RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-late-great-hamas-finally-got-its-wish/

Ever since Hamas was “elected” to run Gaza and then followed the usual “one election/one time” Middle East formula, it has bragged nonstop that its agenda is to erase Israel off the face of the earth (cf. the wall map in the office of our Rep. Rashida Tlaib).

Its unabashed nihilist boasts resonated throughout the Palestinian “movement.” Its fiery threats delighted the Arab street.

Indeed, Hamas was soon celebrated as the most “authentic” of the radical Palestinian terrorist movements.

Which cadre of thugs could top its end-of-days rhetoric, its assured and steady supply of money and weapons from Iran, its satanic eagerness to mutilate and dismember, and the sanctuary and financial wherewithal offered to it by our “ally” Qatar?

None.

Since Hamas was viewed as the most “volatile” and creepy of the Palestinian factions, and the most useful to Iran, the Obama and Biden administrations appeased the murderers. Was it not part of their hare-brained grand strategy of empowering theocratic Iran and its Syrian, Hezbollah and Hamas hirelings?

Their campaign (remember the “they literally know nothing” media and the Obama “echo chamber” created by a boastful Ben Rhodes?) was to forge these disparate Islamists into a crescent of resistance to Israel and any “moderate” Arab regime (recall the Obama-Biden transitory hatred of the Gulf sheikdoms).

The result would be “creative tension”—as well as payback for the Israeli election of Netanyahu.

Through this formula, Obama believed he could always pressure Israel to grant concessions to radical Palestinians thanks to the looming threat of an ever-menacing (and soon-to-be nuclear) Iran with help from Obama’s other friends—the then-Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt and Obama’s pal the neo-Ottomanist and antisemite Erdogan of Turkey, Obama’s self-described personal liaison to the Islamic world.

Yes, this was sheer madness—if perhaps characteristic of Obama’s well-known orneriness.

Perhaps someday soon, a few disinterested historians might even record that the current nightmare in Israel is the logical end result of what Barack Obama, John Kerry (remember his Trump-era Paris reconnaissance with the Iranians?), Ben Rhodes, Valerie Jarrett, Robert Malley, Joe Biden, Antony Blinken and a host of other incompetent but otherwise haughty and dangerous people once conjured up.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-truth-behind-humanitarian-aid-to-gaza/

In response to the Hamas attack on Israel, the Israeli government shut off Gazans’ access to its country’s electricity, food, and water. The move has drawn the expected condemnation of self-described proponents of human rights, such as Bernie Sanders, who said in a statement on Wednesday that “Israel’s blanket denial of food, water, and other necessities to Gaza is a serious violation of international law and will do nothing but harm innocent civilians.”

It’s worth diving into what happens when Israel does send humanitarian aid across the border into the Gaza Strip. As Hamas itself has publicly shared, the terrorist organization turns water pipes into rockets to fire at Israel. 

Not only does Hamas appropriate Israeli aid to turn it into weapons, it actively impedes Israel’s ability to deliver supplies that would increase Gazans’ quality of life. As former Israeli ambassador to the United States Michael Oren explains, Israel sends 1,200 truckloads of humanitarian assistance to its border with Gaza each month. Hamas allows only 400 trucks through. It is not Israel that is to blame for Gazans’ suffering but the terrorist organization it elected as its leadership in 2006 that fully took over the region the following year.

Another point of contention for many in the West is the idea that Israel deliberately targets high-density civilian areas in Gaza. This argument overlooks the fact that Hamas has ordered Gazans to ignore Israel’s calls for evacuation to more sparsely populated areas within the Strip. Not only is Hamas purposely throwing the people it purports to represent directly into the line of fire, it also uses them as human shields. It builds its infrastructure in those high-density areas, storing weaponry and building bases inside hospitals, schools, mosques, and United Nations buildings.

