Showing posts with label Linkdump. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Linkdump. Show all posts

Monday, March 18, 2024

From Ian:

Bari Weiss: ‘History has come for Israel, it’s come for Ukraine and it will come for the West next’
Weiss is known for her coverage of anti-Semitism in America, and calling out its manifestations is one of the things she’s best known for. Her first book, How to Fight Anti-Semitism, published in 2019, was spurred by the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh the previous year. But when we met in New York in 2021, long before the Hamas massacre of October 7, Weiss had told me that, as an American Jew, she’d always felt she could hold her head up high, in contrast to those of us in the Old World. “I had an arrogance, a sense that, you know, anti-Semitism was for Jews of other times, certainly, but also other places. And I remember reading about things that would happen, and places, especially like France, and thinking that could never happen here. I have been disabused of that idea.”

The America that has roiled and reared up since Trump, since the Black Lives Matter movement swept over, and since October 7, has illuminated a new reality for Jews in the US. Weiss explains: “When we’re free, when freedom and liberty thrive, Jews thrive. Because, by their very existence, Jews represent the freedom to think differently, the freedom to believe differently, the freedom to raise their families differently. What we’re seeing now is a turn against freedom. In the grand sense, there’s the turn against the idea, even of the free world and [there’s this] kind of moral equivalency, whether it’s from the Leftists who glorify Hamas, or Rightists like Tucker Carlson [who] glorify tyrants like Putin.

“It’s also coming internally from… elite culture here in the States. I’m sure it’s the same in the UK, where the ability to discern between free and unfree, good and bad, and better and worse, seems to have been erased. The fact that there are whole realms of American life where in order to succeed you kind of need to tamp down or hide your Jewishness is a sign of that.”

Weiss went on a trip to Israel in January with young producers from the Free Press. As well as having drinks with Douglas Murray, she interviewed Lucy Aharish, Israel’s first Muslim-Arab presenter, married to Fauda star Tzachi Halevy, who is Jewish, and held an event in Jaffa with Natan Sharansky, the human-rights activist and former Soviet prisoner, to whom Alexei Navalny began writing in prison. I ask her what she’d like to happen in Israel in the medium term, but she scoffs at the question, because she feels it’s none of her business.

“The thing that really struck me [about the Israel trip] was the clarity, on the right and left, like, we know what we’re fighting for. We know what’s at stake. We know how thin the fence is that separates civilisation from barbarism. And I think if you ask most Americans, even many plugged-in Americans, a question like, ‘Would you fight for America? What are you willing to die for?’ I don’t even think they would have the capacity.

“Many people, especially many of our elites, well, there’s no sense of duty and responsibility. Leaving Israel [was] walking back into a society that I don’t think has fully recognised the history that has come for Israel and has come for Ukraine, and maybe will soon come from Taiwan, will come for us. How can you even conceive of war if you don’t even understand what it is that people are willing to fight and die for? And what are you willing to fight and die for?” Weiss’s coverage of October 7 in the Free Press has largely reflected her stance of staunch support for Israel’s response and the moral importance of its fight for survival, especially in the face of global condemnation.
Fury over ‘sickening’ LRB article saying Israel leverages Shoah to ‘slaughter children’
For well-to-do Jews, Mishra argues, the Holocaust and an affiliation to the Jewish State, “turned into a badge of identity and moral rectitude”.

Now the essayist argues that “Gaza has become for countless powerless people the essential condition of political and ethical consciousness in the 21st century [...] it seems that only those jolted into consciousness by the calamity of Gaza can rescue the Shoah from Netanyahu, Biden, Scholz and Sunak."

Mishra goes on: “Many of the protesters who fill the streets of their cities week after week have no immediate relation to the European past of the Shoah. They judge Israel by its actions in Gaza rather than its Shoah-sanctified demand for total and permanent security.”

The piece has drawn widespread derision from Jewish figures. Writing in The Times, JC columnist, Hadley Freedman, noted “the left-wing intelligentsia only tries this kind of provocative thought experiment with Jews”. The JC’s Anshel Pfeffer tweeted, “There [are] plenty of ways of criticising Israel over the war in Gaza but writing 8000 words lecturing Jews that they are like Nazis and anyway the Holocaust actually wasn’t so special so they should stop obsessing about it says more about this pseud than it does about Israelis or Jews.”

Israeli government spokesman Eylon Levy, wrote that the essay demonstrated the major challenge of “Holocaust inversion, especially when turned against Jews in conjunction with sickening blood libels.”

Political correspondent, Lahav Harkov, called the article “disgusting”, and said the writer’s use of “the concept of the Holocaust as a ‘universal reference point’ is part of the problem [...] It led to the idea that the Holocaust was not unique, and was also some kind of purifying experience from which Jews were ennobled and therefore supposed to behave a certain way”.

The argument over the LRB front page is the latest in a history of controversy between the journal and the Jewish state.

On 18 October, LRB published a letter signed by hundreds of writers which condemned Israel but failed to mention the October 7 massacre. The letter claimed, “The State of Israel commits serious crimes against humanity” and accused Israel of “genocide”.

The Hebrew Writers Association in Israel, representing 800 writers and artists, wrote a public letter condemning LRB for their initial response to the war. The group then denounced LRB when they failed to respond to their letter.
Jonathan Glazer’s Oscars speech condemned by Son of Saul director: ‘He should have stayed silent’
László Nemes, the director of acclaimed film Son of Saul, has criticised The Zone of Interest director Jonathan Glazer’s Oscars acceptance speech.

Speaking at the ceremony on Sunday, Glazer said he and his producer, James Wilson, “stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people, whether the victims of October 7 in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza.”

Glazer’s words have met with both applause and opprobrium, including from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), who on Monday called them “morally reprehensible”.

The ADL posted on social media: “Israel is not hijacking Judaism or the Holocaust by defending itself against genocidal terrorists. Glazer’s comments at the #Oscars are both factually incorrect & morally reprehensible. They minimise the Shoah & excuse terrorism of the most heinous kind.”

This sentiment was echoed by Nemes, who – like Glazer – won the foreign language Oscar for a film about the Holocaust; in Nemes’ case his 2015 movie Son of Saul, about a Jewish prisoner forced to work in the gas chambers at Auschwitz. US Holocaust survivors’ foundation calls Jonathan Glazer’s Oscars speech ‘morally indefensible’

“The Zone of Interest is an important movie,” Nemes writes. “It is not made in a usual way. It questions the grammar of cinema. Its director should have stayed silent instead of revealing he has no understanding of history and the forces undoing civilisation, before or after the Holocaust.

“Had he embraced the responsibility that comes with a film like that, he would not have resorted to talking points disseminated by propaganda meant to eradicate, at the end, all Jewish presence from the Earth.”
This is how Hamas used Gazan journalists for the Oct. 7 massacre
PEOPLE WHO HATE Jews can be journalists, but they should not be reporting about the Jewish state. Therefore, Reuters is wrong to continue paying for pictures from photojournalist Doaa Rouqa, whose social media posts, revealed by HonestReporting, have celebrated rockets fired at Israel and called Hamas’s attacks “brave resistance.” Last week, HonestReporting also revealed a disturbing social media post by Reuters Executive Editor Simon Robinson, who shared an extremely problematic essay titled “The Shoah after Gaza.”

There is also plenty of evidence of journalists collaborating with Hamas that did not come through HonestReporting.

The IDF revealed evidence that two Al Jazeera journalists were active terrorists in Hamas. Mohammed Wishnah held a senior role in the terrorist group’s anti-tank unit and taught young jihadis how to fire anti-tank missiles and make incendiary devices. Ismail Abu Omar was found to have accompanied Hamas terrorists into Israel on Oct. 7, going to Kibbutz Nir Oz.

Gaza-based journalist Muthana Al-Najjar entered Israel on Oct. 7 and shocked Israelis with his stand-up to camera reports from Kibbutz Nahal Oz as gunshots were heard in the background. He did not wear a press vest or a helmet to make him identifiable as a member of the press, and clearly did not feel under threat from the Hamas terrorists in his midst.

Al-Najjar filmed the kidnapping of terrified Shiri Bibas and her small children, Ariel and Kfir, instead of trying to save their lives. He also shared a picture showing two of the terrorists triumphantly stepping on the body of a murdered Israeli, with a comment translated from Arabic: “Their dead under the feet of the warriors of al-Qassam Brigades.”

While Al-Najjar actively knew he was part of a Hamas plan, others listed here might not have. But the line in the Hamas document that Dayan revealed says clearly that the terrorist organization intended to take advantage of journalists, and on Oct. 7 it did just that.

After HonestReporting asked questions about the Gazan photojournalists, reporters from media outlets that we put on the defensive interviewed me and asked what evidence we had. When I honestly – and perhaps foolishly – replied that we had merely raised questions and did not claim to have answers, I was attacked personally and falsely portrayed as if I had backtracked and undermined my organization’s report.

