RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.commentary.org/john-podhoretz/first-thoughts-on-the-war/

Israel spent the past couple of years in a martial daze in which it did not take full measure of Hamas’s ideas and purposes and intentions and capabilities. That will be the subject of the post-war examination inside Israel of what happened this weekend. That examination is likely to create an entirely new political reality—and may wash away two generations of highly flawed leaders. The years during which those leaders argued to stalemate about almost everything will likely be viewed as the slow-acting poison that made possible the horrors of October 7, 2023—the single day on which more Jews died and were wounded than any other since the Nazi death camps eight decades ago.

Still, people who always want to lay some blame on Israel for the threats against it are leaning rather heavily on the talking point that this is an “intelligence failure”—as though Israel somehow summoned this evil upon itself and therefore what we should talk about is what Israel did wrong. That’s like if the law blamed someone for a massacre committed against their family in their house because of a faulty lock. The victim of the massacre will spend the rest of his life tearing himself apart for not having dealt with the lock, and will suffer greatly as a result. But he is not guilty of the crime. The murderer is the criminal, and we can never forget that.

The task for Israel now is to destroy Hamas. This is not just like how it’s a police department’s job to find the perpetrator of the massacre. This is something much larger and far more fundamental. There can be no lesser a response than the destruction of Hamas by the Jewish state—because this was one of the bloodiest pogroms in human history. Hamas infiltrators took Jews and slaughtered Jews en masse. As I write the death toll from a single morning‘s activities is well above 700, with thousands more injured. There is no difference here, even numerically, from the horrifyingly countless stories of the Nazi forces moving into a town in Poland, rounding up the Jews, making them dig a trench, and then murdering them with gunfire in the trench.

https://thefederalist.com/2023/10/09/if-democrats-dont-want-blame-for-appeasing-iran-and-hamas-they-should-stop-doing-it/

Terrorists keep telling us their intentions, and the left keeps pretending they’re bluffing.

There will be much more to say on the heart-wrenching massacre in Israel, the worst attack on Jewish civilians since the Holocaust and one of the most heinous acts of terror in decades.

Right now, though, many on the left seem upset that conservatives are pointing out that the last two Democratic administrations have appeased and funded the terror states responsible for the attack that has killed hundreds, if not thousands, of Israelis and at least  nine Americans.

There is, most obviously, Joe Biden’s recent $6 billion gift to the mullahs.

“Not a single cent from these funds has been spent, and when it is spent, it can only be spent on things like food and medicine for the Iranian people,” a White House National Security Council spokeswoman said. This pathetic and pedantic deflection was repeated endlessly by the president’s defenders. Even a child understands the concept of fungibility. It is true that Hamas didn’t spend that exact funding on their terror proxies. Islamic fascists, like everyone else, make fiscal plans with an eye on future earnings and spending. And the hostage-taking business happens to be booming.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/10/08/cheerleaders-for-hamas/

First, the horror. No sooner had Hamas rolled into Israel on Saturday, murdering and kidnapping those they came across, than images of their depraved exploits were plastered across social media. Innocent people executed on the streets. A pensioner kidnapped and driven into Gaza on a golf buggy. A young woman’s lifeless body, stripped almost naked, paraded on the back of a pick-up truck as men spat on her and chanted ‘Allahu Akbar’. Ordinary people slaughtered and taken for no other crime than being Israeli, than being Jewish. Then, the sewer. Just as social media had confronted us with such unspeakable evil, it then confronted us with those in the West who looked upon these barbaric, blood-thirsty scenes – from the comfort of safe homes 2,000 miles away – and thought to themselves: Good.

We have become accustomed to Hamas apologism from the woke left. They have long responded to the atrocities of this Islamist outfit with a knowing ‘What do you expect?’. Their delusional, bigoted conviction that Israel is the most evil state on Earth, that unlike every other nation under attack it has no right to exist or defend itself, has time and again led them to make excuses for Hamas’ genocidal lunatics – whose founding charter committed them to ‘struggle against the Jews’ and whose leading lights call on Palestinians to ‘cut off the heads of the Jews with knives’. There was plenty of that apologism yesterday. ‘Reap what you sow’, tweeted Jackie Walker, former vice-chair of Momentum, who was expelled from the Labour Party in 2019. But that soon began to look tame by comparison. Apologism gave way to cheerleading. ‘Today should be a day of celebration for supporters of democracy and human rights worldwide’, tweeted Novara Media’s Rivkah Brown, ‘as Gazans break out of their open-air prison and Hamas fighters cross into their colonisers’ territory. The struggle for freedom is rarely bloodless and we shouldn’t apologise for it.’ Yes, Hamas, those theocratic thugs, anti-Semitic killers, oppressors of women and gay people, are apparently champions of freedom and democracy. To call this deranged is too generous. This is psychopathic. But the brain rot wasn’t confined to Brown. ‘All eyes on Palestine in its heroic moment of resistance against the Zionist occupation’, tweeted Pawel Wargan, coordinator of the secretariat of Progressive International. (Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell sit on its council.) Disgraced ex-Labour MP Chris Williamson called Hamas ‘freedom fighters’.

