RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21250/hamas-hezbollah-civilian-deaths

Whether it is using schools, hospitals and other public buildings that are supposed to be afforded immunity in conflict under international law, or simply using Palestinian civilians as human shields, Hamas terrorists have consistently jeopardised the well-being of those they purport to defend.

Another area where Hamas deliberately intensifies the suffering of Palestinian civilians as a means of pressuring Israel to end its military offensive is by denying Palestinian families access to much-needed aid supplies.

When the Gazans, for whom the aid is intended, try to approach it, there have been reports of Hamas operatives shooting them.

If the Biden administration and its allies in the media, the United Nations and the European Union really want to see a peaceful resolution of the conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon, then they should direct their criticism of the wilful mistreatment of civilians towards Hamas and Hezbollah, and their backers, not Israel.

Ending the malign operations of terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah is the best means of ending the conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon respectively, and providing ordinary Palestinians and Lebanese with a genuine opportunity to make a better life for themselves.

If Western politicians and aid agencies want to apportion blame for the high death tolls in the conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon, then they need look no further than the Iranian-backed terror groups cynically risking the lives of innocent civilians to achieve their diabolical agenda.

From the moment Iranian-backed Hamas terrorists launched their deadly attack against Israel on October 7 last year, killing 1,200 people and taking another 250 or so hostage, Hamas terrorists have shown a wilful disregard for the lives and well-being of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/12/27/this-year-israel-showed-us-what-anti-fascism-really-means/

In the future, when humanity comes to its senses, 2024 will be seen as a watershed year in the battle against fascism. More fascist-adjacent killers and loons were bumped off over the past 12 months than in any other year in my lifetime. From the leader of an army of anti-Semites that tells its followers to buy cheap knives and ‘cut off the heads of Jews’ (Yahya Sinwar) to the spiritual head of a self-styled ‘Party of God’ that longs to excise those ‘cancerous’ Jews from the Middle East (Hassan Nasrallah), it’s been a rough year for neo-fascist nuts. And about time, too.

2024 is the year anti-fascism grew up. For years, ‘anti-fascism’ was the weekend hobby of bored rich kids. To say the masked wimps of ‘antifa’ gave anti-fascism a bad name is an understatement. They dragged its name into the gutter. Under their black-clad purview, anti-fascism entailed little more than shouting ‘BITCH’ at women who don’t want to see dicks in their changing rooms, weeping on the campus lawn whenever Ben Shapiro showed up, and having fisticuffs with working-class people who voted for Trump. The men of the Normandy landings and the International Brigades will have turned in their graves at the sight of these toytown radicals throwing milkshakes at ‘rednecks’ and calling it anti-fascism.

Now, thankfully, anti-fascism means something again. Largely courtesy of Israel’s war on the Jew-hating belligerents at its borders, a real fight with fascism has replaced the neurotic street theatrics of the affluent activist class that falsely called itself anti-fascism. Sure, these people might have slapped Richard Spencer once, but the IDF has throttled entire movements that were founded with the expressly fascistic intention to kill Jews and erase their homeland.

This year we bid adieu to Yahya Sinwar, the head of Hamas in Gaza; the man widely suspected of being the architect of 7 October, the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust. It seems likely that Mohammed Deif was also hurried off this mortal coil by the IDF. He was the leader of the al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, which did so much of the raping and butchering on 7 October.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21245/israeli-arab-leaders

“For the longest time, I struggled with my identity. A Palestinian kid born inside Israel. Like…wtf. Many of my friends refuse to this day to say the word ‘Israel’ and call themselves ‘Palestinian’ only. But since I was 12, that did not make sense to me. So, I decided to mix the two and become a ‘Palestinian-Israeli.’ I thought this term reflected who I was. Palestinian first. Israeli second. But after recent events, I started to think. And think. And think. And then my thoughts turned to anger. I realized that if Israel were to be ‘invaded’ like that again, we would not be safe. To a terrorist invading Israel, all citizens are targets…. And I do not want to live under a Palestinian government. Which means I only have one home, even if I’m not Jewish: Israel.” — Nuseir Yassin (“Nas Daily”), Israeli Arab blogger, the day after October 8, 2023.

These [Arab Israeli] leaders will do anything to grab the attention of the media – even if that means inciting against Israel. They know that when they deal with the real problems facing their Arab constituents – such as unemployment and poverty – no one will write about them in the media. Yet, when these leaders make fiery statements against Israel, they often win headlines and front-page stories. As far as they are concerned, “I don’t care what you write about me as long as you spell my name right.”

By engaging in anti-Israel incitement, these Israeli Arab leaders are causing huge damage to their own constituents. These leaders make the Israeli Arabs look as if they are a “Fifth Column” — an enemy within. These leaders are stoking fear and mistrust between Jews and Arabs inside Israel, while ignoring that most Israeli Arabs say they feel comfortable living in the Jewish state.

