RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-scenes-of-genocide-i-saw-in-israeli-morgues-hamas-oct-7-77d45c23?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

A fetal heartbeat flutters and then stills, a bullet lodged in the embryonic heart. The mother survives the shooting and her child’s stillbirth. A body that has been decomposing for almost three weeks lies on the autopsy table, riddled with knife and bullet wounds. Another is nearby, the man’s bluetooth receiver still clipped onto his shirt. Death came as a surprise.

This is Israel. I arrived on Oct. 19 to spend 10 days as a human-rights observer with the permission of the nation’s Foreign Affairs Ministry and help from Israel Defense Forces officer Kobi Valer. As an observant Muslim, I felt a duty to come and bear witness. What I saw will remain with me forever.

Hamas waged its attacks in the nation’s south, but hundreds of its victims have since been moved north. I encountered many of them at the morgues at the Shura military base near Ramle, some 15 miles southeast of Tel Aviv. I toured the Sammy Ofer Fortified Underground Emergency Hospital in Haifa, visiting the neonatal units whose tiny patients had recently been relocated in anticipation of further conflict. I examined bodies and ashes, incinerated teeth and bones. I saw toddlers, teens and adults, young and old, many of them bound, tortured and burned alive.

One word continually came to mind: genocide. No matter how it emerges, the monster is easy to recognize. As a doctor, I had a rare and panoramic view of the aftermath: the targeted people’s long, agonizing journey to death.

This isn’t the first time I have seen Islamist jihadism or even Islamist genocide. I’ve been to northwestern Pakistan and met child Taliban operatives groomed for suicide missions. I still attend to 9/11 first-responders in New York. I’ve been to post-ISIS Iraq to meet with Kurdish and Yazidi survivors of genocide. I’ve spoken with former ISIS child soldiers and the Peshmerga veterans of that brutal and bloody three-year war.

The Oct. 7 genocide was different, more barbaric than anything before it. The attacks were cloaked in the language and metaphors of Islam, yet corrupted with cosmic enmity for the Jewish people, Judaism, global Jewry and the Jewish state.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20134/ceasefires-gaza-hostages

[Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu] argued that the more that 240 Israelis held hostage by Hamas should be released first. Letting up the military pressure on Hamas, rather than forcing Hamas to concede, will only delay the hostages’ release by enabling the terrorists to keep moving them around and re-hiding them.

The other important consideration the Biden administration has failed to grasp is that, by ensuring Israel achieves its goal of destroying Hamas, Washington would be sending a strong signal to hostile states such as Iran, Russia and China that any attack against the US and its allies would receive a similarly robust response.

At the very least the Biden administration should be urgently reviewing its Iran policy and, instead of obsessing about the prospects of reviving the “nuclear deal” with Tehran… concentrating its efforts on targeting top IRGC commanders, as well as imposing tough banking sanctions against Tehran to limit its ability to fund terrorist groups such as Hamas.

https://quillette.com/2023/11/09/the-barbarian-evasions/ When I ask my students to rethink the universality of human rights, the mere suggestion befuddles them. Creatures of their progressive times, the a priori existence of such rights is as firmly established in their minds as the existence of witches or geocentricity was in the minds of their ancestors. Even as they indulge […]

https://victorhanson.com/squeezing-the-worlds-vulnerable-peoples/

https://amgreatness.com/2023/11/09/squeezing-the-worlds-vulnerable-peoples/

The population of Israel is about 10 million. This represents about half of the world’s Jewish people.

The founding idea of modern Israel was to offer a sanctuary for Jews in their biblical home in the Middle East, in the aftermath of Nazi Germany’s mass murder of 6 million Jews. Yet currently, 78 years after the Holocaust, anti-Israel protestors throughout the Middle East, the great cities of the Western world, and iconic American universities chant death threats and “Palestine will be free from the river to the sea.” Their signature slogan is shorthand for the erasure of the Jewish state and everyone in it.

There would currently be zero chance that Jews could live peaceably under any current Middle Eastern government. In the postwar era, nearly a million Jews were persecuted, ethnically cleansed, and forcibly expelled from all the major Arab countries— Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Morocco, Syria, and Yemen—despite hundreds of years of residence.

Anti-Israel hatred still remains a staple in most of the nearly-500-million-person Arab world, and indeed is commonplace among the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims and their countries at the United Nations.

And Israel is only one of a number of small, vulnerable states. Most of them are in the volatile Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. All are surrounded by hostile neighbors. The others have also suffered a long history of persecution and periodic genocide—catastrophes that are not necessarily permanently relegated to their ancient pasts.

Bitter proxy fighting between Armenian- and Azerbaijan-allied forces in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh corridor recently ended with the defeat of Armenian supported forces. As a result, shortly before the Hamas massacre of Jews on October 7, some 120,000 Christian ethnic Armenians were expelled from the region by Muslim and Turkish-speaking Azerbaijan.

