RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/it-turns-out-hamas-wont-just-commit-suicide/

One week ago, Joe Biden revealed the details of an Israeli cease-fire proposal (to which the Israelis seemed conspicuously cold) that he said held out the promise of a “better ‘day after’ in Gaza without Hamas in power” (to which Hamas is expected to consent). The premise would be laughable, but the earnestness with which the Biden administration appears to believe its own suppositions drained the moment of its dark humor.

The widespread skepticism the president’s announcement produced was entirely warranted. But while the Israeli side has apparently consented to what one Netanyahu adviser said was “not a good deal,” Hamas stubbornly refuses to just roll over and die. Though that would represent a pleasantly bloodless conclusion to the war in Gaza, the terror group that slaughtered civilians en masse at the outset of hostilities seems disinclined to consent to its own euthanasia.

“Hamas will not surrender its guns or sign a proposal that asks for that,” the Arab mediators relating Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar conveyed to U.S. officials on Thursday, according to the Wall Street Journal. That revelation was apparently so unremarkable that it merited little in the way of subsequent reporting on Hamas’s negotiating posture.

The rest of the Journal piece was devoted to the political fallout resulting from an Israeli air strike on a compound housing a U.N.-run school that had served as a makeshift civilian shelter. Palestinian officials insist the strike was reckless and unprovoked. The Israelis maintain that the facility was being used by Hamas to shelter militants who participated in the October 7 attacks. The Journal’s report blurs the ethical distinctions between the combatants and their competing claims, but one stands out. When Israeli forces kill civilians, it’s an accident (when it’s not a fabrication). When Hamas kills civilians, it’s strategic.

Tragedies like the one that allegedly unfolded near the Nuseirat camp occur in war — a war, some may need reminding, that was inaugurated by Hamas. It is the offensive actor in this conflict, and the collateral damage that accompanies Israel’s defensive campaign is a lamentable consequence of Hamas’s aggression. Indeed, drawing fire near or onto civilian targets is a key feature of Hamas’s tactics in its asymmetrical struggle against the Israelis. Lending the terrorist sect’s claims credibility — or even mere emotional weight — advances Hamas’s objectives and prolongs the war.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20683/israel-helping-palestinians

Consider the fact that no Arab or Muslim nation has been willing to accept Palestinian refugees from Gaza. Perhaps these nations recall that anyone who has tried to help the Palestinians has lived to regret it.

Perhaps Ireland, Norway and Spain might extend invitations to the Palestinians to become residents there?

On April 13, more than 1,000 demonstrators marched through the streets of Hamburg, Germany and demanded that the country become a Caliphate, with Shariah law.

The only reason that Ireland, Norway and Spain can safely recognize a Palestinian state is that they do not have to live with the consequences.

Many [Arab and Muslim states]… might feel obligated officially to support the Palestinians and a “two-state solution,” but behind closed doors will admit that a Palestinian state is the last thing they want….

The truth is that few outside of Israel really care about the plight of the Palestinian people. The demonstrations on college campuses which purport to be “pro-Palestine” are far more about condemning Israel than about helping the Palestinians.

Those who claim to support the Palestinians… ought to be urging Arab and Muslim nations to help the Palestinians in material ways.

Until that is done, all the Palestinian people will get are hollow demonstrations on university campuses, empty recognitions from anti-Israel governments, irrelevant United Nations resolutions and bigoted demonization of Israel. None of this helps the Palestinian people. It only encourages more hatred, more terrorism and more war.

https://www.jns.org/the-myth-of-gazas-innocent-majority/

It’s time to dispel the myth that Gaza is filled with innocent civilians. In the first place, the residents of the enclave are responsible for Hamas’s takeover in 2007.

Second, their brethren in the Palestinian Authority are hungry to copy the move in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), despite years of ample evidence of what life is like under Hamas’s reign of terror.

Third, no disgruntlement on the part of either populace has replaced antisemitism. On the contrary, the worse their plight, the more they cling to the lie that the Jewish state, from its inception in 1948, is to blame.

In fairness, it’s tough for people who imbibe jihadist ideology with their mothers’ milk to engage in critical thinking when they come of age. In this respect, they’re victims—of their upbringing, not Israel’s existence. Certainly not of its policies, which have been nothing but magnanimous over the decades. Suicidally so.

Indeed, concern for the welfare of noncombatant human shields has not only led to the death of far too many Israel Defense Forces soldiers, it’s been preventing the IDF from defeating Hamas.

