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When terrorists hold hostages and your president is weak and feckless you do not have the upper hand. I believe, in time, Israel will lose any advantage it had because Biden is a pathetic politician who generally does the wrong thing.
If he had any guts he would immediately attack Iran. The only thing they understand and respect is strength.
I hate to say it but it will take deaths of American Military to shake this president out of his torpor.
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Israel’s 52nd Day of War
By Sherwin Pomerantz
NEWS REPORT: The Pause in the Fighting Has Been Extended for 2 More Days
As of this morning, the ceasefire has remained in effect for three days, and Hamas has freed 58 hostages: 40 Israelis, seventeen Thai nationals, and one Filipino. One of the hostages who returned yesterday, an eighty-four-year-old woman, is in critical condition and was immediately brought to an Israeli hospital for treatment.
Hamas has violated several terms of the deal it made with Israel—releasing children without their parents, refusing to allow the Red Cross to visit remaining hostages (a violation the Red Cross has not protested), and firing a rocket fifteen minutes after the ceasefire went into effect. An estimated 178 hostages remain in Gaza, ten of whom are thought to be American citizens, although there is no way to confirm how many are alive. Today is the last day of the ceasefire under its current terms, when the final group of 11 hostages is to be freed.
The release of dozens of hostages by Hamas in recent days under a fragile cease-fire deal has brought a measure of relief to all of us here who have spent the past seven weeks agonizing over the fate of the 240 people abducted from Israel. It has brought joyful reunions for families torn apart by the October 7th massacre, but the homecomings have also been mixed with anguish, as 178 of our fellow citizens remain held in captivity by Hamas. The releases have left many families separated. And with each wave of hostages released, calls to bring the rest home grow louder.
But the government faces a dilemma over how long we allow the pause in fighting to continue. The longer it goes on, the more international pressure could build on Israel for a permanent truce to prevent further civilian casualties in Gaza. Each day of the pause also gives Hamas time to strengthen its military position, potentially undermining our primary goal of eliminating the group.
Nevertheless, it seems that Qatari and Egyptian leaders are now leading talks to extend the four-day pause in fighting beyond today in an effort to secure the release of more hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners and bring further relief to the Palestinians in Gaza. The central issue to resolve, according to Egyptian officials, is providing a list of hostages Hamas would agree to release in subsequent days.
In a statement on Sunday, Hamas said that it was seeking to extend the truce beyond the four-day period if Israel makes a “serious effort” to increase the number of Palestinian terrorists released from prison. Any extension of the agreement would see 10 hostages released per day for up to another six days (10 days in total) before Israel’s military operation in Gaza resumes.
Israel Army Radio reported on Monday morning that Israel believes that Hamas is holding at least 20 more mothers, children and elderly women. According to the report, Palestinian Islamic Jihad handed over to Hamas most of the mothers, children and elderly women it was holding captive. However, Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed Bin Abdulrahman Al Thani told the Financial Times that there are more than 40 women and children in Gaza not held by Hamas and that the terror group needs time to locate them.
As anyone can see, there are many sub plots in this situation and a roadblock in any one of them can mean the end of the discussion.
Now that the war is close to the two-month mark next week, we here in Israel have settled into a somewhat surreal existence. On the one hand we carry on with our daily lives as best we can, working, meeting with people, going to cafes, etc. On the other hand, there is an entire industry of volunteer activity geared to supporting the war effort which seems to have taken on a life of its own, almost 200,000 people evacuated from their homes and living in hotels or other temporary quarters, and a bit of compassion fatigue in evidence as we speak to each other in daily conversation. But life goes on, morale remains high and people are appreciative of the break in hostilities that has stopped the daily publication of funerals for those killed in action.
One thing hopefully each of us has learned during these past 52 days, so clearly enunciated by former US President Eisenhower when he said: “This world of ours... must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.” Indeed, and may we strive for that even in the face of evil.
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.
And:
Israel’s 53rdDay of War – The 5th Day of the “Pause”
By Sherwin Pomerantz
Israel and Hamas agreed on Monday to extend by two days a cease-fire that has brought a measure of calm to the region after seven weeks of intense warfare. The two sides struck a deal to exchange more hostages and prisoners and allow more aid into Gaza.
Last night, on the final evening of the initial four-day agreement to pause hostilities, Hamas released 11 Israelis, including 3-year-old twins and their mother, and Israel provided to Hamas a list of 33 Palestinian prisoners it planned to set free later Monday night, keeping to the three-to-one ratio as previously agreed.
The deal came after an Israeli offer to continue the cease-fire by one day for every additional 10 hostages released, who would be exchanged for 30 Palestinians currently in Israeli prisons.
