RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/israeli-hostages-return-gaunt-and-skeletal/

During their release, the Israeli hostages have been made to suffer various indignities. Some of the girls and women, obviously frightened, have been surrounded by rifle-toting bezonians, pressing against them, screaming at them, pushing and pulling them this way and that, making it difficult for them, even with their Hamas guards, to make it to the Red Cross officials who were waiting to receive them.

Some of the hostages have been paraded on stages in front of Allahu-akbaring Hamas men. Some have been forced to sign documents expressing their “appreciation” for the “good treatment” they received from Hamas. All of them have apparently been told by their captors to smile for the cameras; some of the girls and women being released were ordered not just to smile, but to engage in joking banter with their guards, for if they did not, Hamas would take it out on those those Israelis still in captivity.

Three of the captives released — Doron Seinbrecher, Emily Damari, and Romi Gonen — were videotaped as they were handed “gift bags,” brown paper bags, really, that were said to contain mementos from their time held in captivity in Gaza. On each bag was the logo of the Al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas. In each of the bags, there was a special certificate, also bearing the logo of the Al-Qassam brigades, titled “Release Agreement” in both Hebrew and Arabic, with Israeli media reporting that the document was signed by the Red Cross at the moment of handover.

http://‘We’re the flood; we’re the day after’ – JNS.org

Anyone belittling U.S. President Donald Trump’s plan for post-war Gaza should observe the spectacle of Hamas monsters and their ardent supporters gathering in droves to terrorize each hostage before his or her release, while asserting “victory” over the “Zionist enemy.”

The latest example of this travesty—the least of what the kidnapped Israelis and foreign nationals have been subjected to during their captivity—was displayed on Saturday. Hate-filled Gazans of all ages, sporting Hamas’s signature green headbands, cheered while Eli Sharabi, Or Levy and Ohad Ben Ami were led to a podium and forced to put on a performance for jihadist propaganda purposes.

Hanging from the stage was a banner with the Hebrew phrase, “Total victory,” the vow-turned-slogan reiterated by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the goal of the war. On each side were posters of “martyred” Hamas commanders. The graphic setup wasn’t merely an expression of ridicule; it also conveyed that the West is no match for enemies who glorify death.

The backdrop for the horrific scene of the emaciated victims, alongside their rifle-wielding brutalizers who shoved microphones and cameras in their faces, was a massive banner. It contained a fist and Palestinian flag next to a sentence in Arabic, Hebrew and English—the latter poorly translated—reading: “We’re the flood; we’re the day after.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/who-are-the-terrorists-whom-israel-is-freeing/

Israel has committed itself to freeing 1,900 Palestinian prisoners, including many who are serving life sentences for multiple murders. And for these 1,900, Israel is getting back a mere handful of hostages — likely no more than fifty remain alive of the 98 hostages Hamas supposedly still holds — all of them innocents. Perhaps you’d like to see what 80 of those prisoners are guilty of, to begin to appreciate the danger inherent in this grotesquely lopsided exchange. How many of these terrorists will use their freedom to murder again? 82% of the 1,027 Palestinians who were freed in order to obtain the release of one soldier, Gilad Shalit, in 2011, went right back to murdering Israelis. More on these arch-criminals — their names, their crimes, their victims — can be found here: “The names and crimes of 80 dangerous terrorist murderers being released by Israel,” by Itamar Marcus and Ephraim D. Tepler, Palestinian Media Watch, January 24, 2025:

As Israel celebrates the release of three of the hostages kidnapped on October 7, 2023 and anticipates the release of 30 more over 42 days, every Israeli dreads the consequences of the dangerous price extorted from Israel by Hamas.

Israel has agreed to release over 1,900 terrorists, including many murderers, such as Wael Qassem, who is serving 35 life sentences.

General Security Service Director Ronen Bar told Israel’s security cabinet last week that 82% of the 1,024 terrorists released in exchange for Israeli hostage Gilad Shalit in 2011 “returned to terrorism.” The leaders of Hamas who planned and led the October 7 massacre were released terrorist prisoners. Thousands of Israelis have been murdered as a direct result of previous terrorist-hostage exchanges.

To display the nature of the danger, Palestinian Media Watch has prepared a list of the names of 80 of the terrorist murderers to be released with descriptions of some of their crimes.

Note that among those being released are terror commanders who planned and organized murders by suicide bombing, shooting, and stabbing; bomb builders; and terrorists who murdered with their own hands by stabbing and shooting. As in the past, the majority of those being released now will return to their former positions and be the leaders and foundation of Palestinian terrorism for years to come.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21374/the-palestinian-people-does-not-exist

“The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism.” — Senior PLO official Zuheir Mohsen, interviewed by James Dorsey, Trouw, March 31, 1977.

Jordan… actually was in possession of Jerusalem, if illegally, between 1948 and the 1967 Six-Day War. Jordan nevertheless, the first day of the war, insisted on joining the other Arab countries in attacking Israel, even though General Moshe Dayan had warned Jordan’s King Hussein at the time to stay out of it….

The Al-Aqsa Mosque would therefore have been constructed six years after Muhamad’s death: c. 570- June 8, 632 CE.

While Islamism can be understood as an extremist political and ideological facet of Islam, Palestinianism comprises a narrow ideological expression of such Islamism. In particular, Palestinianism can be regarded as a subset of the broader jihadist Islamist agenda; one of its “action-arms” so to speak.

