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Hamas, Israel and the Hypocrisy of Arab and Muslim Leaders by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on October 20th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20067/hamas-hypocrisy-arab-muslim-leaders

Notably, some of the Arab and Muslim states and their leaders who are pointing the finger of blame at Israel have not hesitated to take punitive measures against Hamas when they themselves felt threatened… In the eyes of these rulers, it is fine for Arabs to punish Hamas, but it is not fine for Israel to respond to the worst atrocity ever committed against its citizens.

The Palestinian Authority (PA)… appears to have forgotten about the violent and bloody coup Hamas carried out in the summer of 2007. Then, Hamas killed and injured hundreds of PA loyalists, some of whom were tossed from rooftops of buildings throughout the Gaza Strip.

This is the same Abbas who is now afraid, or unwilling, to hold Hamas responsible for the outbreak of the war…. Abbas has good reason to avoid overt criticism of Hamas. He is aware of the pro-Hamas demonstrations in the West Bank… where demonstrators chanted slogans calling for toppling the Palestinian Authority leadership.

The Egyptians, Jordanians and Syrians, who are now condemning Israel for targeting Hamas, have not hesitated to confront Hamas when it threatened their national security.

In 2014, an Egyptian court declared Hamas, an off-shoot of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood organization, a “terrorist organization.”

In 1999, Jordan, whose leaders have also refrained from denouncing Hamas’s October 7 massacre of Israelis, expelled the terror group’s political leaders from the country.

These rulers now find it awkward to come out against the same terrorists with whom they have been meeting.

None of these rulers has ever taken a single step to help the Palestinians get relief from Hamas’s human rights violations against the people living under their brutal rule in the Gaza Strip….. When these rulers were unhappy with Hamas, they expelled its leaders, shut their offices and outlawed its armed wing.

Now that Hamas has brought down hell on two million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, perhaps these Arab and Muslim rulers will finally decide whose side are they on. Will they continue to embrace the very Hamas they have targeted for threatening them and their regimes, or will stand with those who — on their behalf as well — are defending themselves against Iran and its proxies?

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Matti Friedman: My Phone Says 2023. It Feels Like 1948. When the Hamas men stormed the border, they removed any pretense about the issue at stake. Not a state alongside Israel. Not even the existence of Israel. But the existence of Israelis.

Posted By on October 20th, 2023

https://www.thefp.com/p/matti-friedman-my-phone-says-2023?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

My smartphone says it’s October 2023, but in Israel it feels like 1948. 

That was the year this country was established as 600,000 Jews fought the combined might of the Arab world three years after the genocide in Europe. You can still feel that war in the air and underbrush of Kibbutz Mishmar Ha’emek in northern Israel, where I traveled this week, passing trucks carrying tanks and armored bulldozers south toward the battle zone around Gaza.  

For Israelis, the name Mishmar Ha’emek evokes 1948—an equivalent of Valley Forge, perhaps, or Gettysburg. The kibbutz is famous for holding out against the superior forces of the Arab Liberation Army in April 1948, helping create the fighting ethos of Israel’s military and the Zionist principle that Jews will never again abandon their homes. On one edge of the kibbutz is a historic site commemorating the Palmach, the militia that helped decide the battle. Amid the trees and bushes of the peaceful cemetery here are graves of people like Moshe Formansky, 41, and Rafael Altberg, 21, killed 75 years ago in the war that created a Jewish state, and then never really ended.  

I’d come here not to revisit history, but to speak to members of another kibbutz, Nahal Oz, on the Gaza border a few hours’ drive to the south—those members, that is, who weren’t killed or kidnapped by Hamas in the massacre of October 7. The evacuees have relocated here, and the locals are doing their best to house and entertain them. When I arrived, the children of Nahal Oz were indoors, squealing at a snake show arranged by volunteers. Outside, their hollow-eyed parents walked the paths. Across a lawn, a few dozen people sat shiva for a friend, Ilan Fiorentino, killed in the assault. 

At first I thought the historical reference for the current horror in Israel would be the Yom Kippur War, which began 50 years earlier almost to the day, on October 6, 1973. In that war Israel was surprised by Egypt and Syria on a Jewish holiday, as was the case last week. But the year that keeps cropping up is 1948.

