RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.thefp.com/p/the-untold-stories-of-gazans?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Watch this video of a grieving woman in Gaza cry out. She says: “All this is because of the dogs of Hamas.” She’s immediately—literally—silenced.

Why?

Since taking power in a 2007 coup, Hamas has violently repressed all opposition to its rule. There is much to repress: recent Palestinian survey data shows most Gazans distrust Hamas, want an alternative government, and prefer economic development over war. But their individual voices are rarely heard. Those who speak out face prison and torture.

In the first episode, a resident of Gaza City shares widespread Palestinian anxiety that international humanitarian aid for Gaza will not reach the people who need it. In Gazans’ experience, he says, “When Hamas distributes the aid, only Hamas members get the aid.” The same applies to Gaza’s healthcare system, where “Hamas families get preferential treatment” and even the most urgent needs of others “could be delayed for a long time so that Hamas loyalists are treated first.”

Some foreign journalists try to cover these voices but face deportation for doing so, while others show little interest in Palestinian grievances unrelated to the conflict with Israel.

My organization, the Center for Peace Communications, has been helping the population breach this communications blackout by interviewing Palestinians across the Strip, from all walks of life, about their travails and aspirations. A mother who dreams of her children getting a proper education. A photojournalist punished for taking pictures. A young couple who hopes to start a family, outside of Gaza. 

Earlier this year, we released their testimony in a series called Whispered in Gaza: 25 short segments, using video animation to protect their identities, accompanied by Gazan polling, rights reports, and reportage.

Following the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, we reconnected with these and other Gazans to gather new testimony. We sought to understand their reaction to the Hamas assault and their views of the developing war, and to document their struggle to survive amid cascading tragedies. 

We are partnering with The Free Press to showcase their voices in a new series called Voices from Gaza, which you can watch below. 

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/11/we-will-defend-ourselves/

PUBLISHED IN AUSTRALIA

We did not think we would ever see such sights in Israel. Helpless Jews—women, children, the elderly—tormented, raped, torched alive, beheaded, and mutilated. There is much that has not yet been made public, and may only reach few, because the gore is not just incomprehensible, but actually traumatising. In some of the worst footage the victims are recognisable, and so they have to be kept away from the public eye lest the victims’ families witness their loved ones tortured and killed. We are faced with Nazi-scale atrocities—inhuman barbarism.

It goes without saying that any civilised person would be deeply shocked. But that does not even begin to describe how this horror played on the collective Israeli psyche, indeed the Jewish psyche in general.

For two millennia, Jews have been helpless. When anti-Semitism swelled and rose around them, they could only try to flee or beg for mercy. They rarely had the chance or the means to organise and resist. Jewish history since the fall of the Second Temple reads like a string of expulsions and pogroms culminating with the Holocaust. The promise of Zionism, the promise of Israel, was therefore Never Again.

By Never Again, Zionism did not mean that Jews would be spared hate, or wars, or even violent death. Rather Zionism meant that we will defend ourselves or die trying. This is so deeply ingrained in the spirit of anyone who grew up under the influence of Zionism that it is an instinct, an existential orientation towards life and death, more than it is a thought or an ideology.

The late Hebrew University professor of history Zeev Sternhell was a child in a ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland. From a hiding place, in a hole in the ground, he saw Jews hunted like animals in the streets, men and women fleeing and shot in the back, shot children falling from treetops where they tried to hide. He survived, migrated to Israel and later served in the Israel Defense Forces. In an interview he gave to journalist Ari Shavit in 2008 in Haaretz he said that when he saw friends and men under his command die in battle, he thought that:

at least they died like human beings. They didn’t die being hunted on the streets. For me the state of Israel is not a political affair. It is something far more fundamental. Far more basic. It is a return to being human. A return to living like a human being. Because there, in the ghetto, there was a loss … of your human identity. You ceased to be a person altogether.

https://www.thefp.com/p/tgif-nellie-bowles-useful-idiots?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

EXCERPTS

 War escalating: Rockets have started flying from Yemen toward Israel, as Iran-backed Houthi rebels (who control the country’s capital) enter the fray. Rockets are also being launched toward Israel by Hezbollah in Lebanon. China’s Baidu (basically Google but more so) removed Israel from its maps. And TikTok’s 150 million users in the U.S. were held like foie gras geese and fed pro-Hamas propaganda through their eye holes. Never before has a foreign adversary had a direct line to feed agitprop into the youth of their enemy, and that’s what China has with TikTok, the viral video app managed by (call me crazy) the Chinese Communist Party.

It seems fitting that all our national defense—the world’s greatest army!—was outsmarted by an app shimmying into our lives with fun viral dance videos, makeup tutorials, and instructional videos on how to have dissociative identity disorder. There’s a great new essay by tech entrepreneur and investor Sam Lessin: “TikTok needs to go.” 

Hamas’s useful idiots: There are a lot of hardened antisemites in this world, but there are also a lot of sweet dumb people who like to go along with things, and that brings us, this week, to a Senate hearing. A group of protesters from CODEPINK, no doubt among whom are some very nice people, directed by some savvy activists, painted their hands red and sat in a Senate Appropriations Committee meeting calling for Israel to declare a cease-fire. They were told to raise their hands up high and they did. Perhaps what they didn’t realize is that the image mirrored a very famous moment. . . of celebrating murder. After a mob in Ramallah lynched two Israeli soldiers, one of the Palestinian men involved raised his hands to show the Jewish blood to a cheering crowd. Do I think the Senate protesters had any idea? No. Or at least, I hope not. But wow: imagine being a Hamas leader right now in some plush Qatar hotel looking at these Americans mimicking that celebration. It’s incredible! And college kids chanting for jihad and praising the martyrs. Could Hamas have ever imagined how successful October 7 would be for them? 
 

Or watch these peaceful protesters try to lead a group in London cheering: “Khaybar ya yahud.” Which means: “Jews remember Khaybar,” where Muslims defeated a Jewish community. Repeat after me, guys! 5, 6, 7, 8!

Here is Ghazi Hamad, of Hamas’s political bureau, on Lebanese TV on October 24: “Israel is a country that has no place on our land. We must remove that country. . . . We are not afraid to say this with full force. . . . We must teach Israel a lesson and we will do it again and again. The Al-Aqsa flood is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth. . . . We are called a nation of martyrs and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs.” The television interviewer asks: “Does that mean the annihilation of Israel?” Response from Hamas chief: “Yes of course. The existence of Israel is illogical.” 

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.