RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

War is messy. It is cruel. It cannot be refined. It cannot be sanitized. Wars were once fought on battle fields. No longer. Civil War historian James McPherson has estimated that about 50,000 civilians died during that conflict, still less than 10% of all military deaths. That changed in the 20th Century. About half of all deaths in World War I were civilians. In World War II, twice as many civilians died as military personnel. Innocent people get hurt in modern wars, as residents of London, Dresden, Hiroshima, and Naples learned during World War II, and as residents of My Lai and Hué learned during the Vietnam War. And as people today in the eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, in Gaza City, Jabalia, and Rafah understand, and in the border villages of Israel’s north where residents have evacuated due to threats from Iran’s other proxy, Hezbollah. 

When the fight is between good and evil, a “proportional” response, as attractive as the concept sounds, is not an alternative. “The moral thing to do,” the columnist Moshe Phillips wrote recently in Israel National News, “is to destroy evil when it poses a ‘clear and present danger’ or likely will again.” Hamas presents to Israel such a threat. In September 1864, on the cusp of taking Atlanta, General William Tecumseh Sherman sent a telegram to President Lincoln: “War is the remedy our enemies have chosen. Other simple remedies were within their choice. You know it and they know it, but they wanted war, and I say let us give them all they want; not a word of argument, not a sign of let up, no cave in until we are whipped or they are.” When Hamas attacked the Kibbutz Nir Oz, during the Tribe of Nova music festival, on October 7, raping women, slaughtering babies and children, mutilating those they had killed and kidnapping those they had not, war was the choice they made. Now, the only way to end the war is for Israel to totally destroy Hamas. 

The battle in Gaza, like the American Civil War and World War II, is a fight between forces of good and evil. (In one sense, this is a civil war, as both Israelis and Palestinians descend from Abraham.) This is not to suggest that all Israelis are paragons of virtue and that all Palestinians are devils incarnate. But Israel, according to the Economist Groups Democracy Index, is the only democracy in the Middle East, while Hamas is designated a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union, and Britain. The people of Gaza bear some responsibility, as Hamas was elected in 2006 with 75% of the vote. Citizens of Gaza know that terrorists hide and store arms in tunnels beneath schools and hospitals. On September 11, 2001 there was dancing in the streets of Gaza. Ismail Haniyeh, former Gaza Prime Minister and Chairman of the Hamas Political Bureau (and who now lives in Qatar), explained in 2020 why Hamas rejects ceasefire agreements: “We cannot, in exchange for money or projects, give up Palestine and our weapons. We will not give up the resistance. We will not recognize Israel. Palestine must stretch from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea.” Commenting on the loss of civilian deaths in Gaza on October 26, 2023, Mr. Haniyeh said: The blood of the women, children and elderly […] we are the ones who need this blood, so it awakens within us the revolutionary spirit.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20513/biden-pier-gift-to-hamas

There are mounting concerns that the Biden administration’s pier plan could ultimately boomerang, especially, as Netanyahu himself has warned, if the US aid and the port itself end up in the hands of Hamas terrorists.

“This [Biden] administration betrayed its allies – the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Jordan – by handing the port over to Qatar, namely to Hamas….. What all anti-U.S. elements will take away from this tragic episode is not that America stands by its human values to support and care for the population of Gaza, but rather that America is weak and that this is why it is granting the port to Qatar and Hamas.” — Yigal Carmon, founder and president, Middle East Media Research Institute, March 20, 2024.

As Hamas ultimately controls most of the aid distribution networks in Gaza, the plans currently being drawn up by the US and Europe to expand aid deliveries could ultimately prove counter-productive in terms of ending the conflict, as Hamas terrorists have a long track record of exploiting foreign aid to strengthen their terrorist activities in Gaza.

If the Biden administration and its European allies are really serious about ending the conflict in Gaza, then they should give their unequivocal backing to the Israeli military in its battle to destroy the terrorist infrastructure Hamas has constructed in Gaza.

For it will only be when Hamas is completely destroyed, and no longer poses a threat to the Israeli people, that there can be any genuine prospect of lasting peace in the region.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20516/gaza-razzia-political-warfare

British and European Union leaders say the time has come to formally accept the creation of a Palestinian state.

Meanwhile, Major-General Ismail Qaani, chief of the Quds Force of the Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, promises to “rebuild Gaza stronger than before as an advance post against world Zionism.”

Claiming to be a “freedom fighter” shouldn’t mean a license to kill at will. Even the “oppressed” have certain duties and must observe some rules while, as history has shown, the tyranny of the underdog could be as deadly as that of the oppressor.

The question today is why, when no time limit is imposed on conventional war until a victor emerges, should war against an insurgent group be subjected to calendar-based shenanigans?

