RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/comment/2023/12/06/idf-israeli-defense-force-hamas-hostages-hospital-gaza/

Now that fierce fighting has resumed in Gaza, international pressure is building on Israel to curb its military campaign and abandon its objective of crushing Hamas. The humanitarian goal of these demands is to protect innocent Palestinians. The political goal is to appease some Muslim states and appeal to anti-Israel “progressives” and Muslims in Europe and North America.

What these demands seldom mention is the cost of leaving in place a terrorist organisation bent on killing civilians, taking hostages, using civilians to shield its own fighters, and doing its best to wipe Israel off the map. The intense pressure on the Jewish state is not matched by that on Hamas.

This sharp asymmetry in political pressure is particularly evident in the fighting around Gazan hospitals. Intense battles have been waged at close quarters in and around the Indonesian Hospital, Al-Shifa (Gaza’s largest), and Al-Rantisi, among others.

News of that fighting is heartbreaking. Medical centers should be places of sanctuary. They have become sites of battle because they are useful for Hamas, which has turned patients and hospital workers into human shields and medical buildings into hiding places for terrorists, weapons, and tunnels.

Hamas uses hospitals like this for three reasons. The terrorist organisation knows that Israel has serious moral reservations about attacking civilian facilities and risking harm to innocents, a reservation not shared by Hamas militants willing to use their own people as human shields. Hospital traffic is also the perfect place to conceal the movement of terrorists and their supplies, a fact often excluded from debates over Israeli strategy. Resultantly, when the IDF launches strategic strikes, they pay a huge price in public opinion. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/hamas-child-hostages/

For at least two generations, Israelis have felt secure in the knowledge that the horrors of the Holocaust were behind them. Safe behind border walls and protected by a powerful military, Jews in Israel would never again have to watch as children were murdered in front of their parents, and parents in front of their children.

October 7 changed all that – dramatically.

The Hamas-led killing spree of that day brought Hitler’s willing executions through the gates of Israel. Suddenly, nowhere was safe anymore.

I have spent the past week in Israel, researching a film on Israel Defense Force (IDF) soldiers with filmmaker Ricky Schroder and his producer, Julie Trammel.

From the very moment I arrived, the presence of the missing – Israelis ripped from their homes by Hamas terrorists – was everywhere. The broad stairs leading down to immigration at Ben Gurion airport were marked with the faces of the missing – on both sides of the hall. On some of the hundred-plus steps, the poster had been taken down to indicate hostages who had been released after more than fifty days of captivity.

By the time I left five days later, the gaps were bigger, as more returnees came home. But more than 136 remained by the time Hamas broke the temporary truce on December 1.

On Ditzengoff Street, one of the main thoroughfares of Tel Aviv, human-sized white teddy bears were strapped to every park bench, their bodies spattered with dirt and blood. Attached to each was a poster of one of the missing.

In Jerusalem, office buildings were lit up with the Israeli flag and holographic projections of the missing, rotating every few seconds.

During that week, we began to learn more about the horrors the hostages had undergone during their Hamas captivity.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/12/04/israel-must-finish-the-job-in-gaza/

For a week now, the world has watched a high-stakes, emotionally draining, and dangerous game being played out in Gaza. What began as a mediated four-day “truce” and swap of 50 Israeli civilians held hostage by Hamas in exchange for 150 convicted Palestinian-Arab terrorists has now been dragged out much further. Hamas, unusually self-aware for a jihadist outfit, has savvily dangled the possibility of the release of ever-more hostages in exchange for further “truce” extensions. Israel, which so greatly values human life that it once infamously bartered over 1,000 terrorists in exchange for captured soldier Gilad Shalit, is all but forced to go along.

But as tantalizing as it is to see more hostages reunited with their families, there are extraordinary costs if Israel prolongs these swaps and continues to indulge the fantasy of a “ceasefire.”

