RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-nazi-roots-of-hamas/

On Oct 7, Hamas, a terrorist organization born in part out of a collaboration between Nazis and Islamists, carried out the greatest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

The butchery of men, women and children and the elderly, was not only ‘Nazi-like’, it was in some ways the final act of a Nazi crime nearly eight decades in the making.

In 1946, the Muslim Brotherhood held its founding conference in Gaza at the Samer Cinema. The movie theater which had opened two years earlier and would be shut down, along with much of Gaza’s movie theaters as the Islamist movement strengthened its grip over the area, represented the secular Western culture that the Islamic organization wanted to destroy.

It was a modest beginning for the group that would eventually become known as Hamas.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s expansion into Israel began a year earlier in 1945. The Brotherhood’s foreign backers, the Nazis, had surrendered earlier that year. The thousand pound checks which had helped take the Brotherhood from just another fringe Islamist theocratic movement to a dominant force in Egyptian political culture would no longer be coming. And Nazi Germany’s armies would not be arriving to help them kill all the Jews.

Without the Nazis, the Brotherhood no longer had the money or any protection from the British, who might seek to punish their Nazi collaboration, or the Egyptian monarchy which was worried that the Islamist group was seeking to overthrow it. By 1948, Egypt had banned the Brotherhood and Hassan al-Banna, its charismatic leader, had been shot dead in the street a year later.

Al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, had admired Nazi organizations and methods. A British report noted that he had made “a careful study of the Nazi and fascist organizations. Using them as a model, he has formed organizations of specially trained and trusted men who correspond respectively to the Brown Shirts and Black Shirts.”

The Muslim Brotherhood from which Hamas sprang had been built in imitation of the Nazis.

The Nazis and the Brotherhood had fundamental religious and ethnic differences but shared common goals: especially when it came to the Jews. A Nazi agent who helped funnel money to the Brotherhood reported on one of its conferences calling for Jihad in Israel.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/11/negotiating_for_hostages.html

Prisoner exchange is not a new event in Jewish history.  From the 1940s on, Israel exchanged Palestinian prisoners and POWs from Arab armies in exchange for Israeli soldiers and civilians taken captive during the war.

In the ancient world, in Numbers 21:1, Israel did not negotiate with the enemy but went to battle against her respective enemies in order to save prisoners.

A seminal case occurred in the early 13th century. Rabbi Meir of Rothenberg (1215–1293) was taken captive when he was 70 years old by Emperor Rudolf I, who demanded an exorbitant sum for the rabbi’s release.  This act was done in peacetime, and the rabbis and leaders of the Jewish communities in that generation were the rabbi’s students.  They were absolutely prepared to raise the sum necessary to free their teacher, even though it would spell financial disaster for the community.

Notwithstanding,  the renowned rabbi would not permit the ransom to be paid, for he understood that such an act would only encourage the enemies of Israel to imprison other rabbis in the future and demand huge sums for their release.

Fast-forward, and Israel continually faces the intractable issue regarding Israeli hostages.  Since its inception in 1988, Hamas is absolutely clear about its total opposition to Zionism and Israel.  Hamas constantly celebrates the killing of Jews.

According to Rabbi Eliezer Melamed, the “rule is that in times of war one does not submit to any of the enemies’ demands.”  For as soon as one gives in to them, they will gain confidence and increase their efforts to strike again and again. 

In fact, “[a]ny concession is seen as a sign of weakness and merely leads to more attacks and more attempts to take hostages.”

What’s more, as a result of [Israel’s] willingness to free large numbers of prisoners for one or two Israeli hostages, the terrorists … figure that even if they do get caught, they most likely will be freed eventually in a prisoner exchange deal.

It should also be noted that many of the terrorists who have been released by Israel in the past simply returned to their terrorist activities, murdering more Israelis. Therefore, as a result of our receiving one Israeli hostage, scores of other innocent Israelis have been murdered.

Presently, the chair of the Israeli Otzma Yehudit party has “stated that that any such swap ‘will bring us to disaster,’ pointing to the 2011 deal to release more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners — including Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, thought to be the mastermind of the October 7 massacre [emphasis mine] — in exchange for captive IDF soldier Gilad Shalit.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-roman-empire-through-virgils-eyes/

Recently a trend on Tik-Tok had its fifteen minutes of click-fame.  It seems that some women are asking their men how often they think about the Roman Empire. The usual suspect experts were consulted, and of course they conclude that this interest in Rome reflects modern males’ angst over, or nostalgia for a time when patriarchy dominated, and manly deeds defined the male sex––the original “toxic masculinity.”

There’s nothing wrong per se with thinking about ancient Rome. Since Edward Gibbon’s magisterial Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the history of Rome has been a cautionary tale of how great empires collapse. Given the abundance of empirical evidence––invasions of unvetted migrants, our geopolitical enemies’ increasing challenges, a looming fiscal apocalypse, and suicidal social and cultural corruption––our country may be experiencing Rome’s fate, making its history deserving of our attention. And one place to start is reading what one brilliant Roman thought about the then new empire.

There’s no greater witness than the poet Virgil, who came of age during the last years of the Roman Republic, a century when social disorder, civic violence, and civil wars between Roman generals and their legions were chronic. Virgil’s Aeneid (19 B.C.) tells the story of Rome’s beginnings in the invasion of Italy by Trojan refugees, and also explores the tragic costs of civilization, and the lofty idealism that some great empires have claimed to represent.

That theme is what makes Rome and its fate so significant for us Americans, who are watching a floundering foreign policy lurching between appeasement and half-hearted interventions abroad.

Virgil has several scenes that make Rome’s imperial idealism explicit. One dimension of Rome’s greatness was its virtue: not just courage, the most important virtue for every civilization, but also pietas, the duty and responsibility one owes to family, the dead, the gods, and Rome itself. Virgil’s hero Aeneas is known for this virtue, hence the honorific pius attached to his name.