Israeli officials have expressed concerns to Qatari mediators that some children were being released without mothers who were also being held captive, running counter to the agreement, according to an official briefed on the talks. The official said Hamas has said that in those cases, the mothers are being held by different groups, and it would take time to get them. Late Monday, Israel’s Army Radio, citing the prime minister’s office, reported that the government had received a list of hostages held by Hamas who are expected to be released today.
The number of women and children still being held in Gaza is unclear. The cease-fire deal initially included the release of 50 women and children because that was the number Hamas had been able to locate, the prime minister of Qatar, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani, told The Financial Times in an interview published on Sunday. More than 40 women and children were being held hostage by groups other than Hamas, Mr. al-Thani said, adding that Israel was willing to extend the cease-fire if “there’s proof” that Hamas has more women and children to release.
While there is a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, the Lebanese border continues to see exchanges of fire between Hizballah and Israel. While there have been no Israeli casualties over the last few days, the situation there remains tense. There are also continued raids by Israel on locations in the West Bank as Israel identifies the location of Palestinian terrorists and goes after them.
Worldwide support for the Palestinian cause and even sometimes praise for Hamas is part and parcel of demonstrations against Israel, the country that suffered the worst one day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. While the demonstrations ostensibly claim that they are intended to voice objection to the bombing of Gaza by Israel, the fact is the demonstrations began in earnest even before Israel dropped the first bomb on Gaza after the October 7th attack. Even worse, the size of the demonstrations, their professional organization, and the paraphernalia which seemed to have emerged from nowhere, makes a good case for those who believe that the organizers knew what Hamas was planning and had demonstrators lined up for this purpose well before the events of the 7th.
The worldwide condemnation of Israel which these demonstrations encourage is testimony to the deterioration of the world’s moral compass. In the face of overwhelming proof that Hamas cares so little about its own people that it is willing to stand by and watch them killed in the name of Jihad, the world still points to Israel as the cause of the war. The oppressed have become the oppressors in the cruelest twist of logic that one can imagine. Those who stand idly by and allow this to happen are, themselves, part of the problem.
We need to remind ourselves of the words of Elie Wiesel, when he said: “We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” Remaining neutral is not an option.
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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How to Kill a Palestinian State
By Bret Stephens
Do the people chanting “Free Palestine” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” have any idea of the irreparable harm they’re doing to any hope of Palestinian sovereignty?
For decades, the question of a Palestinian state has come down to two dates: 1948 and 1967. Most Western supporters of Palestinian statehood have argued that the key date is the Six-Day War of June 1967, when Israel, faced with open threats of annihilation, took possession of the Golan Heights, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula.
According to this line of thinking, the way to peace rested on Arab diplomatic recognition of Israel in exchange for the return of these so-called occupied territories. That’s what happened between Egypt and Israel at Camp David in 1978, and what might have happened at Camp David in 2000 if Yasir Arafat had only accepted the offer of full statehood made to him by Prime Minister Ehud Barak of Israel.
Yet there has always been a second narrative, which dates “the occupation” not to 1967 but to 1948, when Israel came into being as a sovereign state. By this argument, it isn’t just East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Golan Heights that are occupied by Israel: It’s Haifa, Tel Aviv, Eilat and West Jerusalem, too. For Palestine to be “liberated,” Israel itself must end.
Starting in the 1970s, the 1948ers were known as the rejectionist front. More recently, they have become the axis of resistance. Membership includes Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Assad regime in Syria and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps — a who’s who of designated terrorist groups and their state sponsors.
On Oct. 7, the axis of resistance became the face of the Palestinian movement. On Oct. 8, demonstrators around the world chose to embrace that axis. Sometimes they did so unwittingly, believing there was no contradiction between being pro-Palestinian and supporting Israel’s right to exist, or not understanding the implications of the slogans they were chanting.
But just as often they have done so wittingly. When Mohamed Khairullah, the mayor of Prospect Park, N.J., said “75 years of occupation is too long” at an October rally, he was embracing the 1948 narrative. When Rashida Tlaib, the Michigan congresswoman, posted that “75 years later, the Nakba continues to this day” and declined to accept Israel as a Jewish state, she was embracing it. When Judith Butler, the Berkeley professor, told an interviewer that “the roots of the problem are in a state formation that depended on expulsions and land theft to establish its own ‘legitimacy’” and supported a binational state, she was embracing it. When the Los Angeles chapter of Black Lives Matter responded to the Oct. 7 massacres with a Facebook post claiming, “When a people have been subject to decades of apartheid and unimaginable violence, their resistance must not be condemned, but understood as a desperate act of self-defense,” it was embracing it. When the BBC Arabic service repeatedly described ordinary Israelis as “settlers,” it was embracing it.
