RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/former-us-diplomat-tries-to-rescue-hamas/

Former U.S. Middle East envoy Dennis Ross has a plan to rescue Hamas from destruction, and he unveiled it on MSNBC just as announcements were being made that Israel and Hamas agreed to a temporary ceasefire.

Appearing on “Watch the Beat with Ari Melber,” on November 21, Ross said that “the way to end the war in Gaza” would be for Israel to allow the Hamas leadership to leave the territory in exchange for the release of the remaining hostages. Ross said he hopes the Biden Administration will promote such a proposal.

Ross cited a precedent: Israel’s decision in 1982, under U.S. pressure, to allow Yasser Arafat and the rest of the PLO leadership to leave besieged Beirut.

Ross forgot to mention what happened after Arafat left Lebanon. He didn’t ride off into the sunset of some quiet retirement. He sailed to nearby Tunis, set up PLO terrorist headquarters there, and embarked on twenty more years of terrorism. Shootings and stabbings. Bus bombings and intifadas. Thousands of Israelis murdered or maimed.

And now Ross wants Israel to repeat that tragic mistake. Once again, he wants to see terrorist leaders rescued, which would leave them free to orchestrate more October 7-style massacres.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/glazov-gang-the-land-that-israel-never-stole/

Shillman Fellow Daniel Greenfield exposes one of the greatest slanders against the Jewish state.

Don’t miss it!

https://www.frontpagemag.com/parchment-barriers-wont-keep-israel-safe/

Last week during a pause in hostilities Israel started exchanging Palestinian Arab prisoners for Hamas’s Israeli hostages. Obviously, the “international community” has been pressuring Israel to make this concession, one that most Israelis know is dangerous, given the moral hazard of rewarding Hamas’ war-crimes, the certainty that any stop in the fighting will allow Hamas to regroup and rearm, and the Palestinian Arabs’ sorry track-record of serially violating every “agreement” it’s made with Israel, as well as transnational covenants like the Geneva Conventions. Indeed, Hamas is already violating the provision of the agreement that forbids evacuated Gazans from returning to the north.

The broader issue, however, is the continuing fealty that Western nations have to the “rules-based international order,” one predicated on dubious, if not empirically falsified assumptions about state behavior and human motivation; and on a questionable faith in “diplomatic engagement” and treaties to deter aggression and keep the peace. No global conflict illustrates this truth more than the war between Palestinian Arabs and Israel, one that has been going on for at least 75 years.

The failure of the postwar “new world order” and its most consequential institution, the UN, was obvious a few years after its creation, and Israel bore the brunt of that failure. After the Arabs rejected UN Resolution 181 in November 1947, and Israel declared itself a state six months later, five Arab states, four of whom were signatories to the United Nations Charter, invaded Israel.

This resort to violence was a blatant repudiation of the “rules-based international order” and its fundamental principle that no nation should use force to seize territory from another nation. Yet the challenge of this bedrock principle by four UN members was shrugged off, and offenders were not sanctioned or punished.

Several weaknesses of the “new world order” also were exposed, the most serious being the absence of any reliable or consistent provisions for enforcing the UN’s resolutions. Member states’ national interests and passions, no matter how illiberal or totalitarian or destructive, took priority over principle. The UN had begun its transformation into what Churchill feared in his 1946 Fulton, Missouri speech: “a cockpit in the Tower of Babel.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/u-n-women-retracts-statement-condemning-hamas-attacks-on-israel/?utm_source=recirc

After weeks of silence on Hamas’s October 7 crimes against women and children, United Nations Women issued a definitive statement on Friday that condemned “the brutal attacks by Hamas.”

Then, the organization deleted its statement.

In a post on Instagram, U.N. Women initially denounced Hamas’s attacks and said that it would “continue to call for the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages.” U.N. Women deleted the statement soon after it was posted and replaced it with another that omitted condemnation of Hamas.

U.N. Women has faced mounting pressure from Jewish women’s organizations, who say that the organization’s response to Hamas’s October 7 attacks has been skewed at best. In October, U.N. Women waited days to publicly comment on the attack. When the organization did comment on the “situation in Israel,” it called for increased humanitarian aid and fuel for Gaza, began to advocate for a permanent cease-fire in Gaza, and said nothing of the violence that Hamas committed against Israeli women and children.

The U.N.’s leading women’s body is now spearheading its annual 16-day campaign to bring attention to gender-based violence. Its 16-day campaign might be to blame for the media mix-up that caused U.N. Women to post its Friday statement, a representative told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

https://victorhanson.com/what-were-the-hamas-monsters-thinking/

We know the multifaceted strategy of the monstrous Hamas operation of October 7.

