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How Hamas became invisible The greatest trick these vicious Islamists ever pulled was convincing the world they didn’t exist. Tim Black

By on January 23rd, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/01/22/how-hamas-became-invisible/

Almost as soon as the Israel-Hamas ceasefire was declared on Sunday, footage of Hamas fighters on Gaza’s streets was being broadcast to the world. We saw masked assailants, armed with Kalashnikovs and sporting green headbands, riding pick-up trucks through crowds of cheering men in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip. We heard reports of thousands of Hamas-run police in uniform emerging on to rubble-strewn streets. Most striking of all, Hamas fighters were filmed swarming around three Israeli hostages during their handover to the Red Cross in Gaza City. The message being sent around the world was clear: this movement of violent anti-Semites is still a force. It’s still in control of Gaza. And it’s still a threat to the Jewish State.

The sight of Hamas out and about over the past few days should have surprised no one. After all, they’re the reason Israeli forces have been waging a painful, brutal military campaign there for the past 15 months. Yet incredibly, too many in the Western media did indeed seem shocked. It was as if it didn’t compute. ‘That was the one image that really knocked me back a bit’, said Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s international editor, on Monday morning’s Today programme. ‘[Hamas fighters] just emerged… in their trucks, which were somehow still intact’, he said. In an attempt to explain the seemingly inexplicable, he added, ‘I presume they must have been parked in some kind of tunnel perhaps’.

Bowen wasn’t the only member of the press corps to have to scoop their jaws off the floor. Others called the ‘remarkable’ scenes a ‘stark reminder’ that Hamas continues to exist.

This shock and surprise at the seeming re-appearance of Hamas is telling. After all, it is coming from those same press outlets that have spent the past 15 months of this devastating conflict erasing Hamas from the picture. Since Hamas’s massacre of Israeli civilians on 7 October 2023, too many Western reporters, pundits and politicians have presented the subsequent conflict as if it involved only one combatant: Israel. In fact, watching or reading the media coverage, you could be forgiven for thinking that the Israel Defence Forces were not really fighting Hamas at all, but Palestinian civilians.

This erasure of Hamas from the conflict it started serves the anti-Israel narrative that has long been dominant among the right-thinking classes. It allows for the fiction that this is not a war at all. That it’s an act of aggressive ‘colonisation’. An act of ‘ethnic cleansing’. An act of ‘genocide’ against the Palestinians.

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‘7 October was a war against civilisation’ Melanie Phillips on how the West failed the moral test posed by the new wave of anti-Semitism.

By on January 23rd, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/01/23/7-october-was-a-war-against-civilisation/

The first three Israeli hostages were freed at the weekend under the terms of the new ceasefire deal struck between Israel and Hamas. Their return is a chilling reminder of the depravity of 7 October 2023, the day those hostages were first taken captive, and when more than a thousand Israelis were massacred and brutalised. In the weeks and months since, not only has this barbarism been largely forgotten in the West – many self-styled progressives have ended up siding with the barbarians.

As broadcaster and Times columnist Melanie Phillips puts it in her new book, The Builder’s Stone, the West failed the moral test of 7 October. Melanie was the latest guest on The Brendan O’Neill Show. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation. Listen to the full thing here.

Brendan O’Neill: What impact did 7 October have on you?

Melanie Phillips: It was a shattering event, because what happened on 7 October was something that very few of us thought would ever happen again. We knew about the hostility in the Arab and Muslim world. As Jews, we live with it all the time, both inside and outside Israel. But we never thought we would see again what can only be described as Nazi-style behaviour.

This was not just murdering Jews or murdering Israelis. This was the seeking out of Jews and Israelis. It was almost like a kind of ritual mutilation. Hamas militants beheaded some of them. They burned some of them alive. They tortured them. They raped them, both men and women. This was bestial and depraved behaviour and a level of sadism that Jews collectively remember from the Holocaust. And while we should not compare anything to the Holocaust, because it was sui generis in both scale and nature, this had very clear parallels and resonances.

The second terrible shock was simply the awfulness of what happened – the murders, the rapes, the beheadings, the burnings alive, the slaughter of children in front of their parents. Then, of course, there was the abduction of the hostages into Gaza. There was the sight of both militants and ordinary – if I can call them that – people exulting over all this and abusing the hostages, whether they were dead or alive.

The next terrible thing that happened was the aftermath. One would have expected, in a civilised world, that the West would have stood with Israel. But it turned on Israel. It represented everything Israel did to defend itself as aggressive, and completely ignored the fact that Israel was going to unprecedented lengths to preserve the lives of civilians. As if that wasn’t bad enough, an absolute tsunami of anti-Jewish hatred swept across Britain and the West.

