RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/israels-9-11/

In Norway, where I live, there is a very useful word: ukultur.  

Kultur, of course, means culture. Ukultur is the word for a culture that lacks, well, culture.

Which is to say, a culture that preaches, and practices, barbarism.

There is no greater ukultur on Earth than Islam.

And in the entire Islamic world, there is no denser concentration of ukultur than in the Gaza Strip.

For decades, America and other Western nations have poured extraordinary sums of cash into that tiny area in the utterly misbegotten expectation that the savages who live there, if handed enough money, will choose to civilize themselves.

This notion has never been anything less than insanity.

Why? Here’s why.

Islam, even at its best, is nothing to write home about. It’s a violence-obsessed ideology, masquerading as a peaceful religion, that preaches the conquest and murder of infidels.

In some parts of the Muslim world, Islam is less violent than in others.

But in the Gaza Strip, under Hamas, the terrorist organization that has governed it since 2007, Islam dials up to eleven.

Being that close to the Jewish enemy – even though the Jewish enemy supplies everything from water to emergency health care to Gazans – must make the Jew-hatred just too much to contain.

Hence the walls and fences. Hence the Iron Dome, which apparently failed this time around.

And yet the dollars and euros and pounds and kroner have kept on flowing to these monsters with nothing but Jew-hatred on their minds.

And not just to Hamas, but also to Iran, which helps fund Hamas.

https://www.thefp.com/p/i-was-at-a-music-festival-when-the?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

My friends and I love trance music, so when we heard about a 16-hour party in the desert, with DJs coming in from abroad, we bought tickets and drove down from the northern part of Israel. We arrived on Friday night at around 11 p.m. and set up camp.

The event was held a few miles from the Gaza border, but there was no announcement from the army that the area was under threat, or anything like that. The event was amazing. We stayed up all night, and around 6:30 we were still on the dance floor. DJ NoFace was playing his set when we heard rockets above us—it almost seemed like fireworks—and the words Tzeva Adom, or Code Red, over and over. 

Arad and his friend, who was later shot by terrorists while fleeing the festival. (Courtesy of the author)

I realized what was happening, that we were in the worst possible place—in a crowd of people in the middle of a flat expanse—and that we needed to get out of there immediately.

My friends and I packed into our car and drove as fast as we could. We saw rockets falling from the sky all around us. We tried to make jokes and keep it calm among us. My commander—I’m 20, so I’m in the army, in an intelligence unit—texted to ask if I was okay, and I texted back, joking, “Yeah. I’m fine, I’m in Gaza.” 

Two minutes later, we were on the highway. This part happened so quickly that it’s hard for me to remember every detail. Three terrorists surrounded our car and started shooting. We all ducked immediately, and all I could hear was ringing. Bullets had torn up the side of my car, which my friend was still driving. 

One of my friends was shot in his thigh, but we kept moving. Soon, maybe a minute later, we saw someone in a uniform ahead. He looked like a security guard. Next to him was a white car with a machine gun attached to it. The next thing I knew, he was pointing the gun at us and shooting. Again, we all ducked. 

https://www.thefp.com/p/war-in-israel-michael-oren-explains-db5

On October 7, Hamas terrorists streamed across the border in pickup trucks, on foot, by motorcycle, and even on paragliders. Once inside Israel, they abducted and murdered Israelis. They shot people in cars and at bus stops, they rounded up women and children into rooms like Einsatzgruppen—yes, the comparison is appropriate—and machine-gunned them. They went house to house to find and murder civilians hiding in their closets, and they dragged the bloody, dead bodies of Israelis back into Gaza where they are now being paraded, beaten, and mutilated in front of exultant crowds. 

The official numbers as of this writing: 300 Israelis killed and 1,590 wounded. And dozens—maybe many more—taken hostage into Gaza. They include women, elders, and children. 

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyuahu called it a “black day.” He said that “what happened today has never been seen before in Israel.” Think about 9/11 and the kind of shock and terror we felt. That is the level of devastation Israel is now experiencing. 

We are left with so many questions: How did this happen? Who is to blame for this catastrophic security failure? How will Israel respond? How will Israel save the hostages in Gaza? What was the extent of Iran’s involvement in this sophisticated operation? Will this change the Biden administration’s policy toward the Islamic Republic? And so many more.

