“MAY“?!
Category: moslems & jihadis
Squad of female IDF combat troops eliminated nearly 100 Hamas terrorists.
Only a few have had the chance to witness the extraordinary actions of the Caracal Battalion during their battle against Hamas terrorists.
Lt.-Col. Or Ben-Yehuda, the commander of this unit, now recounts her experiences in the southern Gaza Strip, where her battalion eliminated approximately 100 terrorists. She also has a clear message for those who question the capabilities of female fighters in the Caracal (Desert Lynx) and Tank Battalion.
As the assault on the Gaza border area began, Ben-Yehuda swiftly moved from the battalion headquarters in Nahal Raviv to a post on the Egyptian border with armored personnel carriers. Rockets were raining down, and warnings arrived regarding potential terrorist infiltration in the Shlomit and Bnei Netzer towns.
In the midst of this chaos, she received a message from Lt.-Col. Yonatan Tzur, the commander of the Nahal Brigade’s patrol battalion, who was later tragically killed in an encounter with terrorists. He reported an infiltration near Sufa and Nirim, saying, “There are several terrorists there… They’re heavily armed!”
Ben-Yehuda summoned troops from the mixed-gender, infantry combat Caracal Battalion and made her intentions clear: “We are going out to eliminate terrorists. Infiltration into Israel is happening, and it’s spreading. Stay alert. We might cross paths. We are a strong squad.”
During the fast-paced journey, Ben-Yehuda began to understand the scale of the terrorist incidents in the region. Arriving at Sufa, she received a report from a sergeant from the guards at the entrance to the military base, indicating that terrorists were inside with at least three wounded.
Information revealed that the military post contained around 40 combat soldiers from the Nahal patrol, a mix of Nahal, mortar soldiers from the 50th battalion, other soldiers, military drivers operating in high-risk areas, and numerous terrorists. It was apparent that most of the combatants were in the dining room, armed with anti-tank missiles. It became clear that this was not a typical terrorist infiltration.
Approaching the base from all angles, they identified at least seven terrorists, and more from the nearby dirt embankment were starting to climb up. Suddenly, a convoy with almost 50 terrorists and snipers charged toward the squad of 12 at breakneck speed. They responded with gunfire. Terrorists were eliminated, and the others dispersed.
In a harrowing moment, a terrorist advanced on Ben-Yehuda at point-blank range, but her quick reaction saved her from harm.
Lt.-Col. A from the Magic Touch Squadron (190) arrived and identified the terrorists inside the base. He suggested taking action but Ben-Yehuda insisted on avoiding harm to the soldiers inside. Instead, bursts of fire were directed at the surrounding earthen embankments, killing terrorists and preventing further attacks on the squad.
For nearly four hours, terrorists attempted to outflank Ben-Yehuda and her team, engaging them in firefights. More vans arrived, but the Caracal Battalion commander effectively thwarted them. Additional Light Anti-Armor Weapon (LAW) missiles were launched, further eliminating terrorists: Some were killed, and others retreated.
Despite wounds to some of her soldiers, they persevered.
After hours of intense combat, soldiers from the Shayetet (flotilla) 13 Navy Special Forces unit arrived to clear the base of terrorists. Drones were launched to assist them. The firefights continued, and wounded soldiers were evacuated. They remained at the base for a total of 14 hours until it was fully secured.
Ben-Yehuda emphasized the significant contributions of the female soldiers under her command, who saved many lives through medical care and even daring helicopter landings under fire. Their remarkable performance under the extreme pressure of war highlighted their capabilities.
She also acknowledged the tank soldiers under her command, who played a vital role in defending towns and decisively impacting the battle in Holit, a kibbutz near the southwestern-most border of the Gaza Strip where at least 11 of its members were killed along with two migrant workers.
In total, her battalion eliminated around 100 terrorists. She hopes this serves as proof that there should be no more doubts about female combat soldiers. “Their training and performance on the battlefield have erased any doubts. They fought bravely, saved lives, and emerged as heroes,” she said.
Ben-Yehuda also highlighted the dedication of the commanders who rushed from home to join the fight.
She concluded: “There are no more doubts about female combat soldiers, who have triumphed in every encounter with terrorists. At present, we are responsible for 11 towns and are preparing for any potential ground maneuvers to ensure the safety of the southern Gaza border area and the Egyptian border.”
