RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quillette.com/2023/11/09/the-barbarian-evasions/ When I ask my students to rethink the universality of human rights, the mere suggestion befuddles them. Creatures of their progressive times, the a priori existence of such rights is as firmly established in their minds as the existence of witches or geocentricity was in the minds of their ancestors. Even as they indulge […]

https://victorhanson.com/squeezing-the-worlds-vulnerable-peoples/

https://amgreatness.com/2023/11/09/squeezing-the-worlds-vulnerable-peoples/

The population of Israel is about 10 million. This represents about half of the world’s Jewish people.

The founding idea of modern Israel was to offer a sanctuary for Jews in their biblical home in the Middle East, in the aftermath of Nazi Germany’s mass murder of 6 million Jews. Yet currently, 78 years after the Holocaust, anti-Israel protestors throughout the Middle East, the great cities of the Western world, and iconic American universities chant death threats and “Palestine will be free from the river to the sea.” Their signature slogan is shorthand for the erasure of the Jewish state and everyone in it.

There would currently be zero chance that Jews could live peaceably under any current Middle Eastern government. In the postwar era, nearly a million Jews were persecuted, ethnically cleansed, and forcibly expelled from all the major Arab countries— Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Morocco, Syria, and Yemen—despite hundreds of years of residence.

Anti-Israel hatred still remains a staple in most of the nearly-500-million-person Arab world, and indeed is commonplace among the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims and their countries at the United Nations.

And Israel is only one of a number of small, vulnerable states. Most of them are in the volatile Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. All are surrounded by hostile neighbors. The others have also suffered a long history of persecution and periodic genocide—catastrophes that are not necessarily permanently relegated to their ancient pasts.

Bitter proxy fighting between Armenian- and Azerbaijan-allied forces in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh corridor recently ended with the defeat of Armenian supported forces. As a result, shortly before the Hamas massacre of Jews on October 7, some 120,000 Christian ethnic Armenians were expelled from the region by Muslim and Turkish-speaking Azerbaijan.

Gaza is a knife aimed at Israel. Just look at the map. It’s not an accident.

The Gaza Strip was created by Arab states who attacked and lost to Israel in the first Arab-Israeli war of 1947-48. It became a narrow festering laboratory where humans were turned into monsters, encouraged and trained to commit atrocities.

Gaza became the anti-Israel terror base, 20 minutes from Tel Aviv. Gaza’s people have got no flag, no citizenship. Their symbol became the UN refugee card known in Arabic as al-Hawiyya.

Egypt kept the refugees penned up in Gaza in poverty and 70% unemployment, refusing them citizenship, denying them statehood and independence.

Lebanon and Syria also kept their Palestinians in camps. They saw the political potential of the refugees, exploited their suffering to harden them as a knife aimed at Israel. Enmity to Israel was the heart of Qawmiyya — Pan-Arab nationalism. Gamal Abdul-Nasser and Hafez Assad built their careers around it.

Whenever Arab leaders failed their people — low literacy, poor health care, general poverty — they distracted attention, wrapping themselves in the flag of Palestinian resistance and pan-Arab nationalism.

Fighting terror from Gaza consumed Israel in its first 20 years. After winning wars in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973, Israel withdrew its forces from Gaza and Sinai as part of diplomatic settlements, hoping terror would end. Under the 1993 Israel-PLO accords, Israel handed military control in Gaza to Arafat’s PLO. Terror increased. Under Ariel Sharon, Israel, also evicted its civilians from Gaza in 2005.  Arab terror rose even more.

Hamas beat the PLO in the 2006 elections after its participation was encouraged by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Yes, it was a bad idea. Hamas then violently evicted the PLO. Gaza again became the main terror base against Israel. Its main domestic product was not locally grown flowers and citrus fruit pioneered by Israeli farmers, but rocket-based terror. Hamas called it muqawwama sarwakhiyya — “rocket-propelled resistance.”

Hamas used its state educational and social networks to mold thousands of hate-filled killers.  From first grade to summer camps, Hamas gave children rifles and taught them to hate Jews, as detailed in the 36-paragraph Hamas Covenant.

https://unitedwithisrael.org/one-person-injured-in-drone-explosion-at-school-in-eilat/?utm_source=MadMimi&utm_medium=email&

A 20-year-old man suffered smoke inhalation.

