Category: War

Israel-Hamas war update: Gaza babies evacuate from Shifa hospital

Gaza war update: 31 premature babies were transferred from Gaza's Al-Shifa hospital to another in the South. Those 'very sick' babies are currently in Rafah and will be transported to Egypt on Monday. The Associated Press reports the infants suffered from dehydration, hypothermia, and even sepsis. The Palestinian Red Crescent and UN agencies evacuated the babies to a safer location. 

FBI top dog Wray: War ‘has raised the threat of an attack against Americans in the US to a whole other level’

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SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2023/11/fbi-top-dog-wray-war-has-raised-the-threat-of-an-attack-against-americans-in-the-us-to-a-whole-other-level;

Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.

This malignant clown is just covering his tracks. For years he has been lying, claiming that “white supremacists” constituted the nation’s chief terror threat. This was a thinly veiled attempt to criminalize and destroy all political opposition to the Biden regime in the U.S. But now he can’t ignore the jihad threat any longer, and with attacks likely in the U.S., he has to pretend he is on top of the situation. In reality, the FBI has been in denial about the nature and magnitude of the jihad threat for years, and almost certainly will not be able to stop future jihad attacks in the U.S., because it is still so ideologically blinkered and politicized that it doesn’t even know what to look for.

“Director Wray’s Opening Statement to the House Committee on Homeland Security,” FBI.gov, November 15, 2023:

Good morning, Chairman Green, Ranking Member Thompson, and members of the committee.

It’s been more than five weeks since Hamas terrorists carried out their brutal attacks against innocent Israelis, dozens of American citizens, and others from around the world, and our collective efforts remain on supporting our partners overseas and seeking the safe return of the hostages. But this hearing, focused on threats to our homeland, is well-timed given the dangerous implications the fluid situation in the Middle East has for our homeland security.

In a year when the terrorism threat was already elevated, the ongoing war in the Middle East has raised the threat of an attack against Americans in the United States to a whole other level.

Since October 7th, we’ve seen a rogue’s gallery of foreign terrorist organizations call for attacks against Americans and our allies. Hizballah expressed its support and praise for Hamas and threatened to attack U.S. interests in the Middle East. Al-Qaida issued its most specific call to attack the United States in the last five years. Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula called on jihadists to attack Americans and Jewish people everywhere. ISIS urged its followers to target Jewish communities in the United States and Europe.

Given those calls for action, our most immediate concern is that individuals or small groups will draw twisted inspiration from the events in the Middle East to carry out attacks here at home. That includes homegrown violent extremists inspired by a foreign terrorist organization and domestic violent extremists targeting Jewish Americans or other faith communities, like Muslim Americans….

As Iran Wages Proxy War on Israel, Biden Mulls Giving $10 Billion to the Mullahs

When you can't make it clearer where you stand on the Hamas-Israel war.

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SEE: https://www.frontpagemag.com/as-iran-wages-proxy-war-on-israel-biden-mulls-giving-10-billion-to-the-mullahs;

Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.


[Make sure to read Robert Spencer’s contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]

Old Joe Biden couldn’t make it clearer where he stands on the Hamas-Israel war if he screamed “Allahu akbar” and blew himself up in a crowd of Jews.

The alleged president demonstrated, for anyone who was paying attention, which side he is really on in the Hamas-Israel conflict when he went over to Israel in late October and met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He took the opportunity to announce that he was giving $100 million to Gaza, which means, despite his denials, $100 million to Hamas, as there is no entity in Gaza that is not controlled by Hamas and could both receive this money and keep it out of the hands of the terror group. As if that weren’t bad enough, now Old Joe and his henchmen are considering sending $10 billion to the Islamic Republic of Iran, the chief funder of Hamas. Yes, it’s so far beyond outrageous that it is coming up on outrageous from the other side, but it’s true nevertheless.

The Washington Free Beacon reported Monday that “the Biden administration may approve a sanctions waiver on Tuesday that will allow Iran to access at least $10 billion in previously frozen funds held in Iraq.” Displaying an admirable talent for understatement, the Free Beacon noted that this is “driving concerns that the Biden administration is maintaining financial avenues for Tehran as the country’s terrorist proxies foment chaos across the Middle East.”

Now, why would the Biden regime even consider freeing up billions for Iran while the “Death to America, Death to Israel” regime is bankrolling not only Hamas, but Hizballah and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in their jihad war against the Jewish state? There are three possibilities: the regime is either stupid, or evil, or both. In this case, the most likely answer is the third: the sinister, senescent, faux-folksy corruptocrat and his cronies are as clueless as they are immoral. Oh, and wrongheaded, and a hundred other things.

Biden and his team are stupid insofar as they apparently still believe that showering money upon the Islamic Republic will lead that rogue, terror-supporting regime to moderate its practices and possibly even grow friendly toward America and possibly even Israel. This is a ridiculous idea for the State Department wonks and foreign policy “experts” to have, but they have it nonetheless; in fact, American diplomacy has largely consisted of efforts to buy friends internationally for many decades now.

This seldom works with anyone, but it is particularly doomed to fail when tried in the Islamic Republic of Iran, where the rulers believe the Qur’an when it says: “And the Jews will not be pleased with you, neither will the Christians until you follow their religion.” (2:120) Efforts at winning hearts and minds are often seen through this prism, as cynical attempts to begin to lure pious Muslims away from Islam. But of course they have no idea of this in Foggy Bottom, where they’re all bound to believe the iron dogma that Islam is a religion of peace that not only has nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism, but nothing whatsoever to do with contemporary geopolitics.

The evil part of this bargain comes from the fact that if the regime really does manage to send $10 billion to the mullahs, a large part of it, if not all of it, will go for the jihad against Israel. When Barack Obama sent pallets of unmarked bills to Tehran in the dark of night, much of it ended up going to jihad terror groups. What are the chances that at least some of Old Joe’s $10 billion would end up with Hamas, Hizballah, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad? Oh, about one hundred percent.

In response to such concerns, the Biden regime is pretending yet again that the American people have no idea of the most basic principles of economics. It insists that if it does send this $10 billion, it will be earmarked only for humanitarian purposes. The basic lesson of economics here is that getting $10 billion from the United States will free up $10 billion that the Iranian regime would have spent on food for its people, but which can now go to kill Israelis.

The new speaker of the House, in a classic example of failing to notice about fifty elephants in the room, just said that there wasn’t enough evidence to impeach Joe Biden. Well, the fact that the regime is even thinking about sending money to an avowed enemy ought to get Old Joe not only impeached but tried for treason. But for that, we’d need some genuine opposition that had some guts.

Daniel Greenfield Video: David Horowitz Freedom Center is Fighting a Civilizational Battle

Shillman Fellow reveals what we're all up against - and the road ahead.

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SEE: https://www.frontpagemag.com/daniel-greenfield-video-david-horowitz-freedom-center-is-fighting-a-civilizational-battle/;

Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.

SEE ALSO: https://www.frontpagemag.com/restoration-video-all-star-panel-on-israel-and-the-civilized-world-at-war/?mc_cid=e06f4dc9c3

Editor’s note: Below are the video and transcript of remarks given by Shillman Fellow Daniel Greenfield at the Freedom Center’s 2023 Restoration Weekend – just held Oct. 26-29 at the Ritz Carlton in New Orleans.

Daniel Greenfield from DHFC on Vimeo.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for coming out here this weekend.

Unfortunately, I have some bad news. We have savages among us. Not in this room. This is a great room. And the time we spend together is a fortress of sanity in a world going mad.

Here we still believe in a right and a wrong. And we believe that under no circumstances do you start roaming the streets and burning down cities. And under no circumstances do you go to the homes of your neighbors who follow another religion, kill and kidnap their children, and rape their women while shouting, “Allahu Akbar”. Because we’re not savages.

But we can’t deny that there are savages roaming the world… and our country.

I don’t just mean the Hamas terrorists who killed, kidnapped, and tortured Israeli men, women, and children.

I also mean the over 1,700 sociology professors, including some from Yale and Columbia, who signed a letter arguing that the Hamas atrocities had to be “contextualized” as a response to “75 years of settler colonial occupation and European empire.”

And the over 200 faculty members at another university, including Ellen Dichner, the Chief Counsel to the Chairman of the National Labor Relations Board under the Obama administration, who defended the Hamas atrocities as a “military operation”.

The Secretary General of the UN argued that “It is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum.”

You’ve seen the polls in which 57% of Muslims in America said that the Hamas horrors were justified. And the one in which half of 18-24-year-olds in America side with Hamas.

And just so you don’t think I’m picking on Muslims or Generation Z, you may not have seen the one in which 11.5% of American Jews said that Hamas was justified.

Yes, over 1 in 10 American Jews believe that an Islamic terrorist organization whose leaders have called for the extermination of the Jews is justified.

3.6% of American Jews “strongly” agree that the murder of Jewish babies is justified.

We have savages among us. In the most literal sense of the word. There are white savages, black savages, and Asian savages. There are male and female savages, and transgender savages and savages of all members of the 500 genders currently on the table.

What unites them is a hatred of civilization and a burning desire to destroy it, to tear it down, to wreck its most cherished values, and then dance on the flames.

There are savages among us at schools where the tuition is enough to buy a house in the country. There are savages with PhDs preaching that murder and torture are the righteous “decolonization” of the  “settler colonial occupation”.

And by the way when they say “settler colonial occupation”, they don’t just mean Israelis, they mean Americans right here. We’re a “settler colony” too. First, come the “land acknowledgments” in which we admit we don’t belong here. And then once we admit that, we’re illegitimate settlers, we can be “decolonized” by being massacred too.

This isn’t some fringe movement. This is what’s being taught in universities across America.

You’ve all seen the videos of ordinary college students cheering Hamas, tearing down posters of kidnapped people, and sneering at anyone who dares to challenge them.

Who could have seen this coming? One man did.

There’s one more video that I hope you’ve seen even though it’s over ten years old.

We played it tonight but just in case you missed it, I’m going to set the scene.

