Will there be a World War Three? Israel-Hamas war risks escalation
It wasn’t just Israel taken by surprise when Hamas terrorists struck — the atrocity also stunned Washington. The US now faces threats on an unprecedented four fronts and global peace has never looked a more distant prospect, writes Niall Ferguson
By Niall Ferguson -Hoover Foundation
If history at its worst is “one damned thing after another”, then the news can sometimes feel like the same damned thing, every hour on the hour. We have all now seen at least some of the hideous images of the worst attack on Israel since 1973. Most of us understand that, in its reaction to the terrorist atrocities perpetrated by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad against Israeli civilians — including children and even babies — Israel risks being sucked into Gaza and then hit from the north by Hezbollah.
The more thoughtful analysts see that the Israel Defence Forces’ nightmare of a “unification of the arenas” — including also the West Bank — could stretch the IDF to breaking point. The less reflective ones focus on what is now conventionally described as a “colossal intelligence failure” by the once omniscient Mossad and Shin Bet.
The obvious (but stupid) question is how big a role Iran has played in orchestrating this assault on Israel. The less obvious question is why the United States has sent not only two aircraft-carrier strike groups but also two cabinet secretaries (of state and defence) to the region if, as administration officials have stated, it lacks evidence of direct Iranian involvement.
So much for the news. The difference between the news and history is that, as historic events happen, it is easy to fixate on the first-order consequences of any action, and much harder to discern the second and third-order consequences — even though these are sometimes far larger.
Fifty years ago Egypt and Syria launched what would become known as the Yom Kippur war against Israel
Nowhere in the world does this apply more than in the Middle East. And my guess is that future historians will be more interested in the genuine intelligence failure in Washington than in the largely imagined one in Jerusalem.
Fifty years ago, almost to the day, Egyptian and Syrian forces, backed and armed by the Soviet Union, launched the 1973 “Yom Kippur” war against Israel. The news at the time was dominated by the dramatic ebb and flow of events on the principal battlefields along the Suez Canal and in the Golan Heights, closely followed by the frenetic efforts of Henry Kissinger, newly promoted to the post of secretary of state, to negotiate a ceasefire.
Yet the second-order consequences became clear only later — namely that the Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat’s true motive was to achieve a lasting peace with Israel based on respect, rather than disdain, for its Arab neighbours; and that Kissinger’s main objective was to terminate the influence of the Soviet Union in the Middle East.
It took two weeks after the initial Arab offensive for the third-order consequences to manifest themselves. Kissinger had underestimated the readiness of the Saudi ruler, King Faisal, to impose an oil embargo on the US and other countries that supported Israel, including Canada, Japan and the Netherlands.
Henry Kissinger, who celebrated his 100th birthday this year, was deeply involved in negotiations for peace at the time of the Yom Kippur war
The resulting fourfold increase in the price of crude oil dealt a hammer blow to the world economy, greatly exacerbating the already serious problem of inflation and turning it into stagflation. The oil producers, suddenly awash with dollars, discovered the true extent of their power. The hubris this produced in Tehran led in just five years to the Shah’s downfall in the Islamic Revolution, the disastrous consequences of which we all — but especially Israelis — continue to endure.
To discern the second and third- order effects of this crisis, half a century later, is not easy. One way to grasp their potential magnitude is to ask whether the former US defence secretary, Robert Gates, writing in Foreign Affairs before the onslaught on Israel, is right that: “The United States now confronts graver threats to its security than it has in decades, perhaps ever. Never before has it faced four allied antagonists at the same time — Russia, China, North Korea and Iran — whose collective nuclear arsenal could within a few years be nearly double the size of its own.”
The problem, Gates argued, is that at the very moment events demand a strong and coherent response from America, “the country cannot provide one”.
I have argued for five years that the United States and its allies already find themselves in a new cold war, this time with the People’s Republic of China. I have argued for a year and a half that the war in Ukraine is roughly equivalent to the Korean War during the first Cold War, revealing an ideological as well as geopolitical division between the countries of the “Rimland” (the Anglosphere, western Europe and Japan) and those of the Eurasian “Heartland” (China, Russia and Iran plus North Korea).
And I have warned since January that a war in the Middle East might be the next crisis in a cascade of conflict that has the potential to escalate to a Third World War, especially if China seizes the moment — perhaps as early as next year — to impose a blockade on Taiwan. Now that the Middle Eastern war has indeed broken out, what course will history take?
First, let us dismiss the doubts about Iranian complicity. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are funded by Tehran, as is Hezbollah. There are already units of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps all over Syria, poised to assist Hezbollah against northern Israel. Apart from pursuing its ultimate ambition to wipe Israel from the map, Tehran’s secondary goal was to kill off or at least derail the imminent Saudi-Israeli rapprochement. It has succeeded. Saudi media has rapidly pivoted to decrying the “Israeli occupation” as the cause of the conflict and condemning Israel’s “collective punishment” of Gazans.
Hezbollah, which means “party of God”, could move to assist Hamas from Lebanon
Second, it was not just Israel that suffered an intelligence failure last weekend. Egypt’s intelligence minister, General Abbas Kamel, says he personally told the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, only ten days before the attack to prepare for “something unusual, a terrible operation”, according to The Times of Israel. One may speculate about why Netanyahu, now the head of a government of national unity, ignored these warnings (though he denies having received them). But it was the Biden administration that was blindsided — at best. Just a week before the attacks from Gaza, the national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, was telling an American audience: “The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades . . . the amount of time I have to spend on crisis and conflict in the Middle East today, compared to any of my predecessors going back to 9/11, is significantly reduced.” Maybe spending a little bit more time would have been advisable.
What does the US do now? It is hard to believe that Team Biden will be as effective as Kissinger was in 1973. By sending the two carrier groups, they are seeking to deter Hezbollah — in other words, Iran — from opening a second front against Israel from Lebanon. But it is not clear that American deterrence will succeed, any more than it succeeded against Russia in February 2022. Iran’s proxies in Yemen and Iraq have already threatened to target American military bases in the Middle East if the United States intervenes.
President Biden and his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, were caught unawares by conflict erupting once more in the Middle East
The Iranians surely detect Washington’s reluctance to get drawn into a war against Iranian forces in Lebanon and Syria. Regional experts at the state department will be reminding their bosses that Israel got horribly bogged down in Lebanon in 1982 — and that more than 200 American service personnel were killed in a terrorist attack in Beirut the following year.