It was shocking, but wholly unsurprising. That the Labour left has lost the plot on the Israel-Palestine conflict is a profound understatement. Corbyn’s Labour flushed out so many examples of alleged left-wingers making excuses for Hamas, or indulging Islamist anti-Semites, that we almost became numb to it all. Indeed, that a man who once referred to Hamas as his ‘friends’; who once invited Raed Salah, a man convicted for repeating the blood libel, to have tea in the House of Commons; who once gave a speech at a demonstration, yards away from an inflatable effigy of an anti-Semitic caricature – complete with horns, hooked nose and claws – is still considered the cuddly, grandfatherly standard-bearer of the left shows how morally and politically bankrupt the left now is. That more of his fellow travellers have gone from making excuses for Hamas to openly cheering it on was perhaps inevitable.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/10/09/reflections-on-israels-new-existential-war/

There have been plenty of terrorist attacks on Israel. A dozen or so conventional wars of various magnitude have been waged against the Jewish state. And more often there have been mixtures of both.

Yet never have hundreds of gangs of black-clad murderers carefully planned to swarm Israel, with an agenda to pull random Jews out of their homes and off the street, murder them, and toss their bodies in the street.

In fact, the closest parallel to the sort of methods Hamas is now embracing is something close to the Rwanda 1994 mass killing, when swarms of Hutu militia killers launched a preplanned murder spree against thousands of Tutsi civilians.

Note one common theme of these horrific videos of the murdering of young women: the bloodthirst of the Gaza crowd. There appears a natural desire of everyday Gazans to video the mutilations, an embrace of the spitting on the doomed, a frenzied effort to mutilate the dead—and the absence of a single Gazan objecting to the group murder of a civilian.

Hamas did not act out of the ordinary, but in sync with its people. In truth, there is something so terribly wrong in Gaza that the United States should keep as far away as it can from such barbarity—and hope that it too feels the same about America and keeps to itself.

So again why did Hamas mount such a long-planned and multifaceted assault on Israeli towns, public buildings, soldiers, and civilians?

The invasion was not so much a surprise attack, in the conventional Pearl Harbor sense, as a carefully calibrated land, sea, and ground effort at mass killing and hostage taking. It was designed to execute noncombatants, grab Jews for bargaining leverage, and to shock Israelis through their pre-civilizational desecration of the bodies of the dead.

It targeted first a youth concert near the border, on the theory the cowardly killers could gain maximum media traction and Arab solidarity by sensationally butchering and kidnapping helpless adolescents. Will the murderers in the weeks ahead transfer their killing zeal to attacks on the IDF? They will soon have their long desired and ample opportunity to showcase to the world their bravado as they face real soldiers and not unarmed elderly and youth.

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As Israel secures its territory and repels Iran’s terrorist proxy, Hamas, the war will shift almost exclusively to Israel’s efforts to eradicate Hamas in Gaza.  That is when the Nazi propaganda machine will kick into high gear.

Hamas specifically intermingles its military targets with civilian sights like schools, hospitals, and apartment buildings.  Hamas transports weapons and troops in ambulances and school buses.  This strategy is specifically designed to maximize the civilian casualties inside Gaza and to create images for news outlets to run to show the “barbarity” of the “Zionists” as they kill “innocent civilians.”  To be clear, while the Israel Defense Forces stand between the country’s enemies and its civilians to protect their lives, Iran’s Nazi proxies, Hamas, hides behind Palestinian civilians to ensure as many of them die as possible. 

For decades, a willing, ignorant, and in many cases, malevolent media, has taken the bait.  We have already seen the New York Times lay the groundwork for this strategy in its headline announcing the war when it described Hamas as “Palestinian Militants.”   They are militants like the Nazi SS, Al Qaeda, and ISIS are militants.  These are not militants.  These are Nazis. 

There is no moral equivalence between the Nazis in Tehran and Gaza on the one hand, and Israel on the other.  Like Hitler, the Iranian government and Hamas are attacking Western Civilization.   Israel is fighting our war.  Israel must win.  And like Hitler, the Mullahs in Tehran and Hamas, must end up on the ash heap of history. 

Hamas cannot win an all-out military confrontation with Israel.  Therefore, it will quickly pivot to a propaganda war.  Iran and Hamas can only win that war if the American public is uninformed and the American media defaults to its past behavior of showing one side of the conflict.  The media has no problem showing dead Jews and bemoaning the deaths of innocents.  However, when Jews defend themselves, that is when they are no longer worthy of sympathy in the eyes of many in the media.  There is no greater sin to the Progressive left than Jews that will not allow themselves to be victims. 