Such embraces have consequences.
For one, they put a growing fraction of the progressive left objectively on the side of some of the worst people on earth — and in radical contradiction with their professed values.
“A left that, rightly, demands absolute condemnation of white-nationalist supremacy refuses to disassociate itself from Islamist supremacy,” Susie Linfield, a professor of journalism at N.Y.U., wrote in an important recent essay in the online journal Quillette. “A left that lauds intersectionality hasn’t noticed that Hamas’s axis of support consists of Iran, famous most recently for killing hundreds of protesters demanding women’s freedom.”
For another, they reinforce the central convictions and deepest fears of the Israeli right: that Palestinians have never reconciled themselves to the existence of Israel in any borders, that every Israeli territorial or diplomatic concession is seen by Palestinians as evidence of weakness, that a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank would only serve as a launchpad for an intensified assault on Israel, that every criticism of Israeli policies in the occupied territories veils a deep-seated hatred of the Jewish state.
When the left embraces the zero-sum politics of Palestinian resistance, it merely encourages the zero-sum politics of hard-core Israeli settlers and their supporters.
A third consequence is that it abandons the Palestinian people to their worst leaders. It’s bad enough that the West has long accepted, and funded, Mahmoud Abbas’s repressive kleptocracy based in Ramallah. But what Hamas has given the people over whom it rules is infinitely worse: theocratic despotism, soaked in the blood of Palestinian “martyrs,” most of whom never signed themselves or their families up to serve as human shields in an endless — and, in the long run, hopeless — battle with Israel.
It’s fine for Israel’s harshest critics to ask hard questions of Israel’s leaders. But when those same critics stop asking equally hard questions of Palestinian leaders, they are not advocating a cause. They are merely submitting to a regime.
The world, including Israel, has a common interest in an eventual Palestinian state that cares more about building itself up than tearing its neighbors down; that invests its energy in future prosperity, not past glory; that accepts compromise and rejects fanaticism. Since Oct. 7, the loudest professed champions of the Palestinian cause have advocated the precise opposite. It may be a recipe for smug self-satisfaction, but it’s also how to kill a Palestinian state.
And:
WOW: First American Released By Hamas Is Connected To Hunter Biden - Patriot Alerts
Finally:
Those terrorist Catholics.
Catholic Family Dragged Out of Home at Gunpoint, Locked in Van After FBI ‘Goaded’ Teen to Post Offensive Memes, Dad Says › American Greatness
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Terrorists ‘Violate’ Temporary Ceasefire In Gaza As Israeli Forces Come Under Attack: IDF
By Ryan Saavedra
SOUTHERN ISRAEL - NOVEMBER 20: Israeli infantry soldiers take part in a live firing tactical advance exercise near the border in readiness for possible deployment across the border into Gaza on November 20, 2023 in Southern Israel. More than a month after Hamas's Oct. 7 attacks, the country's military has continued its sustained bombardment of the Gaza Strip and launched a ground invasion to vanquish the militant group that governs the Palestinian territory.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said on Tuesday that terrorists have violated the temporary ceasefire in Gaza after its forces came under attack in multiple locations.
“Over the last hour, 3 explosive devices were detonated adjacent to IDF troops in 2 different locations in northern Gaza, violating the framework of the operational pause,” the IDF said in a statement. “In one of the locations, terrorists also opened fire at the troops, who responded with fire.”
“A number of soldiers were lightly injured during the incidents,” the statement added. “IDF troops were located in positions as per the framework of the operational pause.”
The Jerusalem Post said that the IDF was still assessing if the attack was a signal from Hamas that they wanted to end the temporary ceasefire — which Hamas claimed was not the case — or if the attack was a test to see what they could could get away with or if it was a mistake by low-ranking terrorists.
IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi said that the IDF was ready to resume combat operations against Hamas terrorists inside Gaza immediately.
“The IDF is ready today to continue fighting,” he said. “We are using the days of respite as part of the [hostage release] outline for learning, strengthening readiness, and approving the operational plans for the continuation.”
“We are preparing to continue fighting to dismantle Hamas,” he added. “It will take time, these are complex goals, but none of there is nothing more just.”
This report has been updated to include additional information.
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Whatever Muslims touch, wherever Muslims go they "muck" things up.
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+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++So it is Tik Tock. It beats CNN. It beats WAPO and the NYT's. It beats most of America's mass media.