Some of those questions will be answered in the coming days and weeks. For today, historian and former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren helps us make sense of the unfolding crisis.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

https://www.thefp.com/p/today-is-israels-911

I am going to describe the images coming out of Israel over the last 12 hours. I don’t want to believe any of them are real, because they are horrifying, among the most gruesome scenes of mutilation, murder, and abduction imaginable. But there is now going to be a war between Israel and Hamas—and possibly a broader regional war. Israel will invade Gaza. As we speak, Israelis my age are being called up to war. Some of them are my friends.

Within two or three days, the media narrative will change, as it does every time, and the grisly invasion that started the war quickly will be minimized into a half sentence of euphemistic dishonesty in press accounts (“an incursion by Gaza-based militants”) so that the focus can turn to prosecuting Israel. 

This is part of why everyone needs to know about the images—the ones you won’t see if you turn on MSNBC or the BBC today. Because so much of the media and Western foreign policy officialdom do not want to embarrass the Palestinians by showing the sadistic brutality of Hamas. They do not want to undermine the coming effort to pressure Israel to stop fighting. They do not want people to notice the Iranian role in the war and how it is fueled by an appallingly dangerous Biden administration policy toward the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.

So that is why you need to know.

When Hamas invaded Israel this morning, terrorists streamed across the border in pickup trucks, by motorcycle, on foot, and even on paragliders. Once inside Israel, they abducted and murdered Israelis. They shot people in cars and at bus stops, they rounded up women and children into rooms like Einsatzgruppen—yes, the comparison is appropriate—and machine-gunned them. They went house to house to find and murder civilians hiding in their closets, and they dragged the bloody, dead bodies of Israelis back into Gaza where they are now being paraded, beaten, and mutilated in front of exultant crowds. 

One young woman was murdered and stripped to her underwear, and her corpse was thrown in the back of a pickup truck so it could be paraded around Gaza while young Hamas men beat and mutilated her body. 

Hamas terrorists attacked a music festival in the desert. Dozens were killed and injured, and many more are missing. Footage shows young Israelis running for their lives. 

https://www.thefp.com/p/today-is-israels-911-db6?utm_campaign=email-post&r=333m6&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

You are about to withstand a barrage of lies about the war that broke out today in Israel.

Some of those lies will be explicit. Some of them will be lies of omission. Others will be lies of obfuscation. Or lies of minimization. Lies told by people who are simply too afraid to look at such an ugly, barbarous reality. And lies told by people whose true beliefs are too ugly to quite say aloud. Turn on cable news and you can hear some of them right now.

So let’s get some facts straight.

Israel was attacked last night. It was attacked by Hamas terrorists who streamed over the border from Gaza. They came on foot and on motorbikes. They came by truck and by car and by paraglider. They came to Israel to murder and maim and mutilate anyone they could find. And that is what they did.

It is impossible to know the numbers of the dead or the missing or the injured. 

The official numbers as of this writing: 300 Israelis dead; 1,590 wounded. And dozens—maybe many more—taken hostage into Gaza. They include women, elders, and children. 

But none of those words or numbers capture the evil of what unfolded today. 

Young festival-goers running for their lives. Teenage girls dragged by their hair by terrorists. An old woman forced to pose with a Hamas rifle. A mother—a hostage—cradling two redheaded babies in her arms.

I have friends in Israel. Each one of them has a story of someone they know who is missing. Or injured. Or killed. This was not a tit-for-tat. This was not a justifiable military response, or just another day in a cycle of violence. This was the slaughter of innocent civilians.

New York City’s Democratic Socialists of America today announced a protest in honor of the attacks. It’s called All Out for Palestine: “In solidarity with the Palestinian people and their right to resist 75 years of occupation and apartheid.” The anti-Zionist group IfNotNow explained the attacks as Israel’s fault and said of the dead Jews: “Their blood is on the hands of the Israeli government.” 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/marc-lamont-hills-atrocious-libels-against-israel/

Marc Lamont Hill has a long history of posing as an expert on the Middle East with the sole aim of excoriating Israel. In 2019 article in the Jerusalem Post, Seth J. Frantzman observes:

Hill’s latest excoriation of Israel, posted to his 90,000 followers [on Facebook], followed Mazzig’s [Hen Mazzig, an Israeli writer, and Mizrahi] argument that Israel is not a country of “privileged and powerful white Europeans.” Mazzig sought to emphasize the role of Mizrahi Jews in Israeli history and condemned the tendency of critics to define Israelis as Ashkenazi Jews alone. Hill responded that Mazzig ignores “the racial and political project that transformed Palestinian Jews (who lived peacefully with other Palestinians) into the 20th century identity category of ‘Mizrahi’ as a means of detaching them from Palestinian identity.”