Ironically, much of the hesitance emanates from the military itself. Having the most stringent rules of engagement—to the point of referring to the phenomenon as “purity of arms”—does tend to make it more difficult to conduct warfare, particularly on such an asymmetric battlefield as Gaza.

Nor are such directives conducive to deterring the country’s numerous other enemies. This is the Middle East, after all, where strength is revered and weakness scorned. Just ask any Gazan.

https://www.jns.org/british-foreign-office-accused-of-cover-up-over-terror-linked-palestinian-groups/

The British Foreign Office is suspected of sending millions to terror-linked Palestinian groups and then covering it up to avoid a public backlash after refusing to disclose where the money went.

The United Kingdom granted the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) £4.6 million, or about $5.9 million in 2022.

NGO Monitor, a Jerusalem-based research institute, filed a freedom of information (FOI) request on March 25, 2021. It asked the U.K.’s Foreign Office, officially the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), for names of the beneficiaries.

The NRC is infamous in Israel as an NGO engaging in anti-Israel activities disguised as “humanitarianism.” It made headlines in Israel a few years back when it tried to undermine the country’s judicial system by flooding its courts with cases.

NGO Monitor suspected that the Norwegian Refugee Council had funded Palestinian organizations with terror links, notably to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

A tipoff was the U.K. government’s growing reluctance to talk about the NRC’s beneficiaries.

“Up until 2018 or so, the government used to publish the names of all local NGO recipients of U.K. aid via the NRC,” Anne Herzberg, legal adviser at NGO Monitor, told JNS. “We began to see a marked decrease in transparency regarding NRC funding to local NGOs around 2018-2019.”

NGO Monitor knew that the NRC worked with the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC). Fatah identifies UAWC as an official “affiliate” of the PFLP. Two of its officials were arrested in 2019 for the murder of 17-year-old Rina Shnerb. A 2017 NRC document showed the group still worked with the UAWC.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/05/29/americans-back-israels-war-on-hamas-but-just-37-support-a-palestinian-state-ii-tipp-poll/

Given the Biden administration’s official response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks on Israel and the recent call by several nations to recognize a Palestinian state, you might think that Americans are ambivalent about Israel’s tough stance against Hamas terrorism. But in fact, Americans broadly support Israel’s actions by more than 2-to-1, according to the latest I&I/TIPP Poll.

The national online poll, taken from May 1-3, asked 1,435 adults the following question: “Do you support or oppose Israel taking tough actions, such as eliminating Hamas to ensure its security within its borders?”

Of those responding, 54% said they either “strongly” supported (29%) taking such action, or “somewhat” supported it (25%).

By contrast, only 21% said they either “strongly” opposed (9%) or “somewhat” opposed (12%) Israel’s fight (the poll has a margin of error of +/-2.7 percentage points).

Overall, 24% described themselves as “not sure,” a sign that many Americans have yet to fully sort out the issues involved.

There are some key differences within different demographic categories, particular by political affiliation.

Republicans are far more likely to support Israel (68%) than either independents (49%) or Democrats (48%). Not surprisingly, the reverse is true for opposition: Just 12% of GOP members oppose Israel’s military actions, versus 27% of Dems and 24% of independents.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/05/28/rafah-reminds-us-of-the-evils-of-hamas/

The anti-Israel set is right about something for once: it is unconscionable that Rafah has been turned into a warzone. It is an affront to humanity itself that a city once teeming with civilians fleeing the ravages of war elsewhere in Gaza should now be reduced to a hellish battleground. But who did this? Who was it that decided to use this former city of civilians as a launchpad for war? Who was it that posted their military commanders there, hid their ammunition there, fired their missiles from there, dragged hostages there? Who was it who hid the machinery of war among the women and children of Rafah, knowing full well bloodshed would ensue?

It wasn’t Israel. Israel helped to facilitate the evacuation of over 900,000 civilians. No, it was Hamas. To see the evils of Hamas, look at Rafah.

There is ‘global outrage’ following Israel’s firing of a missile that hit a camp in Rafah for displaced Palestinians. According to Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry, 45 civilians were killed. Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has called it a ‘tragic mistake’. The footage from the burning camp is grim in the extreme. And Hamas bears ultimate responsibility for it. It was Hamas that forced Rafah to become the frontline in its apocalyptic war against the Jews. It was Hamas that turned this former ‘safe zone’ into one of the least safe zones on Earth. Nothing captures the ruthlessness and cynicism of these Islamofascists better than the cruel fate befalling Rafah right now.