This happened in the spring of 2010 at the University of California at San Diego. A few months earlier, Hamas terrorists had tried to penetrate the Gaza border fence to invade Israel. And Israeli soldiers had fought them.

We know now what the Hamas terrorists would have done if they had broken through.

David Horowitz had arrived to speak on campus which was always a scene because the Left hated him. It still does. Because he got them, he understood what they were, like no one else.

A member of the Islamist and anti-Semitic Muslim Students Association confronted Horowitz. Horowitz asked the MSA member, a campus association founded by the Muslim Brotherhood, the parent organization of Hamas, whose members and speakers have praised Hamas, whether she would condemn Hamas. She refused.

Then he asked her an even more pointed question:

“I am a Jew. The head of Hezbollah has said that he hopes that we will gather in Israel so he doesn’t have to hunt us down globally. For or Against it?”

She leaned in close to the microphone and spoke clearly. “For it.”

Back then the video was shocking. The student and her political allies on campus claimed that she misspoke. And that she didn’t really mean it. Now Muslim Students Association and Students for Justice in Palestine campus chapters openly celebrate the Hamas butchery.

The national organization of Students for Justice in Palestine hailed the Hamas rape of girls, murder of babies, and kidnapping of children as a “historic win for the Palestinian resistance”.

The national organization which has 200 chapters on campuses across North America put out a ‘toolkit’ which explained that the Jewish victims were “not civilians” and were fair game.

In that one moment in the spring of 2010, David Horowitz had gotten one of them to take her mask off before they were ready. Those of us who were paying attention saw it. Those who didn’t went back to sleep. Now the masks are off and everyone is horrified. Except for those who are cheering it on.

The thing about masks is that we like them. We don’t want to see the ugliness underneath.

When the masks come off, we shudder in horror and then we forget. We go back to our everyday routines. It happened after 9/11. The response to what Hamas did doesn’t surprise me because I was there in Manhattan after the attacks. And what I saw inspired me to do what I do today.

As we were walking north with what used to be the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center behind us, there were college students from NYU in Union Square painting anti-war signs.

America had been attacked hours ago. People were fleeing to get away from what was in the air, but they were already chalking on the sidewalk and drawing up anti-American signs.

Now remember there was no war, but anti-war protests were being organized on the spot.

And then came the arguments that the people in the towers and on the planes had it coming. They were ‘Little Eichmans’, remember that one?  An edgy avant-garde American director was sitting at dinner in a posh London restaurant with his British distributor who told him “I think September 11 was the best thing that ever happened to America. I thought the attack would make Americans understand why the rest of the world hates them.“

The director, who was in no way a conservative, a Republican, or some flag-waver, punched him in the face, broke his nose, and overturned the dinner table on him.

That is sometimes how you respond to savages.

Some of you may have had similar experiences after 9/11. For every international outpouring of sympathy, there were all the “America had it coming” responses. And there was plenty of it at home. Is it any wonder that the response to the Hamas crimes is more of the same?

Civilized people like to believe that there is some level of barbarism, some atrocity, that people on the other side who disagree with us won’t stomach. And individually there is. Collectively it’s another matter. There are always good Nazis who look at something and turn away, who maybe even try to save some Jews, but the stadiums were still packed with people cheering Hitler and Hamas will have plenty of supporters on campus.

So up the ante. Raped women, murdered babies, kids in cages. We think that at some point we’ll reach a red line where everyone will agree that is wrong. And nope. We never do.

Because we miss the point.

When savages look at atrocities, they don’t think, “Good Lord, that’s horrifying. What kind of monsters can do such things.” They think, “Yes, yes, yes!.”

When they put it into words, they talk about “decolonization” and “the resistance of the oppressed”, they quote Franz Fanon about the “wretched of the earth”, but underneath those abstractions that the Left constructed to normalize and rationalize mass murder, much as the Nazis did, is the true response, “Yes! Yes, yes, yes.”

The Left glamorizes the idea of the ‘Noble Savage’ because it loves savagery and wants to be savages. It wants to roll in the blood and the mud, it wants to burn and smash things, to wrap its hands around throats and squeeze. But it’s become too civilized, too urbanized. It needs others, the noble savages it looks down on, to lead the way and smash, burn, and kill.

We’ve seen this in our country. It’s the same around the world.

They’ve got Noam Chomsky out there right now covering for Hamas the way he once covered for Pol Pot who forced everyone in the countryside and killed anyone wearing glasses.

This is what savages do. And college students are being indoctrinated into this cult of savagery.

What do savages want? They want to tear down the world as it is to make their new better world. And they want it to be with so much horror, pain, and death that no one ever dares think about rebuilding civilization again.

Mass murder, the starvation of millions of people, and a culture of terror: are just some of the means that they used in the 20th century, in Communist China, the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Cuba, and Iran.

The common denominator is fear.

Civilized people confronted with savagery freeze. They’re traumatized. They can’t cope with it.

That is what the savages want. It’s why they use terrorism. They want us terrorized.

And we can’t give in to fear.

That is why the David Horowitz Freedom Center is fighting back.

David Horowitz led the way in warning about what was to come. Now even some of the most outspoken liberals are admitting that he was right. They’re seeing the barbarism on campuses, the indoctrination, the hate and they’re asking where did this come from.

It didn’t just appear overnight. It was always here.

And the David Horowitz Freedom Center, from the very beginning, sounded a battle cry against it. When David Horowitz first talked about campus indoctrination, even most Republicans dismissed him. They didn’t want to hear about it. When he warned about Hamas on campus, he was denounced as an alarmist. And even when he demonstrated that college students were being groomed to support the mass murder of Jews, few would take it seriously.

Now it’s impossible to ignore.

And under the leadership of David Horowitz, we are fighting on.

We’ve been tracking and compiling lists of tax-exempt 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations that came out with statements in support of Hamas and we are going to hold them accountable.

Supporting terrorists is a violation of the tax code.

Many of the loudest voices supporting Hamas, including Students for Justice in Palestine, which is behind many of the pro-terrorist campus protests, are tax-exempt groups. Stripping away their tax-exempt status will effectively defund them. Under Obama, the IRS targeted pro-Israel groups. Under a Republican administration, the IRS needs to target pro-terrorist organizations.

Congress also has the ability to close loopholes in the tax code that allow Islamic terrorist groups and their supporters to benefit from tax-exempt status.

We’ve also profiled tax-exempt Chinese Communist and North Korean front groups that advocate in support of Hamas and the  Alliance for Global Justice, which originally started to support Marxist terrorists, which sponsors Samidoun, a terrorist front group that’s been banned in Israel and Germany, which sponsored the New York City rally calling for solidarity with Hamas during which NYPD officers were assaulted.

Loopholes allowing Islamic terrorist front groups to benefit from tax-exempt donations need to be closed.

Congress can do it.

And we’re not stopping there. From our investigative reporting to our Discover the Networks site, led by the incredibly knowledgeable John Perazzo, and with everyday coverage from our intrepid Mark Tapson, Front Page Magazine, where I have the honor to work with Mark and Jamie Glazov, also the editor of an important collection on Obama’s legacy, and Christine Williams, and the many talented writers and journalists who never stop fighting for the truth. And Sara Dogan who runs our campus operation and recently issued a pamphlet on the top campus hate groups. The indefatigable Robert Spencer and Jihad Watch alert us to the state of the enemy. And Michael Finch who keeps all the moving parts from flying off into space.

And so many others who work with us to make this a fight we can win.

We’re collecting information on the enemies within our country.

We’re following the money trails from radical donors and exposing extremists on campus.

And we’re fighting to hold them accountable because we won’t let the savages win.

We’re not doing it as a response to the Hamas attacks, but because it’s what we’ve been doing all along.

David Horowitz saw this battle coming. And he built an organization that, as he’s told you many times, is not a think tank, it’s a battle tank. And with your support, we’re doing battle.

We’re a small organization that always punches above our weight.

We took issues that were obscure, that were controversial, that were on the back burner, and we made them into issues for a movement, for a party, and for a country.

The people you see here, guests, speakers, and thinkers, come together, we share ideas, we learn from each other, and we come away stronger and more determined than ever to win.

There are some of you who came here feeling hurt and broken. I know some here may have family or friends in Israel. But I have to say that every single time I have had the honor to come here, and that includes the 2020 election, no matter what has happened, I have come away stronger, and so many people come back year after year because you feel that way too.

I don’t just come here to speak, I come here to learn, from the speakers and from all of you. When you ask me questions, I learn from you. Every time I’ve done a talk, talking to you has changed what I’m going to say. And this time is no different.

And I also come here like so many of you to feel the energy in the room, the fortress of sanity, from which we return strengthened, certain, and determined that we will win.

This is not just about politics. It’s not just about who’s in charge of earmarks or who gets to wield a gavel.

Moments like the Hamas atrocities bring home to us what this is really about.

This is a global and national struggle between savages and civilization. It’s about whether our children and grandchildren will live in peace and security. Or live in terror and fear.

We will not win this war if we refuse to name the enemy, the thousand-year-old Islamic Jihad against civilization, and the two-hundred-year-old leftist assault on mankind.

We will not win if we turn away from who our enemies are, but we must not fear them.

Civilization is superior to the savage in every way. All we have to do to win this war is wake up.

David Horowitz has spent the better part of a lifetime waking people up. Every few days I’m on the phone with him and he’s telling me to hit harder and to call our enemies what they are.

Every day we wake people up, and every year we come here for a giant wake-up call, to draw strength from each other and to be determined to fight for our country and our future.

We fight because civilization is too precious to give up.

We fight so that our children and grandchildren have the world they deserve.

We fight because the savages must not win.

And they will not win.

The only way the savages can win is if we let them, if we go to sleep, if we despair, if we give up. And we will not give up. The future must not belong to the savages. It must not belong to the beheaders of children, the rapists of women, and those who murder cartoonists.

It’s our future and we’re not giving it up to them.

The David Horowitz Freedom Center is fighting for the future. Thank you for standing with us.

Thank you for being part of our fight.

