| by Abraham D. Sofaer via The Hill The chaos set off by Hamas’s brutal attack on Israel poses difficult challenges for the future of the Middle East. How will Israel destroy Hamas without destroying Gaza or unnecessarily harming non-combatants? Who will govern Gaza after Hamas is defeated? +++++++++++++++ They back ‘Palestine’ because they hate Jews It’s time to stop pretending that those who march to defend Hamas or advocate for Israel’s destruction are defending human rights. By JONATHAN S. TOBIN In the past week, anti-Israel protests on college campuses and in the streets of major cities have continued and grown in size. In Europe, the numbers of those expressing “solidarity with Palestine” are even greater as hundreds of thousands marched as Israel began its ground offensive inside the Gaza Strip. The images of massive throngs of individuals waving Palestinian flags and yelling insults about Israel and Jews have been widely published and broadcast. So, too, have accounts of incidents in which Jews were subjected to intimidation or worse in public venues as aggressive opponents of Israel, who claim to be defending the Palestinian people, vented their spleen and sought to chase those who disagreed with them from public spaces. Incidents of antisemitism are skyrocketing in the United States and are even becoming more brazen and violent in Europe, where Jews already had good reason to fear being publicly identified with their faith. Just as frightening is the way that online threats against Jews have not merely metastasized but are now leading to specific threats against Jewish communities and institutions. Yet opinion leaders and influencers on social media are telling us not to believe our lying eyes and ears when we see the mounting evidence of antisemitism. Drawing conclusions from the behavior of the people screaming that “Palestine will be free from the river to the sea,” carrying posters about throwing the Jews in the trashcan or ripping down posters of Israeli kidnapping victims is mistaken. Such people, we’re told, are just expressing the natural sympathies that humanitarian-minded citizens have for oppressed Palestinians. If you think that’s support for Hamas, then that’s your latent Islamophobia showing. And if you believe such people ought to be held accountable, then you’re promoting cancel culture and trying to shut down freedom of speech. Support for ‘Palestine’ Compassion for Palestinian residents of Gaza, whose lives have been both disrupted and placed in danger by the war Hamas launched on Oct. 7 with its barbaric cross-border terrorist attacks on communities in southern Israel, is understandable and even commendable. Civilian casualties, however, are the inevitable and intended outcome of Hamas terrorism. Even leaving aside the issue of Hamas’s popularity, people in Gaza are not dying for a “free Palestine.” They’re dying to protect a group that has run their coastal enclave as an Islamist tyranny since 2007, and whose avowed goal—made manifest by the Oct. 7 atrocities—is to destroy the state of Israel and slaughter its Jewish population. Nor are the protests merely an expression of sympathy for the plight of those people who are, through no fault of their own, trapped in a war zone. As the flags, placards and speeches at these events make abundantly clear, the focus is on depicting Israel as not merely responding “disproportionately” to the attacks on its citizens inside its own border, as ridiculous as that allegation may be. Rather, their purpose is to rally support for “Palestine.” Defining what exactly “Palestine” is remains an important question. According to Palestinian Arabs, it consists not merely of Hamas-governed Gaza and the territories of Judea and Samaria (the “West Bank”), whose Arab population is governed autonomously by the Palestinian Authority led by the Fatah Party; that area west of Jordan has been considered disputed land since the 1967 Six-Day War. Rather, they view the whole of Israel as well as those territories to be Palestine. And when they say it must be “free,” they mean the eradication of the State of Israel, something that could only be made possible by the genocide of its Jewish population. Support for this concept stems from a belief buttressed by the spread of critical race theory and intersectional teachings, which falsely view Israel as an expression of colonialism and imperialism in which “white” oppressors have victimized “people of color.” These ideas link the struggle for civil rights in the United States and against apartheid in South Africa with a desire to wipe the one Jewish state on the planet off the map. As no less a personage than Karen Attiah, the global opinions editor of The Washington Post wrote this past