Ilana Dayan’s report and the others mentioned here answer the questions and validate the work that HonestReporting is doing as a media watchdog. We asked legitimate questions, and now the answers are out there.
From Ian:

U.S. Fails to Understand What This War Means to Israel
President Biden's standing by Israel at the start of the war with Hamas will be remembered as one of the high points in the special relationship between the countries. But this has been blunted by the passage of time and the images from Gaza.

Biden's demand to increase humanitarian aid and related initiatives (airdrops, maritime pier) show that his administration has not internalized that the problem is not delivering aid to Gaza, but its distribution within it. Hamas will take control of everything that enters. It will use it to supply its fighters (and prolong their ability to fight) and strengthen its rule. The way to prevent this is to deliver the aid to areas where Hamas would not be able to access it.

The U.S. discounts the extent of public support for Hamas in Gaza, and the fact that it is entrenched in all spheres of life. The administration holds an optimistic assessment regarding the ability to bring about deep change through governmental models under Arab or international auspices.

America's vision includes peace agreements between Israel and Saudi Arabia and the establishment of a Palestinian state. But from Israel's perspective, normalization with Saudi Arabia will not compensate for Hamas' non-defeat. Talk of a "Palestinian state" after the Oct. 7 massacre constitutes a prize for Hamas and expresses a lack of understanding of the sentiment in the Israeli public. Anyone who thinks that after Oct. 7 Israel will take risks like those taken in the past lives in a fantasy land.

The Biden administration has not internalized that for Israel, the defeat of Hamas is an existential issue. It is not like America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which were conducted thousands of miles away. Israel's deterrence that collapsed on Oct. 7 will not be restored if Israel stops short of meeting the goals it has defined for the war. The temptation for players in our region to attack it will grow.
WSJ Editorial: A "Revitalized" Palestinian Authority?
The Biden Administration is pitching its "two-state solution" to Israel with the lure of a "revitalized" Palestinian Authority. However, a new report by Regavim, an Israeli NGO, reveals a pattern of Palestinian police "turning their Western-supplied guns on the State of Israel" and then being glorified for their terrorism by the PA.

It specifically identifies 76 officers of the Palestinian Authority Security Forces (PASF) who have been killed or arrested while carrying out terrorist attacks against Israelis in the past three years. The latest example is Capt. Muhammad Manasrah, who shot up a gas station on Feb. 29, murdering two Israelis.

The PASF was created to fight Hamas terrorism in collaboration with Israel, but for too long it has abetted, committed or celebrated terrorism. A serious reform would begin by axing the PA's "pay-for-slay" program, which pays terrorists in prison as well as families of "martyrs," such as the Oct. 7 killers. A reformed PA would also cut the incitement to hatred against Jews from its media, sermons and schools.

The two-state solution is one of those diplomatic constructs that sounds nice but crashes against reality. In this case it's the reality that today's Palestinian leaders don't want Israel to exist.
Arsen Ostrovsky: Hamas are cruelly turning hospitals into targets
In principle, each of these hospitals, which Hamas has totally usurped for purposes of shielding their fighters and weapons, and using them as control and command centers, lose their protected status under international law and become legitimate military targets.

Article 8(2) of the Rome Statute and Article 52(2) of the First Protocol to the Geneva Convention of 1949 both make clear that intentionally directing attacks against hospitals and medical locations, can only be permissible, provided there is a distinct military objective.

In this case, the military objective is clear and defined: to eliminate the threat of Hamas, which continues to use hospitals and other civilian areas in Gaza to plan and execute acts of terror against Israel, as well as rescue the 239 hostages that the terror group is holding captive.

However, merely because Hamas has seized hospitals as their own personal launching pads, does not give Israel carte blanche to automatically attack.

International humanitarian law also dictates that, in the event a decision is made to attack a hospital or such target that would otherwise hold special protected status, there must be sufficient advanced warning provided that goes unheeded, and then ultimately, if an attack should proceed, that it still adhere to the principles of proportionality.

In each case, Israel has been providing repeated warnings for civilians to evacuate and have created safe passages for them to do so. In circumstances where warranted, the IDF have even aborted what would otherwise be deemed legitimate military strikes. In the meantime, Israel continues to facilitate the provision of humanitarian goods and medical supplies into Gaza, and to the hospitals.

Quite simply, the IDF have gone to unprecedented lengths, not seen in the history of modern warfare, to avoid and minimize civilian casualties, whereas Hamas are doing everything possible to maximise casualties.

Having discharged its duty to provide ample warning, Israel is also adhering to the doctrine of proportionality, that is, should there be any potential loss of civilian life, that it not exceed the military advantage to be gained from such a strike or action.

The goal here is clear: eliminate Hamas, a genocidal terrorist organization that seeks Israel’s destruction, and bring back the hostages, following the heinous October 7th massacre.

If the international community truly cares about the wellbeing of civilians in Gaza and is rightfully aghast at the scenes coming out of Shifa, it would be well advised to direct its outrage at Hamas, which continues to unconscionably and illegally, turn hospitals into their personal control and command centers.

Sunday, March 17, 2024

From Ian:

Dore Gold: Defeating Hamas requires a joint effort from the Western world
Ed Husain is a Muslim professor teaching at Georgetown University in Washington. Last week, he made a startling observation in the London Times. Husain noted, ironically, that the Muslim Brotherhood may be banned in Mecca but actually, it thrives in London.

Prof. Husain bravely called for shutting the various arms of the Muslim Brotherhood operating in the United Kingdom, observing that presented danger to British security and British democracy. He observed that Hamas, which is waging a war against Israel in the Gaza Strip, is the Palestinian arm of the Muslim Brotherhood. Moreover, Hamas has vowed to act against Israel again until it succeeds.

True, Hamas has been designated as an international terrorist organization by the European Union (EU), among others, but there has been a disturbing trend in the West to underestimate, to misjudge, and even to misrepresent Hamas and its parent organization, the Muslim Brotherhood.

They have not disavowed their charter or their stated aims. The motto of the Muslim Brotherhood was cosmetically modified after 9-11, now reads: “Jihad is our path; Martyrdom is our aspiration.”

Hamas’s vile assaults on captured Israeli women during and following the October 2023 attacks were not condemned by the Muslim Brotherhood. Indeed many Brotherhood-tied groups shouted their support for what Hamas did. There is no reason to doubt that similar reactions would greet similar atrocities in the future.

The Muslim Brotherhood has global goals
The goals of the Muslim Brotherhood are still global, as the organization reaches out to wider audiences many of whom (Christians, Jews) are themselves targets of the Brotherhood.

But right now the urgent challenge for Israel and the West is Hamas (Arabic: Harakat al-Muqawwima al-Islamiyya – The Islamic Resistance Movement).

Foreign Policy published an analysis in December 2023 of the October attacks on Israel titled “Could Hamas Become a Global Threat?” and the conclusion was yes.
Danny Danon: All Rafah terrorists must be purged
Any call from the world’s representatives for Israel to forgo the operation in Rafah amounts to calling for Israel to surrender to Hamas. Leaving operational Hamas terror cells in Rafah guarantees the regrouping of Hamas and its continuation of its brutal, genocidal path. This unquestionably jeopardizes Israel’s security and paves the path to a recurrence of the atrocities witnessed on October 7, as Hamas’s leaders have promised time and again.

This is unthinkable. For Israel, surrendering is not an option. We will never allow our security to be threatened again.

Israel has no choice. Our people have no choice. To decisively win the war and ensure lasting peace, and also to ensure a better life for the people of Gaza, Hamas must be completely demilitarized, and Rafah strongholds must be eradicated to prevent the re-emergence of terrorism and smuggling through Hamas’s elaborate tunnel system under the Philadelphi Corridor. Following this, the entirety of Gaza must be demilitarized completely. Only once this has been achieved can we begin to discuss the day after in Gaza.

We cannot win the war decisively with Hamas remaining operational in any part of Gaza. Rafah is not up for debate, and we will not rest until the full defeat of Hamas.
Melanie Phillips: The Palestinian Terrorist Authority
For western liberals, the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel is the only answer to the Palestinian-Israel conflict.

The Biden administration wants post-war Gaza to be ruled by the Palestinian Authority (PA). This is being resisted by Israel, one of its disagreements with the US over the conduct of the war for which the Biden administration is increasingly punishing it.

The US is impervious to the argument that the PA, no less than Hamas, would turn Gaza once again into a terror state. The Bidenites close their eyes to the copious evidence of PA incitement and rejectionism. They dismiss the huge salaries the PA pays to terrorists incarcerated in Israeli prisons and to the families of terrorists who have been killed.

They ignore the survey published 100 days after the outbreak of the Gaza war which revealed that around 82 per cent of Palestinian Arabs in Judea and Samaria support the October 7 pogrom, and that support for Hamas among the Arabs in Judea and Samaria rose from 12 per cent in September 2023 to 44 per cent in November-December 2023.