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It is easy for me to say what I am sick and tired of hearing because I am a citizen of a country that, until recently, was welcoming. However, because of a weak president who is manipulated by a former Muslim president, who declared he wanted to transform this great nation and has his administration holdovers still buried in the caverns of our government, I hear things that sicken me like:a) Israel has to be more protective of those who want to kill them.
b) From the river to the sea.
c) A former president called Israel an apartheid nation but offered no valid proof because there was none.
d) America's Mass Media and The U.N lie about this tiny nation in order to appease human animal terrorists who are radical Islamists.
e) Who feed their children a mixture of hatred and lies.
f) Cease fire so you can be killed by Hamas.
g) A current president who is corrupt and not trustworthy and I could go on and on. But I would rather let/prefer to let Sen. Kennedy speak.
Clinic for depraved nitwits:
And:
These are the type of politicians who have interfered in wars we have lost every time over the last 80 years. They never learn weak knees invite more wars.
Democrats Want ‘Conditions’ on Israel
Senators are telling the Jewish state how it must fight against Hamas.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D., Conn.), chairman of the Foreign Relations subcommittee on the Middle East, made positive noises about the idea Sunday. “We regularly condition our aid to allies based upon compliance with U.S. law and international law,” he said, adding, “I think that you can defeat Hamas without this level of civilian casualty,” which he calls “unacceptable.”
Asked on Friday, President Biden said conditioning aid is “a worthwhile thought,” but “I don’t think if I started off with that, we’d ever gotten to where we are today. We have to take this a piece at a time.” Asked twice to clarify, national security adviser Jake Sullivan wouldn’t rule out the idea.
Not for the first time, Democrats are following Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.), who called for the condition on Thursday. “We cannot be complicit in actions that violate international law,” he wrote. “That includes an end to indiscriminate bombing.” Mr. Sanders is responding to the increasingly loud street protests against Israel by the Democratic left.
This is an example of how the proposal to condition aid is linked to the libels against Israel that one hears whenever it defends itself. Israel’s counteroffensive has been the opposite of indiscriminate. Forced by Hamas to fight in a densely populated urban area, Israel has hit more than 15,000 targets. If those had been indiscriminate strikes, the death toll would be many times higher than even Hamas claims.
Hamas has attacked Israel indiscriminately every day of the war, beginning with the Oct. 7 massacre. Each of the terrorist group’s more than 10,000 rocket attacks has been a war crime, firing on Israeli cities without care for who or what gets hit.
Mr. Biden doesn’t need to condition aid to influence Israel. He persuaded Israel to delay and moderate its ground invasion, decline to escalate with Hezbollah, use a smaller force in north Gaza, allow more aid and pause some operations. He encouraged Israel to delay again before turning to south Gaza and helped shape the hostage deal and pause in the fighting.
This heavy involvement—some would say micromanagement—has been geared largely toward ends other than Israeli victory. But imposing this new condition on U.S. aid would be different. Amid a campaign of vilification of Israel on precisely this issue of international law, it would constitute a threat.
U.S. aid to Israel isn’t sacrosanct, and many on the Israeli right have long argued that peacetime aid—mostly credits with U.S. arms manufacturers—fosters unhealthy dependence. But this push from the left, in wartime, has nothing to do with the flaws of foreign aid.
The purpose is to warn Israel that it will risk losing U.S. support if it tries to complete its mission of toppling Hamas; and that Hamas-induced civilian casualties mean Israel can’t destroy Hamas’s terrorist capabilities. Is that the emerging position of the Democratic Party?
Our guess is that Americans reject that view, and that if these questions were put to a vote, so would most U.S. lawmakers. That would be a message worth sending to Israel’s enemies. Republicans, why not help Israel by putting Democrats to the test?
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Finally:
At some point, Bibi and his government will be forced to chose between save hostages versus save an entire nation.
A horrible circumstance but inevitable. Whichever he chooses he/they cannot win. Hamas are clever and care not a whit about civil proprieties.
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If This Pause in the Conflict in Gaza Is Allowed To Turn Into a Durable Ceasefire, It Would Be a Decisive Defeat for Israel
The war is a Manichaean conflict and a proxy war between America and Iran in which no political waffling can be allowed to confuse the issues.
If Israel, as its leaders and President Biden pledge will not be the case, allows this pause in the conflict to turn into a durable cease-fire in which completely innocent Israeli civilians, many of them children, women, and elderly people, have been seized and removed as hostages are gradually returned in exchange for a much higher number of legitimately convicted Palestinian terrorists, and the conflict effectively ends here, it will be a decisive defeat for Israel.
There is no equivalence whatsoever between the seizure and removal of citizens in the midst of a slaughter of the innocents in breach of an agreed cease-fire, and the apprehension and conviction of terrorists. The atrocities of October 7 committed by Hamas after invading Israel were, by virtue of their horrifying proportions, an opportunity for Israel to do what it has stated through all the spokesman of an instantly formed national unity government it will do: completely destroy Hamas as a military force.