A lot of people woke up on October 7 as progressives and went to bed that night feeling like conservatives. What changed?
When Hamas terrorists crossed over the border with Israel and murdered 1,400 innocent people, they destroyed families and entire communities. They also shattered long-held delusions in the West.
A friend of mine joked that she woke up on October 7 as a liberal and went to bed that evening as a 65-year-old conservative. But it wasn’t really a joke and she wasn’t the only one. What changed?
The best way to answer that question is with the help of Thomas Sowell, one of the most brilliant public intellectuals alive today. In 1987, Sowell published A Conflict of Visions. In this now-classic, he offers a simple and powerful explanation of why people disagree about politics. We disagree about politics, Sowell argues, because we disagree about human nature. We see the world through one of two competing visions, each of which tells a radically different story about human nature.
Those with “unconstrained vision” think that humans are malleable and can be perfected. They believe that social ills and evils can be overcome through collective action that encourages humans to behave better. To subscribers of this view, poverty, crime, inequality, and war are not inevitable. Rather, they are puzzles that can be solved. We need only to say the right things, enact the right policies, and spend enough money, and we will suffer these social ills no more. This worldview is the foundation of the progressive mindset.
By contrast, those who see the world through a “constrained vision” lens believe that human nature is a universal constant. No amount of social engineering can change the sober reality of human self-interest, or the fact that human empathy and social resources are necessarily scarce. People who see things this way believe that most political and social problems will never be “solved”; they can only be managed. This approach is the bedrock of the conservative worldview.
Hamas’s barbarism—and the explanations and celebrations throughout the West that followed their orgy of violence—have forced an overnight exodus from the “unconstrained” camp into the “constrained” one.
Repost- How Armed Israelis Stopped Terrorists
I may not know a lot, but I know when to ask someone with more experience. I read reports of armed Israeli citizens stopping the Hamas terrorists who attacked their kibbutz. There are important differences between a deliberate terrorist attack and the armed defense that happens every day in the US. I asked Ben Branum for his opinion on these events. Ben is a marine, a civilian contractor for the military, an instructor in church security, and a civilian firearm instructor. We talked for about an hour about the recent attack on the kibbutz Nir Am.
Give us a listen on Ben’s site, Modern Self Protection Podcast or listen to the mp3 from Libsyn.
No, they haven’t.
Rabbi Claims That Hamas Has ‘Perverted Islam.’ Alas, No.
It’s understandable that in times of crisis, people would reach out for reassurance, for some indication that things aren’t as dismal as they seem. Still, when times are tough, it is more important than ever not to be seduced by wishful thinking.
In a disheartening exercise of willful ignorance and the myopia that wishful thinking can induce, the Jerusalem Post published a curious piece Tuesday entitled “Hamas has perverted Islam for their sacrilegious, blasphemous actions.” The author, Yakov Nagen, is identified as a rabbi and “the director of Ohr Torah Stone’s Blickle Institute for Interfaith Dialogue.” Interfaith dialogue is a realm in which self-delusion can all too easily run wild and fond hopes reign supreme over reality; Nagen’s article is, unfortunately, yet another example of this.
“What empowers Hamas and allows it to thrive,” Nagen asserts, “is that too many have accepted their corruption of the teachings of a world religion.” He notes with satisfaction that Hamas does have opponents within the Islamic world: “Hundreds of Muslim leaders signed a public statement issued by the Global Imams Council (GIC) unequivocally condemning the massacre. In the condemnation, they refer to a legal ruling issued by the Islamic Fatwa Council, located in the Iraqi spiritual capital of Najaf: ‘It is prohibited to pray for, join, support, finance, or fight on behalf of Hamas.’”
That sounds wonderful, but then Nagen adds, “The ruling enumerated 11 correlations between Hamas and ISIS, including the use of suicide bombers, missile attacks against civilians, and genocidal aspirations, in the case of Hamas annihilating the Jews.”
It is unpleasant, but nonetheless true: neither ISIS nor Hamas originated these ideas. They are all rooted in core Islamic texts. The justification for suicide bombing is in the Qur’an, the holy book of Islam: “Indeed, Allah has bought from the believers their lives and their wealth, because the garden will be theirs, they will fight in the way of Allah and will kill and be killed.” (9:111) This is the only promise of paradise in the Qur’an, but one can take hold of that promise by being killed while killing unbelievers.
