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Hamas and Amoral Clarity
Support for Hamas killers by the college DEI crowd reveals the real moral and intellectual rot in higher ed
By Victor Davis Hanson
One unexpected blowback from the medieval Hamas’s barbaric murdering of hundreds of Israeli civilians is the revelation of current global amorality.
More than 20 Harvard university identity politics groups pledged their support to the Hamas murderers—to the utter silence for days of Harvard President Claudine Gay.
Americans knew higher education practiced racist admission policies. It has long promoted racially segregated dorms and graduations. And de facto it has destroyed the First Amendment.
But the overt support for Hamas killers by the diversity, equity, and inclusion crowd on a lot of campuses exposes to Americans the real moral and intellectual rot in higher education.
Democratic Socialist members of the new woke Democrat Party openly expressed ecstatic support for Hamas’s bloodwork.
Their biggest fears were not dead fellow Americans or hostages, or some 1,000 butchered Jewish civilians. Instead they were fearful that righteous Israeli retaliation might destroy the Hamas death machine.
Palestinians for years fooled naïfs in Europe and the Obama and Biden administrations into sending billions of dollars into Gaza.
These monies were channeled to tunnel into Israel, to obtain a huge rocket arsenal, and to craft plans to wipe out Jews.
The Biden administration has blood on its hands.
As soon as Biden took power, he resumed massive subsidies to radical Palestinians, canceled by the prior Trump administration.
He ignored warnings from his own state Department that such fungible moneys would soon fuel Hamas terrorism.
His administration dropped sanctions against Iran, ensuring that Tehran would enjoy a multi-billion-dollar windfall to be distributed to Israel’s existential enemies—another fact well known to the Biden administration.
If the Biden administration had announced overtly that it was rabidly anti-Israel, it would be hard to imagine anything it could have done differently from its present nihilist behavior.
Biden and company quickly restarted the defunct Iran appeasement deal—a leftover from the anti-Israeli Obama administration. No surprise, they appointed radical pro-Iranian activist Robert Malley to head the negotiations.
Malley allegedly has leaked American classified documents to Iranian officials and is under investigation by the FBI. He did his best to place pro-Iranian, anti-American activists into the high echelons of the U.S. government.
Biden was intent on forcing South Korea to release to Iran $6 billion in sanctioned frozen money.
That expectation of cash ensured Iran would be reimbursed for its present terrorist arming spree.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken shamefully tweeted that Israel should settle for an immediate ceasefire. No wonder he soon withdrew his unhinged posting.
That idiocy would be the moral equivalent of an American ally in December1941 urging the U.S. to seek negotiations with imperial Japan after its surprise bombing of Pearl Harbor—to avoid a “cycle of violence.”
The Biden team has drained strategic arms stockpiles in Israel, designed to help the Jewish state in extremis.
It recklessly abandoned a multibillion-dollar arms trove in Kabul, some of which reportedly made its way from Taliban killers to the Hamas murderers.
Once the mass murdering started, the amoral clarity of our “allies” was stunning.
NATO partner Turkey openly sided with the killers. It —along with Blinken—called for a cease fire—at the moment the Hamas death squads had finished, and Israel was ready to hold Hamas to account.
Qatar, where the U.S. Central Command is based, proved little more than a Hamas front.
It offers sanctuary to the architects of Hamas killing. And Qatar ensures a safe financial pipeline to Hamas from Iran and the radical Arab world.
Some of the most vehement current supporters of the Hamas death squads were immigrants to America from the Middle East.
Oddly, they apparently had fled just such illiberal Middle East regimes to reach a tolerant, democratic, and secure United States.
Yet they now endorse the Hamas butchering of Jewish civilians. Its savagery is aimed at executing, raping, and beheading Jews, and then mutilating their bodies.
Hamas apparently hopes to shock the Israeli government into voluntarily committing suicide—in line with the ancient Hamas agenda to destroy the Jewish state.
In a strange way, this reign of death has become a touchstone, an acid test of sorts that has revealed the utter amorality of enemies abroad and quite dangerous people at home.
It is past time that Americans deal with the medieval world that was revealed this week rather than keep dreaming in the fantasy world of our government.
Americans need to stop illegal immigration and restore their southern border, while ceasing all immigration from unhinged, hostile nations.
The military must return to its deterrent role and fire its woke commissariat.
Our leaders must accept that in the last three years of the Biden administration, serial American appeasement abroad, disunity at home, and social chaos have encouraged an entire host of enemies —China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Middle East illiberal regimes, and former friends like Turkey and Qatar.