week, support for Hamas on the left, and specifically among African-Americans, stems from their belief that Israel must be “decolonized” along with every other vestige of Western civilization. Erasing the very idea of Jewish rights, in addition to thousands of years of history and faith, Attiah insists that Jewish liberals need to get over the idea that their erstwhile minority allies are abandoning them. If there is “solidarity with Palestine,” it is because the very existence of Israel is a crime. She then goes on to re-circulate the blood libel that Israel helped train the police in Ferguson, Mo., to kill African-Americans. She also complains that it’s wrong to accuse people who want to eliminate Israel of being anti-Semites, even though the Jews are the only people that “progressives” wish to deprive of their homeland and deny the right to defend themselves. In this same way, a letter signed by numerous members of the faculty of Columbia University defended students supporting Hamas and the destruction of Israel. It also referred to the unspeakable atrocities of Hamas on Oct. 7 as “a military response” and “an occupied people exercising a right to resist violent and illegal occupation.” What is going on at college campuses and demonstrations is the full-throated expression of an anti-Semitic movement that seeks the end of Israel. As the demonstrators keep telling us, if that means that 1,400 Israeli men, women and children, must be slaughtered, Jewish women must be raped and tortured, and infants and children abducted, then that is so much the worse for any of these “occupiers.” This has nothing to do with alleged Israeli misdeeds. The contention is that if Palestinian “rights” are to be respected, then Jewish rights can be erased and Jewish lives don’t matter. Unlike past versions of antisemitism that didn’t bother dressing up hate in the costume of human-rights advocacy, contemporary Jew-hatred masquerades as progressive values, and is championed in prestigious academic and journalistic venues by those respected by society. If liberal institutions like the Post and the faculty of Columbia have no compunction about justifying loathing Jews, why should we be surprised if Jewish students are being locked in libraries at Cooper Union College or threatened with violence at Cornell University? What’s so shocking, then, when mobs in the streets of New York, Chicago, London and other major cities are yelling for Jewish blood? And if their counterparts in places like Dagestan in the Russian Federation riot and hunt for suspected Jews in airports? So, let’s stop pretending that the “Palestine” protests are about human rights. If they were, they’d be protesting Hamas’s terrorism. If expressing compassion for Jewish victims and, say, demanding the release of babies and grandparents being held hostage is too much to ask, they could criticize the terrorists’ use of human shields. That includes Hamas terrorists situating its military headquarters underneath a hospital, hoarding supplies inside Gaza while demanding that the world give more to aid Palestinians and refusing to let civilians under its rule escape the fighting. But they don’t do any of that. Instead, they threaten Jews, tear down posters of kidnapped Israelis and express their support for replacing Israel with “Palestine.” Antisemitism and cancel culture Nor should we treat this public expression of antisemitism as merely something about which decent and honorable people ought to sit down and discuss. There is no wiggle room here. The idea that there is something wrong with publicly exposing those who engage in antisemitism is bizarre, especially coming from those in the academy who have done their best to drive conservative critics of their toxic theories from the public square. Cancel culture is about demonizing and penalizing those who engage in normal political debate. Opposing it has never meant justifying and defending actual racism like those who are neo-Nazis or members of the Ku Klux Klan. That’s why the doxxing of Harvard students who support the destruction of Israel and who back Hamas terrorism isn’t wrong. Reasonable people would never excuse anyone who suggested lynching African-Americans. Yet that is what is being asked for by those who are cheering on or justifying the pogroms against Jews in Israel. Indeed, Harvard even seeks to protect their right to be hired at the country’s most prestigious law firms and corporations—something it would never do for those who call for the murder of any other minority. In a saner era of American public life, those who rationalize Hamas slaughter as “decolonization,” as Attiah does, wouldn’t be editors at The Washington Post. They’d be driven to the margins of American