In precivilizational fashion it wished to kill and mutilate the most vulnerable of all Israeli civilians and thus to shock the world that it was capable of—and proud about— anything, from decapitation to necrophilia. Such animalistic savagery, in the reckoning of Western therapeutic society, was supposedly to be seen as forced upon Hamas murderers by the “occupation.”

The killers felt they would shock the Israelis into concessions given their eagerness to commit the unspeakable. They took captives for tripartite reasons: to barter children and the elderly for their kindred terrorist murderers in Israeli jails; to use captives to force the Israelis to grant cease-fires and pauses in their retaliation; and to bank them as shields to protect Hamas kingpins from retaliation.

Hamas invaded during a holiday in the early hours, in a time of peace, and on the iconic 50th-annivesary of the Yom Kippur surprise Arab attack. Their aim was to prove that  Israeli soil was for the first time porous and 2,000 killers could enter sacred Israeli ground with impunity and kill in one day more Jews civilians than at any day since the Holocaust.

The terrorists shot thousands of rockets into Israel to overwhelm Iron Dome and terrify the entire civilian population.

All these tactics was aimed at long-term strategic goals: stop the Abraham Accords; obey the directives of Hamas’s Iranian terrorist masters as payment for their arms; discredit the radical Palestine Authority and Arab moderate nations as anemic in their opposition to the supposedly shared hated Zionist entity; and prompt an Israeli response that by necessity would involve collateral damage to human shields, and schools, mosques, and hospitals atop subterranean Hamas headquarters.

Yet if we know their despicable methods, aims, and strategies, why did they think the civilized world would support their barbarity or at least excuse it?

One, Hamas assumed anti-Semitism was prevalent throughout the West and was canonical in the Middle East. Palestinian authorities count on the fact that being an enemy of the Jews of Israel wins them empathy of the world and creating their own unique rules of passive-aggressive victimhood.

So Palestinians demand to be the only “refugees” in the world—not Greek Cypriots, Eastern European Germans, and Prussians, Kurds, Armenians, and certainly not a million Jews cleansed from the Arab Middle East.

Israelis are to be “settlers,” not millions of Middle Easterners who surge and settle into the West, form resistance communities, sneer at integration and assimilation, and use Western liberality to protect and project their own illiberality.

https://www.jns.org/the-israeli-people-demand-victory/

Israel is currently focused on the sequential release of groups of our hostages held by Hamas. According to reports, some 52 hostages will be released over a four-day period as part of a temporary truce deal between Israel and the terror group. Three-quarters of them have already been released.

The question is: What follows? This is where things get not only murky, but potentially frightening.

Hamas is clearly hoping that we will become addicted to a daily schedule of releases, which will require a prolonged ceasefire. This scenario makes Hamas the puppet-master. It will be in full control of events and their timing. Moreover, as ceasefires are extended, Israeli leverage, born of battlefield success, will diminish. And it will embolden those who want Israel to stand down and end its military operations.

American and European leaders will proclaim: You’ll get all your people back, you inflicted heavy damage on Hamas, you killed a lot of Gazans—that sounds like enough. There is also the enormous economic cost of keeping hundreds of thousands of IDF reservists in the field.

Taken together, this could mean that the drumbeat for winding things down will become increasingly, even irresistibly loud.

This is a formula for disaster.

Israel is not fighting a war to recover hostages. We are fighting for the ground we stand on. Hamas’s barbaric Oct. 7 massacre taught us that we can no longer tolerate its existence on our border. Not if we want to have a southern Israel.

https://www.newsmax.com/world/globaltalk/elon-musk-israel-visit/2023/11/27/id/1143708/

Tech entrepreneur Elon Musk lent support Monday to Israel’s campaign against Hamas, saying one challenge was stopping propaganda of a sort that led to the Hamas terrorists’ killing spree that triggered the Israel war on Gaza.

The owner of the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, Musk was on an unusual visit to Israel, during a four-day pause to the fighting, and held a live online discussion with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Hearing Netanyahu describe the destruction of Hamas, which Israel has set as a war goal, as necessary for any prospective peace with the Palestinians, Musk sounded his general agreement for such objectives during an X Spaces discussion.

“There’s no choice,” said Musk, who also owns Tesla and SpaceX, adding: “I’d like to help as well.”

“Those that are intent on murder must be neutralized,” Musk said. “The propaganda must stop that is training people to be murderers in the future. And then, making Gaza prosperous. And if that happens, I think it will be a good future.”

