Israel's War Against Hamas - Updates

[Sixties Fan]

“I would never wish on anyone to see what I saw,” Ziadna told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “This is trauma for my whole life. When I sit alone and recollect, I can’t help the tears.”

Joining the legion of heroes protecting Israeli, Arab lives​

Ziadna has joined an emerging pantheon of heroes who were able to carry out daring feats of rescue during a chaotic, dangerous and bloody attack in which thousands of Israelis were killed, wounded or taken captive. One of the people he saved posted about him on social media shortly afterwards.

Ziadna is “a larger-than-life man to whom we will forever be indebted,” Amit Hadar wrote in Hebrew in a post that was shared widely starting on Oct. 7. “When, with God’s help, we reach better days, save the number for the next time you need a ride — if anyone deserves it, this person does.”

Yet at the same time, Ziadna is grieving a cousin who was murdered during the attack and worrying about four other family members who remain missing. He also received a threat from someone who claimed to be affiliated with Hamas, vowing retaliation for Ziadna’s efforts to save Jews after they were recounted in a local newspaper.

Bedouin bus driver saves 30 people from the Negev rave massacre

“I would never wish on anyone to see what I saw,” Ziadna told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “This is trauma for my whole life. When I sit alone and recollect, I can’t help the tears.”

www.jpost.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

It’s very important, therefore, to acknowledge that this is itself a distorted picture of public opinion. There are millions of decent people who are horrified by what happened in Israel, who are aghast at the jubilant Jew-hatred now rampant on the streets and university campuses of Britain, America and elsewhere, and who understand that this evil that’s been unleashed threatens them too.

And there are also some individuals who are bravely and publicly telling the unambiguous truth, and confronting head-on the nauseating hypocrisy and cowardice of the so-called liberals who are dominant in political and cultural life and whose accommodation with evil has brought western civilisation to this terrifying inflexion point in its existence.

Here are some who have caught my eye over the past few days.

• This is Mohammad Kabiya, an Israeli Arab Muslim reservist in the Israel Defence Forces, telling the unvarnished truth about Hamas and Israel’s need to defend itself — while the BBC Arabic station’s anchor vainly tries to “put the other side”, ie defend Hamas, in the BBC style to which we have become accustomed.

• Finally for now, Shai Davidai, an Israeli-American Assistant Professor of Management at Columbia Business School, New York, called out university presidents by name for allowing incitement against Jews by pro-terror organisations on campus.

“To the pro-terror organisations on campus…my two year-old daughter is a legitimate target of resistance; that’s what they’re saying, you’re allowed to murder and kidnap my two year-old daughter in the name of resistance; and none of the presidents of universities all around the country are willing to take a stand”.

To watch this impassioned denunciation, click here.

We should celebrate these courageous souls, and thank them for taking such a stand for truth, civilisation and the Jewish people.



(full article online)

Courage in an age of moral degeneracy

As we reel from both evil and its facilitators, we salute those who publicly call this out

melaniephillips.substack.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

The sight of thousands of young people in London celebrating the massacres that Hamas committed in Israel unsurprisingly made many people’s blood run cold. The demonstrators rejoiced not despite the brutality of what was done but because of it.

What must the celebrants have believed to celebrate in this fashion? It was impossible that they were uninformed as to some of the details of what Hamas had done; nor did they deny the reality of these atrocities. If Hamas had merely sent rockets into Israel that destroyed some, or even many, buildings, there would not have been the same rejoicing. It was the brutality and sadism—the beheaded or burnt babies—that made the difference and was the cause of so much pleasure and joy.

A friend who has spent many years talking to Arabic-speaking supporters of the Palestinian cause in Britain (he is a professional translator) told me that he was not in the least surprised by the celebrations. The supporters had long had what might be called a genocidal imagination. Annihilation of a population, not victory over a state, was their dreamed-of solution.

There has long been a tendency in some intellectual circles to believe that the justice of a cause must be proportional to the lengths that people are willing to go to promote it. Only very desperate people, the argument goes, would do such things; therefore, since they do such things, they must be desperate.

The truth is otherwise. As one of the most efficient genocides in history—that of the Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994—proved, genocide can be fun. People in Rwanda hunted and killed their neighbors and then spent the evenings celebrating, feasting, singing, and dancing. They were happy with their day’s work and couldn’t wait to resume it. In fact, it was the time of their lives.