There is the concrete threat of the convicted terrorists freed from Israeli prison. Among those freed during the Shalit swap was Yahya Sinwar, the current leader of Hamas in Gaza (he is subordinate to Hamas’ Doha-based top brass) and mastermind of the Oct. 7 pogrom. On Thursday, in his first publicized statement since the assault, Sinwar minced no words: “The leaders of (Israel) should know, Oct. 7 was just a rehearsal.” That’s quite a threat. How many future Yahya Sinwars have already been freed this go-around? The Times of Israel noted that 55% of the first 117 terrorists released during the current swaps had been held for violent crimes, including attempted murder; 21% belonged to a jihadist outfit.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-immorality-of-the-two-state-solution/

Joe Biden is a famous incompetent when it comes to foreign policy. Don’t forget, his mentor and former boss, Barack Hussein Obama, quipped that one should never underestimate Biden’s ability to screw up any given policy situation beyond all semblance of rationally expected benefit. Well he didn’t say that exactly, but that’s the gist.

So, it stands to reason, if Biden is in favor of the Two State Solution in Israel, there’s probably something very wrong afoot. It’s the same kind of wrongheadedness that led the notoriously ineffectual U.N. to adopt the policy in 1947. The result of this piece of liberal statecraft has been 76 years of either simmering, or all out war in the Middle East.

The Two State Solution has ensured that the seeds of conflict and destruction sprout into a virulent kudzu that, despite occasional pruning, grows implacably, strangling any hope for peace in the region.

Both Gaza and the West Bank are products of this intractable and untenable state of existence. To put this state of affairs in perspective, imagine if the U.N. had carved out most of the south and the northern Midwest states and implanted ISIS in our midst. At least in terms of proportionate land mass, you have a rough idea of what Israel faces.

As an aside, Biden’s wide open border policy is fashioning a de facto American Two State Solution, pitting illegal aliens against citizens in an explosive environment ripe for demagoguery. Tens of thousands stream across the southern border in anonymity. Military aged males forming battalions of potential Mohammedan insurrectionists.

But to the main point, the plight of “Palestinians” is a result of the Arab world’s refusal to accommodate immigration from Gaza or the West Bank. It seems the Arab states take their borders much more seriously than America. As the current Two State Solution crisis evolves in Gaza, Egypt has refused to allow the incursion of refugees from Gaza. So much for the compassion of Mohammedans, practitioners of the “religion of peace.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-possible-future-for-hamas-depends-on-one-thing/

Just as the world’s media was focused on the first hostages to be freed from Hamas captivity on November 24 a key leader of Hamas named Khaled Mashal gave a video address to a conference of the International Islamic Forum of Parliamentarians stating that “the resistance is in good condition, and although some of its fighters and commanders have been martyred, our tunnels, ammunition and weapons are still intact and we can still maneuver, fire rockets and hit invading tanks.”
Israel and its allies must face the fact that the future of Hamas depends on these tunnels that Mashal specifically boasted about.

One cannot help but connect this statement to the story of four Israeli soldiers who were killed on November 10 by a hidden terrorist explosive device in a booby-trapped tunnel shaft next to a mosque in Gaza’s Beit Hanoun neighborhood.

The father of one of the soldiers, Major Moshe Yedidyah Leiter, grew up in Joe Biden’s hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania.

The question of the possible future of Hamas in Gaza is one that, tragically, now must be asked since the late November ceasefire has given Hamas the chance to refortify and resupply in their terrorist tunnels.

Dennis Ross, a U.S. envoy to the Middle East, admitted in an op-ed in the Washington Post in August 2014 that he put pressure on Israel to allow Hamas to import cement into Gaza.Ross acknowledged that he knew the cement might be misused. “At times, I argued with Israeli leaders and security officials, telling them they needed to allow more construction materials, including cement, into Gaza so that housing, schools and basic infrastructure could be built,” Ross wrote. “They countered that Hamas would misuse it, and they were right.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20204/revitalized-palestinian-authority

Many of the officials managing the Palestinian Authority (PA) are the same ones who helped establish it in 1994 and were responsible for its rampant corruption. This corruption is one of the main reasons why Hamas won the PA parliamentary election in 2006, when the Islamist movement ran under the banner of “Change and Reform.”

