RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.israelhayom.com/2023/11/01/the-blood-money-trail-how-billions-of-dollars-for-hamas-paved-the-way-for-the-massacre-of-october-7/

Sixteen years have elapsed since Hamas took control by force of all the government branches and institutions in the Gaza Strip, and either expelled the Fatah operatives or literally threw them off the rooftops. With the support of international aid organizations, and also to a large extent with the indirect support of Israel, Hamas developed into a governmental terrorist organization.

Various governments in Israel, the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, the IDF, and Israel’s Security Agency, better known as Shin Bet, saw the blood money trail but were blinded by the conception that Hamas is now an established governmental entity, and as such it has much to lose, and so despite the accumulation of its military capabilities and power – it will avoid the use of them for any murderous purposes. Economic analysts of terrorist organizations with whom we have spoken in recent days have all expressed their deep frustration and anger at this. For years they have been looking at the numbers, and the funding channels, and providing warnings regarding the capital being used to fund Hamas’ militarization. The figures are here for you all to see. In this case, seeing is not believing, but rather “disbelieving”.

The overall annual budget available to the Hamas regime in the Gaza Strip amounts to $2-2.5 billion per annum. This is the figure estimated by Yitzhak Gal, an established expert in Middle East economic issues as a whole and the Palestinian economy in particular, who has engaged in comprehensive consulting work regarding the funding of the Hamas regime. This is an enormous amount compared with the size of the economy in the Gaza Strip. It constitutes 65-70 percent of the Gaza Strip’s GDP (Gross Domestic Product = the overall size of the economy). For the sake of comparison, Gal states, the PA’s (Palestinian Authority) budget for Judea and Samaria is slightly over $3 billion, constituting a mere 20 percent of the GDP of that area. And for the sake of further comparison – in Israel, the budget currently accounts for about 25% of the GDP. Following the massacre in the Gaza border communities, in a document published only a week ago by the US Department of the Treasury, the current estimated value of Hamas’ assets is put at hundreds of millions of dollars.

Dr. Udi Levi, a senior analyst at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security (JISS), an expert in economic warfare and the person who headed the Counter Terrorism and Proliferation Finance Bureau (which was closed down in 2016), explains: “In the Gaza Strip a portion of falafel costs NIS 5-7, the unemployment rate is at 50% – and so it was clear that the colossal budget run by Hamas was diverted for the purpose of paying workers who built the tunnels, for the procurement of weapons, for training and employing its fighters – and certainly not for the benefit of the civilians there. We saw all the trucks bringing in metals to the Gaza Strip over the years, and all this just to buy a little peace and quiet. I was the one who screamed out against this conception of allowing the money to flow into the Gaza Strip, I claimed that Hamas should have been undermined by facilitating its economic collapse – but none of this worked. But it is still not too late. Even now, by adopting a series of measures that will not harm even one soldier, the Israeli government can economically choke Hamas and Hezbollah, but it needs to take immediate action.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/israel-gaza-hamas-pause-antony-blinken-joe-biden-5265b7fd?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

President Biden has been stalwart in backing Israel’s right to destroy Hamas after the Oct. 7 massacre. But a political backlash is growing, in the Democratic Party and abroad, to rein in Israel before it can achieve its military objectives. Is the Administration’s support beginning to crack?

Secretary of State Antony Blinken went to Israel Friday to deliver a mixed message: Defeat Hamas—“there cannot and must not be a return to the pre-Oct. 7 status quo”—but pause the fighting and think about a two-state solution for Palestinians “not tomorrow, not after the war, but today.”

He may want to hold off on that last desire. After Hamas used Gaza to carry out massacres, and with some 200,000 Israelis now internally displaced, creating a new Palestinian state near Israel’s big cities sounds reckless even to Israeli doves. Maybe some time down the road.

Mr. Blinken presented “humanitarian pauses” as critical to protecting Gazans, getting them aid and freeing Israeli and U.S. hostages. The “pause” idea was embraced by Mr. Biden Wednesday in response to an anti-Israel protester’s hectoring for a cease-fire. “I think we need a pause,” the President said. “A pause means give time to get the prisoners out.”

On Thursday 13 Senate Democrats echoed that call. Sen. Chris Murphy (D., Conn.) even advised Israeli generals to rethink their “current operational approach.”

