“Oct 7 2023”

New York State law makes it next to impossible for Jews and others legally to arm themselves for protection.

Last week, Inna Vernikov, a New York City councilwoman representing southern Brooklyn, was charged with criminal possession of a firearm. The story flared briefly, then faded amid graver breaking developments, but it’s worth retelling, because the story of Vernikov’s plight is the story of why Jews aren’t and cannot be safe in New York or any other major American city. It’s the story of bad laws happening to good people.

On October 7, the terrorist group Hamas initiated deadly attacks against Israel.

Hamas terrorists invaded Israel, near the Gaza Strip. They murdered hundreds of civilians, took hostages (including children and the elderly), beheaded babies, burned people alive, shot children in front of their parents, shot parents in front of their children, and fired thousands rockets and missiles into a country smaller than New Jersey (roughly 22,000 km²). As of this writing, Hamas has killed more than 1,400 people in Israel since October 7; wounded more than 4,200 people, and abducted 199 hostages who were taken to unknown locations in Gaza. Hundreds remain missing.

Shortly after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, friends and relatives of Gali Shlezinger Idan, who lived in a kibbutz near the Gaza border, received frantic messages to check her Facebook page.

What they found shocked them. Hamas members were using Ms. Idan’s Facebook account to livestream themselves holding her and her family hostage. During the 43-minute broadcast, gunmen forced Ms. Idan and her family to crouch on a tile floor as missiles and gunfire blasted their building.

“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” said Keren de Via, a friend of the Idan family who watched Ms. Idan’s children hug their parents and cry during the livestream. “How could we watch them terrorize the family like this? How could I watch this on Facebook?”

and no one has been shot or beaten or maced https://t.co/EbauDi7IGq

— Daniel Greenfield – "Hang Together or Separately" (@Sultanknish) October 18, 2023

The Biden administration is already in hot water for appeasing Iran and unfreezing of $6 billion in Iranian assets which played a role in the attack that sparked the ongoing Israel-Hamas war.

But did the Biden administration know about the attack in advance, too?

… Most everyone I spoke with agreed Israel was an illegitimate “apartheid” state. They viewed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an extension of the antiracist, progressive-identitarian crusade in the West—even though as many as 70 percent of Israelis are Sephardic or Mizrahi, meaning they come mostly from the Middle East and hardly “present” as white.

The marchers used words like colonizer and oppressor to describe the Jewish state.

“What Hitler did to the Jews, or the Zionists—sorry—the Zionists are doing worse now to the Palestinians,” Abdullah, a Palestinian, told me.

OTTAWA – A majority of Canadians don’t think lasting peace is possible between Israelis and Palestinians, a new poll suggests.

Slightly more than half of the people responding to the Leger poll said lasting peace isn’t possible, while less than one-fifth said a peaceful solution can be reached.

The IDF shared on Wednesday morning an audio transcript of Hamas terrorists discussing the rocket attack by the Islamic Jihad that hit a hospital in Gaza the night before.

In the audio, the Hamas terrorists acknowledge that the shrapnel of the missile “are local pieces, and not Israeli shrapnel.”

Well this looks mighty odd …

Here's daytime footage from the impact site at the hospital https://t.co/t9C2M3QgfA pic.twitter.com/XjLKvtrNQF

— Eliot Higgins (@EliotHiggins) October 18, 2023

Read the whole thread …

The head of MI5 has raised the spectre of Iranian-backed terror attacks in the UK in the wake of the war in Israel.

Ken McCallum, the security service’s director-general, addressed the conflict for the first time while at an unprecedented security summit also attended by intelligence chiefs from the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

He said the “monstrous attacks” on Israel could increase the risk of terror atrocities in the UK and raised concerns about the threat from Iran.

Progressives’ response to Hamas’s atrocities reveals that they never believed in their own dogma.

It was all stuff and nonsense, wasn’t it? All that talk of “hate speech” and “accountability culture” and “systemic oppression” and the need to ensure that everyone in the community feels “safe” at all times? It was all guff, flotsam, baloney. About 15 minutes passed between the news of the atrocities committed by Hamas and the crumpling of the progressive creed. Rarely has jetsam looked so vile.