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I’m a War Scholar. There Is No Genocide in Gaza John Spencer

By on August 20th, 2025

https://x.com/SpencerGuard/status/1948010761957052628

John Spencer is chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute and host of the Urban Warfare Project Podcast. He served twenty-five years as an infantry soldier, which included two combat tours in Iraq. He is the coauthor of the book  Understanding Urban Warfare.

In his New York Times op-ed titled “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It”, Omer Bartov accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. As a professor of genocide studies, he should know better. Genocide is not defined by a few comments taken out of context, by estimates of casualties or destruction, or by how war looks in headlines or on social media. It is defined by specific intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group in whole or in part. That is a high legal bar. Bartov did not meet it. He did not even try.

I am not a lawyer or a political activist. I am a war expert. I have led soldiers in combat. I have trained military units in urban warfare for decades and studied and taught military history, strategy, and the laws of war for years. Since October 7, I have been to Gaza four times embedded with the Israel Defense Forces. I have interviewed the Prime Minister of Israel, the Defense Minister, the IDF Chief of Staff, Southern Command leadership, and dozens of commanders and soldiers on the front lines. I have reviewed their orders, watched their targeting process, and seen soldiers take real risks to avoid harming civilians. Nothing I have seen or studied resembles genocide or genocidal intent.

Bartov claims that five statements by Israeli leaders prove genocidal intent. He begins with Prime Minister Netanyahu’s comment on October 7 that Hamas would “pay a huge price.” That is not a call for genocide. It is what any leader would say after the worst terrorist attack in the nation’s history. He also cites Netanyahu’s statements that Hamas would be destroyed and that civilians should evacuate combat zones. That is not evidence of a desire to destroy a people. It is what professional militaries do when fighting an enemy that hides among civilians.

Bartov presents Netanyahu’s reference to “remember Amalek” as a smoking gun. But this is a phrase from Jewish history and tradition. It is engraved at Israel’s Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, and also appears on the Holocaust memorial in The Hague. In both places, it serves as a warning to remain vigilant against threats, not as a call for mass killing.

He also highlights Defense Minister Gallant’s use of the term “human animals” to describe Hamas fighters. That is not a war crime. After the slaughter, rape, and kidnapping of civilians on October 7, many would understand or even share that reaction.

Unable to find intent among those actually directing the war, Bartov turns to far-right politicians like Bezalel Smotrich and Nissim Vaturi. These individuals do not command troops, issue orders, or shape battlefield decisions. I have studied the actual orders. They focus on destroying Hamas, rescuing hostages, and protecting civilians whenever possible. Their rhetoric is irrelevant to the legal case.

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Yes, anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism Zarah Sultana is so wrong. Today’s obsessive loathing for Israel is definitely driven by bigotry. Brendan O’Neill *******

By on August 20th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/08/20/yes-anti-zionism-is-anti-semitism/

Is it anti-Semitic to criticise Israel? Of course not. No nation on Earth should be shielded from the brickbats or even the ridicule of the world’s citizens.

Is it anti-Semitic to rage day in, day out against Israel? To think of little else? To let this tiny state occupy your every waking thought? To call it uniquely barbarous, borderline demonic, a nation that lusts after blood like no other? To dream of its destruction? To traipse through the streets every week hollering for its obliteration? To call its citizens genocidal freaks and lunatics? To taunt them with memories of their ancestors’ extermination by branding them ‘Nazis’? To devote yourself so singularly to this one nation’s erasure that you come to define your entire political personality by that warped goal and proudly declare yourself an ‘anti-Zionist’?

Yes. Yes, that is anti-Semitic. If you maniacally obsess over the Jewish homeland, and detest Jewish nationalism more than any other nationalism, and gleefully chant for the death of the Jewish nation’s soldiers, and fantasise about the violent excision of the Jewish State ‘from the river to the sea’, then you have a problem with Jews. And more of us need to say so.

The anti-Zionism vs anti-Semitism debate is one of the most infuriating of our times. It reared its head again this week following an interview Zarah Sultana gave to the New Left Review. She’s the former Labour MP, now independent MP, who is setting up a new political party with the Magic Grandpa of Britain’s knackered left, Jeremy Corbyn. She praised Corbyn’s tenure as leader of the Labour Party from 2015 to 2020, but she made some digs, too. He too meekly ‘capitulated’ to the definition of anti-Semitism put forward by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, she said. And that was bad because the IHRA ‘equates [anti-Semitism] with anti-Zionism’.