It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the US was complacent about the threat posed by Iran and its proxies. I believe this was a consequence of the Biden administration — and particularly its Iran special envoy Robert Malley (now under investigation by the FBI) — going too far in its efforts to resuscitate the nuclear deal struck with Iran by President Obama. Had they spent more time focusing on Iran’s collusion with Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah, and less time listening to pro-Tehran influencers, they might have been less surprised by recent events.
What about America’s European allies? The reality is that they are much less united than over Ukraine. The EU is by far the biggest donor of aid to the crumbling Palestinian Authority. On Monday, the European Commission’s neighbourhood commissioner, Oliver Varhelyi, tweeted that the commission would suspend all aid to the Palestinians. However, Varhelyi, who is Hungarian, quickly had to backtrack, as he had not consulted member states, nine of which officially recognise Palestine as a state. Three others — Ireland, Luxembourg and Denmark — reportedly sought a reference to de-escalation in the EU’s official statement responding to the attacks.
In any case, the Europeans feel they have their hands full enough with the war in Ukraine, about which there is more consensus. Yet it will be harder than might be assumed to keep the two wars separate. Russia is already indirectly involved in the Middle Eastern crisis through its presence in Syria, including the air-defence systems it has there. Russian propaganda is already trying to sow dissent between Kyiv and Jerusalem. And there is going to be at least some competition between Ukraine and Israel for supplies of certain kinds of munitions, especially guided bombs and 155mm artillery shells.
The connection of the Middle Eastern conflict to Ukraine — as well as to other conflicts — depends on two things: the extent of collusion between the new “Axis of Ill Will” and the extent of American resolve. There are reasons to fear that the former will be considerable, and the latter will not.
For those who were not previously paying attention, it must now be clear that there are two distinct fifth columns within the West: populist charlatans on the far right as well as the Stalinist left who downplay Putin’s war crimes, and a combination of useful idiots and Islamist sympathisers on the left who exalt the terrorists of Hamas and Islamic Jihad as freedom fighters against Israeli colonisation.
There are also powerful economic and political forces steering the US towards a kind of “appeasement-lite”, in particular the perception that American voters care more about their domestic economic situation than about new “forever wars” — a favourite term of isolationists on both sides of the political spectrum. And, as has been clear from Joe Biden’s handling of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, nothing worries the US president more than that he might inadvertently stumble into a Third World War.
The irony is, of course, that it was appeasement and the failure of deterrence that led the West into the Second World War.
I have argued since Biden’s election that we risked re-running the 1970s. Today, I increasingly fear we may be re-running the 1930s. If Israel finds it cannot contend with a three-front war in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, and turns to the United States for military help against Iran, we shall have reached one of history’s hinges. The future of the world will turn on it.
Niall Ferguson is Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a Bloomberg Opinion columnist
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The Ross Rant
I have returned from Europe and there is so much to comment on this may become two Rants. I did manage to come home with Covid which I likely caught in Budapest. It is so mild I thought I just had a cold or very mild flu. I am fine, but still positive. First, I was in Gdansk, Warsaw and Budapest. Gdansk is a wonderful place to visit, at least in late September. It is exceptionally clean, no homeless, no addicts, no crowds, no tourist crap shops, no apparent crime, mostly new or rebuilt buildings, good food, lovely river walk, no street hustlers, no beggars, or any of that crap. Just a very pleasant safe city still rebuilding from the Russians. It has two excellent museums. It is where WWII started, and where the Solidarity uprisings happened that eventually led to the end of the Soviet Union in other nations. Warsaw is similar as to clean, no homeless or muggers or crappy people on the streets, no addicts on the streets. Same for Budapest. Again, the war, the lead up to Hitler genocide and Russian terror are well explained in the museums. After spending probably10 or 11 hours total in four museums, I came away realizing nothing has changed. Russia is again committing atrocities and trying to recapture its Soviet glory, people are being murdered, and now the Palestinians seem to be trying to outdo the Nazis for despicable atrocities. After spending hours in the Polin Jewish museum in Warsaw and realizing how the Jews have been mistreated since the 13th century in Europe, and since Roman days, it is clear there is no end to anti-Semitism. Nothing ever really changes. Only the names of the perpetrators change.
I arrived back in Manhattan to my upper west side apartment. I went out early the next morning to get a bagel and looked at the filth and litter on Broadway, and the stark contrast with Europe brought home how far down the US has sunk. Manhattan is like a third world country by comparison. Filthy, dangerous, filled with homeless sleeping in the streets, addicts, questionable refugees, thugs who think nothing of shooting you, a DA who arrests people defending themselves and others, where an $800 theft is considered -he must need the stuff, the smell of pot everywhere you walk, and it always feels dangerous. In Europe I never felt one iota of concern. Look around the US major cities and we see depravity on the sidewalks, no enforcement of laws, people getting shot and stabbed and the perp walking with no bail, retailers forced to close, and life deteriorating rapidly while in Europe life is improving rapidly in Eastern Europe. What they have accomplished in the 30 or so years since Soviet occupation given how totally destroyed the cities and societies had been, it is embarrassing to be American from a major city.
What is occurring in Israel is beyond horrifying. The mutilation of the babies pushed this far over the edge, and will prove to be the act that changed history. Now there is no way the US is going to even try to stop Israel from totally destroying Hamas, even if thousands die and the hostages get killed. Hamas, like ISIS, must be eliminated from the earth. Israel listened to the demands of the west and UN in the past, and stopped short of finishing the job. So here we are. You can never compromise with terrorists -you only can kill them all. They will not make that mistake again. If some Palestinians also die because they did not run away when instructed by Israel, so be it. That is the fault of Hamas. We need a bit of history. A lot of people blame Israel for conditions in Gaza. Reality. In 2005 Israel pulled out of Gaza and left behind beautiful greenhouses, infrastructure, a good port, and some light industry, and most important a golden opportunity. The idea was to let the Palestinians take that base and build a homeland for themselves with everything already in place to create a thriving community. In 2007 Hamas took over and destroyed all that Israel had left for them to build an economy, and imposed its control. The 2 million residents then became subject to a terror dictatorship and economic destruction. Israel had no choice but to lock it down. The Palestinians had a golden opportunity, but Iran directed that it be a terror base instead. They have nobody to blame but themselves. For Israel this is Holocaust 2.0 and nothing is going to stop them from totally wiping out Hamas. They will now never allow the Holocaust to be repeated. It now makes no difference what the rest of the world says. This is existential. It is ingrained in Israelis. The UN just refused to condemn Hamas. The US should pull out of the UN as a worthless organization of corruption and anti-Semitism. The world has changed substantially now. WWIII is possible now. My scenario of the comparison to 1938 is now more real. In the end, Hamas will be gone. Maybe Hezbollah will as well. Israel needs to put an end to the threats and terrorists funded by Iran, and now your$6 billion. It will not be surprising to find US F 35s attacking Hezbollah and Syria. It will also not be surprising if the Israelis literally demolish northern Gaza as they send in ground troops. When the world screams, Israel will say we warned everyone, and Hamas wanted to have them as human shields. They want the bodies to pile up on TV. The UN and others will demand restraint and Israel will tell them all go look at the mutilated babies and then tell me why. There is no stopping Israel now no matter if Hezbollah attacks. This is the ultimate black swan event, and nobody can predict what happens next..