And our enemies dream of doing to us what we just saw in Israel.
Finally:
‘This Is Your Legacy’: Ingraham Lights Into Elite University Donors For Supporting ‘Cesspool’ Of ‘Hatred’
DCNF - Ingraham Hamas College Donors Screenshot/Rumble/Fox News
Fox News host Laura Ingraham blasted donors to elite universities Thursday, saying their financial backing supported a “cesspool” of “hatred” after pro-Hamas demonstrations erupted on campuses across the U.S. following Saturday’s terrorist attacks in Israel.
Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) held demonstrations Thursday supporting Hamas in the wake of the attacks, which killed over 1,000 people, including at least 27 Americans. The group announced plans for the protests as a “Day of Resistance” Tuesday. (RELATED: ‘Too Little, Too Late’: Dershowitz Rips Harvard President’s Response To Student Orgs Blaming Israel For Hamas Attack)
“College campuses have seen an explosion in the number of far-left student groups, often with socialist tenets or neo-Marxist origins,” Ingraham said. “But these groups aren’t the liberals of the old free-speech variety. They have gone from being antiwar and demanding First Amendment rights to being deeply anti-American and now passionately pro-terrorism.”
Ingraham took aim at major corporations and billionaires like Bill Gates noting their massive donations to universities where the protests took place.
“I love how all these college presidents and deans are trying to cover their tracks distancing themselves from these pro-Hamas organizations on campus, but I’m not buying it for one minute,” Ingraham said. “They have always known that these groups supported political violence. In 2020, the BLM riots and now the savage killing by Hamas. University officials either agree with the anti-American supporters of violence, or they are just too afraid to challenge them. Meanwhile, corporate America and wealthy donors shower these universities with billions and billions of dollars. Philanthropic giving to higher ed increased by 12.5 percent to $59.5 billion. Three donations totaling 431 million into Harvard in one recent year alone, from Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates and the UAE.”
“Let’s be brutally honest here: Academia for decades has been a cesspool of anti-American and anti-Western hatred. Hatred of all things traditional,” Ingraham added later. “They stopped opposing voices from even speaking on campus.”
Ingraham then played video of a crowd shouting down former NCAA swimmer Riley Gaines at San Francisco State University, where she had been slated to speak at a Turning Point USA event on April 6.
“It’s not surprising that young people who have been taught lies for education just reflexively repeat them and expect standing ovations,” Ingraham said. “For the time has come for everyone responsible for this, the administrators, professors, the donors who pay for it all, to look into the mirror and realize that this this is your legacy.”
https://dailycaller.com/2023/1
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I am perversely delighted anti-Semitism has begun to break out like measles. As long as it remained under subtle wraps anyone who protested lonely ran the risk of being intimidated and enduring possible physical abuse. Consequently, their subsequent silence often morphed into fertilizer causing anti-Semitism to take root and spread.
Now that Hamas has shown their true color their blatant murderous actions have begun to backfire. Consequently, some respected voices are now speaking out and the old expression: " there is comfort in numbers" has resurfaced as a lubricant and loosened tongues.
I have no illusion this "happening" will become permanent. Nevertheless, it is comforting to watch it occur no matter how long it persists. Why? Because it might cause anti-Semites to think twice should they desire to re-emerge. More importantly, it might make it easier for those who were previously reluctant, hesitant and silent to have the courage to become vocal.
And:
Forwarded to me by a friend and fellow memo reader. Rabbi Dov Peretz Elkins
(cell- 972-52-598-9118) sent to my friend
Time will tell.
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"...Some interesting excerpts from a NYT article."
What It Would Mean to Treat Hamas Like ISIS
By David French, New York Times
Excerpts:
Put all this together, and you can immediately perceive Israel’s asymmetric challenge. Hamas scorns the law of war. The reports of its intentional mass killing, mutilation, rape and civilian hostage taking are evidence enough of that fact. Israel legally and morally obligates the Israel Defense Forces to comply with the law. As a result, civilians become one of Hamas’s principal military assets. The presence of civilians gives Hamas the ability to punch first in any given street fight. The presence of civilians raises the bar for approving airstrikes or any other use of long-range weapons. And when civilians die, Hamas uses their deaths to inflame the international community and to help run out the clock on international patience for Israeli military operations.
Even worse, Hamas is helped by an enormous amount of public ignorance combined with outright misinformation. The average journalist — much less the average citizen — doesn’t know much, if anything, about the laws of war. Let’s take, for example, two key legal concepts that will be relevant every single day of the fighting in Gaza: proportionality and distinction.
