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Douglas Murray: Wartime Diary ‘As the helicopters carrying the released hostages landed, traffic stopped. People got out of their cars and broke into song.’

Posted By on November 30th, 2023

https://www.thefp.com/p/douglas-murray-diary-israel-hamas-hostages-war?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

“What is life?” a child asks Oriana Fallaci at the beginning of her great 1969 book Nothing and Amen. As Fallaci wrote, the next morning she flew to the Vietnam War to find out.

I have thought about that question a lot in recent weeks, since arriving in Israel earlier this month to cover the war. I have seen plenty of wars before and they always throw up that question: “What is life?” To understand life you have to understand death, and to understand death you have to try to understand the worst thing that humans can do to each other: war.

Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7 has left 1,200 dead. Nearly 240 hostages—children, women, grandmothers—were taken to Gaza. Over the past few days, about 81 hostages have been returned to their loved ones during the cease-fire.

I was at the children’s hospital in Tel Aviv when the first children and their parents were released. When the helicopters landed and the hostages got out, IDF soldiers blocked their faces with screens to protect them from the glare of the cameras. But I’d already been sent a single photo taken by the Arab press that showed some of the mothers with their children inside a bus when they were still in Gaza.

The terror on their faces. They looked as though they’d aged by decades.

But at this moment, there was joy. As the helicopters landed, traffic stopped, and people got out of their cars and broke into song. They clapped and their voices rang out as they welcomed back the hostages with songs like “Hevenu Shalom Alechem.” (“We brought you peace.”)

As it happened, 12 of the 13 returnees that night were from Kibbutz Nir Oz, the first place I visited on my trip to Israel. But for every returnee, you remember those still in Gaza. I thought especially of the grandsons of the man who showed me around the kibbutz during my visit. On the morning of October 7, the teenage boys were alone in the house. Their grandfather was on the phone with them trying to tell them how to hold the safe room door shut while avoiding being shot from the other side. The two boys struggled with a wound-up sheet, and held out a while, but they couldn’t fight back against two grown men, members of Hamas. They were taken into Gaza.

So was Kfir Bibas, a baby of ten months. So was his brother. So was their mother. Yesterday, Hamas said that they would not be released because they died in captivity. 

Who knows if Hamas killed them, as they killed so many others, or if they are lying in order to torture those waiting for their return. 

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Breaking: Nixon Era Fixture Henry Kissinger Has Died at 100 Stephen Kruiser

Posted By on November 30th, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/stephen-kruiser/2023/11/29/breaking-nixon-era-fixture-henry-kissinger-has-died-at-100-n4924341

Henry Kissinger, one of the most dominant figures of the Watergate and Vietnam War eras, has died. 

The Wall Street Journal:

Former presidential adviser Henry Kissinger has died, according to a statement posted on his website, bringing to a close one of the most polarizing and influential diplomatic lives in U.S. history.

He died Wednesday at his home in Connecticut, said a statement by his consulting firm. He was 100 years old.

The German-born academic was the only American official ever to concurrently serve as both secretary of state and White House national security adviser, giving him immense power during the Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford presidencies. That helped him end the U.S. war in Vietnam and to shape American foreign policy toward the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War.

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The Unhinged Among Us Is the pro-Hamas crowd ignorant of Middle East history?   By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on November 30th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/11/30/the-unhinged-among-us/

October 7 should have been an open-and-shut case of moral condemnation.

During peace and holiday, invading Hamas gunmen murdered, tortured, mass raped, decapitated, and mutilated some 1,200 Israelis. The vast majority were unarmed women, children, infants, and the elderly.

The cowardly murderers proudly filmed their atrocities and then fled back to Gaza—to cheers from the Gaza street.

Before Israel even retaliated, the mass murdering of Jews earned praise from the Middle East, the international hard left, and especially the faculty and students of elite Western campuses

When the Israeli Defense Forces struck back, the killers dispersed to the safety of their multibillion-dollar subterranean cities. The cowardly elite architects of the mass murder fled to Arab sanctuaries in Lebanon and Qatar.

From its headquarters burrowed below hospitals, mosques, and schools, Hamas bartered hostages for a reprieve from the IDF and the release of its own convicted terrorists in Israeli jails.

Hamas shot any of its own supporters who refused to shield Hamas gunmen.

It continued launching rockets at Israeli civilian centers. It serially lied about its casualties, expropriating intended relief food and fuel for its underground tunnel city of killers.

