RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.thefp.com/p/hamas-war-on-israel-everything-you-need-to-know?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

This piece is being co-published with Tablet. 

The shocking attack in southern Israel this weekend was the most deadly killing of Jews since the Holocaust. The death toll is worse than the worst day of the Yom Kippur War. It is a massacre that will transform Israel and the Middle East.

What happened? How did the most sophisticated military power in the Middle East get brought to its knees? And what will this mean for the Jewish state moving forward? The answer to those questions will be the reckoning of our lifetimes. 

But there are more basic questions that so many are asking. What follows are some answers that explain how we got here and where we might be going.

What is the extent of the attacks? Why are people calling this “Israel’s 9/11”?

More than 700 Israelis have been killed and more than 2,100 wounded in a series of coordinated surprise attacks that occurred inside Israel. The attacks began on the morning of Saturday, October 7. That’s when, according to an IDF spokesman, some 1,000 Hamas terrorists crossed the internationally recognized border between Gaza and Israel and began massacring civilians in at least 14 Israeli towns and communities, entering homes and apartments and killing men, women, and children—including nearly 300 young people who were attending a rave in the desert. 

The scenes of horror and bloodshed that resulted, including the murders of entire families, the kidnapping of small children, and rapes of young women, were seemingly intended to cause maximum anger and shock inside Israel. More than 150 people were seized by the terrorists and taken back into Gaza, where they are being held hostage. They include women, very young children, and the elderly.

To give a sense of the scale of these attacks, 700 dead in a country of 9.3 million people (where everyone knows someone’s cousin) is the equivalent of a terror attack on America in which over 25,000 people were brutally murdered. And not in a single catastrophe: imagine 25,000 Americans killed in various murder sprees across the country. 

https://www.thefp.com/p/delusion-in-the-white-house

As Hamas gunmen were in the initial stages of a raid that has left more than 700 dead, 2,408 wounded, and at least 100 held hostage in Gaza, the U.S. Office of Palestinian Affairs in Jerusalem weighed in on the unfolding horror.

“We unequivocally condemn the attack of Hamas terrorists and the loss of life that has incurred,” the official X account for the office posted. “We urge all sides to refrain from violence and retaliatory attacks. Terror and violence solve nothing.”

Observers of America’s policy in the Middle East will recognize the telltale talking points: the urging of restraint in the face of terror; the implied cycle of violence. The peace process has been dead for years, but the mindset behind it survives.

Let’s be clear. The timing of these diplomatic platitudes was grotesque. Here was the official bureau of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem, which deals with the Palestinian Authority, calling on Israel to refrain from responding to the worst slaughter of innocent Jews since the Holocaust. 

The original post was soon erased. Subsequent statements from President Biden and his senior advisers have dropped the both-sidesism and focused instead on Israel’s right to defend herself.

Nevertheless, this administration has a serious problem. While the official rhetorical response to the attack has been strong, there is a wide chasm between the president’s words and his administration’s actions.

Since taking office, the Biden administration has taken numerous steps to relieve pressure on Hamas and its international patrons as a means of restoring U.S. foreign policy to the way it was under Barack Obama, complete with a resurrected Iran nuclear deal. 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/hamas-sets-a-global-test-for-biden-attack-israel-gaza-iran-dfe8b26c?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

Gaza is burning as Israeli forces methodically proceed to dismantle its structures of terror. The coming retribution will be terrible, but it is necessary and just. Hamas has lost the right to rule Gaza. It must be dismantled and disarmed, and neither Israel nor its neighbors can permit the group to return to power. Despite the best efforts of the Israel Defense Forces, innocent civilians will suffer, and too many will die. Urban warfare against a brutal enemy that doesn’t scruple to use civilians as shields can have no other result, but what is coming to Gaza is not the fault of the IDF.

What will follow the fighting can’t be foreseen. The establishment of a new Palestinian governing authority for the territory, linked to Fatah, closely guarded by Israel and Egypt, and funded by the Gulf states would be perhaps the best outcome for all concerned, but the war must be won before peace can be built.

At best, Gaza’s future seems bleak. More than two million people are crowded into a barren wasteland with few natural resources and little hope. A rational Palestinian leadership would understand that, so situated, the only hope for the people of Gaza lies in close collaboration with Egypt and Israel. It would then settle down to the hard but necessary task of creating an economy that can support its people with dignity and security.

Hamas has had other ideas. The misery and poverty of the Palestinian people is the soil, the only soil, in which a movement this perverted can flourish. Hamas has done all it could to keep Gaza wretched while inculcating an ideology of genocidal rage.