Biden’s pact with Muslim Brotherhood-linked group Emgage, and his conundrum over Hamas’ war on Israel

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SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2023/10/bidens-pact-with-muslim-brotherhood-linked-group-emgage-and-his-conundrum-over-hamas-war-on-israel;

Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.

In early 2020, the organization Emgage launched its Million Muslim Votes campaign in order to galvanize a million Muslim Americans to vote for Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election. Emgage’s website stated: “The MMV campaign was our celebration and a reflection of our determination to build elections as a vehicle of change for our community’s political will.” The organization was reportedly a spectacular success in uniting Muslims voters, who turned out in unprecedented numbers in key battleground states, including Michigan and Pennsylvania. Emgage ultimately boasted that “in 2020 we helped turnout 1,087,086 registered Muslim voters. And we’re just getting started.” Emgage and Biden shook hands in a pact in which each made promises to the other. But in all pacts, there is a cost involved in fulfilling the promises; in this instance, the cost to Biden involved the reputation of Emgage, its network, how extensively it managed to infiltrate the administration, and what it all means now, given the fury by Muslims over Biden’s Israel stance.

As Israel battles Hamas, Frank Gaffney recently wrote that Biden:

engaged in outreach to one of his core constituencies: the Muslim Brotherhood. He met privately with five so-called ‘American Arab and Muslim leaders’ including: Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison; Wa’el Alzayat of Emgage, a political mobilization operation; and interfaith influence-operator Imam Mohamed Magid.’ Each has personal and/or organizational associations with the Brotherhood, a group whose Palestinian franchise, Hamas, perpetrated the horrific jihadist attack on Israel on October 7th.

Biden was in urgent damage control mode as Muslims become increasingly enraged over Israel. Take, for example, a Reuters headline: Biden’s Israel stance angers Arab, Muslim Americans; could jeopardize 2024 votes. The magnitude of Biden’s quandary is directly tied to the pact he made with Emgage. To appreciate this, a little history about Emgage is illuminating. According to Middle East Eye, one of Emgage’s first fundraising events “involved Keith Ellison, then a Congressional candidate from Minneapolis. That event in 2006 gave birth to the first iteration of Emgage as a PAC, an entity allowed to raise funds for political candidates. It also helped Ellison become the first Muslim in Congress.” In 2006, the Muslim voter advocacy group was not yet known as Emgage. It was filed as “Center for Voter Advocacy” by registered agent Khurrum Wahid, a founding member and currently the National Chair of Emgage Political Action Committee (PAC). Wahid is also an attorney “who has built his name on representing high profile terrorists”, and landed himself on a federal terrorist watch list in 2011.Discover the Networks names him as “one of the country’s most prominent terror lawyers.”

Emgage’s advocacy and hard work paid off as it rose to prominence during the 2020 election cycle, but the organization’s roots and those of its influential partners were already deep in the Democrat Party prior to the Biden win. Biden addressed the Emgage Million Muslim Votes Summit online in July 2020. This event featured the infamous Linda Sarsour; Emgage CEO Wa’el Alzayat, a decorated diplomat during the Obama administration and an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University (known for its “Islamophobia” “Fact Sheets”); Nihad Awad, co-founder and Executive Director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations; and Khurrum Wahid.

Ahead of the online summit, Emgage Action created an endorsement letter signed by several prominent elected Democrat Muslim officials, including Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, and Indiana Rep. Andre Carson. Wa’el Alzayat, whom Discover the Networks reports is “one of the country’s most prominent terror lawyers,” stated:

Joe Biden’s presence serves not only to galvanize Muslim Americans to cast their ballots, but to usher in an era of engaging with Muslim American communities under a Biden administration.

At the online Summit, Khurrum Wahid stated how Muslims felt “scapegoated and marginalized,” which led to the formation of Emgage. In his introduction of Biden, he revealed the Emgage mission and why Biden was the group’s best choice for President:

That is why we have endorsed you Mr. Vice President….that is why we have you here today. This is truly an historic moment for Muslim Americans…where a presidential nominee has engaged us in such a high priority. It shows us that you care about us and our values and the issues we care about. It shows us you believe in us. Mr. Vice President, I want you to know that we believe in you…You have moved forward funding to nations with large Muslim populations… and you’ve championed the inclusion of Muslim American institutions at the policy table. And we want to partner with you to fix the societal harm of this Trump presidency….We are behind you. We have a swing state strategy and we will deliver for you Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Florida. We will activate large groups of voters in Texas and Arizona…we will have everyone we know to vote Joe.

NPR hailed the event: “Presidential Nominees Rarely Speak to Muslim Audiences. Biden Did Monday.” The story noted that “3,000 people RSVP’d” for Emgage’s livestreamed event with Biden. “Biden focused on Islamophobia…. He didn’t mention terrorism or Islamic extremism.” He then told the audience: “One of the things that I think is important: I wish, I wish we taught more in our schools about the Islamic faith.” It was at this event where Biden promised: “If I have the honor of being president, I will end the Muslim ban on Day 1. Day 1.” Emgage made the pledge to capture more Democrat attention, where Wa’el Alzayat stated:

Emgage made it very clear that as part of our endorsement … we needed a direct engagement with Biden at a visible Muslim-led event. That was one of the clear criteria that we put out there…it’s no longer a question of whether Democrats will engage the Muslim community, but how.  There’s a recognition [in] places like Michigan that went to Trump by just 10,000 votes the importance of all these votes…According to our research, there’s about 150,000 registered Muslim voters in Michigan.

The pact between Biden and Emgage was now sealed with a tit-for-tat agreement: Biden serves the Muslim community, while Muslims deliver votes. According to the Washington Free Beacon:

Emgage has collaborated with a Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated group on events that in recent years attracted speakers who openly opposed LGBT rights and supported terror groups. Last year, Emgage became an official cohost of Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) conferences. ISNA was previously revealed to be part of the Muslim Brotherhood network.

ISNA and CAIR were both listed as unindicted co-conspirators during the Holy Land Foundation Trial. Both were deemed to be, or to have been, “part of the HAMAS social infrastructure in Israel and the Palestinian territories.”

Fast forward to March 2021, when NPR interviewed the Deputy Director of Emgage, Iman Awad, about Biden’s immediate repeal of the Trump travel ban and “what advocates want the Biden administration to do.” The mere question invoked an expectation that the incoming administration would be at the service of Emgage. This was not unreasonable, as it was exactly what Biden had established with Emgage during its summit. So Emgage was now poised to direct the new administration. As expected, the Left took up the cause. Politico reported after the fact that “nearly 1.1 million Muslim voters cast a ballot in the 2020 election, turning out in numbers large enough to swing the presidential race in key battleground states, according to a new report.” The report cited by Politico was that of Emgage itself; it describes its own political action committee (PAC)  as “the nation’s largest Muslim American bi-partisan political action committee that supports local, state, and federal candidates who share our vision of an inclusive and pluralistic America.” The group not only aims to dominate Muslim life in America, but also to represent the broader minority community under the banner of intercultural-interfaith dialogue.

On April 9, 2021, further damage to America’s security was becoming apparent, while Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ignored the real threat of jihad. He announced in a memorandum “the establishment of a Countering Extremism Working Group (CEWG) to spearhead the military’s continued effort to locate and stamp out ‘extremism’ in its ranks.” Austin consistently fails upward. During the Obama administration, he was in charge at US Central Command of the fight against ISIS in Iraq, “when that nation quickly fell to the terrorist group.” See more about his background HERE.

Under Austin, “no fewer than 6 of the CEWG’s 18 members were radical Islamists who viewed the United States as a racist cesspool.” Emgage CEO Alzayat was one of them.

By now, it should be clear to anyone what the ambitions of Emgage are to unite Islamic supremacists everywhere in America, while presenting patriotic Americans as “Islamophobes”; and influencing White House policy, both domestically and abroad. Emgage diligently aims to do nothing less than steer America’s direction as it works with its most powerful ally, the President of the United States. Working as a fifth column from the highest office, the group also has global ambitions, focusing (of course) upon Palestinian interests. Hamas is, after all, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, which a long list of unindicted co-conspirators with Hamas has enabled to operate through an expansive network throughout America. According to a recent news story, “Muslim American leaders, in private meeting, he needs to show more empathy toward Palestinians,” Joe Biden just hosted a core group of Muslim leaders in the White House. According to Frank Gaffney, former Assistant Secretary of Defense under Ronald Reagan and founder of the Center for Security Policy, Biden engaged “in outreach to one of his core constituencies: the Muslim Brotherhood.” The meeting included demands for an end to Israel’s defensive war on Hamas, although the participants called it a “ceasefire.”

Biden has now found himself between a rock and a hard place. He pledged to support the interests of Emgage and its network in exchange for votes. Yet America was shocked awake by Hamas’ ISIS-like attack on innocent civilians in Israel. Biden’s default mode now is remain as non-committal as possible, and even to engage in stalling tactics as he tries to keep his shaky coalition together. He appeals to humanitarian principles as he tries to keep his support base together: Muslims on the one hand, Jews on the other, and everyone in between, all while being forced to live up to expectations that the long history of American support for its ally, Israel, will continue.

The truth is becoming more apparent to mainstream America. The Democrats helped create the current crisis in the Middle East, as well as threats beyond that region). They emboldened Iran and helped fill its coffers through an outrageous deal that was based on lies and backroom deals. Consider more recent activity under Joe Biden:

  • It was discovered that Iranian spies have infiltrated the Biden administration.
  • The Biden administration’s Iran envoy Robert Malley helped “fund, support, and direct an Iranian intelligence operation designed to influence the United States and allied governments.”
  • Right before the Hamas attack on Israel, Iran seized upon a chance to get even more money from Joe Biden.
  • In an extreme act of insensitivity and even provocation to patriotic Americans, Biden announced the deal to send $6,000,000,000 to Iran in exchange for hostages on September 11, of all dates.
  • The Biden regime sent $148 million to Palestinian areas weeks before the attack on Israel.
  • The main goal of Biden’s Israel trip was to secure entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza, not to help fortify Israel against its worst enemies.