This is the centuries old clash of cultures and religion. The Muslims set out hundreds of years ago to take control of parts of the world, and they have no hesitation to kill anyone. It is their culture. There is no solution. There is only killing all the bad guys. You can count on BBC, CNN, NBC, etc to blather on about civilian casualties, the siege, and the number of bodies. They have already forgotten the mutilated babies and no warning to run for the concert goers. Just machine guns mowing them down, and yet the media will forget that now, and complain so called innocent civilians are getting killed. That is the price they pay for electing Hamas in 2007. That is the price they pay for the mass corruption of the PLO. Culture is always at the core. These people do not know how to act like civilized humans be it Al Qaeda, ISIS, Hamas, Iran, Assad. Makes no difference. When Assad let the Russians wipe out thousands of Palestinians and bomb hospitals, they whined but did not act. Obama made believe, but then did nothing and let his red line become invisible. And that led to the world realizing he was weak and toothless, and things went downhill after that.
In case you still wondered if American colleges were being destroyed by radical left ideology egged on by the administrations led by DEI presidents who are not capable of running large complex organizations, but they checked all the boxes like the presidents of Harvard and Penn, just look at what these DEI figureheads failed to do this week. . Their lack of forceful responses to the disgraceful shouts of the pro-Palestinian protestors just eggs them on to believe they are approved. Academia in the US has sunk to a level of non-education and primarily indoctrination about pronouns, trans, race, and anti-America. At Clemson they took the tampons out of the men's room and the students were outraged. That shows you what is now the ideology on campus. Then the kids wonder why their expensive tuition does not lead to high paying jobs. Bill Ackman and Mark Rowan have told students a Penn and Harvard that in the real world nobody wants to hire anyone who supports Palestinians genocide. Job offers have already been withdrawn so now of course the protestors cover their faces and delete their names. They are learning that bad acts have real consequences in the real world outside of campus. All of these protestors who shout anti-Semitic chants and claim the murdered babies never happened should be expelled. On these same campuses if you use the wrong pronoun you can get in serious problems, but if you show hate against Jews you are just protesting. This is how sick it has become in American academia.
The Republicans should save us all from more pain and just get in a big circle and open fire. For those of you who think Gaetz is wonderful, this is the result. The destruction of the Republican party. He is led by Trump whose goal is to reformulate and control the party and have his people like Gaetz running it. I have said for a very long time, Trump is a really bad guy and here you see it unfolding. The US is now at a very dangerous place politically, and things can go over the edge very easily. This is the last thing the world needs right now. I am unclear how or where this finally ends, but it will not likely be Jordan as Speaker. Scalise would have been a very good choice, but the Trumpsters refused. The budget deadline is fast approaching. The last Treasury auction of30 year bonds did not go well. The two year is over 5% and the ten is over4.6%. They will go up from here. The ten is headed to 5% or higher. Your REIT and real estate investments just took another hit with more to come as cap rates rise further. For those of you, like me, have had a long career in real estate, we are only back at normal rates, and not even high rates. The ten has averaged around 4.5%, and much higher, for long periods before 2008. There is nothing special about where rates are today. Get used to it.
There is over $100 billion of dry powder at private equity funds waiting to buy distressed debt and foreclosed buildings. At some point the prices will reach a level where the buyers will flock in. Rents are down in some markets, but not at crisis declines. Occupancy overall is holding up in most markets. The issue is debt service and insurance and wages squeezing margins. The good news is many proposed multi development projects have been put on hold so the extreme flood of new units will not be so bad as feared. It is likely more projects will be delayed, and the multifamily industry will get through this and end up in stronger hands. It is unlikely to take down many, if any banks.
Wall St continues to live in fantasyland. They act like the world is not their concern, and they go on trading as though not much has happened. It is October, and as I have been predicting, this is the month when inflation comes back, and world events and the situation in DC spin out of control, and the market has a good chance to go back to 3600-3700 by year end if not sooner. Brent crude is closing in on $91 and headed up. That is the world price. Gasoline and diesel are headed up just as consumer savings are used up, and credit cards are getting maxed out. And the holiday season has not yet begun so it will get worse by Thanksgiving. The job market is holding fairly well, but as the UAW strike goes on things are going to get more risky. Wages will rise more than they should due to the UAW and Biden's strong support for unions, and then he will wonder why inflation is still rising. There is now a good chance the Fed goes 25 in November when the October inflation number comes in. Then add on the bizarre stupidity of the far-right Republicans, and two wars, and this is going to get a lot uglier. Yet the Street acts like it is sunshine and butterflies. One of the best bets made has been Pershing's short of Treasuries. Buckle up, this is going to be a nasty ride. Short term Treasuries is a very good place to hide now at 5.4% rates. I will take that all day until the world resettles, but that could take a few years. Do not expect any big gains in the stock market for the next few years. Jamie Dimon is saying the same as me in case you think I am off reality. "This may be the most dangerous time for the world in decades." My view, 1938 has now arrived.
We are experiencing the ultimate clash of cultures. Muslims vs Judeo Christian world. This goes back thousands of years, and has never changed. That is what really underlies this situation. Hamas and Iran have said time and again they intend to wipe out the Jews. That is no different than Hitler or Stalin, or numerous tyrants before now. Golda Meir said in 1967, we have no other place to go so we will win. It is the same today. Add on the power struggle of Communism vs capitalism and Russia China vs the west. This is why it now so dangerous. We are at the inflection point and there will be a different world by 2024. We just do not know what that will be. This is the worst possible time to have Biden Harris or Trump in the White House and why I have aligned with No Labels to try to save America. Those of you who thought I have been over negative, now see what I was talking about.
CMBS defaults remain well below the GFC data when it was 10.34%. Office is only 5.07% and hotel 5.3%. Most other products are below that. The Sunbelt continues to do OK. Smaller cities are doing fine. So far the banks are OK mostly, but it depends on their individual portfolio and quality of borrower. Things will get worse into 2024, but so far there is no crisis apparent. We will have to wait to see how things unfold. It is market by market, and bank by bank.