As the war continues and as the destruction mounts, you will hear a number of voices condemn Israel for a disproportionate response, but many of these critics fundamentally misunderstand what proportionality means in the law of war. The U.S. Army’s “Law of Land Warfare” field manual — which is deeply grounded in the international law of armed conflict and governed our urban operations in Iraq and Afghanistan — defines the legal obligation of proportionality as requiring “commanders to refrain from attacks in which the expected loss or injury to civilians and damage to civilian objects incidental to such attacks would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage expected to be gained.” It also requires that commanders “take feasible precautions to reduce the risk of harm to civilians, other protected persons and civilian objects.”
Proportionality does not require the Israel Defense Forces to respond with the same degree of force or take the same proportion of casualties as Hamas. In addition, as the manual states, “the proportionality standard does not require that no incidental harm results from attacks.” If you’re a soldier on patrol and someone fires at you with a rifle, you don’t have to respond with a rifle. You can use a tank round or a missile in response, unless you have reason to believe the tank round or missile will cause extraordinary collateral damage. But if you’re taking fire from a single house, proportionality prohibits you from destroying the entire block. Throughout the war on terrorism, American forces used powerful, longer-range weapons to attack individual targets. That does not violate the laws of war.
In reality, inflicting disproportionate casualties can be one of the goals of a fighting force. Ukraine appears to have inflicted substantially greater casualties on Russia than the Russian Army has inflicted on Ukraine. That doesn’t mean Ukraine’s response was disproportionate under the law of armed conflict. In every fight, the goal is to inflict as many losses as possible on your opponent while taking as few losses as possible.
There is a similar public ignorance problem with the concept of distinction, which “The Law of Land Warfare” defines as requiring combatants to distinguish “between combatants and military objectives on the one hand and civilians and civilian objects on the other in offense and defense.” Distinction requires soldiers to separate themselves from civilians by wearing uniforms, for example, or by fighting from marked military vehicles. It prohibits militaries from fighting from places like hospitals, schools and mosques.
Hamas disregards the principle of distinction. Its fighters take aim from civilian buildings while wearing civilian clothes and using civilian vehicles. This presents an attacking military with serious targeting problems. It is easy to identify, say, an armored personnel carrier as a military vehicle. But what if there are four Toyota Tacomas in the street and only one is full of Hamas fighters?
But here’s the key point: When Hamas abandons the principle of distinction, then Hamas is responsible for the civilian damage that results. If Hamas fights from a hospital — or stores munitions in a hospital — damage to that hospital is Hamas’s responsibility. If Hamas fighters shoot at Israel Defense Forces from a home that contains a Palestinian family, then Hamas is responsible for the civilian casualties if that family is harmed in the resulting exchange of fire.
There is also the unique military legal doctrine of siege warfare. On Monday, Israel announced a “complete siege” and said that “no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel” would be allowed inside the Gaza Strip. A siege is an ancient form of warfare, and the modern legal obligations of a besieging party are a matter of dispute, but again, “The Law of Land Warfare” is instructive. It explicitly declares it “lawful” to cut off “reinforcements, supplies and communications,” but it also states that the belligerents should “make reasonable, good-faith efforts to conclude local agreements for the removal of wounded, sick, infirm and aged persons, children and maternity cases from the besieged or encircled area.”
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I have increasingly observed Vivek Ramaswamy and I might be totally wrong and overly prejudiced but the more I hear him the more I am beginning to fear he might be a white version of Obama. He is verbally gifted yet, perhaps, a bit too slick. He also admits to being Muslim and with respect to Hamas, when questioned/challenged, he seems to hedge his bets.
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Israel’s 6th Day of War
By Sherwin Pomerantz
Six days into the war here and as I opened my lap top today there was a Facebook posting from a colleague, Alan Feld, one of the early technology venture capital pioneers here in Israel. The notice did not speak about the death of one person but rather two brothers, Sgt. Maj. Noam Slotky and Sgt. Maj. Yishai Slotky, the sons of Rabbi Shmuel Slotky (Head of the International Association of Synagogues) and his wife Talia. The two brothers died in battle on the Gaza border as part of the group that was defending Israeli positions there when they were overrun by Hamas terrorists.
Can one even imagine how the parents felt when they received the knock on the door from the Israel Defense Forces representative? How did the mother feel when, knowing who was at the door, asked “Which one?” and the military representative answered: “Both of them,” No parent should ever have to face that truth. Never, ever, ever!!!