In fact, the origin of razzia is the Arabic word ghazwa, which means a sudden no-holds-barred attack on a single set of targets in the hope of knocking out an adversary… The 9/11 attacks of 2001 on the US were four coordinated razzias.

World War II produced over 30 million refugees, all of whom acquired new abodes within a decade. The partition of India produced 14 million refugees, again, seeing all of them re-settled in less than a decade. Since 1959, more than 10 million Cubans have been driven out of their homeland and settled in a dozen countries, notably the United States.

Does it make any sense to have refugee camps even in Gaza, which was free of Israeli occupation for two decades? Or in the West Bank, governed by the Palestinian Authority? Is it humane to turn being a refugee into a profession, with UNRWA as the franchise-holder?

The Biden administration is making a big mistake by implicitly upgrading Hamas to a legitimate partner through regional allies, thus creating the illusion that razzias like the October 7 one could still produce at least a lollipop for perpetrators.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/03/23/show-the-video-israel/

Across the globe, a critical mass of the ignorant, the brainwashed, the Islamist supremacists, and the evil is forming.

Just consider what a massacre of Jews on October 7 launched:

Downtown London has become a no-go zone for Jews every weekend.
Jewish teachers have been being chased by frenzied student mobs through the halls of New York schools.
Jewish university students have been barricaded in auditoriums and libraries by braying mobs.
Synagogues and Jewish hospitals in the US and Canada have become the targets of screaming protesters.
Jewish-owned restaurants and businesses have been vandalized, and their patrons have been threatened with violence.
Jewish artists have had their shows cancelled or protested.
Rallies featuring Nazi imagery and celebrating the events of October 7 have taken and continue to take place in Times Square and on the streets of New York City.

And all this has been in response to a genocidal attack on Jews on October 7.

October 7 was the final crank of a jack-in-the-Pandora’s-box of Leftist and Islamist antisemitism that has been bubbling under the surface for years.

The Hamas pogrom of October 7 is no longer just an existential threat to the Jewish state. It is an existential threat to every nation in the civilized world. And the civilized world, from academia to politicians to law enforcement, has proven incapable of or unwilling to forcefully stamp this evil out.

Which is why Israel must do what few others in power are able or willing to do: directly confront

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/387184

On March 18 Jake Sullivan, the United States National Security Advisor, said “The president told the prime minister again today that we share the goal of defeating Hamas.”

And the very next day, on March 19, Matthew Miller, Spokesperson for the United States Department of State, said “every step must be taken to degrade Hamas so such an event like October 7th can’t be repeated.”

Is the State Department now saying that the Biden Administration policy is to see Hamas degraded and not destroyed? If the defeat of Hamas remains “the goal” why hasn’t State corrected its March 19 statement?

Is the delivery of conflicting signals intentional?

To have the goal that Hamas does not ever carry out another October 7th type event assumes that Hamas is evil and both needs and deserves to be utterly and completely destroyed. Destroyed because it is evil. The moral thing to do is to destroy evil when it poses a “clear and present danger” or likely will again.

When the Allies after World War Two conducted a systematic effort of denazification it was not because the Nazi Party or Nazi ideas were going to be threat in 1946 or 1947 but because the Nazis’ ideas were dangerous enough that if not outlawed and fought and vanquished on the battlefield of ideas then the Allies had every right to believe that they might have to return to combat on the actual battlefield in the 1950s or 1960s and fight the Nazis yet again. Israel has fought Hamas too many times already.

The purpose of war is to permanently eliminate the threat coming from your enemy. Far too often history has revealed the eternal truth that wars are things that must be won decisively or they will cause subsequent conflicts that will grow in both intensity and the degree of devastation. Evil must be confronted and evil must be destroyed. Hamas is evil. Hamas is the enemy. Hamas must be eliminated.

Destroying Hamas is the right thing to do.

Destroying Hamas is a necessary thing to do.

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-792959

Children, clergymen, and Israeli citizens supposedly are among the Arabs least likely to carry out anti-Jewish terrorism. They don’t fit the profile. And yet all six of the most recent terrorist attacks have been carried out by precisely those individuals.

Supposedly, the “typical” Palestinian Arab terrorist is a young Palestinian Arab man, single, uneducated, and unemployed, who turns to violence because of his difficult personal circumstances.

But the terrorist who was shot dead while throwing firebombs at Israelis near Ramallah on March 4, Mustafa Abu Shalbak, was just 16. 

The next day, a Palestinian Arab terrorist named Muhammad Shehadeh stabbed and seriously wounded an Israeli near Bethlehem. The would-be murderer was 17.

And the day after that, a Palestinian Arab stabbed and wounded an elderly Israeli man standing at a bus stop in Jerusalem’s Neve Yaakov neighborhood.