REITS are not doing well and will not. REIT dividends average 4.2% but carry risk vs short term Ts at 5.4%. Why risk an investment in a REIT which is going to go down further when you can buy a risk-free T and go back to sleep.
Leon Panetta, former CIA director, said on TV yesterday that he still believes the Hunter laptop is Russian disinformation, and he does not regret signing the phony letter the 51 Dem CIA directors and intel heads signed saying so. This guy ran the CIA. So now you know how screwed up DC intel services really are. It is all political. That is why Kirby said this week the US has no direct proof Iran was involved in the Hamas attack even though the WSJ and others have the direct proof . Even after this they continue to play insane political games. Kirby would probably say old Joe is in perfect health if told to say that. Anything Kirby says is garbage, and he is a disgrace to the Navy.
Some have noted spelling errors. So here is what happens. When drafted a spell check program corrects everything. Then it is transferred to Mail Chimp and it scrambles the entire memo for reasons that are impossible to discern. So then I run a new spell check and correct everything again, but it seems when MailChimp sends it out it decides it knows better what I was saying and makes some changes. Welcome to AI. So just accept the errors. I have no way to fix it.
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It Is Heartwarming That the World Loves Dead Jews So Much - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
By Dov Fischer
This war has nothing to do with revenge.
Isn’t it heartwarming that the world loves dead Jews so much? I almost feel guilty for getting that lung transplant. It pains me that I deprived so many members of Black Lives Matter — may they all be damned by G-d Almig-ty — and so many neo-Nazi white supremacists of a small moment of extra joy.
My gosh, how beautiful their eulogies are! In England, they have projected an Israeli flag image, replete with Jewish star, on 10 Downing. In France, on the Eiffel Tower. In Germany, on the Brandenburg Gate. I could go on. Projecting six-pointed stars in the blue and white. Touching.
When was the last time England exercised its veto power on the U.N. Security Council for Israel? Once in 75 years? Twice? Never? They sip Pimm’s No. 1 Cup or No. 6 and leave it for America to be the heroes, as they did in the Great War, World War II, and every war since. And what about Le France? Jamais — never. And again never. And even never again. They leave it for America to show courage while they snicker behind our backs and also leave it for us to save them — again and again. As for Germany, we Jews don’t hold our breaths for much more than that they just keep their hands off us.
In the United Nations, Israel has only one almost totally reliable ally, America. And even that was not the case when Obama was there, thanks partly to leftist Jewish votes that contributed to helping elect him twice and the likes of the snake Jack Lew who served as his “Orthodox Jewish” defender. Or as they say in politics: Obama’s human shield. And human shill.
On vote after vote in the U.N., on the most simple and obvious of opportunities to stand with Israel, the “great world powers” are gutless. The final vote tallies on some General Assembly resolutions are appalling, as one after another after another of these “great Western powers” gutlessly votes to “abstain,” leaving it to Israel and America to stand alone, backed only by — I am sorry to say — the least important of itsy-bitsy countries that no one ever knew existed until Jewish news reports started hailing them for voting with Israel. We can always count on Micronesia (name says it all), the Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea, and Togo (not the sandwich takeout chain). Often Cameroon, Uruguay, and Guatemala. Sometimes Canada, sometimes not. Australia used to be a surprisingly reliable friend, but their new leader is changing course, hopping backward like a kangaroo in heat.
I once wondered, “How will there be room for all the souls of 6,000 years of humankind to fit in the Holy Land when Moshiach (the Messiah) comes and the era of Olam Haba (the World to Come) arrives?” Well, there is part of the answer, I guess. There will be the righteous nations of the United States of America joined by the denizens of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea, and Togo. And when other nations come, embodying an image some Talmud students may recognize from the first chapter of Mesekhet (Tractate) Avodah Zarah, the Holy One Blessed Is He will hear the leaders of England and France and Germany and Japan ask of Him, “May we also enter eternal life and the World to Come?” And G-d will answer, “I abstain.”
So they love us when Jews die. The armed security guards companies send us moving cards of sympathy, with competitive pricing if we increase our temples’ and synagogues’ paid security coverage now during their seasonal Hamas Sale. Insurers of synagogue and temple property and personnel send us lovely words of comfort while reminding us to add special riders to our policies, still at popular prices. University presidents — more spineless than worn-out bound book volumes on a library shelf — wait four, five, six days to see whether the pro-Hamas Black Lives Matter, and all the Jewish apostate professors who back them, and all the “Jewish” students born of non-Jewish mothers who back Hamas, in alliance with foreign exchange students from anti-American Arab Muslim countries, will topple the campus. If the anarchists and Antifa lovers threaten campus instability, which can endanger university presidents’ jobs, then the university presidents remain silent. Their silence is broken, if at all, not when conscience or soul-searching takes place but when a few self-respecting billionaire Jewish and Christian Zionist alumni advise that they are pulling their donation pledges to fund new buildings and laboratories and professors’ lounges and students’ recreation centers. And then the university presidents finally issue their statement on the Hamas War: “As a matter of conscience, we hereby call on all sides to the conflict to stop beheading babies and raping women. #MeToo. Black Lives Matter. And stop climate change.”
Well, here is my statement to them: Drop dead all of you — Black Lives Matter, Jewish leftist apostates, anti-Zionists (a synonym for anti-Semites) of all colors and creeds and ethnicities. Just drop dead. All of you. And when you do, I will lay a wreath on your graves — to make sure you are where you belong.
My lot is with Christians who stand for decency and by Israel. And with atheists and agnostics who stand by the right of Jews not only to die but also to live. And not only in ghettoes constructed for Jews by others but in a free land where Hebrew is the spoken language, the Bible is the GPS road map, and Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are the national holidays when the highways are almost empty of traffic, where United Jerusalem is the nation’s capital and the Temple Mount overlooks the Western Wall, and where 3,500,000 Jews spend half of each day of their lives arguing with 3,500,000 other Jews over every imaginable issue — court reform, drafting those who seek to evade military service, budget priorities, matters of war and peace, the comparative quality of kosher apple strudel versus non-kosher — but all agree that they have no other country, nowhere else to go as a people. They are a single family, writ large: non-stop arguing, but warm tears and hugs before taking leave.