And at the private meeting at the White House, Muslim leaders appealed to Biden for “more empathy toward Palestinians.” Among the guests was Emgage CEO Alzayat; the chief of staff of Muslim Brotherhood-linked Congressman Keith Ellison, who recently promoted a pro-Hamas “March for Palestine” rally in Minneapolis, at which demonstrators “called for Israel’s eradication” and used vulgar expletives to condemn Israeli “settlers”; and Imam Mohamed Magid, Executive Imam of All Dulles Area Muslim Society Center in Sterling, Virginia, former President of the Islamic Society of North America, and a big player in the “interfaith dialogue” network, serving as Chairman of International Interfaith Peace Corps. He was also recipient for the Washingtonian of the Year 2009 and the Human Rights Award 2005 from Fairfax County.

Biden now stands at a crossroads. He has pledged his support for Emgage in exchange for votes, and now the Emgage network has arrived to collect.  His public relations with Muslim Brotherhood players can only go so far now that Hamas is fully exposed. So far, Biden hasn’t been backed enough into a corner to pull a stunt that his neighbor Justin Trudeau favors in times of crises: conveniently disappear.

Biden regime has sent over $1,000,000,000 to UN agency described as ‘effectively a branch of Hamas’

  BY 

SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2023/10/biden-regime-has-sent-over-1000000000-to-un-agency-described-as-effectively-a-branch-of-hamas;

Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.

Which side are Old Joe and his henchmen really on? That’s obvious.

“Palestinian group accused of harboring terrorists received $1B from Biden admin: report,” by Edward Lawrence, Andrew Miller, and Lauren Shank, Fox Business, October 18, 2023:

FIRST ON FOX: The Biden administration has sent more than $1 billion in taxpayer dollars to a Palestinian relief organization that has previously been accused of providing safe harbor to terrorists in Gaza, drawing increased scrutiny amid Hamas’ attacks on Israel.

In a report exclusively obtained by FOX Business, watchdog OpenTheBooks.com found that the taxpayer money was sent to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), whose schools were accused in a recent report of being complicit in teaching children to hate Jewish people and praising terrorism.

Critics and watchdog groups also say UNRWA resources may help Hamas with recruitment and storage for weapons, along with other support.

According to the UNRWA’s website, the group works with Palestinians doing “human development and humanitarian services, encompass primary and vocational education, primary health care, relief, and social services, infrastructure and camp improvement, microfinance and emergency response, including in situations of armed conflict.”

However, U.N. Watch and IMPACT released a report in March, uncovering 100 pages of evidence that schools built and run by the UNRWA taught hate toward the Jewish people and glorified terrorism.

The UNRWA Islamic education exam asks students whether “Liberating the Al-Aqsa Mosque and making sacrifices for it is an obligation for all Muslims” is true or false. The exam cited the statement as true and noted that violence and martyrdom to free Al-Aqsa are obligations for Palestinians and “all Muslims.”

In 2014, the left-leaning New Republic described UNRWA as “effectively a branch of Hamas.”

UNRWA acknowledged in 2014, and condemned, Hamas missiles that were found at one of its schools in Gaza twice in one week….

Israel’s Gaza Ground Offensive Begins…in the West Bank?

BY STEPHEN GREEN 9:02 AM ON OCTOBER 27, 2023
SEE: https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2023/10/27/israels-gaza-ground-offensive-begins-in-the-west-bank-n1738499;Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.

Israel's Gaza Ground Offensive Begins... in the West Bank?
TSAFRIR ABAYOV
Pundits and amateurs alike have wondered when Jerusalem would order the ground troops into Gaza to take direct action against Hamas and that terrorist government’s cement-lined “spider-web” of tunnels beneath the city. On Thursday, the Israelis did indeed begin a ground offensive, with at least 40 tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, and Caterpillar D9 Armored Bulldozers. The big surprise is that the IDF attacked the Palestinian city of Jenin in the West Bank.

Jenin is just across the border from Israel proper and has long been a stronghold for Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Hit ’em where they least expect it, I suppose. The attack has been described as a “large-scale raid,” undoubtedly to knock out at least one Hamas base. Gunmen in the city have shot at Israeli troops in recent days, resulting in a series of rare airstrikes. IDF raids are much more common, but I can’t recall one on Thursday’s scale.

Some sources report that the bulldozers were sent to destroy streets and infrastructure but this video shows the IAF clearing streets in Jenin.

While the world’s attention has been largely focused on Gaza — and Jerusalem would probably rather remain focused on Gaza, too — Hamas and their jihadi allies have lit up the West Bank in recent days. I’m otherwise wary of this Time report for mindlessly parroting Hamas’s casualty claims, but it’s correct when it quotes Israel-Palestine analyst Mairav Zonszein saying West Bank violence is now “on steroid

The Jerusalem Post reported that three Palestinian terrorists were killed in Jenin clashes on Friday, including “a senior member of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s al-Quds Brigades.”

But with more than 300,000 reservists mobilized, it isn’t as though events in Jenin have Israel distracted from the main event in Gaza. NBC News reported late Thursday/early Friday on a similar “targeted raid” into northern Gaza with an unknown number of troops and armored vehicles. According to Israeli sources, the raid was part of their “preparations for the next stages of combat.” Meanwhile, IAF airstrikes hit a reported 250 targets in Gaza over the previous 24 hours.

Recommended: You’ll Never Believe Where Hamas Hid a Military Headquarters (Actually, You Will)

Pulling back to look at the bigger picture reveals a confused and dangerous mess. Some of the confusion emanates — because of course, it does — from the Biden administration.

On the one hand, Reuters reports that Biden and his national security team “have markedly shifted their tone on the Israel-Hamas crisis in recent days, moving from unfettered support of Israel to emphasizing the need to protect Palestinian civilians in Gaza.” World opinion, as tainted by antisemitism as ever, has apparently caused the White House to blanch.

The shift might also be because of the antisemites within the Democrat party’s own ranks. Since the start of the Israel-Hamas War, Biden’s “approval rating among Democrats has tumbled 11 percentage points… the worst reading of his presidency from his own party.” This is what happens when a political party gets into bed with the likes of The Squad and campus radicals devoted to the destruction of Israel.

On the other hand, the administration hasn’t just ordered even more forces to the Middle East, they’re increasingly in a war posture. A local source privately reports that Marines have been ordered into their desert camouflage uniforms with muted rank insignia. And there’s the tiny little matter of Thursday’s U.S. Air Force strikes against “two facilities linked to Iranian-backed militias in eastern Syria.”

So it’s OK when we do it but Israel needs to show some more restraint?

Finally, let’s look towards Moscow, where Russian strongman Vladimir Putin is hosting a Hamas delegation to discuss “Zionist crimes supported by the United States and the West.” The actual talks might also involve Putin giving Hamas tips on large-scale ethnic cleansing.

I fully expect this report to be half out of date by the time I file it, so stay tuned because this is a bumpy ride we’re on and it’s barely begun.

Biden is Obstructing Israel’s Fight Against Hamas

Behind the pro-Israel rhetoric are policies that help Hamas.

 by  

SEE: https://www.frontpagemag.com/biden-is-obstructing-israels-fight-against-hamas/;

Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.


After the Hamas massacre of over 1,000 Israeli men, women and children, President Biden and members of his administration appeared to be saying all the right things about the attack.

In reality, the Biden administration tied down the Israeli response, making airstrikes less effective, delaying a ground assault, resupplying Hamas, and slowing down military aid to Israel. Its intervention has made Israel less likely to destroy Hamas and more likely to lose lives.

There was always a great difference between Biden’s public and private responses.

Biden and administration officials began pressuring Prime Minister Netanyahu and Israeli officials to avoid civilian casualties almost right after the Hamas attacks. Warnings that were initially relayed in phone conversations were leaked to the media. And shortly after they became public warnings. During his speech, three days after the attacks, Biden introduced the emphasis on following the “laws of war” that everyone in his administration would echo.

Administration officials took up the theme with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin lecturing Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on “the importance of adhering to the law of war, including civilian protection obligations, and addressing the worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza.”

Avoiding civilian casualties while fighting terrorists whose defensive strategy is hiding behind civilians and embedding their infrastructure around mosques, schools, and hospitals is impossible. But as a result of Biden’s pressure campaign, Israel issued more warnings, allowing civilians, but also Hamas terrorists, to abandon areas and infrastructure they knew were targets.

But that still wasn’t good enough.

In his remarks in Israel and his prime-time speech to the nation, Biden scolded that “when America experienced the hell of 9/11, we felt enraged as well. While we sought and got justice, we made mistakes. So, I cautioned the government of Israel not to be blinded by rage.”

The Biden administration returned to this theme of Israel as dangerous, lashing out with rage and prone to killing innocent people unless it was prevented from doing so by Washington D.C. Biden had not lectured Ukraine about not being blinded by rage, but Israel was another matter.

National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson limited the administration’s support to “necessary and proportionate action to defend its country and protect its people”. What the “proportionate” response to mass murder, torture, rape, and beheading was, went unmentioned.

Publicly, Biden’s trip to Israel was hailed as a show of support, but officials suggested to the media that it was seen as the only way to apply pressure on the Israeli government in person.

Biden’s conditions for the trip included Israel ending its ‘siege’ of Gaza, demanding that Israel continue to supply power and water, as well as allow convoys into the Hamas territory even while Deputy National Security Adviser Jon Finer admitted to CNN that there was no way to stop Hamas from making use of them. $100 million in aid to Gaza was promised by the Biden administration and its proposed aid package of $9 billion to Israel includes $9 billion in aid which can be utilized for the ‘Palestinians’. This ended Israel’s efforts to cut off supplies to Hamas.

The Biden trip was also contingent on Israel delaying its ground assault on Hamas originally planned for that week. Once Biden visited Israel, the ground assault was further delayed under pressure from the Biden administration which demanded that Israel first allow in aid convoys and give it time to properly secure American diplomatic facilities in the region.

Hamas was able to resupply through the aid convoys, but Israeli soldiers still couldn’t go in.

300,000 Israeli soldiers have been mobilized in a nation of 7 million. Ordinary people have closed their businesses, canceled their plans, and collapsed the economy.