society where they could advocate for whatever variant of antisemitism they like. The same could be said of the Daily Wire’s Candace Owens, who described the pro-Hamas demonstration in London as proof that “people are not accepting the media narrative about what is happening in the Middle East despite the insistent rhetoric from government officials.” But what else did we expect from a defender of Kanye West’s antisemitism, whether she calls herself a conservative or not? The ability of Harvard’s Jew-haters to go on to glittering careers, or the ability of Owens and Attiah to retain their influential perches, isn’t the real question. It’s whether society has now gone so far in accepting the demonization of Israel and Jews that there is no penalty attached to public expressions of Jew-hatred, whether they pose as sympathy for Palestinians or not. What does matter is whether moral people are willing to go along with the pretense that demanding Israel’s eradication and the murder of its population is acceptable discourse. What is needed is for all people of goodwill—no matter where they sit on the political spectrum, no matter their faith or background—to denounce these vile ideas as hate speech. What’s more, they should demand that those who support this hatred be given the opprobrium and shunning that would be their fate if they were avowed Nazis, rather than merely those who support Hitler’s Islamist successors. Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him on Twitter at: @jonathans_tobin. ++++++++++++++++ One-Sided Rules of War By Steve Huntley We’re hearing a lot of talk these days about the rules of war. All of it is aimed at Israel. No one is calling on Hamas to follow those rules. There’s a simple reason for that. No one — no one — thinks Hamas will do anything other than what it always does. And what it did on Oct. 7. The music concert massacre. The murders of civilians from babies in cradles to grandmothers. The rapes. The mutilation and burning of bodies. The beheadings. The hostage-taking of civilians, including 20 children, one of them in a wheelchair. The use of Palestinians as human shields. No one expects Hamas to obey civilization’s standard for conducting warfare. No one even thinks of calling on Hamas to do so. But it’s a different case with the Jewish state. Israel is getting a lot of, what’s the right word — advice, guidance, cautions, veiled warnings? — whatever the word, Israel is hearing from various corners about its conduct of the war against Hamas. Make sure to avoid civilian casualties. Don’t do anything that would be “disproportionate.” Don’t let “rage” affect your decisions, as President Biden put it in talking about the need to adhere to the rules of civilized warfare. Delay the ground invasion of Gaza in hopes of getting more hostages out now that four have been released, say some European nations and the U.S. government. Others, such as the Democrat squad in the U.S. House of Representatives, aka the congressional anti-Semitic caucus, demand a cease-fire. All this is coming from people who bear no responsibility for protecting the citizens of Israel. I mean, who else is going to step up to make Hamas pay for the terrible war crimes, the pogrom of Oct. 7? Will the International Court of Justice based at The Hague issue an indictment and send a posse of steely lawmen into the Gaza Strip to arrest the Hamas war criminals and bring them to justice? Dream on. Will the United Nations assemble an army, equip it and dispatch it to Gaza City to wage the unbelievably complex and dangerous mission of urban warfare necessary to bring retribution to these terrorists? There’s a reason the UN is called the Useless Nations. Even worse, the UN secretary general tried to justify the Hamas savagery of Oct. 7 Will the European Union call up soldiers from its member nations to rout Hamas out of the Gaza Strip? Hell, European countries can’t even handle backing the Ukraine war on their own without the spine-enforcing support of the United States. And what about all the Arab nations that are so, so concerned about the fate of the innocent Palestinians in Gaza? Will they tell the Israelis to stand aside while their armies invade Gaza to protect civilians and capture the Hamas terrorists? A fantasy beyond the imagination of any sane human being. This is true even though Hamas is funded, armed and advised by Shia Iran, the committed enemy of the Sunni Arab world. No, Israel knows — as it has tragically learned time and again — that only it will step up to protect Jews, only it will fight to save Jewish lives, only it will endure the terrors of war to combat a wretched bestial organization that in its charter is dedicated to genocide and mass murder of Jews. While