RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20209/how-to-end-hamas-war-on-israel-this-week

Iran’s militia groups have initiated more than 82 attacks — just since October 17 — on US forces and assets in Syria and Iraq. The latest, on the US Embassy in Baghdad, is an attack on US sovereign territory. During Biden’s presidency, Iran has initiated 151 attacks against the US. Forty-six US service members have so far been wounded, 19 seriously, with traumatic brain injury.

These strikes do not include Iran’s having largely funded and helped plan a savage invasion of Israel by an estimated 3,000 Gazans under the direction of Iran’s proxy, the terrorist group Hamas, on October 7. Once there, they murdered 1,200 people; raped and tortured an untold number, and kidnapped around 240, about 100 of whom — women and children — have been released. Several hostages have reportedly been murdered (here, here and here).

The Biden administration has thankfully been supportive of Israel defending itself and trying to rescue those hostages who remain. The Biden administration immediately sent naval ships and fighter jets to the region to prevent the war from spreading to Lebanon and other countries nearby; and on December 8, vetoed an attempt by the United Nations Security Council to force Israel to submit prematurely to a ceasefire.

Before October 7, there was a ceasefire. Regrettably, Hamas broke it. A few weeks later, there was another humanitarian ceasefire to which Israel agreed. Hamas broke that one, too. Hamas refused to release the list of people who were to be delivered on the ceasefire’s last day, possibly because Hamas was afraid of what they might say about how they had been treated in captivity. This week, when Israel created a safe zone in the southern Gaza Strip for Gazans, Hamas used that humanitarian zone to fire rockets into Israel.

The US could stop these assaults tomorrow. So far, the Biden administration has appeared unwilling even to entertain the thought of addressing Hamas’s patron, Iran. Here are a few possible ways:

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/12/come-and-see/

Alan G. Futerman and Walter E. Block are the co-authors of The Classical Liberal Case for Israel (published by Springer in 2021, with commentary by Benjamin Netanyahu).

The horrors of the Holocaust, particularly those involving the mass murder process itself, are impossible to conceive. We may read documents, watch documentary films, listen to survivors, learn its history, and visit concentration camps and museums. But we cannot perceive them.

Certain films, though, allow us access to the closest kind of experience we could expect. They permit us, in a sense, to see from within. One of these films is Son of Saul (2015). There is another one, set during the Nazi Blitzkrieg on Byelorussia that left 25 per cent of the country’s population killed. This is a Soviet film, released in 1985 and directed by Elem Klimov. Its name is Come and See.

This film, a true masterpiece, not only shows with excruciating detail the unbearable degree of Nazi destruction, but something more, something that is essential to the phenomenon of mass murder. In one scene, we follow Flyora (the main character, superbly interpreted by Aleksei Kravchenko) while he witnesses the extermination of an entire village. In that scene, we can see a hell that is difficult to put into words. The Einsatzgruppen and their collaborators sardonically laugh at the villagers, sadistically mock them and maniacally sneer at them, while they herd them to be burned inside a church. No one is spared, children, elderly, women. There is no escape, no logic, no reason. In an immortal scene, a group of Nazis take a picture with Flyora while one of them points a gun to his head. The surreal scene captures well that this event seems from another dimension, although it is placed on Earth.

So, what is it that the film portrays that is so special? It shows that, although this horror is performed by humans, it does not belong to humanity as such. That is, it consists of a fundamental intent of changing human nature—a departure from humanity. It is a systematic, premeditated intent to inflict the cruellest forms of sadistic destruction under the disguise of a rational system. In the film, this is implied by some of the phrases that are said through the speakers before the Nazi massacre occurs: “Germany is a cultured country.”

What happened on October 7, 2023, in Israel is an instance of this specific phenomenon. Of course, the Holocaust is an event of such scale and horror in history that cannot be compared. But the essential factor, the subversion of humanity mentioned above in conjunction with the most maniacal Jew-hatred, did take place.

According to what captured Hamas assassins themselves have confessed, they were told that they could do with Jews whatever they wanted. They could kill, rape, burn, destroy. Moreover, it was their duty to do just that.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-true-face-of-the-anti-israel-movement-fa3e94fe?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The response in anti-Israel circles to Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre has been clarifying. Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), the tip of the spear on U.S. campuses, early on called the slaughter “a historic win for Palestinian resistance.”

The tune hasn’t changed, even from the leaders pressuring President Biden. Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), celebrated Oct. 7 at an American Muslims for Palestine convention on Nov. 24. A damning excerpt was publicized Thursday by the Middle East Media Research Institute.

American Muslims for Palestine then took down the full video, and Mr. Awad now claims a “hate website selected remarks from my speech out of context and spliced them together to create a completely false meaning.” But we got the video before Mr. Awad’s ally hid it, and here’s what CAIR’s leader had to say:

“The people of Gaza only decided to break the siege, the walls of the concentration camp, on Oct. 7. And yes, I was happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land, and walk free into their land, that they were not allowed to walk in. And yes, the people of Gaza have the right to self-defense, have the right to defend themselves. And yes, Israel, as an occupying power, does not have that right to self-defense.”