She is presumably referring to the IHRA’s insistence that some forms of Israel-bashing cross the line from political critique into something darker and dodgier. For example, using ‘symbols and images associated with classic anti-Semitism’, such as ‘claims of Jews killing Jesus’, to ‘characterise Israel or Israelis’. That seems reasonable to me. I once saw a placard on a ‘pro-Palestine’ demo that said ‘They killed Jesus and now they’re killing Palestinians’ – anyone denying the virulent Jew hatred in such a crude cry is either a fool or a liar.

The IHRA also says it is suspect to make comparisons between ‘contemporary Israeli policy’ and the policies of the Nazis. Again, that’s reasonable. I don’t want anyone cancelled or censored for drawing pitiless and historically illiterate links between the Nazis’ industrialised burning of the Jews and Israel’s wars against the armies of anti-Semites that surround it. But it is unquestionably bigoted. The gross fashion for referring to Gaza as a new Warsaw Ghetto, or to Israel’s war on Hamas as a new holocaust, or to Benjamin Netanyahu as the new Hitler, has one aim and one aim only: to wound Jews with reminders of their people’s near destruction; to shame them by likening them to the very monsters they were once gassed by.

Ms Sultana got some flak on X. Some people even called her anti-Semitic. She fired back. Your ‘smears won’t work this time’, she said. And then, definitively: ‘Anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism.’ She warned those accusing her of being anti-Jewish to ‘lawyer up’. I am more than happy to accept that Ms Sultana is not an anti-Semite. I hope she and her new party extend that courtesy to others and hold back from branding them ‘Islamophobes’. Otherwise, who knows, they might have to ‘lawyer up’, too. But on anti-Zionism, she is plain wrong. To some of us, it is patently clear that this strange and feverish ideology that has such a brutish grip on the minds of our young and our intellectuals is often anti-Semitism in wokeface.

Let’s leave to one side Ms Sultana and take a look at the broader Israelophobic animus that has swept the West like a fever since Hamas’s fascistic pogrom of 7 October 2023. There is nothing more disingenuous than when leftist hotheads or liberal scribes say, ‘It isn’t anti-Semitic to criticise Israel’, because we are not talking about criticism of Israel. We are talking blind hatred for Israel. Hysteria about Israel. The fantasy of Israel’s death. The wild and demented conviction that Israel is the most murderous state in existence, if not the most murderous state ever, and that it wields staggering power over the obsequious nations of the West. That’s not criticism – it’s a species of madness, built on the foul belief that the Jewish State is the most nefarious, most bloody and most sneakily powerful state on Earth.

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Israel’s High Court of injustice and the Red Cross Ruthie Blum

By on August 20th, 2025

https://www.jns.org/israels-high-court-of-injustice-and-the-red-cross/

Israel’s High Court of Justice has once again revealed its misplaced priorities. And that’s putting it delicately.

In a hearing on Monday about National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s policy to bar Red Cross visits to Nukhba terrorists in Israeli prisons until the organization gains access to the hostages in Gaza, the judges made their outrage clear. But their fury was not aimed at Hamas or the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which has utterly abandoned its humanitarian mission. Instead, it was directed at their own government and prison authorities.

The ex parte session was spurred by a petition on behalf of the terrorists. It was submitted by the usual left-wing “suspects”: the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, Physicians for Human Rights, HaMoked (the Center for the Defense of the Individual) and Gisha.

These NGOs pulled a typical fast one. They first acknowledged that “Hamas doesn’t provide information about those it holds in captivity, and refuses to allow Red Cross visits to the hostages … in Gaza [among whom] are those who were murdered in Hamas captivity.”

They then went on to get to the crux of their foul maneuver to equate victim and perpetrator, by stating that “Israel’s obligations toward those it holds do not change because of Hamas’s war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

As if Israel’s “holding” of mass murderers is comparable to Hamas’s “holding” of innocent captives.

