RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/israel-hamas-gaza-civilians-united-nations-1222797b?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

As Israel prepares for its likely ground invasion to pursue Hamas in Gaza, the world is warning about civilian casualties. The moral point to keep in mind as the fighting gets intense is that the responsibility for those casualties will lie with Hamas.

Israel has an obligation to do what it can to protect civilians, and it is doing so. It has warned Gazans to move to the south of the territory as it prepares its campaign. It is using precision-guided bombs when it can to target Hamas combatants rather than civilians. No one has a bigger strategic stake in reducing civilian Palestinian casualties than Israel given the propaganda fodder they provide its enemies.

Contrast that with Hamas, which gave no warning to the Israeli and foreign civilians it slaughtered on Oct. 7. Killing civilians was the explicit goal. Hamas has ordered Gazans not to flee, and its leaders hide weapons in hospitals, schools and mosques.

Israel built bomb shelters for its citizens. Hamas built a network of tunnels for its combatants but keeps its civilians above ground, where they can be used as human shields or casualties showcased on TV. It’s not too much to say that Hamas wants Palestinian casualties to stir an uprising on the West Bank and turn world opinion against the Jewish state.

Yet the United Nations and others criticize Israel more than they do Hamas. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres has denounced Israel’s evacuation order but he says little about Hamas’s human blockade.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/israels-siege-of-hamas-is-no-war-crime-da6f5659?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Most victims of the Oct. 7 massacre in Israel weren’t yet buried when some prominent international voices—including U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, the nonprofit Human Rights Watch, and Josep Borell, the European Union’s top diplomat—suggested that Israel’s first efforts to defend itself are war crimes. This raises an important question: Does international law require a nation to choose between committing war crimes and having war crimes committed against it?

The answer is no. One of the great tragedies of war is that civilians often become victims. That is why countries like Israel resort to war only as self-defense, which, according to the United Nations Charter, is every nation’s inherent right. But if even unintentional harm to civilians constitutes illegal “collective punishment,” as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has called Israel’s operations in Gaza, even defensive war is effectively precluded.

The law of war prohibits directly targeting civilians. Israel has made clear that its objectives are only military. “The IDF will destroy Hamas,” Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Thursday, “and we will hunt down every last man with the blood of our children on his hands.”

But military targets can be attacked even when doing so may result in the loss of civilian life. International humanitarian law requires that civilian casualties from a particular action be balanced against “anticipated military advantage,” a rule known as proportionality. In practice, as this rule is understood by Western countries, even significant civilian casualties don’t necessarily make strikes on legitimate targets illegal.

Hamas has violated international law by hiding among civilians. But international law doesn’t reward the use of human shields. Instead, it makes clear that “the presence of civilians within or near military objectives does not render such objectives immune from attack.” Israel’s critics want it to fight in a way that would have made it impossible for democracies to wage war in every conflict from World War II to the U.S.-led campaign against ISIS, which killed about 10,000 civilians by some estimates.

A legal analysis of Israel’s response must take into account the barbarity and scale of Hamas’s attack. Israel now knows that Hamas’s goal is the annihilation of the Jewish people and the Jewish state. Defeating Hamas isn’t simply a tactical military goal but an existential national one—a military objective of the highest order. There is no basis on which to bar Israel ex ante from a generally lawful means of warfare such as siege, or maneuver in urban areas.

https://www.jns.org/hamas-weaponizes-sympathy-for-civilians-they-help-kill/?_se=YW5uZS1tYXJpZS5m

Suffering in Gaza is real, though the false victimhood narrative gives Hamas benefits and deflects attention from saving the hostages and defeating the terrorists.

It’s a difficult balancing act, but most of the talking heads and pundits are managing to pull it off. Unlike the hard left, most liberals and Democrats have not abandoned sanity and embraced the open antisemitism that has been expressed at rallies for “Palestine,” in which Hamas is not just supported but justified. To the contrary, at least for the moment, the old bipartisan consensus in favor of Israel seems to have re-emerged since the unspeakable terrorist atrocities on Oct. 7. The vast majority of Democrats and almost all Republicans are solidly backing Israel’s right to defend itself and condemning Hamas, even as many of them also speak of their concerns about Palestinian suffering.