The slaughter and arson in Nahal Oz and elsewhere, one evacuee told me, was an attempt to “do to us what they think we did to them in 1948”—a reference to the flight of Palestinian refugees from territories that became our state. Amir Tibon, a colleague from the newspaper Haaretz, who was trapped with his wife and children in their home as Hamas soldiers tried to break in and kill them, wrote that the initial defense of the kibbutz by a handful of Border Police troops facing dozens of Hamas fighters was “the few against the many, like 1948.”

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Steven Malanga Illegal Immigration’s Terrifying Cost State and local governments are spending billions on migrants and asylum seekers—and the bill will only grow steeper.

Posted By on October 20th, 2023

https://media5.manhattan-institute.org/iiif/2/wp-content%2Fuploads%2Fsites%2F5%2FAsylum-seekers-and-illegal-immigrants-sleeping-on-the-sidewalk-outside-the-Roosevelt-Hotel-in-Manhattan.jpg/full/!99999,960/0/default.jpg

When Florida governor Ron DeSantis tapped local funds late last year to start flying undocumented immigrants out of his state and into blue states, Democrats blasted him for trying to score “political points” with taxpayer money. DeSantis countered that the $12 million fund that financed the flights represented only a tiny portion of the money that Florida was spending on asylum seekers, after the federal government briefly detains them at the border, releases them, and they wind up in the Sunshine State. Florida hospitals alone had racked up hundreds of millions of dollars in costs for uncompensated care to migrants, DeSantis noted—and the state had to subsidize those services. And it was largely progressive-led municipalities declaring themselves immigrant “sanctuaries” that helped attract record recent numbers of asylum seekers and illegal immigrants, DeSantis argued, so it was only fair that those cities and states pay for sheltering them. “If the policy is to have an open border, I think the sanctuary cities should be the ones that have to bear that,” said DeSantis.

For many Democrat-led cities and states, those flights, and similar migrant trips to blue locales that Texas officials had arranged, have made much clearer the full price of dealing with the flood of immigrants released into the country by federal officials over the last several years. Because of their distance from America’s southern border, these governments had felt insulated from such pressures, but no longer. New York, a sanctuary city since 1989, spent $8 million a day throughout much of this year to care for migrants, including housing some 3,000 families in hotels for hundreds of dollars a night. Massachusetts—where liberal cities like Boston and Cambridge have also proclaimed themselves sanctuaries—scrambled last year to expand its shelter system to meet the influx. The projected bill for taxpayers: nearly $140 million, thanks to “the federal government’s inability to address our country’s immigration challenges,” then-governor Charlie Baker, a Republican, charged. Several Democratic states, including California, Illinois, and New York, have expanded access for illegal immigrants to social programs like Medicaid, deeming it humane. They now face eye-watering unanticipated bills, as illegals deluge the system.

The northward flight of migrants has changed the immigration conversation. New York City was being “destroyed by the migrant crisis,” warned Mayor Eric Adams. He complained that President Biden had “failed” the city and demanded federal aid to ease the crisis. Adams has tried to offload some arriving immigrants to suburban New York communities. A Democratic governor, Colorado’s Jared Polis, ignited his own controversy early in 2023 when he joined Republicans in transporting migrants to out-of-state cities, including Democrat-run New York and Chicago, after Denver declared a state of emergency because of an illegal immigrant influx.

Even if the southern border were completely secured, the costs of the massive movement of migrants into the U.S. over the last few years will reverberate for decades on city and state budgets. That price will include not merely the short-term burden of housing and feeding asylum seekers, but the longer-term expenditures of providing the newcomers with basic services like health care and education. Just how much these undocumented migrants will contribute, in turn, to America’s economy, given that many are largely unskilled and poorly educated, remains to be seen—though it’s unlikely to be enough to help balance municipal and state books anytime soon. Meantime, Congress and the White House neglect sensible reforms to the legal immigration system that would open doors to the skilled workers our economy needs.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

The Aberrant American Appeasement of Theocratic Iran Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on October 20th, 2023

https://victorhanson.com/the-aberrant-american-appeasement-of-theocratic-iran/

The Obama–Biden pathological appeasement of Iran is shameful. Barack Obama cooked up the “Iran deal” design to ensure the development of an Iranian bomb—although not on his watch. Every aspect of that deal favored Iran, and then in quite an unconstitutional fashion he ignored the Senate and reclassified the treaty as an “accord” to avoid the need for ratification.