Which raises the last point. What exactly is the motivating thought animating Hamas on Israel’s south, Hezbollah on Israel’s north, and the Evil Palestine Authority of lifelong terrorist Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) on Israel’s east? When Arab terror against Israel began the day she was born in 1947, there were 630,000 Jews there. Jews living in Israel and in Judea-Samaria composed 39 percent of the population. Arab countries decided to crush Zionism by persecuting and expelling their own Jewish residents. Geniuses, they. Their expulsions drove 900,000 more Jews to Israel. Thus, in 1950, the Jewish population of Israel had almost doubled to 1,203,000; in 1955 to 1,590,000; and by 1960 1,911,000. Moreover, with the Soviets persecuting Jews from the minute the Bolsheviks and Communism took over, another million opted for Israel.
How’s that Jew hate doin’ for ya, Arabs?
After 75 years of Arab terror attacks, Jews now compose 69 percent of Israel’s population — including all of Judea and Samaria. There are 7.5 million Jews in Israel (including the “West Bank”) and only two million Arabs in pre-1967 Israel plus 1.4 million in Judea and Samaria (the “West Bank”). The Jewish birthrate in Israel has grown to 3.13 per household, while the Arab birthrate has dropped from 9 per family in the 1960s to 2.85 in pre-1967 Israel and 3.02 in Judea and Samaria. In other words, contrary to the myth of an Arab demographic time bomb, Jews there have more babies than Arabs do.
Instead of scaring Jews into leaving, the terrorists inspire Jews from overseas to donate wherewithal to Israel and move to Israel. More than 20 of my closest friends and colleagues have moved to Israel in the past 10 years, inspired part by religious passion, part by idealism, part by a perceived duty to respond that way to Arab terrorism, and part by Obama and what he wrought. Between my California congregants whom Newsom has been driving to DeSantis’ Florida and Abbott’s Texas, and whom Hamas has been inspiring to move to Israel…
Soon, Israel will learn the hard way which friends are rock-solid and which fair weather. As she annihilates Hamas, she will need to send in ground forces after two or three weeks bombing the smithereens out of Hamas hideouts, tunnels, and installations in Gaza. She will encounter Hamas hiding their weapons and themselves behind women and children, in hospitals, in schools, in residential buildings, and in ambulances, and this time she will wipe out Hamas. Inevitably, hundreds and maybe thousands of those who elected Hamas will be killed as collateral damage to war. Germans who bombed London every night, and the British who later bombed Germany each night, and the French who begged FDR and Churchill to save them will demand that Israel stop: “It is enough. You got your revenge. Now the numbers are disproportional.” And Democrats, whose Harry Truman atom-bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki and converted Dresden into the Town of Bedrock, will echo their overt Jew haters like Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush, and Betty McCollum: “It’s too much. You got your revenge.”
But this war has nothing to do with revenge. Revenge will not bring back the dead. This war is not even about justice, although little could be more righteous. Rather, this war is about putting murderers out of business for once and for all so that fewer Jews die pointlessly in the future. The poor nations of Europe and elsewhere will have to find somewhere else to weep and lay wreaths.
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So what's new? In many ways, we Jews have always been on our own because the world needs scapegoats. That is why Israel is so critical because it shows we are capable of taking care of our own and doing so beyond world expectations.
In my own case, my closest and dearest friends have always been decent, wonderful Christians. That is true when I was at Wharton, was in law school, lived in Atlanta, moved to the Landings.
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Universities to Jewish Students: You're on Your Own
Students for Justice in Palestine is the Cheering Squad for Genocide
By ABIGAIL SHRIER
Days after the terror group Hamas committed the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, American universities erupted—in celebration.
Stanford students waved their support for Hamas in bedsheet flags draped on campus. “The Illusion of Israel is Burning,” one said.
“Handala is returning by any means necessary,” another proclaimed—Handala being the personification of the Palestinian people.
At Harvard, 31 student groups signed a letter deeming Israel “entirely responsible” for butchery that took place over last weekend. Read that again. The day after the deadliest attacks on Jews since the Second World War—with whole families burned alive, babies mutilated, and young women raped and tortured—hundreds of students at Harvard signed a statement saying that Jews had brought this on themselves.
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At elite college campuses across the country, chapters of the Students for Justice in Palestine celebrated Hamas’s act of “resistance.” At the University of Virginia, SJP referred to the butchery—“the events of yesterday,” as they put it in an October 8th letter—“are a step towards a free Palestine.”
Then came the rallies. SJP called for students to mobilize in support of the “resistance” in Palestine. A rally invitation at the University of Washington included a remarkably explicit graphic: silhouettes of Hamas terrorists paragliding into Israel, on their way to murder Jewish civilians.
With the rare exception of the University of Florida, fortunate to be led by former United States Senator Ben Sasse, university presidents met these student loyalty pledges to Hamas and celebrations of the massacre with silence. Or with a refusal to wade into the issue. Or with gutless word salads that invariably failed to condemn the student groups, much less punish their members.
The hypocrisy of the universities’ sudden reticence when it comes to public affairs is particularly galling, considering how universities rushed to condemn the 2016 election of Donald Trump, the 2020 death of George Floyd, and, in 2022, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Student celebrants of Hamas’s terrorism are not merely espousing an unpopular view. They proclaim support for a genocidal organization.
Just last year, days after the Russian invasion, Harvard University’s then-president Lawrence Bacow declared: “Now is a time for all voices to be raised. The deplorable actions of Vladimir Putin put at risk the lives of millions of people . . . Institutions devoted to the perpetuation of democratic ideals and to the articulation for human rights have a responsibility to condemn such wanton aggression.” So that none would doubt where Harvard stood, the university raised the Ukraine flag over Harvard Yard. “Harvard University stands with the people of Ukraine,” Bacow declared.
But in the days after the Hamas massacre of 2023, when hundreds of students on her campus were celebrating this act of “resistance,” Harvard president Claudine Gay’s arm had to be twisted into even condemning the atrocities, let alone the demonstrations in support of them. To date, she still hasn’t denounced the student groups. Instead, she has apparently decided that this was a good time to remind Harvard’s Jews that the pro-Hamas radicals on campus had a right to “free expression.”
A dean at the University of South Carolina opined similarly about the massacre: “I have lots of thoughts about global affairs. I tweet or publish them as a citizen and a philosopher. But as a dean, it isn’t my job to weigh in with my students on current affairs unless they are somehow disrupting the work of the college I oversee.”