Iran and Hezbollah have already acknowledged that they will not intervene on a significant scale in this war. The other Arab powers, despite the customary lip service they give the Palestinian cause, detest terrorism as much as Israel does. Terrorists assassinated President Sadat of Egypt in 1981 and the grandfather of the present King Abdullah of Jordan in 1951 and have torn Iraq, Syria, and Yemen to pieces.
From the rise of the pan-Arab nationalist leader Gamal Abdul Nasser to the presidency of Egypt in 1953, and the murder of the Iraqi royal family in 1958 until relatively recently, the Palestinian cause was a splendid fraud to gull uninformed and historically ignorant people in order to accuse Israel of being a Western-imposed usurpation of Arab territory.
As long as Turkey was impotently knocking on the door of Europe and Iran was either a firm Western ally under the Shah or an aberrant theocracy fighting off the aggressions of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, raising this sob-story about the deprived Palestinians who have never been a defined people or a functioning jurisdiction of their own, was a useful distraction of the Arab masses from the misgovernment that almost all of them suffered. (The Palestinians are a tragic and castaway group, who have been moved about as pawns, and still are, by Iran, but their claims to all of Israel “from the river to the sea” are moonshine.)
Once the inspired statesmanship of President Carter helped push the Shah out of power and bring in the mad and belligerent ayatollahs, followed by the brain waves of President George W. Bush which removed Hussein as any kind of check on the Iranians, and as a bonus produced the election of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, and the Turks grew tired of being rejected by the Europeans and began encroaching on the Arabs as the Iranians did the same, the Arabs became fearful of their ancient Turkish and Persian enemies (and oppressors).
They were encouraged and abetted by the Russians and the Chinese in this mischief, and the Arab powers lost interest in antagonizing Israel and promoting the self-serving melodrama of an illicit Jewish occupation of Israel. There seems to be general agreement that the October 7 outrages were provoked by a desperate ambition of Iran to ward off a peace agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Whatever may happen with the hostages, the strategic realities and moral imperatives of the contemporary Middle East require that this opportunity to extirpate Hamas as a military and terrorist force which Israel has every justification to do, not be squandered. Again, it is difficult to be confident, much less certain, of exactly what the Biden administration is telling the Israeli government. There seems, though, no doubt that it is strongly encouraging this pause.
There is now solid bipartisan support in the Congress and professed solidarity in the administration for a large military aid package for Israel and all polls indicate solid American public support for this action also. It is outrageous to see mobs in front of the White House smearing red paint on the gate posts and holding up banners accusing the president of genocide. The idea that any such allegation could be made against Israel or anyone who supports Israel of all countries, is incomparably scandalous given the horrifying genocidal assault upon European Jews within living memory. And whatever criticism may be leveled against Mr. Biden, it does not include ambivalence about genocide in any circumstances.
The Biden administration’s problem stems from 2020, when the Democrats, in their desperation to defeat President Trump, gave aid and comfort to the domestic forces of anti-American and antisemitic and broadly anti-white nihilistic lawlessness. It has nurtured a viper, which is now biting it. The Biden reelection effort is disintegrating and the administration is trying to respond effectively to the bipartisan majority of Americans that wishes to support Israel without completely alienating the far left whose presence was practically ignored and whose summer-long riots in 2020 were variously dismissed as “peaceful protests” and evidence of the chaos generated by Mr. Trump.
What is likely to happen is that the powers that be in the Democratic Party will persuade the president that it is time for him to announce that he will not seek reelection. They can primary the vice president out of the succession race. Yet if they think that Governor Newsom of California or any other visible and plausible Democratic presidential candidate is going to have an easy time standing for the reelection of the party that has given America the quavering Biden leadership standing on the socialist Sanders platform, then they are delusional.
There is no other evident way of emancipating the Democratic Party from the taint of the extreme and anti-American left and regaining any support from the Trump Republicans. It is conceivable that if Mr. Biden withdraws some combination of Mr. Trump’s legal travails and a general sentiment that a change is called for in both parties it could give Nikki Haley a chance to be the Republican nominee.
This is a longshot and in any case has almost nothing to do with the current crisis in Gaza. The only foreign power whose support Israel needs is America, and the only circumstances in which the Israeli government could be dissuaded from carrying out its promise to deal Hamas a mortal blow as a terrorist organization are if Israel were deserted by the United States.