If Israeli Arabs want to secure a prosperous future for themselves and their children, they need to get rid of extremist Arab leaders who speak and act against the interests of the Arab community inside Israel. If these Arab leaders are unhappy living in Israel, they are welcome to move to the West Bank, Gaza Strip or any Arab country — where they will quickly miss Israel’s democracy and freedom of speech.

The Iran-backed Palestinian Hamas terrorist group has long been seeking to spark a civil war between Israel’s Arab and Jewish citizens. Over the past few years, Hamas has called on the two million Arab citizens of Israel to revolt against their own country and join the Jihad against Israel.

Hamas’s attempts were partially successful in May 2021, when some Arabs attacked their Jewish neighbors. The assaults occurred at the same time as an Israeli military operation in the Gaza Strip. That operation was launched in response to rockets fired by Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups at Israel. Fortunately, the violence that erupted in 2021 ended quickly.

https://jihadwatch.org/2024/12/netanyahu-and-the-road-to-victory?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=netanyahu-and-the-road-to-victory

Elliot Kaufman published in the Wall Street Journal on December 20 an interview he had just conducted with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It’s a riveting read. At three key moments since October 7, 2023, Netanyahu was given advice by the Biden administration on the conduct of the war against Hamas, and then on the war against Hezbollah. In all three cases, Netanyahu ignored that advice and went ahead with what turned out to be moves essential to the IDF’s success. More on Netanyahu’s road to victory can be found here: “Benjamin Netanyahu: The Inside Story of Israel’s Victory,” by Elliot Kaufman, Wall Street Journal, December 20, 2024:

…”The Americans said to me, ‘If you go into Rafah, you’re on your own, and we’re not going to send you the critical arms,’ which is tough to hear,” Mr. Netanyahu says. Internally, others argued that Israel was too reliant on U.S. munitions to risk fighting on. “That’s a legitimate case,” Mr. Netanyahu says. “But if we don’t go into Rafah, we can’t exist as a sovereign state. We’d become a vassal state and we won’t survive. The question of arms will fix itself, but the question of our independence will not. That’s the end of Israel.”

In Rafah, Israel cut off Hamas’s supply route [for weapons] and later killed Sinwar, its chief. The Biden administration imposed a de facto arms embargo on Israel, delaying weapons shipments.

Just as Netanyahu rejected the American advice not to conduct a ground invasion of Gaza but instead to stick to airstrikes, he rejected the American pressure not to enter Rafah, which was accompanied by a threat to withhold some weaponry. He was told that the people in Rafah would not evacuate, for there was “no place” for them to go, and that such an operation would cost 20,000 lives. The Americans were wrong on both counts. Within a few weeks, almost one million civilians had evacuated, as directed, from Rafah, and went to the town of Al-Mawasi on the coast, near Khan Younis, an area where the IDF would not attack. And instead of 20,000 casualties in Rafah — the number that the Americans feared would result from the operation — there were only a few thousand, both combatants and civilians.

“The U.S. withheld critical weapons,” Mr. Netanyahu admits, but he appreciates the pressure Mr. Biden was under. “It’s not easy to be president, let’s face it, with these very radical fringes in his party. It wasn’t easy to do what Mr. Biden did,” including helping Israel in its defense against Iranian missile attacks, he says….

For Israel, it’s a return to form. “Power isn’t merely guns, missiles, tanks and aircraft,” Mr. Netanyahu says. “It’s the will to fight and seize the initiative.”

Iran’s nuclear program now looks vulnerable. “I’m not going to talk about that,” Mr. Netanyahu says. When I say I’ve never heard him so reticent on his favorite subject, he responds cryptically: “I’ve always said the jury’s out, still out on all of us, and I don’t exclude myself.” It is perhaps on this that he expects to be judged.

https://www.jns.org/piers-morgan-candace-owens-and-haaretz/

The International Federation of Journalists was disturbed last month when the Israeli Cabinet voted to cut all financial ties with Haaretz, the country’s self-described “paper of record” with a proud, far-left bent.

“We are extremely concerned over Israel’s authoritarian drift that undermines media pluralism and the public’s right to know,” Anthony Bellanger, the IFJ general secretary. responded to the move. “The IFJ urges the government to review its decision and stop damaging press freedom in the country by boycotting a newspaper. We express our solidarity with Haaretz journalists.”

It’s typical of the IFJ to decry Israeli policies as antithetical to Western values. You know, like the time it blasted the Jewish state for “targeting” Al Jazeera reporters. Never mind that those paragons of the press were affiliated with Hamas and participated in the Oct. 7, 2023 massacre.