Intellectual support in the West for the Soviet Union was at its height when the regime was at its worst. Its atrocities were known and obvious. It was only when the Soviet Union moderated its repression and seemed to have lost the courage of its brutality that support for it in the West waned. Moscow was no longer a model for intellectuals that they deemed worthy of imitation once they had attained power. It had become grey and banal rather than vivid, exciting, and experimentally utopian.

Some years after the fall of the Argentinian junta, which was no stranger to sadistic brutality, a book was published with the title Nunca Más (Never Again), an inquiry into the number of people “disappeared” by the junta. A better title, perhaps, would have been Siempre Más, or Always Again, for the idea that mass cruelty has been banished forever from the human repertoire is as illusory as the hope that we are done with stock market bubbles.

The latest example of the attraction of mass genocidal cruelty, not merely to the perpetrators but to the hearts and minds of large numbers of people, is more than usually chilling. As ever, the barbarians are within the gates. France has just banned pro-Palestinian demonstrations on its soil, and Britain is likely to follow suit. However justified this measure may be, it is not exactly a vote of confidence in the fundamental decency of what has become a significant portion of the population.

Genocidal Imaginations

As ever, the barbarians are within the gates.

www.city-journal.org

 

[Sixties Fan]

Internationally, some of the most educated people—including students, professors, and administrators at the most elite universities in the world—have either equivocated or remained silent in the face of mass atrocities. Others, by the tens of thousands, have taken to the streets to rejoice in the terrorist attack, screaming “resistance is justified” and “glory to the martyrs.”

That is why this story matters. Because this is not just a war in a faraway land; it’s a battle for civilization itself. As my friend Sam Harris recently said, “There are not many bright lines that divide good and evil in our world, but this is one of them.”

This war should matter to everyone—not just Jews—who care about the future of civilization. Because if there is one lesson from history, it’s that what starts with the Jews never ends with them. And societies in which the Jewish people are persecuted are societies in which no one is safe.

That is why we will continue to report on this war with such urgency.

On today’s episode, you’ll hear just nine of the stories from the more than three dozen Israelis we have spoken to since the attacks on October 7. We talk to a woman, Shaked, who tells us that eleven of her family members—including her three- and eight-year-old niece and nephew—were taken hostage by Hamas. We talk to survivors of the Nova music festival, like Amit and Chen, who miraculously escaped. We talk to a father whose son, Hersh, was kidnapped from the music festival, and to a mother whose daughter, Oriya, was killed there. We talk to a grandmother who hid in the safe room of her home for hours with her 10-day-old grandson as terrorists shot at them from the other side of the door.

These stories are difficult to hear. But we will keep reporting them, and hope that you will take the time to listen them, and to share.

The Stories—and Stakes—of War in Israel

‘I didn’t think you could live much longer in that smoke, in that hellish place. And now I see it was so much worse for other people. So much worse.’

www.thefp.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

The least grateful generation

Like many who watched the Hamas attacks unfold on television, the images of burnt-alive bodies and child corpses being piled into shabby truck beds slapped me awake into a truer and more terrible reality. My good fortune borders on the hallucinatory in times like these — the fridge full of fresh…

www.washingtonexaminer.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

Gerald Steinberg, Founder of NGO Monitor, Speaks on the Human Rights Crisis in the Israel-Hamas War

During this briefing, we discussed the disparate media coverage of Israelis and Palestinian lives impacted by the violence of the Israel-Hamas War.

Let us know your thoughts in the comments and don’t forget to subscribe for more content about the global fight against antisemitism!

2) Israel will allow remaining & new intl aid mechanisms (reconstruction & beyond) to operate on the basis of detailed plans and oversight to prevent repeat of large scale terror diversion. >
— Prof Gerald M Steinberg (@GeraldNGOM) October 20, 2023

4) Gaza population will no longer be able to go back & forth to work in Israel, receive medical care (real or facade for terror), etc. Regardless of post-war Israeli political leadership, no international pressure will change this -- the Israeli public will say no. >
— Prof Gerald M Steinberg (@GeraldNGOM) October 20, 2023

6) In case #1 wasn't clear, the era of @UNRWA, @ochaopt @UNICEFpalestine in Gaza is over - they ran conduits for the terror infrastructure & indoctrination. UNRWA will still exist on paper and in NY, & maybe in Lebanon & Syria "refugee camps", but not in Gaza or West Bank.
— Prof Gerald M Steinberg (@GeraldNGOM) October 20, 2023

 

[Sixties Fan]

Part 1

Beslan. Mumbai. Paris. Manchester. New York City. Nairobi. Luxor. Sulu. Kibbutz Be’eri.