The atrocities of October 7 committed by Hamas produced a double watershed: in order for peace to be possible that force which has made it clear it will never accept Israel as a Jewish state has to be eradicated. In order for Israel to conduct such an operation from which the Arab powers will also benefit, America must maintain its support and that support must not be conditionalized in the slightest degree by the woke, self-hating cancer within the Democratic Party.
This is a Manichaean conflict between legitimate good and stark evil and to a significant degree a proxy war between the United States and Iran. No political waffling must be allowed to confuse the issues or muddy the waters.
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Bari Weiss asks:
Is there a single major feminist or women’s rights organization that has unequivocally condemned these horrors?
Is there a single major feminist or women’s rights organization that has unequivocally condemned these horrors?
And:
What Were the Hamas Monsters Thinking? Victor Davis Hanson
Posted By Ruth King
https://victorhanson.com/what-were-the-hamas-monsters-thinking/
We know the multifaceted strategy of the monstrous Hamas operation of October 7.
In pre-civilizational fashion it wished to kill and mutilate the most vulnerable of all Israeli civilians and thus to shock the world that it was capable of—and proud about— anything, from decapitation to necrophilia. Such animalistic savagery, in the reckoning of Western therapeutic society, was supposedly to be seen as forced upon Hamas murderers by the “occupation.”
The killers felt they would shock the Israelis into concessions given their eagerness to commit the unspeakable. They took captives for tripartite reasons: to barter children and the elderly for their kindred terrorist murderers in Israeli jails; to use captives to force the Israelis to grant cease-fires and pauses in their retaliation; and to bank them as shields to protect Hamas kingpins from retaliation.
Hamas invaded during a holiday in the early hours, in a time of peace, and on the iconic 50th-annivesary of the Yom Kippur surprise Arab attack. Their aim was to prove that Israeli soil was for the first time porous and 2,000 killers could enter sacred Israeli ground with impunity and kill in one day more Jews civilians than at any day since the Holocaust.
The terrorists shot thousands of rockets into Israel to overwhelm Iron Dome and terrify the entire civilian population.
All these tactics was aimed at long-term strategic goals: stop the Abraham Accords; obey the directives of Hamas’s Iranian terrorist masters as payment for their arms; discredit the radical Palestine Authority and Arab moderate nations as anemic in their opposition to the supposedly shared hated Zionist entity; and prompt an Israeli response that by necessity would involve collateral damage to human shields, and schools, mosques, and hospitals atop subterranean Hamas headquarters.
Yet if we know their despicable methods, aims, and strategies, why did they think the civilized world would support their barbarity or at least excuse it?
One, Hamas assumed anti-Semitism was prevalent throughout the West and was canonical in the Middle East. Palestinian authorities count on the fact that being an enemy of the Jews of Israel wins them empathy of the world and creating their own unique rules of passive-aggressive victimhood.
So Palestinians demand to be the only “refugees” in the world—not Greek Cypriots, Eastern European Germans, and Prussians, Kurds, Armenians, and certainly not a million Jews cleansed from the Arab Middle East.
Israelis are to be “settlers,” not millions of Middle Easterners who surge and settle into the West, form resistance communities, sneer at integration and assimilation, and use Western liberality to protect and project their own illiberality.
Second, Hamas relies on useful Western idiots. It understands its terrorists repel the majority of Americans. But it figures Western and globalist institutions—academia, the media, popular culture—in their wealth, ignorance, and self-importance, alleviate guilt and find resonance by mouthing the shibboleths of the “underdog.”
In particular, Hamas understands that the Palestinian cause has fused with the leftwing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion industry. Thus Hamas becomes the Middle-East counterpart to BLM, aggrieved minorities, and, more preposterously, the trans/gay/feminist movement. Meanwhile, Israelis are recalibrated as the demonized Western “colonialist” white supremacists.
Third, the Islamic expatriate populations of Europe and the U.S. have soared. In the strange logic of the Middle Easterner in the West—on a green card, or a student visa, or either as an illegal alien or a first-generation immigrant—he will envision the magnanimity of Americans and Europeans who offered him refuge from the violence, hatred, tyranny, racism, sexism, terrorism, and violence of his homeland all too often as weakness to be manipulated, not as generosity to be appreciated much less reciprocated.
Middle Eastern expatriates brag of their growing numbers and the political clout that Islam accrues in liberal democracies, without a clue of their hypocrisy of supporting illiberal tyrannies whose violence drove them out to the West in the first place.
So, we watch Middle Easterners in the U.S. trying to ruin iconic events such as crashing “Black Friday” shopping, disrupting the New York Thanksgiving parade, or tearing down American flags on Veterans’ Day.
