RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/opinion/383639/up-close-killers-then-and-now/

    What kind of human being is capable of walking up to another person—an innocent, defenseless, unarmed civilian—and, at close range, shooting him or her?

    That question must be on the minds of many who are reading about the Palestinian Arab terrorist attack on bus passengers in Jerusalem this week. The killers were within a few feet of their victims.

    Prof. Daniel Goldhagen considered this question in his famous book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners. There are those who dislike comparisons between contemporary terrorists and the Nazis. Let’s take a closer look at Goldhagen’s analysis and consider whether it’s valid to compare up-close killers, then and now.

    Goldhagen focused on a particular German police unit, Reserve Police Battalion 101, which carried out up-close shootings. That segment of the genocide, which historians today call “the Holocaust by bullets,” took place before gas chambers became the Germans’ primary means of mass murder.

    In June 1942, five hundred battalion members were assigned to the town of Jozefow, in German-­occupied southern Poland. They were instructed to force local Jews out of their homes, take them to a nearby forest, and shoot them point-­blank.

    When a truck unloaded its Jewish prisoners at the edge of the Józefów forest, each of the waiting policemen selected a victim. The two then walked together to the nearby execution site. Many of the captives were children. The walk “afforded each perpetrator an opportunity for reflection,” Goldhagen noted. “It is highly likely that, back in Germany, these men had previously walked through woods with their own children by their sides. . . . In these moments, each killer had a personalized, face-­to-face relationship to his victims.”

    Goldhagen wondered if the typical killer ever “asked himself why he was about to kill this little, delicate human being who, if seen as a little girl by him, would normally have received his compassion, protection, and nurturing.” Or perhaps it was that the killer could only “see a Jew, a young one, but a Jew nonetheless,” and therefore accepted “the reasonableness of the order, the necessity of nipping the believed-­in Jewish blight in the bud.”

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/09/10/the-pathological-chutzpah-of-israels-critics/

Israel’s in trouble now. For none other than Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart, the two cheeks of the bony arse of British centrism, have done an ‘emergency podcast’ on its bombing of Hamas leaders in Qatar yesterday. I bet the Jewish nation is quaking. It might have faced off against the neo-fascists of Hamas and Hezbollah but now it faces a far more formidable foe: an army of turbo-smug centrist dads in Next cardigans nodding vigorously as the two perfumed ponces of The Rest is Politics give it what-for on an impromptu pod. It’s curtains for you now, Israel!

Have you ever, in your life, heard of anything as hubristic and ridiculous as an ‘emergency podcast’? These are hitherto untapped depths of human vanity, as if the world and its dog are just sitting around waiting to hear what a cranky old spin doctor and failed Tory have to say about Israel’s wars. It was Campbell who announced it. ‘We will be doing an emergency podcast [at] 4.15pm’, he said, ‘on the catastrophic events in Qatar’. It’s hard to know what’s more batshit: telling us the weirdly specific time at which they’ll be recording their prattle, or thinking it’s ‘catastrophic’ that some Hamas cunts got blown up.

Actually, here’s what’s most batshit: the idea that Alastair Campbell has the moral authority to wag a finger at a nation at war. The Qatar strike proves we live in a world where ‘strongman leaders think they can do what they want where they want with impunity’, he said. That sound you can hear is a hundred thousand Iraqis rolling in their graves. This is the man whose bollocks and bluster when he was Tony Blair’s spin doctor helped to justify a truly ‘catastrophic’ war against a nation that hadn’t even attacked us. And he thinks he can hold forth on Israel’s targeting of the anti-Semitic freaks who raped and murdered more than a thousand of its citizens? These are industrial-strength levels of brass neck.

The Campbell / Stewart wang-fest on Israel’s ‘catastrophic’ bombing of Islamofascists really does sum up the imperious conceit of Israelophobia. Here we have a propagandist for one of the bloodiest wars of modern times (Campbell), and the man who served as a colonial-style governor in Iraq once it had been violently subdued by the West (Stewart), badgering Israel for firing a few missiles at the terror army that invaded its territory and murdered its people. It’s like being lectured about misogyny by Fred West.