Now a startling and important report by the Israeli group Regavim, which works to protect Israel’s land and resources in order to uphold its integrity as a Jewish state, illustrates the insanity of assuming that the PA is a route to peace and security in the region.

Under the 1995 Oslo Agreement, a broad Palestinian security apparatus was established consisting of the Palestinian Police and other security officials who are supposed to combat terrorism and collaborate with Israel on security matters. But the Regavim report, “Officers by Day, Terrorists by Night”, has identified at least 78 members of the Palestinian Authority Security Forces (PASF), many of them officers, who since 2020 have carried out terrorist attacks against Jews.

Since Regavim gathered its information from official PA statements and announcements, this figure is likely to be a significant underestimate.

Saturday, March 16, 2024

From Ian:

Shattered
When Israelis speak about Oct. 7, they frequently say “there are no words.” But one word they consistently use is “shattered.”

Israeli psychologists have been treating severe trauma, complex trauma and collective trauma. The word “trauma,” however, fails to convey the scale, the savagery or the sadism of events that day. The term does not encompass the complex mix of disorientation, anguish, emotional overload and the experience of utter brokenness after the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.

There is no word for the shock felt by Jews around the world when Israel was suddenly and without warning attacked by thousands of rockets targeting civilians from the north to the south and from the river to the sea. There is no word to describe what it is like to be a Jew kidnapped by terrorists indoctrinated since early childhood to believe that murdering Jews is rewarded in the afterlife. Or to know that the people you love are in the hands of terrorists who delight in rape, torture and slaughter; who enjoy forcing parents and children to watch as they inflict horrors on loved ones.

There is no word to convey the terrifying ordeal suffered by survivors of the attempted genocide that Hamas perpetrated on Oct. 7. There is no word that communicates the panic, betrayal, horror and distress of those who hid for hours waiting for help to come, reading WhatsApp messages about terrorists inside their neighbors’ houses. Hearing terrorists break into their own homes. Hearing the screams of injured and dying friends and relatives. Hearing sounds of gunfire and exploding RPGs punctuated by ecstatic shouts of “Allahu Akbar.” All the while knowing they were being hunted.

Everyone in Israel is just one or two degrees of separation from someone who was murdered, injured or kidnapped on Oct. 7. And everyone knows someone who sped to the rescue that day, many of whom never returned.

There is no word to describe the grief of a country still holding its breath while more than a hundred hostages remain in Gaza, and while hundreds of thousands of soldiers, many in their teens and early 20s, go to battle. Some returning badly injured. Some returning to be buried.

Israel, which in the 20th century absorbed hundreds of thousands of displaced Holocaust survivors as well as nearly 900,000 Jewish refugees fleeing antisemitism and violence in neighboring Arab countries, is now temporarily housing about 200,000 displaced Israelis — refugees in their own country — some in hotels and even dormitories.

This includes not only those evacuated from areas near the Gaza border, but also from the north, as confrontations with terrorists in Lebanon escalate. Many displaced families are unsure how long it will take before they can return home. Some refugees from the south have already returned. Some don’t have homes to return to. Some don’t know if they want to return.

There is no word in the psychological lexicon for what happened on Oct. 7 or the new world in which Israelis now live. But “shattered” comes closer than “trauma.”
Sharansky: Oslo sowed the seeds for the October 7 massacre
THE DISCUSSION quickly turns to Oct. 7 and the “shocking” and “terrible” failure beforehand of Israel’s intelligence community and of the IDF that day. He says that everyone wants "to fight back and restore peace, but our perception of our security changed that day.”

On the other hand, he says, “I think so much good has come out of our people” since the massacre. “In one day, we went from being a polarized society to the most united. Suddenly, it was clear that the whole year of these mutual accusations was not in the hearts of the people.

“I am sure there will be at least two new parties in the next elections: one to the left of Likud, and one to the right, with new faces for everyone.”

But Sharansky cannot let go of what he believes was the catalyst for the Gaza war: the Oslo Accords, meaning that the seeds of Oct. 7 were planted 30 years ago. He says the Olso approach essentially communicated that “It’s not our business, and it’s not important for us in what kind of society the Palestinians live” but rather that Israel “find a dictator who can guarantee our stability.”

“That was the idea of Oslo,” Sharansky explains. “We are bringing [Yasser] Arafat. We know that he is a ruthless dictator. And we say to the Palestinians, ‘Whether you want it or not, he will be your leader.’ And we say to ourselves, ‘Our prime minister said that it’s good he [Arafat] is not restricted by democracy because that’s how he will defeat Hamas much quicker than we can do it.’”

Sharansky opposed Oslo because he believed Arafat would quickly understand that the only way he could maintain power by force was to find an external enemy. “What other external enemy would he have except us?” he asks. “A lot of public money was put into Arafat’s account so he would be loyal to us. And it failed big.”

The former minister says that not only did Arafat fail to defeat Hamas, but “Hamas defeated him.”

Then came the Disengagement in 2005 and the vision that Israel could separate from Gaza. Sharansky was the first minister to resign over the idea.

It’s not that he does not want peace or believe it is achievable, Sharansky stresses. Rather, he does not think Israeli and world leaders have gone about obtaining it in the right way. He calls former prime minister Shimon Peres “primitive and a neo-Marxist,” having fully bought into a blissful vision of Mideast peace.

“He was so popular because of his optimism,” Sharansky says of Peres. “I am also optimistic, but I am not naive.” Former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, he opines, was more realistic but felt it was worthwhile to proceed.

He says he does not believe that then-prime minister Ariel Sharon really felt the Disengagement would achieve its goal. Sharon told Sharansky that he thought if Israel separated from Gaza and gave the Gazans complete independence, Israel would have 10 years of international approval – and be able to respond if Gazans carried out attacks against the Jewish state.

“I told him, ‘We don’t have 10 years; we don’t have 10 days,’” Sharansky says. “I was wrong. We had a couple of months.

“We are paying a very big price for our attempts,” he continues, speaking quickly. “We have no choice now. If we want to continue to exist as a state, we have to destroy Hamas. We have to take control over the security.”
Seth Frantzman: Why wasn’t October 7 prevented? Time to look to the West
While Israel will need to investigate its own failures on and leading up to October 7, there is also enough blame to go around Western nations.

Hamas is hosted by Qatar, a major non-NATO ally of the US. Doha is also close to many other western countries. In addition, Turkey, a member of NATO backs Hamas. As such, two of the West’s closest allies in the Middle East are both closely connected to Hamas.

How did Hamas plan the greatest mass murder of Jews in a single day since the Holocaust while also being hosted by western allies? How is it possible that western allies hosted and backed Hamas while western governments knew nothing about the plans for October 7?

These are important questions because October 7 was certainly not in the interests of Israel or Gazans. More than 200,000 Israelis had to be evacuated in its wake, and Hezbollah’s supporting rocket fire.

'Ceasefire' calls amid post-Oct. 7 realities
Some 1,200 people were killed in Israel and 253 were taken hostage. Israel’s inevitable response has been massive. Most countries in the region as well as in the West would surely have wanted to avoid this war. Pro-Palestinian activists across the West demand a ceasefire and there are fears of a wider regional war Gaza war and famine in Gaza.

All of this could have been prevented, not just by more vigilant Israeli protection of its Gaza border. October 7 could not possibly have been carried out by a handful of terrorists alone. Hamas has never carried out such a complex attack. In fact, Hamas has only recently become powerful enough to conceive of such an attack. Its sophistication point to foreign support and advice.

Reports have shown that Hamas cyber and intelligence capabilities have expanded in recent years. It expanded its rocket arsenal and ability to fire large barrages of rockets simultaneously. It expanded its knowledge of Israel’s border fence electronics and sought to use new methods to outsmart artificial intelligence-driven technologies.

In addition to two Western backers Hamas’s main backer is Iran. After October 7, Russia and China did not condemn Hamas and have appeared to excuse its attack. In addition, the Iranian regime sent its foreign minister to Qatar to congratulate the Hamas high command.

Friday, March 15, 2024

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The West’s abandonment of the Jews
As the ultimate particularist culture, Judaism is in the way of all universalizing creeds; and so Israel, the particularist Jewish state, had to be dumped. The stage was set for the demonization of Israel tied to the increasing dominance of international human rights doctrine.

A living example of this is Samantha Power, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Obama administration’s U.S. ambassador to the U.N.

A noted expert on genocide, Power has long said the United States bears a unique responsibility to prevent mass atrocities.

It was therefore an irony that, earlier this year, Power was attacked by current and former USAID employees for belonging to an administration providing military support to Israel in the war against Hamas. Although she told these officials it was “very important that what happened on Oct. 7 never happen again,” she failed to push back against their claim that Israel was committing “genocide” in Gaza.