Perhaps universities should refrain from weighing in on foreign affairs entirely. Why does Harvard need to take a side between Russia and Ukraine at all? Maybe you believe that we should put an end to all the virtue signaling—the ceaseless preening on everything from the Kyle Rittenhouse trial verdict to the affirmative action case at the Supreme Court to warnings against “cultural appropriation” on Halloween. (Heaven forfend any student on campus be caught wearing a sombrero.) With regard to the universities’ sudden embrace of humility, maybe you’re thinking: better late than never.
But something different is at work here, something far more sinister than the universities’ hypocrisy. It is the menace behind it. Hamas does not distinguish between soldiers and civilians, or between Israeli Jews and other Jews. Hamas official Ali Baraka exemplified the group’s fanaticism on October 11: “The Israelis are known to love life. We, on the other hand, sacrifice ourselves. We consider our dead to be martyrs.”
That’s what the student rallies on campus cheering on Hamas are supporting: the genocide of Jews. The notion that the “martyrs” who kill Jews are heroes.
Student celebrants of Hamas’s terrorism are not merely espousing an unpopular view. They proclaim their support for a genocidal organization, repeat the talking points of a group pledged to kill all Jews, wherever it finds them.
Allowing students to rally in support of Hamas is more akin to allowing a Ku Klux Klan demonstration on campus, in the days after white supremacists had killed African Americans.
Note that this is nothing like a student rally to support Russia in its war with Ukraine; Russia does not pledge to kill Ukrainians wherever it finds them. Nor, despite the blood on its hands, has Russia ever committed atrocities against Ukrainian civilians in any way approaching what we saw on October 7.
Allowing students to rally in support of Hamas is more akin to allowing a Ku Klux Klan demonstration on campus, in the days after white supremacists had killed African Americans. What would Harvard do in that situation? It’s a ludicrous thought experiment on its face: We know precisely what Harvard would do, and how swiftly they would condemn the rallies, shut them down, punish the students involved, and rush to safeguard the lives of black students on campus.
Instead, American universities shrug while Jewish students on American campuses face students cheering for their murder. As one Jewish young woman cried to a professor, during yesterday’s University of Washington pro-Hamas rally, “How are you allowing this. They want us dead. Please.”
The professor is shown to whisper something to her while the pro-Hamas rally crescendos. You can’t hear what he says. But the statements American universities are making to Jewish students across the country could not be clearer: We will not protect you, they all but scream. You’re on your own.
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Hamas and the Immorality of the "Decolonial" Intellectuals
by Alex Joffe and Asaf Romirowsky
The National Interest
Intellectuals have a deep addiction to terror. From the French revolutionaries of the late 18th century who invoked Jean Jacques Rousseau to the physician ideologues of ISIS like Ayman al-Zawahiri, intellectuals have been at the forefront of justifying and instigating mass violence.
The latest iteration of this intellectual tradition of terror is "decolonization." The invasion of Israel and the murder of over 1300 Israelis to date have illustrated this mindset at work.
In the wake of the slaughter, Walaa Alqaisiya, a research fellow at Columbia University, wrote "Academics like to decolonize through discourse and land acknowledgments. Time to understand that Decolonization is NOT a metaphor. Decolonization means resistance of the oppressed and that includes armed struggle to LITERALLY get our lands and lives back!"
Likewise, for Uahikea Maile, Assistant Professor of Indigenous Politics in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto, "From Hawaiʻi to Palestine—occupation is a crime. A lāhui [Nation, race, tribe, people, or nationality] that stands for decolonization and de-occupation should also stand behind freedom for Palestine."
Leave aside the malleable notion of "settler colonialism," which is regularly leveled at Israel as well as Western states like the U.S. and Australia but never at Muslim, Arab, or African ones. Many pro-Palestinian intellectuals have long claimed that "resistance" may include any means and may not be criticized. For academics, who dominate wide swaths of academia, the notion of "decolonization" has been cited but with little specificity regarding the term's meaning, at least in practical terms.
Indeed, in an often cited paper, "Decolonization is Not a Metaphor," academics Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang expound at length on the "entangled triad structure of settler-native-slave," and the "the real and symbolic violence of settler colonialism."
They posit decolonization as "a distinct project from other civil and human rights-based social justice projects, is far too often subsumed into the directives of these projects, with no regard for how decolonization wants something different than those forms of justice." But they insist that "decolonization specifically requires the repatriation of Indigenous land and life. Decolonization is not a metonym for social justice." But "decolonization is not obliged to answer" what methods are involved or what the future looks like for anyone.
But now we know. Decolonization in Hamas' case looks like rape, murder, kidnapping, beheading, torture, and execution of hostages, in this case with a uniquely Islamic bent reminiscent of ISIS. Its future is simply the extermination of Israel.
Decolonization dissolves fundamental categories of combatants and civilians, it legitimizes everything, including the abuse of corpses, and demands our acquiescence in the name of "resistance" and "liberation." It renders international law meaningless except to bend it over backward as a tool of violence and terror. Decolonization is thus an explicit license for ethnic cleansing and genocide, provided it is done by, and against, the proper people. Not surprisingly, "decolonization" increasingly dominates university courses and academic discourse.
What explains this intellectual love of violence? One understated feature is the role of philosopher Frantz Fanon, whose book The Wretched of the Earth provided a justification for retributive violence that stands outside of any conventional morality. Ussama Makdisi of UCLA approvingly cites Fanon's famous quote "But every time Western values are mentioned they produce in the native a sort of stiffening or muscular lockjaw...when the native hears a speech about Western culture he pulls out his knife—or at least he makes sure it is within reach."
Makdisi goes on to claim that "the Western idea of morality has long had a Palestine-shaped hole in it. The West simply does not count Arab Palestinians as equal human beings. Which is why Palestinians turn to armed struggle in face of massive Western-funded & backed oppression. Then the West condemns them [sic]." This pretzel-shaped morality fails to account for billions of dollars in Western support for Palestinian institutions and billions more from Iran for Islamist ones. Similarly, for philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who lauded Fanon, the liberation of the "colonized" can only come about by eliminating all aspects of European life. Apparently, this now includes taboos against the rape of captives and the murder of infants.
Yet, at the heart of this matter is an intellectual psychodrama, of passive-aggressive participation by the intelligentsia in something an authentic and exhilarating revolutionary moment. Events of historical importance give otherwise humdrum lives meaning, even if no one in Cambridge or Morningside Heights has to pull the trigger themselves.
The question of whether, if given the chance, Hamas supporters including "decolonial" intellectuals, would pull the trigger, or behead fellow human beings, is pressing, especially as thousands of supporters march through the streets of Western cities cheering the bloodshed. Of course, the fact that the victims were Jews—now redefined by too many intellectuals and progressives in the Soviet-style as Nazis or fascists themselves—helps to suppress whatever tinges of compassion might remain.