Israel’s strike on the Hamas leaders holed up in Doha really has exposed the pathological chutzpah, the cavernous gall, of its preening critics in the West. No sooner had it fired its missiles at the assembled militants than a chorus of condemnation was ringing out in the West’s corridors of power and our haughty media. This was a ‘flagrant violation of Qatar’s sovereignty’, yelped useless Keir Starmer. Oh, so Mr Second Referendum, that implacable old foe of Brexit, suddenly gives a shit about sovereignty? Good to know.

To be clear, Israel’s whack on Doha is a striking development. This is the first time Israel has fired at a Western-backed Gulf state. Qatar had long considered itself immune to the Middle East’s waves of violence, not least because it is close to mighty America and home to Al Udeid, the largest US airbase in the Middle East. It seems Britain had no advance warning of Israel’s attack but America did, and apparently America is not best pleased. Trump reportedly feels ‘very badly’ about it. And it’s unclear if the strike was a success: Hamas says five of its members were killed but its leaders survived.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-end-game/

Just ten days after the Israeli Air Force all but decapitated the Yemeni Houthis’ leadership in one deft blow, and just under a year after the Israelis meted out a similar fate to Hezbollah’s senior commanders, Hamas’s Politburo abroad may have been eliminated in an Israeli airstrike.

In an unprecedented airstrike, Israel finally took long-threatened action against Hamas’s leadership inside Doha, Qatar – the senior members of which were apparently still taking shelter in Qatar’s capital city despite the government’s pledge to kick Hamas out at Washington’s request in November of last year.

“For years, these members of the Hamas leadership have led the terrorist organization’s operations, are directly responsible for the brutal October 7 massacre, and have been orchestrating and managing the war against the State of Israel,” the Israeli Defense Forces said in a statement.

As of this writing, there are still conflicting reports about the status of the figures Israel targeted. We do, however, know who those targets were:

Nizar Awadallah, a U.S.-branded Specially Designated Global Terrorist and an associate of Hamas’s founders and spiritual leaders who has played a central role in negotiating prisoner exchanges with Israel going back decades.
Mohammed Darwish, the head of Hamas’ Shura Council and reportedly one of the figures considered to replace Ismail Haniyeh (who was neutralized in a covert Israeli operation inside Tehran) as the head of the terrorist group’s political bureau.
Zaher Jabarin, “considered Hamas’s ‘economic brain,’” according to Ynet, Jabarin was described as Hamas’s “CEO” – the man at the top of the terrorist group’s global financial network who underwrote Hamas’s terror attacks, including the 10/7 massacre.
Khaled Mashaal, Hamas’s leader abroad and the head of Hamas’s political bureau before Haniyah’s ascension, is under indictment in the United States for his involvement in a “decades-long campaign” of terrorism that has claimed hundreds of lives, including American citizens.

The Qatari government has bitterly protested Israel’s “reckless” conduct and the “blatant violation” of its sovereignty — language that mirrors Doha’s protests over the “flagrant violation” of its borders and international law following Iran’s effort to retaliate for Operation Midnight Hammer against the U.S.-run Al Udeid base inside Qatar. We subsequently learned that Tehran had given Qatar a heads-up in advance of that strike. The Wall Street Journal reported that similar forewarning was provided to the Qataris ahead of Tuesday’s action.

https://quillette.com/2025/09/10/gaza-and-the-collapse-of-truth-seeking-united-nations/

One of the biggest stories of the year sits on a shelf, unreported and unremarked upon in serious ways. For those willing to look closely, this omission indicates a larger and increasingly dangerous breakdown of truth-seeking in public life.

On 31 July 2025, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) issued a press release in which it announced that “at least 1,373 Palestinians have been killed while seeking food” since 27 May. “Most of these killings,” the statement added, “were committed by the Israeli military.” Subsequent UN “situation updates” during early September have increased that number to 2,146. If the UN is telling the truth, this would constitute the largest military atrocity committed by a liberal democracy in at least half a century, by a wide margin. For context, according to official tallies, US troops murdered between 347 and 504 civilians during the 1968 My Lai Massacre in Vietnam. There are, however, good reasons to believe that the UN’s figures are wrong.