Hamas is using this time to prepare more booby traps and a defense strategy for block-by-block fighting in Gaza City. Israel’s efforts to convince Gazans to leave were meant to prepare the ground for an assault. The longer a ground attack is delayed, the more soldiers will die.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant had sought to carry out a first strike to decimate Hezbollah’s massive arsenal of rockets in Lebanon, but the Biden administration had vetoed that on the grounds that it would escalate the conflict and instead offered to deploy two aircraft carriers to potentially dissuade a Hezbollah campaign while limiting the fighting to Hamas.

Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed terror group that controls Lebanon, instead has waged a lower-intensity conflict with Israel, killing soldiers and civilians, while threatening a larger one.

The ground assault on Hamas in Gaza continues to be postponed. The Biden administration has demanded that Israel have humanitarian plans fully implemented and a post-Hamas governance model in place before Israel can really send ground troops into Gaza.

But, as days pass, the population is trickling back in, which will mean far more civilian casualties. The Biden administration’s obsession with delaying an assault to wait for humanitarian aid would mean far more dead people if a full ground attack takes place. It would have saved more lives to quickly remove Hamas and provide aid than the other way around.

Seeing that the Biden administration had been effective in crippling Israel’s military response, Hamas began releasing a trickle of hostages to further slow down the Israeli operation. The Biden administration and the European Union have come out against a ground assault, now believing that diplomacy can free the hostages from Hamas. All that does is demonstrate to Hamas that having hostages is leverage that can be used to get Biden to stop an Israeli attack.

The hostages weren’t actually ‘hostages’ until Washington D.C. and Brussels made them so by blocking an Israeli ground assault on Hamas. Meanwhile, Iran’s Shiite-backed militias in Iraq and its Islamist allies around the Middle East began attacking and threatening American targets. The Biden administration once again gave in to the hostage situation by asking Israel to hold off its operation until it had managed to further secure American facilities. Why were these facilities not secured after Benghazi, the attacks on other diplomatic facilities on that same day, and years of rocket attacks by Iran’s militias on American facilities in Iraq, and what more can be done to secure them now? And how long will the process of securing them take? Who knows.

What is clear is that Biden demonstrated that Iran can take American facilities hostage across the region to force Washington D.C. to restrain Israel from destroying its terrorist organizations.,

Meanwhile, the clock is ticking.

Biden chose to tie $9 billion in military resupply to Israel to a $106 billion package of which $61 billion will go to Ukraine and another $14 billion to processing border invaders more rapidly. This had the intended effect of drastically slowing down aid to Israel while creating a crisis with House Republicans who question further aid to Ukraine and oppose Biden’s border policies.

By making Israel’s military resupply dependent on a much larger Ukraine aid package, Biden reinforced the primacy of the Ukraine war over Israel’s campaign against Hamas. While Biden has repeatedly scolded Israel about following the laws of war, no such criticism has been directed toward Ukraine even when sending cluster munitions and other controversial weapons.

Rather than providing military resupply to Israel as quickly as possible, Biden had taken it hostage for political profit, trying to turn pro-Israel voters against House Republicans. It’s a win-win strategy for the Biden administration which for once can position itself on the pro-Israel side of an issue while slowing down aid to Israel in order to delay its military response.

Biden’s rhetoric after the Hamas attack won praise, even from some Republicans, but his policies don’t match his words. While he spoke of backing an Israeli military campaign against Hamas, what his administration actually did was to cripple it. The warnings about civilian casualties encouraged Hamas to hide behind women and children while making Israeli air strikes less effective. The constant delays imposed on a ground operation in Gaza may scuttle it altogether or make it longer and more costly in the lives of Israeli soldiers.

Hamas hostage-taking was rewarded and if real fighting with Hezbollah breaks out, the lack of a first strike may prove to be an even more catastrophic disaster than the original Hamas attacks.

Finally, Biden promised rapid aid and instead turned it into a political game with Republicans to extract $61 billion for Ukraine and score some political points ahead of the 2024 election.

The Israeli government has tried to accommodate the Biden administration, but making its military response dependent on support from Washington D.C. will work out the same way that all past concessions, including those that allowed Hamas to win elections in 2006 and seize control of Gaza in 2007, have, leaving Israel with neither political support nor tactical options.

The greatest level of political support for a campaign against Hamas came right after the initial massacres. As time passes and the media barrages the public with Hamas propaganda like the hospital hoax, that support is disappearing and whatever support the Biden administration is promising will go with it.

Biden will take the admiring newspaper columns in Jewish weeklies and the ‘thank you’ letters sent to the White House, and tell Israel that it needs to wrap up its operation in a week or two. No matter how much Israel struggles to avoid killing civilians and how much aid it allows inside, his administration’s spokesmen will still blame civilian casualties and the “humanitarian crisis” in Gaza for the withdrawal of support. And many American Jews will side with Biden.

The Israeli government is waiting around for a level of political support that will never come. It has learned nothing from the failure of past concessions. It is always easier for an administration to sell out Israel than to stand up to Muslim countries and the American Left.

If the Netanyahu government is to fulfill its promise of ending Hamas rule in Gaza, it will have to act sooner rather than later. And it will have to go ahead without Biden’s approval. If it does not, Hamas will remain in power and the politicians will build a bigger wall and rationalize that this time they will make sure that the Islamic terrorists don’t get through it.

Listening to the Biden administration won’t defeat Hamas: it will allow it to survive. And that injustice will disgrace the memory of the dead and threaten the survival of the Jewish State.

Israel Calls for UN Chief’s Resignation After Comments Justifying Hamas Attack

BY RICK MORAN 11:07 AM ON OCTOBER 25, 2023
Israel Calls for UN Chief's Resignation After Comments Justifying Hamas Attack
(AP Photo/Richard Drew)
Israel is calling for the resignation of the United Nations secretary-general, António Guterres, for comments he made defending Hamas’s brutal attacks on Israel

After an obligatory reference to comments he says he made that “condemned unequivocally the horrifying and unprecedented 7 October acts of terror by Hamas in Israel,” Guterres took it all back.

Guterres said that “it is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum,” pointing to “56 years of suffocating occupation” that the Palestinian people suffered. So “56 years of suffocating occupation” justifies beheading babies, raping women, murdering defenseless civilians, and then celebrating the bloody rampage?

Why yes, says Guterres. Yes, it does. Except when it doesn’t.

“The grievances of the Palestinian people cannot justify the appalling attacks by Hamas,” he added. “Nothing can justify the deliberate killing, injuring, and kidnapping of civilians — or the launching of rockets against civilian targets.”

What planet does this guy live on?

Sorry, Mr. Moral Pygmy. You can’t have it both ways. I’ve said several times when writing about this war that when politicians have tried to straddle the Hamas atrocities by practicing bothsidesism, they ignore the fact that this is an either/or question. Either you justify Hamas atrocities or you stand with Israel against the barbarians. There’s no “in-between.” There’s no middle ground. And politicians like Barack Obama and Guterres who attempt to split the moral difference end up being morally diminished.

The New York Sun editorial board tried to give voice to the rage and hurt inflicted on Israelis and Jews all over the world by those mealy-mouthed words.

The speech today by the secretary general of the United Nations, António Guterres, blaming Israel for the attack on it by Hamas is one of the most shocking moments in the history of the world body. It absolutely infuriated Israel, its diplomats, and the Jewish community world wide. It is hard to imagine that the UN, already a deeply corrupted institution obsessed with Israel, can continue with business as usual.

We grasp that there was a certain diplomatic subtlety to the way Mr. Guterres couched his libel — a blood libel, at that.  There is no justification for the October 7 attack by Hamas, he said, and then justified it by claiming it “did not happen in a vacuum.” As our Benny Avni reports, he enumerated hardships inflicted on Palestinian Arabs. His remarks smacked of attempts by enemies of the Jews to suggest that the Jews deserved the Holocaust.

Israel’s foreign minister, Eli Cohen, responded to Guterres’s blood libel by fighting off tears while reading the names of the dead children murdered by Hamas in the October 7 attacks.

“Mr. Secretary-General, in what world do you live? Definitely, this is not our world.”

Later, Cohen said he would not meet with Guterres and that “there is no room for a balanced approach. Hamas must be erased from the world!”

Israel’s UN ambassador, Gilad Erdan, called on Guterres to resign.

“The U.N. is failing, and you, Mr. Secretary-General, have lost all morality and impartiality. Because when you say those terrible words that these heinous attacks did not happen in a vacuum, you are tolerating terrorism, and I think that the secretary-general must resign,” he said. “Because from now on, every day that he is here in this building, unless he apologizes immediately, today, we called him to apologize, there’s no justification to the existence of this building. ”

Would Israel leave the UN over this? Cohen seemed to hint it was a possibility. As long as Guterres remains as secretary general of the UN, Mr. Erdan told reporters, “there is no justification for this building.” He added that Israel will have to reassess its relations with the UN.

If Biden was truly “standing with Israel,” he would also call for Guterres’s resignation. But Biden is a Moral Pygmy too, and there’s no chance of that happening.

How the Hamas Attack Took Israel by Surprise

Not just Israel’s 9/11 -- also its Tet Offensive.

 by  

SEE: https://www.frontpagemag.com/how-the-hamas-attack-took-israel-by-surprise/;

Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.


A week before its attack Hamas agreed to another truce with Israel. The agreement negotiated by Qatar, Egypt and the United Nations traded an end to border attacks for more imports, a bigger fishing zone, and more work permits that allowed 20,000 Gaza Muslims to enter Israel.

The agreement reached between Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, and Sukkot, the conclusion of the High Holy Days season, offered an end to the explosives and rocks being hurled at Israeli soldiers on the border and the incendiary balloons starting fires on Israeli farms. And terrorist attacks on civilians like the murder of Batsheva Nigri: a kindergarten teacher shot and killed while driving in her car with her 12-year-old daughter.

Qatar, a state sponsor of Hamas and an ally of the United States, claimed that it had “succeeded in de-escalating the situation in the Gaza Strip by mediating an understanding.”