This had a tremendous effect on me. It brought to a head something that I had long been considering – namely, the decline of the West. When the West turns on itself, what is it turning against? It’s turning against its core, foundational values. Those values were largely embedded by Christianity, but Christianity didn’t come out of nothing. Christianity came from Judaism. If the West wants to stop itself from going off the edge of the cliff, then what it has to do is reconnect itself with those foundational Jewish values.

The West didn’t understand that 7 October wasn’t just a war against Israel. It was a war against civilisation.

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The Red Cross is humiliated as it again serves murderers of Jews It succeeded in making its profile invisible while not gaining the release of a single hostage or providing them with any assistance.Mitchell Bard

By on January 23rd, 2025

https://www.jns.org/the-red-cross-is-humiliated-as-it-again-serves-murderers-of-jews/?utm_campaign=

It was a joyous moment to see three female Israeli hostages finally released from 15 months of harrowing captivity. That happiness was tempered by the disgusting spectacle orchestrated by Hamas and enabled by the Red Cross. This humiliating episode highlighted its total failure to assist Jewish victims, evoking bitter memories of its inaction during the Holocaust.

I wrote in November 2023 about the attitude of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) from the beginning of the war. On Oct. 7, 2023, the ICRC released a statement expressing concern over “armed violence in Israel and the occupied territories.” This mealy-mouthed response ignored the slaughter of civilians by Hamas terrorists, instead framing the events as mutual violence and subtly implicating Israel.

Days later, the ICRC issued another statement acknowledging “premeditated killings of civilians” but avoided identifying either the perpetrators or victims. In the same breath, it criticized Israeli “bombings in residential neighborhoods,” drawing a false equivalence between terror massacres and defensive military actions.

It took more than a month before the American Red Cross said the ICRC was pursuing “every possible avenue to secure the release of all remaining hostages.” It would remain silent, however, because its experience—ignoring the Holocaust—was that it was most effective if it kept a low profile. Well, it succeeded in making its profile invisible while not gaining the release of a single hostage or providing them with assistance.

For the transfer, they showed up as if they were heroes when they were essentially Uber drivers taking the former hostages a few miles to an awaiting military helicopter.

First, though, they played a part in the grotesque Hamas spectacle in which heavily armed masked terrorists in freshly laundered uniforms delivered and surrounded the hostages. Hundreds of jeering civilians lined the streets celebrating the dehumanization of the women right to the end of their ordeal. Civilians, including children—frequently portrayed as innocent victims of “genocide”—actively participated in the degradation of survivors of the Hamas massacre.

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Her name is Emily Damari The left will never live down the shame of staying silent on the racist kidnapping of a British Jew. Brendan O’Neill

By on January 21st, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/01/20/her-name-is-emily-damari/

There is a British woman who survived 15 months at the hands of a neo-fascist militia. A woman who was cruelly deprived of her liberty and dignity by racist monsters and yet who emerged from that hell smiling and defiant. A woman who spent her 28th birthday in the bondage of an army of bigots. A woman who was subjected to the most intolerable persecutions for one ‘crime’ and one ‘crime’ only – she’s a Jew.

And yet if you said her name on the streets of Britain, many people would not know who she was. No one on the ‘anti-racist’ left held a vigil for her. The activists of Antifa raised not a peep of concern for this Jew seized by a racist army. These people see ‘fascism’ everywhere, in every utterance made by Donald Trump, every bristling against mass immigration, every criticism of the Koran. Yet when a fellow Brit was cruelly incarcerated by a movement founded with the express intention of murdering Jews, they said not a word. To them everything is fascism, except fascism.

Her name is Emily Damari. Go and say it to people. Let them know that a British citizen was kidnapped by Hamas and that British ‘progressives’ said nothing. Let them know that this British-Israeli was brutalised by Jew-killers and it made not so much as a dent in the conscience of Britain’s bourgeois left. The people who cry ‘black lives matter’ and ‘trans lives matter’ and ‘Muslims matter’ could not bring themselves to utter these three poxy words: ‘Emily Damari matters.’

Ms Damari was taken from her home in Kibbutz Kfar Aza in southern Israel during Hamas’s orgy of barbarism on 7 October 2023. She was shot in the hand, causing her to lose two fingers. She was dragged to Gaza where she spent 471 days in the captivity of anti-Semites. She was released yesterday, as part of Phase 1 of the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas, along with two other women: Romi Gonen, 24, and Doron Steinbrecher, 31. I have come ‘back to life’, said Emily on Instagram after her release.