He has a point from ignorance. Willful of otherwise, I neither know, not care. He can’t figure out that it’s because they’re not ‘brothers’ to any of the Arabs. They’re violent grifters, like leftover beached pirates. They were taken in by Jordan and then started a civil war. That example was not lost on the rest of Araby.
Listen to the Muslim Arab’s response pic.twitter.com/VFax1yrWFd
— HeavenBound.org (@HeavenBoundOrg) October 19, 2023
WATCH: A group of pro Palestinian insurrectionists stormed the Capitol today. Have any of them been arrested, hunted down, or thrown in gulags yet? Will any of them get 17-22-year prison sentences? Shaking. pic.twitter.com/jOV3AFv3sq
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) October 18, 2023
“Arm yourself, because no one else here will save you.”
When Hamas Attacked, This Israeli Kibbutz Fought Back and Won
At 6:56 a.m. on Oct. 7, Moshe Kaplan sent an urgent alert to his volunteer security force in Mefalsim, a kibbutz of 1,000 men, women and children in southern Israel where he served as security chief.
“There’s a shooting in the village from the gate!” he texted after militants fired at his car as he drove past the main entrance. Attackers later blew open a pedestrian gate nearby with explosives and flooded into the kibbutz.
Kaplan rushed home to grab his armored vest, helmet and M16 rifle, then drove off to check another gate on the northwest corner. There he found armed men were already inside the razor-wire security fence that encircled the community.
“Terrorists in the kibbutz! Terrorists in the kibbutz!” he yelled in a second, panicked voice text, begging his men to hurry. Gunshots sounded in the background. He had trained a dozen men for this moment, a surprise attack from nearby Gaza. Yet 19 minutes after his first alert, none had arrived.
Kaplan left his car and shot at assailants from behind a metal garbage container. One lobbed a hand grenade at him. In a stroke of luck for him and Mefalsim, it didn’t explode.
More than two dozen Hamas fighters from Gaza had arrived with orders to subdue the small security force and herd hostages into the community dining hall. They carried a detailed map of the kibbutz and, like other assault teams in southern Israel that morning, an attack plan labeled “top secret.”
Mefalsim was one place that day where nothing for the Hamas attackers went according to plan.
All failures – if this can be called that – especially that of opponents, should also be studied for lessons to be learned.
Consider; If they all became ‘martyrs’ would there be a problem?
Hamas’s Strategy of Human Sacrifice
Never before has a party adopted a war strategy to maximize civilian deaths on its own side.
On October 13, Israeli military commanders told Palestinians living in Gaza to evacuate to the south. The northern half of the strip is full of Hamas assets—from rockets to rifles, communications gear to personnel—that Israel plans to destroy in the coming days of the war. But Hamas leaders demanded that the people stay in place. Why?
While some of Hamas’s most brutal tactics, like systematic rape and beheading captives, are long-practiced atrocities for which the armies of Stalin, Hitler, and Genghis Khan are infamous, it is unprecedented for a party to adopt a war strategy to maximize civilian deaths on its own side. This is so strange and evil that it should appall any decent person. Contrary to conventional commentary, this is not a human shield strategy. It’s a human sacrifice strategy.
Since its birth in 1987, Hamas has declared its aim to destroy Israel. Its strategy is asymmetric—that is, because Hamas is smaller and weaker than the Israeli army, it relies on a strategy designed to undermine Israel politically. In hopes (presumably) that it can induce Saudi leaders to drop their plans to normalize relations with Israel, Hamas launched this war with two goals. First, to provoke uprisings among Arabs and Muslims, both within and outside Israel. Second, to cause the rest of the world to view Israel with disgust and hatred.
To achieve these aims, Hamas is ensuring that its war will harm and kill large numbers of Palestinians in Gaza. To bring this about, it has strategized and laid groundwork for years. Its aim is to propagandize a gullible world—to put the blood of Palestinian victims on Israel’s hands.
Defense officials in numerous countries, for operational reasons and to comply with international laws of war, take pains to locate their military assets away from their civilians and to maximize protection for the latter. Hamas officials do the opposite. As United Nations officials and others have disapprovingly noted, Hamas stores ammunition in schools, puts missile launchers adjacent to mosques, sets up command centers in hospitals, and generally bases its operations in densely populated civilian neighborhoods.