By JNS

A drone caused a large explosion at an elementary school in Eilat on Thursday afternoon, injuring one civilian, reported the Israel Defense Forces.

“A UAV hit a civilian building in the city of Eilat, in southern Israel. The identity of the UAV and the details of the incident are under review,” said the IDF.

A 20-year-old man suffered from smoke inhalation and was evacuated to the city’s Yoseftal Medical Center, the Magen David Adom emergency response service said. In addition, paramedics treated five people suffering from anxiety.

https://bit.ly/3ssfqV1

Can/should Israel defy US pressure to act against its (Israel’s) own most critical national security interest (e.g., allowing a ceasefire in the war to obliterate the anti-Western Hamas Islamic terrorism; bolstering the Palestinian Authority despite its terror-driven policy and education system; allowing a non-Israeli security control of Gaza following the current war) while the US extends Israel a highly-appreciated(!), vital support, militarily, financially and diplomatically?
 
2. Israel’s defiance of US pressure has been an inherent feature of US-Israel relations since 1948. It has caused short-term frictions, while generating long-term US strategic respect toward Israel, triggering a dramatic enhancement of mutually-beneficial strategic cooperation. 
 
3. As expected, Israeli defiance of US pressure spared the US economic and national security setbacks, dealing major blows to enemies and rivals of the US.

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-772008

Despite the horrific October 7 pogroms in southern Israel, carried out by Hamas terrorists, US President Joe Biden continues to push for the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian-Arab state next to the Jewish state. Unfortunately, he doesn’t seem to understand that October 7 has changed everything.

For decades, the debate over creating a Palestinian state revolved around two major issues: the intentions of the Palestinian Arabs and the actual borders of such a state.

Statehood supporters claimed that the Palestinian Arab leadership, and the majority of Palestinian Arabs, would live in peace with Israel if given a sovereign state.

Until the 1993 Oslo Accords, nobody knew whether that claim had real merit. Nobody knew for sure how the Palestinian Arabs would behave if given self-rule. But since 1993, the question of their intentions has been tested, and they have failed that test. Miserably. There’s just no debating that point.

The first test was in 1993-1995, when Israel signed the Oslo agreements and surrendered control of 40% of Judea-Samaria to the Palestinian Authority. The behavior of then-PA leader Yasser Arafat, and his successor Mahmoud Abbas, was supposed to show that it was safe to give them a full-fledged state.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/what-is-the-proportionate-response-to-terrorism/

On October 7th, 2023 – a date that will live in infamy – an army of bloodthirsty Hamas jihadists swarmed into Israel and laid waste to a reported 1400 innocent, unarmed civilians including women, children, the disabled, and old people, committing war crimes of a sickening nature that historian Victor Davis Hanson has labeled “pre-civilizational.”

In response to the terror assault, the Jewish state justifiably declared war on Hamas, with Israeli leader Bibi Netanyahu vowing that every single member of the terror organization is now a dead man walking. And right on cue, the mainstream (read: left-wing) media, left-wing politicians, and globalist institutions like the farcical United Nations Security Council that are packed with enemies of the Western world, demanded that Israel exhibit “restraint” in its response and refrain from “disproportionate violence.”

This curious notion of “proportionate response” comes up every single time Israel is hit with a terror attack. Has a single one of the aforementioned talking heads or politicos or global entities ever called for Hamas terrorists to show “restraint”?

What retaliation is “proportionate” to the burning alive of families, the gang rape of female prisoners, the beheading of babies and toddlers, the torture of old people, and the kidnapping of hundreds more who live in terror that their beheading will be live-streamed on the internet? What would the anti-Israel Left consider an acceptably “proportionate” response to those atrocities? Would they be satisfied if the Israeli Defense Force limited itself to a surprise invasion of Gaza, burning Palestinian families alive, raping Palestinian women, beheading Palestinian infants, torturing Palestinian grandmothers, and kidnapping hundreds of Palestinians? Because technically, that would be proportionate.

Of course not. The same Western leftists who celebrated the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7th would have apoplectic fits of outrage if Israel ever perpetrated a single one of these war crimes. The revulsion and shock these hypocrites should have felt over Israel’s victims are reserved only for the “oppressed” so-called Palestinians. Let’s be real: the only response to Hamas terrorism which the Left considers appropriate for Israel is for the Jewish state to sit on its hands and submit to its own extermination.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/hamas-defenders-wield-words-as-weapons-91713cee?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

John F. Kennedy said of Winston Churchill that he “mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.” From Pericles to Abraham Lincoln, words have often been as effective as armaments in shoring up a people’s defenses, reinforcing an army’s resolve, or inspiring a unit’s bravery.

