RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21813/how-hamas-sees-the-west-recognition-of-palestine

Hamas’s primary goal is evidently to remain in power after the war so that it can continue its jihad (holy war) to eliminate Israel.

Western leaders have succeeded in making any negotiations impossible. The message they sent was: Massacre and keep the hostages and be rewarded with a state. The terrorists clearly see yet again that terrorism pays off. So keep on doing it — especially in Europe!

Despite their opposition to the “two-state solution,” the Palestinian terrorists are nevertheless prepared to take any land Israel gives them so it can be used as a launchpad to destroy Israel.

In 2017, Hamas issued a “policy document” that basically confirmed this approach. The terror group made it clear in its document that it would not oppose the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem. Hamas, however, stressed that this does not mean that the terror group would recognize Israel’s right to exist:

Hamas’s policy document has been mistakenly interpreted by some Westerners as a sign of pragmatism, moderation and acceptance of the “two-state solution” on the part of the terror group. False. Hamas, as part of a campaign to deceive and mislead Westerners into accepting it as a legitimate player in the Palestinian arena, is pretending that it supports a Palestinian next to Israel. In reality, Hamas is clearly stating that such a state will be used to “liberate all of Palestine, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. In the same document, Hamas also makes it abundantly clear that it will pursue its jihad against Israel after the establishment of a Palestinian state….

This is certainly not the right time to talk about a “two-state solution.” The jihadists and terrorists see it as a reward for their atrocities against Israel. It is more important to focus efforts on dismantling and crushing all the Palestinian terror groups and embarking on a process of deradicalization for the Palestinians before talking about a peace process or “two-state solution.”

Under the current circumstances, statements about recognizing a Palestinian state send a message to the Palestinians that terrorism and violence –not negotiations — are the best way to gain international support for statehood …and anything else.

The recent announcements by France, Britain, Canada and other countries that they intend to recognize a Palestinian state have emboldened the Iran-backed Palestinian terror group Hamas. Its members, on October 7, 2023, were behind the worst crime committed against Jews since the Holocaust. By declaring their support for the establishment of a Palestinian state in the aftermath of Hamas’s attack on Israel. The massacre resulted in the murder of more than 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals and the injury of thousands. In addition, another 251 Israelis and foreign nationals were kidnapped to the Gaza Strip, where 50 – 30 dead and 20 believed alive – are still held captive.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/08/04/the-west-is-complicit-in-hamass-torture-of-the-hostages/

We know why Hamas would drag two Jews underground and starve them: because it is an army of anti-Semites founded with the express intention of persecuting Jews. We know why it would humiliate the Jews further by taunting them on film, forcing one to dig his own grave for the cameras and capturing the other weeping in ravenous pain: because it revels in the psychological torment of what it views as a ‘lesser people’. And we know why it would marshal these two skeletal men – Evyatar David, 24, and Rom Bravslavski, 21 – to the end of horrifying the people of Israel: because its sole motivation is to wound, ideally fatally, the Jewish State.

But here’s my question: how do we explain Hamas’s lack of shame over what it inflicted on those two Jews? What lies behind the pride with which it paraded its crimes before the world media? To mimic the Nazis and jail Jews for being Jews before reducing them to raw-boned shadows of their former selves – that’s one thing. But to boast about it, to publish the videos, to show the world the inhuman consequences of your fascistic delirium – that’s another thing entirely. Why is Hamas so content to revel in its aping of the racist hysterias of the past?

It’s because it feels emboldened. It senses that it enjoys a kind of moral impunity among the opinion-shaping classes of the West. It knows our activist classes and influencers have supped so giddily on the Kool-Aid of Israelophobia that even this, even these dystopic images of Jews half-starved by armed anti-Semites, will not be sufficient to steer them back to moral reason. It knows that this horror, too, will be blamed on Israel. The enslavement of young David and Braslavski to the twisted cause of hurting the Jewish nation is a testament to the evil of Hamas. Hamas’s cockiness in releasing sick images of their suffering is a testament to the moral disarray of us.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/08/05/ezra-klein-peddles-old-progressive-disdain-for-israel-as-new/

As in 2003, so too in 2025: The illiberal imagination nourishes progressive disdain for Israel.