Not that you’d know it from the public discussion. Peruse the mainstream media or the tweets of the woke and you could be forgiven for thinking Israel is attacking Rafah for sport. Both the cranky left and batshit right are even referring to the ‘tragic mistake’ in Rafah as the ‘Rafah Holocaust’. This is Holocaust inversion of the most rank variety, where Israel’s rightful pursuit of the fascists who carried out the pogrom of 7 October is rebranded as ‘fascism’; where a war on the genocidal terrorists of Hamas is reimagined as ‘genocide’. War is peace, freedom is slavery, anti-fascism is fascism.

The truth is that Hamas didn’t only start the Israel-Hamas War, with its vile pogrom – it also brought it to Rafah. Consciously, determinedly and without so much as a passing thought for the impact it might have on the people there. Indeed, as some of the news reports begrudgingly acknowledge, Hamas attacked Israel from Rafah just hours before Israel returned fire with the missiles that caused that tragic mistake. Hamas fired eight missiles from Rafah towards Tel Aviv. It gloated about its ‘major rocket attack’. It used Rafah as a staging area for anti-Semitic warfare. It knew what the consequences would be. It invited war to Rafah, and war came.

For some time, Hamas has been making Rafah the main base of its genocidal crusade against the Jewish State. Harried by the IDF from the rest of the Gaza Strip, Hamas spied in Rafah a ‘safe’ site for its warmongering. Israel believes Hamas has six battalions left, and that four of them are operating out of Rafah. Many missiles have been fired from Rafah. One killed four IDF soldiers. Others have rained down on Israeli territory, with the aim of slaughtering the Jews there. Israeli hostages are being held in Rafah. Hamas is using Rafah as a base from which to taunt, blackmail and assault the Jewish State. If you hate what has happened to Rafah, if you hate that it’s been sucked into the vortex of war, then you should hate Hamas.

Of course, the luxuriant moralists of the West, the noisy purveyors of lazy correct-think, prefer to hate Israel. They blame Israel for everything, even for things Hamas did, like the condemnation of Rafah to war. The catastrophe of Rafah ought to have prized open the eyes of Western opinion-formers to the evils of Hamas. To the bracing truth that this is a movement so bereft of basic decency it is willing to hide itself among humanitarian infrastructure, to use a city designated as a safe space from war for war. The IDF is surely right that Hamas’s use of Rafah for arms storage, hostage-keeping and missile-firing represents a ‘systematic exploitation of humanitarian facilities and spaces’.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20670/hamas-must-be-destroyed-before-peace

Do Ireland, Norway and Spain not see how appeasing terrorists anywhere only emboldens the militants in Europe? Last month, in Germany, more than 1,000 demonstrators took to the streets demanding that Germany become a Caliphate with sharia law.

Is [Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez] ready to grant the Catalans in Spain, who for years have been fighting for their independence, a State of Catalonia?

In Ireland, even at its most violent, there were never calls to take over Scotland, England and Wales to displace the British.

The capitulation of Ireland, Norway and Spain also reveals a deliberate misinterpretation of the root causes of Israel’s long-running conflict with the Palestinians, in which the constant refusal of successive generations of Palestinian leaders to renounce terrorism as the primary means of achieving their political objectives has made the concept of a lasting peace between the two sides impossible.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, called by Andrew Roberts “The Churchill of the modern Middle East,” remains bitterly opposed to Palestinian independence as a “prize for terrorism”. “A reward for terror will not bring about peace,” said Netanyahu, “and also will not stop us from winning over Hamas.”

Hamas have repeatedly used their own people as human shields and shot at them to prevent them from fleeing to safety.

While the Biden administration’s stance towards Israel in the Gaza conflict has often been hostile, its rejection of the joint declaration by Norway, Ireland and Spain is most welcome.

If Israel could be allowed to succeed in “freeing Palestine from Hamas,” it would significantly improve the prospects of both Israelis and Palestinians.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/israelis-forced-to-bail-out-bidens-failed-gaza-aid-pier/

Biden wasted over $300 million and two months, put the lives of American soldiers to set up a pier that was supposed to provide a permanent port to move materials in and out of Gaza. I argued at the time that it was meant to be a ‘Trojan Pier” that would lock Israel out of the process.

While administration officials describe the pier as “temporary”, a senior official also admitted that “we look forward to the port transitioning to a commercially operated facility over time.”

That means it’s not actually meant to be temporary, but a permanent port for the terrorists.

That looks like it won’t be happening because the whole JLOTS setup didn’t account for the weather.