Given her history, this perhaps wasn’t surprising. In 2002, she was asked as a “thought experiment” what she would advise the U.S. president to do about the Israel-Palestinian problem “if one party or another [starts] looking like they might be moving towards genocide.”

In response to this already disturbingly loaded question, Power said that something should be put “on the line” to help the situation. This might mean “alienating a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import. … It does require external intervention.”

Power wasn’t talking about preventing the Palestinians from committing genocide against the Jews of Israel. She was talking about invading Israel to prevent an Israeli genocide against the Palestinians.

She was suggesting that Israel might commit atrocities against people who themselves make Israel the victim of precisely such atrocities: The vile smear being used against Israel today.

She also suggested that the only people who might be alienated if the U.S. invaded Israel for this purpose would be American Jews, who she said exercised tremendous political and financial power over America.

The antisemitism of this remark aside, the thinking here was that Jews can’t be allowed to get in the way of the human rights doctrine that state power is always used to make victims and never to protect people from becoming victims in the first place.

Israel is fighting a desperate battle for its survival. Its people are in a state of ever-deepening trauma, grief and anxiety. Some of their families and friends are still hostages in Gaza meeting unthinkable fates. The death toll among their conscripted children and grandchildren fighting to defend their country is steadily ticking upwards.

They understand that genocidal savages intend to continue their attacks until they have destroyed the Jewish homeland and slaughtered every Jew.

In this truly desperate situation, what’s even worse is that the so-called “civilized” West—which also wants the Jews removed from its headspace and its conscience—is accusing them of the crime of which they are the present and intended victims.

That is an unspeakable abandonment of the Jewish people and to the West a source of ineradicable shame.
‘He Made a Good Speech,’ Biden Says of Schumer's Call To Oust Netanyahu
President Joe Biden told reporters on Friday that Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer's (D., N.Y.) call for Israelis to vote out Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came in "a good speech."

"Sen. Schumer contacted my staff, my senior staff, he was gonna make that speech. I'm not going to elaborate on the speech," Biden told reporters in the Oval Office. "He made a good speech, and I think he expressed a serious concern shared not only by him, but by many Americans."

Schumer in the Thursday speech on the Senate floor said Netanyahu was "stuck in the past" and that he allied with "radical right-wing Israelis," even saying that he should not remain in power.

"I believe a new election is the only way to allow for a healthy and open decision-making process about the future of Israel," Schumer said.

Several Republicans blasted Schumer for his remarks. Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) said his call for new elections was "inappropriate and offensive."

"Israel is a close ally and a healthy, vibrant democracy. The last thing Israel needs is the 'foreign election interference' that Democrats so often decry here," Cotton said in a statement.

Even the more centrist American Jewish Committee admonished Schumer for his call.
Douglas Murray: Why do clueless Hamas supporters keep getting away with disruptive protests? Arrest them!
If your print copy of The New York Post was slightly delayed yesterday morning you can blame the “peace” brigade.

The same people who have spent the last few months blocking bridges and stopping New Yorkers getting to work yesterday morning targeted one of this paper’s printing works in Queens.

The plant also prints The Wall Street Journal, Newsday, USA Today and the New York Times.

The protestors seemed especially angry about the last of these. Though I’m tempted to say that they deserve each other.

In the early hours of the morning these protestors lay across the road and put a barricade in the middle of it.

They also put up a sign saying “Consent for genocide is manufactured here.”

Wearing Palestinian bandanas and other terrorist-chic the protestors sought to disrupt the operations of the free press. All to demonstrate their opposition to something that isn’t happening.

Because of course there is no “genocide” in Gaza. There is a targeted military operation in a heavily built-up area where Hamas hide behind the civilians and also dress as civilians.

In any case, what military operation there is could stop at any moment if the terrorists of Hamas just handed back the more than 100 Israeli hostages who they are still holding.

But you never hear calls like that from these activists. Because human details don’t disturb them. Any more than facts or reality do.
‘We Should Salute Them’: Hezbollah Leader Expresses Gratitude for American Anti-Israel Activists
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on Wednesday praised Americans who are putting pressure on US President Joe Biden to limit support for Israel because they are helping the Lebanese terrorist group’s cause.

“Today, what many people demonstrating in America are doing … Of course, we should salute them and be grateful to them,” Nasrallah said in remarks translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).

In his speech, the terrorist leader highlighted the importance in his view of anti-Israel activism in the US.

Nasrallah went on to praise Democrats in America who are threatening not to vote for Biden in this year’s US presidential election due to his support for Israel in its war against the Hamas terrorist group in Gaza.

“The Arabs, the Muslims, and the non-Muslims, from among the other free Americans — Christians and others — in the Democratic Party who wrote to Biden: ‘We are uncommitted to vote for you.’ These people are very influential at this stage,” Nasrallah said.

These Americans are so important, Nasrallah explained, because Biden “is not afraid of the world, the international community, God, history, or anything. Biden now is afraid of one thing only — that his policy and actions in Gaza will lead him to lose the presidential elections. This is why he keeps debating, denying, and playing games.”

More than that, Nasrallah seemed to see an opening to help his cause, saying, “If the pressure and opposition [to Biden] in America continues, this may also open a door for hope.”

Both Hamas and Hezbollah are backed by Iran, which provides the Islamist terrorist groups with arms, funds, and training.

In its 1985 manifesto, Hezbollah wrote, “Our struggle will end only when this entity [Israel] is obliterated. We recognize no treaty with it, no cease fire, and no peace agreements, whether separate or consolidated.”

The terror group’s praise for American anti-Israel activists comes amid rising pressure in the US from segments of the Muslim community, the far left, and increasingly the mainstream left on Biden to lessen his support for Israel.
From Ian:

The Big Lies About Israel’s Big Bombs
President Joe Biden says Israel is losing support because of its “indiscriminate bombing” in Gaza. He says that Israeli conduct in Gaza has been “over the top.” His secretary of state, secretary of defense, and vice president have all said Israel must do more to make the war in Gaza less destructive. Yet the White House has never laid out precisely what Israel is doing wrong on the battlefield. How does one wage a less destructive war when facing an enemy that has spent more than a decade building hundreds of kilometers of tunnels underneath densely populated areas, turning whole neighborhoods into human shields?

A growing contingent of journalists believes it has the answer to this question: Israel must stop using 2,000-pound bombs in Gaza and shift to smaller, less powerful munitions. Investigations by CNN, the Washington Post, and the New York Times all make the case that employing such large bombs in dense urban environments is inherently reckless, even criminal.

Yet the military analysis that informs this conclusion is amateurish, placing inordinate emphasis on the potential of 2,000-pound bombs to inflict grave harm on people and buildings far from the point of impact. This ignores how a well-trained air force can limit such harm by fusing a bomb to detonate below ground, as well as adjusting factors such as the angle and velocity of its delivery.

The indictments also tend to brush aside that Hamas has spent a decade constructing a tunnel network that is more extensive, built tougher, and buried deeper than those of other insurgent forces, such as ISIS. Ignoring this key fact, the critics ask why Israel needs to use 2,000-pound bombs if the United States and its allies used them infrequently in urban environments when fighting ISIS.

Another flaw of the broadsides against Israel’s use of large bombs is that their conclusions rest heavily on analysis provided by experts drawn from progressive ranks, and especially from organizations calling for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza and an immediate end to U.S. military support for Israel. The voices of independent military experts are conspicuously absent.

Finally, the critics shy away from observing that Hamas has embedded its military infrastructure directly under homes, hospitals, schools, and mosques. This is a war crime, plain and simple, yet the media’s emphasis remains on Israel’s alleged culpability, with no reference to the original sin of locating military infrastructure in prohibited spaces. Unquestionably, the war has inflicted unprecedented suffering on the people of Gaza. Yet that is part of Hamas’s plan.
Top U.S. intelligence officials refuse to reject claim that Israel is "exterminating" Palestinians
Avril Haines, director of national intelligence, and Williams Burns, director of the CIA, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Monday. Sen. Tom Cotton asked Haines and Burns whether they agreed with allegations that Israel is “exterminating” the Palestinian people.

For any honest, non-biased intelligence director, answering would be easy. Of course, Israel isn’t exterminating the Palestinian people; nor is it attempting to do so.

Yet, neither Haines nor Burns disavowed this slanderous claim. Cotton gave Burns two tries. Both times, Burns refused to disagree with the slander, choosing instead to mouth non-responsive Biden administration talking points about the need for a cease-fire, etc.

Cotton then asked Haines the same question. She replied that she fully endorses Burns’ (non) response. You can watch these exchanges here, beginning at around the 1 hour, 8 minute mark

The answers Burns and Haines gave are disgraceful. One can be “mindful” of the deaths of innocent civilians in Gaza, as Burns said we should be, without lending credence to the calumny that Israel is exterminating the Palestinian people. But neither of Americas two top intelligence repudiated that charge.