The crowd applauded, and not a word in Mr. Awad’s speech qualified his pleasure with Oct. 7, justified as “self-defense.”

Democrats and media have long treated CAIR as a primary political spokesman for Muslim Americans. In late October the White House invited Mr. Awad to convey Muslim concerns about the war to the President. In May the Biden Administration included CAIR as a partner in its Strategy to Counter Antisemitism. The White House has now removed CAIR from that document and condemned Mr. Awad’s remarks.

https://www.jns.org/hamas-attack-plans-including-map-of-idf-base-suggest-espionage/

New documentation, including the laptop of a key Hamas commander, offers additional proof of the terrorist group’s meticulous planning of the Oct. 7 massacre.

The field intelligence unit of the Israel Defense Forces’ Military Intelligence Directorate, known by the Hebrew acronym AMSHAT, released the documents on Monday.

The material provided to JNS by the IDF came from a laptop belonging to the head of Hamas’ Nukhba Force, who took part in the attack. It was recovered in southern Israel.

Uploaded to the laptop was a notebook with detailed plans to conquer the army’s Nahal Oz base adjacent to the border fence along the northern Gaza Strip.

It included a hand-drawn sketch of the base, providing a visual representation of the strategic details in the notebook. The illustration, revealing accurate knowledge of the base, suggests Hamas had help from within.

(An Israeli intelligence source cited by The Guardian said the map revealed “inside knowledge … almost certainly from a Hamas spy.”)

Prior to Oct. 7 many Arabs from Gaza entered Israel regularly for work (17,500 daily at the time of the attack), and a week after the attack, Israeli security services had already begun investigating the possibility that some of these individuals had passed information to Hamas.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/chanukah-in-israel-upholds-light-against-darkness/

A week before Chanukah, Israeli soldiers set up a 15-foot tall menorah in Gaza. As the holiday arrives, menorahs large and small will be lit in enemy territory. Lights will flicker along tanks and from across rubble-strewn battlefields. Out of the darkness of the Jihad, there will be light.

The Jewish holiday commemorating the resistance of the Maccabees, a conservative religious family from the hinterlands of Israel, has always had a special resonance in Israel. In the northern parts of Israel that have often come under Hamas rocket attacks, the shells and debris of the rockets have been repurposed into menorahs symbolizing darkness becoming light.

As public menorah lightings in America and Europe are canceled to avoid triggering the rage of Islamists and leftist allies, preparations are underway for a bigger Chanukah than ever in Israel.

300,000 Israelis have been displaced from their homes because of the war that began with the Hamas invasion of Israel on Oct 7. The war brought an end to tourism and hotel rooms around the country are full of refugees from the war who are living out of the contents of their suitcases. Children who have spent two months in wartime and horror need something to celebrate.

In city squares, voices will ring with the classic Chanukah children’s song, “Banu hosech legaresh” or “We came to drive back the darkness” in defiance of the long solstice night.

In Modiin, the hometown of the Maccabees where the revolt against the Syrian-Greek Empire’s war on Judaism originated, people have been forced to head for shelters after rocket warnings sounded, but it’s not stopping them from preparing menorahs in every home and square. Or from continuing to donate supplies, everything from toothbrushes to cans of tuna, for the hundreds of thousands of refugees and the soldiers mobilized to fight the Islamic terrorists.

According to the European Union, the Maccabean city is actually an “illegal settlement” on land that belongs to the Muslim invaders, and not to the Jews who had fought an empire to free it over 2,000 years ago. Chanukah reaffirms the history of Modiin and the rest of Israel.

History hits differently in Israel.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/comment/2023/12/06/idf-israeli-defense-force-hamas-hostages-hospital-gaza/

Now that fierce fighting has resumed in Gaza, international pressure is building on Israel to curb its military campaign and abandon its objective of crushing Hamas. The humanitarian goal of these demands is to protect innocent Palestinians. The political goal is to appease some Muslim states and appeal to anti-Israel “progressives” and Muslims in Europe and North America.

What these demands seldom mention is the cost of leaving in place a terrorist organisation bent on killing civilians, taking hostages, using civilians to shield its own fighters, and doing its best to wipe Israel off the map. The intense pressure on the Jewish state is not matched by that on Hamas.

This sharp asymmetry in political pressure is particularly evident in the fighting around Gazan hospitals. Intense battles have been waged at close quarters in and around the Indonesian Hospital, Al-Shifa (Gaza’s largest), and Al-Rantisi, among others.

News of that fighting is heartbreaking. Medical centers should be places of sanctuary. They have become sites of battle because they are useful for Hamas, which has turned patients and hospital workers into human shields and medical buildings into hiding places for terrorists, weapons, and tunnels.