He brought in Robert Malley, the pro-Iranian, pro-Hamas leftwing journalist to help John Kerry slow down but also ensure an Iranian bomb. Kerry was so desperate to help Iran that even after office he met clandestinely with Iranian government officials in Paris to help undermine U.S. foreign policy under Trump and Pompeo.

When Iranian dissidents hit the streets in the 2009 Green Revolution, Obama had ignored them for days, terrified they might endanger his détente with the terrorist regime.

His apex? Sending cash on pallets by night to Tehran, apparently embarrassed by the Iranians into physically delivering dollars and euros, although careful, he thought, not to disclose that to the American people.

Remember the plan: empower Iran and its crescent of Assad’s Syria, Hezbollah, the Lebanese extremists, and Hamas. They collectively would put constant pressure on the Gulf Monarchies and help surround Israel.

The resulting “creative tension” would force Israel to grant concessions to the radical Palestinians. Under such a regime, the U.S. would then monitor the warp and woof, the Yin and Yang of the Middle East, with no clear friends and no clear enemies—but which in fact would create a de facto U.S. Iranian-American axis that would allow Nobel laureates like Obama now and then to pontificate to all.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Does Iran Realize Its Own Growing Danger? Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on October 20th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/10/19/does-iran-realize-its-own-growing-danger/

Iran understandably believes it is riding quite high.

It is flush with cash. It hints it almost has the bomb—and might use it soon.

The Iranians are bragging about their new tyrannical allies like Russia and China.

Iran boasts of now being the self-proclaimed leader of jihad on behalf of all Muslims. It gloats that it is feeding the Russian war-machine by exporting its own drones.

Tehran proudly supplied and funded Hamas’s savage murdering of Jewish children in Israel.

It eggs on its other pawn Hezbollah to launch a reputed 100,000-Iranian-supplied missiles into Israel.

It constantly provokes the U.S.—mostly by veiled threats to unleash anti-American terrorists in the Middle East and perhaps inside America itself.

But above all, Iran is giddy over the appeasing Biden administration.

Biden resurrected the unhinged Obama administration plan of empowering a “Shiite crescent”—of Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah, including Hamas.

This American idea of a radical bloc would supposedly birth “creative tension” and thus on autopilot balance the dominance of our friends in Israel and the Gulf regimes with our new Iranian clients. Yet the logical result of such madness was the massacre we saw in Israel.

Biden put pro-Iranian envoy Robert Malley—now under FBI investigation—in charge of begging Iran to restart the disastrous Iran Deal.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

A lie can get halfway around the world The evidence is increasingly clear that Israeli Defense Forces did not bomb a hospital in Gaza Charles Lipson

Posted By on October 20th, 2023

https://thespectator.com/topic/lie-halfway-world-gaza-hospital-israel/

The charge damning Israel with bombing a hospital in Gaza has circled the globe at lightning speed, time and again. But slowly the truth is getting its pants on.

The evidence is increasingly clear that Israeli Defense Forces did not bomb a hospital in Gaza, either deliberately or inadvertently. A video, now publicly available, shows the rocket coming from inside Gaza, not from outside or from a plane. CNN has had experts confirm that analysis. The US has confirmed that point with sensitive (and still secret) signals-intelligence. So has Israeli intelligence, independent of the US. There is also at least one captured phone call among jihadists acknowledging that the rocket was fired from inside Gaza. That, too, is publicly available. We also know that almost one third of the rockets launched from Gaza, either by Hamas or Palestine Islamic Jihad, misfire and explode within their own territory. (Israel says this rocket was fired by Islamic Jihad.) So, the evidence is strong and mounting that Israel was not responsible for this deadly attack on civilians.

Still, it’s crucial to nail down all the facts before reaching a firm conclusion. Anyone who remembers secretary of state Colin Powell telling the United Nations that Saddam Hussein definitely, absolutely, certainly had weapons of mass destruction can be excused for waiting until all the evidence is in, the conclusions confirmed, the objections refuted by sources without an ax to grind.

Currently, the best judgment by intelligence professionals is that the deadly rocket was fired by a terrorist group from inside Gaza. They are confident in that conclusion and the evidence on which they base it. (Of course, the source of the rockets doesn’t lessen the human tragedy. Innocent people were killed.)