The charge is manifestly false. According to Hamas, Israel has killed around 31,000 Palestinians in Gaza. This number is garbage, but let’s assume, for purposes of argument, that it’s accurate. And let’s add in the nearly five hundred Palestinians that, allegedly, have been killed in the West Bank.

Prime Minister Netanyahu says that Israeli forces have killed approximately 13,000 Hamas terrorists. I have no reason to doubt this figure, but let’s say, again for the sake of argument, that the real number is half of what Netanyahu claims.

Under these assumptions, all of which are highly favorable to the Hamas propaganda machine, Israeli forces have killed approximately 25,000 Palestinian civilians, around 24,500 of whom resided in Gaza. The population of Gaza is around two million.

“Exterminate” means to destroy completely. Clearly, there has been nothing resembling an extermination.

Nor, especially in light of Hamas’ strategy of hiding among civilians, has there been an attempt at extermination. Given Israel’s massive military superiority, if its forces were trying to exterminate Palestinians, they would have killed many times more of them than they have.

Yet, America’s two top intelligence chiefs wouldn’t deny the calumny — a modern day blood libel — that Israel is exterminating Palestinians.
Caroline Glick: Israel’s strategic game of survival
To understand the nature of the armed conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, “you really have to go back to World War II-style battles,” said Spencer.

“Defense is always the strongest form of warfare … Hamas has had 15-plus years to build defensive positions. … Yes, they don’t have an air force. They don’t have armor and tanks. They’re mostly light infantry. But they’re in probably the most defensive terrain that could ever be created. They’re in literally bomb-proof bunkers underneath every house. … It’s 400 miles of tunnels that range from 15 feet to 300 feet underground where no military munition can reach.”

The IDF, Spencer noted, “has lots of drones and things above, but you can’t see through concrete. You can’t see underneath the buildings. It’s an immense defensive capability, but also the rocket supply. The fact that Hamas has launched over 12,000 rockets at Israel’s civilian sites—every one of them a war crime—is part of their combat power. … The fact that they’re sitting in their defensive positions, waiting for attack and have been planning for that for 15 years means it doesn’t really matter how big the IDF is or how powerful they are.”

The second fundamental feature of Hamas’s war against Israel that the United States refuses to acknowledge is that Hamas’s Oct. 7 operation was not a terrorist attack. “They did terrorist things, but that was a full division-level invasion of a nation, of Israel,” and “while Hamas is a terrorist organization, it’s also an army.”

The terrorists that carried out the slaughter that day didn’t “penetrate” Israel, like a suicide bomber who explodes himself in a crowded cafe. Hamas operatives invaded Israel with thousands of well-trained, heavily armed terror forces organized as light infantry and artillery units. Their goals were to seize whole communities, military bases and villages, and enact a premeditated plan of sadistic slaughter, gang rape, seizure of hostages of all ages, seizure of strategic targets, and, if possible, the holding of territory within Israel. The ground invasion was synchronized with a massive missile and drone strike, in addition to a cyber-attack against first-response systems and other critical infrastructure.

Three things Israel must do to win
Israel’s mini-war against Hamas in 2014 ended with a tactical victory and strategic stalemate. Ten years ago, Netanyahu was able to withstand the Obama-Biden administration’s demand that Israel capitulate and enable Hamas to win a strategic victory by mobilizing the support of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which opposed Hamas.

Fearing Hamas’s mastermind Iran—and in light of the U.S.’s determination to enable a Hamas victory to empower Iran—today the moderate Arab states are unwilling to stick their necks out. In the absence of Sunni support, Israel is compelled to stand alone against the United States.

To win, Israel must do three things. It must remain politically stable. Schumer’s broadside from the Senate floor was just the latest salvo in an all-out effort by the administration to destabilize Israel politically and replace Netanyahu with his chief rival Benny Gantz, whom they believe will agree to capitulate and accept the formation of a Palestinian state. Minister-without-Portfolio Gideon Sa’ar’s decision on Tuesday to ditch Gantz’s party and take his faction’s four Knesset seats into the coalition speaks to the near consensus view in Israel that Netanyahu is the only leader that will fight to victory despite U.S. opposition. On Wednesday, a new Direct Polls survey showed that U.S. hostility has strengthened Netanyahu and the right. Netanyahu leads Gantz 47 % to 37% in public support. His right-religious bloc of parties, (including Sa’ar) is polling a 62 seat-majority to Gantz’s leftist bloc of parties’ 48 seats.

The second thing Israel must do is mobilize U.S. public opinion on behalf of its goal of achieving strategic victory by eradicating Hamas and maintaining its security control over Gaza for the foreseeable future. According to last month’s Harvard-Harris poll. Americans support Israel against Hamas 82% to 18%. Netanyahu opened a campaign this week to secure public support with a slew of interviews to the American media and his speech to AIPAC’s annual convention.

Schumer’s hysterical attempts to walk his remarks back amid a furious storm of criticism from all quarters revealed that pro-Israel public opinion remains a factor in American politics.

Finally, Israel must conquer Rafah in defiance of the Biden’s redline and do so as quickly as possible.

As the weeks and months pass, and Election Day in America draws nearer, if Israel remains politically stable, if the IDF continues its brilliant fight in Gaza and if U.S. opinion remains supportive, just as Israel has turned Hamas’s tactical advantages into its own, it will turn the Palestinian U.S.-centered strategy on its head. For once, time will work in Israel’s favor, and Israel will win the strategic victory it needs to secure its survival.

Thursday, March 14, 2024

From Ian:

Arnold Roth: Betrayal, lies, politics and grief
Seven years have passed since criminal charges were brought in Washington, D.C. against the woman who murdered my sunny, lovely, empathetic 15-year-old daughter Malki. The anniversary of the charges being made public is today, March 14.

As milestones go, this one is dark. The fugitive killer admits to her central role in the massacre for which she is being prosecuted. Though she brags about her atrocity, she lives the life of a celebrity and an inspiration to others. Yet her ongoing freedom gets negligible attention in the news industry and public discourse—even in the U.S. To the extent that the Arab media report on her, it is overwhelmingly favorable and sympathetic.

The dry details of Ahlam Aref Ahmad al-Tamimi’s long-thwarted prosecution are easy to find. The mugshots, biographical details and charges are accessible via three sites: The FBI’s list of Most Wanted Terrorists, the 2017 Department of Justice announcement of the previously secret charges and the State Department’s 2018 post of a $5 million reward that is still unclaimed two decades after it first went public.

What’s behind Tamimi’s freedom is harder to ascertain. Those who know don’t talk openly and those with a stake in her ongoing freedom are too often untruthful about it. Understanding this and conjecturing why it is the case is at the heart of the nightmare my wife and I endure years after our beautiful child’s life was extinguished.
Yisrael Medad: The world must be reminded of the Palestinian genocide campaign against Jews
If you do a Google search for the entry “Palestinian genocide accusation,” it starts with the 1948 Nakba, goes on to the 1967 Naksa, includes the Maronite-perpetrated Sabra and Shatila killings, and ends with the Gaza blockade. It references such terms as “ethnic cleansing,” “politicide,” “spaciocide,” and “cultural genocide.”

However, if you are looking for this year’s model, the entry is titled “Allegations of genocide in the 2023 Israeli attack on Gaza.” That includes such sub-sections as “Alleged genocidal intent,” “Academic and legal discourse,” “Statements by political organizations and governments,” and “Cultural discourse.” When I last looked, there were 299 references, not including footnotes.

The charge that Israel is engaged in a campaign of genocide in Gaza is ubiquitous, from The Hague to campuses, to the media, and in the streets. It is heard in museums and art galleries. It has led to the slogan “Abolish Zionism.” In a medical journal, British Medical Global Health, Israel’s policies were described as an “eliminatory settler colonial strategy.”

All this is propaganda, of course. After all, despite Israel’s campaigns against Hamas aggression, Gaza’s population shows no real signs of any serious demographic downfall. Neither has that of Judea and Samaria, except for voluntary emigration abroad.

Yet, there was a genocide campaign. It was conducted not against ‘Palestine’, but in Palestine, in the Mandate of Palestine. It was a campaign of attempted genocide, not against Arabs but against the Jews. It began in April 1920, and through riots, pogroms, and terror, as well as political and diplomatic pressure, it has not let up.
Michael Oren: Hamas has reminded us that we are a nation, a family - a mishpacha
Anybody who’s ever concluded a speaking tour, especially one as long as mine—nine weeks—knows this feeling. Of being in an airport and not being able to say for sure what city it’s in or even the date of the month. All that remains are the impressions which, gathered in a time of desperate war, of a deepening sense of Jewish loneliness, and of skyrocketing antisemitism, are unprecedentedly profound.

In visits to several dozen Jewish communities across North America, I saw a degree of confusion and fear I never before encountered. People unfamiliar with antisemitism now confront it persistently and in multiple forms—in the Jew-hating slurs of pro-Palestinian protestors, in university administrators indifferent to their Jewish students’ plight, to the ovations received by comedians poking fun at Hollywood’s Jews, and filmmakers weaponizing the Holocaust against Israel.