On the world stage and promoted by the legacy media, the Palestinian issue is relentlessly and often callously exploited by ruthless jihadist Islamists and their sympathizers, despite the immense suffering of many innocent civilians from both parties to the conflict. It is the gross misuse of the Palestinian people’s predicament for tactical purposes that has led to the fabricated ideology of Palestinianism. Admittedly, the Islamist propaganda “machine” has been partially successful in persuading the West as to the justice, however fabricated, of the Palestinian cause.

https://verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com/

Beyond the headlines of hostage releases, and new paradigms for the future of Gaza, there is a nation of start-ups, scientists and researchers that develop new technology to improve every aspect of beneficent human endeavor. After work they can enjoy cafes, bistros, restaurants, concerts, theater and dance, in a democracy that protects their civic lives. Michael Ordman details the foregoing . Read all about it. rsk

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/02/08/who-really-wants-ethnic-cleansing-in-the-middle-east/

A new definition of chutzpah just dropped. It’s people thinking they can spend 16 months crying ‘Crush the Zionist entity!’ and then wring their hands over the threat of ‘ethnic cleansing’. It’s protesters thinking they can wail ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ – shorter version: erase Israel – and then accuse others of wanting to ‘cleanse’ the Middle East of ‘problematic’ people. It’s an activist class that is consumed by a burning hatred for the very idea of a Jewish homeland thinking it can lecture its opponents on the importance of respecting other people’s homelands.

I can stomach some hypocrisy, but I draw the line at pontifications on ‘forced removal’ from a political set that dreams of removing the Jewish State from the family of nations. Behold the orgy of sanctimony that has greeted Donald Trump’s nutty proposals to push Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip so that he might turn it into the ‘Riviera of the Middle East’. We’ll come back to Trump’s vision, if you can call it that. But first we need to take down the idea that he has unforgivably put ‘ethnic cleansing’ on to the agenda for the Middle East, for the truth is that the West’s influential Israel-loathers did that long ago.

The fury over Trump’s Gaza idea is intense. He proposed resettling its population so that the Americans might go in and remake the place. We will ‘rebuild’ this ‘demolition site’, he said. The right-thinking are horrified. He’s flouting all the ‘established laws’ of international relations, says the Guardian. One wonders where this white hot fury was during earlier crusades of ‘nation-building’. From Bosnia to Libya, Iraq to Afghanistan, Washington and its allies dispatched local leaders, caused mass exoduses of people, and assumed the godly right to remake said country in their own ‘democratic’ image. And the Guardian often supported it. Keep your wigs on, people – Trump is not the first US president to propose ‘rebuilding’ a nation.

Still the cries of ‘ethnic cleansing’ have come thick and fast. Trump’s proposal would amount to an ‘alarming escalation’ in the ‘ethnic cleansing of Palestinians’, says Human Rights Watch. The UN also says it is ‘ethnic cleansing’. The left has been Trump’s noisiest critic. We know Israel has been ‘plotting the violent removal of Gaza’s surviving population’, says one commentator, and now these ‘genocidal’ ambitions are being abetted by the American president. Student radicals at Columbia University in NYC are damning Trump for ‘advocating for ethnic cleansing’ – a ballsy position for a campus where just a few months ago Jewish students were being told to fuck off back to Poland.

What’s exasperating about all this is that we’ve just come through 16 months of shameless agitation for the end of the Jewish State. Modern anti-Israel activism, at root, is a dream of ethnic cleansing. Consider Columbia. Its woke students are fuming over Trump’s Gaza idea. Yet this is a campus where apocalyptic Israelophobia has run riot since Hamas’s pogrom 16 months ago. Campus activists referred to Israel as ‘the pigs of the Earth’ and fantasised about a future when it would die. ‘We don’t want no two states / We want ’48!’, they cried, referring to 1948, when the modern state of Israel did not yet exist. Plainly put, they want the obliteration of the Jewish homeland.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/71-year-old-israeli-grandfather-recounts-his-horrific-experience-as-a-captive-of-hamas/

Luis Har is a 71-year-old Israeli grandfather who was taken from his home at Kibbutz Nir Yitzhak on October 7, 2023 by Hamas terrorists. He was finally freed from captivity in the Gazan city of Rafah in “a daring military operation” carried out by the IDF in February 2024. More on his story, which he recently told to the newspaper Maariv, can be found here: “Most Hamas terrorists were drugged, completely inhumane, rescued hostage says,” by Sherry Makover-Balikov, Jerusalem Post, January 28, 2025:

“The hostages today are suffering from prolonged hunger,” released hostage Luis Har said in an interview with Maariv.”Hamas takes all the aid,” he continued. “I was there; I know what delaying the deals means. Every day increases fear, danger, and suffering. We must not wait, and we must not delay because every passing day increases the concern that, in the end, there will be no one left to bring back.”Har, who was abducted on October 7 from Kibbutz Nir Yitzhak, was later freed in a daring military operation in Rafah in February 2024. In his interview, he described the terrifying moments of his abduction, his prolonged captivity in the home of a Hamas operative in southern Gaza, and his eventual rescue and return to Israel….

Har said the captors’ treatment of the hostages varied. “There were some moments of humanity, but not the majority. Most of them were either drugged or completely inhumane.”

“The man of the house, for example, took care of us and made it a point to reassure us that we would be okay. He said, ‘If there’s peace between us, I’ll come to your kibbutz to eat pizza at your place.’ That doesn’t negate the brutality of him and the others, who constantly threatened and shouted. They thought our situation would end in two or three days, but suddenly it became long-term.”