And forget the fact that its depiction of the measure adopted in relation to Haaretz is totally false. Canceling subscriptions to and pulling ads from a publication over its content do not violate freedom. On the contrary, they constitute consumer prerogatives.

Furthermore, Haaretz has only itself to blame for its waning readership, as its open anti-Zionism is too much for even many liberal Israelis to tolerate. This is especially true in the wake of Oct. 7 and the paper’s extremist positions on Israel’s defensive seven-front war.

The last straw for the government—and its purse strings—was publisher Amos Schocken’s appalling performance at a conference in London at the end of October, sponsored by Haaretz, in conjunction with JW3-Jewish Community Centre London, New Israel Fund U.K., Yachad, A Land for All and Standing Together.

During his speech at the event—titled “Israel After October 7th: Allied or Alone?”—Schocken smeared his country with lies its enemies love to hear.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/12/21/israel-is-winning-the-war-while-the-west-retreats/

It’s now clear that, given a free hand, Israel can handle its mortal enemies in the Middle East. It’s their so-called friends in the West and the ‘international community’ that the Israelis have to worry about.

In 2024, Israel has achieved remarkable military successes on every front. The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) have hammered the genocidal pogromists of Hamas in Gaza, devastated their fellow Islamist terrorists of Hezbollah in Lebanon, and shaken their sponsor, the Islamic Republic of Iran, to its tyrannical roots. All of which, as Brendan O’Neill recently argued on spiked, also facilitated the collapse of the brutal Assad dictatorship in Syria.

By the year’s end, nobody could seriously doubt Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s declaration that ‘We are winning’. Moreover, anybody who believes in freedom should surely be celebrating the success of the only Western-style democracy in the Middle East as a blow struck for civilisation against barbarism.

Instead, Israel’s traditional Western allies have spent 2024 retreating from its side almost as quickly as Hamas and Hezbollah fled before the IDF. For every military advance Israel has made over the past year, it has seemed to suffer more political setbacks on the international battlefield.

At the end of 2023, Israel was accused of committing ‘genocide’ in Gaza before the International Court of Justice – a perverse claim put forward by South Africa, supported by other states and recently endorsed by Amnesty International.

Worse, as 2024 ends, the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant against Netanyahu for allegedly committing crimes against humanity in Gaza – the first leader of a Western-style democracy to be charged with war crimes. Forget all the tyrants on Earth, the prime minister of the world’s only Jewish state must apparently be singled out for punishment. And worse still, several Western states – including, shamefully, the UK Labour government – have declared their willingness to execute the warrant and arrest him.

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com

Can one name a single example of a democratic nation beset by a war against its existence on almost every front that continues its 24/7 outsize research and technology to benefit all humanity? Here, thanks to Michael Ordman, is a handful of examples of one week’s science and medicine that illustrate how Israel does it.

Detecting 250 genetic diseases. 

Decoding rare brain disease. 

 US & Europe approve focused ultrasound scanners. 

Transporting greener vegetables. 

 Recycling organic waste. 

How iron dome tech extinguishes fires

More integrated data for farmers. 

Read it all….rsk

POSITIVE NEWS IN A WAR
 
Thousands help farmers rebuild. The HaShomer HaChadash (“The New Watchman”) agricultural volunteer organization aims to bring at least 100,000 volunteers to help farmers in the north repair hundreds of acres of orchards. The nonprofit has already mobilized some 300,000 volunteers to help farmers in the south.
https://www.jns.org/seeds-of-hope-volunteers-help-farmers-rebuild-northern-israel/
 
Eyeglasses for soldiers & evacuees. Since Oct 7 2023 Israeli nonprofit RE-SPECS has assisted thousands of evacuees from southern and northern Israel as well as soldiers with subsidized corrective eyewear. RE-SPECS takes inquiries via WhatsApp and after processing, the spectacles are sent to a local volunteer for collection.
https://www.jns.org/re-specs-helping-israeli-soldiers-evacuees-see-light-after-darkness/
https://www.respecsframes.com/english
 
Mother of two IDF soldiers, enlists. (TY Yanky) Liora Lubovitz Batan has a daughter and a son in the IDF.  Instead of sitting home and worrying, she enlisted in the IDF reserves, decades after completing her army service. she has since served 14 months in logistics positions and in combat support in the northern sector.
https://haipo.co.il/en/item/549196
 
Religious Zionist towns lead reserve duty. The IDF has reported that residents from religious Zionist towns in Judea, Samaria, and The Golan were leaders in the average number of days of military reserve duty served in 2023. Moshav Ramat Magshimim in the Golan Heights led with 53.94 days per resident on average.
https://www.jns.org/religious-zionist-towns-lead-in-idf-reserve-duty/
 