Virtually every Israel supporter I met had lost friends because of that support. Though an occasional heckler accused Israel of causing antisemitism by killing Palestinians—internalizing the antisemitic claim that all Jews everywhere are liable for Israel’s actions—the vast majority of American Jews understood that rampant anti-Zionism merely exposed a latent Jew-hatred that existed well before October 7. All but a few realized that Israel’s security was directly linked to their own and that the state of American Jewry was severely threatened by attacks on the Jewish state.

Asked repeatedly, “What should we do?” I responded that American Jews could adopt one of three courses. They could remove the mezuzah from their doors, lock themselves in, and ignore all the prejudice outside. They could move to Israel. Or they could stay and fight. They could resist in the Churchillian sense, I explained, on the campuses, in the media, and through their elected officials. And Jews were only beginning to discover the many ways they can fight back.

Recalling the resignation of the presidents of Penn and Harvard, I reminded my listeners of their ability to exact a price from any official who fails to stand up to antisemitism. “Support pro-Israel media initiatives,” I urged them. “Support anti-boycott legislation.”
From Ian:

Biden's Middle East Is a Fantasy World
According to the White House, the Palestinians aspire to peace, reject Hamas, and are ready to make painful concessions. In reality, according to a November survey by Arab World for Research and Development, affiliated with Birzeit University, 59% of Palestinians "extremely support" the Oct. 7 massacre, and another 16% "somewhat support" it.

When President Biden refers to the Palestinian Authority as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, he ignores that its president, Mahmoud Abbas, was last elected 19 years ago to a four-year term, and that the last time the Palestinians went to the polls, in 2006, they voted for Hamas.

Vice President Kamala Harris this week uttered a statement about Israel typically reserved for dictatorships: "It's important for us to distinguish or at least not conflate the Israeli government with the Israeli people." Yes, there is a significant disparity between Israel's leadership and its citizens - but it's the opposite of what people in Washington assume.

A February survey conducted for Channel 12 News found that 63% of the Israeli public strongly opposes a Palestinian state under any circumstances. The Israeli government has been providing humanitarian aid to Gaza, but a January survey found that 72% of the public opposes such aid until all hostages are released.

The Israel Mr. Biden knows - the one that supports deep withdrawals, settlement evacuations, and the two-state solution - ceased to exist two decades ago during the second intifada. Savage Palestinian violence at that time indiscriminately claimed the lives of more than 1,000 Israelis, including babies, women and the elderly.

It's time the administration recognizes reality: The Palestinians overwhelmingly support the murder of Jews, and the Israelis don't think the Palestinians deserve a state.

I'd like to remind my fellow Israelis that it's important for us to distinguish, or at least not conflate, the American government with the American people. According to a recent Harvard Caps-Harris poll, the American public supports Israel much more than the president does.
Dennis Ross: Building a New Security Reality for Israel in Gaza
Oct. 7 changed Israel, inflicting trauma and hardening Israelis' belief that they cannot live with Hamas in control of Gaza. Israel needs a strategy for ensuring that its military efforts and achievements in Gaza translate into a new political reality that means Israel will no longer be threatened from the strip.

Israel does not want to be responsible for the Palestinians living in Gaza. However, Israel should not leave Gaza before it knows that Hamas is not in a position to reconstitute itself, its military means, and its political control. This requires that Hamas' military infrastructure, weapons depots, military industrial base, systems of command and control, and organizational coherence are largely destroyed. Israel's objective - and that of the U.S. - needs to be a permanently demilitarized Gaza, which can never again be used as a platform for attacks against Israel.

As long as 91% of Palestinians believe that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas should resign and 80% are convinced that the PA is corrupt, it is pointless to talk about a political horizon or an endgame involving the PA.

Everyone knows that Hamas will seek to divert the assistance and to reconstitute itself and its military machine. No donor will invest in Gaza if Hamas is in control or siphoning away supplies. So a condition for reconstruction must be a genuinely different administration in Gaza.
There's No Such Thing as a "Ramadan Truce"
An aspect of Ramadan that has been a tradition through the ages is the holy month as a time for war.

There is a history of Muslim armies waging war during Ramadan.

This makes it ironic that some well-meaning non-Muslims are calling on Israel to suspend its military operations against the Islamist extremists of Hamas out of respect for Ramadan.

The 1973 Arab-Israeli war is widely known in the Arab world as the Ramadan War, when Anwar Sadat dispatched Egyptian forces to cross the Suez Canal.

The Saudi newspaper Arab News reported that "some of the greatest victories in Islam occurred during Ramadan."

The Washington Institute's Patrick Clawson noted: "Modern proposals for Ramadan ceasefires by secular governments - the Soviets in Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein when fighting the Islamic Republic of Iran - were uniformly rejected by the Islamist side, which usually intensified fighting during Ramadan."

For Hamas and their fellow travelers, waging war during Ramadan is as valid as in the other months of the year.

The American government should not fall for well-meaning calls to urge Israel to display one-sided military restraint out of deference to Ramadan.

We can be sure that Hamas (or what's left of it) won't be devoting the next month to introspection, service and worship.

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

From Ian:

Howard Jacobson: Who dares to “hijack” the Holocaust?
Such are the canards deployed to rob the Jews of any lingering sympathy they might yet enjoy as victims of that inhumanity The Zone of Interest depicts, and so to downplay, as just another gambit in Jewish subterfuge, the Holocaust itself. Hijack! Consider the import of that word. So despicable are the Jews, they will steal from themselves the most hellish events in their history to justify visiting hell on others.

Why would Jonathan Glazer, of all people – a man who has been immersed to an unusual degree in recent Jewish history – give the slightest weight to this libel?

I don’t say he should have stood before a televised audience of millions and cheered on the Israeli Defence Forces. Indeed, he had no need to invoke his Jewishness at all. But since he chose to do so, could he not have used the opportunity to unite rather than divide, to explain, to speak wisely about a tragedy that is tearing all parties to it apart? Could he not have spoken of the horror felt by every Jew on 7 October, not just on account of the violence done but the approving reactions to it, and the horror felt today by every Jew at the death toll in Gaza, and allow no one to suppose that the heartbreaking scenes there somehow give succour to a fictional Jewish blood-lust justified by the Holocaust?

I don’t accuse Jonathan Glazer of being selective in his compassion. “Whether the victims of October 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza,” he said, “all the victims to dehumanisation – how do we resist?” But resistance to dehumanisation does not necessitate divesting oneself of Jewishness, however one interprets that, whether as the hijacking of it to win a false legitimacy or in seeking any other advantage that being Jewish might confer. For a Jew to concur in this fashionable defamation – that Jews are moral profiteers, and that it is only by shedding such Jewishness that a Jew can feel pity – is doubly despicable.

As a serious, thinking Jewish man, Jonathan Glazer must have read the late Amos Oz on the tragedy of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in which both parties could be said to be in the right, and then, when the situation worsened, both parties could be said to be in the wrong. The “occupation” didn’t just happen one day to satisfy Holocaust righteousness. It was a child of history, born of a mutual intransigence that pre-dated the Holocaust, the consequence of mistakes and violent obduracies on both sides. A tragedy does not entail blame, but if Jonathan Glazer must buy into Jewish blame he must buy into Palestinian blame as well. It would have taken real moral courage to pursue that line; right now it takes none to castigate Jews.

In my years teaching English literature I had frequent recourse to DH Lawrence’s dictum, “Never trust the teller, trust the tale.” That Dickens was a bad husband, I was forever telling my students, no more made him a bad novelist than beating her dog made Emily Brontë a bad novelist. We will no more fathom the nexus between art and moral intelligence, than that between a normal family life and savagery.

Jonathan Glazer made an ambitious, important film. I salute the artist. But his abject mea culpa debases him as a man.
Seth Mandel: Berkeley’s Jews Show Some Spine
In the late 1950s, the University of California, Berkeley started cracking down on campus politicking. By the ’60s, this effort almost became a total ban. The backlash congealed into the famous Free Speech Movement, whose strategy was to make sure that any rulebreakers were accompanied by dozens (or more) others. This way, the ban’s enemies could paralyze virtually any disciplinary enforcement. The signature moment was a march to a central campus building where participants held giant signs in favor of free speech.

There’s an iconic photo of the demonstrators marching through Sather Gate in November 1964. Ironically, they could not have done so in recent weeks: The antithesis of the Free Speech Movement, at the center of what is now the antithesis of Berkeley 1964, has had the gate blocked off. Pro-Hamas activists on campus have been blocking the gate and harassing any Jewish students in the vicinity. This comes on the heels of the same group’s violent and highly symbolic night of fascist role playing, in which they forced the cancellation of a Jewish speaker by physically assaulting a Jewish woman, spitting on others, smashing the venue’s window and hurling obscenities that wouldn’t have sounded out of place in The Zone of Interest.