To be clear, Emily was not forgotten. Britain’s Jewish community held vigils for her. Fans of Tottenham Hotspur – the team she supports – campaigned for her release. So did fans of Arsenal. Not for the first time, working-class football fans showed themselves to be the moral backbone of the nation, as our ‘betters’ shamefully looked the other way. It fell mostly to Emily’s heroic mother, Mandy, to keep her daughter’s plight in the headlines. Her dogged campaigning even compelled government officials to break their reprehensible silence and speak on the racist brutalisation of one of their own people.

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Why Hamas still stands: Failed military doctrine drives IDF thinking David Isaac

By on January 21st, 2025

https://www.jns.org/why-hamas-still-stands-failed-military-doctrine-drives-idf-thinking/

Ran Baratz, who teaches military doctrine at the IDF’s National Defense College and founded Mida, an online Hebrew-language Commentary-like magazine, raises no objections to the ceasefire deal with Hamas—but not for the reasons one would expect. It’s because the IDF can’t win. At least, not with a General Staff marinated in postmodern military doctrine.

Baratz notes that the army’s rank-and-file is second to none, but the General Staff’s lack of strategy results in endless targeted raids, where the IDF goes in, kills some terrorists, retreats, then reenters the same area to cope with more terrorists—and lose more of its valiant young soldiers.

“When generals don’t have a strategy, they come up with an overarching strategy of attrition, which doctrinally, is achieved by raids,” Baratz told JNS on Jan. 15.

“They have different names for raids. In Vietnam, it was called ‘search and destroy.’ But it was the same idea. You raid a place, you kill the enemy combatants, with some collateral damage, and you pull back. You could see that in the Second Lebanon War [in 2006], and you can see that today. If they had a good operational plan, they wouldn’t be speaking about raids,” he says.

The General Staff didn’t even have a plan in place to invade the Gaza Strip, Baratz says. They thought it wasn’t needed as Hamas was “deterred.” That’s why it took so long for the IDF to go into Gaza after the Oct. 7, 2023, invasion.

So Baratz says of a ceasefire, “whatever the government thinks best.” His focus is on bigger issues, such as how Israel can rebuild its once-vaunted military institutions.

The main problem in his view is postmodern military doctrine, which afflicts not just the IDF, but Western militaries in general. Postmodern doctrine replaced classical military doctrine as a result of two events.

The first was the advent of nuclear weapons.

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POSITIVE NEWS FROM ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

By on January 20th, 2025

What could be more positive than pictures of three young women hostages returned to a mother’s embrace? Even those of us opposed and enraged at the disproportionate terms of the cease fire are happy to see them home.

Home, is Israel, often and gratuitously accused of “disproportionate” responses to evil. What is truly disproportionate, is Israel’s dazzling contributions to humanity and all its beneficent endeavors. To his enormous credit, Michael details this in his weekly newsletters.  rsk

 

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com 

 

POSITIVE NEWS IN A WAR
 
150 lone soldiers join the IDF. Over 150 young immigrants from the US, Canada, UK, and other countries are currently arriving in Israel as part of the Garin Tzabar Scouts program. After four months in an absorption program they will enlist in the IDF. Garin Tzabar has supported 7,000+ lone soldiers during its 33 years.
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-836917
 
US students cheer up wives of reservists. The NGO Israel Resilience together with the OU-JLIC (Jewish Learning Initiative on Campus) has given US students volunteering in Israel the task of giving support to the wives of IDF reservists. They visit, hand them gift cards, and offer them thanks.
https://www.jns.org/us-students-launch-initiative-to-support-wives-of-idf-reservists/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hNL_dBC3us
 
Better than before. On Oct 7 2023, homes, fields and vehicles at Kibbutz Nirim were destroyed by Hamas terrorists and their supporters. Almost immediately afterwards, rebuilding and renovating began. Kibbutniks and external contractors are busy making Nirim bigger and better, safer and stronger than ever before,
https://www.jns.org/bigger-and-better-than-ever-rebuilding-nirim-after-oct-7/
 
Rehabilitating tourism in the North. The Jewish Agency for Israel is establishing a fund to rehabilitate the tourism industry in the north of Israel. Businesses impacted by the war – mainly those in tourism – can receive a low cost loan up to NIS 650,000. Since Oct 7 2023, the Agency has lent NIS 350 million to 8,000+ businesses.
https://www.jns.org/wire/the-jewish-agency-signs-agreement-to-rehabilitate-the-north-of-israel/
 