Israelis are temporarily setting their differences aside in the face of this hideous shock, as well they should. But there will be a reckoning in Israel too. Those who missed or misread the signs of danger will be driven ingloriously from office if they lack the grace to resign. A national-security establishment that wasted the past year in frenzied political infighting shouldn’t be allowed to escape harsh public scrutiny. From the prime minister to the intelligence chiefs, those at the helm of Israel’s affairs will have to account for their actions.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/tribe-of-nova-music-festival-massacre-israel-gaza-hamas-war-e21e95ea?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

At dawn Saturday in the Negev desert in southern Israel, a few thousand young revelers were celebrating Simchat Torah, the end of the Jewish holiday season, at the Tribe of Nova music festival. It would soon become the scene of the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust.

A few revelers noticed what seemed to be parachutes descending from the sky, filming them on their phones. Soon they saw trucks of armed men arrive. Then the shooting began, point blank, as the crowds fled for their lives. Those who tried to reach their cars to escape were slaughtered as the Hamas killers waited at the exits. In one festival tent, bodies of the murdered lay piled together where they’d been shot en masse, like the scenes of Jews shot and dumped into ditches in World War II.

Those who fled across the desert were luckier, at least at first, though the killers soon pursued them too. Some hid behind trees and under bushes, according to the accounts of survivors. Others were shot as they fled, some in the legs so they could be taken captive. Readers have seen the videos of captives, some wounded, being carried off to a dungeon in Gaza as hostages.

Israeli rescue groups report finding some 260 bodies at the festival site. The Tribe of Nova massacre joins other mass murders of the innocent that history should never forget. Stalin’s massacre of Polish officers in the Katyn forest comes to mind, as does the Nazi execution of thousands of Jews at Babi Yar in 1941.

It’s another reminder that the arc of history may be long but it doesn’t always bend toward justice. It often points toward mayhem and injustice when the baser instincts of human nature and murderous ambition are left unchecked by civilized nations. In a world where might is allowed to determine right, the innocent aren’t spared. Let’s hope hundreds or thousands more won’t have to die before we relearn this ancient lesson.

https://www.commentary.org/john-podhoretz/first-thoughts-on-the-war/

Israel spent the past couple of years in a martial daze in which it did not take full measure of Hamas’s ideas and purposes and intentions and capabilities. That will be the subject of the post-war examination inside Israel of what happened this weekend. That examination is likely to create an entirely new political reality—and may wash away two generations of highly flawed leaders. The years during which those leaders argued to stalemate about almost everything will likely be viewed as the slow-acting poison that made possible the horrors of October 7, 2023—the single day on which more Jews died and were wounded than any other since the Nazi death camps eight decades ago.

Still, people who always want to lay some blame on Israel for the threats against it are leaning rather heavily on the talking point that this is an “intelligence failure”—as though Israel somehow summoned this evil upon itself and therefore what we should talk about is what Israel did wrong. That’s like if the law blamed someone for a massacre committed against their family in their house because of a faulty lock. The victim of the massacre will spend the rest of his life tearing himself apart for not having dealt with the lock, and will suffer greatly as a result. But he is not guilty of the crime. The murderer is the criminal, and we can never forget that.

The task for Israel now is to destroy Hamas. This is not just like how it’s a police department’s job to find the perpetrator of the massacre. This is something much larger and far more fundamental. There can be no lesser a response than the destruction of Hamas by the Jewish state—because this was one of the bloodiest pogroms in human history. Hamas infiltrators took Jews and slaughtered Jews en masse. As I write the death toll from a single morning‘s activities is well above 700, with thousands more injured. There is no difference here, even numerically, from the horrifyingly countless stories of the Nazi forces moving into a town in Poland, rounding up the Jews, making them dig a trench, and then murdering them with gunfire in the trench.

https://thefederalist.com/2023/10/09/if-democrats-dont-want-blame-for-appeasing-iran-and-hamas-they-should-stop-doing-it/

Terrorists keep telling us their intentions, and the left keeps pretending they’re bluffing.

There will be much more to say on the heart-wrenching massacre in Israel, the worst attack on Jewish civilians since the Holocaust and one of the most heinous acts of terror in decades.

Right now, though, many on the left seem upset that conservatives are pointing out that the last two Democratic administrations have appeased and funded the terror states responsible for the attack that has killed hundreds, if not thousands, of Israelis and at least  nine Americans.

There is, most obviously, Joe Biden’s recent $6 billion gift to the mullahs.