Israel has assimilated the lessons of history, incredibly too many in the world have not — even after the horrors of the Holocaust. Worse, as we have seen, in some of our most esteemed institutions like Harvard, UPenn, Columbia and other elite universities ruled by extreme left thought, in some Muslim immigrant communities resistant to Western ideas of civilized warfare and even in the halls of Congress, the cancer of antisemitism is alive and well — and metastasizing. No one but Israel is going to fight and bleed to protect Jews. To his credit, Biden has committed America to providing military assistance to Israel and he has dispatched U.S. naval forces to Mideast waters with the goal of preventing Iran and other bad actors from widening the genocidal war against Israel. Some have seen weakness on Biden’s part because the leaders of Jordan, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority canceled a summit with him during his recent visit to the region. I understand that argument. But it masks a greater, more serious, more depressing truth. These Arab leaders have never even started preparing their populations for a real, lasting peace with Israel. Now they tremble in fear that anger in their streets from people fed lies for decades about Israel will threaten their rule. That fear was intensified to the point of canceling the summit after Hamas falsely accused Israel of bombing a Gaza hospital. It should have been no surprise that intelligence and evidence quickly revealed it was an errant Islamic Jihad missile that fell into the hospital parking lot. The news media should be engaging in serious soul searching after so many of our prestigious newspaper, broadcast and cable news outlets accepted uncritically and published/broadcast an accusation against Israel from an organization whose fundamental, essential, core belief is that the only good Jew is a dead Jew. That’s the neighborhood that Israel must live in. The Jewish state needs no sanctimonious advice, smug guidance or veiled warnings about how to defend its people. And what does proportionality actually mean in war? Hamas fired thousands of unguided missiles into Israel with the obvious intention of killing Israeli civilians. Would it be proportionate for Israel to fire the same number of unguided missiles into Gaza? Would it be proportionate for Israeli troops to rape Palestinian women? To target babies for murder? Mutilate and burn bodies? Capture civilians as hostages? That would be doing exactly the same thing as Hamas did. Isn’t that the very definition of a proportional response? Do exactly the same thing and in the same numbers as Hamas did? Tit for tat, proportionality. The Geneva Conventions adopted after World War II outlawed that kind of proportionality. Hamas has shown time and again it doesn’t care about those rules of war, its only standards of war are savagery, barbarism, cruelty and brutality. But the Israelis are a civilized, moral people and they are not going to deliberately violate the conventions of warfare. They will do all that they can to minimize civilian casualties, to follow the civilized principles of conducting a necessary, just war. They don’t need any moralizing advice or pious warnings about the battle they are fighting. And when in history has any nation fought a war agreeing with recommendations to tie its hands behind its back? Did anyone tell the Red Army to be sure to protect innocent German civilians when it unleashed its soldiers on a starving Berlin in 1945? An estimated almost 2 million German women in Berlin and elsewhere were raped by the Red Army. The Nazis had waged war on Russian civilians. The Soviets waged war on German civilians. Proportionality. Despite the prospect of civilian deaths, America dropped two atomic bombs on Japan for the just, righteous reason of saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of GIs who faced the forbidding, bloody challenge of invading the home islands to end World War II. And don’t forget that Japan waged war on civilians. Exhibit No. 1: the Rape of Nanking. And even after the terrible punishment of atomic bombs, fanatics within the Japanese military wanted to fight on. That’s the kind of fanaticism Israel faces in its enemy Hamas, terrorists so maniacal that they use Palestinian civilians as human shields. So rabid they don’t care how high Palestinian bodies pile up. To them, Palestinian deaths are propaganda fodder in their war for Israel’s extinction. Today’s reality is this: Hamas will keep flouting civilization’s rules of war, keep committing atrocities, keep sacrificing Palestinian lives as human shields. And the world will keep self-righteously wagging its finger at Israel. And worse — in academia, in far left