Not surprisingly, Justice Yitzhak Amit, the self-anointed president of the Supreme Court, agrees with this twisted logic. But the reasoning that he proffered during the hearing went beyond woke politics to focus on his personal reputation and that of his hallowed perch in the international arena.   

“Right now, what’s … being publicized abroad [is] that there is starvation, that dozens of prisoners are dying, that it’s basically the Israeli Guantánamo,” he bellowed, banging on his table. “And you’re putting us, the court, at the forefront, on the front line.”

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Sally Rooney’s luxury loathing for Israel The ban on Palestine Action has made martyrs out of moral conformists. Brendan O’Neill

By on August 19th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/08/18/sally-rooneys-luxury-loathing-for-israel/

Reading that soppy Sally Rooney op-ed in Saturday’s Irish Times, it suddenly struck me: the UK government’s proscription of Palestine Action is one of the best things that’s happened to her. And to all the other keffiyeh-adorned poseurs in the bourgeois cult of Israelophobia. For at last, these people get to disguise their morally conformist abhorrence for the Jewish State as something radical. As something daring, sexy, possibly illegal, a thing you might even be arrested for. Courtesy of Keir Starmer’s clampdown on Palestine Action, these privileged spouters of the conventional wisdom of blind hatred for Israel have been gifted the thing they so sorely lacked – a frisson of revolutionary defiance.

Rooney’s piece has got the digital left squealing into their keffiyehs with delight. Puffing herself like some Boudicca of the anti-Israel set, she says she will continue to cheer and even fund Palestine Action. That’s the middle-class movement that loved making a spectacle of its virtuous animus for the Jewish State by carrying out infantile and sometimes dangerous stunts. It was proscribed as a ‘terrorist’ organisation in July, meaning you can get 14 years in the clink just for expressing support for it, never mind funding it with some of the royalties from your naff novels. Our hero Sally doesn’t care, though: I’ll still back them, she says, and ‘if this makes me a “supporter of terror” under UK law, so be it’.

Is anyone else dying from second-hand embarrassment? Here we have a rich novelist, the darling of the literary establishment, cosplaying as a modern-day Bernadette Devlin. It’s giving radical chic, to borrow Tom Wolfe’s phrase, where the patrician classes cosy up to ‘street politics’ in the hope that some of its hustle and glamour might rub off on their otherwise plain, bourgeois lives. My favourite bit is when Rooney says she even intends to fund Palestine Action using the ‘residual fees’ she gets from the BBC for its ‘two fine [TV] adaptations’ of her novels. Shorter version: I’m successful and moral! She thinks she’s getting one over on the BBC, blissfully unaware that it is packed with Israel-haters like her who’ll be clinking their Prosecco glasses when they hear that their favourite novelist plans to give Beeb money to Palestine ponces.

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My Say: Pictures and Propaganda

By on August 18th, 2025

An Allegedly Armless Lebanese Child, Wounded by Israeli Bomb, Actually Has Both Arms Intact August 23, 1982

The difference today is that President Donald Trump has Israel’s back and is fighting antisemitism while Ronald Reagan turned away and abstained in the vicious UN response to Israel’s bombing  of  the Osirak nuclear research reactor being built near Baghdad. rsk

https://www.jta.org/archive/an-allegedly-armless-lebanese-child-wounded-by-israeli-bomb-actually-has-both-arms-intact

An allegedly armless child, whose picture is reportedly displayed on President Reagan’s desk as a symbol of suffering in Lebanon, turns out to be a boy, not a girl as alleged, with both arms intact. The child, identified as four-month-old Eli Massou, whose mother is 16 years old, was discharged from the hospital a few days after the picture was taken.

According to the caption accompanying the United Press International photo distributed throughout the world, it was a picture of a baby girl swathed in bandages after both arms had been blown off by a misdirected Israeli bomb. The child was seen held in the arms of a nurse.

After a news report that Reagan had publicized the picture as a symbol of suffering in the Lebanon war, the Israel medical corps started to track down the infant and the nurse holding him.

The nurse and the doctor who treated the baby were found, and sworn depositions were taken from them. The child was tracked down along with his mother in a Lebanese village where they had taken refuge after they were both released from the hospital.