The exquisite precision of “1,373” and “2,146” notwithstanding, the OHCHR has dispensed entirely with evidence and sources for its Gaza claims. Instead, it hung its entire late-July press release on the word “reportedly,” and offered no external attribution whatsoever in its subsequent updates. That was deemed sufficient by far too many people in today’s information environment, especially after the claims are laundered through credulous “news media.” Not only clickbait sites and wire services but also legacy media such as the BBC and the New York Times promoted the UN’s precise numbers this summer. Other news sources hedged with “more than 1,000” killed, while influencers on social media simply printed the bumper stickers.

This is the kind of information and these are the supposedly reliable sources from which AI chatbots collect their internet scrapings when they are asked, “How many Gazans have been killed by Israel trying to get to food aid sites since May?” Try it yourself.

Missing from any of these information sources, however, are photographs or videos of the killings, documentary records of any kind, or any independent confirmation of the UN’s claims besides a handful of (unverified) first-person anecdotes. In a typical example, USA Today and its local-news affiliates linked a “gallery” of 22 photographs to a 4 August wire story about aid-site killings in Gaza, not one of which includes a dead person, let alone evidence of a larger atrocity. The slide-show makes clear that cameras do exist in Gaza, but we are invited to believe that not a single phone or other image-recording device documented even one of 1,400 killings that by then had allegedly taken place near crowded food-delivery locations and access routes over the course of more than two months. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/idf-kills-palestinian-boy-and-then-the-boy-gives-a-tv-interview/

It was one of the most horrific stories of the entire Israel-Hamas conflict, or any conflict. Back in late May, a retired Green Beret named Anthony Aguilar, who had been working with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), claimed that he witnessed an incident of such shocking heartlessness and inhumanity that it seemed destined to be remembered as one of the most cruel war crimes in the entire history of the world. There was just one catch: it has now been definitively established that not a word of it was true.

Aguilar said that while he was working with the GHF, he saw a young Gazan boy, whom he called Amir, approach in hopes of obtaining some food, and was given a bag of lentils. Amir was so overjoyed at this that he kissed Aguilar’s hand in joy and gratitude. This touching moment was captured in photos, as is so often the case these days, and Amir went on his way with everyone feeling happy. Aguilar’s happiness, however, was shattered soon after, when Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers began firing on aid recipients, and shot down young Amir in cold blood. Aguilar was featured on news outlets worldwide, and told the BBC, “I’ve never seen such brutality.”

And that was true: he never did, because as it turns out, his whole story about Amir being gunned down was a fabrication. Amir, whose real name is Abdul Rahim Muhammad Hamden, has reappeared in a TV interview, very much alive and not wounded. Fox News reported recently that he “has been found alive and was hiding out with his mother.” Why was he hiding out? Because if he had appeared, Hamas would likely have killed him, so as to preserve the story that Aguilar spread worldwide. The propaganda had to be preserved. Eventually, however, he was found anyway, and now the cat cannot be put back into the bag.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/09/greta_thunberg_sets_sail_for_gaza_on_a_ship_that_consumes_diesel_at_a_shockingly_rapid_rate.html

If your whole claim to fame is being one of the world’s most obnoxious “climate change” activists, sputtering about stolen dreams and childhoods from a United Nations stage, fearmongering about “mass extinction” and collapsing ecosystems—a narrative and schtick you’ve continued to repeat for the last six years—then you hop on a diesel-guzzling army ship from the 1960s to cruise to Gaza for some new type of activism, you’re definitely a hypocrite.

Shouldn’t these virtue-signaling autists be using sails and oars?

I had to run a quick search to figure out why Greta and her comrades were attempting to reach Israel—after a failed attempt earlier this year—and apparently they’re trying to deliver food and supplies since many of the individuals in Gaza are going without.