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Left’s Anti-Semitism Crisis Is the Right’s Opportunity France’s Marine Le Pen and Germany’s AfD are embracing Israel while socialists equivocate.By Joseph C. Sternberg

Posted By on October 20th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-european-lefts-anti-semitism-crisis-is-the-rights-opportunity-ee81b8b1?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

Wars have a way of scrambling politics near and far, and so it may become with the war Hamas has launched against Israel. One topsy-turvy outcome in Europe is that ostensibly anti-Semitic parties on the further reaches of the political right have embraced Israel—likely because they’ve realized that doing so emphasizes the left’s embarrassing anti-Semitic hypocrisies.

In France, representatives of the two main right-wing political movements—those led by Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour—participated in a pro-Israel rally days after the attack. Ms. Le Pen in the National Assembly last week expressed solidarity with Israel, describing Hamas’s attack as a “pogrom,” and reminding lawmakers of the need to “protect French Jews.”

That’s striking rhetoric from Ms. Le Pen’s party, now known as the National Rally, which has an awful record on anti-Semitism. The party’s founder and her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, is notorious for Holocaust denial, and Ms. Le Pen eventually expelled him from the party because of it. She herself has waded into debates about France’s culpability for the deportation of its Jews under Nazi occupation and whether kosher animal slaughter should be legal.

In Germany, a parliamentary resolution in support of Israel garnered support from the Alternative for Germany, or AfD. This movement of the populist right, which opinion polls suggest is now the second most popular party after the opposition conservative Christian Democrats, periodically stokes arguments over how Germany interprets the history of the Holocaust. But two AfD members of Parliament visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Israel in May.

This apparent unity in support of Israel on the further reaches of the right contrasts with the disarray on the left. While Ms. Le Pen was speaking up for Israel, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the French version of Bernie Sanders who founded the France Unbowed party, argued Israel and Hamas both were responsible for the violence and then picked a fight with a major Jewish organization.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

DeSantis vs. Newsom on Violent Crime New FBI data shows a sharp divergence in their records on public safety.

Posted By on October 20th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/desantis-vs-newsom-on-violent-crime-5161224f?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

California Gov. Gavin Newsom isn’t running for president in 2024, at least not yet, but he has agreed to a televised Fox News debate next month with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. One worthy topic will be their respective economic records, but they should also spend some time on public safety.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation this week released national statistics on 2022, and the headline was that violent crime fell 1.7%, dipping back to the same level as before the pandemic. But it’s a big country, and those averages don’t tell the whole story. In California violent crime is still up 13% since 2019. In Florida it’s down 31.5%. The rate of violent crime in Mr. Newsom’s state last year, 499.5 per 100,000 people, was nearly double that in Mr. DeSantis’s domain, 258.9 per 100,000.

The nearby chart shows a longer view. Amid the Covid lockdowns, the George Floyd protests, and a public backlash toward law enforcement, violence shot up in Florida, as in many other states, though California stayed on a higher plateau. But the real difference is what happened next: in 2021 and 2022, violent crime plunged in Florida while surging in California. One caveat is that the FBI in 2021 changed its methodology for calculating crime rates, but this affected all states, so it isn’t responsible for the obvious divergence.

2012’13’14’15’16’17’18’19’20’21’22225250275300325350375400425450475500525 Crime rates per 100,000 peopleCalif.Fla.

Mr. Newsom touts California’s strict gun-control laws, but at least a fifth of its aggravated assaults last year were committed with a knife or blunt object. Many of the state’s violent offenses are perpetrated by mentally ill or drug-addicted people living on the streets. Mr. Newsom himself was assaulted in 2021 by a homeless man in Oakland.

The FBI’s numbers on property crime add to the picture. In Florida such offenses are down 27% since 2019, about three times as much as nationwide, while in California they’re up 0.3%. Those figures likely underestimate the true difference, since businesses are less inclined to report theft to law enforcement in jurisdictions where it often goes unprosecuted.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Hamas: Genocidal Hatred and Jihad against All ‘Unbelievers’ by Uzay Bulut

Posted By on October 18th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20066/hamas-genocide-hatred-jihad

Hamas terrorists invaded Israel, near the Gaza Strip. They murdered hundreds of civilians, took hostages (including children and the elderly), beheaded babies, burned people alive, shot children in front of their parents, shot parents in front of their children, and fired thousands rockets and missiles into a country smaller than New Jersey.