How should normal people with normal morality respond to academics who advocate terror? One is to identify, repudiate, and isolate intellectuals who espouse these views, and who use the shield of academic freedom to defend their hateful views. Publicize them widely and condemn them, challenge their ideas and their immorality, and question their fitness to be accepted into society, much less their role as teachers and thinkers.
What can be done institutionally? Condemning universities and think tanks that employ bigots who salivate over murder may cause embarrassment but no change. Refusing to engage with these institutions is key. They rely on their social reputations for their very existence—reputations that should already be in tatters for countless other reasons, from exorbitant costs to nonsensical course offerings. Moral obscenities like cheering mass murder in the name of decolonization should be the final straw.
Shattering their reputations and repudiating their influence and roles in society, is key. Without it, murder will find high-sounding advocates who sway students, like those thirty student groups at Harvard who "hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence." Those students, too, should be isolated and shunned. But without addressing the intellectual foundations that support, in this case, Islamic antisemitic terrorism, academia will become irredeemable. The moral foundations of global society stand in the balance.
Alex Joffe is the Director of Strategic Initiatives of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa. Asaf Romirowsky is the Executive Director of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA) and Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME).
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Decent liberals may do more harm than pro-Hamas demonstrators
Those who decry the crimes of Hamas while opposing efforts to destroy the terrorists are a greater threat to Israel than those openly cheering for Nazi-like atrocities.
By JONATHAN S. TOBIN- JNS)
The aftermath of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel was a wake-up call for a lot of Jewish liberals. It’s not just that they, along with the rest of the world, were shocked by the depravity of the terrorist assault, which left more than 1,300 Israelis dead, thousands wounded, and approximately 150 believed to have been kidnapped and taken to Gaza. The appalling evidence of rapes and mass killings of men, women and children, including the burning and the beheading of infants is almost beyond comprehension. But for political progressives, the fact that some were cheering for Hamas was a bridge too far even for those who have always preferred to see no enemies on the left.
The existence of a pro-Hamas wing of the progressive movement is a stain on the honor of the political left that shouldn’t be ignored or downplayed. It illustrates not just the indecency of those taking this stand but demonstrates the consequences of the rise of toxic ideologies like intersectionality and critical race theory in which Jews and Israelis are mischaracterized as, by definition, white oppressors of Palestinian people of color.
Conservatives who have been pointing out that woke ideas like the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) catechism enable antisemitism already had plenty of proof to back up their conclusions. But the spectacle of pro-Hamas activism in American streets—and especially on the campuses of elite universities like Harvard and Columbia, which has led directly to threats and acts of violence against Jews—has established beyond any doubt the intersectional left’s embrace of a form of Jew-hatred that is indistinguishable from that of the Nazis.
As outraged as I am about the moral bankruptcy of these progressives, I don’t view them as the primary threat to Israel in the West. Just now, I’m far more worried about the behavior and comments of decent liberals than their more radical erstwhile allies.
By that I mean those figures who have expressed their revulsion at Hamas’s actions and denounced the support the terrorists have gotten from the progressives, but who, unlike President Joe Biden, don’t add a “full stop” to their support of Israel. The loud chorus of corporate media talking heads and pundits, both Jewish and non-Jewish, who are treating Israel’s efforts to put an end to this deadly threat as morally dubious may not be as despicable as those openly approving of the mass killing of Jews. However, it is those avatars of a “decent left” that treat the Israeli counter-offensive aimed at hopefully eliminating Hamas as also wrong who wield far more influence and do a great deal more damage to the existential struggle to defend the Jewish state than the ones who react to images of murdered Jewish babies with cries of “Free Palestine.”
These supposedly good people don’t merely virtue signal their anguish about Palestinian casualties as well as those of Israelis. Instead, they assert a degree of moral equivalence between the efforts of the Israel Defense Forces to take out terrorists and the crimes of Hamas. They denigrate advocacy for the complete defeat of Hamas as not merely futile but wrong since they claim that the taking of life on both sides should be denounced, regardless of the circumstances.
It is hard to ignore the mobs in New York’s Times Square howling for the shedding of Jewish blood. Yet it is unlikely that anyone in the Biden administration, even those mid-level staffers most hostile to Israel, is paying much attention to them. But the op-ed columnists working at The New York Times just a few blocks away—right now writing pieces urging opposition to Israel’s counter-offensive and calling for international pressure on the Jewish state that will essentially leave the murderers in place and triumphant when the shooting stops—are the real problem.
BLM and Hamas
The statements and social-media posts from the Black Lives Matter movement noting their approval of the attacks, including one in which they invoked the paragliders used to perpetrate the massacre at a Rave festival in which hundreds were slaughtered and women were raped next to the corpses of their friends, was particularly egregious. So, too, were the demonstrations held by leftist groups like the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), where Hamas was applauded, as well as gatherings around the country where Arab and Palestinian Americans took a prominent role in both identifying with Hamas and falsely labeling their bestial acts as justified “resistance” against Israeli “occupation.”
Most of the liberal Jewish establishment had endorsed the BLM movement in 2020 in the wake of the killing of George Floyd. But when Zionist Organization of America national president Mort Klein denounced BLM for its open anti-Zionism, he was denounced by many on the Jewish left as a racist for having the bad manners to tell the truth about a group that was treated as irreproachable by those desperate to stay in sync with liberal political fashion.
Still, no one on the Jewish left could be surprised that many of their allies were anti-Zionists. But the fact that they had no scruples or reticence about publicly embracing not just violence against Israel but atrocities of this sort had to hurt. After all, rather than dispute the atrocities, the Hamas perpetrators were proud of them—posting the images of their murderous spree and abuse of women on social media—and then were cheered in the streets of Gaza.
The identification with these crimes even shocked some on the left. Congressional “Squad” leader Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) felt the need to disassociate herself from what she rightly described as the “bigotry” and the “callousness” on display at the Times Square DSA pep rally for Hamas. Yet in the same statement, she asserted a moral equivalence between Israeli victims and Palestinian terrorists, and their supporters, and called for a ceasefire that would allow the Islamist group to escape punishment for its crimes.
AOC’s pivot away from open support for Hamas—a stance that separated her from her more “Squad” colleagues Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.)—proved telling. The opportunistic Ocasio-Cortez understood instinctively that the place for critics of Israel to be was not among the ranks cheering the slaughter of Jews but rather among those seeking to stop Israel from preventing future terrorist attacks.