Hill is claiming that the category of “Mizrahi Jews” — “Oriental Jews,” that is, “Jews of Middle Eastern ancestry” — was made up by Ashkenazi Jews to “detach” them from their “Palestinian identity.” In fact, Mizrahi Jews have their own history, never considered themselves as “Palestinians,” and did not “live peacefully” with Arabs, but only as dhimmis, subject to a host of social, economic, and political disabilities, including, most importantly, the duty to pay the jizyah, a capitation tax that allowed them to continue to worship as Jews free from Muslim attack. Frantzman also states:

Mazzig posted a screenshot of another exchange with Hill in which Hill wrote that “I literally study Yemeni and Moroccan Jews for a living.”

What “living” is that? He doesn’t teach about Yemeni and Moroccan Jews; he hasn’t written a word about them. So why does Marc Lamont Hill claim that he “literally” studies them “for a living”? I thought he studied race, racism, anti-racism, and of course hip-hop lit, for his living. Has he quietly changed the subject of his study? Can we be expecting a paper soon on “Yemeni and Moroccan Jews” by “one of the leading intellectual voices in the country”?

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20006/palestinians-steal-water

“Yesterday there was an enforcement activity in the Idna area near Hebron during which four illegal water wells were sealed. The water wells, which were drilled in violation of the interim agreement [with the Palestinians], damage the natural water reserves and pose a pollution threat to the aquifer [the source of water supplied to both Palestinian and Jewish communities]. The enforcement action was carried out in accordance with the jurisdiction authority and established protocols.” — Israeli authorities, July 27, 2023.

“Additionally, there were approximately 2,500 instances during those years in which Israeli authorities disconnected illegal connections to existing water infrastructure.” — NGO Monitor, October 2021.

The “illegal connections” included wells and pipes in the West Bank to illegally divert the water elsewhere, thereby stealing water that Israel had intended for both Israelis and Palestinians.

In 2018, the Israel Water Authority identified 77 Palestinian illegal well-diggings in the West Bank. During the same year, Israeli authorities arrested 25 Palestinians on suspicion of stealing water and disconnected 1,457 illegal connections to water mains. Some Palestinians also reportedly drilled holes in water mains to divert water.

“Without this activity [by the Israeli authorities], the water supply would have been significantly disrupted,” the Israeli Water Authoroity said. The following year, Israeli authorities discovered another 58 illegal water wells and confiscated ten well- drilling machines.

The Palestinians’ actions are in violation of the “Water Agreement” that is part of the Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement (“Oslo II”) of September 18, 1995 (Annex 3, Appendix 1, Article 40), which stipulates the manner in which the parties must act in the field of water in the West Bank. This is an international agreement that was not only signed by Israel and the Palestinians, but also witnessed by the US, Russia, the European Union, Norway, Jordan and Egypt. According to the Oslo II accord: “Each side shall take all necessary measures to prevent any harm, pollution, or deterioration of water quality of the water resources.”

[T]he Israelis and Palestinians agreed in 1995 to establish a Joint Water Committee to deal with all water and sewage issues, including protection of water resources. The Palestinian Authority, however, decided to boycott the committee after the start of the Second Intifada in September 2000.

According to a 2017 report from Israel’s State Comptroller, the Palestinian Authority prevented the committee from convening for seven years. The report noted that the reason for the Palestinian boycott was to hinder the development of water infrastructure for Israeli communities in the West Bank. Instead, the Palestinian boycott severely hindered the development of water infrastructure for the Palestinians and created a massive blockage of projects, including several waste-treatment facilities.

While Israel has fulfilled its obligations according to the “Water Agreement,” the Palestinians have continuously breached the accord. Israel made available approximately 70 million cubic meters (MCM) a year of water to the Palestinians in the West Bank before they boycotted the Joint Water Committee, even though the agreement allocates a much smaller quantity of only 23.6 MCM/year for the West Bank.

