“Oct 7 2023”

The residents of kibbutzes near Gaza dreamt of a two-state solution with their Palestinian neighbours – then the Oct 7 attacks began…

There used to be a saying among those Israelis who lived in the communities next to the border with Gaza, commonly said with a shrug as missiles flew overhead: “We live in paradise 95 per cent of the time. The other 5 per cent is hell.”

The paradise was all too clear for them: loving communities where those living next door felt more like family than neighbours; gorgeous scenery overlooking the arid majesty of the Negev desert; a still quietness that would only be pierced by the laughter of children playing.

Gaza situation ‘heartbreaking,’ says Freeland when asked about Netanyahu’s rebuke

OTTAWA – The situation in the Gaza Strip is “heartbreaking,” Canada’s deputy prime minister said Wednesday, the day after Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rebuked Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for urging Israel to show the highest level of restraint in the besieged Palestinian territory.

“I think everyone would agree that the humanitarian situation in Gaza is heartbreaking. It’s really difficult to see the images of what’s happening,” Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland told reporters Wednesday in Mascouche, Que.

Freeland, who is also the federal finance minister, had been asked to respond to Netanyahu calling out Trudeau on Tuesday evening, hours after he had urged Israel’s government to “exercise maximum restraint” in its war against Hamas, which has included regular airstrikes in Gaza.

Some in Parliament appease them because they want their votes. Others fear confrontation. The door is closing.

Nemo propheta in patria (no man is a prophet in his own land)…But on August 21, 2021, I wrote:

“‘The Taliban have defeated the West,’ says Lord Dannatt, former head of the British military mission in Afghanistan. London today sends its military to evacuate British citizens in Kabul. Tomorrow what will you do with the English cities that have fallen into the hands of the same Islamic fundamentalists?”.

November 11 was Remembrance Day in Great Britain, the day on which the English solemnly remember all those who have fallen in the nation’s wars. A huge event emotionally, no doubt due to the country’s heavy losses in the First World War.

On Hamas and the moral blindness of identity politics

Support for Hamas on U.S. college campuses has not surprised those of us who have witnessed the slow but decisive erosion of liberal thought on the hallowed grounds ostensibly committed to nourishing it. The humanities capitulated decades ago; now the natural and social sciences have succumbed as well. Every discipline stumbles over itself seeking absolution for sins its present-day adherents did not commit. College administrators respond to, and accelerate, this longing, while students bear the ever-rising cost of an anti-liberal crusade. In gatherings formal and informal, faculty, staff, and students signal their religious need to be counted among the redeemed rather than the damned.

The roots of the elite university’s antisemitism and Nazi association run deep

In the aftermath of the October 7 attack on Israel, when videos were circulating on social media showing the enormities perpetrated on Israelis by Hamas terrorists — women raped, old people and children abducted, civilians murdered en masse — students of Harvard’s leftist groups banded together to condemn… Israel. Members of thirty-four student organizations signed a letter declaring that they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” The spectacle of America’s elite youth engaging in a shameless act of victim-blaming sent shockwaves through the world.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan today said Israel was a ‘terror state’ committing war crimes and violating international law in Gaza, while repeating his view that Hamas gunmen are not terrorists but a ‘political party elected by Palestinians’.

In a fiery speech to members of his party, Erdogan said Turkey would work to ensure that Israel’s political and military leaders are recognised as ‘terrorists’ and brought to trial in international courts.

A ranting Erdogan said Israel was a ‘terrorists state’ intent on destroying Gaza along with the thousands of people who live in the besieged territory.

EXCLUSIVE: Rep. Rashida Tlaib is part of a secret social media group in which its members have glamorized Hamas in its war battle with Israel after the terror group attacked and killed hundreds of innocent Israeli civilians last month, Fox News Digital has found.

The Michigan Democrat is a member of the Palestinian American Congress group on Facebook. The group is hidden from non-members and does not appear on the platform’s search engine, though Fox News Digital was able to gain access to it.

Benjamin Netanyahu has warned America and the West will ‘be next’ if Hamas is not eradicated.

The Israeli PM told Fox News on Monday that for the sake of the ‘civilized world’ it is essential the IDF roots out the terrorists responsible for the October 7 massacre.

Netanyahu said: ‘If we don’t win now, then Europe is next and you’re next. And we have to win.

Israel says its military has entered Gaza’s largest hospital in a “precise and targeted operation” against Hamas.

The al-Shifa hospital has been the site of a stand-off, with debate raging over the Israeli claim that it is being used as cover for a Hamas command and control centre in bunkers built ten metres underground. Hamas and Shifa medical staff deny the allegation.

More … IDF says it has entered Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital in ‘targeted operation’ against Hamas

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu teed off on Justin Trudeau’s critique on Tuesday about his country’s war against Hamas, saying the militant group is committing a “double war crime” by putting civilians’ lives at risk in Gaza.

The death of a 19-year-old hostage who is believed to have been killed amid airstrikes in Gaza has been weaponised as part of a campaign of “psychological terrorism” by Hamas, Israel said.

Amnon Scheffler, a spokesman for the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), said that a video released by Hamas of Noa Marciano, a soldier from Modiin who turned 19 while kidnapped, was “horrific and evil and clearly psychological warfare”.

In a video released by Hamas last night, Marciano said that she was being held with others. “The bombing is very close to us … We could die from the bombings” she said, apparently reading from a script. “Please stop.”

The Oct. 17 “bombing” of the Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza City led to a “day of rage” against Israel throughout the Muslim world. Of course, when it was revealed that, rather than a hospital being bombed by Israeli war planes, a parking lot was hit by an errant Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket, we did not hear calls for a day of rage against Palestinian terror groups.