Gaza is a knife aimed at Israel. Just look at the map. It’s not an accident.

The Gaza Strip was created by Arab states who attacked and lost to Israel in the first Arab-Israeli war of 1947-48. It became a narrow festering laboratory where humans were turned into monsters, encouraged and trained to commit atrocities.

Gaza became the anti-Israel terror base, 20 minutes from Tel Aviv. Gaza’s people have got no flag, no citizenship. Their symbol became the UN refugee card known in Arabic as al-Hawiyya.

Egypt kept the refugees penned up in Gaza in poverty and 70% unemployment, refusing them citizenship, denying them statehood and independence.

Lebanon and Syria also kept their Palestinians in camps. They saw the political potential of the refugees, exploited their suffering to harden them as a knife aimed at Israel. Enmity to Israel was the heart of Qawmiyya — Pan-Arab nationalism. Gamal Abdul-Nasser and Hafez Assad built their careers around it.

Whenever Arab leaders failed their people — low literacy, poor health care, general poverty — they distracted attention, wrapping themselves in the flag of Palestinian resistance and pan-Arab nationalism.

Fighting terror from Gaza consumed Israel in its first 20 years. After winning wars in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973, Israel withdrew its forces from Gaza and Sinai as part of diplomatic settlements, hoping terror would end. Under the 1993 Israel-PLO accords, Israel handed military control in Gaza to Arafat’s PLO. Terror increased. Under Ariel Sharon, Israel, also evicted its civilians from Gaza in 2005.  Arab terror rose even more.

Hamas beat the PLO in the 2006 elections after its participation was encouraged by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Yes, it was a bad idea. Hamas then violently evicted the PLO. Gaza again became the main terror base against Israel. Its main domestic product was not locally grown flowers and citrus fruit pioneered by Israeli farmers, but rocket-based terror. Hamas called it muqawwama sarwakhiyya — “rocket-propelled resistance.”

Hamas used its state educational and social networks to mold thousands of hate-filled killers.  From first grade to summer camps, Hamas gave children rifles and taught them to hate Jews, as detailed in the 36-paragraph Hamas Covenant.

https://unitedwithisrael.org/one-person-injured-in-drone-explosion-at-school-in-eilat/?utm_source=MadMimi&utm_medium=email&

A 20-year-old man suffered smoke inhalation.

By JNS

A drone caused a large explosion at an elementary school in Eilat on Thursday afternoon, injuring one civilian, reported the Israel Defense Forces.

“A UAV hit a civilian building in the city of Eilat, in southern Israel. The identity of the UAV and the details of the incident are under review,” said the IDF.

A 20-year-old man suffered from smoke inhalation and was evacuated to the city’s Yoseftal Medical Center, the Magen David Adom emergency response service said. In addition, paramedics treated five people suffering from anxiety.

https://bit.ly/3ssfqV1

Can/should Israel defy US pressure to act against its (Israel’s) own most critical national security interest (e.g., allowing a ceasefire in the war to obliterate the anti-Western Hamas Islamic terrorism; bolstering the Palestinian Authority despite its terror-driven policy and education system; allowing a non-Israeli security control of Gaza following the current war) while the US extends Israel a highly-appreciated(!), vital support, militarily, financially and diplomatically?
 
2. Israel’s defiance of US pressure has been an inherent feature of US-Israel relations since 1948. It has caused short-term frictions, while generating long-term US strategic respect toward Israel, triggering a dramatic enhancement of mutually-beneficial strategic cooperation. 
 
3. As expected, Israeli defiance of US pressure spared the US economic and national security setbacks, dealing major blows to enemies and rivals of the US.

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-772008

Despite the horrific October 7 pogroms in southern Israel, carried out by Hamas terrorists, US President Joe Biden continues to push for the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian-Arab state next to the Jewish state. Unfortunately, he doesn’t seem to understand that October 7 has changed everything.

For decades, the debate over creating a Palestinian state revolved around two major issues: the intentions of the Palestinian Arabs and the actual borders of such a state.

Statehood supporters claimed that the Palestinian Arab leadership, and the majority of Palestinian Arabs, would live in peace with Israel if given a sovereign state.

Until the 1993 Oslo Accords, nobody knew whether that claim had real merit. Nobody knew for sure how the Palestinian Arabs would behave if given self-rule. But since 1993, the question of their intentions has been tested, and they have failed that test. Miserably. There’s just no debating that point.

The first test was in 1993-1995, when Israel signed the Oslo agreements and surrendered control of 40% of Judea-Samaria to the Palestinian Authority. The behavior of then-PA leader Yasser Arafat, and his successor Mahmoud Abbas, was supposed to show that it was safe to give them a full-fledged state.