But only a week after the slaughter of men, women and children in the Jewish communities along the Gaza border and at a music concert attended by young adults—and with Israel still sifting through the wreckage, finding bodies of the slain and tortured victims of these atrocities, and preparing to bury some 1,400 people—the conversation about the conflict is shifting. To no one’s surprise, the headlines are now all about a “humanitarian crisis” and not a hostage crisis, even though the fate of the estimated 150 people, including 14 Americans, kidnapped by Hamas is still unknown. The suffering of Palestinians—President Joe Biden has been at pains to try and differentiate from the terror group, stating that “the vast majority of them have nothing to do with Hamas”—has become the world’s top concern.

Callousness about deaths in Gaza is wrong. So, too, are overwrought expressions of rage about terrorist crimes that lead to talk about wiping out the Palestinians or turning a place where so many people live into a parking lot.

However, Biden is wildly overstating his case about the level of support Hamas can count on. More important than that, the seemingly irresistible impulse on the part of Western politicians to deny that Hamas represents Palestinian aspirations is linked to a wave of sympathy for the Palestinians that is bound to influence administration policy as the war continues.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/savages/

We’re in a war between savages and civilization. Everything else is a detail.

Some of us woke up to that war when planes crashed into skyscrapers. Others when we saw beheading videos spread across social media. What we saw in Israel, Hamas terrorists raping, mutilating and defiling corpses, is another bloody wake-up call. There will be many others.

Beyond the politics and the geopolitics, we still haven’t come to terms with what we’re fighting.

The barbarism of murdering women and children, taking them as hostages, and posting photos of their dead bodies to social media, is not a byproduct of Islamic warfare, it’s the whole point.

Cruelty, beheading, burning to death, torturing and mutilating are the essence of Islam. This is how Islamic warfare was practiced beginning with Mohammed for over a thousand years. It’s how it continues to be practiced, whether it’s ISIS fighting other Muslims, Azerbaijani troops killing Armenians, Hamas attacking Israelis, or Islamic terrorists plotting carnage in Western nations.

Islam was born out of a war by barbarians against the civilized societies of Persia and Byzantium. Despite academic mythmaking, its vision never extended beyond rape and slavery, its empires fell into power struggles, beginning with Sunnis and Shiites, and its cultural and scientific accomplishments were all looted from conquered peoples. When civilization finally toppled the Ottoman Empire with some help from its internal barbarians, the cycle began again.

Israel is just one front in a global war between savages and civilization. And not all of the savages bow to Allah. There are inner city gangs across the American hemisphere that behead and torture their victims. And there are children of civilization that turn into savages. Savagery is not a condition of birth: it is a choice. People born into savagery can become civilized and those born into the highest echelons of civilization can prey on us like the worst vicious animals.

The question is how do civilized societies confront savagery? Do we blame ourselves for having made the savages what they are through our capitalism and colonialism even though they have behaved this way long before modern western civilization amounted to anything? Or do we set forth to reeducate them, to build modern nations for them and teach them to become civilized?

We have sent forth our sons and daughters to make peace with them and to educate them. Our societies opened themselves to embrace and celebrate the virtues of the noble savage. When we realized that we could not coexist with savages, we tried to remake our societies to serve them. All of that has been tried and civilization is still drowning in the violence of the savages.

The fundamental truth is that civilization and savagery are innately at war with one another.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20059/iran-helped-hamas-assault

“We coordinated with Hezbollah and with Iran and the Axis [of Resistance] before, during and after the battle at the highest level.” — Hamas representative Ahmed Abdulhadi, revealing Hamas coordination before and during the massacre, Newsweek, October 11, 2023.

Another Hamas official, Ali Baraka, told Russia’s state-run RT outlet that his group had secretly planned the assault for two years and did not inform any other factions or allies, including Iran and Hezbollah, of the “zero hour.” Baraka confirmed that Iran “gives us money and weapons.”

While many in the West chose to disregard Iran’s role in arming, training and funding Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the same cannot be said about a large number of Arabs who have long been warning of Tehran’s expansionist actions in the Middle East. Some of those Arabs have been openly talking about how Iran uses its proxies to wreak havoc not only on Israel, but on some Arab countries. Through its proxies, the Iranian regime now effectively occupies Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, in addition to the Gaza Strip. The Arabs, in short, see clearly what many Westerners apparently want to remain oblivious to.

“Hamas is an organization affiliated with the clerical regime in Iran, just like Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq, and it is the same axis that threatens Saudi Arabia and Kuwait day and night. We differentiate between a just cause and a terrorist axis.” — Mansour al-Malik, Saudi Arabian petroleum engineer, on X, October 8, 2023.