It is appropriate, then, that the jackboot siege of Sather Gate was protested on Monday by a peaceful but determined march of Jews reprising their role as enemies of blood-and-soil racial hierarchies. “At noon,” an ABC affiliate reported that “the Jewish students marched onto Sproul Plaza and instead of passing through Sather Gate and past the banner, they avoided a confrontation by literally fording the creek to get to the other side on a foot path.” The report continues: “The crowd of 200 Jewish supporters ended up in front of California Hall where faculty members offered their support, commenting on the Feb. 26 disturbance that forced Jewish students to move off campus.”

That Feb. 26 incident was the breaking point. Anti-Semitic harassment and threats have been part of life for students there since Oct. 7. Other Jews have been assaulted on campus. A federal civil-rights complaint alleges that two-dozen law-school groups have anti-Jewish policies. Kosher restaurants have been targeted. It’s reached the point where one Jewish Berkeley professor is staging a live-in at his campus office.

Berkeley’s repression of Jewish civil rights won’t be solved by one march, but the change in posture to visible protest is welcome. The students and families tried working with the administration but have been ignored at every turn. A school spokesman even admitted the university would not be taking down the Palestine banner blocking part of campus because, although it clearly violates campus rules, “we assessed that using law-enforcement to clear it would create turmoil.” And God forbid there should be turmoil!
Batya Ungar Sargon: The left’s sickening betrayal of Israeli women
Every Palestinian outranks every Jew on the oppression scale and so any Palestinian in conflict with any Jew is the one the left must side with. The Jew has all the agency and the Palestinian has none. Anything bad that happens between them cannot be the Palestinian’s fault, because you cannot blame someone with no agency for anything. They are innocent, like a child. To the woke, the less powerful have no responsibility to act ethically because their rank on the oppression scale means they cannot act at all – and they are already inherently imbued with virtue, no matter what they do. And that goes for the terrorists among them, too.

To the woke, when a so-called person of colour commits a heinous act against a so-called white person, the agency of their actions – and the evil inherent in them – must be reassigned to their victims. What this means is that when a Palestinian rapes a Jewish woman, the agency was hers, not his. She remains the oppressor. His act was her fault, and her suffering does not release her from the burden of her status as oppressor, even in death.

That’s why leftist feminists can’t side with raped Israeli women. To do so would betray everything they believe. They see the Israeli women as deserving of everything that happened to them – as having brought it on themselves. Like the conservatives of yore who blamed rape on the miniskirt worn by the victim, the left today blames the fact that Israel has more power than Hamas for Hamas’s brutalisation of Israeli women. They simply can’t think their way out of seeing Hamas as virtuous. Because to do so would be to admit that their entire worldview is not only wrong, but also morally depraved.

Why didn’t the images from the Nova festival move the left? Because the left has moved on from things like peace, love, dancing, eros, joy, beauty, truth and goodness. It has replaced these with an embrace of ugliness, hatred, resistance ‘by any means necessary’ and a rejection of the kind of joyous sexuality one finds at a music festival. That’s why the images that I assumed would draw sympathy only further served to cast the Israelis as worthy of condemnation.

The Israelis dancing at that festival didn’t know they were ‘evil oppressors’. They didn’t know that any calamity that might befall them would be ‘deserved’, instigated even by their joyous existence. Their agency itself was a crime.

At the end of the day, 7 October revealed how little of the left’s ideology is about values, and how much of it is about power – specifically, about using a person or a group’s supposedly abject status as a method of wielding power. That is the leftist playbook now. Masquerade as powerless so as to grab power. Bray about being marginalised as a way of silencing dissent. Screech about being oppressed as a way of firing your boss and getting their job, or casting your political opponents as unworthy of the franchise.

And that’s why the woke just can’t quit Hamas. They recognise their own game when they see it, even when it shows up as a raping Hamas butcher.
From Ian:

Bernard-Henri Lévy: Stop the War in Gaza by Defeating Hamas
Those crying out against genocide are the same people who call for the birth of a Palestine from the Jordan River to the sea that would involve an ethnic cleansing purging the entire region of all Jewish presence. (Apparently, pure genocide is OK, where imagined genocide is worthy of an impassioned outcry!)

A small, fragile, and threatened country, confronted with the most sadistic mass terror attack in modern history, responds like any other democracy would have in its place, and, in fact, like the U.S. did when invading Afghanistan after Sept. 11. Instead of supporting Israel in its legitimate self-defense, the world accuses the Jewish state of poisoning wells and starving the civilian population.

It takes for granted that Israel is "indefensible," that Zionism - alone among national liberation movements - is a curse word, and that the very survival of the Jewish people on its land is an entirely legitimate object of dispute.

"Ceasefire now!" is a solution that would hand victory to Hamas; prolong the hold of a Muslim Brotherhood death cult on a population that serves as its guinea pig in a horrific experiment; and see the aura of the terror cult and its backers grow beyond Gaza, with all the cataclysmic consequences that one can imagine, both throughout the Middle East and in Europe.

Does anyone care about peace and justice enough to demand an end to this war in the only way it can actually end - with the defeat of Hamas?
Seth Mandel: Time for Biden to Deliver an Inconvenient Truth on Gaza
America can only reduce the threat by capitulating to Hamas and Iran, according to this reading of the report. There are two major problems with this. The first is that it’s hogwash, and the authors of the report know it’s hogwash.

As terror experts pointed out in the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7 slaughter, the attacks themselves were a catalyzing force for global terrorism, much more so than was Israel’s dismantling of Hamas in response. In October, I quoted Lynn O’Donnell on the “broader impact of the Hamas attacks,” which was, she said, “the possibility that terrorist groups around the world will try to match the spectacular carnage that Hamas pulled off earlier this month, which had a death toll equivalent to multiple Sept. 11 attacks on a per capita basis in a small country such as Israel.”

This is because it’s the successful attacks, not the failures, that garner funding for terrorist groups. Hamas has had fairly steady financial patrons because it is somewhat fixed territorially and serves a very specific purpose that is tied to Israel. But the global terror groups that could represent a threat to America are in competition for resources that Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks will free up for groups other than Hamas. The Hamas attacks serve as model and inspiration for copycats and their moneymen.

Which means the most dangerous option is to allow Hamas to get out with anything it can reasonably claim as a victory. Hamas’s defeat will benefit America’s security; its survival will put more targets on Western backs.

The other problem is that administration officials know this—the Post says the report itself acknowledges the public-relations coup that Oct. 7 was for Hamas. The administration feels the need to spin how the report is sold to the press and the public because the truth contradicts the president’s political interest in uniting his party in an election year. To do that, he wants (though he doesn’t need) to bring back into the fold enough dissenters on his Gaza policy to take the air out of the pro-Hamas faction of his progressive base.

This is becoming a pattern. In a stunning moment in the president’s MSNBC interview over the weekend, Biden admitted that “Hamas would like a total ceasefire across the board, because then they see they have a better chance to survive and maybe rebuild.” The president sputtered immediately after saying that and fumbled out four separate segues as if he were a skipping record: “But that’s not what—I think the majority of people think—you have to—look—.” Then he went silent to collect his thoughts and get back on track. He wasn’t supposed to make the argument against a permanent ceasefire precisely because that argument is unassailable. He can’t pretend to want to give in to his left flank if he’s also going around explaining why their demands are so ludicrous and contrary to U.S. interests.

But he’s going to have to explain this, eventually. And when he does, he cannot pretend he misspoke. The fact of the matter is Biden and the intelligence community know what’s best for America and are choosing to dissemble at a time when U.S. leadership is called for. This will continue to backfire until someone is willing to be honest with the anti-Israel caucus in the party and align American policy and the president’s rhetoric with what Biden knows to be true: Israel must win this war.
Bret Stephens: Israel Has No Choice but to Fight On
If Israel were to end the war now, with several Hamas battalions intact, at least four things would happen. First, it would be impossible to set up a political authority in Gaza that isn't Hamas: If the Palestinian Authority or local Gazans tried to do so, they wouldn't live for long. Second, Hamas would reconstitute its military force as Hizbullah did in Lebanon after the 2006 war with Israel - and Hamas has promised to repeat the attacks of Oct. 7 "a second, a third, a fourth" time.

Third, the Israeli hostages would be stuck in their awful captivity indefinitely. Fourth, there would never be a Palestinian state. No Israeli government is going to agree to a Palestinian state in the West Bank if it risks resembling Gaza.

This is the fifth major war that Hamas has provoked since it seized power in Gaza in 2007. After each war, Hamas' capabilities have grown stronger and its ambitions bolder. At some point this had to end; for Israelis, Oct. 7 was that point.

