RUTHFULLY YOURS

The world is full of horror: Tribal wars in African nations such as Congo with millions of victims, which Nicholas Kristoff, to his credit, revealed in columns and a documentary, just don’t capture the high dudgeon of those who sanction the violence and arson occasioned by the death of one individual George Floyd.

However, when it comes to the world’s only Jewish state, a freewheeling democracy, attacked by monsters, does moral equivalence grip the hypocritical critics of Israel’s response in the media and academia. Those who decry “blame the victim” in every other scenario, real or perceived, indulge in it endlessly when it comes to Israel.

And what I call “standby antisemitism”is instantly deployed. rsk

https://www.city-journal.org/article/western-medias-moral-equivalence

The horror of the events that took place in Israel this past weekend is still sinking in. Such atrocities, deliberately videoed and broadcast for the world to see, reveal a pathological mindset. It is also a harbinger of far worse to come unless we face the truth: far from constituting a clash of civilizations, these attacks repudiate civilization.

Sponsored by Iran, Hamas has little ideology beyond hatred, but hatred is ideology enough when your adversary fails to understand the multifaceted war being waged against it. For decades, Islamists, trained first by the Nazis and later by the KGB, learned how to manipulate the instruments of political warfare. By coopting naïve Western elites to embrace anti-Western, anti-Israeli, anti-Zionist, and anti-Semitic memes, they’ve gradually succeeded beyond their wildest initial expectations.

True to form, the mainstream media in the West covered the attacks with soulless rhetoric. The New York Times, for example, refused to apply the word “terrorists” to the murderers, even as images of the atrocities flooded social media. The Washington Post, PBS, NPR, and Reuters all opted for the far milder “militants.”

An antiseptic moral equivalence infuses mainstream media coverage in the West. Reports routinely take pains to emphasize that there are victims on both sides. Hours after the invasion, PBS’s NewsHour announced, “In an unprecedented surprise attack, the militant Hamas rulers of Gaza sent dozens of fighters into Israel by land, sea, and air,” but then followed with this laconic statement: “Hundreds of Israelis and Palestinians are reported dead between the attack and Israel’s retaliatory airstrikes on Gaza cities.” Similarly, the Washington Post noted that “[t]he death toll has risen to 700 in Israel and thousands have been injured, according to local media, while Palestinian authorities said at least 370 were killed and 2,200 injured in Gaza.” On October 9, too, the New York Times and the Washington Post duly reported death totals on both sides.

In a New York Times editorial, “The Global Context of the Hamas–Israel War,” we see two photos: one of a boy running against a background of unidentified burning buildings far in the distance, from Ashkelon in Israel; the other, with no location provided, shows “a Palestinian mother [crying] next to the body of her son.” The asymmetry of pity on display in the pairing is clear. From these contrasting photos, are we meant to understand that the greater fault lies with Israel and, ultimately, America?

https://www.jns.org/acts-of-courage-amid-horror-israelis-rise-to-occasion/

Israelis caught in the murderous rampage by Hamas terrorists demonstrated heroism, determination and fortitude.

As Hamas terrorists made their savage way through Israel’s south, slaughtering more than 1,300 people and displaying the worst humanity has to offer, Israeli men and women carried out countless acts of courage.

For some it was their final act. Kibbutz Be’eri’s 22-year-old paramedic insisted on staying and helping the wounded, then hid for six hours in the clinic’s kitchenette grasping a knife, waiting (like so many) for help that never came. As the terrorists closed in, she texted her last words to her sister, “I love you.”

There was the young couple from Kibbutz Kfar Aza, who hid their 10-month-old twins in their safe room before engaging in a hopeless fight with the well-armed terrorists.

Or the old-timers, former IDF officers, now grandfathers and great-grandfathers, who sped south to engage the enemy, killing dozens.

Doubtless many more acts of bravery went unseen and unheralded

Here are a few that have made it to the headlines:

1. The heroine of Nir Am

Inbal Liberman, 25, saved her entire kibbutz from the gruesome fate of many other kibbutzim in the region.

Serving as military security coordinator of Kibbutz Nir Am since December 2022, Liberman heard explosions on Saturday morning, the day of Hamas’s sneak attack.

Inbal realized that the explosions were different from the rocket attacks that she had become accustomed to. With little time to spare—Kibbutz Nir Am is located just a stone’s throw from the Gaza Strip, just over a half mile—she rushed to open the kibbutz armory.

She distributed weapons to her 12-man security team, made up of other kibbutz members, arranged them along the kibbutz fence and set ambushes for the terrorists.