Well, when you vote in a group like Hamas…isn’t that kind of on you? At what point do these people take some responsibility for who they elected? If you find that the best representation for your political beliefs is a group that warmongers, rapes, steals, and uses civilians as pawns in a war against Israel and the West for Allah, I’d be confused how you though this would turn out any different than…terribly. You reap what you sow, and I suppose it’s just the natural outcome of electing terrorists to run your government.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/09/08/the-slow-death-of-the-genocide-lie/

Now we know: Gaza must be a genocide because Adolf Hitler says it is. And that man knows a thing or two about genocide. His name crops up in the list of experts behind the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), which last week decreed that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians. He seems to have moved, though: he’s now ‘Adolf Hitler of Gaza City’ rather than of Berlin. Yet there he is, alongside Emperor Palpatine and the Cookie Monster, proudly aligning himself with this organisation whose latest ‘resolution’ says Israel has engaged in ‘systematic and widespread crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide’.

It’s not actually Hitler. He’s been dead for 80 years. It’s not even some Nazi fanboy in Gaza City who’s taken his favourite murderer’s name. No, it’s an online wag who wants the world to know that the IAGS is not all it’s cracked up to be. For a start, any chump can become a member for $30. Hence why, for a period of time last week, this esteemed gathering of human-rights boffins included not only the usual tenured worthies who think their word counts for more than everyone else’s, but also the Cookie Monster, sporting a fetching, Hamas-style bandana.

When future historians look back on the Israelophobic delirium of the post-7 October moment, last week might strike them as the week the genocide lie finally died. For it started with media outlets across Christendom reporting with naked glee that ‘the experts’ have ruled that Israel really is the genocidal loon of world affairs. And it ended with those experts looking damn foolish, not to mention partisan, opportunistic and cynical. As the Free Press put it, the lesson is that when you see the phrase ‘experts say’ in a headline, it’s a sign to think twice and for yourself’.

The closer one looks at the IAGS and its resolution, the more it smacks of a self-appointed kangaroo court of academic smartarses desperate to pin the sickest of crimes on the Jewish State. First, there’s the make-up of the IAGS. Salo Aizenberg of HonestReporting, which challenges media prejudice against Israel, found not only that fictional baddies from Star Wars have joined the IAGS, but also that 80 of its 500 members are based at universities in Iraq. Is Iraq well known for its genocide scholarship, so much so that its professors account for nearly 20 per cent of a global association of genocide oracles?

Then there’s the tiny numbers involved. Israelophobic hotheads spent last week crowing that ‘86 per cent’ of the world’s ‘leading genocide scholars’ now say Gaza is a genocide. If you deny this is a genocide, then you’re ‘as much in denial of reality as a climate denier’, said Owen Jones – only ‘far more depraved’.

But it isn’t true that ‘86 per cent of genocide scholars’ backed this resolution. In fact, it was 86 per cent of those who could be arsed to vote.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21892/palestinian-journalists-attacked

Reporters Without Borders also ignored allegations that many of the Palestinian journalists targeted by the Israel Defense Forces were affiliated with Hamas and other terror groups.

The silence of the international community has empowered Hamas to get rid of most of its political critics, as well as journalists who dared to criticize the terror group and its leaders. Consequently, the only Palestinian journalists who were free to operate in the Gaza Strip for nearly the past two decades were those working for Qatar’s Al-Jazeera (Arabic) television empire, serving as Hamas’s unofficial mouthpiece, or those whose reporting was limited to attacking and smearing Israel.

Several international news agency journalists received telephone threats and warnings against covering Hamas’ suppression of the protests.

Those who continue to ignore Hamas atrocities and human rights abuses against Palestinians are doing a great disservice to the Palestinians: they are allowing Hamas to get away with its crimes against its own people.

A recent international campaign to express solidarity with Palestinian journalists in the Gaza Strip has pointed an accusing finger at Israel, while ignoring the suffering they have experienced under Hamas’s rule during the past two decades.

The global media campaign of more than 150 outlets from 70 countries, coordinated by a group called Reporters Without Borders, also ignored allegations that many of the Palestinian journalists targeted by the Israel Defense Forces were affiliated with Hamas and other terror groups.

https://verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com/
Another week, another dazzling compilation of Israel’s outsize contribution in medicine, technology, and science, in spite of the harsh conditions of war. rsk