Israel will not let Hamas win the physical war. It’s important that we don’t let it win the information war, either.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2023-10-11-unique-hatred-for-jews-and-israel-among-the-trendy-western-left

“I won’t try to justify everything that Israel has done, but I think there is no doubt that Israel needs to take aggressive steps to control ongoing violence and atrocities against their citizens. The steps taken by Israel are not remotely comparable to the real genocides and ethnic cleansings regularly carried out by Muslims against members of all other religions in their midst. Why the trendy Left never criticizes any of this, and reserves its ire uniquely for Israel, I cannot explain.”

Among the trendy Left, and particularly on elite academic campuses, hatred of Israel, and by association of all Jews, has long been on the ascendant. The Anti-Defamation League traces the origins of the “Boycott, Divest, Sanctions” movement against Israel to the early 2000s. By the time we get to the most recent ten years, every elite academic institution has multiple student groups and scores of faculty members advocating for delegitimizing Israel as oppressors of the Palestinians, or even as an “apartheid state.”

And thus the current wave of atrocities perpetrated by Hamas against Israel has brought out statements of support from some 30+ student groups at Harvard, from the Student Bar Association at NYU, from a group of students at Stanford, and many other such around the country.

In the bigger picture, the treatment of Israel and Israeli Jews by Muslims is not at all unique. Around the world, the fact is that the Islamic religion and its members are not tolerant of members of other religions. And by “not tolerant,” I mean, absolutely willing to kill to force the non-believers to conform. I’m not saying that all adherents to the Muslim faith are so intolerant; but many are, and the rest support the intolerant ones, either explicitly or implicitly. The world is full of news — very sparsely reported by our dominant press — of persecution and killings of members of any and all other religions by Muslims when they are in a dominant position. Although our press systematically suppresses information on this subject — as they do with almost everything that it is important to know about — this activity is sufficiently widespread that it is inexcusable for well-informed people not to know about it.

https://bit.ly/46Mg5PK

No common-sense-observer of the volcanic Middle East and Islamic terrorism, in general, and Hamas/Palestinian terrorism, in particular, should be shocked by the October 2023 Hamas’ atrocities, which are not driven by the size of Israel and its policy, but by the aim to uproot the “infidel” Jewish State from the “abode of Islam.”

Ignoring the nature of Hamas

*Significant elements in Israeli, the US and Western policy-making and national security and the intelligence establishment have been in denial of the nature of Palestinian terrorism, as the Western establishment has been in denial of the megalomaniacally rogue nature of Iran’s Ayatollahs regime since its ascension to power in February 1979.

*They have eagerly attempted to pacify Hamas. However, they failed to realize the pivotal role of the 1,400-year-old fanatic, anti-Western ideology of Hamas, which views Israel as the beachhead of the “infidel” Western culture in the Middle East.  

*Their eagerness to advance the cause of peace has led them to sacrifice the frustratingly complex Middle East reality on the altar of a convenient, virtual reality, as was the case in the Israeli-initiated (and Western embraced) 1993 Oslo Accord and the 2005 Gaza Disengagement, which catapulted Palestinian terrorism to unprecedented intensity, paving the road to the 2023 atrocities of Hamas.

*They have based their approach to Hamas – as the Western policy has approached Iran’s Ayatollahs – on the assumption that generous financial benefits would induce Hamas to alter its order of priorities, and prefer standard of living considerations over its core, zealot ideology. They believed that dramatic economic gestures could lead Hamas to eventually comply with agreements, accept a reality of a manageable low-intensity conflict, or even peaceful-coexistence with Israel.

The centrality of the Hamas covenant

The world is full of horror: Tribal wars in African nations such as Congo with millions of victims, which Nicholas Kristoff, to his credit, revealed in columns and a documentary, just don’t capture the high dudgeon of those who sanction the violence and arson occasioned by the death of one individual George Floyd.

However, when it comes to the world’s only Jewish state, a freewheeling democracy, attacked by monsters, does moral equivalence grip the hypocritical critics of Israel’s response in the media and academia. Those who decry “blame the victim” in every other scenario, real or perceived, indulge in it endlessly when it comes to Israel.

And what I call “standby antisemitism”is instantly deployed. rsk