Abroad, Hamas supporters also emulated the methods of the pro-Nazi demonstrators in Western cities of the 1930s. Unlike their pro-Israel critics, the pro-Hamas demonstrators in the U.S. and Europe turned violent.

They took over and defaced private and public property. They chanted genocidal anti-Semitic slogans calling for erasure of the nation of Israel.

They interrupted shoppers, blocked highways, attacked businesses, and swarmed bridges. They assaulted police.

The majority wore masks to hide their identities in the fashion of anti-semitic Klansmen.

Why did the doctrinaire left, the youth of the Democratic Party, and the campuses outdo each other in their anti-semitic venom toward Israel?

For the first time in their lives, many of the ignorant protestors suddenly professed concern about refugees, colonialism, disproportionality, innocent civilians, and the rules of war.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Five Reasons Why Climate Skepticism And Dissent Are Important

Posted By on November 30th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/11/30/five-reasons-why-climate-skepticism-and-dissent-are-important/

Today a blithering throng of nascent tyrants, fevered zealots, useless office-holders, hypocrites and ignoble grifters will gather to kick off 28th United Nations Conference of the Parties in the grand pursuit of “global transformative climate action.” For nearly two weeks they will rail and prattle endlessly about how important it is to end fossil fuel use, nag those they slander as “deniers,” tell new lies, restate old lies, hold themselves up as saviors, dine sumptuously – then board jets, many of them privately owned, that burn oceans of hydrocarbon-based aviation fuel to return home.

The legacy media, naturally, will go gleefully along for the ride. They will employ the usual terminology – emergency, crisis, apocalypse, warmest, hottest, wettest, driest, melting, temperature records, accelerating change – that is intended to both frighten the public and boost their green cred that is earned by showing just how much one really cares about the climate.

While this spectacle grinds on, it can’t be forgotten that the global warming narrative should not be taken as indisputable fact. Here are five reasons that we can’t blindly trust and follow the political left’s climate line:

As we recently mentioned in regard to the political left, which is now almost entirely radicalized, the issue it is raging about at any given moment is not the real issue. It is “only an occasion,” says David Horowitz, once a member of the New Left, “to advance the real cause which is the accumulation of power to make the revolution.” The constant screeching over man-made global warming is simply a pathway to accumulating ever-greater political power and control.
Science, real science, not politicized, self-serving Tony Fauci science, demands skepticism and dissent. Minds should never be closed off to the possibilities that are beyond current scientific findings and theories. Science can never evolve or grow if today’s accepted truths are not challenged tomorrow. The “politically motivated manufacture of scientific consensus corrupts the scientific process and leads to poor policy decisions,” says Judith Curry, former professor and chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and now president of the Climate Forecast Applications Network. “Consensus enforcement,” she continues, “interferes with the self-correcting nature of science via skepticism, which is a foundation of the scientific process.”

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Pro-Hamas Muslims Attack Rockefeller Tree Lighting Burning a Koran is hate, but a Muslim mob attacking a Christmas tree lighting is fine. by Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on November 30th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/pro-hamas-muslims-attack-rockefeller-tree-lighting/

“Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant.”

CAIR co-founder Omar Ahmad

The Muslim American Society, which has links to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, and Samidoun, designated as a terrorist front group in Israel and banned in Germany, along with other terror adjacent groups, announced that they were going to “Flood the Tree Lighting for Gaza”.

By ‘Flood’, they were referencing the Hamas name for the Oct 7 massacres, Operation Al Aqsa Flood, and by “tree lighting”, they meant the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree lighting.

Pause for a moment to consider that burning a Koran is considered an outrage and there have been constant calls to ban it, but a Muslim mob attacking a Christmas tree lighting is “speech”.

Religious tolerance only goes one way.

Imagine 500 Americans descending on a mosque to protest Islamic terrorism. There would be condemnations and endless lectures about Islamophobia. But when Muslim pro-terror groups do this, there’s no discussion about hate or religious intolerance.

Hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters swarmed the streets surrounding Rockefeller Center Wednesday, clashing with NYPD cops and chanting “river to the sea,” long seen as an antisemitic slogan, in an effort to derail the annual tree lighting in support of Gaza.

Unable to get to the NYC Christmas tree, the enormous crowd instead swarmed around the tree outside the News Corp building, which houses The Post and Fox News, and has already been targeted by pro-Palestinian protesters on at least two occasions.