“Not a single cent from these funds has been spent, and when it is spent, it can only be spent on things like food and medicine for the Iranian people,” a White House National Security Council spokeswoman said. This pathetic and pedantic deflection was repeated endlessly by the president’s defenders. Even a child understands the concept of fungibility. It is true that Hamas didn’t spend that exact funding on their terror proxies. Islamic fascists, like everyone else, make fiscal plans with an eye on future earnings and spending. And the hostage-taking business happens to be booming.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/10/08/cheerleaders-for-hamas/

First, the horror. No sooner had Hamas rolled into Israel on Saturday, murdering and kidnapping those they came across, than images of their depraved exploits were plastered across social media. Innocent people executed on the streets. A pensioner kidnapped and driven into Gaza on a golf buggy. A young woman’s lifeless body, stripped almost naked, paraded on the back of a pick-up truck as men spat on her and chanted ‘Allahu Akbar’. Ordinary people slaughtered and taken for no other crime than being Israeli, than being Jewish. Then, the sewer. Just as social media had confronted us with such unspeakable evil, it then confronted us with those in the West who looked upon these barbaric, blood-thirsty scenes – from the comfort of safe homes 2,000 miles away – and thought to themselves: Good.

We have become accustomed to Hamas apologism from the woke left. They have long responded to the atrocities of this Islamist outfit with a knowing ‘What do you expect?’. Their delusional, bigoted conviction that Israel is the most evil state on Earth, that unlike every other nation under attack it has no right to exist or defend itself, has time and again led them to make excuses for Hamas’ genocidal lunatics – whose founding charter committed them to ‘struggle against the Jews’ and whose leading lights call on Palestinians to ‘cut off the heads of the Jews with knives’. There was plenty of that apologism yesterday. ‘Reap what you sow’, tweeted Jackie Walker, former vice-chair of Momentum, who was expelled from the Labour Party in 2019. But that soon began to look tame by comparison. Apologism gave way to cheerleading. ‘Today should be a day of celebration for supporters of democracy and human rights worldwide’, tweeted Novara Media’s Rivkah Brown, ‘as Gazans break out of their open-air prison and Hamas fighters cross into their colonisers’ territory. The struggle for freedom is rarely bloodless and we shouldn’t apologise for it.’ Yes, Hamas, those theocratic thugs, anti-Semitic killers, oppressors of women and gay people, are apparently champions of freedom and democracy. To call this deranged is too generous. This is psychopathic. But the brain rot wasn’t confined to Brown. ‘All eyes on Palestine in its heroic moment of resistance against the Zionist occupation’, tweeted Pawel Wargan, coordinator of the secretariat of Progressive International. (Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell sit on its council.) Disgraced ex-Labour MP Chris Williamson called Hamas ‘freedom fighters’.

It was shocking, but wholly unsurprising. That the Labour left has lost the plot on the Israel-Palestine conflict is a profound understatement. Corbyn’s Labour flushed out so many examples of alleged left-wingers making excuses for Hamas, or indulging Islamist anti-Semites, that we almost became numb to it all. Indeed, that a man who once referred to Hamas as his ‘friends’; who once invited Raed Salah, a man convicted for repeating the blood libel, to have tea in the House of Commons; who once gave a speech at a demonstration, yards away from an inflatable effigy of an anti-Semitic caricature – complete with horns, hooked nose and claws – is still considered the cuddly, grandfatherly standard-bearer of the left shows how morally and politically bankrupt the left now is. That more of his fellow travellers have gone from making excuses for Hamas to openly cheering it on was perhaps inevitable.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/10/09/reflections-on-israels-new-existential-war/

There have been plenty of terrorist attacks on Israel. A dozen or so conventional wars of various magnitude have been waged against the Jewish state. And more often there have been mixtures of both.

Yet never have hundreds of gangs of black-clad murderers carefully planned to swarm Israel, with an agenda to pull random Jews out of their homes and off the street, murder them, and toss their bodies in the street.

In fact, the closest parallel to the sort of methods Hamas is now embracing is something close to the Rwanda 1994 mass killing, when swarms of Hutu militia killers launched a preplanned murder spree against thousands of Tutsi civilians.

Note one common theme of these horrific videos of the murdering of young women: the bloodthirst of the Gaza crowd. There appears a natural desire of everyday Gazans to video the mutilations, an embrace of the spitting on the doomed, a frenzied effort to mutilate the dead—and the absence of a single Gazan objecting to the group murder of a civilian.

Hamas did not act out of the ordinary, but in sync with its people. In truth, there is something so terribly wrong in Gaza that the United States should keep as far away as it can from such barbarity—and hope that it too feels the same about America and keeps to itself.

So again why did Hamas mount such a long-planned and multifaceted assault on Israeli towns, public buildings, soldiers, and civilians?

The invasion was not so much a surprise attack, in the conventional Pearl Harbor sense, as a carefully calibrated land, sea, and ground effort at mass killing and hostage taking. It was designed to execute noncombatants, grab Jews for bargaining leverage, and to shock Israelis through their pre-civilizational desecration of the bodies of the dead.