According to the medical report, one of the infant’s arms was broken in a bombing raid. The arm and his face were also slightly burned. His mother was also slightly injured in the raid and his father was killed. Doctors said the child was completely swathed, as shown in the UPI photo, because that is the standard procedure of dealing with an infant whose arm has been broken to prevent unnecessary movement during medical treatment.

Photographs of the apparently now healthy baby were published in Israeli papers today. Copies have been sent to the Israel Embassy in Washington, which presumably sent a copy to the White House to replace the incorrectly-captioned picture on the President’s desk.

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They Became Symbols for Gazan Starvation. But All 12 Suffer from Other Health Problems. A Free Press investigation found that viral photos lacked important context: The subjects have cystic fibrosis, rickets, or other serious ailments.By Olivia Reingold, Tanya Lukyanova

By on August 18th, 2025

https://www.thefp.com/p/they-became-symbols-for-gazan-starvation

For the past several weeks, critics have fumed at The New York Times over a misleading photo of an 18-month-old boy in Gaza on its front page. It turns out that Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq, who was a symbol for a story about widespread hunger in Gaza, wasn’t simply suffering from malnutrition. He had pre-existing health issues “affecting his brain and his muscle development,” according to an updated version of the story. But that detail didn’t find its way into print.

When the so-called paper of record updated its story with an editors note four days later, it also quietly deleted the mother’s claim that her son was “born a healthy child.” There was still no mention of the boy’s brother, who appears healthy in the background of another photo that appeared online.

This incident wasn’t just a one-off.

An investigation by The Free Press reveals that at least a dozen other viral images of starvation in Gaza also lacked important context: The subjects of those photos have significant health problems. Those appeared all over social media, in the reports of leading international aid organizations, and on some of the most prestigious news outlets in the United States, including CNN, NPR, and the Times—without disclosing the complicated medical histories that help explain their stark appearances.

It’s not that there isn’t hunger in Gaza. There is. The World Health Organization reported 63 deaths from malnutrition last month alone, including 25 children. Some of them might have been sick or worse even if there was no war. In 2022, about 50 Gazans under the age of 20 died from malnutrition, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.

Yannay Spitzer, an economist at Hebrew University of Jerusalem who has been tracking food prices in Gaza during the past few months, said hunger in Gaza is largely declining since Israel resumed aid deliveries in late May after its nearly 80-day blockade. During that period, prices for basic necessities like flour skyrocketed by 4,000 percent, according to his review of data from the Gaza Chamber of Congress and the World Food Programme.

“If a situation like that lasts more than a few days, a lot of people will go hungry but not starve to death en masse. That’s the beginning of a process, which the media portrayed as already at the catastrophic end stage,” Spitzer said, before pausing. “But it never happened.”

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Here We Go Again – The West’s Palestinian State Fantasy by Nils A. Haug

By on August 18th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21834/palestinian-state-fantasy

Only leaders completely sold out to extremist ideologies would persist in pushing a proposal so far detached from reality and so harmful to many people — starting with the atrociously governed Palestinians — that it is almost beyond comprehension.

“If you notice, the talks with Hamas fell apart on the day Macron made the unilateral decision that he’s going to recognize a Palestinian state. And then you have other people come forward, other countries say, well, if there is not a ceasefire by September, we’re going to recognize a Palestinian state. Well, if I’m Hamas, I basically conclude, ‘let’s not do a ceasefire because we can be rewarded, we can claim it as a victory.'” — US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

The situation in Gaza could quite easily have been resolved many months ago if Hamas had laid down its weapons and released the hostages it had no business kidnapping in the first place. This did not happen. Nevertheless, Israel is blamed for trying to get its tortured and starved hostages released. What would France, Britain, Canada or Australia have done? The party responsible for Gaza’s collateral damage is Hamas.

Israel… is doing its best in horrendously dangerous circumstances to feed the hungry people of Gaza, while Hamas deliberately starves the hostages, and has lately photographed them digging their own graves.

A Palestinian state would, in addition, continue trying to conquer more of Israel’s historic homeland, and try to drive Jews out of it, as they openly vow to do…

That, it seems, is Macron’s view of a “just and lasting peace”.

