“Oct 7 2023”

To one side, Columbia students stood silently, wrapped in the blue and white of Israel as they gripped pictures of the murdered and abducted. Across the grass and brick divide, a slightly larger cohort of students chanted “Free, free Palestine.”

The faultline between the two ran along the claim by each that the other was pursuing a kind of bloodlust – a charge that has divided university campuses across America in the wake of the bloody Hamas attack on Israeli communities and Israel’s ongoing military assault on Gaza.

A terrorist group’s savage attack reflects dangerous changes in the world

On the morning of October 7, a barbarian horde of Hamas terrorists cascaded into Israel from the Gaza Strip determined to commit as many atrocities against Israelis as possible. What followed was a grotesque attack on civilization itself — the most audacious act of genocidal violence against Jews since the Holocaust.

Emmanuel Macron addressed France on television on Thursday evening. It was an opportunity for the president to reiterate his support for Israel in its war against Hamas, but also to call for his country to remain united.

As Macron spoke to the nation, police in Paris were using tear gas and water cannons to disperse a pro-Hamas demonstration. Meanwhile, some 10,000 police in France have been deployed to stand guard outside Jewish schools and places of worship.

The Israel-Palestine conflict has dominated the news since Hamas terrorists killed and kidnapped hundreds of Israeli civilians on October 7.

How does this terrible conflict relate to Catholic prophecy? Could this be the start of a third world war? To discuss these questions, lay theologian Xavier Ayral returned to The John-Henry Westen Show this week.

Well this is something different.

It was 6.30am, in the half-light of Israel’s early morning, when Yonatan Shamriz’s wife, Natali, called out to him that she had heard the sound of rockets overhead. In the kibbutz of Kfar Aza, they were accustomed to rockets. Aza is a Hebrew spelling of Gaza, nkly three miles away: once an easy drive away for kebabs by the beach but now another world, enclosed and hostile.

In the best of times the residents tried to live ordinary lives, but the tell-tales signs were always there of a community that was under attack.

Bomb shelters, brightly painted so as not to frighten the children, were strategically located among its rows of bungalows.

America’s new world order has empowered its enemies

Israel’s forces are massed at the border awaiting orders to launch a “full offensive” against Gaza. For days, airstrikes and artillery have been bombarding the Gaza statelet where Hamas has its warfighting machinery honeycombed inside city blocks. “You will have the ability to change the reality here,” Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told the waiting Israeli soldiers on Tuesday. “Gaza will never go back to what it was.”

So it’s come to this. Israel has felt moved to release images of the bloodied and charred corpses of babies – of murdered infants – to try to convince a cynical online world that even its most defenceless, tiny citizens were among the 1,300 people killed by Hamas last weekend.

Last night, Israel’s official social-media accounts posted three images. One picture shows a slain baby, his or her face blurred, covered in blood in an open body bag. Another two pictures show pint-sized corpses, burned beyond recognition. ‘This is the most difficult image we’ve ever posted. As we are writing this we are shaking’, said the text accompanying one image. ‘We went back and forth about posting this, but we need each and every one of you to know. This happened.’

All across the West, there is no shortage of people blaming the horrors in Israel on Israel itself — and openly supporting the perpetrators.

The head of policy at the Community Security Trust, which monitors hate crimes committed against British Jews, has said: ‘Anti-Semites are getting excited by the sight of dead Jews . . . Hamas murdering Israeli civilians has exhilarated them . . . We’ve had reports of people driving past synagogues shouting ‘Kill the Jews’.’

Anti-Semitic incidents in Britain are currently three times higher than they were this time last year, the charity adds.

The scariest outcome of the attacks in Israel may also be the most likely: that this one is just the first of its kind.

I spent last December in Jerusalem. It’s a vibrant city unlike any other, ebbing and flowing with ancient religious passions yet still youthful—and filled with the political extremism common to the young. Violence hovers here, enough to be felt, but not enough to paralyze. That’s how Ilya Sosansky, a bartender, 26, told me he felt.

Ilya said that he never felt safe in Jerusalem, though he accepted this as a fact of life. He was born in Ukraine but raised in Israel after his parents fled anti-Semitism there. He was jealous of those, like me, who grew up in quiet America. (My parents left Russia for America instead of Israel.)

Some Second Amendment proponents are criticizing the policies of an Israeli music festival that was attacked by Hamas militants over the weekend.

Thousands of people were dancing at the Supernova festival early Saturday when the surprise assault on Israel took place. After hearing sirens and rockets go off, festival-goers heard a barrage of gunfire that halted the music and sent crowds scrambling to get to safety. At least 260 bodies have been recovered from the festival site in the Negev Desert in southern Israel, according to rescue agency Zaka.

h/t DG

One of the lesser-known heroes of the Holocaust was a man named Rudolf Vrba, a Slovakian Jew who managed to escape from Auschwitz in 1944. Together with fellow escapee Alfred Wetzler, Mr. Vrba put together a collection of sketches, stories and descriptions of the concentration camp where he personally saw Nazis murder thousands of Jews. Their report would eventually wake up the world to the mass exterminations happening at Nazi death camps.

Pic above ‘Hamas Attack Aftermath’ – Warning, assuming video is still up – it is extremely graphic.

There was long been a swell of sympathy for Hamas in the West. A certain leader of the opposition, you will remember, referred to them as his ‘friends’ and said that the UK government classifying them as a ‘terrorist organisation’ was a ‘big, big historical mistake’. He did not condemn Hamas this week. And he is not alone. The mass rallies on the streets of Britain in recent days have shown the level of support for a barbarism that for years has been quietly accommodated in this country.

When, on October 7, the terrorist group Hamas launched an unprovoked attack on Israel, killing more than 1,300 Israeli men, women and children (and wounding thousands more), Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, rather than dusting off his usual inflammatory anti-Israel rants, uncharacteristically advised both sides for restraint. That was, after Erdoğan’s vow to isolate Israel internationally had brought Turkey a heavy geopolitical cost, This was Erdoğan’s pragmatist-self.

BREAKING: Hamas publishes footage of its fighters keeping Israeli children as human shields in Gaza. pic.twitter.com/AvhLj3WOwH

— Hananya Naftali (@HananyaNaftali) October 13, 2023

Push them into the sea. Sink their boats and rafts.