The President may conciliate some Democrats to his left, but a pause would halt Israel’s advance and momentum in exchange for uncertain gains. Mr. Blinken acknowledged that Israel has raised “legitimate questions” about “how to connect a pause to the release of hostages, how to ensure that Hamas doesn’t use these pauses or arrangements to its own advantage.”

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/case-full-israeli-victory-over-hamas-gaza-207129

Israel is facing all-too-predictable global pressure to scale back its military operation in Gaza to spare innocent lives and prevent a regional conflict that could draw in Iran, the United States, and other nations.

But critics have it backward. Those concerned about human rights and those seeking peace should be rooting for Israel’s full-scale destruction of Hamas—however long it takes or bloody it becomes. That may sound harsh, but it’s the only path to more human rights and more peace for both Israelis and Palestinians.

On human rights, Israelis deserve to live without fear of rocket attack, infiltration, and slaughter from across their border. But Gaza’s two million Palestinians also deserve peace as well as the prospect of a better life—both of which will remain elusive not because they live next to Israel but because they live under Hamas.

Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood movement, seized control of Gaza from the Palestinian Authority in a violent coup in 2007 and has ruled it since with an iron fist. It allows no elections; permits no free press; arrests, beats, and tortures its critics; and murders those suspected of collaborating, or seeking peace, with Israel.

Over the last sixteen years, Hamas has instigated multiple wars with Israel by launching thousands of rockets or attacking the Jewish state in other ways. It then hides its fighters (as it’s now doing) in hospitals, mosques, and other population centers in order to boost civilian casualties and turn global opinion against Israel after it responds and the deaths mount.

Nothing would reduce innocent deaths in Israel and Gaza more than Israel’s total victory over Hamas. Those pressuring Israel to ease its counter-attacks would, over the long term, subject Israelis to more terror and Palestinians to more rounds of Hamas-instigated war, more death, no freedom, and little opportunity.

For regional and global peace and stability, the case for a total Israeli victory is equally robust: it centers on the impact that Israel’s victory—along with parallel and supportive U.S. policies—would likely have on the aggressive aspirations of critical regional and global powers.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/11/barbarism_tape_emerges_of_hamas_terrorist_playing_with_severed_heads.html

Is there any sicker, viler, more demonic movement in the world today than the Hamas terrorist organization?

The latest from them is that Hamas’s terrorists, fresh from murdering 1,400 people on October 7, blood undoubtedly still dripping from their hands, made a tape of themselves describing how they “played” with severed heads of their Israeli victims:

According to William A. Jacobson at Legal Insurrection:

Audio was recovered of the terrorists admitting they played with decapitated heads while at Kibbutz Nirim:

“They cut off their heads with knives…. take photos of the heads as the guys are playing with them.”

And of course, they took selfies of themselves doing it.

These savages are depraved beyond belief. Did someone ask them if they had fun? They have a funny idea of fun.

It’s not the first we have heard of Hamas’s depravities and atrocities in that horror attack they conducted on innocent Israeli civilians on that terrible day last October.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/hamas-ghazi-hamad-interview-israel-oct-7-0731bd48?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Hamas has two messages for two different audiences. To the international community, it pleads for a cease-fire on humanitarian grounds. To the Arab world, it pledges to repeat its Oct. 7 attacks and sacrifice as many Palestinians as it takes to destroy Israel.

That was the message of Ghazi Hamad, a member of the Hamas Politburo, in an Oct. 24 interview on Lebanese television. “We must teach Israel a lesson,” he says, “and we will do this again and again. The Al Aqsa Flood”—the name Hamas gave its Oct. 7 operation to slaughter defenseless Israelis—“is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth,” he says, as translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute.

That’s what a cease-fire means to Hamas: a chance to repeat Oct. 7 another day. The similar idea of a “humanitarian pause,” gaining steam on the Western left, is to Hamas merely an opportunity to reload. There is nothing humane about pressuring Israel to leave a genocidal enemy in power on its border.

“Will we have to pay a price?” Mr. Hamad continues, referencing Hamas’s plan for endless invasions of Israel. “Yes, and we are ready to pay it. We are called a nation of martyrs, and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs.”