This is not simply a human-shield strategy, where the aim is to deter an attack by using innocent lives as a barrier. Hamas is doing something far more insidious: it’s ensuring the mass death of Palestinians. Here is Hamas official Ali Baraka summing up the difference between the two worldviews: “The Israelis are known to love life. We, on the other hand, sacrifice ourselves. We consider our dead to be martyrs.”
“Freedom Fighters” coming to a major city near you.
It’s about on par with the stupidity of this administration. There’s a reason no country in the Middle East wants them.
— 𝙼𝚁. 𝙻𝙴𝙰𝙳𝚂𝙻𝙸𝙽𝙶𝙴𝚁 (@Lead_Flinger) October 16, 2023
US death toll in Hamas terror attack rises to 29, 16 unaccounted for: State Department
The State Department said Saturday that 29 Americans were murdered by Hamas terrorists during their brutal Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel — adding two more US citizens to the tragic toll.
Another 16 Americans — 15 citizens and one legal permanent resident — remain missing, a State Department official told CNN.
“The US government is working around the clock to determine their whereabouts, and is working with the Israeli government on every aspect of the hostage crisis,” the official said.
The slain Americans have not been officially identified, but several families — including that of Cindy Flash, 67, a Minnesota native who had advocated for Palestinian rights — have come forward to speak of their lost loved ones.
Flash and her Israeli-born husband Igal were slain in the safe room of their home in the Kfar Aza kibbutz, her daughter Keren said.
“They were good people,” Keren said of her parents.
“They fought for other people’s rights and other people’s voices.”
Danielle Waldman, 24, a native of Palo Alto, Calif., was one of 260 victims killed at the Nova Festival, a “rave for peace” near the Gaza border.
Her father Eyal Waldman tracked Danielle’s phone and Apple Watch to discover the bullet-riddled car where she and her friends died.
“Each and every one that met her has loved her,” Waldman said.
“She’s done nothing wrong and nothing bad to anyone.”
Biden Admin Gave Hamas $75 Million While Knowing Terror Attack Was Imminent
New: The USAID inspector general warned just a few weeks ago that the Biden administration was ignoring risks in sending aid to Gaza.
The Biden admin has indeed funded groups in the region that have links to Hamas and terrorism, a review found.https://t.co/Lrwoktb9MP— Sarah Bedford (@sarahcbedford) October 11, 2023
Democrat President Joe Biden’s administration gave Hamas $75 million in early October, just days before the group launched an assault against Israel and after learning that a terrorist attack was imminent.
The aid was pushed through in a quiet move bypassing Republican obstructionism.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken approved the release of $75 million in funding for Hamas-controlled Gaza.
Blinken diverted the cash to Hamas just hours before the funds were set to be redistributed elsewhere.
The move was hushed through with little attention in early October, just days before Hamas launched its terrorist attacks against Israel, slaughtering, raping, and kidnapping hundreds of innocent civilians.
However, the funding was approved after the U.S. government learned that Hamas was likely planning an upcoming terror attack against Israel.
Blinken’s decision came after months of pressure from Democrat lawmakers and dozens of civil society groups.
They warned that blocking the aid would create a humanitarian disaster for over one million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
The aid had been held up by Republican Senators who were pushing back against the release of the funds.
Senator Jim Risch and Representative Michael McCaul, the top Republicans on the Senate and House of Representatives Foreign Relations Committees, have since late July been blocking the State Department from providing funds to the UN’s Palestine refugee agency (UNRWA).
After he assumed office, Biden reversed President Donald Trump’s efforts to squeeze off funding to the UN agency and Hamas.
UNRWA thanked Blinken for the funds that will sustain its food distribution through early 2024.
“Thank you [Blinken] for providing $75 million in food assistance to Palestine refugees in Gaza!” said UNRWA
“This generous support from the American people will allow UNRWA to continue this critical aspect of its humanitarian and human development work through the end of Q1 2024.”
Meanwhile, more details have emerged the Biden admin also sent $33.7 million from the American Rescue Plan.
The spending bill was meant for Americans to combat Covid during the pandemic.
It was sent to a Palestinian relief organization that has previously been accused of providing safe harbor to terrorists in Gaza.
As if we needed more evidence that Hamas has engaged in barbarity beyond belief in their attack on Israel, now “top secret” maps and documents captured from the bodies of dead Hamas terrorists show they made detailed plans to directly target youth centers and elementary schools — in the hopes of “seiz[ing] hostages”:.