As of this writing, Hamas has killed more than 1,400 people in Israel since October 7; wounded more than 4,200 people, and abducted 199 hostages who were taken to unknown locations in Gaza.

Hamas, a jihadist organization, has a charter that calls for the obliteration of Israel and the extermination of the Jewish people.

Even though there are now no Jews left in the Gaza Strip, that is not enough for Hamas. Backed by Iran, Turkey and Qatar, Hamas is now the main organization perpetrating terrorist attacks on civilian targets throughout Israel. On October 7, Hamas breached Israel’s security barrier at the Gaza border with explosives and bulldozers, and thousands of Hamas terrorists poured into Israel, launching a massive war.

Hamas’s aggression against Israel is not a squabble over land or “settlements.” To Hamas and many Palestinians, the whole of Israel is one big settlement that needs to be ripped up by the roots and eradicated.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian-Arab leadership has rejected offers for a Palestinian state at least six times in the past 90 years, without so much as a counter-offer: in 1937, 1947, 1967, 2000, 2008 and in 2020. All the offers were made by or accepted by the Jews.

The reason for the current Palestinian-Arab statelessness is their own political leaders who have rejected all these offers and instead chosen war and terrorism over peaceful coexistence.

Seventy-five years after the establishment of the State of Israel, Muslim fanatics still hope to destroy it.

“The Koran defines the kafir and says that the kafir is hated (40:35), mocked (83:34), punished (25:77), beheaded (47:4), confused (6:25), plotted against (86:15), terrorized (8:12), annihilated (6:45), killed (4:91), crucified (5:33), made war on (9:29), ignorant (6:111), evil (23:97), disgraced (37:18), cursed (33:60), stolen from (Bukhari 5,59,537), raped (Ishaq 759) and a Muslim is not the friend of a kafir (3:28).” — Dr. Bill Warner, July 17, 2008.

“Christians and Jews are infidels, but infidels are kafirs, too. ….Polytheists are Hindus, but they are also kafirs. The terms infidel and polytheist are religious words. Only the word “kafir” shows the common political treatment of Christian, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, animist, atheist and humanist.” — Dr. Bill Warner, July 17, 2008.

Turkey’s Islamist government — and Iran’s and Qatar’s — have for years been a lifeline for the Hamas jihadists.

Iran, Qatar and Turkey — the “heads of the snake” — must not be allowed to get a pass. They all have to be held accountable. The US should relocate its airbase in Qatar to its real ally, the United Arab Emirates.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Hamas ‘Inside Job’ Truthers Don’t Understand Israel or War by Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on October 18th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20065/hamas-israel-inside-job

There have been two kinds of conspiracy theories circulated by ‘truthers’ after the Hamas massacre of Israelis.

The first kind essentially denies there was an attack or nitpicks the details. Those arguments are made in obvious bad faith by people who simply hate Israel and side with the terrorists. Any evidence presented to them is dismissed as fake.

The second kind of conspiracy theory is of the “inside job” variety most often involving a “stand down” order that allowed Hamas to massacre over 1,000 people without any military intervention. Some of the people pushing this stuff are the usual suspects, alt-righters and anti-semites, some of it’s coming from anti-war leftists and libertarians who treat every war as a vast conspiracy, and some from fringe figures in Israel.

The idea that Prime Minister Netanyahu or top generals would have issued a “stand down” (apart from being horrifying) makes no sense. Before this attack, he was the longest-serving prime minister in Israeli history. Now he’s been forced to join a unity government and polls show that most Israelis want him to resign. His political career may be over. Likewise that of the top generals. In Israel, they transition into politics. That is a whole lot less likely to happen now.

The 1973 Yom Kippur War disaster tanked Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan despite their heroic stature. There’s no political gain to letting the enemy murder over a thousand of your people in a preventable attack.

Finally, Israel is a small country. A whole lot of people know each other and are related or friends with each other. This conspiracy theory requires you to believe that military personnel who had friends and family living in these communities decided to ignore calls for help and sit around playing cards while they were being butchered. Not to mention ignore attacks on their own bases and allow their fellow military personnel to be murdered, tortured, and taken hostage.