Mahmoud Abbas and senior PA officials have been stirring up bloodlust for Israel both before and after Hamas’s October 7 massacre. Palestinians hear these messages and vote for Hamas when given the opportunity, as we saw in the recent student council elections at a number of Palestinian universities in the West Bank. This is exactly what Abbas feared when he cancelled the PA’s presidential and parliamentary elections that were slated to take place in 2021.

The assumption that, three decades later, the Palestinian Authority is going to embark on any serious reforms is a mirage. Abbas and the PA leadership will not change unless they are pressured to do so… One thing is clear: the Palestinian Authority is in no way, shape or form up to this job.

The Biden administration is continuing to promote the idea of having a “revitalized” Palestinian Authority (PA) govern the Gaza Strip after the Israel-Hamas war. US President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken used the phrase “revitalized Palestinian Authority” to express support for placing the Gaza Strip, currently ruled by the Iran-backed Hamas terrorist group, under the control of the PA, headed by Mahmoud Abbas. On December 2, Vice President Kamala Harris became the latest official to promote the idea that “we have to revitalize the Palestinian Authority” to prepare it for ruling the Gaza Strip after the war.

The White House has further suggested that Palestinians “should be the determining voice” in who governs them.

The Palestinians already had a determining voice. They elected Hamas. According to public opinion polls, even in the West Bank, under the supposedly moderate Palestinian Authority that pays people to murder Jews, Palestinians would elect a terrorist regime once again.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/03/charging-jews-with-genocide-declare-them-guilty-precisely-what-was-done-to-them-middle-east

Israel’s response to the 7 October Hamas attacks has emboldened many to say the once unsayable.

When is a genocide a genocide? The word is much in vogue, though its precise meaning – the intentional destruction of a people – is hard to justify in the case of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, which, though without doubt brutal in execution and heartbreaking in effect, falls a long way short of any ambition to exterminate an entire population.

Genocides don’t leaflet the populations they want to destroy with warnings to stay out of harm’s way, and Hamas, which Israel avowedly does want to see the back of, is not the Gazan people. For all the sensationalist pronouncements of academics who specialise in genocide, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, settler-colonialism, etc, the words simply flutter like so many pennants at a medieval joust. Denoting, in the fading light, which side you’re on, no more.

The only party to a declared intention to commit genocide is Hamas. It is a matter of contention whether the chant “From the river to the sea” is also genocidal. But perhaps the circumstances allow for hyperbole. To accuse its enemies of wanton exaggeration is not to exonerate Israel. There has to have been, and there will need to be, a better way of securing peace for the country than the assertion of military might. But brutality isn’t genocide.

Words matter in war, and when a vocal third party to a war operates from the campuses of western universities, where words go off like hand grenades, we must be careful which we choose. Among the casualties of this war are the young, who are susceptible to lurid language and who get their disinformation from the internet and their rhetoric from their professors. We have been here before but with this difference: the vilification of Israel is more scurrilous and orchestrated this time because on 7 October Hamas breached not only a fence but a decorum that in the past has marked us out as civilised. We don’t – we didn’t – turn the traumatic history of a people into a justification for hating them. Post 7 October, we can say things about Jews we haven’t dared say before. At last, we can throw the Holocaust back in their teeth.

Some years ago, I borrowed the title for a lecture from the English philosopher John Gray. “It has long been known,” he wrote in his book Straw Dogs, “that those who perform great acts of kindness are rarely forgiven. The same is true of those who suffer irreparable wrongs.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/12/witnesses-confirm-rape-beheadings-systematic-genital-mutilation-by-hamas/

‘Everything was an apocalypse of corpses,’ one official said, as Israel challenged the U.N.’s silence about Hamas’s crimes.
Witnesses to the brutal aftermath of Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attack presented new, graphic testimony about the group’s widespread use of rape, at a United Nations event today organized by Israel’s mission to the body — one of the most extensive public presentations on those, and other, atrocities yet.