“If France is really so determined to see a Palestinian state, I’ve got a suggestion for them: Carve out a piece of the French Riviera, and create a Palestinian state. They’re welcome to do that, but they’re not welcome to impose that kind of pressure on a sovereign nation. ” —US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, June 1, 2025.

A further reason that Western efforts to impose a Palestinian state are inadvisable is that they ignore a warning from the Trump administration that “any country that takes ‘anti-Israel actions’ will be viewed as acting in opposition to US interests and will face diplomatic consequences.”

“There was a Palestinian state. It was called Gaza. Look what we received. The biggest massacre since the Holocaust. To establish a Palestinian state after October 7 is a huge prize not only for Hamas [but] for Iran.” — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, February 6, 2025.

The question remains how any rational national leader can simply discount Israel’s attitude towards an independent Palestinian (terrorist, Jihadist) state within or alongside its borders? Would those leaders countenance an uppity ISIS or Al Qaeda on their borders? Yet, Starmer and Macron (together with leaders of Spain, Norway and Ireland) are doing exactly that. Is it possible that they are endeavouring to accommodate the millions of Muslim voters they have helped infiltrate into their own broken countries?

This irony is that many in the West who are advocating “social justice for all people” think nothing of vilifying the Jews.

At this point in history, Israel’s legitimate actions consist in defending its people — and the stunningly ungrateful West — from a horror disguised within a veneer of fake “moral clarity,” along with false charges of a supposed genocide in Gaza. As Huckabee remarked, “If Israel is trying to commit genocide, they are really, really bad at it.” In fact, Israel is defending the West — the very people undermining them — from a genocide. Publicly expressed slogans targeting Jews simply support the murderous intent of the enemies of Israel and those apparently trying to help them finish the job.

A majority of Western leaders clearly refuse to exercise integrity when it concerns the Palestinian issue. Only leaders completely sold out to extremist ideologies would persist in pushing a proposal so far detached from reality and so harmful to many people — starting with the atrociously governed Palestinians — that it is almost beyond comprehension. Perhaps this phenomena is best described as a “cognitive bias” that can “lead to a person interpreting all new information as supporting their preconception.”

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The Palestinian Authority’s Human ‘Slaughterhouse’ by Khaled Abu Toameh

By on August 18th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21846/palestinian-authority-slaughterhouse

None of these countries… [France, Canada, Australia, the UK] has demanded that the Palestinian Authority halt its human rights violations against its own people. Ending financial and administrative corruption and excluding Hamas from governance is pointless as long as the PA continues to crack down on its political rivals and impose severe restrictions on freedom of speech.

Last month, Palestinian Authority security officer Ammar Saeed Abu Thahri reportedly died while in PA custody. It remains unclear why Abu Thahri was arrested by PA security forces in the first place.

“Most of the arrests were related to freedom of expression or participation in demonstrations in solidarity with the Gaza Strip.” — Palestinian human rights group Lawyers for Justice, safa.pa, July 30, 2025.

The Palestinian Authority security officers who beat political activist Nizar Banat to death in 2021 have still not been punished. Banat, an outspoken critic of the PA leadership, was beaten to death by PA security officers in Hebron.

“We have documented hundreds of cases of arrest, torture, and ill-treatment of activists and political opponents since Nizar’s killing…. Those involved in most of these crimes have not been held accountable.” — Lawyers for Justice, June 24, 2025.

If France, Australia, the UK and Canada really cared about the Palestinians, they should be demanding that the PA respect public freedoms and stop its crackdown on political and human rights activists.

The last thing the Middle East needs is another Arab dictatorship run by corrupt leaders whose main goal is to batter their own people while siphoning off still more European and international aid money into their own bank accounts.

France, Canada, Australia, the UK and other Western countries that recently pledged to recognize a Palestinian state have said that their decision is “predicated” on commitments from the Palestinian Authority (PA) to undergo critical governance reforms, as well as excluding the Iran-backed Hamas terrorist group from a future Palestinian government.

None of these countries, however, has demanded that the PA halt its human rights violations against its own people. Ending financial and administrative corruption and excluding Hamas from governance is pointless as long as the PA continues to crack down on its political rivals and impose severe restrictions on freedom of speech.