186 children murdered in a school in Beslan. Dozens of children taken hostage from a Catholic school in the Philippines. Two teachers were beheaded, but not the girls. “We do not kill women. We will just enslave them,” the Jihadists promised. 8-year-olds gunned down in the Westgate Mall in Nairobi. The terrorists asked their victims to name Mohammed’s mother to tell apart the non-Muslims from the Muslims. In Luxor, Egypt, the terrorists danced, sang and killed and mutilated the foreign tourists. They “took all the young women, the girls, and disappeared with them. I don’t know where they went with the women, but they hurt them. We could hear screams of pain.” Among the dead was Shaunnah Turner, a 5-year-old British girl.

Pregnant women and children murdered in Israel baffle the world. They seem implausible because each time they happen, we forget. A few days of horror pass and we move on.

When a Muslim terrorist set off a bomb in Manchester at a concert full of children and teens, there was shock and outrage. Nails were pulled out of children’s faces.

“This attack stands out for its appalling, sickening cowardice, deliberately targeting innocent, defenceless children and young people,” then Prime Minister Theresa May fumed.

That was 6 years ago. It might have been an eternity.

Our governments, talking heads and thought leaders find excuses for the killers. The Manchester Arena bomber was angry about the Syrian Civil War so he killed some British kids. Abu Sayyaf, ‘Bearers of the Sword’, keeps attacking Christian schools in the Philippines because it isn’t allowed to form its own state. The Jihadis who murdered children in Beslan were furious about Chechnya, in Nairobi, they were upset about Somalia, and in Luxor about the ban on the Muslim Brotherhood. In Israel, Hamas murdered children because the border wall makes their terror entity into an “open air prison” which prevents them from killing Israeli children.

We’re told not to look at the pattern. It’s Islamophobic. Instead we must take each attack not as a manifestation of Islam, but of local issues or a response to oppression. When Muslims gang raped and sawed in half a Hindu schoolteacher in Kashmir, it was about India’s treatment of Muslims. And when they rampaged through the Bataclan theater in Paris, killing everyone within reach, they were protesting France’s treatment of ISIS. And when they rape a woman at a concert in Israel by the bodies of her murdered friends, they’re protesting for Gaza.

But in 1929, Muslim mobs in the Jewish city of Safed burst into an orphanage and “smashed the children’s heads and cut off their hands.” During the Hebron Massacre that same year, a British policeman described how, “on hearing screams in a room I went up a sort of tunnel passage and saw an Arab in the act of cutting off a child’s head with a sword. He had already hit him and was having another cut, but on seeing me he tried to aim the stroke at me, but missed; he was practically on the muzzle of my rifle. I shot him low in the groin.”

Israel had not even come into existence yet. What were Muslims protesting then: Jews?

During the first siege of Vienna in 1529, when the invading Muslim horde decided that “children were cut out of their mothers’ wombs and stuck on pikes”, was that a protest against colonialism or capitalism? When a Muslim chronicle boasted that during the genocide against the Sikhs in the 18th century, “the shrieks of the women captives who were being raped, deafened the ears of the people”, was this a response to globalism or Zionism? Or was this just Islam.

Everything Hamas did during the bloody High Holy Days massacres has been done by Muslims throughout history and is still being practiced today. There is nothing new here whatsoever. Medieval barbarism never went away because Islam kept those grisly practices alive. It endures side by side with the modern world of smartphones, electric cars and AI because its worst crimes are an object of religious law and faith.

A Yazidi girl abducted by the Islamic State when she was only 12 described how the Jihadist who raped her explained to her that because she “practiced a religion other than Islam, the Quran not only gave him the right to rape her — it condoned and encouraged it”. He “bound her hands and gagged her. Then he knelt beside the bed and prostrated himself in prayer before getting on top of her. When it was over, he knelt to pray again”. The girl begged him to stop, but he “said that by raping me, he is drawing closer to Allah.”

This is Islam.

It’s not about Israel, India, Russia, America, England, France, the Philippines or any of the numerous other countries that have been marked by Islamic terrorism. It’s not about “oppression”, “colonialism”, “settlers”, “cartoons” or a lack of “integration”. None of the excuses ever hold up or explain the pattern that consistently and indelibly marks Islamic violence.