Hamas ended the border riots and Israelis went into the Sukkot holiday with an apparent calm. The Israeli army and security forces continued to focus on the West Bank, where much of the violence appeared to be coming from, rather than the Gaza Strip which seemed quiet.

But the border attacks and the negotiated ceasefire had all been part of a feint. Hamas had been working on a large-scale attack for two years. During this time it had calculatedly tamped down some of the violence and appeared amenable to informal truces in exchange for benefits.

When Hamas began conducting exercises on kidnapping Israelis and “storming settlements” in plain sight in September 2023, experts dismissed it as posturing to extract more concessions. In an article five days before the attacks, the default assumption by a Western diplomat and Israeli defense officials was that Hamas was running short of money and an infusion of Qatari cash along with more work permits, which brought $2 million a day into Gaza, would appease it.

An expert quoted in the media described Hamas border violence as a “tactical way of generating attention about their distress. It’s not an escalation but ‘warming up’ to put pressure on relevant parties that can come up with money to give to the Hamas government.”

It was in this state of tactical blindness, the equivalent of America’s obliviousness before 9/11, that the Hamas attacks executed on the conclusions of the High Holy Days took place.

Israel did not entirely drop its guard. Army units were still watching the border and a unit of the Shin Bet, its domestic security agency, had been dispatched in anticipation of an attack. There had been warnings that something was coming, but in line with previous attacks, the most Israeli security personnel anticipated was a 7-10 man incursion by a Hamas strike force.

No one expected over 2,000 terrorists breaking through at multiple points for a full-scale invasion of neighboring Israeli towns and communities. But they should have.

The Hamas campaign has been described as Israel’s 9/11, but it has more of an analogy to another disaster in America’s military history. In January 1968, Communist forces in Vietnam launched the Tet Offensive, taking advantage of a local holiday truce and the conviction of American military leaders that enemy forces were not capable of an attack on that scale.

The ambition of the attack took everyone by surprise. The Viet Cong were able to attack even the U.S. embassy in Saigon and take control of cities like Hue where they murdered and tortured whomever they pleased. While the Tet Offensive failed, it broke the morale of the Vietnamese and helped end Democratic Party support for the Vietnam War.

Like the Tet Offensive, the Hamas attacks violated a cease-fire and depended on diverting Israel’s attention away from the Gaza border and to the West Bank. The border riots and the agreement had lulled Israel into a false sense of security about the scale of Hamas ambitions. Like the Tet Offensive, rocket attacks were followed by a large-scale assault targeting populated areas deeper inside Israel that were not properly hardened. Gazan workers who had been given work permits guided the Hamas terrorists with information about those communities.

Israeli deployments at the Gaza border had been aimed at countering the two usual scenarios over the years: attacks across the border and infiltration by small groups. During border riots, a limited number of IDF soldiers would warn off the rioters, often by firing in the air, and snipers would be on watch for long range attacks. The border fence had been built to block any but the most determined infiltrators and to quickly alert response teams to any incursions. In the event that the border fence was breached, Israeli special units would quickly intercept the terrorists.

In these scenarios, a relatively small number of soldiers could secure the border. No one had planned for a third scenario or brought in sufficient numbers of soldiers to cope with it. Like most militaries, the IDF had focused on winning the wars as they were being fought now.

And that is always a fatal error.

The border fence had been designed to alert Israel to individual breaches so that military forces could quickly converge on the area. But now there were far more breaches than forces. While overwhelmed Israeli border forces tried to stop the invaders, more of them were breaching at multiple points and heading toward their real targets: communities inside Israel.

Unlike the Jewish communities that had existed in Gaza before the disastrous ‘disengagement’ that forced them out in the name of peace or the Jewish ‘settlements’ in the West Bank, the ‘kibbutzim’ were not especially hardened. Whereas Jewish ‘settlements’ tend to be more religious and heavily armed, the equivalent of small towns in Texas, the communities near Gaza attacked by Hamas were more approximately Boston suburbs. They were not entirely helpless: but they were dependent on security teams who kept weapons in a central location.

The Hamas terrorists, who had used the Gaza work permits to gain detailed intelligence on their targets, were well aware of this. Security in these communities had been set up to cope with the usual threat of one or two terrorists but was completely unready for 70 or 90 heavily armed attackers with detailed maps of their targets and a plan to secure their objectives. And that included knowing where the security teams and IDF personnel in those communities lived.

In some communities, members of security teams and ordinary civilians heroically fought back. The story of Inbar Lieberman, a 25-year-old woman who served as the security coordinator for Kibbutz Nir Am, who rallied her neighbors, killed 5 terrorists, and saved the kibbutz has been widely told. But other communities were not so lucky. That was where the massacres happened.

The system fell apart and those on the ground improvised. Troops on the ground used WhatsApp to request fire support from choppers. Commando units used WhatsApp groups to locate veterans with military experience and deploy them to targeted areas. “Suburbanites and urbanites, including some retirees, simply holstered their guns, jumped in their cars, and drove maniacally down South – saving their kids, their grandkids, or mere strangers.”

Where the IDF had been overwhelmed and tied down, an informal IDF of veterans stepped into the breach. And without them, Hamas might have achieved its overall objectives.

Hamas had waited two years and deployed over 2,000 terrorists not just to carry out a few large scale massacres, but to seize and secure the targeted communities as forward operating bases, expanding its territory, and seeking to move beyond them in a battle for all of Israel. Its Jihadis wore cameras and recorded their atrocities to use them as a rallying call to summon Arab Muslims in the West Bank and inside Israel’s ‘Green Line’ to join a battle for all of Israel.

The ultimate plan was “to seize the Gaza corridor and open a pathway to Tel Aviv”: a not unthinkable distance of 44 miles away. Hamas moving its atrocities to Tel Aviv would have been the perfect equivalent of the Tet Offensive.

As the Hamas attacks were underway, Al Jazeera reported that mosque “minarets in the West Bank began making calls of ‘Allahu Akbar’ in an expression of support” and “massive processions set out in a number of places in the West Bank…  in Jenin, Tubas, Ramallah… in Hebron, and Bethlehem… to celebrate the ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’ battle.”

The images of the hostages, the kidnapped children and abused women were intended to panic Israelis and convince Arab Muslims to join a battle on the verge of being won. The Hamas message was that Israel was weak and ripe for destruction. But no real support arrived. Despite its initial victories and massacres, Hamas was unable to sustain its momentum. Like the Tet Offensive, the High Holy Day atrocities were a political victory and a military defeat.

Estimates are that Hamas left behind as many as 1,500 dead inside Israel and more along the border. The Jihadiis, fueled by captagon, known as “the drug of jihad”, a popular amphetamine in the Middle East mass produced by the Assad regime in Syria, and widely used by Islamic terror groups from ISIS to Hezbollah, felt invulnerable and gleefully tortured, mutilated and raped their way across communities, heady with the conviction that they could not be stopped.

The captagon high of ‘poor man’s cocaine’ also made them slow to respond as the tide of battle turned. Many fought and died rather than strategically pull back. A surprise attack had turned into a rout. Like Al Qaeda and ISIS, the larger plans of Hamas resembled those of most Islamists whose military strategies were rooted in a mixture of Marxist guerrilla tactics, Mohammed’s conquests and prophecies of final battles when the end times arrive.

Islamic terrorists and guerrillas execute an attack in the expectation that the larger ummah of the Muslim world will rally to their banners. Islamists like Marxists see all battles as primarily ideological. Victory or defeat in any individual battle is less important than raising morale, terrifying enemies and using that to generate recruitment. The Marxist and Islamist guerrilla aims not as much at winning battles as maintaining a higher level of morale and staying power.

Hamas had won and lost before. Each time it emerged with more financing, fame, and manpower. To defeat Maoist forces in the field, you have to actually destroy them. Or make them completely irrelevant. The Tet Offensive had failed at achieving its military objectives, but demonstrated how the Communists intended to win. That is what Hamas had also set out to do.

Israel had spent so much time focusing on Hamas tactics that it lost track of the terrorist group’s actual long-term objectives. That is a mistake that it cannot afford again with either Hamas, Hezbollah, Fatah, or any of the Islamic terrorist groups that it is confronting. Washington’s bad habit of looking at Islamic terrorists through the eyes of realpolitik had rubbed off on Jerusalem. Believing that Islamists want what we all want, that Hamas considerations were driven by $2 million a day or fishing zones rather than a religious mandate to destroy Israel was an error.

Counterterrorism is inherently reactive. Israel excelled at counterterrorism, but that success was also a trap. While the Israelis built better mousetraps, they had come to think of the enemy as a mouse. The more they reacted to what Hamas was doing, the better able they were to stop it in the short term, but the more they lost track of countering its larger plans in the long term.

Islamists engage in terrorism, but it was a catastrophic mistake to think of Hamas as merely a terrorist group and to reduce it to its tactics. The Hamas attacks discarded terrorism and turned to guerrilla warfare, drawing on everything from classic Mohammedan warfare to ISIS attacks to Marxist campaigns in Southeast Asia. Hamas stepped out of the box to launch an operation that overwhelmed Israeli forces still thinking of it in terms of counterterrorism rather than all-out war.

To win a war, you must know the enemy. Israel had lost sight of who its enemy really was. But so has every nation in the free world facing a religious war that is over a thousand years old.

Why Israel Still Hasn’t Started its Ground Operation in Gaza

What's Biden up to, exactly?

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SEE: https://www.frontpagemag.com/why-israel-still-hasnt-started-its-ground-operation-in-gaza/;

Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.


[Make sure to read Robert Spencer’s contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]

What’s taking so long? Why hasn’t Israel moved into Gaza and begun to obliterate Hamas? The answer, I’m afraid, is drearily predictable.

The death toll for the Hamas jihad massacres in Israel has now climbed over 1,400, yet over two weeks after the Oct. 7 attacks that appalled the world, the promised Israeli ground offensive has not yet materialized. The reason for the delay can be summed up in what the man who claims to be president would say were two words, and those words are that same man’s name: Old Joe Biden.