Documents exclusively obtained by NBC News show that Hamas created detailed plans to target elementary schools and a youth center in the Israeli kibbutz of Kfar Sa’ad, to “kill as many people as possible,” seize hostages and quickly move them into the Gaza Strip.
The attack plans, which are labeled “top secret” in Arabic, appear to be orders for two highly trained Hamas units to surround and infiltrate villages and target places where civilians, including children, gather. Israeli authorities are still determining the death toll in Kfar Sa’ad.
“Including children” would be more accurately worded as “deliberately targeting children,” which in recent days we have seen Hamas doing repeatedly. Hamas has used children as human shields, and the captured docs reveal their intention not only to capture children but to murder them:
The documents were found on the bodies of Hamas terrorists by Israeli first responders and shared with NBC News. They include detailed maps and show that Hamas intended to kill or take hostage civilians and school children.
One page labeled “Top Secret” outlines a plan of attack for Kfar Sa’ad, saying “Combat unit 1” is directed to “contain the new Da’at school,” while “Combat unit 2” is to “collect hostages,” “search the Bnei Akiva youth center” and “search the old Da’at school.”
Another page labeled “Top Secret Maneuver” describes a plan for a Hamas unit to secure the east side of Kfar Sa’ad while a second unit controls the west. It says “kills as many as possible” and “capture hostages.” Other orders include surrounding a dining hall and holding hostages in it.
In response to the release of information on Hamas’ targeting of civilians and children, Hamas has released a video of what was purported to be a Palestinian infant killed by Israeli fire; the “infant” was obviously fake, and the video was taken down, but not before going viral.
These were the results of that planning:
The Hamas documents, footage of the aftermath of the massacre and interviews with eyewitnesses and first responders tell a harrowing story.
“I saw murdered babies. I saw murdered children. I saw mothers and children murdered together,” said Yossi Landau, a commander of ZAKA, an Israeli first responder organization.
This is another startling example of the barbarity of Hamas in this attack. More than that, it proves that these attacks were carefully and scrupulously planned and rehearsed. The level of specificity in the documents shown is the product of a military structure; these were not simple thugs who planned and carried out these atrocities. Continue reading “”
Frog, meet scorpion
Eyal Waldman, the Israeli high-tech magnate, astounded the tech industry and the entire Arab world by creating research and development centers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, all while employing hundreds of Palestinian developers. On Saturday, Hamas murdered his daughter Daniel pic.twitter.com/6KNuKhAXZP
— raz_sauber (@raz_sauber) October 12, 2023
CDR SALAMANDER: Gaza COA Decision Brief.
“Like I said … [Israel’s promise that ‘Gaza will never return to what it was’] had me ditch two of the my three COA [Course of Action] from this weekend. If you wanted to know how it shifted, my most dovish COA is gone, and my most harsh COA is now the center of my Overton Window. A planner must try to align with CI and D&G as it is understood – not how he wishes it to be.”
Here they are:
COA-A: Germany 1945
• The Gaza Strip will be segmented and block by block, field by field, be demilitarized. Person by person will be identified biometrically with the primary goal to “de-Hamas” the entire population. Responsible leaders will be found to administer civil requirements. Zero tolerance for breaking the peace. Peaceful civilians can stay. Violence will result in non-subsidized exile or imprisonment followed by exile. (NB: the voluntary or involuntary exile of Gazans is a problem in all COA. If you look from London, to Sydney, to NYC, the West does not need to import any more of those who want to bring their sectarianism to the West. Any of these highlighted nations will suffice.) After appropriate security environment is achieved, transition to home rule for all but military or diplomatic areas can continue.
COA-B: Danzig 1945
• As with COA-A, the Gaza Strip will be segmented, etc. The exception here is the humane (as opposed to the rather brutal 45-47 depopulation of Danzig (now Gdansk)) depopulation of the Gaza Strip. As German Danzig is now Polish Gdansk – and Danzig will never be the same as it was – so too could Gaza no longer be non-Israeli. As German excesses (understatement) in WWII opened the window for otherwise unacceptable exile of an entire population, Hamas Gaza’s beheading of infants and Einsatzgruppen LARPing through neighboring kibbutzim has opened that window for Gaza. Israel suffered for decades terror from Gaza and in 2005 gave them a chance to be self-governing. Instead, they became a nest of death squads. An Israeli-annexed Gaza would not have that problem. COA-B is the entry level response if you want to make a statement to enemies that will last generations, while still maintaining humanity – especially if exile is subsidized. Per capita income in Gaza is $2,764. Upon exile with no right for return, each will receive $3,000 in three installments over three years; $9,000 total. Cost: ~$6 billion a year for three years, $18 billion total.