It targeted first a youth concert near the border, on the theory the cowardly killers could gain maximum media traction and Arab solidarity by sensationally butchering and kidnapping helpless adolescents. Will the murderers in the weeks ahead transfer their killing zeal to attacks on the IDF? They will soon have their long desired and ample opportunity to showcase to the world their bravado as they face real soldiers and not unarmed elderly and youth.

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As Israel secures its territory and repels Iran’s terrorist proxy, Hamas, the war will shift almost exclusively to Israel’s efforts to eradicate Hamas in Gaza.  That is when the Nazi propaganda machine will kick into high gear.

Hamas specifically intermingles its military targets with civilian sights like schools, hospitals, and apartment buildings.  Hamas transports weapons and troops in ambulances and school buses.  This strategy is specifically designed to maximize the civilian casualties inside Gaza and to create images for news outlets to run to show the “barbarity” of the “Zionists” as they kill “innocent civilians.”  To be clear, while the Israel Defense Forces stand between the country’s enemies and its civilians to protect their lives, Iran’s Nazi proxies, Hamas, hides behind Palestinian civilians to ensure as many of them die as possible. 

For decades, a willing, ignorant, and in many cases, malevolent media, has taken the bait.  We have already seen the New York Times lay the groundwork for this strategy in its headline announcing the war when it described Hamas as “Palestinian Militants.”   They are militants like the Nazi SS, Al Qaeda, and ISIS are militants.  These are not militants.  These are Nazis. 

There is no moral equivalence between the Nazis in Tehran and Gaza on the one hand, and Israel on the other.  Like Hitler, the Iranian government and Hamas are attacking Western Civilization.   Israel is fighting our war.  Israel must win.  And like Hitler, the Mullahs in Tehran and Hamas, must end up on the ash heap of history. 

Hamas cannot win an all-out military confrontation with Israel.  Therefore, it will quickly pivot to a propaganda war.  Iran and Hamas can only win that war if the American public is uninformed and the American media defaults to its past behavior of showing one side of the conflict.  The media has no problem showing dead Jews and bemoaning the deaths of innocents.  However, when Jews defend themselves, that is when they are no longer worthy of sympathy in the eyes of many in the media.  There is no greater sin to the Progressive left than Jews that will not allow themselves to be victims. 

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2014/09/air-raid-shelters-road-masada/

This essay originally appeared in our September 2014 edition.
It is reprized as a reminder that, for Israel and the Jews,
when things change they get even worse

The road to Masada, my road at any rate, began not in Jerusalem but three weeks earlier in Northcote, that quiet, secure and exquisitely fashionable suburb on the outer edge of inner-city Melbourne, where a dinner invitation saw the table talk soon turn to Israel. The television news that night had led with reports from Gaza—images of rockets heading north interspersed with grim-faced Israelis asserting that enough was enough. “You can’t support Israel, surely not?” marvelled a fellow guest, a chap with some sort of academic sinecure who had begun airing his impeccably righteous views well before the crudités were whisked away.

If you watch ABC television, listen to Radio National or once read Mike Carlton in the Sydney Morning Herald, there will be no need to cite another word or talking point, for it was all there in my fellow guest’s laundry list of the lockstep Left’s latest crusades and grievances. Had it not been for the irregular sprays of spittle that marked his more animated complaints, he might have been a life-size example of those talking dolls with the programmed catchphrases small children expect and enjoy. Just pull the string and out the clichés tumble to their immediate delight.

“Seriously,” he continued, “I’ve got nothing against Jews, except when they act like Nazis.” This observation passed for wit, and the table was ringed with wry smiles at Zionism’s evil being so pithily laid bare. Our hostess was a lovely woman, someone whose passions run hotter for hemlines and health fads, and this being Melbourne, her favourite football team, than international affairs. She had laboured long and hard to prepare the evening’s fare, so rather than ruin her night, to my shame I let the comment pass with nothing more muscular than a meek and muttered, “That’s not really fair.” If there is a book of postmodern etiquette it must surely advise that taking up such a gauntlet is best done over dessert, when harsh words can no longer ruin a fine main course of well-cooked organic beef.

On the way home, modern Melbourne was John Batman’s sleepy village: light traffic, no perils but for unilluminated cyclists and those low-rise roundabouts which town planners have insisted on placing at nearly every intersection. If there was a moment of anxiety it came at the roadblock near the zoo in Royal Park, but it was only a sobriety checkpoint manned by Victoria Police with their blow-in-this demands. It is an ostentatiously safe place, this city on the Yarra, protected from unpleasantness and peril at every round-the-roundabout turn of life’s daily journeys. Safe to live and raise a family, to pursue love if that joy is not already yours. And safe, too, to mount abstraction’s pulpit and sermonise from the great heights of moral clarity, as the blowhard from the ivory tower earlier demonstrated, about the murderous shortcomings of others in a distant and far, far more perilous land.