Only in America would the Iranian terrorist theocracy’s ex-ambassador to the UN, Mohammad Jafar Mahallati, be accorded a professorship at Oberlin or a former top diplomat for the Iranian regime Seyed Hossein Mousavian land a coveted billet at Princeton.
From such perches these expatriates are free to promote pro-Hamas, Iranian, anti-Semitic—and Anti-American—agendas. They consider their hosts not so much tolerant as stupid, in the sense that any American expatriate in Iran who whispered criticism of the theocratic regime would either be hanged or used as a barter hostage. Why would those whose careers were devoted to demonizing and harming the United States from their coveted billets in Iran even wish to move to the Great Satan, while keeping warm relations with their theocratic kingpins in Tehran?
Four, behind all these considerations, is the reality of terrorism and the fear it instills in the West, given the 21st century history of Middle Easterners slaughtering thousands of Americans and Europeans. In crude terms, Hamas and its terrorist affiliates signal us, “damn Israel or be prepared for another 9/11.”
Five, Hamas is a death cult, an updated terrorist version of the more organized SS—with the qualifier it broadcasts rather than hides its savagery.
Radical Palestinians brag that they love death more than Israel loves life. So they count on Israel giving up three convicted terrorists for one elderly or young captive, on targeting civilians with rockets while Israelis drops leaflets warning of their bombing attacks, on coercing human shields that they assume Israel will avoid, on sanctioning raping, mutilating, and beheading in a way Israel would never conceive of reciprocating in kind, and on and on.
So will all these tactical and strategic methods work? For all the UN, media, and globalist support for Hamas, still perhaps not.
October 7 was a declaration by Hamas that all barbarity imaginable was now fair game. Yet its sheer evil has unleashed the IDF that perhaps not even Joe Biden, hostages, and “world opinion” can permanently stop.
For all the boasts about loving death, it was Hamas who cowardly murdered the unarmed, scampered back to the safety of their tunnels, and used their own kindred Gazans to shield them from death—delivered to them by supposed nerds who love life too much.
Europeans also have had it with unlimited immigration from the Middle East. Restrictionist politicians throughout Europe are ascending as never before, in Greece, Ireland, Italy, Germany, Holland, Spain, and Sweden.
They all reflect growing public anger that Europeans are hated by the very people who seek them out and wish to destroy their Enlightenment institutions by manipulating and discrediting them. The thousands who hit the streets to cheer on October 7 and damn their hosts only confirm a growing global consensus—in the West, Latin America, Asia, and even throughout the Middle East—that admitting migrants from Palestine or Gaza, or their supporters, is a veritable death wish.
Pro-Hamas protestors calling Joe Biden “Genocide Joe” and boasting about the Arab or Muslim vote in Michigan is incoherent. Not only do harassing Thanksgiving shoppers and parades, disrupting iconic American holidays and events, swarming highways and bridges, and preying on Jews alienate Americans. But also taking credit for ensuring Biden’s defeat will only distance the Democratic establishment, such as it is, from its embarrassing, loud, but ultimately relatively impotent Islamic constituency.
Shouting for mass death “From the River to the Sea” does not endear the pro-Hamas crowd to half of their fellow Democrats, much less unabashedly strutting their anti-Semitism. The current overt support for Hamas, in other words, has revealed to the nation the bankruptcy of the entire pro-Hamas/DEI base of the Democratic Party and will do much to ensure a conservative president in 2024.
And that president will likely deport anyone on a green card or student visa promoting Hamas terrorism, or violating U.S. law, while ensuring a travel ban from terrorist supporting regimes in the Middle East. Such measures will win overwhelming public support, despite media and academic outrage.
Strategically, Iran, Hamas, and the Palestinians may seem to have flummoxed Israel into endless concessions by metering out hostages for serial pauses. But again, no Israel government can retain power by allowing the mass murdering Hamas to survive and so it will not.
Despite all the blood-curdling rhetoric of Hezbollah and Iran, neither will attack Israel or U.S. assets in force, given no American president could afford not to retaliate disproportionately. And “disproportionately” would mean rendering Iran’s military and Hezbollah to something akin to the current status of Hamas.
So for now, Hamas and its American-residing apologists are full of themselves and feel they are leveraging and manipulating the West. But such haughtiness may be a delusion. Hamas in the Middle East and its enablers in Europe and America have done more to harm the Palestinian cause and the idea of Middle Eastern immigration to the West than at any time since 9/11.
It is hard to anger Westerners, but continue the death chants, the violent demonstrations, the creepy anti-Semitism, and the proud support for the Hamas bloodwork of October 7, and they will be surprised at the growing anger of otherwise postmodern Europeans and distracted Americans.