Netanyahu replied: “I hope you will be involved. And the fact that you came here, I think, speaks volumes to your commitment to try to secure a better future.”

Musk has himself been accused of incitement after agreeing on Nov. 15 with a post that falsely claimed Jews were stoking hatred against white people.

Netanyahu showed Musk some footage of the Oct. 7 attack assembled from Hamas bodycams, CCTV and other sources.

When they last met, in California on Sept. 18, Netanyahu urged Musk to strike a balance between protecting free expression and fighting hate speech after weeks of controversy over antisemitism on X.

https://www.renewamerica.com/columns/sharpe/231127

Since October 7, 2023, everything has changed

The latest Hamas and Hezbollah aggression, unleashed against Israeli civilians by the mullahs of the Islamic Republic of Iran, masks the growing and insidious myth that has metastasized in the West, namely the endlessly repeated lie by Arab propaganda that the Jewish state occupies a country called Palestine and that Israelis are colonists and occupiers. I first became aware of this baseless lie during the last two weeks of May 2003 when I spent time in England visiting family and friends.

My visit afforded me an opportunity to sense how the British media was treating Israel in its daily news coverage. I was already aware of the corrosive and institutionalized bias by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) towards Israel, but what I saw and heard exceeded my worst fears.

On one day alone, the BBC ran a program called “Correspondent” in which Israel’s construction of a security fence to protect Israeli citizens from Arab terror was roundly criticized. The BBC correspondent expressed no understanding of Israel’s basic needs of defense; instead, the program blamed Israel’s “occupation” for the Palestinian violence and denounced the fence as a “wall of apartheid.”

Of course, when Arabs use the word “occupation” they are not talking of Judea and Samaria (the so-called West Bank) or Gaza, they are talking about all of Israel. Thus, when they speak of peace once Israel withdraws from “occupied territory” what they really mean is that there will be peace once Israel no longer exists. That is also what they mean when they scream, “From the River to the Sea.”

The same day on British TV’s Channel 4, a bizarre opera called “The Death of Klinghoffer” was aired. This filmed opus, composed by a John Adams, dealt with the hijacking by Palestinian terrorists of the cruise ship, the Achille Lauro, in 1985 and the murder of the hapless wheelchair bound Jewish American, Leon Klinghoffer, who was subsequently tossed overboard by the Arab hijackers. The opera provided a misplaced dignity to the terrorists and attempted to excuse their actions in part because of the Israeli “occupation.”

Earlier in the week, BBC 1 was to have televised “Raid on Entebbe” and viewers tuned in only to be dismayed that the Beeb, as the BBC was once affectionately known, arbitrarily cancelled the program. The showing of the film, which cast Israeli commandos in a heroic light as they rescued hijacked Jewish passengers from a German/Palestinian gang in Idi Amin’s Uganda, was deemed by the BBC spokesperson as “insensitive at this time of terrorist alerts.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20178/arabs-betrayed-palestinians

The stance of the Arabs and Muslims is yet another indication of their disillusionment with the Palestinians in general and Iran’s proxies — Hamas, Hizballah and the Houthis — in particular.

Countries such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Egypt and Jordan are as opposed to Hamas as they are to Israel. Hamas is another branch of the Muslim Brotherhood organization, which has long posed a threat to their national security.

In 2017, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain cut ties with Qatar after accusing it of providing support for Islamist terrorists, including Hamas and the Taliban, as well as Iran.

Now that their eyes have been once again forced open, the Palestinians should distance themselves from Hamas and other terrorist groups and join forces with those Arabs and Muslims who recognize that to create a better future for their people, it would benefit them immeasurably to recognize the legitimacy of the State of Israel.

The Iran-backed Hamas terrorist group and its supporters are once again disappointed that the Arab countries did not come to the rescue of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip during the current war which erupted after the October 7 Hamas massacre of Israelis. At least 1,200 Israelis were murdered and more than 4,500 wounded in the massacre. Another 240 Israelis, including toddlers, children, women and the elderly were kidnapped to the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.

This is not the first time that the Palestinians have voiced disappointment with their Arab brothers. In all previous rounds of fighting between Israel and Hamas, the Palestinians have claimed that the Arab and Islamic states were not doing enough to help them. In fact, Palestinians have over the past few decades accused the Arabs of “betraying” them by signing normalization agreements with Israel and refusing to provide them with financial aid. The Palestinians receive lip service from the Arabs and Muslims, but that is all.