COA-C: Carthage
• Segmentation and subsidized exile as per COA-B, but no immediate Israeli settlement for 50-years. Inventory World Heritage Sites, religious sites that existed prior to 1950, and cemeteries. Protect and preserve. Level every other building in the Gaza Strip except for needed infrastructure and national security related locations. Allow the strip to rewild and turned to a nature preserve. Allow for a reevaluation of Gaza’s status in 2073. Want the lesson to be remembered? Want to make sure the threat does not return? Want to make Gaza unlike it was? That will do it, yet allow the nation of Israel to maintain its humanity.
If A) seemed too harsh for most people’s tastes on Sunday and C) seemed impossible, just remember that once an Overton Window begins to shift, it can move far, rapidly.
Well, actually they can be. You simply have to kill them until you run out of those who want to fight, just like any other war.
Hamas assault shows terrorists can’t be managed.
The main lesson for Israel from the hideous Hamas attacks suffered over the weekend is a simple one: Terrorists can’t be managed.
For decades, Israel worked with Hamas and the Palestinian Authority (PA) by combining incentives on the one hand with controlled military responses on the other. Major attacks, including rockets from Gaza last May, prompted retaliation, usually with air power, and a subsequent cease-fire, often brokered by Egypt.
When Iranian-sponsored militias set up weaponry in the West Bank, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) conducted on-the-ground operations in Jenin and Nablus.
In the case of Hezbollah, Israel allowed the US to broker a maritime border semi-deal last year that allows Lebanon to pump natural gas and receive the financial benefit, which will accrue to Hezbollah and run the government in Beirut.
All in the name of tamping down fires that could ignite the big blaze.
The policy derived from several elements. The first is “world opinion,” specifically American government opinion, that could turn against Israel unless it responded to terrorism in a manner congruent with pronounced Western standards. Israel believed that any military response had to happen quickly to avoid blowback from allies and friends as much as from enemies.
Israel has also always believed that someday, somehow there would be a political solution. Israeli leaders could be angry with Palestinian leadership – Hamas or the PA – but they also talked to them, subsidized them, looked the other way at language that veered into Nazi trope and even invited them to lunch.
The corollary was not to hammer too hard in response to terror and to go after individual terrorists, not the leadership, as much as possible – always leaving the door open to more talks.
Israel also thought it could use its long-range capabilities, especially airpower, to destroy enemy assets. While this sometimes worked as a form of retaliation, it never stopped the massive accumulation of Iranian-supplied and financed missiles, rockets and other weapons.
Hamas just demonstrated that fact by sending thousands of missiles into Israel and overwhelming Israeli air defenses not six months after the Spring rocket wars.
Israel understood, too, that billions of dollars flowed to the Palestinians not only from Iran and its partners like Qatar but also from the US and Europe. Much of it directly and indirectly fueled terrorism and hatred.
Israel itself provides gas and clean water as well as food aid and Israeli work permits. Before the weekend, 18,000 Gaza Palestinians entered Israel daily, sending $2 million per day into Gaza. To some extent, it was to help the people. To another, it aimed to moderate or placate Hamas.
It was no closer to true than the US financial support for Iran offered by the Obama and Biden administrations placated or moderated the mullah regime in Tehran.
One deeply-experienced Israeli expert writing about the intelligence failure that allowed preparations for the Hamas attack to go undetected noted, “Israelis have grown accustomed to missile attacks from Gaza.” In short, Israel built up some defenses, retaliated and otherwise figured it was controlling the situation, when in fact it was losing the larger war.
Carrots and sticks failed; there is now no going back. The more media coverage shows the shocking depravity of Hamas terrorists when they found Israeli and even foreign civilians to rape and murder– people burned alive and babies decapitated – the more necessary it becomes for Israel to revise its battle plan.
Because of internal political conflict in Israel, many citizens have lost faith in their democratic institutions. The Gaza war has temporarily created some unity – and soldier loyalty to the IDF is clear – but that won’t suffice.