political circles, in Muslim immigrant communities — apologists for Hamas will keep excusing and justifying its war crimes, its massacres, its rapes, its ritual of human sacrifice of Palestinian civilians. War is hell, as Sherman said. It always has been and remains so. Just ask the Ukrainians brutalized by Vladimir Putin’s armies. Just ask the people of Sudan, Ethiopia, Sri Lanka and other nations that have suffered warfare in recent years. Just ask the people of Mosul where 10,000 civilians died in 2016 in a nine-month campaign by Iraqi troops, backed by U.S. air support ordered by President Barack Obama, to defeat Isis. And just ask the survivors of the massacres, the pogroms of Oct. 7. War is hell and no civilized nation enters one for any reason other than protecting its citizens. That’s what Israel is doing. It didn’t seek this fight. It was attacked by the barbarians of Hamas. And it must exercise its best judgment on how to fight the genocidal fanatics of Hamas. It will conduct this fight by the rules of war as decreed by 21st century civilization. It must fight this war to win and it doesn’t need lectures on how to do that. Steve Huntley, a retired Chicago journalist now living in Austin, Texas, has contributed other pieces to johnkassnews, from an examination of the secret jail for Christopher Columbus and other politically problematic public art to an essay on Americans suffering from Joe Biden gas pain. For almost three decades Huntley spent most of his career in Chicago journalism at the Chicago Sun-Times, where he was a feature writer, metro reporter, night city editor, metropolitan editor, editorial page editor and a columnist for the opinion pages. Before that he was a reporter and editor with United Press International (UPI) in the South and Chicago, and Chicago bureau chief and a senior editor in Washington with U.S. News & World Report. Northwestern University Press has issued soft cover and eBook editions of Knocking Down Barriers: My Fight for Black America by Truman K. Gibson Jr. with Steve Huntley, a memoir of a Chicagoan who was a member of President Roosevelt’s World War II Black Cabinet working to desegregate the military. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ No cease fire's after pearl Harbor, 9/1, Hiroshima, Battle of The Bulge, Invasion of France, (D Day,) or Dresden. Over 70 percent of the largest cities had their urban core destroyed. Worst cases: Cologne, Essen, Dortmund, Hanover, Nuremberg, Chemnitz. +++ A Changing Time! Author Unknown Men, like nations, think they're eternal. What man in his 20s or 30s doesn't believe, at least subconsciously, that he'll live forever? In the springtime of youth, an endless summer beckons. As you pass 70, it's harder to hide from reality... as you lose friends and relatives. Nations also have seasons: Imagine a Roman of the 2nd century contemplating an empire that stretched from Britain to the Near East, thinking: This will endure forever.... Forever was about 500 years, give or take.... not bad, but gone!! France was pivotal in the 17th and 18th centuries; now the land of Charles Martel is on its way to becoming part of the Muslim ummah. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the sun never set on the British empire; now Albion exists in perpetual twilight. Its 96-year-old sovereign is a fitting symbol for a nation in terminal decline. In the 1980s, Japan seemed poised to buy the world. Business schools taught Japanese management techniques. Today, its birth rate is so low and its population aging so rapidly that an industry has sprung up to remove the remains of elderly Japanese who die alone. I was born in 1945, almost at the midpoint of the 20th century - the American century. America's prestige and influence were never greater. Thanks to the 'Greatest Generation,' we won a World War fought throughout most of Europe, Asia, and the Pacific. We reduced Germany to rubble and put the rising sun to bed. It set the stage for almost half a century of unprecedented prosperity. We stopped the spread of communism in Europe and Asia and fought international terrorism. We rebuilt our enemies and lavished foreign aid on much of the world. We built skyscrapers and rockets to the moon. We conquered Polio and now COVID. We explored the mysteries of the Universe and the wonders of DNA...the blueprint of life. But where is the glory that once was Rome? America has moved from a relatively free economy to socialism - which has worked so well NOWHERE in the world. We've gone from a republican government guided by a constitution to a regime of revolving elites. We have less freedom with each passing year. Like a signpost to the coming reign of terror, the cancel culture is everywhere. We've traded