah’s leaders, most of its commanders, and thousands of its beeper-issued jihadists, deputy leader Naim Qassem is now hopeful that “after the issue of a cease-fire takes shape, and once diplomacy can achieve it, all of the other details can be discussed and decisions can be taken.”

It marks the first time Hezbollah has signaled willingness to stop the fighting it started on October 8, 2023, without conditioning a cease-fire on a cessation of the fighting that Hamas started with its atrocities the preceding day. Getting your brains beaten in can be clarifying.

For public consumption, Qassem takes the position that he is supporting a cease-fire initiative being led by Nabih Berri, nominally the speaker of Lebanon’s parliament. And putting on his brave face, he added that “if the enemy [Israel] continues its war, then the battlefield will decide.”

That’s two brave faces in one day. Earlier, Qassem claimed that Hezbollah had “overcome all the blows that have been dealt us,” in conjunction with which the jihadists fired over 100 missiles at Haifa. The attack had no meaningful effect; in the interim, the IDF proceeded with more aerial bombardments of Hezbollah havens south of Beirut.

The battlefield has already decided.