Hamas called its assault, ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’, a reference to the colonial mosque planted by Islamic conquerors in Jerusalem on top of the holiest place in Judaism, site of the former Temple. This wasn’t about “resistance”, Gaza being an “open air concentration camp” (with luxurious hotels, restaurants and mansions) or any of the excuses that the media has thrown at us.

It was a religious war. That’s why Hamas scheduled its attack on the Sabbath and on Simchat Torah, the final day of the High Holy Days and the most joyous day in Judaism. Just as the Yom Kippur War had been scheduled for the holiest day in Judaism. And the worst previous Hamas terrorist attack had been the bombing of a Passover seder in Netanya which killed 30 and wounded 140.

It’s Islam, Stupid | Frontpage Mag

It’s not about Israel, colonialism, globalism or capitalism; it’s about Islam.

www.frontpagemag.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

Part 2

In Nigeria, Boko Haram has set off bombs in churches on Christmas. In 2015, a Muslim couple opened fire at a workplace Christmas party in San Bernardino, California, while a year later a Muslim terrorist drove through a Christmas market in Berlin and a 12-year-old Muslim boy tried to detonate a nail bomb at another Christmas market in Germany.

In India, Muslim terrorists set off bombs on the Hindu festival of Diwali. Massacring Christians, Jews and Hindus on their religious holidays is not a political statement: it’s a religious one.

Islamic terrorism is not an American problem, a British problem, a French problem, a Russian problem, a Chinese problem or an Israeli problem. It’s an Islamic problem. The only way we will ever triumph against it is to stop treating it as someone else’s problem. If only India gave up Kashmir, Israel gave up more of the West Bank, if America stopped being involved in the Middle East, if France hadn’t banned the hijab and the Netherlands hadn’t allowed cartoons of Mohammed, there would be no Islamic terrorism are the kinds of lies that are killing us.

We are not responsible for Islamic terrorism. None of us. Only Islam is responsible.

Islamic violence is over 1,000 years old. It predates most modern countries and it is not caused by anything we do. The only thing we are guilty of is our failure to smash the Jihad.

Nothing that we or anyone else does will appease the terrorists. Islam is not Northern Ireland: peace negotiations have never accomplished and will never accomplish anything. It cannot be reasoned or co-existed with. Its violence is a religious duty written into its scripture and its laws, its atrocities, murder, torture, mutilation and rape, are acts of sacred religious devotion. The Islamic kingdom of heaven can only be achieved when the entire world submits to Islam.

The horrors we have seen in the Jewish communities near Gaza are the same ones that Islam has perpetrated across Africa, Asia, Europe and America. In Nigeria, Boko Haram has kidnapped over 1,000 children from Christian schools. In the Philippines, Muslims burst into a school and took children hostage. In Algeria, they beheaded Trappist monks while in Thailand, they beheaded Buddhist monks. In Boston, they blew the legs off marathon runners while in France they drove a truck through a crowd on Bastille Day until the wheel well filled up with body parts.

This is grotesque, hideous, horrific and unimaginable. This is Islam.

We look away because we can’t bear it. When the attacks happen somewhere else, we pretend that it has nothing to do with us. And when it happens to us, then we let ourselves be persuaded that if we just avoided doing anything to upset the Muslims, like allying with the peoples and countries they’re trying to exterminate, drawing cartoons or mishandling korans, we’ll be fine.

It’s not a problem of “those people fighting over there and bringing their problems here.”

Islam is not just at war with us or with them, but with the entire world. If you are not a Muslim or the right kind of Muslim, then you are in a war whether you like it or not. You can be a peace activist and march with a ‘Queers for Palestine’ banner. You can welcome in migrants or blame the whole thing on conspiracy theories, but it still won’t matter. They will kill you if they can.

This is not about politics: it’s a thousand plus year crusade to subjugate all of mankind.

To win, we have to stop blaming ourselves, stop treating Islamic terrorism as someone else’s problem and stop pretending that it goes away when it’s not in the headlines. To win, we have to stand together and stop letting the enemies of mankind and their useful idiots divide us up. To win we have to recognize that we either fight or die. If we’re not faced with that choice right now, we will be, and if not us, then our children and grandchildren will one day come up against it.

We must reject terms like “senseless violence” because there is nothing senseless about it. Our enemies know who they are and what they want. We refuse to understand who they are. The only thing truly standing between us and victory are the lies that we tell ourselves. In moments of truth, the lies temporarily fall away and we see the enemy revealed for what it is.