The numbers here continue to climb. Deaths resulting from the brutal invasion of Hamas terrorists last Saturday have now climbed over the 1,300 mark (169 of them Israeli soldiers). Of those, 25 were Americans. In addition, it is now estimated that Hamas took more than 150 people hostage, ranging from small children to old men and women many of whom were dragged from their homes, shot and kidnapped Of those being held 11 are members of just one Israeli family.
Over the last 24 hours, in addition to what we knew earlier about the beheading of babies, it is now clear that a number of IDF soldiers who, after they were killed, were then decapitated by the Hamas barbarians.
The Hamas attack was far larger than anything the group had attempted before, with a coordinated destruction of Israel’s network of electronic border surveillance and remote-controlled weaponry, as well as dozens of breaches in the border barrier. The Israeli military, which took days to regain control of the areas affected, has said it recovered the bodies of 1,500 Palestinian gunmen who took part in the assault and were killed
In retaliation, Israel overnight attacked 2,400 targets in Gaza by air, which included 136 command centers and 40 underground staging facilities. No doubt Hamas is feeling the pain but there is more yet to come
The good news, if there can be good news in this environment, is that a War Cabinet has been formed here composed of people who have experience dealing with the kinds of issues that Israel is now facing. The government that has been in power since the end of last year was almost totally bereft of ministers with the kind of experience required to manage a military challenge. The agreement by Benny Gantz, a former IDF Chief of Staff, who is well respected throughout the country, joined by Defense Minister Yoav Gallant (who himself was a former candidate for Chief of Staff) brings people into the government who are experienced in managing military campaigns. Additional advisors such as Gadi Eizenkot, another former IDF Chief of Staff, adds strength to the governance team.
That team will know how to deal with Hamas, which has threatened to kill hostages if Israel strikes civilian homes without warning. Israel “will make sure that by the end of this operation, Hamas will have zero military capabilities,” Tal Heinrich, a spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said on Wednesday in a briefing with reporters, making clear that the objective is to destroy the Al Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing.
Earlier today US Secretary of State Antony Blinken landed in Israel as well. At the Prime Minster’s office after his arrival he said: “The United States has Israel’s back. We’ll have it tomorrow, we’ll have it every day, We stand resolutely against terrorism.
Meanwhile, in the north, the Israeli military said it had struck Hezbollah targets in Lebanon with aircraft and artillery on Wednesday, in response to a missile attack by the group. The number of casualties on both sides remained unclear. Israel continues to watch that border carefully as it would make life more difficult for all of us here if we had to deal with a two-front war
Having said all of that, the spirit of our troops is high, the people of Israel are unified with one goal, to stop Hamas and the level of volunteer activity to support our troops is mindboggling.
Let us hope that the combination of intelligence, governance, commitment, spirit and unity will be sufficient for us to prevail against the enemies of Israel bent on our destruction.
Sherwin Pomerantz has lived in Israel for 40 years, is CEO of Atid EDI Ltd., a international business development consultancy. He is also the Founder and Chair of the American State Offices Association, former National President of the Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel and a past Chairperson of the Board of the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies.
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Civilisation’s fifth columnists
The depravity shown by Hamas has entered the collective mind of the west itself
By MELANIE PHILLIPS-Jewish News Syndicate
At a synagogue vigil in London on Monday evening for the victims of the Hamas pogrom, Britain’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said he stood in solidarity with Israel.
Hamas, he said, “are not militants. They are not freedom fighters. They are terrorists. There are not two sides to these events. There is no question of balance. I stand with Israel”.
At virtually the same time he was making his morally uncompromising statement, a mob of around 1,000 people demonstrated outside Israel’s embassy in London chanting the war cry for the annihilation of Israel: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” They were waving Palestinian flags, setting off fireworks and banging drums.
Similar demonstrations were held elsewhere. In Newcastle, a demonstrator called Ahmed held aloft a green flare and declared: “Let there be bloodshed for now. Hamas is a freedom movement. … Israel is an apartheid state”. Dana Abuqamar, president of Manchester Friends of Palestine, said she was “full of pride and joy” at the butchery.
This chilling glorification of the Hamas attack was repeated in demonstrations in America and Australia. Placards waved in New York City’s Times Square justified the rape and murder of women and the beheading of children as “resistance by any means necessary”.
In Australia, a mostly Muslim mob chanted “Gas the Jew,” “f*** the Jews” and “f*** Israel” on the steps of the Sydney Opera House.