Whenever Israel's critics lecture the country on better calibrating its use of force, they don't have any concrete suggestions. The reality of urban warfare is that it's exceptionally costly and difficult. The U.S. spent nine months helping Iraqi forces flatten the city of Mosul to defeat ISIS, with results that looked even worse than Gaza does today. I don't remember calls for "Ceasefire Now" then.

Israel is fighting a war it didn't seek, against an enemy sworn to its destruction and holding scores of its citizens hostage. Around 200,000 Israelis are living as refugees inside their own country because its borders aren't secure. No country can tolerate that. There should be more public pressure on Hamas to surrender than on Israel to save Hamas from the consequences of its actions.

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

From Ian:

The WWII ‘lessons’ that wouldn’t have saved a single Jew
Antisemites like Ken Roth, ‘as-a-Jews’ like Jonathan Glazer, and even non-antisemites like US President Joe Biden are lecturing Israel on the lessons Israel should learn from the Holocaust and the Second World War, but their ‘lessons’ would have prolonged the war, left Hitler in power, and led to more Jews being murdered in gas chambers.

There’s a lot that can be learned from the Holocaust and World War II as a whole. There are lessons in the bravery of some and the cowardice of others. There is so much to be learned from how Hitler was allowed to start another World War and commit a crime so great a new word had to be developed to describe it, "genocide", as well in how he was finally defeated.

People seem to love to try to apply these lessons to Jews and the Jewish State, Israel, especially in the aftermath of the Hamas massacre of October 7, the worst massacre committed against the Jewish people since the Holocaust. But the lessons they want Israel to learn would not have stopped World War II or saved a single one of the six million Jews who were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators.

On Sunday, during the Academy Awards, Writer/director Jonathan Glazer used his acceptance speech for best international picture to attack Israel using the supposed “lessons” of the Holocaust and even “renounced” his Jewishness.

“Our film shows where dehumanization leads, at its worst,” Glazer said. “Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people, whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel, or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims, this humanization, how do we resist?”

How fitting that the film for which Glazer won his award, “Zone of Interest,” is a Holocaust film in which the actual victims of the Holocaust, the Jews, never appear. He has joined the ranks of the ‘as-a-Jews,’ those supposedly Jewish people for whom Judaism is nothing more than a means to attack or erase the 99% of the Jewish people who don’t think Jews should let themselves be slaughtered.

Former Human Rights Watch Director Ken Roth, the man who almost single-handedly transformed that NGO from a respected defender of human rights into an antisemitic cesspool obsessed with denying Israel’s right to not let its civilians be murdered, invoked the Holocaust on Sunday while criticizing Israel’s left-wing president.

“The Holocaust teaches no one's rights are secure unless everyone's are, but Israeli Pres. Herzog faces protests today for spreading the opposite message by saying there are no "uninvolved civilians" in Gaza, suggesting Palestinian rights are dispensable,” Roth wrote on X.

It is no secret that Roth believes that Israeli and Jewish lives are dispensable, just as so many did before and during World War II.
Hollywood Jews are like turkeys for Christmas
One cannot help but compare Glazer to Marius von Mayenburg, whose play Nachtland is having a short run in London. Nachtland tells the story of Nicola and Philipp, German siblings who find a painting by A. Hitler in their father’s attic. In an effort to find a Nazi provenance for the painting so that they can sell it for a fortune, the family’s past associations with Martin Bormann are revealed. It is up to Philipp’s Jewish wife Judith to make the moral case for why the family should not be making money from the blood of dead Jews.

Nicola brings up the Palestinians in order to tell Judith to ‘learn from the lessons of history’.

‘Isn’t it surprising that the Jews of all people should know better than to ‘erect camps, build walls and kill innocents’, she declares.

Judith retorts: ‘If you think you can talk about Israel and point fingers as if it has nothing whatsover to do with Germany, then (…) I’m not going to do your homework for you, and I can’t give you absolution …with your vain perpetrator cult…look it up yourself, al-Husseini, Arafat, Ahmed Yassin, the Hamas charter.”

Interestingly enough, these words, written before the 7 October Hamas massacre, were cut out of the script on the night I saw Nachtland. The director clearly thought that, spoken against the background of the current Israel-Hamas war, they would prove too controversial for some in the audience. But they are in the playtext.

Marius von Mayenburg knows what Jonathan Glazer could not be bothered to find out: that there there is a direct link between the Holocaust, the Palestinian Nazi collaborator Haj Amin al Husseini and the Nazi-inspired Muslim Brotherhood, whose Gaza branch – Hamas – was founded in 1987 by Ahmed Yassin.

Like turkeys voting for Christmas, the Hollywood glitterati who sport their Free Palestine pins and abjure their Jewishness have no idea that they are actually supporting a form of antisemitism that would murder them – as Jews – if it could.

It takes a non-Jewish German to have the moral clarity that Glazer and Co so clearly lack.
From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Biden’s Alienating Strategy
Joe Biden is used to talking to Israel-skeptics who insist their beef isn’t with the Israeli people but with their government, and claim that their resentment isn’t aimed at the Jewish state’s existence but at the lack of a Palestinian state alongside it. The problem is, those folks are gone. Or, to put it more precisely, the people protesting Biden’s support for Israel no longer rely on polite arguments. Now they come right out and say they object to Israel’s very existence.

Biden refuses to address this new reality. It’s the primary reason why his attempts to mollify his party’s base on Gaza have fallen flat. They are talking right past each other.

Biden’s MSNBC interview with Jonathan Capehart on March 10 made it clear the administration has settled on the talking point that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is the problem. “In my view,” the president said, “[Netanyahu] is hurting Israel more than helping Israel by making the rest of the world—it’s contrary to what Israel stands for. And I think it’s a big mistake.”

What is the “it” here? Biden tried to explain that Bibi is not, apparently, paying enough “attention to the innocent lives being lost as a consequence of the actions taken.”

That didn’t make it any clearer, but his discussion of the war in Gaza followed this pattern: he brought it back it back to Bibi.

Vice President Kamala Harris took a more explicit route to the same destination. “I think it’s important for us to distinguish, or at least to not conflate, the Israeli government with the Israeli people,” Harris said. “The Israeli people are entitled to security, as are the Palestinians. In equal measure.”

This is the sort of thing the administration says about the Palestinians and Hamas. The moral equivalence is egregious, but another problem with it is this: Whom are they talking to? Who is the audience for this?

Vilifying Bibi was edgy a decade ago, maybe, especially as a way of saying Israel might conceivably have the right to defend itself but not this way. Today, the activists powering the pro-Hamas protest movement don’t believe and don’t claim that “the Israeli people are entitled to security.” They are, instead, saying that the Israeli people are colonizers, that decolonization is necessarily violent, and that Israel doesn’t have the right to security and self-defense from the people it supposedly oppresses.

Biden and Harris are arguing with a ghost.
Jacob Stoil & John Spencer: The Road to Ceasefire Leads Through the Rafah Offensive
Chair of Applied History at the West Point Modern War Institute; chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point

When Hamas attacked and invaded Israel, it did so knowing there would be a massive response by Israel and an operation into Gaza. It knew many Gazan civilians would die, indeed they counted on it, referring to their population as a "nation of martyrs." Hamas' hope is that repeated attacks like Oct. 7 will eventually break the will of the Israeli population. To do that, Hamas would need to survive the war.

Hamas saw that if the U.S. could be made uncomfortable enough with the continuing war, it would put more pressure on Israel to wind down operations. Hamas believes the U.S. will keep Israel out of Rafah, enabling Hamas to walk away with a strategic victory and emerge as the only Palestinian organization to defeat Israel.

Without the realistic threat of an Israeli operation in Rafah, Hamas has no reason to seek a ceasefire, and given Hamas' strategy, there can be no truly lasting ceasefire if Hamas can return to control Gaza. Hamas' unwillingness to negotiate is entirely dependent on the U.S. acting as Hamas wants.
What's Behind the Propaganda War Against Israel
What does Israel have to do to be allowed by the rest of the world to defend itself? The insistent effort by some governments, officials and much of the media in the U.S. and Europe to get the Jewish state to relent against enemies that actively seek to destroy it gives rise to the suspicion that for too many of them, perhaps Israel doesn't deserve the right to exist at all. Fortunately, Israel doesn't need the West's permission to save itself.

The president feels obliged to balance his support of Israel with a rhetorical campaign of increasingly shrill, daily denunciations of Israel's efforts in Gaza. He told MSNBC that the offensive in Gaza was "hurting Israel more than helping Israel...and I think it's a big mistake."

Even after the horrors of Oct. 7, Israel is tagged as the aggressor in the media. Israel is said to have - either recklessly or out of genocidal intent - massacred tens of thousands of innocent civilians. But in the process of extirpating Hamas it was inevitable civilians would be killed. This wasn't simply because there is "collateral" damage in any large-scale warfare, but because Hamas intended it that way. To the terror group, the propaganda value of a dead Palestinian child is as great as that of an Israeli.

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