Hamas isn’t ashamed to announce its intent to sacrifice Gazans to kill Jews—at least to receptive audiences. A poll published Monday in Beirut’s Al Akhbar newspaper reported that 80% of Lebanese respondents supported Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack. In another Arabic-language interview, on Oct. 19, Hamas leader Khaled Mashal argued that “nations are not easily liberated,” noting that it sometimes has required the deaths of millions of people. He figures he’s the man for the job.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20120/two-state-solution

Every Palestinian child knows that if presidential elections were held today, the terrorist group Hamas would win. The most recent PSR poll, published one month before the Hamas massacre, showed that 58% of the Palestinians would vote for Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh as opposed to 37% for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. The poll also showed that 58% of the Palestinian public supports “armed confrontations and intifada” against Israel.

Abbas and the Palestinian Authority have proven again and again that they hate Israel as much, if not more, than Hamas hates Israel.

There is a dangerously false idea that Abbas or any other Palestinian leader would rein in Hamas in the West Bank. Abbas has no problem with Hamas operating in the West Bank, as long as the terrorist group is targeting Israel, and not him or the Palestinian Authority leadership…. but everyone who lives in the West Bank and Gaza Strip knows that this is a lethal lie.

Creating a Palestinian state in the West Bank would mean turning it into another Iran-led base for Jihad against Jews.

What appears to be missed by many in the West is that it is Israel’s security and civilian presence in the West Bank that is preventing Hamas, or groups such as Al Qaeda or ISIS, from seizing control of the area.

It is high time for Biden and other Western leaders to stop pushing delusional ideas that will quickly lead to a repeat of the October 7 massacre. How many Jewish babies must be beheaded or baked alive in an oven, one wonders, for them to see that Palestinian leaders have radicalized their people against Israel to a point where they brag about slaughtering Jews with their own hands.

Since Hamas’s October 7 massacre, thousands of Palestinians from the West Bank have been taking to the streets almost on a daily basis to voice support for the Iran-backed terrorist group based in the Gaza Strip.

This is the same West Bank that the Biden administration and many Westerners are hoping will be part of a future Palestinian state next to Israel. Those who continue to promote the dangerous idea of a “two-state solution” are ignoring the fact that Hamas is sitting not only in the Gaza Strip, but in the West Bank as well.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20108/france-eu-israel

At the recent European Summit in Brussels, the heads of state and government did not make the call for “humanitarian pauses” conditional on the release of the Israeli and foreign hostages held in Gaza by Hamas.

Thirty-five French citizens were murdered by Hamas on October 7, and nine others are being held hostage (among approximately 230 hostages), but France wants to provide aid to those who are holding them?

Unsurprisingly, according to reports, Hamas has been hoarding the food and medicine intended for the suffering people of Gaza… Cement for “rebuilding Gaza” has instead been diverted to building attack tunnels, and water pipes from the European Union are made into rockets. Hamas has also reportedly hoarded food, water, medicine and fuel, with the fuel being used in their rockets.

Central, however are the hostages. Their release will not be facilitated by a ceasefire or humanitarian corridors; quite the contrary. France and the European Union should have made their aid to Gaza conditional on the hostages’ release, and stated that no “humanitarian” aid will be provided until Hamas releases them. Hamas has created this situation, not Israel.

Last week, with 120 votes in favor, 15 against and 45 abstentions, the United Nations General Assembly passed a shameful resolution calling for a ceasefire and humanitarian corridors in Gaza — without condemning the crimes of Hamas. While four European countries voted against and fifteen abstained (including Germany), France approved a UN General Assembly resolution that makes not even mention of Hamas’s crimes. At the recent European Summit in Brussels, the heads of state and government did not make the call for “humanitarian pauses” conditional on the release of the Israeli and foreign hostages held in Gaza by Hamas.

https://www.commentary.org/articles/norman-podhoretz/jaccuse/

“In the broadside from which I have borrowed the title of this essay, Emile Zola charged that the persecutors of Dreyfus were using anti-Semitism as a screen for their reactionary political designs. I charge here that the anti-Semitic attacks on Israel which have erupted in recent weeks are also a cover. They are a cover for a loss of American nerve. They are a cover for acquiescence in terrorism. They are a cover for the appeasement of totalitarianism. And I accuse all those who have joined in these attacks not merely of anti-Semitism but of the broader sin of faithlessness to the interests of the United States and indeed to the values of Western civilization as a whole.”

