RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/antonio-guterres-united-nations-israel-palestine-hamas-gaza-c4adf77a?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

In the ever-expanding hall of shame for propagators of global disorder, prepare a special pedestal for United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres. His disgraceful remarks Tuesday to the Security Council are an example of why the U.N. can’t be counted on to keep the peace anywhere.

Mr. Guterres’s comments amount to nothing less than an apologia for Hamas terrorists, despite a few thin caveats. “It is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum,” he said of the Iran-backed terror group’s Oct. 7 invasion of southern Israel, which claimed more than 1,400 lives.

Lest anyone miss his point: “The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished.”

Although he allowed that these “grievances” don’t justify the “appalling attacks by Hamas,” he warned that “those appalling attacks cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.” We quote Mr. Guterres at length in case readers assume someone in his position couldn’t really have delivered a speech of this sort. He did.

Mr. Guterres seems to know little about the institution he leads. A U.N. resolution passed in 1947 recommended the partition plan for Palestine that led to the creation of Israel the following year, as our friends at the New York Sun note in a sharp editorial.

Meanwhile, for decades the U.N., under the auspices of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) refugee agency exclusively for Palestinians, has discouraged permanent resettlement by refugees and runs schools that teach children Israeli territory belongs to them.

November 2006  Outpost – Monthly Publication of Americans for a Safe Israel.During the summer of 2005, cheered by both left and right, Israel would leave Gaza. Many saw the
area as a drain on Israeli military forces and not crucial for Israel’s long-term security. And doubters relied on Ariel Sharon: if he proposed it, then it must be right. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice gushed: “This is an historic moment for both sides, and the commitment of both sides to a successful disengagement process has been impressive.”

American philanthropists, buoyed by the possibility that Gaza’s Arabs would continue the prosperous agricultural businesses created by Jews (a major source of export income) purchased existing farms, greenhouses and agricultural equipment from Jewish residents to give them to the Arabs.

This would give the Arabs, who were ostensibly ready to get down to the business of disciplined self-rule, a big economic boost. Inspired by this notion, Mortimer Zuckerman, a staunch supporter of Israel,
persuaded other moguls, not proven friends of Israel, to ante up $14,000,000 for this noble enterprise.

Just think, …the world would see how generous the Jews were…how flexible…..how devoted to
peace. Global warming was just around the corner. Right? Well, not exactly. In short order the Arabs of
Gaza ransacked, looted and destroyed the homes and farms. They turned their energies to more congenial enterprises, like digging tunnels for smuggling weapons and showering the village of Sderot with missiles.

They elected the unapologetically terrorist Hamas oneof whose leaders declared “The jihad and the resistance are the only ways to liberate our homeland, not negotiations and agreements.”

Nonetheless, the media quickly put out the spin that Hamas won because of its “humanitarian”
work in providing food, shelter, band-aids and bubblegum to the Palestinian Arabs.
And while the administration tirelessly avers that the peaceful “Palestinian people” yearn only to
live in a democratic state beside Israel, Ehud Yaari (Jerusalem Report, October 16) offers this sober assessment of the facts on the ground in Gaza. (Yaari, author of Toward Israeli-Palestinian Disengagement is currently an associate of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, hardly a right-wing group.)

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20090/eu-rewards-terrorism

Israel had not even buried its dead from the horrifying jihadist pogrom that Hamas terrorists unleashed on Israeli civilians in south Israel — beheading babies, burning them alive, torturing, raping, kidnapping, murdering — before the European Union decided to reward the terrorists by tripling its assistance to Gaza.

“The Commission will immediately increase the current humanitarian aid envelope foreseen for Gaza by 50 million euros,” European Commission President Ursula van der Leyen said. “This will bring the total to over 75 million euros. We will continue our close cooperation with the UN and its agencies to ensure that this aid reaches those in need in the Gaza strip.”

Oh really? How? The terrorist group Hamas, a proxy of Iran, the “worst state sponsor of terrorism,” is wholly in control of Gaza and will take what shows up and dribble it out slowly to a chosen few, mainly in their military. The idea that any of it will reach the million displaced souls who were urged by the Israelis to flee to southern Gaza to save their lives is charming, but woefully starry-eyed. Food and water — if that is really what is in the uninspected trucks, rather than weapons — will go to the Hamas foot soldiers to make sure they stay fit and loyal.