In Britain, America and Australia, people who were still trying to digest the appalling barbarism of the Hamas pogrom were horrified by this eruption of support within their midst for savages who had burned people alive, raped women and murdered children in front of their parents.
It’s necessary to understand just what was happening at these demonstrations. They weren’t just protests against Israel or supporting the Palestinians. They were frenzies of bloodlust.
The scale and barbarism of the slaughter in southern Israel produced in these demonstrators a jubilant excitement that more Jews would now be killed and Israel would be exterminated.
These shocking scenes, and the horrified and uncomprehending reaction they provoked, illustrated what so many westerners have always failed to grasp about Islamic suicide bombings: that they are inspired not by despair but by exultation.
Individuals such as the pro-Hamas demonstrators rejoice in the annihilation of people because they subscribe to a death cult, because they fanatically hate those they are taught are the “enemies of Islam” and because such murders make them believe that they are winning against those they want to annihilate.
Hamas is barbaric, but what we have now seen is that this depravity has entered the collective mind of the west itself. In universities and other institutions and organisations, people have been blaming Israel for the Hamas pogrom.
Pro-Palestinian groups on campus have been glorifying the slaughter as “resistance to this vile occupation”. In Britain, Sussex University women’s officer Hanin Barghuti told a rally that the murder of Israelis was “so beautiful and inspiring”.
Elsewhere, a neurologist employed by Britain’s National Health Service, Dr. Mennah Elwan, claimed “there are no civilians in Israel,” suggesting that every Israeli was a legitimate target for murder.
In America, student groups at many elite universities including Harvard, Yale and Columbia have come out in support of Hamas.
A group of 31 Harvard organisations blamed Israel for the Hamas pogrom, writing that they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence”.
Throughout the west, Hamas depravity has been met with silence from people who habitually leap to condemn “micro-aggressions” and other liberal thought crimes. As the British cultural historian Dr Philip Kiszeley has observed: “Significant portions of the population are now comfortable to publicly sing and dance in celebration of rape, torture and murder. And many highly educated people are happy to frame this abomination as social justice.”
Among self-righteous actors and other celebrities, human rights groups and feminists who campaign day in, day out against men for sexual assault, the barbarism of the Hamas death squads against women, children and old people has been met with silence.
In Britain, the BBC still refuses to call Hamas mass murderers terrorists. Even though it uses “terrorism” to describe the activities of Al Qaeda and ISIS, it refers to Hamas as “militants”. That implies a justification for the Hamas agenda that the BBC denies to other terrorist groups. And that implies a double standard by the BBC towards victims of terror who happen to be Jews.
Other institutions are paralysed by ignorance, apathy and moral confusion. The British police stood by and did nothing during the pro-Hamas demonstrations, even though the government has proscribed Hamas as a terrorist organisation and it is a crime to glorify terrorism.
Home Secretary Suella Braverman has now told the police they must clamp down not just on pro-Hamas symbols and chants but the calls to erase Israel “from the river to the sea” and even the waving of Palestinian flags.
The police, however, don’t get it, because virtually no-one in the establishment gets it. Those of us who have warned for years about the scale of extremism and antisemitism in Britain’s Muslim communities have been excoriated by liberals — including the Jewish community leadership — as “Islamophobes”.
When Suella Braverman recently criticised “multiculturalism” for creating communities that were “in the society but not of the society,” she was denounced for racism and “Islamophobia”.
Now we can see the result of this myopic name-calling. The pro-Hamas demonstrations in London, Sydney and American cities have drawn back the veil on a terrifying degree of near-psychopathic support throughout the west for barbarism against the Jews.
In Britain, the majority of Muslims oppose terrorism and embrace western values. But a frighteningly large minority say they want to live under sharia law, which is inimical to democracy and human rights.
Moreover, according to politics professor Matthew Goodwin, the most comprehensive polling to date has shown that around one-third of British Muslims endorse antisemitic tropes, only 29 per cent think the Holocaust occurred and one in ten openly sympathises with terrorists.
One-tenth of Britain’s Muslim population is around 380,000 people — more than in the entire Jewish community.
Although many in the west have now have had their eyes opened about Hamas, they still don’t grasp that there are no moderate Palestinian leaders. Fatah, which dominates the Palestinian Authority, has openly supported the Hamas pogrom and is urging further attacks.
Yet the PA, which glorifies terrorism against Israel and teaches its children to hate and murder Jews, is heavily funded by the US, EU and UK, who all promote it as the legitimate future ruler of a Palestinian state.