The war in Lebanon triggered an explosion of invective against Israel that in its fury and its reach was unprecedented in the public discourse of this country. In the past, unambiguously venomous attacks on Israel had been confined to marginal sectors of American political culture like the Village Voice and the Nation on the far Left and their counterparts in such publications of the far Right as the Liberty Lobby’s Spotlight.

Even when, as began happening with greater and greater frequency after the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel was attacked in more respectable quarters, care was often taken to mute the language or modulate the tone. Usually the attack would be delivered more in sorrow than in anger, and it would be accompanied by sweet protestations of sympathy. The writer would claim to be telling the Israelis harsh truths for their own good as a real friend should, on the evident assumption that he had a better idea than they did of how to insure their security, and even survival.

In perhaps the most notable such piece, George W. Ball (of whom more later) explained to the readers of Foreign Affairs “How to Save Israel in Spite of Herself.” No matter that Ball warned the Israelis that unless they adopted policies they themselves considered too dangerous, he for one would recommend the adoption of other policies by the United States that would leave them naked unto their enemies; no matter that he thereby gave the Israelis a choice, as they saw it, between committing suicide and being murdered: he still represented himself as their loyal friend.

And so it was with a host of other commentators, including prominent columnists like Anthony Lewis of the New York Times, academic pundits like Stanley Hoffmann of Harvard, and former diplomatic functionaries like Harold Saunders. To others it might seem that their persistent hectoring of Israel was making a considerable contribution to the undermining of Israel’s case for American support and thereby endangering Israel’s very existence. Nevertheless they would have all the world know that they yielded to no one in their commitment to the survival of Israel. Indeed, it was they, and not Israel’s “uncritical” supporters, who were Israel’s best friends in this country. As a matter of fact, they were even better friends to Israel than most Israelis themselves who, alas, were their “own worst enemies” (an idea which recently prompted Conor Cruise O’Brien, the former editor of the London Observer, to remark: “Well, I suppose Israelis may be their own worst enemies, but if they are, they have had to overcome some pretty stiff competition for that coveted title”).

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/10/how-i-became-a-zionist/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=more-from-author&utm_term=first

I was not always a Zionist.

That is perhaps not a surprising statement for an Irish Catholic born in the 1970s. Nor for conservatives in general above a certain age. But how I got there is a journey others have taken, and it bears lessons for those taking a fresh look at Israel after October 7.

Out of the Cold War

Israel was for many years a socialist country, and more socially liberal than the United States. Our government has, since 1948, consistently recognized Israel as a sovereign state and supported its right to exist, but that commitment in the past was far less certain than it is today. Early Israeli governments had, for a time, fairly warm relations with the Soviet Union, before the USSR decided that Israeli democracy was a greater liability than Israeli socialism was an asset. For the first three decades of Israel’s existence, America often had more of an arm’s-length relationship with Israel than an alliance.

The overriding imperative of American foreign policy between 1947 and 1990 was the Cold War. That was the foreign-policy framework I grew up with in the 1980s. Rose-colored retrospectives may paint the Reagan era as a time of pristine moral clarity, pitting the Free World against the Evil Empire. And so it was, in its essential character and in important aspects of the rhetoric of Ronald Reagan and his administration. But there was continual agitation over the unsavory anti-communist allies (dictators, human-rights abusers) who made their home under the umbrella of “the Free World.”

This was practically necessary, but it also required us to steel ourselves to a foreign policy that was not always morally pure. Some de facto allies, such as apartheid-era South Africa or Mao’s China after 1972, were sufficiently odious that the United States didn’t quite acknowledge them as allies. Famous neoconservatives such as Jeanne Kirkpatrick argued for the necessity of alliances with authoritarians.

So, it was fashionable, or at least necessary, for Reagan-era Cold Warriors to make their peace with the fact that the choice of allies and enemies around the world was not always just about the fellowship of liberal democracies. It was, like our wartime alliance with Josef Stalin himself, sometimes simply a matter of the enemy of my enemy — in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous phrase, an SOB, but our SOB.

If you looked at things in the coldest light of realpolitik, it seemed strange that we would ally ourselves with Israel at the cost of alienating its many enemies. Israel was one small state, of little or no economic importance at the time, and with no oil. The Arab and Muslim states were numerous, populous, oil-rich, and covering many strategically important corners of the map. Even in spite of their obvious military inefficiency in comparison with the Israelis, it would seem that one would prefer them as allies in a global war if choosing between the two.