“Iranian Regime Mouthpiece Kayhan : Iran Is The Mind And Hands Behind Hamas; Operation ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’ [The Invasion of Israel] Was Planned By Qods Force Commander Qassem Soleimani Before he Was Killed; Khamenei Hinted in August 2022 at ‘The Complete Conquest of Israel.” — Report by the Middle East Media Research Institute, (MEMRI), October 12, 2023.

“Iranian Website Asr-e Calls On Iranians Not To Speak Out On Iranian Involvement In ‘The Hamas-Israel Conflict’ – For Fear Of Harming Iranian Interests….” — Report by MEMRI, October 13, 2023.

What will it take for the US and its allies to grasp that the appeasement of the Iranian regime is read by the mullahs and their proxies as weakness? If such appeasement continues, make no mistake: today, the carnage is Israel; tomorrow, it will be the US and Europe.

The Biden administration insists that it does not have any evidence of Iran’s “direct” involvement in the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel. The Biden administration has apparently totally dismissed the Wall Street Journal report on October 9, “Iran Helped Plot Attack on Israel Over Several Weeks,” as well as the Washington Post’s “Hamas received weapons and training from Iran, officials say.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-west-has-israeli-blood-on-its-hands/

The mass terror attacks on October 7th by Hamas against Israeli citizens is a milestone of heinous savagery––the beheading of some of 40 murdered babies, the slaughter of 1300 Israelis and 27 Americans, as well as the usual indiscriminate butchering, rape, torture, grisly videos flaunting the dead, and hostages taken to brutalize and hold for ransom. None of this is new, but the scale of the attack and the atrocities mark a dangerous escalation.

One contributing cause of this mayhem is the feckless, if not lunatic, foreign policy blunders of the Biden administration. But the last 75 years of Western foreign policy and its idealizing illusions, along with sacrifices of Israel’s security to Western national interests, have been predicates for this mass savagery.

There’s no question that actions both taken and avoided by Biden’s puppeteers enabled the terrorists and their patron and financier Iran. Our willful blindness about the Iranian Revolution and the mullahs’ religious motives reached its post-Cold War apogee in the Munich-class appeasement of Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons via the Iran nuclear deal signed by Barack Obama.

Donald Trump wisely ended our participation in this dangerous “parchment barrier.” He increased sanctions on Iranian oil sales, imposed “maximum pressure” on its economy, and took out one of Iran’s most effective and dangerous terrorist bosses, Qassem al Soleimani, despite our foreign policy clerks who issued dire warnings of apocalypse in the region.

Yet for Israel, disaster didn’t happen on Trump’s watch, but on Biden’s. Biden transferred billions of dollars to Iran, and relaxed sanctions on oil sales, allowing the regime to generate $80 billion more from oil exports. He squandered our country’s prestige on groveling outreach to lure Iran back to the nuclear deal, even though the regime has serially violated its terms from the start, in addition to attacking Americans 83 times––with a U.S. military response to only four.

As a result of Biden’s cringing solicitude, Iran now has enough enriched uranium to be months away from producing nuclear weapons, and has increased its support to violent proxies and clients like Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and other jihadist storm troopers. Indeed, according to The Gatestone Institute, “Iran provides roughly $100 million a year to Palestinian terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and $700 million a year to Hezbollah.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/enablers-of-hamas-should-take-gaza-refugees-c7c4b44c?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Thousands of civilians in Gaza are about to endure another nightmare brought on by Hamas’s mass slaughter and kidnapping of Israelis and foreign nationals. Now that the border between Israel and Gaza is mostly under control, Israeli forces are preparing for a ground invasion to end Hamas’s brutal rule. The battle isn’t likely to end quickly.

Civilians are seeking to flee in advance of the fighting, and we shouldn’t expect Israel to take them in. With nowhere else to go, Egypt is the only possible escape route for Palestinians hoping to find refuge by land.

The U.S. has already started to discuss this with the government of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, according to recent reports. An Israeli military spokesman, when asked by reporters where displaced persons might go, suggested Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula is the logical location. He added, “Anyone who can get out, I would advise them to get out.” In an interview with Army Radio, Israel’s Education Minister Yoav Kisch also said that Palestinians seeking to flee Gaza should look to Egypt.

The Rafah crossing on the Egypt-Gaza border is open. The Israeli military issued a statement on Oct. 10 indicating that it was briefly closed. Egyptian officials later told Reuters that operations at Rafah had been disrupted by a nearby Israeli airstrike but had reopened shortly afterward, at least for humanitarian purposes. On Sunday, national security adviser Jake Sullivan said that Hamas has been preventing people from leaving through the Rafah crossing.