Northern hospitals come up for air. (TY Yanky) Several hospitals across northern Israel have spent 14 months in fortified underground bunker-like facilities. Now, since the ceasefire, they are leaving the crowded and dark conditions and returning to normal. Staff and patients are delighted to be breathing fresh air again.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/northern-hospitals-move-out-of-underground-bunkers-after-months-of-war/
 
Student of courage. On Oct 7 2023, Coral Hamo Goren – a Ph.D. student at Israel’s Technion, mother of three, and operations officer in the IDF was called to manage a command center near the Gaza border. When she can, she commutes between Gaza and Haifa, submits papers, attends courses, and keeps up with research.
https://ats.org/our-impact/on-the-front-lines-of-war-and-academia/
 
Voices of Iron. (TY UWI) 50 pro-Israel public diplomacy professionals, activists and social-media influencers were presented with the inaugural “Voices of Iron” award in a ceremony held at the Knesset auditorium. They were honored for their “Iron Dome” advocacy “blowing lies out of the sky” during the Swords of Iron war.
https://www.jns.org/voices-of-iron-award-honors-online-israel-advocacy-warriors/
 
Huge post-Oct 7 giving boom. (TY Yanky) Overseas charities bring hope to Israel’s frontline communities. The Diaspora Ministry estimates over $1.4 billion in foreign donations since Oct 7 2023. This article focuses on the Jewish Agency, KKL-JNF, Keren Hayesod, UJIA, Jewish Federations of North America, and the Joint.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/huge-post-october-7-giving-boom-from-overseas-brings-hope-to-battered-frontlines/
 
Yeshiva hosts injured soldiers. Yeshivat Hakotel hosted injured IDF soldiers, members of the Lifros Knaf nonprofit, who came to Jerusalem as part of a rehabilitation trip. They were welcomed by the students and heads and, during Shabbat, they were given a guided tour of Jerusalem’s Old City and the Jewish Quarter.
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/402198  https://www.lifroskanaf.co.il/
 
 
ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
 
Immunotherapy can slow aging process. Israel Prize winner, Weizmann Institute’s Prof. Michal Schwartz and her research team are working on a groundbreaking treatment to boost immune cells relevant to the brain, cure brain diseases, and slow the aging process. Schwartz founded Israel’s ImmunoBrain (see here previously).
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-scientist-in-peer-reviewed-study-immunotherapy-treatment-could-slow-aging-process/    https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(24)00882-1
 
Huge rise in organ donations. Israel’s National Transplant Center has reported that a record number of heart transplants (36) were performed in Israel in 2024. There was also a 6% rise in the number of kidney transplants to 469, including 313 from living donors. Also see article about those who have donated a kidney to a stranger.
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/402203
https://www.israel21c.org/why-danny-newman-gave-his-kidney-to-a-stranger/
 
Scientists identify a new blood group. (TY Yanky) In 1972, doctors discovered a woman missing a surface molecule found on all other known red bloods. 50 years later, Israeli and UK researchers have finally identified it as a new blood group, “AnWj-negative”. It will help provide better care for these patients.
https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-identify-new-blood-group-after-50-year-mystery
https://ashpublications.org/blood/article-abstract/144/26/2735/517404/Deletions-in-the-MAL-gene-result-in-loss-of-Mal
 
Understanding chronic pain. (TY ATS) Researchers from Israel’s Technion were part of a team that has discovered why only some whiplash injury patients, suffer from chronic pain. It is related to their brain’s memory communication system, plus if they had high anxiety after the injury – literally “painful memories”.
https://technologytangle.com/new-study-identifies-brain-activity-predicting-chronic-pain-after-whiplash-injuries/    https://www.nature.com/articles/s44220-024-00329-8
 
Treating cardio-metabolic diseases. Bar-Ilan University’s Dr Sivan Spitzer and EU colleagues won a €22 million EU-IHI grant for CAREPATH – a 5-year project to use cutting-edge tools to ensure diabetic, obese, and heart patients take their medication. It involves international researchers, plus companies led by Novo Nordisk.
https://www.biu.ac.il/en/article/582866
 
OncoHost wins BIG. (TY OurCrowd) Israel’s OncoHost (see here previously) has won a 2025 BIG Innovation Awards for Healthcare. BIG (Business Intelligence Group) CEO Russ Fordyce said,  “We’re thrilled to spotlight OncoHost as a shining example of innovation making a profound impact globally.”
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/oncohost-wins-2025-big-innovation-award-for-healthcare-302351878.html

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A Deal That Keeps Hamas in Power Is Meaningless by Khaled Abu Toameh

By on January 20th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21322/hamas-deal-power

The ceasefire-hostage deal does not require Hamas to disarm or cede control over the Gaza Strip…. The terrorist group seems to be convinced that the deal will enable it to keep control of the Gaza Strip and prepare for more massacres of Jews.

