Star of David graffitied on Berlin homes in chilling echo of Nazi crimes

The Star of David has been graffitied on the doors of several homes in Berlin, in a chilling reminder of the persecution Jews suffered under the Nazis. Four cases have been reported to German police in recent days, escalating concerns about the safety of Jewish people in the German capital.

In one incident, a Jewish resident arrived home on Thursday evening to find graffiti smeared on her house door. “I speak Hebrew, talk on the phone in Hebrew, and wear a Star of David,” the young woman told Bild newspaper. “I really thought about whether I should stay at home.”

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Hamas, Israel and the ‘yes, but’ squad

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.

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More Pro-Hamas Than Hamas

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.

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Allahu Akbar: It couldn’t happen here…

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.

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The week Hamas reinvented horror

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.”

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Unspeakable slaughter, but I’ve seen nobody flying an Israel flag

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.

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Conrad Black: Following Hamas attack, no one can deny Israel’s claim to righteousness

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.

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Once, I Was a Peace Advocate. Now, I Have No Idealism Left.

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.

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