“Oct 7 2023”

After Hamas’ horrific attack on Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, Israel has declared total war. Israel’s stated goal is to eliminate the terrorist organization’s military capabilities. The crisis faced by Gazans caught in the midst of the conflict is heartbreaking and likely to get worse, but Hamas has left Israel with no other choice.

Those who believe Israel has other alternatives tend to hold two assumptions that are patently false. First is the belief that Hamas is not thoroughly committed to the violent destruction of Israel as a non-negotiable article of faith.

A senior writer for New York Magazine has come under fire for a series of tweets he made in which he claimed that Zionists worked with Nazis during World War II and allowed some of the horrors of the Holocaust.

“Wait til they find out Zionists could’ve saved hundreds of thousands of Jews from the gas chambers and decided not to,” wrote Tirhakah Love, author of New York Magazine’s Dinner Party newsletter who previously publicly celebrated the death of Queen Elizabeth II.

One thing in urban combat in Gaza is not like it is in the films: you do not kick in doors. You blow them up instead.

“You put rockets in through the sides of houses or the walls or you blow up the door,” said Benzi Sanders, a former soldier, speaking from his experience of the last war in the enclave. “You go in, weapons firing. Everyone is supposed to have left.” All that is supposed to wait for you, supposedly, is booby-traps and militants.

For Sanders, 32, there was no time to be afraid, as you blasted your way into the unknown. “You are trying to stay alert,” he said. “You are in confident survival mode but you don’t have fear because you don’t have time to reflect. If you feel fear coming you say ‘not now’ to yourself.”

The first casualty of reporting on Israel is the truth.

On October 17, as Israel waged a counter-offensive against Hamas in the wake of the Palestinian terror organization’s grotesque terror spree against Israeli innocents earlier in the month, a rocket struck the Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza City. Initial reports were that hundreds had been killed. Before any investigation or conclusive evidence had been presented, Hamas and Palestinian supporters in the media seized the propaganda opportunity to blame Israel for a shocking war crime.

The Hamas apologism of Black Lives Matter activists has exposed the twisted, hateful logic of identity politics.

Following Hamas’s pogrom of Jewish people in Israel on 7 October, numerous Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists made clear where their sympathies lie. Within days, BLM’s chapter in Chicago posted a graphic that celebrated the slaughter. It showed a paraglider of the kind used by Hamas terrorists to enter Israel from Gaza and murder over 200 young people at a music festival. Below the picture, the caption read: ‘I stand with Palestine.’

The sick thrill of antisemitism has a price

I grew up in a tiny Jewish enclave on Chicago’s South Side. When I first saw New York, in the Sixties, I was awed as by no subsequent marvel of nature: stretching north from Columbus Circle, up the West Side, was a Jewish metropolis.

New York, in my lifetime, had always been a Jewish city: the rhythms, the accent, the humour always felt to me like home. Because they were home. The populace, of whatever ethnicity, was formed or noodged by Yiddishkeit, much as the Chicago of my youth was by the culture of the Irish and the Poles.

As Tsachi Idan was driven away to Gaza, his hands were still covered with his daughter’s blood.

He wasn’t allowed to wash them after cradling 18-year-old Maayan, who was murdered in front of her family by a Hamas gunman.

Nor was he able to wipe them clean before he used his body to shelter his two youngest children, as the sound of explosions ripped through the air outside their home.

European climate activists have staged protests and posted messages in support of Palestinians, prompting an online backlash and raising internal questions within the environmental movement.

Long-running tension in the Middle East exploded on 7 October when Hamas militants killed 1,400 people in southern Israel. Since then, Israeli strikes have killed at least 5,087 Palestinians, 2,055 of them children, according to the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza.

Ha Ha! … Israel Removes Climate Activist Greta Thunberg From School Curricula After ‘Stand With Gaza’ Post

Smile …

OMG, did she just say that in order to save the planet we should use battery operated fighter jets?pic.twitter.com/1CYldMT6zq

— General™️👀🇺🇸🦅 (@TheGeneral_0) October 23, 2023

From Anne Frank’s iconic “Diary of a Young Girl,” one quotation is especially prized: “It’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical,” she wrote. “Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.” It’s a sweet sentiment, but wishful thinking, written before her exposure to the horrors of Bergen-Belsen, the concentration camp where she died.

Terrorists. Terrorists. Terrorists.

Sadly, it does bear repeating apparently, to call Hamas what it is. Already — actually within hours — the barbaric and terrorist incursion into Israel a fortnight ago, the butchery of men, women, babies and the elderly, has been transformed into an act of justifiable resistance to the occupation of Gaza.

In Canada, as in the United Kingdom and the United States, there should be no trembly caution about using the term “terrorist” because Hamas has been formally deemed a terrorist group.

OTTAWA – Toronto police say they are aware of a demonstration that happened this weekend in front of a Jewish-owned business, but no one has filed a report with them.

Footage shared on social media shows a group of pro-Palestinian protesters gathered in front of a restaurant in Toronto, with some members of the crowd calling it a “Zionist café” and calling for a boycott.

The surest way to work up a crusade in favour of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behaviour ‘righteous indignation’ – this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.

Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow