RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.jns.org/idf-still-hasnt-internalized-the-tunnel-threat-experts-say/

Tunnels have proven to be a critical threat to the Jewish state. While the Israel Defense Forces certainly hasn’t ignored them, it has been slow to grasp their strategic significance.

Some argue that it still hasn’t.

“I still don’t see the necessary change in the IDF’s worldview that would allow us to better deal with this phenomenon of underground warfare,” Yehuda Kfir, a civil engineer and researcher of subterranean warfare, told JNS.

Professor Joel Roskin, a geomorphologist at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, has reached the same conclusion.

Perhaps the best supporting example is that when the IDF built its defensive “smart wall” (completed in 2021) between Israel and the Gaza Strip, it continued to let Hamas build all the underground infrastructure it pleased as long as it stayed on its side of the fence.

The resulting underground city in Gaza, from which Hamas could command and control its forces, send them out to attack and recall them to shelter in place, has served to prolong the war and prevent Israel from saving the remaining hostages.

It allowed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar to elude Israeli forces for more than a year. Sinwar himself (along with 1,026 others) was released from Israeli prison in 2011 in exchange for IDF soldier Gilad Shalit—who had been kidnapped by terrorists who emerged from a tunnel.

https://dailycaller.com/2024/10/18/opinion-israel-wisely-not-listen-biden-harris-shoshana-bryen/

The elimination of Yahya Sinwar improved the already-joyful Sukkot holiday for millions of Israelis and Jews and their supporters around the world. In all likelihood, it will also irritate President Joe Biden, as the Hamas leader was killed in Rafah, where he demanded Israel not enter under threat of an arms embargo and a warning by Vice President Kamala Harris that it was impossible.

Israel, wisely, didn’t listen.

It will also irritate Qatar, a regional partner of both Iran and the United States. Qatar has been hosting Hamas leadership in very swanky quarters in Doha while insisting that Sinwar, hiding under the ravaged streets of Gaza, held the key to a hostage release. If he ever did, he no longer does.

And Iran will be shaken by one more setback in its pursuit of victory in a broad religious war against Israel and the United States and their allies.

How did we get here? A reminder is useful: The Hamas orgy of rape, torture, mutilation and murder was accompanied by the transport of 241 people from Israel to the Gaza Strip — most living, some already dead. According to the International Humanitarian Law Database, hostage-taking is a war crime.

The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) entered Gaza with guns blazing — destroying vast tunnel networks and military facilities that Hamas had built under the civilian population of Gaza City (also defined as a war crime under IHL). One of the announced aims of the IDF entry was the return of the hostages.

The U.S. was, apparently, unhappy with the intensity of military operations. In early November, Secretary of State Antony Blinken suggested that Israel use “smaller bombs,” try “targeted assassinations,” and offer Hamas a “humanitarian pause.” Israel declined the first two on military grounds and said the third was only possible after the hostages were released.

https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2024/10/03/geert-wilders-for-breitbart-why-european-patriots-should-support-israel/

War is terrible. If only because there will always be innocent victims on both sides. But sometimes war is inevitable, because war can be just. Nowhere is this clearer today than in the war Israel is waging against the powers that want to wipe not only the state of Israel but also the Jewish people of the face of the earth.

Last Tuesday, Iran fired 180 ballistic missiles at Israel. Wednesday, Hezbollah fired over 100 rockets into Israel from Lebanon. In order to neutralize the Hezbollah terrorists, the Israeli army has launched the first ground offensive in southern Lebanon since 2006.

The war in the Middle East is rapidly escalating. But it is clear who is to blame and it is equally clear which side we must back. We stand with Israel, because its enemies are evil and neutrality in the face of evil is evil.

The war began almost exactly one year ago, on the 7th of October 2023. This day will forever remain one of the most infamous days in the history of Israel and the free world. Everyone has seen the horrific pictures of the massacres at the Supernova music festival and in the Jewish villages near the border with Gaza. Hundreds of innocent people, including children, babies and elderly people, were killed, kidnapped and raped by the terrorists of Hamas.

Everyone remembers how the corpse of 22-year-old German Jewish Shani Louk was paraded in Gaza City in the back of a pickup truck, while people cheered and spat on it. And then there are the hostages – more than 250, of whom an estimated 100 perhaps are still alive in the dark tunnels beneath Gaza after 363 days of captivity.

What happened one year ago was a wake-up call for Israel, but it was also a wake-up call for us, reminding us of the deep hatred of Muhammed, the founder of Islam, towards the Jews. It can be found in his book, the Quran (e.g. Surah 4:47: “You who have been given the Book! Believe in what we have sent down… before we obliterate faces”), and in the Hadiths, the collections of Muhammed’s words and deeds written down by his contemporaries (e.g. Sahih Muslim 41-6985: “The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him”).

But almost as shocking as the events one year ago has been the hideous surge of anti-Semitism and moral cowardice in our own countries during the past twelve months.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21031/israel-fights-alone-carrying-by-itself

Little Israel is showing the world how to win again – and saving civilization and a free way of life into the bargain …. let Israel keep winning!

The problem with the JCPOA was, of course, its “sunset clauses.” They assured Iran that it could legitimately have as many nuclear weapons as it can produce in just a few short years.

The West has left Israel to fight a war that should never have been Israel’s alone. The Western nations, through diplomatic miscalculations, the need for votes, cowardice and a fear of conflict, have essentially outsourced their responsibilities for maintaining global peace to Israel, watching from the sidelines as the conflict ramps up.

If the West is too fearful or reluctant to engage directly in the fight against injustice, terror, and tyranny, the very least it can do is stand with Israel and stop trying to sabotage it at every turn. Support should not be limited to words but include political, diplomatic and military backing. By failing to support Israel fully, the West is empowering exactly those countries working to revise the world order — from one of freedom to one of tyranny — by displacing the West.

It is a grotesque reflection on the international community, particularly the Biden-Harris administration and the European Union, not to be offering unequivocal support. Israel’s struggle is not just for its own survival but for the security and peace of the Free World. The West, through its passivity, is failing not only Israel, it is hollowing out its own survival.

Culminating with the dispatch of arch-terrorist Yahya Sinwar this week, how many of the world’s most vicious terrorists has Israel liberated the world from in a few short weeks? Little Israel is showing the world how to win again — and saving civilization and a free way of life into the bargain. For those of us fortunate enough to live in a free society rather than in a society of fear, as the former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky calls them, let Israel keep winning!