Egypt may not be thrilled about the role it is being asked to play. Egyptian security sources have said it wouldn’t permit a mass exodus of Palestinians from Gaza to Sinai. Cairo is deeply skeptical of Hamas, given the terrorist organization’s roots in the Muslim Brotherhood, which Egypt’s government views as a threat. Moreover, Cairo has consistently tried to distance itself from any responsibility for Gaza, which it occupied between 1948 and 1967.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20052/should-we-help-gaza-palestinians

The countries of the European Union are divided over whether to continue aid to Gaza. However, the question of whether it is possible to help the civilian population without strengthening Hamas is not part of the current debate.

Most international aid to Gaza is channeled through UNRWA, a UN agency dedicated exclusively to Palestinian refugees and their descendants… Unfortunately, UNRWA’s very existence and modus operandi directly reinforce Hamas. For this international organization, though there are only a handful of surviving refugees from 1948, supposed “refugee status” is passed down from father to son, so there are now around five times as many “refugees” in Gaza as there were originally.

It appears intended as political thorn to be administered for the purpose of maligning Israel for a war that was started by five Arab armies… which they then lost. Perhaps they should have thought of that before they started the war.

Meanwhile, roughly the same number of Jewish refugees, about 650,000, were fleeing for their lives from Arab countries to Israel. The newly created Jewish state, about the size of New Jersey or two-thirds of Belgium, and with no funds, managed to absorb everyone.

Given Palestinian demographics, return to the places deserted in 1948 would mean the end of the Jewish state of Israel, and is just as utopian as the idea of the returning German refugees from 1945 to areas of pre-war Germany, Poland or the Czech Republic.

[A]id, even humanitarian aid, to dictatorial countries inevitably strengthens that power, even more so with an Islamist totalitarian power such as Hamas, which does not care about the well-being of its citizen as Western countries do.

The US and the EU, if they want to continue officially supporting an increasingly unrealistic “two-state solution”, should first stop funding UNRWA, whose tasks could eventually be taken over by other organizations unrelated to refugee status.

UNRWA, which is inordinately active in education, has been criticized for helping to indoctrinate children with radical Hamas rhetoric through school textbooks and extremist teachers…. UNRWA does not have the reputation of being accountable. A recent report discloses that “UN Teachers Call To Murder Jews.”

The problem is therefore not, as we hear today in European circles, to avoid supporting organizations linked to Hamas. All aid benefits Hamas, which can then concentrate on war and terrorism, since it is largely exempt from the tasks normally devolved to those who control a territory.

No one will dispute that it is useful to teach Gaza’s children to read and write, but it is legitimate to question whether literacy training is actually being used to indoctrinate students and ignite a terrorist drift…

Sometimes, refraining from assisting people is the least bad solution when there is no good one… [O]ne wonders why the United States and the European Union want to help in Gaza and thus help Hamas… It is also usually not clear how much aid actually gets to its intended recipients and how much ends up in Hamas’s coffers.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20048/hamas-israel-what-next

They [the Israelis] ignored one of the advice of the Florentine clerk that “Don’t wound a deadly enemy and let him live to recover. Either turn him into a friend or kill him!”

Israeli leaders tried to apply to Hamas the strategy they had used against hostile Arab neighbors since 1948: “Taking them to the dentist every 10 years to defang them.”

The error the Israelis made was not to see the difference between classical state structures that have to run a country and respond to the minimum needs of their society and a non-state actor that has little concern about the people under its rule.

Hamas has been in a position to totally ignore the needs of people living in the enclave. Essential needs as food, education and health care are covered by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), over 100 NGOs from some 30 countries and frequent donations from countries wishing to show solidarity with Palestinians. In some cases foreign, donors even pay the salaries of the personnel in the local administration.

Thanks to “gifts” from “certain friendly powers”, Hamas and its junior partner, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, even don’t have to buy their arms.

Hamas, as its charter clearly states, is not in the business of nation-building: what it seeks is the elimination of Israel, something that Israelis are unlikely to offer.

The threat of executing hostages, that include citizens of several countries other than Israel, could sap much of the sympathy that there is for the Palestinian “cause” especially in the West.

The current showdown also shows the inability or unwillingness of the Biden administration to discard then President Barack Obama’s disastrous Middle East policy of cold-shouldering friends in the hope of getting warmth from foes.