Israel needs a new security strategy and an internal political solution – a unity government with a strong security component would be a big step forward.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he intends to “crush Gaza.” But what does that mean? Israel will send in the army and try and free as many hostages held in Gaza as possible. Then Israel will go after as many Hamas leaders as it can find, but many will likely try to cross the border into Egypt.
If and when Hamas is ousted it will leave the problem of who will run the Gaza Strip? Israel could, in theory, reoccupy it, but the burden will be huge and threats from inside lethal. It also risks blowback from Israel’s usual allies and friends – a political matter with security implications.
There aren’t many rays of hope in the situation. However, the fact that the UN constructed an international military coalition to manage Haiti temporarily in the absence of a national Haitian government and in the face of brutal rule by gangs, leaves some slim hope for an international solution until new Palestinian leadership emerges.
If that is possible.
This Is What ‘Decolonization’ Looks Like
Fancy-sounding academic jargon is not a curious intellectual exercise. Words make worlds. Words make nightmares.
On Saturday, as the raping and murdering and kidnapping were happening in Israel, Najma Sharif, a writer for Soho House magazine and Teen Vogue, posted on X: “What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers.”
So far, Sharif’s post has been liked 100,000 times and reposted nearly 23,000 times—by, among others, The Washington Post’s global opinions editor, Karen Attiah.
The point was: Don’t be squeamish. Never mind the Jewish girl being pulled by her hair with blood streaming between her legs. Never mind the women being raped beside the corpses of their friends at a music festival. Never mind the children and babies snatched from their parents.
If you can’t handle it, if you condemn it without a preamble or equivocation, you’re an apologist for the Zionist colonizers.
All this is a good reminder that when people say something, they often mean it, and we should believe them, or at least take them seriously. Fancy-sounding academic jargon is not a curious intellectual exercise. Words make worlds.
Here is how Quillette editor Claire Lehmann put it on X, formerly Twitter: “For the past decade I’ve been told that jokes, words & scholarly debates need to be suppressed because they may cause ‘harm’ to vulnerable minorities. Yet when a global minority is butchered, tortured & maimed, those who suppress words shrug as if war crimes are no big deal.”
Real decolonization is a physical process. It is about removing bodies from a place.
The meaning of Sharif’s post—a very tidy, very millennial encapsulation of the old Bolshevik spirit—is: the ends shall justify the means, and if that bothers you, well, you’ve probably been infected by some bourgeois, liberal fungus.
Nor was she alone.
“And as you might have seen, there was some sort of rave or desert party where they were having a great time until the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters,” a speaker at a Democratic Socialists of America rally in New York proclaimed to whoops and laughter. (DSA members include representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jamaal Bowman, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar.)
“Decolonization is about dreaming and fighting for a present and future free of occupied Indigenous territories,” Jairo Fúnez-Florez, an assistant professor at Texas Tech, posted. “It’s about a Free Palestine. It’s about liberation and self-determination. It’s about living with dignity.”
Columbia student groups called the attack on Israel “an unprecedented historic moment for the Palestinians of Gaza, who tore through the wall that has been suffocating them.”
A joint statement issued by dozens of Harvard student organizations declared “the Israeli regime” is “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”
“Shabbat shalom and may every colonizer fall everywhere,” wrote Barnaby Raine, who received his PhD in history from Columbia and now teaches at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.
The writer Mohammed El-Kurd, the Palestine correspondent for The Nation, stated: “What is happening in occupied Palestine is a response to weeks and months and years of daily military invasions into Palestinian towns, killings of Palestinians, and the very fact that millions of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are besieged under Israeli blockade.”
Rania Khalek, a Lebanese American journalist, wrote: “Watching armed indigenous people take their land back from their colonizers is something else.”
Self-styled “journalist” Mariam Barghouti said: “Gaza just broke out of prison.”
Former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis suggested “the path to ending the tragic loss of innocent lives—both Palestinian and Israeli—begins with one crucial first step: the end of the Israeli occupation and apartheid.”
The New York Times decided this was the right moment to run a story headlined “Gaza Has Suffered Under 16-Year Blockade.” The Times was good enough to note that the blockade was made possible not only by Israel but by Egypt, but it failed to mention Israeli forces withdrew from Gaza in 2005; that Palestinians elected Hamas to rule them; that Israelis routinely give Gazans notice before attacking to minimize loss of civilian life; and that one reason (maybe the reason) so many Palestinian children have died during Israeli air strikes is Hamas uses them as human shields—the better to generate sympathetic news coverage.