The protesters attempted to knock down the barricades cops put up to keep them separate from the throngs hoping to take in the Big Apple holiday tradition.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Hamas Also Slaughters Muslims by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on November 30th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20189/hamas-also-slaughters-muslims

Awad Darwashe, 23, an Arab-Israeli paramedic, remained behind, refusing [on Octobet 7] to abandon the injured. “I speak Arabic. I think I can manage,” Darawshe said, supposing that he could reason with the terrorists. Perhaps he thought they would not harm a fellow Muslim Arab. He was wrong.

“I never felt that I’m deprived in any way….Stop the nonsense. It is empty whining. I don’t believe in that. Everyone here can get where they want. What – the country doesn’t let them study? Y’allah, be a lawyer, be a teacher. Does anyone stop you? Even in prayer. Does anyone stop you praying? We pray five times a day, five times no one stops us. Whoever wants to be successful can be successful. Whoever doesn’t want to be successful blames the country, the government.” — Ibrahim, a middle-aged man, “Is Israel an Apartheid State?”, YouTube, February 23, 2014

Where in the Middle East are Arabs thriving throughout society, not just in a privileged whirl of favors and nepotism? Israel.

“We are very proud of his actions…This is what we would expect from him and what we expect from everyone in our family — to be human, to stay human and to die human.” —

The family of Darwashe, the paramedic who would not abandon the injured, apnews.com, October 15, 2023

“People from all over the country come to hug and support the family. The entire nation is one family now.” — Ali Alziadna, whose four family members are currently held hostage, haaretz.com, November 13, 2023

Hamas has repeatedly demonstrated that it cares nothing for the well-being of Arabs and Muslims. From their luxury homes in the safety of Qatar and Turkey, its leaders give the orders to attack Israel and then sit back and let the world weep over the destruction they wrought upon their own people.

Perhaps the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip should look at the Arab citizens of Israel and note how they enjoy democracy, freedom of speech and a free media. If the Palestinians wish to live well, like the Arab-Israelis, this is the time for them to get rid of Hamas and all the terror leaders who, for seven decades, have brought them nothing but one disaster after another.

HISTORY Comments turned off

The Nazi Roots of Hamas What the true origins of Hamas reveal about its nature. by Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on November 30th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-nazi-roots-of-hamas/

On Oct 7, Hamas, a terrorist organization born in part out of a collaboration between Nazis and Islamists, carried out the greatest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

The butchery of men, women and children and the elderly, was not only ‘Nazi-like’, it was in some ways the final act of a Nazi crime nearly eight decades in the making.

In 1946, the Muslim Brotherhood held its founding conference in Gaza at the Samer Cinema. The movie theater which had opened two years earlier and would be shut down, along with much of Gaza’s movie theaters as the Islamist movement strengthened its grip over the area, represented the secular Western culture that the Islamic organization wanted to destroy.

It was a modest beginning for the group that would eventually become known as Hamas.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s expansion into Israel began a year earlier in 1945. The Brotherhood’s foreign backers, the Nazis, had surrendered earlier that year. The thousand pound checks which had helped take the Brotherhood from just another fringe Islamist theocratic movement to a dominant force in Egyptian political culture would no longer be coming. And Nazi Germany’s armies would not be arriving to help them kill all the Jews.

Without the Nazis, the Brotherhood no longer had the money or any protection from the British, who might seek to punish their Nazi collaboration, or the Egyptian monarchy which was worried that the Islamist group was seeking to overthrow it. By 1948, Egypt had banned the Brotherhood and Hassan al-Banna, its charismatic leader, had been shot dead in the street a year later.

Al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, had admired Nazi organizations and methods. A British report noted that he had made “a careful study of the Nazi and fascist organizations. Using them as a model, he has formed organizations of specially trained and trusted men who correspond respectively to the Brown Shirts and Black Shirts.”

The Muslim Brotherhood from which Hamas sprang had been built in imitation of the Nazis.

The Nazis and the Brotherhood had fundamental religious and ethnic differences but shared common goals: especially when it came to the Jews. A Nazi agent who helped funnel money to the Brotherhood reported on one of its conferences calling for Jihad in Israel.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Does Anybody Know What Books Biden Reads? Or If He Reads?

Posted By on November 30th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/11/30/does-anybody-know-what-books-biden-reads-or-if-he-reads/

Time was when the elite media class obsessed over how many and what books presidents read. But since President Joe Biden took office, they’ve completely lost interest. Do they know something we don’t?