the American Revolution for the Cultural Revolution. The pathetic creature in the White House is an empty vessel filled by his handlers. At the G-7 Summit, 'Dr. Jill' had to lead him like a child. In 1961, when we were young and vigorous, our leader was too. Now a feeble nation is technically led by the oldest man to ever serve in the presidency. We can't defend our borders, our history (including monuments to past greatness) or our streets. Our cities have become anarchist playgrounds. We are a nation of dependents, mendicants, and misplaced charity. Homeless veterans camp in the streets while illegal aliens are put up in hotels. The president of the United States can't even quote the beginning of the Declaration of Independence ('You know - The Thing') correctly. Ivy League graduates routinely fail history tests that 5th graders could pass a generation ago. Crime rates soar and we blame the 2nd Amendment and slash police budgets. Our culture is certifiably insane. Men who think they're women. People who fight racism by seeking to convince members of one race that they're inherently evil, and others that they are perpetual victims. A psychiatrist lecturing at Yale said she fantasizes about 'unloading a revolver into the head of any white person.' We slaughter the unborn in the name of freedom, while our birth rate dips lower year by year. Our national debt is so high that we can no longer even pretend that we will repay it one day. It's a $30-trillion monument to our improvidence and refusal to confront reality. Our 'entertainment' is sadistic, nihilistic, and as enduring as a candy bar wrapper thrown in the trash. Our music is noise that spans the spectrum from annoying to repulsive. Patriotism is called an insurrection, treason celebrated, and perversion sanctified. A man in blue gets less respect than a man in a dress. We're asking soldiers to fight for a nation our leaders no longer believe in. How meekly most of us submitted to Fauci-ism (the regime of face masks, lock-downs, and hand sanitizers) shows the impending death of the American spirit. How do nations slip from greatness to obscurity? * Fighting endless wars they can't or won't win * Accumulating massive debt far beyond their ability to repay * Refusing to guard their borders, allowing the nation to be inundated by an alien horde * Surrendering control of their cities to mob rule * Allowing indoctrination of the young * Moving from a republican form of government to an oligarchy * Losing national identity * Indulging indolence * Abandoning God, faith and family - the bulwarks of any stable society. In America, every one of these symptoms is pronounced, indicating an advanced stage of the disease. Even if the cause seems hopeless, do we not have an obligation to those who sacrificed so much to give us what we had? I'm surrounded by ghosts urging me on: the Union soldiers who held Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg, the battered bastards of Bastogne, those who served in the cold hell of Korea, the guys who went to the jungles of Southeast Asia and came home to be reviled or neglected. This is the nation that took in my immigrant grandparents, whose uniform my father and most of my uncles wore in the Second World War. I don't want to imagine a world without America, even though it becomes increasingly likely. During Britain's darkest hour, when its professional army was trapped at Dunkirk and a German invasion seemed imminent, Churchill reminded his countrymen, 'Nations that go down fighting rise again, and those that surrender tamely are finished.' The same might be said of causes. If we let America slip through our fingers, if we lose without a fight, what will posterity say of us? While the prognosis is far from good. Only God knows if America's day in the sun is over." Read it and weep, forward or erase it! I read it and am now forwarding it to you, believing that we in America are at the moment in time to stand up, or let it fall! We now may soon beat the next step in our country's future. I believe that it might be closer than we think.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ I dare you listen to these two factual videos. Then, I dare you to believe them. The Middle East Problem The Middle East conflict is framed as one of the most complex problems in the world. But, in reality, it's very simple. Israelis want to live in peace and are willing to accept a neighboring Palestinian state. And most Palestinians do not want Israel to exist. As Dennis Prager explains, this is really all you need to know. In 5 minutes, understand how Israel was founded, and how, since that auspicious day in 1948, its neighbors have tried to destroy it, again and again.
| 
No comments:
Post a Comment