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2014/09/air-raid-shelters-road-masada/

This essay originally appeared in our September 2014 edition.
It is reprized as a reminder that, for Israel and the Jews,
when things change they get even worse

The road to Masada, my road at any rate, began not in Jerusalem but three weeks earlier in Northcote, that quiet, secure and exquisitely fashionable suburb on the outer edge of inner-city Melbourne, where a dinner invitation saw the table talk soon turn to Israel. The television news that night had led with reports from Gaza—images of rockets heading north interspersed with grim-faced Israelis asserting that enough was enough. “You can’t support Israel, surely not?” marvelled a fellow guest, a chap with some sort of academic sinecure who had begun airing his impeccably righteous views well before the crudités were whisked away.

If you watch ABC television, listen to Radio National or once read Mike Carlton in the Sydney Morning Herald, there will be no need to cite another word or talking point, for it was all there in my fellow guest’s laundry list of the lockstep Left’s latest crusades and grievances. Had it not been for the irregular sprays of spittle that marked his more animated complaints, he might have been a life-size example of those talking dolls with the programmed catchphrases small children expect and enjoy. Just pull the string and out the clichés tumble to their immediate delight.

“Seriously,” he continued, “I’ve got nothing against Jews, except when they act like Nazis.” This observation passed for wit, and the table was ringed with wry smiles at Zionism’s evil being so pithily laid bare. Our hostess was a lovely woman, someone whose passions run hotter for hemlines and health fads, and this being Melbourne, her favourite football team, than international affairs. She had laboured long and hard to prepare the evening’s fare, so rather than ruin her night, to my shame I let the comment pass with nothing more muscular than a meek and muttered, “That’s not really fair.” If there is a book of postmodern etiquette it must surely advise that taking up such a gauntlet is best done over dessert, when harsh words can no longer ruin a fine main course of well-cooked organic beef.

On the way home, modern Melbourne was John Batman’s sleepy village: light traffic, no perils but for unilluminated cyclists and those low-rise roundabouts which town planners have insisted on placing at nearly every intersection. If there was a moment of anxiety it came at the roadblock near the zoo in Royal Park, but it was only a sobriety checkpoint manned by Victoria Police with their blow-in-this demands. It is an ostentatiously safe place, this city on the Yarra, protected from unpleasantness and peril at every round-the-roundabout turn of life’s daily journeys. Safe to live and raise a family, to pursue love if that joy is not already yours. And safe, too, to mount abstraction’s pulpit and sermonise from the great heights of moral clarity, as the blowhard from the ivory tower earlier demonstrated, about the murderous shortcomings of others in a distant and far, far more perilous land.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20033/palestinian-war-on-israel

Less than 48 hours after 20 US Democratic Senators urged President Joe Biden to push for the establishment of a Palestinian state as part of a normalization agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia, Iran’s Palestinian terror proxies launched a massive attack on Israel, killing more than 700 Israeli men, women and children, and wounding thousands more. An unknown number of Israelis (estimated at more than 100), including infants, toddlers and an elderly Holocaust survivor in a wheelchair, have also been kidnapped and taken to the Gaza Strip.

This war, as noted by the Wall Street Journal, was caused directly by Iran, which funds and directs Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and by the appeasement of the Iranian regime by the Biden administration and its allies.

The two groups [Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad] do not recognize the Oslo Accords that were signed between the PLO and Israel in 1993-1995, and they are opposed to the establishment of a Palestinian state only in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem. The only solution they believe in is one that would see Israel replaced with an Islamic state.

If the Democratic senators have it their way, the future Palestinian state will also be controlled by Hamas and PIJ.

Instead of condemning the Palestinians for transforming the Gaza Strip into a base for Jihad against Israel, the Senators who signed the letter are asking the Biden Administration to give the Palestinians another state in the West Bank and east Jerusalem. Like the Gaza Strip, the new Palestinian state will also be quickly transformed into an Iran-backed terror entity and a base for pursuing the Jihad against Israel.

In the past two years, Hamas and PIJ have increased their terror activities in the West Bank. The Palestinian Authority (PA), headed by PA President Mahmoud Abbas, has done nothing to stop terror attacks against Israelis. Abbas knows that the day he orders his security forces to crack down on the terrorists, his people will condemn him as a traitor and collaborator with Israel.

Instead of denouncing the terrorists, Abbas continues to reward them with monthly stipends through what is known as a “Pay-for-Slay” program. In 2021, the Palestinian Authority spent no less than 841 million shekels ($270.75 million) paying rewards to terrorists. 600 million shekels ($193.16 million) were paid to imprisoned terrorists and released terrorists and another 241 million shekels ($77.59 million), at least, were paid to wounded terrorists and the families of dead terrorists. That totals, in just one year, $541.5 million (nearly 1.7 billion shekels).