The foreign-policy establishment had already begun to weigh in to deprecate any Israeli action that might take down Hamas as pieces by Richard Haas and Thomas Friedman indicated. They were soon joined by other Times columnists like Nicholas Kristof and Michelle Goldberg, who were careful to denounce Hamas atrocities but swiftly moved on to their real objective: establishing that Israel’s counter-attack was, in principle as well as practice, bound to be as wrong as the terrorist massacre.
The foes of moral clarity
None were more clear about this than Washington Post columnist Paul Waldman, an influential figure inside the Beltway who, like Haas, Friedman and Goldberg, is Jewish. Waldman’s piece, titled “Israeli-Palestinian conflict needs moral consistency, not moral clarity,” got to the heart of the debate that will determine whether the Biden administration will stick to its praiseworthy stance supporting Israel or abandon it in the coming days once an Israeli offensive comes under fire from those who will cite Palestinian casualties as a reason to let Hamas off the hook.
Waldman thinks the effort to draw a clear moral distinction between Hamas crimes and Israeli efforts to prevent future crimes and to punish the perpetrators is wrong. Indeed, in a gobsmackingly outrageous argument, he claims that if you see Hamas as in the wrong and Israel as being in the right, then you are no different from Hamas.
That makes sense if, like those who peddle the foreign-policy establishment’s failed ideas about the only solution to the conflict being territorial compromise, you see Palestinian efforts to destroy Israel as not that dissimilar from Israel’s unwillingness to be destroyed. What he wants is more nuance in which our grief for Palestinian civilian casualties is balanced against our tears for Israelis who have been murdered, raped or kidnapped. He believes that if one is justified, so is the other.
It’s true that we should deplore the suffering of all innocents. But the problem with this is not just his insufferable virtue-signaling. Rather, it is his unwillingness to understand that a cause that cheers the most depraved atrocities is immoral, and one that seeks to defeat and completely destroy the group and the ideology that produces those crimes is, by definition, moral, even if sometimes the pursuit of that just end, may require military action that results in the deaths of civilians.
Just as the military campaigns of the Allies against the Nazis necessitated an unfortunate toll of German civilian dead, so, too, must those of Israel to wipe out Hamas, even if its army does far more to avoid such deaths. Some historians continue to debate the morality of some of the air raids on Germany. But can anyone seriously doubt that a moral scrupulousness about violating the laws of war that allowed the Nazi regime to survive in Berlin so as to lessen the total of German civilian casualties would have been profoundly immoral?
A just war against Hamas
The evidence of Hamas beliefs that was on display during the Oct. 7 attacks—the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust—compels the observer to conclude that the Islamist group is not merely dedicated to Israel’s destruction but is, at its core, as genocidal and barbaric as the Nazis. That means that those who argue that Israel must stand down and allow Hamas to survive as the sovereign power in the Gaza Strip are advocating a stance that is not just “pro-terrorist” but immoral. In wars like these, responsibility for the deaths that occur belongs to those who pursue immoral ends, not their opponents.
The campaign to completely eliminate Hamas is—from both a legal and moral perspective—a just war. To oppose such a war in the name of a dubious “moral consistency” about abhorring civilian casualties isn’t merely specious. Those who take this position want us to think they are “decent” liberals and morally distinct from progressives who glory in Hamas crimes. But those opinion leaders who are pushing hard for the Biden administration to use its leverage to stop Israel from defeating Hamas are actually far worse than the leftists who aren’t afraid to express their antisemitism in public.
The rantings of the hard left are upsetting and create an atmosphere of hate that makes Jewish life more difficult on campuses and in cities. But the “decent” liberals who may well prove to be the lifeline that the criminals who shed Jewish blood in such great quantities this past week need may do a great deal more harm than those radicals in the long run. If they succeed in persuading Biden to back away from Israel and let Hamas win, these supposedly virtuous people who are so convinced of their goodness will have the blood of all the future victims of Islamist terrorism—both Jewish and non-Jewish—on their hands.
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Docs on slain terrorists show Hamas plan to target children
The Islamist marauders were instructed "to kill as many people as possible" in elementary schools and a youth center.
Hamas targeted elementary schools and a youth center “to kill as many people as possible” during the Oct. 7 terrorist rampage in the western Negev, documents obtained by NBC News show.
The detailed plans for the cross-border massacre, labeled “top secret” in Arabic, were found on the corpses of Hamas terrorists and shared to the U.S. media outlet by Israeli first responders.
Terrorists were also given instructions to capture hostages and take them quickly across the border to the Gaza Strip.
Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist assault claimed the lives of more than 1,300 people and left more than 3,500 wounded. More than 150 hostages were taken back to Gaza.
One page outlined a plan for the attack on Kibbutz Sa’ad calling on “Combat Unit 1” to “contain the new Da’at school” while “Combat Unit 2” was ordered to “collect hostages” and “search the Bnei Akiva youth center” and “search the old Da’at school.”
Other plans in the documents included instructions to “kill as many as possible” and to “capture hostages.”
The documents contained maps for Sa’ad and for four additional kibbutzim—Kfar Aza, Nahal Oz and Alumim.
Israeli officials said that they are analyzing all of the documents, which show that Hamas had been systemically gathering intelligence on each kibbutz that they raided with the intention to target women and children.
Other documents viewed by The Wall Street Journal showed that a Hamas hit squad that targeted Alumim was directed to “achieve the highest level of human losses” and then take captives.
“The dental office, the supermarket, the dining hall,” an Israel Defense Forces source told NBC News. “The level of specificity would cause anyone in the intelligence field’s jaw to drop.”
Another IDF official told NBC News that he had “never seen this kind of detailed planning” for a mass terrorist attack.
Another document found on a vehicle used in the coordinated massacre showed that the terrorists were instructed to murder civilians and take captives, according to a report by Israel’s Kan News.
The document was recovered at Kibbutz Re’im, near where at least 260 people were killed and an unknown number of others taken captive back to Gaza during a music festival.
Code words included “black” in Arab to slaughter all of the captives and “bus” to take the captives back to Gaza to be used as human shields. Other instructions were not coded such as plans to burn homes, cars and agricultural fields.
“Hamas’s strategy behind this attack was very clear: They were on a mission to hurt and murder as many innocent civilians as possible,” Tal Heinrich, a spokeswoman for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told the Wall Street Journal, in reference to “maps and documents found on the bodies of Hamas terrorists.”
“I saw murdered babies. I saw murdered children. I saw mothers and children murdered together,” Yossi Landau, a commander of Israeli emergency response organization ZAKA, told NBC New
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