Hamas uses hospitals like this for three reasons. The terrorist organisation knows that Israel has serious moral reservations about attacking civilian facilities and risking harm to innocents, a reservation not shared by Hamas militants willing to use their own people as human shields. Hospital traffic is also the perfect place to conceal the movement of terrorists and their supplies, a fact often excluded from debates over Israeli strategy. Resultantly, when the IDF launches strategic strikes, they pay a huge price in public opinion. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/hamas-child-hostages/

For at least two generations, Israelis have felt secure in the knowledge that the horrors of the Holocaust were behind them. Safe behind border walls and protected by a powerful military, Jews in Israel would never again have to watch as children were murdered in front of their parents, and parents in front of their children.

October 7 changed all that – dramatically.

The Hamas-led killing spree of that day brought Hitler’s willing executions through the gates of Israel. Suddenly, nowhere was safe anymore.

I have spent the past week in Israel, researching a film on Israel Defense Force (IDF) soldiers with filmmaker Ricky Schroder and his producer, Julie Trammel.

From the very moment I arrived, the presence of the missing – Israelis ripped from their homes by Hamas terrorists – was everywhere. The broad stairs leading down to immigration at Ben Gurion airport were marked with the faces of the missing – on both sides of the hall. On some of the hundred-plus steps, the poster had been taken down to indicate hostages who had been released after more than fifty days of captivity.

By the time I left five days later, the gaps were bigger, as more returnees came home. But more than 136 remained by the time Hamas broke the temporary truce on December 1.

On Ditzengoff Street, one of the main thoroughfares of Tel Aviv, human-sized white teddy bears were strapped to every park bench, their bodies spattered with dirt and blood. Attached to each was a poster of one of the missing.

In Jerusalem, office buildings were lit up with the Israeli flag and holographic projections of the missing, rotating every few seconds.

During that week, we began to learn more about the horrors the hostages had undergone during their Hamas captivity.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/12/04/israel-must-finish-the-job-in-gaza/

For a week now, the world has watched a high-stakes, emotionally draining, and dangerous game being played out in Gaza. What began as a mediated four-day “truce” and swap of 50 Israeli civilians held hostage by Hamas in exchange for 150 convicted Palestinian-Arab terrorists has now been dragged out much further. Hamas, unusually self-aware for a jihadist outfit, has savvily dangled the possibility of the release of ever-more hostages in exchange for further “truce” extensions. Israel, which so greatly values human life that it once infamously bartered over 1,000 terrorists in exchange for captured soldier Gilad Shalit, is all but forced to go along.

But as tantalizing as it is to see more hostages reunited with their families, there are extraordinary costs if Israel prolongs these swaps and continues to indulge the fantasy of a “ceasefire.”

There is the concrete threat of the convicted terrorists freed from Israeli prison. Among those freed during the Shalit swap was Yahya Sinwar, the current leader of Hamas in Gaza (he is subordinate to Hamas’ Doha-based top brass) and mastermind of the Oct. 7 pogrom. On Thursday, in his first publicized statement since the assault, Sinwar minced no words: “The leaders of (Israel) should know, Oct. 7 was just a rehearsal.” That’s quite a threat. How many future Yahya Sinwars have already been freed this go-around? The Times of Israel noted that 55% of the first 117 terrorists released during the current swaps had been held for violent crimes, including attempted murder; 21% belonged to a jihadist outfit.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-immorality-of-the-two-state-solution/

Joe Biden is a famous incompetent when it comes to foreign policy. Don’t forget, his mentor and former boss, Barack Hussein Obama, quipped that one should never underestimate Biden’s ability to screw up any given policy situation beyond all semblance of rationally expected benefit. Well he didn’t say that exactly, but that’s the gist.

So, it stands to reason, if Biden is in favor of the Two State Solution in Israel, there’s probably something very wrong afoot. It’s the same kind of wrongheadedness that led the notoriously ineffectual U.N. to adopt the policy in 1947. The result of this piece of liberal statecraft has been 76 years of either simmering, or all out war in the Middle East.

The Two State Solution has ensured that the seeds of conflict and destruction sprout into a virulent kudzu that, despite occasional pruning, grows implacably, strangling any hope for peace in the region.

Both Gaza and the West Bank are products of this intractable and untenable state of existence. To put this state of affairs in perspective, imagine if the U.N. had carved out most of the south and the northern Midwest states and implanted ISIS in our midst. At least in terms of proportionate land mass, you have a rough idea of what Israel faces.

As an aside, Biden’s wide open border policy is fashioning a de facto American Two State Solution, pitting illegal aliens against citizens in an explosive environment ripe for demagoguery. Tens of thousands stream across the southern border in anonymity. Military aged males forming battalions of potential Mohammedan insurrectionists.

But to the main point, the plight of “Palestinians” is a result of the Arab world’s refusal to accommodate immigration from Gaza or the West Bank. It seems the Arab states take their borders much more seriously than America. As the current Two State Solution crisis evolves in Gaza, Egypt has refused to allow the incursion of refugees from Gaza. So much for the compassion of Mohammedans, practitioners of the “religion of peace.”