RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/this-is-an-iranian-war-gaza-israel-terrorism-massacre-kidnapping-military-4d6b2137?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

As Jews celebrated a festive holiday on Saturday, the Iranian-backed Palestinian militia Hamas invaded Israel from Gaza. Spreading out through Israeli towns, the terrorists went house to house gunning down innocent civilians, including hundreds of young revelers at an outdoor “peace” rave. They abducted scores of civilians—the precise count is as yet unknown—including women and children, as hostages; and chilling videos have surfaced of them desecrating bodies and parading captives through the streets of Gaza, as large crowds yell “God is great.”

It is a rampage of unspeakable cruelty, the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. It is also a security catastrophe of unprecedented proportions for Israel’s military and political class. Much time will be spent figuring out the causes and responsibility. For now, some broader observations:

First, call it the Iran-Gaza War. To be sure, Hamas bears responsibility, and any serious Israeli response will involve its total, unconditional defeat. But Hamas is an ally and instrument of Iran. An operation of such scale and complexity is unlike anything Hamas has previously attempted and strongly suggests significant Iranian involvement. Hamas has publicly thanked Iran for its support, and Iran’s supreme leader applauded the invasion.

In the north, Israel faces Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy that has de facto control over much of Lebanon, with a vast arsenal of missiles aimed at Israeli cities. Iran is reportedly close to nuclear breakout. This is the war with Israel that it wants—on Israeli soil, through once-removed marauding militias. Tehran terrorizes much of the Middle East in this manner.

Any serious response must go through Tehran. If the U.S. and the international community are truly outraged by the scenes of senior citizens gunned down on the street and women and children abducted, they must not only refrain from limiting Israel’s operation in Gaza but resolve to oust the genocidal regime in Tehran. President Biden’s policy has been exactly the opposite. His administration has sought rapprochement with and even allegedly been manipulated by an Iranian influence operation. He has eased sanctions and in recent weeks gave the mullahs $6 billion for the release of American hostages.

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/israel-strikes-hamas-and-hezbollah-sites-hunts-intruders-in-the-south-f8f40203

TEL AVIV—Israeli troops engaged in fierce fighting into the early hours of Monday morning to regain control of swaths of the country’s south after Hamas militants flooded in from Gaza, with the military struggling to reseal the border to further incursions.

The last infiltrators from Gaza were being hunted down with the task expected to take at least a few more hours, military spokesman Jonathan Conricus said in a livestream on X, formerly known as Twitter, around 2 a.m. local time Monday.

Throughout Sunday, the Israeli government was still working to evacuate civilians from towns and villages near Gaza, densely populated Palestinian enclaves, and authorities worked to treat hundreds of wounded civilians, recover the bodies of the dead and try to determine how many Israelis were being held hostage.

The Israeli cabinet approved a declaration of war after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced Saturday a call-up for hundreds of thousands of military reservists, saying in a televised address: “We are at war and we will win it.”

Iran-backed Hamas said it had been able to send additional men and weapons into Israel on Sunday and it launched a fresh barrage of missiles from Gaza.

Meanwhile, another Iran-backed militant group, Hezbollah, fired mortar shells and a missile at Israeli targets from southern Lebanon. The Hezbollah attacks raised the specter of a second front opening in the conflict as Israel prepared for broader strikes on militant targets in Gaza. Hamas sought to sow more turmoil, calling for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank to riot and confront Israeli soldiers there.

Late Sunday, Gaza militants fired another barrage of rockets, while Israel carried out airstrikes in the Palestinian territory. The Israeli military also said that one of its marine commando units had captured a Hamas deputy commander of the militant group’s naval force.

More than 700 Israelis have been confirmed dead, and 2,408 wounded, according to Israel’s Army Radio. At least 413 Palestinians have been killed and around 2,300 injured in Israeli counterstrikes on Gaza, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/378095

Colonel Richard Kemp, the former commander of the British military forces in Afghanistan, spoke to Israel National News – Arutz Sheva on Sunday about the Hamas-launched war on Israel in which over 350 people have been murdered so far and stated that Russia’s hand can be seen in the attack in addition to the hand of Iran.

The attack began with a coordinated breach of the Gaza border fence at multiple locations accompanied by the firing of thousands of rockets into southern Israel, allowing squads of terrorists to penetrate into Israel and attack numerous communities and cities in southern Israel in the early morning. Israel was caught completely off-guard by the assault, representing a massive intelligence failure.

“I have no doubt that questions about this intelligence failure are being addressed now in the Israeli government,” Col. Kemp said of the failure to predict and stop the deadly Hamas onslaught. “I am sure there will be a full inquiry when the current situation is stabilized. Until then we can only speculate. This attack has been called Israel’s 9/11 by some people, or Israel’s Pearl Harbor, both of which were also accompanied by tragic intelligence failure.”

He stated that Iran and Russia were behind the attack which was, according to him, “too complex for Gaza terrorists to pull off on their own.”

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.”