“Oct 7 2023”

Whenever there is a terrorist atrocity somewhere in the world, you can count on hearing from the “yes, but” squad.

Yes, it was awful that the Irish Republican Army set off a bomb at a crowded pub, but you have to remember how angry Irish Catholics are about their persecution by Protestant bigots and British soldiers. Yes, it was terrible that hijackers flew planes into the twin towers, but aggressive U.S. foreign policy stirred up anger in the Muslim world. Yes, Vladimir Putin was out of line to bomb and pillage Ukrainian cities, but the West backed him into a corner by expanding NATO.

The Israeli navy takes out multiple terrorists trying to swim on to the Israeli shore. pic.twitter.com/tWlpOeSdSU

— Viral News NYC (@ViralNewsNYC) October 14, 2023

The terrorist group’s disingenuous denials of its atrocities catch its Western allies—which had celebrated them—in an awkward position.

To call someone “more Catholic than the Pope” is to satirize their presumptive piety. What should we call it when someone is more pro-Hamas than Hamas? That is the level to which the terrorist organization’s cheerleaders in the West, most vocal on American university campuses, have sunk.

Hamas terrorists committed the worst atrocities imaginable in Israel last weekend, on a scale difficult to fathom. Their barbarities are stomach-churning—and Hamas even admitted as much, in an official statement released on Wednesday, in which it claimed that it did “not target children,” and that those who believed it had done so were blindly siding with “the Zionist narrative, which is full of lies and slander.” In other words, it would be a slander, says Hamas, to claim that its terrorists had massacred children in their beds, beheaded them, burned them alive, or kidnapped them.

Admittedly, I grew up in the golden age for Jews in America. Anti-Semitism was muted; Jews were respected for their family values and love of education. In fact in past presidential elections, candidates delved deep into their genetic inheritances to divine a Jewish gene or two.

The existence of the modern state of Israel, a Jewish state but unequivocally also a democracy, gave Jews existential pride, a psychological homeland to which they could move if so desired, and a sense of protection and invincibility.

This war has nothing to do with revenge.

Isn’t it heartwarming that the world loves dead Jews so much? I almost feel guilty for getting that lung transplant. It pains me that I deprived so many members of Black Lives Matter — may they all be damned by G-d Almig-ty — and so many neo-Nazi white supremacists of a small moment of extra joy.

Israel has become a theatre for gruesome spectacle

Israel and Gaza are a Pathé newsreel of violence. Atrocity mounts upon atrocity. Blood smeared on gristle. Festivals mottled with corpses. Women dragged off to be raped and killed. And, now, perhaps the ultimate taboo. “This is the most difficult image we’ve posted,” ran the Daily Telegraph’s front page, reprinting a tweet from the State of Israel’s official account.“As we are writing this we are shaking. We went back and forth about posting this. But we need each and everyone of you to know. This happened.”

A Reuters fact check of an online video suggests Israeli concertgoers were unharmed by Hamas’s terrorist attack—and is prompting Hamas sympathizers to argue that the attack didn’t happen at all.

h/t XC

Are the Israelis innocent here? Are the Jews? Yes and no, seems to be the general answer

When Russia invaded Ukraine last year, the schools near me put Ukraine flags in their windows. When George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis two years earlier, Black Lives Matter posters appeared overnight all over my north London neighbourhood. Because that’s the kind of caring, sharing milieu in which I live, full of politically aware good liberals.

So do you know how many Israeli flags I’ve seen in the week since Hamas kidnapped, raped and slaughtered over a thousand Jews in Israel, from geriatric Holocaust survivors to tiny babies? That’s right: nada, zip, none.

The Hamas attack on Israel was an even greater atrocity than the suicide aerial assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, and was a greater act of collective suicide. Al-Qaida knew that the 9/11 attacks were a “massacre of the innocents,” but their principal target were famous buildings that symbolized the power of American capitalism and military strength. The attacks were a shocking escalation of long-standing terrorist activity, following attacks in the previous several years on the U.S. Marine Corps barracks in Beirut (1983), the international barracks at the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia (1996), the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania (1998) and the USS Cole in Yemen. They were, in their psychotic way, intended to be a show of purposeful strength and menace. The Hamas attack on Israel was a deliberate assault on random civilians with no greater symbolism and no reasonable possibility that the authors of it did not know that Israel’s response would be a determined effort to capture or preferably kill every member of the Hamas military and terrorist apparatus.

This is the home of an entire family in #KfarAza slaughtered by #Hamas #terrorists. The family dog refuses to leave the bed where the family’s children used to sleep before they were butchered. #HamasTerrorist #Gazagenocide #Isarael #Palestine #GazzeUnderAttack #Israel #Gaza pic.twitter.com/fqTX0SLCPl

— Breaking News Worldwide (@FelizKarenP1) October 14, 2023

After terrorists killed my cousin Daniel Pearl, my family called for peace. But after the worldwide celebration of our people’s slaughter, my hope for peace is dead.

The story I’m about to tell is one that many progressive Jews can relate to. In some ways, it’s a prototypical arc of a diaspora Jew who has always advocated for nuance. This week, something broke in us. We watched history repeat itself. Not just on the global scale, with the wanton massacre of our people, the savage mass murders and dismemberments of entire families and communities. But for many, my family included, history is repeating itself on a personal level as well.

How did we get to the point that on numerous American campuses devoted to “social justice,” many student groups openly celebrated a brutal Hamas attack that killed more than 1,000 Israeli civilians and saw many hundreds tortured, beheaded, executed in front of family members and set on fire?

Meet 20 year old Inbal Rabin-Lieberman.

After hearing a noise at 6:30 a.m., she knocked on all the doors in her kibbutz.

She realised danger was imminent, so she armed herself and her team.

During 4 hours of combat, she took down 5 terrorists and her team took down another 15. pic.twitter.com/1nyqwb2YU6

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) October 14, 2023

h/t Mauser

A lone supporter of Israel is attacked by a mob who violently beat him, surround him and scream "Allahu Akbar"

Terrifying.

British Jews stay safe. pic.twitter.com/nlutwcW4dq

— Israel Advocacy Movement (@israel_advocacy) October 14, 2023