In their letter, [the Senators] make no mention of the tens of thousands of rockets fired from the Gaza Strip into Israel over the past two decades — into a country roughly the size of New Jersey (22,000 km2), or the thousands of rockets that are raining down on Israel since October 7. Imagine thousands of rockets fired into New Jersey.

The Senators also failed to mention the wave of Palestinian terrorism that Israel has been facing over the past two years in the West Bank. Hardly a day passes without Israelis being targeted with shootings, stabbings, and car-rammings.

The Senators further ignore Abbas’s “Pay-for-Slay” program that rewards terrorists and their families, as well as the Palestinians’ ongoing campaign of incitement to violence… The Senators want to give a state to a Palestinian president who pays salaries to terrorists and goads them to murder on a regular basis.

The Senators calling for the establishment of a Palestinian state also ignored the fact that the Palestinians have never abandoned the Palestine Liberation Organization’s 1974 “Ten Point Plan” (also known as the “phased plan”) for the “comprehensive liberation” of all the land stretching “from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea” — a euphemism for the destruction of Israel.

The Palestinians [in 2005] were given, with no conditions, the entire Gaza Strip. They replied by launching tens of thousands of rockets into Israel. These are inconvenient facts that the 20 Democratic Senators, who appear to be shockingly uninformed, do not want to acknowledge.

It now remains to be seen whether the same Senators who are pushing for the establishment of a Palestinian terror state will speak out against this latest grisly massacre of Jews.

Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg Sr. (March 22, 1884 – April 18, 1951)  coined the phrase: “Politics stops at the water’s edge” condemning those who criticize their nation abroad.

Melanie Phillips writing  today: “Jews on the left, including those now wringing their hands over the massacre in Israel, are complicit in this malignant echo chamber.”

Both apply to Israelis Daniel Gordis, Matti Friedman and Yossi Klein Halevi who penned a vicious plea to American supporters of Israel in February 2023 in the middle of leftist protests which fractured the nation, asking them to oppose the legally elected Prime Minister of Israel.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/an-open-letter-to-israels-friends-in-north-america/

An open letter to Israel’s friends in North America: Diaspora Jews have both the right and the responsibility to speak out against a government that is undermining our society’s cohesion and its democratic ethos

He is, according to their diatribe:

” A prime minister currently on trial for corruption, and who has appointed ministers with criminal records, is claiming legitimacy to overturn the legal system. Understandably, many of Israel’s supporters want to believe that Netanyahu is still a cautious conservative loyal to the country’s liberal DNA. In fact, though, he has become a very different kind of leader, one who subverts the national interest to his own. A wise leader encourages unity among his people; Netanyahu is stoking hatred and schism.

And a not so subtle threat:

The North American Jewish community has steadfastly come to the aid of Israel at moments of crisis. Israel belongs first of all to its citizens, and they have the final word. But Israel also matters to the entire Jewish people. When an Israeli government strays beyond what your commitments to liberal democracy can abide, you have both the right and the responsibility to speak up.

Israeli leaders need to hear where you stand. North American Jews and their leaders must make clear to this government that if it continues on the path to transforming Israel into a country of which Diaspora Jews can no longer be proud, there will be no business as usual.

https://www.thejc.com/lets-talk/all/the-hamas-pogrom-is-the-result-of-the-wests-refusal-to-accept-the-idea-of-evil-2HXpjrqVX2QVwC0q3WnTmO

Israel’s heart has been broken. At war once again against genocidal enemies, its people are shattered by shock, grief and horror.

At time of writing, the number of those murdered has risen to 800, with 2,315 wounded and at least 100 being held hostage in Gaza.

The images of what happened will stay with us forever. 

Elderly people and small children were slaughtered; women were raped; bodies taken into Gaza were paraded and desecrated; mothers with children in their arms were abducted and are now being held as hostages in Gaza’s terror tunnels.

This was barbarism and depravity, not seen on such an infernal scale since the Holocaust.

Every one of these attacks on Israeli civilians was a war crime. It is a moral imperative to destroy the forces who committed them and who — as they tell us — are intent upon eradicating Israel and the Jewish people.

And yet the US State Department said after the pogrom: ‘We urged all sides to refrain from violence and retaliatory attacks. Terror and violence solve nothing.”

All sides? That means the US is telling Israel to “refrain” from defending its people. Should the Americans have refrained from waging war against Afghanistan to destroy the Taliban after 9/11 as a “retaliatory attack”?

Of course not. Such moral equivalence, it seems, applies only to Israel. It is also the default position of the western left.