“Oct 7 2023”

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

I visited Sheikh Yassin, the founder of Hamas, one desolate rainy morning during the first Intifada. I was a writer for Time, and on that day, Jamil Hamad, Time’s Palestinian stringer, drove me down to Gaza from my hotel in East Jerusalem.

On the Nablus Road, we passed the shell of a burnt-out Israeli school bus. Jamil’s car had blue Palestinian license plates and a big sign in the windshield that said PRESS. He spread a checkered black-and-white Palestinian kaffiyeh on the dashboard, just to make sure, but the shebab (young Palestinians) threw stones at us anyway. They did it satirically—their rough little joke. We ducked and flinched and laughed at them and waved. The boys had good arms. I told Jamil the Yankees could recruit pitchers here.

In a number of statements since Hamas’s October 7 massacre in Israel, US President Joe Biden stated that Hamas does not represent all the Palestinian people. “I think Israel understands that a significant portion of Palestinian people do not share the views of Hamas and Hezbollah,” Biden said in an interview with CBS.

Biden’s claim was repeated by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who told Jordan’s King Abdullah and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas that Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people. In a phone call with Abbas, Blinken “expressed continuing US support for the Palestinian people, stressing that Hamas terrorists do not represent Palestinians or their legitimate aspirations for self-determination and equal measures of dignity, freedom, security, and justice,” according to a State Department readout.

Hamas released two Israeli women held hostage in Gaza on Monday, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) confirmed.

The release of the two hostages, 85-year-old Yocheved Lifshitz and 79-year-old Nurit Cooper, was confirmed by the ICRC after Hamas released a statement earlier about the release.

Having exposed the rise in antisemitism since 2009 and the haters who perpetuate it, I knew the Jew hatred would escalate once Hamas left a trail of 1,400 murdered Israeli babies, moms and dads, seniors and children following its barbaric acts of two weeks ago.

The Israeli government on Monday screened for 200 members of the foreign press some 43 minutes of harrowing scenes of murder, torture and decapitation from Hamas’s October 7 onslaught on southern Israel, in which over 1,400 people were killed, including raw videos from the terrorists’ bodycams.

The IDF just screened 43 minutes of horrors from the Hamas massacre on October 7 for foreign journalists. I was not there, my colleague @cjkeller8 was.

Here is the one minute of footage approved for mass publication at this point, barring most of it out of respect for the dead. pic.twitter.com/UDmQSrkYBL

— Amy Spiro (@AmySpiro) October 23, 2023

Sir Mark Rowley has called for changes in the law around policing extremism as he said officers cannot be expected to “enforce taste and decency”.

In the Metropolitan Police commissioner’s first comments following criticism of officers’ failure to intervene when pro-Palestine protesters chanted “jihad”, Sir Mark warned there were gaps in the law that meant extremist groups were able to steer around laws and propagate “some pretty toxic messages”.

The TPS will cave if TO’s Islamists decide to loot & riot.