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POSITIVE NEWS FROM ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

By on August 17th, 2025

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com

The expression “all Greek to me” means that something is incomprehensible, but Greek mythology covers every aspect of human endeavor.

Apate was the Greek goddess of fraud, deceit, trickery, deception and guile. She is the perfect symbol for the mainstream media with its anti-Israel bias churned out daily in deceptive accusations of forced starvation, deliberate targeting of children and hospitals and “genocide” against Israel.

Themis is the Greek goddess of truth and justice, the perfect symbol of Michael Ordman’s weekly report on the outsize and dazzling contributions of succor and healing which benefits the entire world. rsk

POSITIVE NEWS IN A WAR
 
It must have been witchcraft! On social media. Abdollah Ganji, former editor of Iran’s state-controlled newspaper Javan, accused Israel of utilizing “Jewish witchcraft” and demonic forces during the recent war between the Jewish state and the Islamic Republic of Iran.  How else can anyone explain the Israeli victory?
https://worldisraelnews.com/israel-used-jewish-witchcraft-during-war-iranian-journalist/
 
Technion graduates celebrate. Among the 1,904 graduates who just received Technion diplomas, was Adi whose brother, Shlomi was in the audience, having survived kidnapping by Hamas. Also twin brothers Ofek and Shachaf (electrical and computer engineering graduates) who completed 500 days of reserve duty together.
https://www.technion.ac.il/en/blog/article/1904-graduates-received-their-technion-diplomas-this-week/
 
Ex-hostages celebrate daughter’s wedding. Shir Siegel waited nearly 2 years for her wedding as Hamas held her parents hostage in Gaza. Mother Aviva was released after 51 days and Father Keith after 484 days. Fellow ex-hostages Emily Damari, Liri Albag, Agam Berger, and Amit Soussana joined them under the chuppah.
https://unitedwithisrael.org/watch-keith-and-aviva-siegel-walk-daughter-down-aisle-as-six-freed-hostages-recite-heartfelt-shehecheyanu-prayer/  https://israfan.com/p/freed-hostages-join-siegel-wedding
 
Building Weizmann back better. A month after Iranian missiles struck the Weizmann Institute, demolishing cancer, heart research and environmental labs, repair work is fast underway. And a “miracle” prevented the mass of flammable materials on site from igniting.
https://www.jns.org/israels-symbol-of-science-will-build-back-better-after-iranian-attack/
 
Agricultural school near Lebanese border. Kibbutz Yiron – an Israeli farming community in the Upper Galilee adjacent to the border with Lebanon – is opening a new Israeli agricultural boarding school this fall. It merges education with agriculture, breathing new life into the region following the war with Hezbollah.
https://www.jns.org/new-israeli-agricultural-high-school-to-open-near-the-border-with-lebanon/
 
85,000+ foreign workers. More than 85,000 foreign workers have entered Israel since Oct 7 2023. In addition, 11,000 agricultural laborers who had fled the war have returned to Israel.
https://www.jns.org/more-than-85000-foreign-workers-have-arrived-in-israel-since-start-of-war/
 
“You are my friend”. This video shows an IDF soldier giving a Gazan child puddings to share with his brother, who later thanked the soldier by calling him a friend with a good heart.
https://worldisraelnews.com/watch-heartwarming-moment-as-idf-soldier-shares-food-with-gazan-child/
 
 
ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
 
Groundbreaking cancer research.  One of European Research Council’s latest grants awarded to Israelis is for Bar-Ilan’s project targeting Protein Degradation, aiming to revolutionize how cancer and other diseases are treated at the molecular level. It specifically involves instructing cells to destroy harmful proteins.
https://www.biu.ac.il/en/article/583680
 
Swallowing your tongue? No need to worry. (TY Hazel) A new study led by a Tel Aviv Ichilov (Sourasky) Medical Center cardiologist reveals that it is wrong (and dangerous) to check if heart attack victims risk swallowing their tongue before commencing CPR. Delays can cause death or severe anoxic brain damage
https://www.ynetnews.com/health_science/article/hjblh11avxg
https://onlinecjc.ca/article/S0828-282X(25)00384-8/fulltext
 