POSITIVE NEWS IN A WAR

Rebuilding the Kibbutz. 50 young educators from the Hashomer HaTzair Labor Zionist youth movement have relocated to Kibbutz Nir Oz (see here previously) that was devastated by Hamas terrorists on 7 Oct 2023. Kibbutz chairman Tzvika Tesler said a prayer at a ceremony marking the start of the rebuilding process.
https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/kibbutz-nir-oz-the-hardest-hit-community-in-the-10-7-attacks-welcomes-50-new-idealistic-residents-as-it-looks-to-rebuild/ https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/414164
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rwqZ_uBUmI

German volunteers restore Metula guest house. A group of German volunteers, including descendants of Nazi families, went to Metula, a northern Israeli town damaged by war. Their goal: to help rebuild homes and support recovery efforts. Their message: “We came to fix, not to forget.”
https://worldisraelnews.com/watch-german-volunteers-help-restore-northern-israel-community/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4KPxwGGlFo

Parents volunteer to see their lone soldier children. 77 Parents of lone soldiers from the US, Russia and Argentina arrived as an organized group on the Birthright Israel volunteer program to see their children and assist the Jewish state. They had an emotional reunion on Aug 7 at the IDF base in Glilot Junction.
https://www.jns.org/parents-of-lone-soldiers-visit-in-volunteer-cohort-via-birthright-israel/

German Christians support Israel. To show faith and solidarity, young German Christians defied fear and public opinion to come to Israel and support the Jewish state. They sang in Hebrew, prayed at the Western Wall, and witnessed both the beauty and heartbreak of a nation under fire.
https://unitedwithisrael.org/watch-young-german-christians-visit-israel-to-show-support/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_1N1fEhQ50

More students than before the war. (TY Sam K) 23,700 students have returned to school in the Gaza envelope – an increase of approximately 2,000 since 7 Oct 2023. https://ground.news/article/back-to-school-data-in-the-envelope-number-of-students-returning-increased-by-2-000

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Brain stem tumor removed through eye socket. Surgeons at Tel Aviv Sourasky (Ichilov) Medical Center performed Israel’s first-ever minimally invasive brain surgery through the eye socket. Surgeons successfully removed a rare skull base tumor without the need to open the skull.
https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/israel-performs-its-first-ever-eye-socket-brain-surgery-removes-rare-tumour-9195158/amp/1

Groundbreaking bacteria research. Hebrew University of Jerusalem scientists have developed a technique that distinguishes the precise subgroup of a bacteria strain that is causing infection. It explains why antibiotics and vaccines sometimes fail. The discovery can lead to more precise treatments.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/using-novel-method-to-compare-subgroups-israeli-researchers-unlock-bacterias-secrets/ https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(25)00915-8

No wasted medical trials. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s QuantHealth.ai (see here previously) has successfully simulated 350+ clinical trials, with 90% predictive accuracy. Its 23 therapeutic areas, include oncology, immunology, cardio-metabolic diseases, and gastroenterology. It saved one top 10 customer $31.4 million.
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250722764714/en/QuantHealth-Successfully-Simulates-350-Clinical-Trials-with-90-Accuracy-Delivering-%2431.4M-in-Savings-for-a-Top-10-Pharma-Company

Combating obesity. (TY WIN) The US FDA has approved generic liraglutide injection from Israel’s Teva. It copies Novo Nordisk’s obesity drug Saxenda, which costs over $1,300 per month. Liraglutide mimics the body’s glucagon-like peptide-1 hormone, suppressing appetite and triggering insulin release for up to 24 hours.
https://jewishbreakingnews.com/teva-wins-fda-approval-for-first-generic-weight-loss-drug/

Another award for OncoHost. (TY OurCrowd) Israel’s OncoHost (see here previously) has been selected as the Top Precision Oncology Solution for 2025 by Life Sciences Review. OncoHost’s PROphet® predicts how a specific immunotherapy treatment will perform on a cancer patient, from a single blood sample.
https://www.prnewswire.com/il/news-releases/oncohost-named-top-precision-oncology-solution-for-2025-302517239.html https://www.lifesciencesreview.com/oncohost

Prem baby returns to hospital. 24 years ago, Prof Simcha Yagel delivered premature baby Ruhama, weighing just 495 grams, at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Mount Scopus Hospital. Ruhama has just returned to the same hospital – to give birth to her first child – a boy. And Prof Yagel was present at that delivery too.
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/414035