Finding hi-tech jobs for wounded IDF soldiers. Israeli nonprofit Atidim (see here previously) has established the “Warriors for High Tech” program to help IDF veterans transition to technology careers. It is especially attentive to the employment requirements of ex-soldiers who have suffered physical injury or trauma.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/y3zcammov  https://atidim.org/en/ 
 
NIS 200 million for victims of Hamas. Israel’s Merit Spread Foundation has raised over NIS 200 million in US-tax-exempt donations since the Oct 7 2003 Hamas invasion. It advertises as having unprecedented zero cost overheads and the fund has financed various projects covering multiple social benefit causes relating to the war.
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/400602  https://meritspread.com/
 
Teen Oct 7 survivors play basketball in LA. 15 Israeli high-schoolers from Gaza envelope kibbutzim went on a week-long trip to Los Angeles to watch NBA games, tour Universal Studios and play against a local Jewish day school. The program was organized by Project 24, connecting Israeli and North American communities.
https://www.jns.org/they-survived-oct-7-now-theyre-playing-basketball-in-los-angeles/
https://www.project24israel.org/
 
Baby shower for 40 pregnant army wives. Forty wives of IDF reserve soldiers gathered in Modi’in, between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, recently for a collective baby shower (pre-birth party). They received hundreds of gifts from companies and individuals, including essentials for the hospital. Most of all, they made new friends.
https://www.jns.org/our-jewish-revenge-pregnant-army-wives-throw-massive-baby-shower/
 
 
ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
 
Detecting 250 genetic diseases. The non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) technology from Israel’s IdentifAI (see here previously) can detect any of 250 hereditary genetic disorders from a maternal blood sample. It isolates and performs full genetic sequencing of fetal DNA as early as nine weeks of pregnancy.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/hj8wgtmnkx
 
Decoding rare brain disease. Researchers at Tel Aviv University have developed an research model to decode the mechanism underlying a severe and rare neurological disease. A mutation in the protein TIMM50 causes epilepsy, developmental delay, and intellectual disability. It could lead to new treatments for many diseases.
https://english.tau.ac.il/research/decoding-brain-disease
https://elifesciences.org/reviewed-preprints/99914#tab-content
 
US & Europe approve focused ultrasound scanners. Israel’s Insightec has received both FDA approval and the CE mark for its Exablate Prime focused ultrasound system integrated with MR scanners from medical equipment giant Philips. It extends Insightec’s treatment of essential tremor and Parkinson’s patients.
https://www.ourcrowd.com/startup-news/insightec-secures-fda-approval-and-ce-marking-for-exablate-prime-on-philips-mr-systems
 
New private medical school. (TY Atid-EDI) The Council for Higher Education in Israel has granted approval to the independent Reichman University in Herzliya to establish a Medical School.  Eighty medical students will be enrolled in the first four-year program, which will begin in February 2025.
https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-medical-school-approved-for-reichman-university-1001493862
 
First-ever MedEx LA event. Dozens of Jewish doctors, many planning to make Aliyah in the near future, gathered in Los Angeles for the inaugural MedEx LA fair. It follows recent MedEx events in London, Paris, Buenos Aires, and New Jersey, addressing Israel’s shortage of doctors plus easing the Aliya process for them.
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/400544

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21234/israel-saving-the-world-defending-freedom

When it comes to national security, appeasement is not an option. Bribing aggressors only finances their militaries for attacks on the West in the future. Israel’s approach to combating terrorism has always been characterized by thoroughness and determination — for which is usually put through the tortures of hell by the very countries it is working to save.

With a vision of ultimately fostering peace, harmony, security and prosperity throughout the region, as in the Abraham Accords, Israel expanded its military operations beyond Hamas… reshaping the Middle East into a region free of the grip of terror… Make Persia Great Again!

So long as Iran’s regime remains in power, brutalizing its people and making plans for global expansion, there can be no chance for peace in the region.

Removing the regime… would bring lasting security and prosperity to the Middle East and beyond…. One could then set about subduing Turkey and its terrorist proxies in Syria.

After Hamas carried out its horrific October 7, 2023 massacre by invading Israel, murdering hundreds of people and kidnapping individuals from various countries, Israel reached a breaking point. This act of terrorism ignited a wave of decisive actions across the Middle East that catalyzed remarkable developments, aimed at countering and eliminating terror networks.

For decades, the region has been plagued by violence and instability, but Israel’s response marked a significant turning point, showcasing its resolve to confront terrorism head-on and help usher in a new era of security.

Israel has consistently demonstrated its commitment to thorough and resolute action. When it comes to national security, appeasement is not an option. Bribing aggressors only finances their militaries for attacks on the West in the future. Israel’s approach to combating terrorism has always been characterized by thoroughness and determination — for which is usually put through the tortures of hell by the very countries it is working to save.