Through a rain of paper and ash on a September in New York City, nails driven into the faces of children in Manchester and the mutilated legs of runners in Boston, the bloodied half-naked children of Beslan and the kidnapped children of kibbutzim in Israel, we glimpse the truth.

Hold on to that truth. We are not weak, we have been weakened by lies. And the greatest of those lies is that this endless catalog of crimes to which a new one is added every few weeks is about anything but Islam. It is about Islam. It has been about Islam for over 1,000 years.

Instead of “regional dispute”, say Islam. Instead of “cycle of violence”, say Islam. Instead of militants, say Islam. Instead of terrorists, say Islam. Instead of war, say Islam.

One little word explains all of this. One little world has led to an endless world of horror.

Our only hope for victory begins with ending the lies and telling the truth.

It’s Islam, Stupid | Frontpage Mag

It’s not about Israel, colonialism, globalism or capitalism; it’s about Islam.

www.frontpagemag.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

[ Endless waste of money and not taking care of the rest of the population. Thank Qatar and other donors ]

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

[ With the education he got from birth, what else can he do? ]

 

[Sixties Fan]

[ It's Islam, Stupid ! ]

 

[Sixties Fan]

[ Let us hope UNWRA id done with in Gaza and PA. Hopefully in Lebanon, Syria, etc Free these people who are not refugees and give them dignity through a real life in the countries they live in ]

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

[ Same problem with the Million people taken by Europe and other places. How were they vetted]

 

[Coyote]

I believe one of the most important things that we, as non-Israelis and non-Palestinians, can do to promote solutions and peace is to stop using unnecessarily incendiary framing of a complex conflict with language like "open air prison", "seige", "collective punishment". Not only are they inaccurate, none of these "short-cut" phrases leaves space for holding all of the policies and actions both parties to the conflict.

I agree in what you say about incendiary language and it is far from a simple black and white situation as is often presented by each side.

BUT…I disagree that it is inaccurate, particularly in the past several decades.

It also isn’t helpful to gloss over or skirt around certain realities.

Siege: I believe the Israeli government used that term to describe what it was doing. Cutting off all access, egress, food, electricity, fuel, medical supplies and water is a siege.

Open air prison: ok, we don’t call it that, but what else is it for the civilian population within? A population that is hugely young, with almost half having little to no memory of anything else?

Collective punishment: that has to be acknowledged because it is what has been occurring for a long time. Maybe it is time to be honest about it?

Just as we have to be honest about Hamas. They are not freedom fighters, they are ISIS. They are not victims nor do they care about the Palestinian people they are using in an attempt to promote a religious war. Hamas holds 100% responsibility for forcing Israel’s current actions in Gaza. However Israel bears a large responsibility for fostering a situation that empowered them.

What other words would would describe it?

(good to see you again, you’ve always been a voice of reason imo)

 

[Sixties Fan]

I agree in what you say about incendiary language and it is far from a simple black and white situation as is often presented by each side.

BUT…I disagree that it is inaccurate, particularly in the past several decades.

It also isn’t helpful to gloss over or skirt around certain realities.

Siege: I believe the Israeli government used that term to describe what it was doing. Cutting off all access, egress, food, electricity, fuel, medical supplies and water is a siege.

Open air prison: ok, we don’t call it that, but what else is it for the civilian population within? A population that is hugely young, with almost half having little to no memory of anything else?

Collective punishment: that has to be acknowledged because it is what has been occurring for a long time. Maybe it is time to be honest about it?

Just as we have to be honest about Hamas. They are not freedom fighters, they are ISIS. They are not victims nor do they care about the Palestinian people they are using in an attempt to promote a religious war. Hamas holds 100% responsibility for forcing Israel’s current actions in Gaza. However Israel bears a large responsibility for fostering a situation that empowered them.

What other words would would describe it?

(good to see you again, you’ve always been a voice of reason imo)

Yes, NOW it is a siege. It was not before.

Gaza has its own government and there is a reason Egypt also keeps their crossing closed to the people of Gaza. Like now. Deal with the reason.

Collective punishment while Hamas and others manage to get all the material they want, all the things they need and leave the rest of the population to rot? Collective punishment from whom to whom?


Israel LEFT Gaza in 2005. Anything that has happened since is because of Hamas' choices, and to nothing Israel did. When attacked by rockets, a Nation must defend itself. When attacked by people infiltrating into your country, via tunnels, or cutting fences, you must protect your Nation.

Choose terror, one will pay the price.
And that is what Hamas and others have chosen, and Israel and Egypt have said NO very loudly.