RUTHFULLY YOURS

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

https://www.city-journal.org/article/western-medias-moral-equivalence

The horror of the events that took place in Israel this past weekend is still sinking in. Such atrocities, deliberately videoed and broadcast for the world to see, reveal a pathological mindset. It is also a harbinger of far worse to come unless we face the truth: far from constituting a clash of civilizations, these attacks repudiate civilization.

Sponsored by Iran, Hamas has little ideology beyond hatred, but hatred is ideology enough when your adversary fails to understand the multifaceted war being waged against it. For decades, Islamists, trained first by the Nazis and later by the KGB, learned how to manipulate the instruments of political warfare. By coopting naïve Western elites to embrace anti-Western, anti-Israeli, anti-Zionist, and anti-Semitic memes, they’ve gradually succeeded beyond their wildest initial expectations.

True to form, the mainstream media in the West covered the attacks with soulless rhetoric. The New York Times, for example, refused to apply the word “terrorists” to the murderers, even as images of the atrocities flooded social media. The Washington Post, PBS, NPR, and Reuters all opted for the far milder “militants.”

An antiseptic moral equivalence infuses mainstream media coverage in the West. Reports routinely take pains to emphasize that there are victims on both sides. Hours after the invasion, PBS’s NewsHour announced, “In an unprecedented surprise attack, the militant Hamas rulers of Gaza sent dozens of fighters into Israel by land, sea, and air,” but then followed with this laconic statement: “Hundreds of Israelis and Palestinians are reported dead between the attack and Israel’s retaliatory airstrikes on Gaza cities.” Similarly, the Washington Post noted that “[t]he death toll has risen to 700 in Israel and thousands have been injured, according to local media, while Palestinian authorities said at least 370 were killed and 2,200 injured in Gaza.” On October 9, too, the New York Times and the Washington Post duly reported death totals on both sides.

In a New York Times editorial, “The Global Context of the Hamas–Israel War,” we see two photos: one of a boy running against a background of unidentified burning buildings far in the distance, from Ashkelon in Israel; the other, with no location provided, shows “a Palestinian mother [crying] next to the body of her son.” The asymmetry of pity on display in the pairing is clear. From these contrasting photos, are we meant to understand that the greater fault lies with Israel and, ultimately, America?

https://www.jns.org/acts-of-courage-amid-horror-israelis-rise-to-occasion/

Israelis caught in the murderous rampage by Hamas terrorists demonstrated heroism, determination and fortitude.

As Hamas terrorists made their savage way through Israel’s south, slaughtering more than 1,300 people and displaying the worst humanity has to offer, Israeli men and women carried out countless acts of courage.

For some it was their final act. Kibbutz Be’eri’s 22-year-old paramedic insisted on staying and helping the wounded, then hid for six hours in the clinic’s kitchenette grasping a knife, waiting (like so many) for help that never came. As the terrorists closed in, she texted her last words to her sister, “I love you.”

There was the young couple from Kibbutz Kfar Aza, who hid their 10-month-old twins in their safe room before engaging in a hopeless fight with the well-armed terrorists.

Or the old-timers, former IDF officers, now grandfathers and great-grandfathers, who sped south to engage the enemy, killing dozens.

Doubtless many more acts of bravery went unseen and unheralded

Here are a few that have made it to the headlines:

1. The heroine of Nir Am

Inbal Liberman, 25, saved her entire kibbutz from the gruesome fate of many other kibbutzim in the region.

Serving as military security coordinator of Kibbutz Nir Am since December 2022, Liberman heard explosions on Saturday morning, the day of Hamas’s sneak attack.

Inbal realized that the explosions were different from the rocket attacks that she had become accustomed to. With little time to spare—Kibbutz Nir Am is located just a stone’s throw from the Gaza Strip, just over a half mile—she rushed to open the kibbutz armory.

She distributed weapons to her 12-man security team, made up of other kibbutz members, arranged them along the kibbutz fence and set ambushes for the terrorists.

When the bloodthirsty killers arrived, expecting another easy slaughter, they got the surprise of their lives. The security team gunned down 20—Liberman herself killed five—as the Hamas murderers encountered a wall of fire.