Before Biden, the press loved to ask presidents about their favorite books. What’s on their nightstand? What are they reading on vacation? It has always been treated as a sign of intelligence. A measure of sophistication.

The Daily Beast once compared presidential reading habits to how historians ranked them as presidents. “The results are not surprising—the top-ranked presidents all made our list near the top of presidential readers,” it reported.

The press lavished praise on Barack Obama and Bill Clinton for their book-reading habits. When Clinton was running in 1992, for example, the New York Times reported glowingly that he was “an omnivorous reader.” Obama’s summer reading list was treated as front-page news.

This fixation on presidents’ literary habits usually comes out strongest when a Republican is president as a way to prove they’re dumb.

When George W. Bush was running for president, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that “just how much Bush hits the books — or doesn’t — has suddenly become a campaign issue.”

Trump was routinely attacked for his lack of interest in books.

The Atlantic ran a lengthy piece — “The President Who Doesn’t Read” — that began: “Trump’s allergy to the written word and his reliance on oral communication have proven liabilities in office.”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Who the Israelis Are Releasing in Return for Hamas’s Hostages The Palestinian women and children include attempted killers and violent teenagers.

Posted By on November 30th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/israel-releasing-palestinian-prisoners-hamas-gaza-4d21a9b4?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Hamas continued to release hostages on Wednesday, for a total of more than 100 so far, a bit more than a third of the estimated 240 civilians seized on Oct. 7. In return Israel has freed more than 200 Palestinian prisoners, but nobody should think these prisoners are at all morally comparable.

Hamas is releasing Israeli and foreign women and children abducted in illegal acts of war targeting civilians in their homes. The recently released include grandmothers in their 70s and 80s, Thai guest workers, and more than 20 children under age 12—including preschoolers and a toddler.

By contrast, the Palestinians Israel is releasing were in prison because they were arrested and awaiting trial, or were convicted of violent crimes. Of the 39 Palestinians released Saturday night, Haaretz reports that eight were convicted of attempted murder. Let us introduce you to a couple of them.

There’s Israa Jaabis, a Palestinian woman who in 2015—during a wave of other attacks in Jerusalem—attempted a car bomb that wounded an Israeli police officer. According to the Shin Bet security service, Jaabis yelled “Allahu Akbar” as the officer approached and detonated an explosive device.

Israel also released Maysoon Musa Al-Jabali, who was convicted of attempted murder for her 2015 stabbing of a female Israel soldier; Shorouq Dwayyat, who was convicted of attempted murder after she wrote on Facebook in 2015 of her desire to become a martyr and stabbed an Israeli man multiple times; and Aisha Afghani, who was convicted after an attempted 2016 stabbing attack on Israelis in Jerusalem.

All were adults when they committed their attacks, and all were released this week well before the end of their sentences. Most of the children Israel has released are teenage boys—age 14 and older—arrested or charged in recent years for making explosives or throwing stones or petrol bombs at Israelis.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

THAI HOSTAGE: Hamas Tortured Captive Jews with Electric Cables By Baruch Green

Posted By on November 30th, 2023

https://vinnews.com/2023/11/29/thai-hostage-hamas-tortured-captive-jews-with-electric-cables/

A Thai hostage who was released by Hamas told Israel’s Channel 12 that the Jewish hostages with him were beaten with electric cables, and that all the hostages were denied adequate food.

Channel 12 also quoted the Thai hostage as saying that Jewish hostages were kept in worse conditions than others.

As reported by the Times of Israel:

“He says there was little to eat for the hostages — a pita a day, sometimes a tin of tuna to share between four, and sometimes a piece of cheese. Held for more than seven weeks, he says they were allowed to shower once.

“We were with Israelis, and they were guarded all the time,” he is quoted saying. “The Jews who were held with me were treated very harshly, sometimes they were beaten with electric cables.”

In addition, it has been reported that Hamas tortured children by forcing them at gunpoint to watch films of atrocities against Israeli civilians during the attack. It also kept some children alone for weeks, and denied hostages sufficient food, water, and sunlight.

Many hostages lost weight, and not unexpectedly, many of the children have shown signs of psychological trauma.

The Red Cross has not been allowed to visit the hostages, nor has it transferred medicines and other needed items to them. In fact, there is no evidence that the Red Cross, which has immense leverage, has made any serious effort to pressure Hamas to allow them in.