RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/israel-has-already-opened-the-northern-front-lebanon-hezbollah-iran-d4a6b62e?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

Rosh Hanikra, Israel

Will Israel launch a military operation to clear Hezbollah from its northern border? Or is the war there already under way?

“We see a steady escalation in terms of the range and variety of munitions being launched by Hezbollah at Israel,” Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, international spokesman of the Israel Defense Forces, told a group of foreign journalists at a briefing in northern Israel on Dec. 18. “We can do the same, if we need to, against Hezbollah that we are doing against Hamas in the south. This may be the scenario that we will need to implement.”

The briefing took place at a deserted kibbutz called Rosh Hanikra. Only yards from the border with Lebanon, it once was a flourishing community of 1,400 people but was evacuated, along with 27 other communities, in the days following Hamas’s massacre on Oct. 7. Israel has withdrawn its civilian population 2.5 miles south from its border with Lebanon, obliging 86,000 people to leave their homes. The residents of these border communities have become refugees in their own country.

Amid the deserted houses, fields and farms, the IDF conducts its daily duel with the Iran-backed Hezbollah militia. More than 1,000 Hezbollah attacks have taken place since Oct. 7 as the Lebanese Shiite Islamist group seeks to maintain a controlled second front to aid its Sunni allies in the south.

https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/us-news/robert-f-kennedy-jr-hailed-for-single-greatest-defense-of-israel-worth-three-minutes-of-your-time-101702960343411.html

Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s exchange with Krystal Ball, where they discuss who is responsible for the tragic situation of Palestinians in Gaza, has gone viral

Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s heated exchange with Breaking Points commentator Krystal Ball, where they discuss who is responsible for the tragic situation of Palestinians in Gaza amid the Israel-Hamas conflict, has gone viral. The two spoke about the Palestinians’ plight, civilian casualties and other complications the ongoing conflict has caused.

The conversation spiralled into a heated exchange when Ball and Kennedy began debating the political logistics behind the conflict. They also went back and forth over how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu handled the situation. “The Palestinian people are arguably the most pampered people by international aid organisations,” Kennedy said.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr and Krystal Ball’s heated exchange

“Are you kidding me?” Ball said, shocked. “Even before this war, 78 percent of people in Gaza had not enough food to eat.”

“Why are you blaming Israel?” Kennedy asked, and Ball went on to cite the blockade on food. Kennedy then went on to say Hamas’ leadership stole international aid, becoming rich in the process. He accused Ball of making Israel look responsible for the poverty in Gaza.

“They have no control over their own territory!” Ball exclaimed. “Israel controls everything that comes in and goes out.”

“Why do you insist on blaming Israel?” Kennedy said. “Why not Hamas?”

https://www.jns.org/fetterman-tiktok-warping-young-peoples-views-on-israel-hamas-war/

U.S. Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) on Wednesday told Jake Tapper of CNN that the popular social media app TikTok is distorting Americans’ perception of the war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Tapper, who is Jewish, had asked Fetterman—who is not, but has been one of the most vocal Zionists in Congress of late—about a New York Times/Siena College poll which found that 72% of registered voters aged 18 to 29 disapprove of the way U.S. President Joe Biden is handling the Israel-Palestine conflict. Why do so many younger people, especially Democrats, see Israel differently from the senator, Tapper asked.

“I really don’t know,” Fetterman replied. “I do know that a lot of people are getting their perspective from TikTok.”

“If you’re kind of getting your perspective on the world on TikTok, it’s going to tend to be kind of warped or not reflective of the history and actually the way things absolutely are,” said Fetterman. “Hamas started this, and they actually broke the ceasefire and they attacked and murdered babies, children, women—attacked a music concert and everything. It’s outrageous.”

He went on to say that “it’s been very clear that Israel would very much want there to be peace. But they’ve made it very clear that after Oct. 7, that’s just not possible so long as Hamas is allowed to exist.”

Earlier this month, Jewish TikTok employees reported experiencing antisemitism on the job and anti-Israel bias in content moderation. 
In March, Noa Tishby, the former Israeli special envoy for combating antisemitism, told JNS she regarded TikTok as the most hateful social media platform.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/gaza-hospital-boss-admits-hes-a-hamas-commander-used-medical-facility-as-terror-base/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

Ahmed al-Kahlout, the manager of the Kamal Adnan Hospital in northern Gaza, admitted during an interrogation with Israeli security forces that Hamas used the medical facilities to advance its military operations.

“I know 16 employees in the hospital — doctors, nurses, paramedics and clerks — who also have different positions in the Qassam Brigades,” Kahlout told Israel’s Shin Bet in a video clip released on Tuesday afternoon, referring to the military of Hamas. “They hide in hospitals because, for them, a hospital is a safe place.”

Kahlout, whose hospital is located in the Jabaliya neighborhood of northern Gaza, explained to Israeli security officials, “They [Hamas] won’t be targeted when they are inside a hospital.”

“That they will not be harmed when they are inside a hospital. Hamas has offices inside the hospitals. There are places for senior officials, they also brought a kidnapped soldier there. There is a designated place for interrogations, internal security, and special forces. Everyone has private phone lines inside the hospital,” Kahlout added.