When the bloodthirsty killers arrived, expecting another easy slaughter, they got the surprise of their lives. The security team gunned down 20—Liberman herself killed five—as the Hamas murderers encountered a wall of fire.

https://media5.manhattan-institute.org/iiif/2/wp-content%2Fuploads%2Fsites%2F5%2FHarvards-Horror.jpg/full/!99999,960/0/default.jpg

“In nearly 50 years of @Harvard affiliation, I have never been as disillusioned and alienated as I am today,” tweeted Harvard professor and former Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers on October 9, when he learned that 34 Harvard student organizations had signed a statement saying that they “hold the Israeli regime responsible for all unfolding violence” in the Middle East and added that Israel “is the only one to blame.” The students’ statement was a direct response to Hamas’s murderous attack on Israeli civilians the day before, which has claimed more than 1,000 civilian lives, injured many more, and saw some 150 Israeli hostages carried off into captivity.

Presumably, Summers felt even worse than he did on February 21, 2006, when he was literally “alienated” from his post as Harvard’s president, resigning amid criticism for having suggested that women inherently might have less scientific aptitude than men. Summers apologized for those remarks, which he made based on empirical data that he said he hoped would be disproved. That did not save him from Harvard’s social-justice warriors, including a majority of Harvard’s faculty, who voted no confidence in his leadership. Instead, Summers’ downfall emboldened his critics, and led him and his successors to make identity politics central to Harvard’s mission.

More than a decade and a half later, only Summers can say whether he is truly surprised that hundreds of Harvard students would blame Israeli children, babies, grandmothers, and hundreds of others—among them at least 14 Americans now confirmed dead—for their own murders, injuries, and kidnappings. Despite his stated outrage, Summers has shown no interest in ending his affiliation with Harvard, as a principled person with such sentiments and bearing some responsibility for the climate at the school might have done.

Current Harvard president Claudine Gay confirmed that such statements are acceptable at what supposedly is the nation’s most prestigious university. Writing after 48 hours of silence, she declared that “our students have the right to speak for themselves,” even if “no student group—not even 30 student groups—speaks for Harvard University or its leadership.”

After massive public criticism, including from many Harvard affiliates, Gay amended her statement to declare, “I condemn the terrorist atrocities perpetrated by Hamas.” She nevertheless qualified her condemnation of Hamas’s “abhorrent” actions, leaving space and consideration for “whatever one’s individual views of the origins of longstanding conflicts in the [Middle East] region” might be. Harvard’s best purpose, Gay continued, would “be well served in such a difficult moment by rhetoric that aims to illuminate and not inflame. . . . I appeal to all of us in this community of learning to keep this in mind as our conversations continue.”

https://freebeacon.com/columns/the-shame-of-academe/

As Israel mourns some 1,200 dead, prays for the release of more than 100 captives, reels from the worst day in its history, and mobilizes some 360,000 reservists, student activists and the international Left have mobilized to defend, apologize for, and appease evil.

Protests, marches, and statements of solidarity for Palestinian “resistance” have bloomed on city streets throughout the developed world and within America’s institutions of higher learning. The actions of these young people, and of the elites who run the schools, are more than appalling. They are evidence of Western confusion and decadence.

Who could have predicted that within 24 hours of a pogrom, crowds would appear in New York, Ft. Lauderdale, Toronto, London, and Sydney denouncing Jews and calling for an end to the Jewish State? Who might have anticipated that the message from academe would be, in so many words, that Israel had it coming?

Amid a backdrop of Palestinian flags and keffiyehs, a New Yorker waved a cellphone displaying the image of a swastika. Londoners chanted “From the River to the Sea,” demanding the elimination of Jews from the Holy Land. A kosher restaurant was vandalized in the same city. Down under, in front of the Sydney Opera House, masked men lit flares and called out “Gas the Jews.”

After the terror attacks against America on September 11, 2001, similar scenes of denunciation and celebration played out in Iraq and the Palestinian territories. Now, after Israel’s 9/11, they take place openly and unabashedly in the heart of the West.

Whatever this is, it is not progress. The grotesque tableaux represent social fracture, dissolution, ideological sorting, and weakening of confidence. They are a bad omen. Many of the protesters are young males asking for a fight. The last war with Hamas, in the spring of 2021, was accompanied by a surge of anti-Semitic violence in the United States. The Jewish community must prepare for another hateful backlash when Israel launches its ground campaign to destroy Hamas.