The Palestinians have also failed to treat their sewage, which flows freely into streams flowing through the West Bank and Israel, thereby contaminating both the environment and the Mountain Aquifer for everyone.

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/israels-democracy-protesters-destroy?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

The shocking scenes in Tel Aviv on Yom Kippur not only destroyed the principal claim of Israel’s nine months-old protest movement against the government. They also illuminated a fundamental and disturbing fault-line in the wider Jewish world and the west.

Those who came to pray together in Tel Aviv’s public spaces on the holiest day of the year were shouted at, abused, reduced to tears and forced to disband their prayer services.

This repellent spectacle, on Yom Kippur of all days, was redolent of the forcible attempts to suppress Jewish prayer that have characterised Jew-hatred throughout the ages. Yet sickeningly, the perpetrators were themselves Jews spitting baseless hatred against other Jews.

The immediate cause was that the worshippers had erected a mechitzah, or divider, between men and women. Tel Aviv’s Mayor Ron Huldai had made a ruling forbidding segregated prayers in the city’s public spaces, a ruling that was upheld by the Supreme Court.

The objectors said the Rosh Yehudi movement, which tries to spread Orthodox Judaism in Tel Aviv, deliberately provoked disorder by disobeying Huldai’s ruling.

However, as everyone could see, the mob wasn’t only targeting Rosh Yehudi but also ordinary, religiously observant people who came to pray in those open spaces.

During the Covid emergency, segregated public prayers were regularly held in Tel Aviv and provoked no problem. The flashpoint occurred this week because, for the past nine months, secular people have whipped up hysterical loathing of the haredim and religious-nationalist Jews, whom they accuse of plotting to destroy Israeli democracy and human rights through the government’s judicial reforms.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20001/palestinian-concessions-peace

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was quoted on September 15 as saying that “normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel….needs to involve a two-state solution.” Most Palestinians, however, take quite a different view of the matter.

[A] public opinion poll revealed that a majority of the Palestinians are opposed to a normalization agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel and the so-called two-state solution. The two-state Saudi solution envisages the establishment of an Iran-backed Arab terror state next to Israel. Israel already has such a terror state next to its border: the Gaza Strip, ruled since 2007 by Iran’s proxies, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

On August 25, the American media outlet Axios reported that Blinken told Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer that the Israeli government is “misreading the situation” if it thinks it will not have to make any concessions to the Palestinians as part of any Saudi deal.

If anyone is misreading the situation, however, it is Blinken, who thinks that Israeli concessions would convince the Palestinians to accept a normalization agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel. As the results of the PCPSR poll showed, the Palestinian public is not impressed with the proposed concessions.

If the Palestinian Authority is currently unable to prevent terror groups from attacking Israelis, it is truly delusional to think that it would be more diligent in protecting any new areas it received from Israel. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is hardly likely to send his security officers to arrest or kill the terrorists in the cities of Jenin and Nablus. He knows that if he does, his people will condemn him as a “traitor” and “collaborator” with Israel, and quickly dispatch him to “drink tea up there” with the assassinated former President of Egypt, Anwar Sadat who was murdered for brokering Israel’s 1979 peace deal with Egypt. Moreover, Abbas will not go against the terrorists as long as they do not physically go against him.

Most of all, the idea of transferring more land to the Palestinians is terrible because sends a message to the Palestinian Authority that, after it failed to combat terrorism in land under its control, it will be rewarded with even more land.

As the poll illustrates, support for anti-Israel terrorism among the Palestinians has risen from 53% (three months ago) to 58% today. That is why it is unrealistic to expect the Palestinian Authority to take any measures to disarm the terror groups in the West Bank. Unlike Blinken, Palestinian leaders are aware of the massive support for terrorism among their people. Unlike Blinken, Palestinian leaders also know that without Israel’s presence in the West Bank, Iran and its terror proxies would have taken complete control of the area a long time ago and ousted Abbas just as they did from the Gaza Strip in 2007

The Palestinian Authority, through its “Pay-for-Slay” policy, does indeed proudly reward terrorists who murder or injure Jews. In just one year, “Ramallah paid out around NIS 600 million ($187 million) in salaries for Palestinians imprisoned, jailed, or killed by Israel in 2020, according to a senior Palestine Liberation Organization official.”

So, while Blinken is talking about the need to involve the “two-state solution” in a Saudi-Israeli deal, 67% of the Palestinians oppose it.