Portions of the floating pier already had to be brought to the Israeli port of Ashdod after stormy weather. And now portions of the pier have broken off and need to be taken in for repairs. Some US Navy vessels were also apparently beached. 3 soldiers were reportedly injured while one remains in critical condition. And the only end result of the pier was a lot of damage and some limited supplies delivered to Hamas.

The damage, first reported by NBC News, occurred three days after heavy seas forced two small US Army vessels to beach in Israel, according to US Central Command, while another two vessels broke free of their moorings and were anchored near the pier.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-globalist-perversion-of-justice/

The International Criminal Court is seeking warrants to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, along with three Hamas chiefs, one of whom was the mastermind of the October 7 massacre. A German government official has pledged to execute the warrant should Israel’s Prime Minister set foot on German soil.

This shameful stunt––like South Africa’s earlier charges of genocide against Israel via the International Court of Justice ––reminds us of the moral idiocy and political corruption of what British historian Corelli Barnett called “moralizing internationalism.” That century-long attempt to set aside human nature as it actually is, and replace violent conflicts with “diplomatic engagement,” international law, and transnational institutions like the ICC, has now reached its reductio ad absurdum with its disgraceful and hypocritical bout of moral preening.

The ICC was created in 1998, and like most of the “rules based international order” since the League of Nations, it came into being at a time of feckless optimism––the West’s arrogant pretensions that the tragic nature of interstate relations had ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Liberal democracy and free-market capitalism, human rights and justice under law, were now poised to expand freedom and prosperity to the whole world. With peace and trade, nationalist and ideological passions along with autocratic gangster regimes would wither away, and with them armed conflict.

Typical of this wishful thinking were the sentiments George H.W. Bush proclaimed in 1991, when he announced a “new world order . . . where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind––peace and security, freedom, and the rule of law.”

Yet despite the repudiation of this idealism on 9/11 by the horrific display of diverse creeds and beliefs about justice and violence, George W. Bush doubled-down with dubious begged questions. In the 2002 National Security Strategy, Bush defined U.S. foreign policy as a focus on the promotion of a “single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise,” for “these values of freedom are right and true for every person across the globe. We will actively work to bring the hope of democracy, development, free markets, and free trade to every corner of the world.”

However, subsequent history has exposed the arrogance and naïveté of this radical simplification of global diversity, which comprises an irreducible complexity of ethnicities, histories, cultures, religions, ambitions, traditions, and notions of honor and vengeance. As such, many of these global folkways necessarily conflict with our own, and those diverse markers of identity make many peoples resent the power and influence the West possesses.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20668/fatah-october-7-atrocities

[Other groups that] participated in the October 7 massacre…. include Palestinian Islamic Jihad — and Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the armed wing of the Fatah faction headed by none other than the president of the Palestinian Authority (PA), Mahmoud Abbas.

The involvement of terrorists from Abbas’s Fatah faction in the October 7 slaughter and terrorist attacks against Israeli soldiers and civilians, however, may surprise some people. Many in the West consider Fatah, which dominates the PA, to be a “moderate” party that wants to live in peace and harmony with Israel. This rumor may have come about because we have been told many times by Palestinian officials that Fatah’s armed wing, Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, was dismantled (at least in the West Bank).

Earlier this month, Abu Mohammed, the official spokesman for Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, revealed that the group’s fighters participated in the Hamas-led October 7 attack on Israeli communities near the border with the Gaza Strip.

In another recent video, Fatah claimed responsibility for a “sniper operation” against Israeli soldiers in Jabalya refugee camp, a stronghold of Hamas and PIJ in the Gaza Strip. The Fatah terrorists said that they used a Hamas-manufactured rifle called Al-Ghoul to target the Israeli soldiers. The video is clear evidence that Abbas’s Fatah loyalists have been working in coordination with Hamas.

That Fatah participated in the October 7 massacre and other terrorist attacks shows that there is really little if no distinction between Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah, and Hamas. It also demonstrates why, after Hamas is removed from power, the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority absolutely cannot be trusted to rule the Gaza Strip. Both Fatah and Hamas continue to engage in terrorism and are outspokenly proud of their attacks on Jews. Fatah and Hamas seem, in fact, to be competing to prove to the Palestinians who is carrying out more terrorist attacks against Israel.

So long as Abbas and Fatah are producing and arming terrorists, all plans by the Biden administration to “revitalize” the Palestinian Authority are worthless. If the Biden administration is sincere about reforming the PA, it ought to begin by insisting that Abbas disband his own terrorist organization and stop endorsing terrorists and compensating them with monthly payments. Until then, handing over the Gaza Strip to Abbas and his Fatah terrorists would be a monstrous mistake.