This took place against the backdrop of a rapidly unfurling backlash against the U.N.’s laggard approach to acknowledging Hamas’s use of rape on October 7, with UN Women only condemning the assaults in a statement following public criticism and an interview in which an official struggled to unequivocally condemn the terrorist group. Last week, U.N. secretary-general António Guterres said in a statement on X that accounts of Hamas’s sexual violence need to be “vigorously investigated and prosecuted.”

Meanwhile, the Israeli authorities have deepened their investigation into sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas during the massacre. Hamas’s sexual crimes might also have played a role in its decision to break the cease-fire with Israel, with State Department spokesman Matthew Miller saying today that Hamas appears have chosen not to hand over several female hostages because “they don’t want those women to be able to talk about what happened to them.”

During today’s event, individuals directly involved in tending to the bodies of Hamas victims gave testimony about their experiences, and Israeli officials played videos featuring interrogations of Hamas fighters who acknowledged that members of the group raped victims and an interview with a woman who witnessed rape at the Nova music festival.

Yael Richert, chief superintendent of the Israeli Police’s Lahav 433 unit, described some of the horrifying testimony that her colleagues have gathered so far. Referring to an interview with a survivor of the Nova music festival, she said: “Everything was an apocalypse of corpses. Girls without any clothes on . . . without underwear. People cut in half, butchered, some were beheaded.

“There were girls with a broken pelvis, due to repetitive rapes. Their legs were spread wide apart in a split.” Other survivors said that girls were pulled out of shelters, raped, then burned.

https://bit.ly/3NbGIq2

“Those who experience wake up calls usually discover, in hindsight, that they had received plenty of warning before the poop hit the propeller, but they chose to disregard it…. Whether a wake up call becomes a boon, or a bane, depends on what you’re willing to learn from it, and whether you’re willing to be moved by experience.” (Greg Levoy, a psychologist and an author).

The US-Israel mutual threat of Islamic terrorism

Israel’s war against Hezbollah and Hamas is a wakeup call, highlighting the shared US-Israel war against Islamic terrorism. The latter considers Israel a US geo-strategic beachhead in the Middle East, that should be uprooted as a critical step toward the defeat of the Western “infidel.”

For example:   

*Hezbollah and Hamas are critical proxies of Iran, which funds, trains and supplies advanced ballistic and engineering hardware, aiming to realize its 1,400-year-old vision of toppling all “apostate” (Sunni) regimes, export the Islamic Shiite Revolution globally, and bring “the Great American Satan” to submission.

*Hamas was established in 1988 by the Muslim Brotherhood, which has been dedicated since 1928 to the toppling of all national Islamic regimes, replacing them with a universal Islamic society, establishing Islam as the only, divinely-ordained, legitimate religion on earth, defeating the “infidel” Western culture and bringing down “the Great American Satan.”

*Securing a boon, rather than a bane, requires the uprooting of Hamas’ terroristic, political and educational infrastructure, which would deter anti-US Islamic terrorism. On the other hand, the survival of Hamas would adrenalize the veins of anti-US Islamic terrorists in the Middle East and beyond, afflicting the US with a bane.

Israel’s war highlights Iran’s terrorist nature  

*Heeding the October 7, 2023 wakeup call should trigger a US reassessment of its 44-year-old diplomatic option toward Iran, which has facilitated Iran’s lead role – operationally and financially – in the transformation of Hezbollah and Hamas (as well as a multitude of additional Islamic and non-Islamic terror organizations) into a most effective anti-US global terrorist network. The US diplomatic option has also bolstered the evolution of Iran into the leading regional and global epicenter of anti-US terrorism, drug trafficking, money laundering and proliferation of advanced military systems.