The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that “U.S. and European governments have joined to put pressure on Israel to hold off on its ground invasion of Gaza to allow more time to win the release of hostages held by Hamas, U.S. and foreign officials said.” That pressure almost certainly originates from the Biden regime, which showed its hostility to Israel from the beginning by restoring aid to the Palestinians after Trump had stopped that aid in view of their continuing support for jihad terror, and which reaffirmed that hostility just days ago, when Old Joe went all the way to Israel to stab our most reliable Middle East ally in the back and announce that he was giving $100 million to Gaza, which means, despite his denials, $100 million to Hamas.

Meanwhile, the Journal adds that “several countries have been trying to leverage their contacts with Hamas to press the militant group to release the hostages taken during their onslaught on Israel earlier this month. One U.S. official had said that Qatar’s government had been very helpful on the matter, but noted the difficulties of reaching an agreement given Israel’s bombardment of Gaza and the spiraling humanitarian crisis there.”

Yeah, that may be gumming up the works. Another problem may be that Qatar is quite chummy with Hamas. On the day of the jihad massacres in Israel, Hamas leaders were videoed in a plush office in Qatar, watching news of the attacks and then getting down on their knees to give thanks to Allah for the wanton butchery of Israeli civilians. Qatar is a principal backer of the Muslim Brotherhood. In its charter, Hamas (which is an acronym for Islamic Resistance Movement) states: “The Islamic Resistance Movement is one of the wings of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine.”

So how can Qatar be “very helpful” in getting Hamas to release the hostages? Only in ways that benefit Hamas and harm Israel. One way to do that is for Qatari negotiators to drag their feet in carrying out negotiations over these hostages, giving Hamas time to prepare for an Israeli ground invasion. In making these preparations, they can likely use material that was delivered on the trucks full of “humanitarian aid” that Old Joe Biden strong-armed Benjamin Netanyahu into allowing through; Old Joe’s “humanitarian aid” to the Palestinians has been diverted to friends of terrorists before.

Every day the ground incursion is delayed, in fact, aids Hamas by giving it time to strengthen its defenses, set traps for Israeli soldiers, and stir up its populace with even more Jew-hatred and bloodlust than they get in ordinary times. At this point, it isn’t even completely certain that there will be any ground operation in Gaza at all, despite the fact that there can be no definitive end of Hamas without one, and so the bloody events of Oct. 7 will just be replayed on another day.

If, after all the delays, Israel does finally enter Gaza with ground troops, its operation will be hamstrung from the beginning. There will immediately be reports of civilian casualties. These reports don’t bother to inform the public that Hamas deliberately stages attacks from civilian areas in order to draw retaliatory fire it can use for propaganda purposes. Old Joe and his henchmen will immediately denounce Israel’s “disproportionate” response and call upon it to show “restraint,” while self-righteously reminding Netanyahu about “international law” that he is supposedly ignoring.

In reality, Israel has been called the most moral army in the world and takes immense care to avoid civilian casualties. Those casualties will come, however, if the Gaza ground operation ever does begin. Hamas will make sure of that. And then Israel will have to endure a chorus of international condemnation that may end up making it end operations short of its goal. That will mean the loss of more innocent lives in the future. But hey, endangering people and mortgaging their future — that’s what Old Joe Biden does.

Biden is Blocking Israeli Ground Assault on Hamas

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SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2023/10/biden-is-blocking-israeli-ground-assault-on-hamas;

Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.

U.S. and European governments have joined to put pressure on Israel.

Some are wondering why Israel hasn’t begun the ground assault on Hamas yet. The answer is in Washington D.C.

After the Hamas atrocities, Israel went on a full war footing. 300,000 Israelis have been evacuated from front-line areas and the IDF mobilized 300,000 troops. Those are people who are not with their families or working, some flew in from abroad. This makes Israel one of the most mobilized nations in the world. But it can’t keep that up forever.

But instead of going in, everyone is waiting because D.C. and the EU want to hold off an assault on Hamas.

U.S. and European governments have joined to put pressure on Israel to hold off on its ground invasion of Gaza to allow more time to win the release of hostages held by Hamas, U.S. and foreign officials said.

Several countries have been trying to leverage their contacts with Hamas to press the militant group to release the hostages taken during their onslaught on Israel earlier this month. One U.S. official had said that Qatar’s government had been very helpful on the matter but noted the difficulties of reaching an agreement given Israel’s bombardment of Gaza and the spiraling humanitarian crisis there.

Qatar is a state sponsor of Hamas. It’s harboring Hamas leaders. Before the Hamas attack on Israel, Qatar very helpfully negotiated a truce.

And now that the U.S. and the EU have made it clear that they can stop Israel from taking out Hamas as leverage for the hostages, Hamas has no reason to release the hostages.

Those hostages are the only reason IDF soldiers aren’t in Gaza City right now.

Rather than securing their release, they’ve made them more valuable as hostages.

What did Hamas buy with the release of two female American hostages? The conviction by D.C. diplomats that they can get more released if they just spend more time negotiating with Hamas.

The United States is pressing Israel to hold off on a ground invasion of Gaza to allow for more time for hostage negotiations, according to a CNN report published Sunday.

“The [administration] pressed Israeli leadership to delay because of progress on the hostage front,” a person familiar with the U.S.-Israel talks told the cable network, one of two sources it cited in its report.

Asked on Meet the Press on Sunday about the U.S. delaying a possible ground incursion by Israel into Gaza, Secretary of State Antony Blinken sidestepped the question, but said they are not “second guessing” their ally.

On Saturday, President Joe Biden responded to a question about delaying a potential ground incursion by telling reporters: “I’m talking to the Israelis.”

It’s in Hamas’ interests to appear reasonable but to hang on to enough hostages to slow any Israeli action.

And Hamas is doing just that with the able assistance of its useful idiots in D.C. and Europe.

“Hamas does not appear to have gotten anything concrete out of the Friday release of Americans Judith Tai Raanan and her 17-year-old daughter, Natalie Raanan,” CNN claims.

Hamas has gotten Israel to delay a ground assault. How much more concrete can you get?

Hamas Founder’s Son Says Media Too ‘Afraid’ To Label Group As Terrorists, Fearing Religious War

OAN’s Brooke Mallory
3:45 PM – Monday, October 23, 2023

Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of a Hamas co-founder, declared on Monday that Hamas is even more dangerous than ISIS and that the mainstream media is reluctant to label the organization as terrorists and a genocidal religious movement for fear of starting a full-scale religious conflict.

“It’s their own comparison to say Hamas and ISIS because I think Hamas is a lot more dangerous,” Mosab Hassan Yousef told reporters. 

“Look at the division and the global confusion because of Hamas. They brought us to our knees somehow by their brutality and their barbarism. Brutality is even understating Hamas’ acts. Hamas is a religious movement, and they are a raging religious movement against Israel. The mainstream media cannot say this, because they are afraid to ignite a religious war. And what I say, it already is. They want to annihilate the Jewish people because they are Jewish people, because they are a Jewish state,” he continued.

Yousef, who denounced Islam to become a Christian and left the terrorist organization in the 1990s to secretly work as a spy for Israel’s Shin Bet internal security agency, claimed that since Hamas is neither a political nor national movement, negotiations with them are practically impossible.

“They are driven by dark hatred toward a race, toward a nation,” he asserted.

The Islamic State, known as ISIS, has seen a significant decline in power after gaining territorial control over portions of both Syria and Iraq in the 2010s. It gained notoriety for its terrorist attacks and heinous violations of human rights against those living under its rule.

After Israel left the Gaza Strip in the 2000s, Hamas seized authority and has been in charge of the region ever since it was elected in 2006. This month, Israel declared war on Hamas following the terrorist group’s unexpected invasion and murderous spree against Jews in southern Israel.

More than 200 captives have been captured by Hamas and taken as hostages to Gaza, the territory it controls that borders Egypt and Israel.

According to Yousef, much of Hamas’s strength in withstanding an Israeli ground assault would come from its established tactic of employing “human shields.”

“They have many tunnels. They used the funds and the aid that came to Gaza, they used it to dig tunnels,” he said. “It’s very hard to deal with this style of suicidal group of fighters who basically don’t appreciate life. They actually [are] looking forward to death.”

It is feasible to eliminate Hamas, Yousef said, but it would begin with demolishing its infrastructure, obtaining information, and imposing a strangling siege.

According to the Jerusalem Post, the Israel Security Agency, often known as Shin Bet, formed a new division called NILI, which stands for “The Eternity of Israel Will Not Lie,” in Hebrew.

The new unit’s mission is to find and eliminate every individual involved in the heinous crimes. It will reportedly function independently of other command and control groups that are concentrated on removing attack cells and senior Hamas officials, the paper states.

It is also intended to deliberately target members of the Nukhba branch of Hamas, a secret commando force inside the terror group that Israel thinks was responsible for the assaults.

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Israeli Christian: ‘This is not a war for only Jews against Hamas. It’s the fight of light against darkness.’

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SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2023/10/israeli-christian-this-is-not-a-war-for-only-jews-against-hamas-its-the-fight-of-light-against-darkness;

Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.

Yes. But many Christians are blinded to this by a lingering and/or recrudescent antisemitism.

“Israeli Christian says Hamas isn’t just a danger to Jews: ‘Fight of light against darkness,’” by Kassy Dillon, Fox News, October 22, 2023:

Shadi Khaloul, a Christian Israeli, said he believes the ongoing war isn’t just between Jews and Hamas, but between those who defend the value of light against darkness.

A Christian and former Israel Defense Forces paratrooper said he believes Hamas is not just a danger to Jews, but also to followers of Jesus.

“We think that this is not a war for only Jews against Hamas,” Shadi Khaloul said. “It’s the fight of light against darkness.”…

“We, as Israelis, are fighting this fight together with Jews, Christians, Muslims and Druze, Arameans like us,” Khaloul said. “We fight this together with Jews in order to defend the values of light of our actually common Judeo-Christian values that our democracies are built in.”

Khaloul, 47, is a part of the Christian Maronite Aramaic community that believes its members are descendants of Jesus’ early followers. Many pray in Aramaic — the language Jesus spoke — and do not identify as Arab….