Support for the Palestinian cause is ingrained throughout the western liberal world. As a result, generations have been brainwashed into believing the lie that Israel is a colonial oppressor and the Palestinian Arab aggressors are its victims.
That’s why every attempt by the Israelis to defend themselves militarily against the Palestinians results in increased attacks on Diaspora Jews. In Britain, that’s already happening — and as the casualty toll in Gaza mounts, it’s expected to get worse.
British Jews are under siege. Community patrols have been stepped up. A Jewish school in London has told its children not to wear their school blazer off premises, as it bears an obvious Jewish symbol.
Now we can see how the Holocaust was allowed to happen. When evil people try to wipe the Jews from the earth, millions avert their gaze, fruitlessly wring their hands or even tacitly support those involved in such evil.
Never again? It’s happened again. But this time, there’s a fifth column within the west that the west itself has nurtured, and which it still can’t even bring itself to name.
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The question I have with respect to the $6 billion hostage money will, when no one is looking, it slide into the hands of Iran? Time and again, these kind of situations occur after a period of time has passed.
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My own sentiments have been expressed by ALTABEF below.
I have been a contributing member of CUFI ( Christians United For Israel) for well over 20 years.
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We need a born-again IDF
The specter of barbarism demands a new perspective.
By DOUGLAS ALTABEF
For all their brilliance in hiding their intentions and plans from the IDF, Hamas made one glaringly stupid mistake, one that has the potential to determine the outcome of this war: They showed the world what they really are.
Instead of staging fake scenes of children being shot, Hamas gleefully paraded videos of their sadistic, barbaric inhumanity: The wanton murder of children, the rape of girls, the dragging of dead people through the streets and the horrific spectacle of mass-murdering young people attending a dance party in the desert.
No one who sees these videos can ever again regard Hamas as benighted defenders of a desperate people. They are animals, and they have made that crystal clear for the world to see
The question now is how to take advantage of this newly perceived reality. For starters, the gloves must come off the fists of the IDF. The conceit of its being “the most moral army in the world” must be laid to rest.
It is a perversion of morality to grant any accommodation, latitude or excruciating care to anyone in Gaza. There should be no more leaflets on roofs, no calling off attacks for fear of innocents in the vicinity.
We do not target innocents, but we cannot refrain from what needs to be done because of their presence.
Here is another suggestion: It turns out that, due to the sanctimony of some of our higher-ups, the daughter of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh is once again being treated at Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv. Since more than 1,000 Gazans are treated in Israeli hospitals annually, there might very well be quite a few others in Israel.
These people should be treated, but not allowed to leave. They must be placed under arrest. Of course, there will be a hue and cry about this, but I would send the videos of Nazi and Cossack-like pogroms perpetuated by Hamas as a rejoinder.
To those who say that we should not stoop to the level of our enemies, I would say two things: First of all, we’re not. Second of all, if we are too sanctimonious to get closer to their level, we will never defeat them.
The IDF needs to know that the groundwork for their needed evolution has been laid by the nation. I, like many others, have been bombarded with messages from abroad expressing shock and horror at Hamas’ atrocities. Most of them are coming from people who have heretofore expressed no support or concern for Israel.
Any sentient being in Israel who is having conversations with family, friends and neighbors is hearing a consistent narrative that ranges from scorching the earth to total obliteration. In other words, the people of Israel are thoroughly disgusted, revolted and have abandoned all but the most essential compunctions.
I am not worried for a minute that we are somehow sullying ourselves by willing to treat the enemy as the scum that they are. I would be far more worried if we were trying to make excuses for why we somehow cannot do what needs to be done.
The return to our ancestral homeland was in part predicated on the need to find a refuge from the barbarism of pogroms and the sadism of the exile. The on-the-ground Never Again of Israel includes an end to pogroms ever being visited upon the Jewish people.
Shockingly, the events in the south show that this worthy goal has been shattered. We have experienced, on our own land, a pogrom of massive proportions. The difference between now and then is that we have the wherewithal to do something about it.
Israel can and must attack the pogromists with a ferocity that makes the desire to try it again inconceivable. We must send a message to Gazans (many of whom would probably welcome the demise of Hamas), to Hezbollah and of course to Iran that we are far more invested in our survival than they are in our demise.
Nothing can soothe, salve nor justify the deaths of the innocent. But if their deaths produce a newly fierce, ferocious and determined IDF and the political class that directs it, then these deaths will not have been without recompense and righteous vengeance.
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