Cross-border operations. Two critically ill Israelis were saved thanks to the heat and lungs donated by a newly deceased patient in Cyprus. Despite a car breakdown, the organs was transported to Israel within 4 hours. In addition, in cross-donations from living donors, five Israelis and three Cypriots received a new kidney.
https://worldisraelnews.com/israeli-doctors-transplant-cypriot-heart-and-lungs-in-race-against-time/
 
How to spot those at risk of genetic diseases. Researchers at Rambam Medical Center in Haifa have rewritten the book on prenatal testing for genetic diseases. The “old” method checks for identical segments (ROH) in the DNA inherited from mother and father. The new algorithm recognizes that ethnic minorities have more ROH.
https://unitedwithisrael.org/israels-rabin-medical-center-reports-genetic-disease-breakthrough/

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As Bono now knows, you criticise Hamas at your peril The mad backlash against U2 confirms pop music is under the spell of Islamo-fascism. Brendan O’Neill

By on August 16th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/08/14/as-bono-now-knows-you-criticise-hamas-at-your-peril/

Bono’s getting flak again. What’s he done now? Foisted another U2 album on iPhone users? Donned his expensive shades for yet another gurning selfie with some president or pope? Nope, it’s far worse than that – he criticised Hamas.

Yes, the U2 frontman is getting it in the neck for calling Hamas ‘evil’. It was in a statement issued at the start of this week. After nearly two years of being harangued by the keffiyeh knobs who clog up the cultural establishment, all of them wailing ‘When will U2 speak about the genocide?!’, the band buckled. But it wasn’t enough to satiate the fury of the Israel haters. In fact it riled them even more. For Bono made the fatal mistake of reminding folk that an army of Jew-loathing lunatics started this infernal war, and its name is Hamas.

Under the title ‘On Gaza’, all four band members offered their thoughts. It’s mostly typical Boomer fare on the horribleness of war. But then there’s the Hamas slamming. It is a testament to the choking conformism of our Israelophobic moment that it feels balls-out radical to see a rock act criticise that neo-fascist militia. Drummer Larry Mullen Jnr even opens his remarks with a furious dig at the ‘Hamas-led massacre of Israelis’ when ‘innocent music fans [were] slaughtered, beaten and abused at the Nova music festival’. He goes on to rail against Israel, natch, but my mouth was nonetheless agape: a musician mentioning the savagery at Nova? Can it be?

It is Bono’s comment that is most striking. He lays into Israel, which is what the pitchfork-wavers wanted. But he lays into Hamas, too. ‘The rape, murder and abduction of Israelis at the Nova music festival was evil’, he says. He dares to humanise the youth of Nova. They were ‘music lovers and fans like us’, he says. It feels like sweet moral relief from the anti-Semitic damning of those dancers in the desert as ‘settler-colonialists’ who had it coming. To think of those kids ‘hiding under a stage in Kibbutz Re’im’ is awful, writes Bono. And then they were ‘butchered’ by Hamas, he says, to ‘set a diabolical trap for Israel and to get a war going that might just redraw the map from “the river to the sea”… a gamble Hamas’s leadership were willing to play with the lives of two million Palestinians’.

I’ve done my fair share of Bono-bashing, but I’ll admit it: there is great moral clarity here. Bono recognises that Hamas started this war, that it did so with the aim of erasing Israel, and that it has zero regard for the Palestinians sacrificed at the altar of its psychotic anti-Semitic dream. ‘Yahya Sinwar didn’t mind if he lost the battle or even the war if he could destroy Israel as a moral as well as an economic force’, says Bono. His terrorists ‘deliberately positioned themselves under civilian targets’, he says, ‘having tunnelled their way from school to mosque to hospital’. Why would a terror outfit behave so insanely? Check out its charter, says Bono. ‘It’s an evil read.’

He then turns his guns on Benjamin Netanyahu. Under his rule, what was ‘once an oasis of innovation and free-thinking’ in the Middle East risks falling under the spell of ‘a fundamentalism as blunt as a machete’. He goes way over the top, accusing Netanyahu’s Israel of a ‘depravity and lawlessness’ that ‘feels like uncharted territory’. If he thought such stinging words would placate the keffiyeh mob demanding he take the knee to their demented animus for Israel, he was mistaken. They’ve still found him guilty of the greatest sin in the era of Israelophobia: nuance.

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