Since 1897, when Theodor Herzl convened the first Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, Jews have divided over the significance of a Jewish nation-state in the Jewish people’s ancestral homeland. Seldom, however, have American progressive Jews shown so little sympathy for the challenges that Israel faces as they have in the 21st century or delivered themselves of such illiberal judgments in condemning Israel as they have in the aftermath of Iran-backed Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, massacres.

In Oct. 2003, amid the Second Intifada’s carnage, the late New York University history professor Tony Judt proclaimed in The New York Review of Books the death of “the Middle East peace process.” The then-common phrase referring to efforts to resolve the Israel-Palestinian conflict was highly misleading because the parties’ combined population – Israel, along with West Bank and Gaza Palestinians – totaled around 10 million, while the Middle East’s Muslim population stood at approximately 270 million. Not only did the conflict directly involve less than 4% of the Middle East’s population, but it also revolved around a contested sliver of territory that represented less than 0.5% of the land over which Arab states and Iran exercised sovereignty.

Identifying the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the principal source of instability and violence in the Middle East casts doubt on Israel’s legitimacy as the nation-state of the Jewish people.

So does assigning Israel the lion’s share of the blame for the conflict. This Judt also did in “Israel: The Alternative.”

His New York Review of Books essay barely alluded to the Second Intifada, which erupted in fall 2000, a few months after then-Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat stormed out of Camp David negotiations over a Palestinian state. Over the next five years, Palestinians conducted more than 130 suicide-bombing attacks on primarily civilian targets in Israel, killing more than 1,000 and wounding more than 8,000. Furthermore, Judt understated the jihadists’ ideological hatred. He said nothing about the Palestinian refusal to recognize Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. And he ignored the Palestinian insistence on a “right of return,” a right without foundation in international law that would allow the then-approximately 4 million descendants of some 700,000 Palestinian refugees from Israel’s 1948-49 War of Independence to take up residence in Israel and turn it into a Muslim-majority state.

https://www.thefp.com/p/coleman-hughes-the-simple-truth-about?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Over the past few weeks, images of emaciated Gazan children have circulated the media. Global outrage has exploded over emerging evidence of widespread hunger that the pictures purportedly capture. The anger has led major U.S. allies, including France, Britain, and Canada, to say they will recognize a Palestinian state.

Amid these developments, it may seem cartoonish, even obscene, to say that in the war between Israel and Hamas, Israel is the good guy. But it’s the truth. And it’s a truth that’s incredibly easy to forget amid the day-to-day coverage of this terrible war.

If you need a reminder, consider what Hamas did on Saturday when the terrorist group released a video of Israeli hostage Evyatar David. Evyatar, who is 24 years old, has been held captive by Hamas for 667 days. He is shirtless, gaunt, and clearly starving. Or as his family put it: “a living skeleton, buried alive.” He tells the camera he hasn’t eaten in days.

In one section of the video, he is forced to dig a hole in the tunnel where he is being held. He says it will be his grave.

Hamas released this video because it wants to increase its leverage in negotiations. If the Israeli population becomes so heartbroken that they demand a hostage deal on any terms, then Hamas can go back to ruling Gaza, building up its forces using stolen aid, and preparing for the next October 7.

Another way to put it is that the terrorist group is running a highly effective campaign of information warfare, and Western media outlets are falling for it.

Take a recent article, by now much discussed, published by The New York Times. Relying on testimony from several doctors working in Gaza as well as the Gaza Health Ministry, the article states that deaths in Gaza from starvation are on the rise. One photo stands out: a mother holding an emaciated, skeletal toddler named Muhammad.