Not only was the attacker just 14 – presumably too young to fit the profile of the “typical” terrorist – but he was a resident of Jerusalem, and Jerusalem’s Arabs are supposedly more “moderate” than those who live in the Palestinian Authority territories. Well, not much moderation was on display in that attack.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20488/israel-betrayed

It seems clear that the Biden administration would like to see the rapid creation of a Palestinian state or at least a “Palestinian unity government” — unfortunately composed of the Palestinian Authority and the terrorist group Hamas — and, abracadabra, recognize it.

The Palestinian leaders have, in fact, been admirably clear: They do not want a state alongside Israel, they want a state instead of Israel.

“[W]hile Qatar is helping assemble a new ‘technocratic’ front for the terrorists, the Moscow summit made it clear that the real agenda of the new government would be terror against Israel and the U.S.” — Daniel Greenfield, journalist, March 12, 2024.

“They [families of the hostages] can raise hell for the release of their loved ones – in media, in Congress, and by demonstrating in front of the Embassy of Qatar on M Street in Washington, D.C. Qatar is extremely and incredibly sensitive to being exposed in any way as a terror-sponsoring state… A single statement by a U.S. Department of Defense official, about relocating – or even considering relocating – this base from Qatar to another country that is not a state sponsor of terrorism is all it would take to get the American hostages released. Even indicating that the U.S. has other options besides Qatar would do it.” — Yigal Carmon, Founder and President of the Middle East Media Research Institute, November 6, 2023.

Qatar is not an honest broker…. Qatar has been Hamas’s main funder… Hamas is Qatar’s pet; Qatar most likely does not want Hamas to lose the war and is sure to do all it can to secure that result.

It appears that the Biden administration would like to trade Netanyahu in for a doormat who would agree to a terrorist Palestinian state next door, a Hamas victory in Gaza and Iran having nuclear weapons.

February 15, 2024. President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have a long phone conversation. The communiqué published by the White House briefing room says they spoke about humanitarian assistance to civilians in Gaza and Israeli military operations.

https://www.jns.org/former-amb-friedman-schumers-speech-a-desecration/

Former U.S. Ambassador David Friedman handed the Biden administration a failing grade for its steadily eroding support for Israel since the Oct. 7 atrocities, and reserved especially sharp words for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), speaking during an interview on Israeli TV on Monday.

Schumer made headlines on March 14 when, from the floor of the U.S. Senate, he called Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu an obstacle to peace for not supporting a two-state solution, grouping him with the terrorist group Hamas, Palestinian Authority chief Mahmoud Abbas and “radical right-wing Israelis.”

Asked by Channel 14 interviewer Libi Alon what he thought of Schumer’s speech, Friedman said, “I’ll say it in the words that your audience will understand. It was a chilul Hashem [a desecration of God’s name.]”

Schumer opened his remarks with a refrain he often uses when speaking about Israel, referring to the fact that his last name derives from the Hebrew word shomer, or “guardian,” and that he thinks of himself as a guardian of the Jewish people.

Friedman said, “It was horrible for a Jewish person who claims to be, you know, the great Jewish protector in the United States government of Israel, for him to say that.”

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-problem-with-schumers-israel-speech

Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer has long claimed to be a shomer—Hebrew for guardian or watchman—of Israel and the Jewish people. But his speech last Thursday on the Senate floor, in which he called for new elections in Israel, more readily brings two Yiddish words to mind.

The first word is chutzpah, which connotes arrogance-laced presumption. That perfectly describes Schumer instructing Israel—the only democracy in the entire Middle East—to jettison its elected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and hold new elections, or else. Schumer threatened: “[i]f Prime Minister Netanyahu’s current coalition remains in power after the war begins to wind down . . . then the United States will have no choice but to play a more active role in shaping Israeli policy.” That is election interference, plain and simple.

The Israeli people are quite capable of deciding when to hold elections and whom to elect, notwithstanding Schumer’s insinuation to the contrary. No foreign politician—even, or especially, one who prefaces his remarks with “as a Jew” and “a life-long supporter of Israel”—has any business interfering with an ally’s democratic processes. Critics might point to Netanyahu’s 2015 address to Congress opposing the proposed Iran nuclear deal. Democrats were livid at the time. But Netanyahu was arguing against a specific agreement that many Americans, and most Israelis, believed posed an existential threat to Israel and the world. He was not advocating for President Obama’s ouster.

Schumer claimed Netanyahu is “allowing his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel.” But does anyone doubt Schumer is ditching Israel to save Joe Biden by placating his party’s radical left? Unsurprisingly, Biden praised the speech.

The second word is sechel—common sense or wisdom—something Schumer’s speech clearly lacked. The Senate majority leader claimed that the Israeli people are being “stifled by a governing vision that is stuck in the past.” But the only people stuck in the past are those, like Schumer and the foreign policy establishment, who persist in wanting to impose a two-state solution that Palestinians have never favored and that Israelis, brutalized by decades of intifadas and terrorism culminating in October 7, have given up on.