Then, of course, there were the moral relativists, those who provide a patina of legitimacy to the alleged freedom fighters. Amnesty International’s Agnes Callamard called on “all parties to the conflict to abide by international law and make every effort to avoid further civilian bloodshed.” Representative Ilhan Omar reminded everyone, “Gaza doesn’t have shelters or an iron dome” (one wonders if she mentioned this to the Hamas leadership in Doha or its patrons in Tehran before the violence commenced). Or Jeremy Corbyn, Britain’s national embarrassment, declaring, “we need a route out of this tragic cycle of violence.”
Meanwhile, the ersatz activists of Hollywood and Silicon Valley are eerily quiet. The people who turned the Ukrainian flag into their avatars, those who worry about misgendering and triggering and safe spaces, those who insist words are violence (those for whom violence is apparently not violence)—they’re busy ignoring all this.
We should listen closely to these latter-day Bolsheviks and their many enablers. They are being honest. They are saying exactly what they believe and what they want to see happen.
In western France, the moslem conquest (the ‘left hook’) from Spain into Europe was stopped, but cold.
The Battle of Tours: When the West ‘Manfully Resisted’ Islam
Today in history, on October 10, 732 A.D., an epic battle saved Western Europe from becoming Islamic.
Precisely one hundred years after the death of Islam’s prophet Muhammad in 632 — a century which had seen the conquest of thousands of square miles of formerly Christian lands, including Syria, Egypt, North Africa, and Spain — the scimitar of Islam found itself in the heart of Europe in 732, facing that continent’s chief military power, the Franks.
After the Muslim hordes, which reportedly numbered 80,000 men, had ravaged most of southwestern France, slaughtering and enslaving countless victims, they met and clashed with 30,000 Frankish infantrymen under the leadership of Charles Martel, on October 10, somewhere between Poitiers and Tours. An anonymous medieval Arab chronicler describes the battle as follows:
Near the river Owar [Loire], the two great hosts of the two languages [Arabic and Latin] and the two creeds [Islam and Christianity] were set in array against each other. The hearts of Abd al-Rahman, his captains and his men were filled with wrath and pride, and they were the first to begin to fight. The Muslim horsemen dashed fierce and frequent forward against the battalions of the Franks, who resisted manfully, and many fell dead on either side, until the going down of the sun.
Entirely consisting of wild headlong charges, the Muslim attack proved ineffective, for “the men of the north stood as motionless as a wall, they were like a belt of ice frozen together, and not to be dissolved, as they slew the Arab with the sword. The Austrasians [eastern Franks], vast of limb, and iron of hand, hewed on bravely in the thick of the fight,” writes one chronicler. The Franks refused to break ranks and allow successive horsemen to gallop through the gaps, which Arab cavalry tactics relied on. Instead, they tightened their ranks and, “drawn up in a band around their chief [Charles], the people of the Austrasians carried all before them. Their tireless hands drove their swords down to the breasts [of the foe].”
Military historian Victor Davis Hanson offers a more practical take:
When the sources speak of “a wall,” “a mass of ice,” and “immovable lines” of infantrymen, we should imagine a literal human rampart, nearly invulnerable, with locked shields in front of armored bodies, weapons extended to catch the underbellies of any Islamic horsemen foolish enough to hit the Franks at a gallop.
How Obama Paved the Way for the Iran-Promoting, Israel-Pummeling, Squad-Like Biden White House.
Why would the Biden administration take a position indistinguishable from that of The Squad in calling for Israel to stand down via “ceasefire” — as its people, and among them some Americans, are brutally murdered and held hostage by Hamas’ genocidal jihadists?
Why would the Biden administration have tabbed a Hamas-tied Hezbollah apologist, and all-around Third World Man like Rob Malley as State Department Envoy to Iran — enabling him apparently to build a spy ring for the mullocracy?
Why would the Biden administration have so empowered Iran and its proxies, while putting the screws to Israel in the first place — helping create the conditions for the catastrophe that has unfolded, which could well expand into a regional if not world war?
To understand all of this, you have to understand how President Barack Obama normalized the unholy intersectional progressive-Islamist alliance that has now come to dominate the Democrat Party, including this White House.
I sought to explain the seemingly inexplicable in a book I wrote three years ago, American Ingrate: Ilhan Omar and the Progressive-Islamist Takeover of the Democratic Party, which foretold what we are seeing play out today.