The hospital manager also told Israeli officials that he’d been involved in the Palestinian terror group for over a decade and had risen through its ranks over the years. “I was recruited to Hamas in 2010 with the rank of Brigadier General. There are employees in the hospital who are military operatives of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades – doctors, nurses, paramedics, clerks, and staff members,״ Kahlout said, according to an Israeli military press release.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/israels-right-of-reprisal

“The law of war can no more wholly dispense with retaliation than can the law of nations, of which it is a branch. Yet civilized nations acknowledge retaliation as the sternest feature of war. A reckless enemy often leaves to his opponent no other means of securing himself against the repetition of barbarous outrage.”

President Abraham Lincon’s military orders resonate 160 years later, after Hamas’s barbaric invasion of Israel on the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, the worst attack against Jews since the Holocaust. Hamas-run Gaza, effectively an independent country, organized the massacre and murdered more than 1,200 Israelis and foreigners, the vast majority civilians, with widespread torture, rape, and mutilation.

Hamas bound victims, including young children, and burned them alive, leaving ashen remains that took weeks to identify. Hamas tortured and killed parents and children in front of each other, and, in one instance, sat down to eat the family’s holiday meal. Hamas broke into one home, tortured the father, raped the mother, murdered both, and burned alive their baby child in the oven. Hamas ripped open the stomach of a pregnant woman, stabbed the baby, and shot the mother. Hamas took 240 hostages, some of whom it raped and paraded around Gaza. Hamas videotaped its atrocities with GoPro cameras, and sometimes with the phones of its victims.

“It is the duty of every government to give protection to its citizens, of whatever class, color, or condition,” said President Lincoln. No government but Israel’s carries, or will fulfill, this responsibility to protect the Israeli people. To do so, the Israeli government must destroy Hamas and convince Palestinian Arabs that massacring Israelis will backfire. Its response must be devastating enough to deter Israel’s other enemies, chiefly Iran. The Islamic Republic wants to erase Israel from the map and may soon have the means to do so with a breakout time of a month to build multiple nuclear bombs.

https://www.renewamerica.com/columns/sharpe/231219

Though they will not expose it in the media, Arab-Muslim anti-Israel activists feel a profound and debilitating sense of humiliation at the inherent failings of their own societies. So, what better way to deflect their dissatisfaction within the Arab and Muslim world than to employ the language of the Left – in particular, such phrases as “national liberation, anti-apartheid and anti-colonialism – with which to level false charges against the embattled Jewish state?

It doesn’t matter to these Arab-Muslims, or to their leftist and ‘progressive’ amen chorus, that Israel is dwarfed by an enormous Arab landmass, which is 570 times greater than that of tiny Israel – a state no larger than Wales or New Jersey. Indeed, the leftists, while ironically turning on the one state in the Middle East that provides its people with freedoms no Arab or Muslim country will ever provide, choose to embrace the Arab falsehoods. Why? Because the Left is terrified of being seen as racist. Yet by their very own actions and words, they are just that.

The Left buys the Arab and Muslim lies against Israel because they believe that the Arabs can never change for the better. That is pure racism of the worst kind. The corollary to this put-down of an entire Arab ethnicity is that the Left refuses to admit that it is the Arab-Muslim culture that actively engages in the very evil practices that they falsely hurl towards Israel. And where do you find apartheid, racism, repression, torture? Why, in the very Arab-Muslim world the Left supports and embraces.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/half-of-young-americans-say-israel-should-be-ended-and-given-to-hamas-poll/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

Roughly half of young Americans say Israel should be “ended and given to Hamas and the Palestinians” amid the ongoing war despite continuing support for the Jewish state among older Americans, according to a new poll.

While 51 percent of 18–24-year-olds in the U.S. want Israel to lose to Hamas, that sentiment decreases significantly among the higher age brackets in the monthly Harvard CAPS/Harris poll. Thirty-one percent of 25–34-year-olds, 24 percent of 35–44-year-olds, 15 percent of 45–54-year-olds, 13 percent of 55–64-year-olds, and only 4 percent of Americans aged 65 and older say Israel should be wiped out.

In comparison, an overall 81 percent of Americans support Israel over Hamas. However, support between the two sides is split evenly among the 18–24 age bracket.

Although the slight majority of respondents in that age group support the genocide of Jews, 58 percent of respondents aged 18–24 say Hamas should be removed from running Gaza. The same group further displayed contradicting views, with 66 percent saying Hamas’s October 7 attack was genocidal and 60 percent answering that Israel’s campaign in Gaza also constitutes genocide.

Additionally, 32 percent of young Americans want Israel and Palestine to be recognized in a two-state solution and 17 percent think Arab states should absorb the Palestinians displaced by the conflict. Overall, a two-state solution was the preferred answer to that question, with 60 percent of all respondents favoring it.

The poll comes over 70 days since Hamas terrorists invaded Israel two months ago, killing over 1,200 people and kidnapping approximately 240. About 110 living hostages remain in Gaza, although that number has dropped in recent days.