RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/12/12/leftist-lunacy-fuels-hamas-atrocity/

Israel’s descent into tragedy at the hands of Hamas reveals America’s descent into idiocy at the hands of the Left.  Every anti-Semitic outrage, all the Hamas apologists, each excuse for terrorism — together they reveal that we are not confronting just terrorism alone but an absolutist ideology.  The left has prepared the ground in which Hamas and its supporters have sown their hate, and America is witnessing its flowering.  

As the aftermath of October 7th continues unfolding, we see mounting examples of leftist arguments defending it.  The latest lunacy occurred on Nov. 23 when Sky News’ Kay Burley interviewed Israeli spokesman Eylon Levy about the exchange of 150 Hamas prisoners for 50 Israeli hostages.  Burley stated: “I was speaking to a hostage negotiator this morning…. and he made the comparison between the numbers and the fact that does Israel not think Palestinian lives are valued as highly as Israeli lives?”

Shocked temporarily speechless, Levy recovered:  “It is outrageous to suggest that the fact that we are willing to release prisoners who are convicted of terrorism offenses, more of them than we are getting our own innocent children back, somehow suggests that we don’t care about Palestinian lives? Really, that’s a disgusting accusation.”

Assuredly “disgusting,” the accusation is also disturbing in its revelation of the shallowness to which the left has spiraled this discussion’s descent.  Deconstructing the accusation shows that there is no debate — and cannot be one — with the left.

First, it was Hamas that created this vile market for the exchanging of human beings.  Hamas abducted 240 innocent Israeli civilians and did so for the clear purpose of doing what it is doing now: obtaining the release of its captured terrorists.  And without captured terrorists, there would be no one to exchange Hamas’ hostages for.  So, Hamas created both sides of this transaction.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/israels-message-in-gaza-to-iran-and-hezbollah-al-shifa-hospital-war-hamas-cd7855b3?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Gaza City

Northern Gaza has been flattened. It isn’t just another combat zone. The area will need years of rebuilding before Palestinian civilians can live there.

I saw the fallout from the war between Israel and Hamas during a recent trip with Israel Defense Forces to Gaza City, including the vast network of tunnels around Al-Shifa Hospital, one of the terror group’s unofficial capitals. I moved around the area aboard one of the IDF’s Namer armored personnel carriers.

What happened in Gaza, and particularly at Al-Shifa, will reshape the Middle East, including for Hezbollah and Iran, over the next decade and possibly beyond. While the Mossad blocked Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons for more than 20 years, questions persisted about whether Israel would actually launch a major strike against Tehran if Ayatollah Ali Khamenei gave the order to break out a nuclear weapon. My visit to Gaza answered that question.

But first, what has emerged from the war and the IDF’s taking over Al-Shifa Hospital and Hamas’s underground tunnels there? What paradigms have been shattered?

For the past 16 years, with Hamas controlling the Gaza Strip, Al-Shifa was untouchable. After the 50-day Gaza conflict in mid-2014, many Israeli defense officials said if they could take out the tunnels under Al-Shifa, they could end Hamas or cripple its leadership hiding there. At the same time, the IDF warned that Hamas was storing weapons and running command-and-control operations from Gaza hospitals. Al-Shifa, the pinnacle of those activities, is no longer untouchable. No part of Gaza is.

Hamas’s officials lost their precious underground network at Al-Shifa. They had sent forces and messages through the tunnels and sneaked commanders throughout Gaza City, with Israel’s mighty air force and technological sensors unable to track any of it.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20209/how-to-end-hamas-war-on-israel-this-week

Iran’s militia groups have initiated more than 82 attacks — just since October 17 — on US forces and assets in Syria and Iraq. The latest, on the US Embassy in Baghdad, is an attack on US sovereign territory. During Biden’s presidency, Iran has initiated 151 attacks against the US. Forty-six US service members have so far been wounded, 19 seriously, with traumatic brain injury.