“Hamas are trying to prevent people leaving northern Gaza. And that is the point… Of course we want to minimize Palestinian casualties. We want to minimize Israeli casualties. We want everybody to respect civilians. But the real clear distinction is Israel are trying to get civilians out of danger; Hamas are trying to put civilians into danger, and that is a fundamental difference between the two.” — UK Foreign Secretary James Cleverly, October 15, 2023.

Sadly, massive injustices were done by the international media which, without checking, wrongly blamed Israel for firing at a hospital in Gaza, supposedly killing hundreds. Video evidence and a voice recording revealed that the real cause of the explosion at the hospital was a rocket, launched toward Israel by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, that landed in the hospital parking lot. The media, it seems, could not wait to stick it to the Jews.

http://www.acpr.org.il/english-nativ/09-issue/sharon-9.htm

The second Lebanon War (the “Three Weeks of Mourning War”) of the summer of 2006 has not yet come to an end. As this is being written, one round of the war has concluded in an intermission. It is only an introduction to the prologue. Even now our enemies are aligning for another war and another one after that, for many years to come. Over the last decade and a half, ever since the foolishness of the Oslo Accords, everything has been done to erode the nation’s resolve, its strength, and its belief in the justness of its path.

Contributing to this phenomenon has been a media mobilized to the insane idea of “peace” and a “new Middle East,” various intellectuals who depicted peace as being just around the corner and prevented by the “occupation,” which, if it were only to end, the End of Days would arrive immediately and Islam would lovingly accept the Jewish state.

Orientalists and Islamists swept under the rug all of the truths crying out to them from every document that they researched, from the pages of every Arab newspaper that they read. They told the nation just how peace-loving the Syrians and the Palestinians were, how their only desire was that the occupation cease and a small state be established alongside Israel; things which do not appear in any authorized or semi-authorized Arab-Islamic document.

They did not report about that which was openly stated nor did they relate to what anyone could read on the MEMRI website: That the demand to end the occupation is just a pretext to separate Israel from the few strategic assets still under its control and hold it hostage to the kassams of Hamas and the katyushas of Hizbullah.

They repressed the fact, which they knew better than anyone else, that since 1979, when the 15th century of Islam (according to the Muslim calendar) began, the majority of the Muslim world has been engulfed in the fire of messianic expectations.

From that point on, the molten lava of jihad, shot forth, poured into the Middle East and the world in general, and began to flow through the pathways and tunnels of fanatical Islamic fundamentalism, kindling half-dormant hopes and arousing the fire of hatred for everything non-Muslim everywhere. Over the course of an entire generation it has been boiling and blistering and amassing power daily. In its wake lie the Twin Towers from September 11 along with thousands of dead in Europe, the United States and in the Arab countries themselves, especially in Iraq.

Today it is clear to everyone who is prepared to confront unadorned reality, and they are the majority of people in Israeli society with the wish to live, that we have to take advantage of the short period of time left to us to prepare the army for the inevitable next war. It is already on the way.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/israel-needs-unconditional-surrender-from-hamas-c56d725d?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Israel needs to declare the precise goals of its Gaza campaign—for its own citizens and soldiers, and to establish the credibility of its efforts in the world’s eyes. The “destruction” of Hamas has no meaning in international law and is too vague for Israelis being asked to sacrifice everything.

History provides an example of what Israel should do. At the end of World War II, the Allies’ goal was clear: The German Third Reich must agree to an “unconditional surrender.” The Allies’ demand of Germany should be the model for Israel now. Hamas’s war crimes are equal in depravity to those of the Nazis; their magnitude is far less only because Jews now have a fortified homeland and an Israeli army. Hamas and the Nazis also shared the goal of Jewish genocide. Following the Allies’ example, Israel should announce that it will obtain Hamas’s unconditional surrender.

In 1945, in the presence of representatives of the Allied Powers, German High Command officials signed military surrender documents—the Reims accord in France on May 7 and the Act of Military Surrender in Berlin on May 9. The documents required German soldiers to cease military operations. The Allies’ control of German territory enabled them to enforce that order, which they did.

At the Potsdam Conference in the summer of 1945, the Allies agreed on a complete disarmament and demilitarization of Germany, the transfer of land from Germany to Poland and the Soviet Union, and the expulsion of German populations from the countries Germany had attacked. The Allies also provided for “de-Nazification”—removing Nazis from positions of authority, eliminating Nazi political organizations, and the arrest and trial of war criminals.