“It’s not a war between Jews and them,” Khaloul said, referring to Hamas. “It’s a war between them and other people that are different from Hamas.”

Moderate Muslims are also “a target to be attacked,” according to Khaloul, citing Hamas’ attacks on members of the Palestinian political party Fatah….

“No one of the Christians wants to live under this jihadi Islamic regime that treats them as infidels, that treats them as … maybe fifth-class citizens,” Khaloul said.

He pointed out that the Christian population in Gaza has dramatically decreased under Hamas. It dropped from around 3,000 prior to 2007 to about 1,300, according to the University of Notre Dame.

“This is horrible. Because of Hamas, now the Gazan people are suffering,” Khaloul said. “It’s not because of Israel.”…

US warship intercepts missiles/drones launched by Iran-backed Houthis toward Israel

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SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2023/10/us-warship-intercepts-missiles-drones-launched-by-iran-backed-houthis-toward-israel;

Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.

Iran is becoming increasingly agitated over the Israel war on Gaza and has now apparently decided to enter the war via its proxies. The regime is so desperate that it “strong-armed the Tehran Jewish community into condemning Israel on its Telegram channel for its efforts to defeat Iran’s ally, Hamas.”

Iran has been relentlessly bashing and threatening Israel since the launch of Israel’s Operation Swords of Iron. According to another report from Iran International:

The head of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, Peyman Jebelli, conveyed a message that they are preparing to broadcast news of Israel’s disappearance from the scene. He stated, “Israel is digging its own grave and won’t last beyond 2040.” His rhetoric echoes Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s previous comments from 2015.

Iran is the funding source behind Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hizballah, as well as other proxies in Syria and militias in Iraq. Iranian proxies are operational far beyond the Middle East. The world’s chief Shia nation is now so emboldened that its Syrian proxies are targeting American bases with drones as tensions in Gaza escalate. Hizballah, meanwhile, fired anti-tank missiles at IDF forces near Lebanon’s border as Lebanon prepares to evacuate.

Despite the West’s longtime appeasement of Iran, the Iranian regime has made no secret of its ambitions, nor of its own violation of the disastrous 2015 nuclear deal. Iran never had any intention of scaling back its uranium enrichment, which is clearly directed toward making a nuclear bomb. As the Israel war on Gaza escalates, it is important also to recall that Shia Iran ascribes to a doomsday theology, which has persistently been ignored by the mainstream media, despite its significance.

The Hidden – or Twelfth – Imam plays a dominant role in one specific form of Shi’ite Islamic theology, called “Twelverism,” which happens to be the primary belief system of Iran’s leadership. There is a messianic belief that at the end of days, the Hidden Imam will appear in the midst of a violent apocalyptic scenario played out on a battleground stained with infidels’ blood.

Western leaders must wake up if it isn’t already too late.

“US Navy Warship Intercepts Missiles, Drones By Iran-Backed Houthis,” Iran International, October 19, 2023:

A US Navy warship on Thursday intercepted three cruise missiles and several drones launched by the Iran-backed Houthi militants from Yemen.

While Washington is on heightened alert for activity by Iran-backed groups as regional tensions soar during the Israel-Hamas war, the Pentagon said that the projectiles were potentially fired toward Israel.

The Pentagon said the destroyer USS Carney was operating in the northern Red Sea on Thursday when it brought down the projectiles and there were no injuries.

“We cannot say for certain what these missiles and drones were targeting, but they were launched from Yemen heading north along the Red Sea, potentially towards targets in Israel,” Pentagon spokesman Brigadier General Patrick Ryder told reporters.

Earlier in the day, US forces in Syria also brought down two hostile drones, leading to some minor injuries. The attack took place on Wednesday against US forces at Al-Tanf base, near Syria’s borders with Iraq and Jordan. Unnamed US officials did not say who was responsible for the attack, but Iranian backed militia groups have targeted the bases multiple times in the past.

State Department Official Quits Over How Biden Is Handling Hamas-Israel Conflict

TOPSHOT-US-politics-government-pandemic-Covid-19 TOPSHOT - US President Joe Biden delivers remarks on the COVID-19 response and the vaccination in the East Room at the White House in Washington, DC on May 17, 2021. (Photo by Nicholas Kamm / AFP) (Photo by NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP via Getty Images)

OAN’s Abril Elfi 
1:27 PM – Thursday, October 19, 2023

SEE: https://www.oann.com/newsroom/state-department-official-quits-over-how-biden-is-handling-hamas-israel-conflict/;

Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.

Josh Paul, a State Department official who spoke to the press, has now resigned from his position for reasons pertaining to the Biden Administration’s strategy on the current conflict between Israel and Hamas.

Paul, who had worked at the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs for over 11 years, announced through a statement posted on LinkedIn on Wednesday that he quit his job “due to a policy disagreement concerning our continued lethal assistance to Israel.”

“Let me be clear,” Paul wrote. “Hamas’ attack on Israel was not just a monstrosity; it was a monstrosity of monstrosities. I also believe that potential escalations by Iran-linked groups such as Hezbollah, or by Iran itself, would be a further cynical exploitation of the existing tragedy. But I believe to the core of my soul that the response Israel is taking, and with it the American support both for that response and for the status quo of the occupation, will only lead to more and deeper suffering for both the Israeli and the Palestinian people – and is not in the long term American interest.”

 

He continued, saying: “This Administration’s response – and much of Congress’ as well – is an impulsive reaction built on confirmation bias, political convenience, intellectual bankruptcy, and bureaucratic inertia.”

“That is to say, it is immensely disappointing, and entirely unsurprising. Decades of the same approach have shown that security for peace leads to neither security, nor to peace. The fact is, blind support for one side is destructive in the long term to the interests of the people on both sides,” Paul added.

Paul also asserted that he is unable to support a set of policy decisions that he believes are “shortsighted, destructive, unjust, and contradictory to the very values that we publicly espouse.”

He also said that the U.S., as a “third party,” should not take sides in the conflict and expressed that Israel had committed “gross violations of human rights.”

The decision of the former state official comes as President Joe Biden has increased funding and weapons to Israel, a long-standing Middle East ally, in response to the Islamic terrorist group’s unexpected attacks on the country earlier this month. 

The U.S. currently provides $3.8 billion in security support to Israel each year, and the administration is preparing to request even more security assistance.

In an interview, Paul told reporters that legal safeguards intended to keep American weaponry out of the hands of human rights violators are failing since the U.S. is supporting Israel while cutting off water, food, medical care, and energy to Gaza.

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Ken Roth Falsely Claims That Israel Engages in ‘Collective Punishment’

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SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2023/10/ken-roth-falsely-claims-that-israel-engages-in-collective-punishment;

Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.

Ken Roth, the former Human Rights Watch head, who turned that NGO into an unextinguishable fount of anti-Israeli animus, has just tweeted from his new post at Princeton, to which he moved after his one-year, extravagantly-paid year at Harvard’s Kennedy School, the following:

He goes on to say in his tweet that Israel’s attacks on Hamas in Gaza constitute “collective punishment.” Elder of Ziyon then takes him to task: “No, Israel isn’t engaging in ‘collective punishment’ under international law,” Elder of Ziyon, October 16, 2023:

He gave the source from the ICRC – and it proves the opposite of his attempt to paint Israel as guilty.

The first paragraph, which he skips, defines collective punishment:

The term refers not only to criminal punishment but also to other types of sanctions, harassment, or administrative action taken against a group in retaliation for an act committed by an individual/s who is considered to form part of the group. Such punishment therefore targets persons who bear no responsibility for having committed the conduct in question.

The word “retaliation” makes it sound as if the action must be done deliberately as a punishment, not as a consequence of going after the actual guilty party.

For example, if a terrorist group gets its arms flown in on flights t a commercial airport, a nation can bomb that airport runway – even if it means that legitimate airplanes cannot land. It definitely affects innocent people but it is not collective punishment, because that is not the intent.

Similarly, other dual use targets – power stations, TV and radio broadcast stations – may be attacked if they are also used by the combatant. (All of these are subject to proportionality analysis, as with any military action.)…

What Hamas did last week was prompted by a genocidal impulse. It was not an attack directed at combatants, though some IDF soldiers were among its victims. The targets were Jews, Jews from babes in swaddling clothes to grandmothers in wheelchairs. Every Jew, not just in Israel, but everywhere in the world, is regarded by Hamas as a legitimate target. It does not depend on what an individual Jew has done, or does, or will do, but only on the fact that someone is a Jew. This is far worse than “collective punishment.” Indeed, no Jew need have done anything to make him fit to be murdered by Hamas; only the fact of his Jewishness counts. That constitutes genocide.

Is Israel now inflicting “collective punishment” on the Palestinians? Has it been rounding up, arresting, or bombing Palestinians in the West Bank, or has it left them entirely alone? In Gaza, has it tried to impose a “collective punishment” on all the residents of the Strip? Quite clearly, no. It has bombed weapons hideouts, rocket launching pads, command-and-control centers, and places where Hamas leaders, including the mastermind of the recent attack in Israel, are now crouching in fear. The IDF does its best to warn civilians away from buildings that are soon to be targeted, by text messaging, telephoning, leafletting, and use of the “knock on the roof” technique. It is Hamas that places its men and weapons inside, alongside, or in tunnels under, civilian structures such as schools, hospitals, apartment houses, and mosques. Israeli pilots, too, call off attacks at the last minute if they detect too many civilians in the targeted area.

Right now, Israel has called on the residents of northern Gaza to move south to safety. Instead of inflicting collective punishment on the Palestinians in Gaza, Israel is making enormous efforts to persuade the ordinary civilians of Gaza to flee from the north to the south of the Strip, where Israel has no plans to attack, and where their safety will be assured. In the north, Israel will as usual do everything it can to avoid harming innocent civilians. Inevitably some will be wounded or killed; that is the nature of modern warfare. But Israel’s intent — and intent is everything — is to minimize civilian casualties.

None of this matters to Ken Roth. For several decades he’s been maligning the Jewish state. Why would he let a little thing like the Hamas attack on Oct. 7 stop him now?

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