These strikes do not include Iran’s having largely funded and helped plan a savage invasion of Israel by an estimated 3,000 Gazans under the direction of Iran’s proxy, the terrorist group Hamas, on October 7. Once there, they murdered 1,200 people; raped and tortured an untold number, and kidnapped around 240, about 100 of whom — women and children — have been released. Several hostages have reportedly been murdered (here, here and here).

The Biden administration has thankfully been supportive of Israel defending itself and trying to rescue those hostages who remain. The Biden administration immediately sent naval ships and fighter jets to the region to prevent the war from spreading to Lebanon and other countries nearby; and on December 8, vetoed an attempt by the United Nations Security Council to force Israel to submit prematurely to a ceasefire.

Before October 7, there was a ceasefire. Regrettably, Hamas broke it. A few weeks later, there was another humanitarian ceasefire to which Israel agreed. Hamas broke that one, too. Hamas refused to release the list of people who were to be delivered on the ceasefire’s last day, possibly because Hamas was afraid of what they might say about how they had been treated in captivity. This week, when Israel created a safe zone in the southern Gaza Strip for Gazans, Hamas used that humanitarian zone to fire rockets into Israel.

The US could stop these assaults tomorrow. So far, the Biden administration has appeared unwilling even to entertain the thought of addressing Hamas’s patron, Iran. Here are a few possible ways:

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/12/come-and-see/

Alan G. Futerman and Walter E. Block are the co-authors of The Classical Liberal Case for Israel (published by Springer in 2021, with commentary by Benjamin Netanyahu).

The horrors of the Holocaust, particularly those involving the mass murder process itself, are impossible to conceive. We may read documents, watch documentary films, listen to survivors, learn its history, and visit concentration camps and museums. But we cannot perceive them.

Certain films, though, allow us access to the closest kind of experience we could expect. They permit us, in a sense, to see from within. One of these films is Son of Saul (2015). There is another one, set during the Nazi Blitzkrieg on Byelorussia that left 25 per cent of the country’s population killed. This is a Soviet film, released in 1985 and directed by Elem Klimov. Its name is Come and See.

This film, a true masterpiece, not only shows with excruciating detail the unbearable degree of Nazi destruction, but something more, something that is essential to the phenomenon of mass murder. In one scene, we follow Flyora (the main character, superbly interpreted by Aleksei Kravchenko) while he witnesses the extermination of an entire village. In that scene, we can see a hell that is difficult to put into words. The Einsatzgruppen and their collaborators sardonically laugh at the villagers, sadistically mock them and maniacally sneer at them, while they herd them to be burned inside a church. No one is spared, children, elderly, women. There is no escape, no logic, no reason. In an immortal scene, a group of Nazis take a picture with Flyora while one of them points a gun to his head. The surreal scene captures well that this event seems from another dimension, although it is placed on Earth.

So, what is it that the film portrays that is so special? It shows that, although this horror is performed by humans, it does not belong to humanity as such. That is, it consists of a fundamental intent of changing human nature—a departure from humanity. It is a systematic, premeditated intent to inflict the cruellest forms of sadistic destruction under the disguise of a rational system. In the film, this is implied by some of the phrases that are said through the speakers before the Nazi massacre occurs: “Germany is a cultured country.”

What happened on October 7, 2023, in Israel is an instance of this specific phenomenon. Of course, the Holocaust is an event of such scale and horror in history that cannot be compared. But the essential factor, the subversion of humanity mentioned above in conjunction with the most maniacal Jew-hatred, did take place.

According to what captured Hamas assassins themselves have confessed, they were told that they could do with Jews whatever they wanted. They could kill, rape, burn, destroy. Moreover, it was their duty to do just that.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-true-face-of-the-anti-israel-movement-fa3e94fe?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The response in anti-Israel circles to Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre has been clarifying. Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), the tip of the spear on U.S. campuses, early on called the slaughter “a historic win for Palestinian resistance.”

The tune hasn’t changed, even from the leaders pressuring President Biden. Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), celebrated Oct. 7 at an American Muslims for Palestine convention on Nov. 24. A damning excerpt was publicized Thursday by the Middle East Media Research Institute.