But in war, as in peace, words can also be used to demoralize and disorient. They can be used—and have been—more deviously by the enemy, and its quill-, microphone- and laptop-carrying enablers and propagandists, to obfuscate and confuse, to seed doubt in a just cause.

The war in the Middle East is a month old but it is producing plenty of the latter. From the streets of American and European cities, television studios, newspaper columns and legislatures, we are being bombarded with rhetoric that seeks to persuade us not to believe what we see, to convince us that right is wrong, justice is tyranny, terrorism is heroism.

I’ve lost count of the number of words that are being manipulated in this way. All kinds of cunning efforts have been used to get us to see that the country whose citizens were wantonly slaughtered on Oct. 7 by an enemy that has sworn to wipe it from the planet is in fact the wicked oppressor. But here are a few of the highlights:

• Cease-fire. This is the most frequently used and superficially persuasive misuse of terminology. “Cease-fire” sounds straightforwardly decent. Who could object to the cessation of hostilities that are killing and wounding thousands?

Nine days after the attack, 13 Democrats in Congress submitted a resolution urging that the Biden administration “immediately call for and facilitate de-escalation and a cease-fire to urgently end the current violence.”

But we know what that would mean: victory for Hamas. It would mean that the terrorist group should be allowed to continue to run a statelet only a few weeks after it has made good on its commitment to attack its neighbor and done so with complete disregard for international law or common decency.

Even after Hamas’s leader helpfully spelled out that, in the event of a cease-fire, the terror group would reinitiate hostilities again and again until it had killed every Jew.

• Genocide. “Joe Biden supported the genocide of the Palestinian people,” says a video posted by Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.), in one of many such claims by opponents of Israel. There is something especially malignant about this term to describe Israel’s operation—and those propagating it know that full well. They know its resonance in the history of the Jewish people, and they use it deliberately to equate what happened to the Jews at the hands of the Nazis with a military action today that is justified in self-defense, but which inevitably, tragically results in large numbers of civilian casualties—often because Hamas itself deliberately exposes civilians to harm.

To use this term is a form of Holocaust denial. If you can suggest that what Israel is doing in Gaza is equivalent to what happened in the gas chambers, then you are explicitly reducing the Holocaust to the level of a regrettable byproduct of a legitimate military campaign. That apparently so many of our young people—and a disturbing number of elected Democratic officials—seem to believe this is shaming.

• Decolonization. This is a favorite term of the obfuscators and apologists for terror, partially because it neatly ties up the whole intersectional, Black Lives Matter, critical race theory baloney with what is supposedly happening in the Middle East.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/hamass-fateful-errors

Hamas seems to have made two fundamental miscalculations in staging its barbaric October 7 attack on Israel.

First, its leadership clearly assumed that the United States would not continue to support Israel if it killed enough of the Palestinians whom Hamas has been using as human shields to protect its command centers and underground tunnel networks in Gaza.

Second, Hamas apparently assumed that if enough Palestinians in Gaza died in Israeli bombing, the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and its patron Iran would escalate the conflict by opening a second front in the war, a scenario that has clearly worried both Israel and Washington.

Both calculations might still prove valid if Palestinian deaths and suffering in Gaza continue to command the world’s attention and spark increasing outrage, but Hamas’s hope that Iran and Hezbollah, which has de facto control of Lebanon, would escalate the conflict to defend Hamas and the Palestinians of Gaza seems to be misplaced.

Last Friday, in his first public comments since the October 7 attack, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said that an expanded war remains a “realistic possibility,” but he did not declare an official intervention in the conflict.

Speaking in a sermon broadcast after Muslim prayers Friday to thousands of supporters in Dahieh, Hezbollah’s main stronghold in Beirut’s southern suburbs and elsewhere in Lebanon, Nasrallah denied that his militant Shiite Muslim “Party of God” played any role in Hamas’s attack on Israel. Hamas’s Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, he said, was “100 percent Palestinian in terms of decision and execution.” Hamas, he added, had kept it secret not only from fellow militant groups in Gaza, but also from “other resistance factions across the resistance axis”—that is, from Iran.