Shortly after the ceasefire-hostage deal was announced on January 15, Hamas leader Khalil al-Hayya made it clear that his group intends to pursue its Jihad against Israel.

The new US administration, to avoid more violence and bloodshed, must insist that Hamas be removed from power.

This can only be accomplished by applying pressure and sanctions on Hamas’s Qatari and Iranian sponsors.

Those who think that the Iran-backed Palestinian terrorist group Hamas will abandon its Jihad (holy war) to murder more Jews and destroy Israel in the aftermath of the recent ceasefire-hostage agreement are mistaken.

Although the agreement may put an end to the current conflict between Israel and Hamas, it does not, in any way, reflect a shift in the radical and dangerous ideology of the Islamist group, as outlined in its 1988 Covenant. The document quotes Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood organization (of which Hamas is an offshoot), as saying: “Israel will arise and continue to exist until Islam abolishes it, as it abolished what went before.”

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Melanie Phillips :An obscene spectacle Do the west’s Israel-haters even understand what they saw today?

By on January 20th, 2025

melaniephillips@substack.com

To all those in the west who have perpetrated the lie of Israeli genocide in Gaza for the past 15 months: look at the pictures of the mob surrounding the three Israel women hostages who were freed today, and see thousands of Gazans who are well-fed, well-groomed and well-dressed.

What do you have to say now about the murderous libel you have perpetrated against the Israeli victims of these people, the lie that the Israelis were deliberately starving them, that they were the victims of Israeli-induced famine, that the Jews were behaving like Nazis? Do you have a scintilla of shame or regret about what you have done in spreading this foul incitement? Do you even understand what you saw today? Or are you too busy cheering on instead the pictures of those “pro-Palestinian” hate-marchers in London yesterday, dozens of whom were arrested by the police because they were absolutely determined to harass and terrorise British Jews at their synagogue Sabbath services nearby?

Look at that horrifying footage of those Gaza mobs, those enormous potential lynch mobs jeering and threatening the three Israeli women as they were handed over to the Red Cross — the same mobs who abused the live hostages and desecrated the bodies of the murdered ones when they were all dragged into Gaza after the October 7 massacre; look at that footage and then tell us all again that the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs in Gaza are innocent civilians and victims of the Israelis.

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There is a frightening defect in the Israel-Hamas ‘deal’ – the terrorists live to fight on Charles Moore

By on January 18th, 2025

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/there-is-a-frightening-defect-in-the-israel-hamas-deal-the-terrorists-live-to-fight-on/ar-AA1xpuZa?ocid=winp2fptaskbarhover&cvid=3ff8207ea26c41a4edbb93a2a0de580d&ei=102 On October 7 2023, Hamas murdered more than 1,200 people in Israel and abducted 251. The deal which begins its enactment tomorrow, provides for the release, in phases, of the estimated 94 hostages still held by Hamas, of whom, the Israeli government calculates, 34 are dead. In return, Israel will let hundreds of Palestinian […]

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Douglas Murray: A real cease-fire deal must ensure the destruction of Hamas By Douglas Murray

By on January 18th, 2025

https://nypost.com/2025/01/16/opinion/douglas-murray-it-is-time-to-eliminate-hamas-and-bring-our-hostages-back-home/

“Bring them home” has been the slogan of the hostage families in Israel since October 7, 2023.  

But when Hamas murdered 1,200 people, including 46 Americans, and when it took 254 people hostage, including 12 Americans, there should have been a different slogan: “Give them back. Now.”

Since that day, so many opportunities have been missed. 

On October 8, Joe Biden could have called up the governments in Qatar, Iran and other rogue states and told them to get their friends in Hamas to hand over the hostages now. 

Or else.

With the leverage the US has in the Middle East, a hardball approach against the Qataris, Iranians and Turks could have solved this mess 15 months ago.

Instead it has taken the pressure of the incoming Trump administration to get a deal agreed to.

It is still a bittersweet moment.

On the one hand, everyone except Hamas and its goons in the West must feel their hearts lift at the idea of the remaining hostages being released. 

These are men, women and babies who did nothing wrong but have spent 15 months in the hell of Hamas captivity. 

On the other hand, the deal includes the release of Palestinian prisoners, including murderers.

In the first round of releases, nine ill and wounded hostages will be exchanged for 110 Palestinian prisoners who are serving life sentences. 

Just think about that. 

An Israeli baby could be released in exchange for a dozen grown murderers. 

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