The Allies pursued the removal of Nazis from positions of authority only halfheartedly; but Nazi political parties and organizations were effectively suppressed, and the highest-ranking Nazi leaders were arrested, tried and punished, including by death.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20089/hamas-represent-palestinians

The Biden administration’s assertion that Hamas is an insignificant group of terrorists that does not enjoy the support of many Palestinians is not only false; it is dangerously so. This assertion contradicts the reality, which proves that Hamas actually does represent a significant portion of the Palestinians.

This inconvenient reality is based on public opinion polls conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR) and the results of elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council and university student councils and professional unions. It is also based on mass demonstrations and rallies in support of Hamas before and after the October 7 carnage in which Hamas terrorists murdered more than 1,400 Israelis and wounded more than 4,000.

The most recent PSR poll, published last month, showed that if new presidential elections were held today, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh would win 58% of the vote, while Mahmoud Abbas would only receive 37%. Hamas’s “armed struggle” (terrorism) against Israel was supported by 58% of the Palestinian public, the poll showed…

This means that a majority of Palestinians share Hamas’s desire to eliminate Israel as expressed in the terror group’s 1988 charter. The poll also showed that 71% of the Palestinians support the formation of armed groups to murder Israelis.

In the past few months, Hamas-affiliated students won elections at two major Palestinian universities in the West Bank.

“The [university] elections are considered the bellwether of West Bank politics… With no general Palestinian elections on the horizon, student polls are seen as a ‘test for measuring public opinion’…” — Middle East Eye, May 25, 2023.

In 2021, Abbas cancelled elections he had called for the Palestinian Authority presidency and parliament after realizing that his Fatah faction was poised to lose to Hamas, as took place in the 2006 parliamentary election.

If, according to Biden and Blinken, Hamas does not represent the Palestinians, how do they explain the fact that… hundreds of Palestinian residents of the Gaza Strip joined the Hamas terrorists who attacked the Israeli communities near the border with the Gaza Strip?

The Biden administration is presenting a false claim according to which most Palestinians are opposed to Hamas and that Abbas’s Palestinian Authority, which rewards terrorists who murder Jews with monthly stipends, is a “peace partner” for Israel. This is a complete distortion of reality and does not represent the truth.

Recently, Abbas reminded everyone that he is an antisemite and a Holocaust denier.

When will Biden and Blinken grasp that there is no difference between the murderous Hamas leaders and Abbas the antisemite? Surely, Biden and Blinken are aware that Abbas has not condemned the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7. Abbas’s silence is a rambunctious approval of the cold-blooded massacre of hundreds upon hundreds of Israelis. Let there be no mistake about it: both Hamas and Abbas represent a majority of Palestinians whose goal is to murder Jews and destroy Israel.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20081/palestine-cause-state

Why did Hamas trigger its attack out of the blue? Hamas apologists repeat the usual shibboleths: occupation, colonial settlements, expulsions, Apartheid, the two-state solution.

A closer look, however, shows that none of those “reasons” could explain, let alone justify, why Hamas did what it did on October 7.

The [Palestinian Authority] and Hamas have preferred to pose as guardians of the flame rather than builders of state structures…. For a brief period, 2007-2013, the PA under Prime Minister Salam Fayyad tried to promote the state-building culture as opposed to the chest-beating posture of “the cause”. But both Hamas and the PA did all they could to derail Fayyad’s project.

The “Gaza first” scheme exposed the concept of “security through evacuation” as a dangerous myth that replaced another myth: land-for-peace, which has offered what amounts to lukewarm and always reversible peace.

All along, Israeli leaders tried to jump through one hoop after another to avoid seriously dealing with the “two-state” formula, which the United States and its Western allies promoted regardless of its lack of support among Israelis and Palestinians.

[T]he “Palestinian cause” [is] used, and abused, as a means of legitimizing regimes as diverse as the Islamic Republic of Iran; the AKP in Turkey and, believe it or not, the leftist outfit in Colombia. And that not to mention “return ticket revolutionaries” in the West who draw voyeuristic pleasure from watching others kill and die for “great causes.”

Throughout the Cold War, ignoring the geopolitical dimension of the Israel-Palestine issue encouraged wild-goose diplomatic chasings most notoriously symbolized by the “two-state” formula. Today, the same error is repeated by focusing almost exclusively on Hamas without asking who is funding, training, arming and manipulating Hamas in the name of “clash of civilizations”.

The current tragedy has shattered the status quo that took shape in the aftermath of the Cold War. Attempts at reviving it in one form or another would only provide a prelude to even bigger tragedies.