Just as Israel realizes that there is no living with Hamas killers, so the West is learning that it can no longer sustain universities that despise the culture that nourishes it or Middle Eastern immigrants, visiting students, and residents that use the gift of freedom and tolerance to promote their abhorrent anti-Semitism, violence, intolerance—and, yes, hatred of their generous hosts.
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The Real Reason Iran Hates Israel - WSJ
The founder of the revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, set the standard for the Islamic Republic of Iran. In his book “Islamic Government,” he wrote, “From the very beginning, the historical movement of Islam had to contend with the Jews, for it was they who first established anti-Islamic propaganda and engaged in various stratagems, and as you can see, this activity continues down to the present.” He depicted Jews as distorters of the Quran, financial hoarders, and agents of the West.
Khomeini’s anti-Semitic themes were picked up by his two most important disciples, former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the “pragmatic” cleric par excellence, and the current supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. Rafsanjani published a book, “Israel and Beloved Jerusalem,” claiming that resistance to the Jewish state was the sacred duty of “every Muslim and anyone who believes in God.” Judaism for Rafsanjani was irretrievably “immersed in colonialism” and “Zionism is the essential partner of global arrogance [America].” Messrs. Rafsanjani and Khamenei green-lighted the bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1994, which left 85 dead and 300 wounded.
Holocaust denial is a natural consequence of this mentality. Mr. Khamenei has been the regime’s most imaginative inventor of such odious tales. “There are documents showing close collaboration of the Zionists with Nazi Germany, and exaggerated numbers relating to the Jewish Holocaust were fabricated to solicit the sympathy of world public opinion, to lay the ground for the occupation of Palestine, and to justify the atrocities of the Zionists,” Mr. Khamenei said in a 2001 speech, Iran’s state television reported. He has even turned Holocaust denial into a free-speech issue, saying in a 2002 address: “All politicians, all reporters, all intellectuals, all officials, all experts in the West should bow their heads to commemorate the gas chambers. That is, they should all endorse a tale the authenticity of which is not clear.”
For four decades, the Islamic Republic has created a propaganda machine of hate. Iranian state agencies have routinely published an infamous booklet—“The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”—and other anti-Semitic tracts. The Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting airs anti-Semitic documentaries and TV series. Regime leaders, including Mr. Khamenei, have met routinely with Western Holocaust deniers at state-sanctioned conferences in Tehran. The International Holocaust Cartoon Contest, which Mr. Khamenei began in 2006, awards a prize to anti-Semitic art.
Iran’s position on the Middle East peace process has always been more extreme than that of most anti-Zionist Arab states. Iran has nurtured and armed rejectionist groups, such as Hamas, Palestine Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah. The clerical regime has repeatedly sent Hezbollah abroad to attack non-Israeli Jews.
Mr. Khamenei, who often speaks of Israel as a cancerous tumor on Islam’s body politic that must be excised, has insisted, referring to the Oct. 7 attack, that “the Zionist regime has suffered an irreparable defeat both in terms of military and intelligence. Everyone admitted the defeat but I emphasize irreparability.” Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator Ali Bagheri Kani added, “If the war expands we cannot say that Israel would lose, because nothing will remain of Israel to be described as loser or winner.”
Iran’s continuous assault on the Jewish state aims to demoralize its people, batter its armed forces’ reputation, divide its politics, and, most important, provoke an exodus of its best and brightest.
Western statesmen and journalists have often seen the Iranian theocracy’s anti-Semitism as anti-Zionism, something turned on and off for Arab audiences by more sophisticated Persians. Many have consistently tried to isolate the regime’s anti-Semitism to a group of Iranian “hardliners”—even though these same men have always held power. Obviously it is easier for Barack Obama and Joe Biden to envision their nuclear diplomacy with Tehran as stabilizing and possibly transformative when Iran’s rulers aren’t seen as diehard, lethal anti-Semites. Imagine, however, if the Islamic Republic’s anti-Semitism were transmuted into a murderous creed targeting non-Jewish Americans? Would these presidents have been so keen to give billions in sanctions relief and seek a new modus vivendi with the U.S.?
Western policy toward Iran’s theocracy should see the regime as Mr. Khamenei does. Anti-Semitism isn’t adventitious, a passion that can be compartmentalized as pragmatism requires. Iranian expansionism—its support to radical militias throughout the Middle East—is impossible to understand properly without seeing the world as Iranian leaders do. They believe they are fighting a Jewish conspiracy that controls the West and intends to humble Muslims everywhere. Hamas’s war against Israel is part of that struggle.
Mr. Gerecht, a former Iranian-targets officer in the Central Intelligence Agency, is a resident scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Mr. Takeyh is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
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