American Muslims for Palestine then took down the full video, and Mr. Awad now claims a “hate website selected remarks from my speech out of context and spliced them together to create a completely false meaning.” But we got the video before Mr. Awad’s ally hid it, and here’s what CAIR’s leader had to say:

“The people of Gaza only decided to break the siege, the walls of the concentration camp, on Oct. 7. And yes, I was happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land, and walk free into their land, that they were not allowed to walk in. And yes, the people of Gaza have the right to self-defense, have the right to defend themselves. And yes, Israel, as an occupying power, does not have that right to self-defense.”

The crowd applauded, and not a word in Mr. Awad’s speech qualified his pleasure with Oct. 7, justified as “self-defense.”

Democrats and media have long treated CAIR as a primary political spokesman for Muslim Americans. In late October the White House invited Mr. Awad to convey Muslim concerns about the war to the President. In May the Biden Administration included CAIR as a partner in its Strategy to Counter Antisemitism. The White House has now removed CAIR from that document and condemned Mr. Awad’s remarks.

https://www.jns.org/hamas-attack-plans-including-map-of-idf-base-suggest-espionage/

New documentation, including the laptop of a key Hamas commander, offers additional proof of the terrorist group’s meticulous planning of the Oct. 7 massacre.

The field intelligence unit of the Israel Defense Forces’ Military Intelligence Directorate, known by the Hebrew acronym AMSHAT, released the documents on Monday.

The material provided to JNS by the IDF came from a laptop belonging to the head of Hamas’ Nukhba Force, who took part in the attack. It was recovered in southern Israel.

Uploaded to the laptop was a notebook with detailed plans to conquer the army’s Nahal Oz base adjacent to the border fence along the northern Gaza Strip.

It included a hand-drawn sketch of the base, providing a visual representation of the strategic details in the notebook. The illustration, revealing accurate knowledge of the base, suggests Hamas had help from within.

(An Israeli intelligence source cited by The Guardian said the map revealed “inside knowledge … almost certainly from a Hamas spy.”)

Prior to Oct. 7 many Arabs from Gaza entered Israel regularly for work (17,500 daily at the time of the attack), and a week after the attack, Israeli security services had already begun investigating the possibility that some of these individuals had passed information to Hamas.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/chanukah-in-israel-upholds-light-against-darkness/

A week before Chanukah, Israeli soldiers set up a 15-foot tall menorah in Gaza. As the holiday arrives, menorahs large and small will be lit in enemy territory. Lights will flicker along tanks and from across rubble-strewn battlefields. Out of the darkness of the Jihad, there will be light.

The Jewish holiday commemorating the resistance of the Maccabees, a conservative religious family from the hinterlands of Israel, has always had a special resonance in Israel. In the northern parts of Israel that have often come under Hamas rocket attacks, the shells and debris of the rockets have been repurposed into menorahs symbolizing darkness becoming light.

As public menorah lightings in America and Europe are canceled to avoid triggering the rage of Islamists and leftist allies, preparations are underway for a bigger Chanukah than ever in Israel.

300,000 Israelis have been displaced from their homes because of the war that began with the Hamas invasion of Israel on Oct 7. The war brought an end to tourism and hotel rooms around the country are full of refugees from the war who are living out of the contents of their suitcases. Children who have spent two months in wartime and horror need something to celebrate.

In city squares, voices will ring with the classic Chanukah children’s song, “Banu hosech legaresh” or “We came to drive back the darkness” in defiance of the long solstice night.

In Modiin, the hometown of the Maccabees where the revolt against the Syrian-Greek Empire’s war on Judaism originated, people have been forced to head for shelters after rocket warnings sounded, but it’s not stopping them from preparing menorahs in every home and square. Or from continuing to donate supplies, everything from toothbrushes to cans of tuna, for the hundreds of thousands of refugees and the soldiers mobilized to fight the Islamic terrorists.

According to the European Union, the Maccabean city is actually an “illegal settlement” on land that belongs to the Muslim invaders, and not to the Jews who had fought an empire to free it over 2,000 years ago. Chanukah reaffirms the history of Modiin and the rest of Israel.

History hits differently in Israel.