Tag Archives: Hamas

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The Horror of Sexual Violence on Oct 7. Believe It.

“You haven’t talked about this until now. Why?

I decided to talk about it only after I heard that people are trying to say that it didn’t happen….I needed to talk for women. I need to talk because I won’t forgive myself if I will still see people that are saying  those things didn’t happen when I know that they did.”  

Testimony of an Israeli victim of sexual violence on Oct 7, Screams Before Silence

A claque of 59 academics who describe themselves as “professors of journalism and scholars of news media” from across the country are in high dudgeon about a Dec. 28, 2023 New York Times story describing a “pattern of rape, mutilation and sexual violence by Hamas” during its Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel.

Asserting there are compelling reports questioning the integrity of the story, the professors said in a letter to the paper, “We recommend that The New York Times immediately commission a group of journalism experts to conduct a thorough and full independent review of the reporting, editing and publishing processes for this story and release a report of the findings.”

Leaving aside that of all the things to complain about regarding coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict, a group of academics are focusing on a sexual assault story, it will be regrettable if the professors’ complaint is used to try to undermine widespread and convincing allegations of sexual violence committed by Hamas on Oct. 7.

Don’t let it.

Rami Davidian, who rescued some people from Nova, told Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, he saw women’s bodies tied to trees in the area of the party. “There were trees on which there was one body, and there were cases in which a number of bodies were tied to the same tree,” he related. “There was a case of a couple who were in an embrace, naked, and tied to a tree. Both of them had been shot in the chest.” Davidian said he had seen more than five bodies that had been mutilated “in intimate places… their organs were cut off, damaged. There was blood from the groin… There were also shots to breasts.”

The aftermath of the Nova massacre

In  Screams Before Silence, a new documentary film from Sheryl Sandberg, former COO of Meta, Sandberg interviewed multiple eyewitnesses, released hostages, first responders, medical and forensic experts, and survivors of the Hamas massacres..

“I’ll never forget what I saw there for so long as I live,” a witness to the massacre’s results said in the film ” I saw girls tied up with their hands behind them to every tree here…Someone murdered them, raped them, and abused them here on these trees. Their legs were spread. Everyone who sees them knows they were abused. Someone stripped them. Someone raped them. They inserted all kinds of things into their intimate organs, like wooden boards, iron rods. Over 30 girls were murdered and raped here. I had to close their legs and cover their bodies so no one else would see what I saw.”

“Every one of us, women and men, must speak up for these women and say, “We will bear your story. We will bear witness for you…what happened to you will be told.”   said Shari Mendes, an Israeli Defense Force (IDF) reservist. 

Whatever the reliability of the New York Times article, the professors need to acknowledge the truth of the larger story of sexual assault by Hamas.

Never forget that..

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Oregon Schools Are Fighting Rising Anti-Semitic Denialism

If there was ever a time for Oregon schools to teach about the holocaust, the time is now.

In a December 2023 YouGov/Economist poll, 20% of young American respondents aged 18-29 said the Holocaust is a myth. Another 30% said they don’t know if it’s a myth. And the proportion of respondents who said they believe the Holocaust is a myth was similar across all levels of education.

And now, denial of the well-documented Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel that left about 1,200 people dead is spreading, despite truly massive real-time documentation of the attacks.  

On social media, an expanding group of denialists link Israel itself to the attack, claiming it was a “false flag” event spurred by Israel to cast blame on Hamas. And as the Washington Post has reported, the denialism is “bleeding into the real world.”  

“Demonstrators have shouted the claim at anti-Israel protests and have used it to justify removing posters of hostages in cities like London and Chicago,” the Washington Post reported. “At a November city council meeting in Oakland, Calif., multiple residents disputed the veracity of the attack.”

According to the Post, “researchers are warning that Oct. 7 conspiracy theories may follow a similar trajectory to Holocaust denial, which was waning before social media platforms propelled a resurgence a decade ago.”

Fortunately, Oregon is ahead on educating its public school students on the Holocaust.

Claire Sarnowski, when she was a freshman at Lake Oswego’s Lakeridge High School, came up with the idea of mandating Holocaust instruction at Oregon’s public schools after hearing a Holocaust survivor, Alter Wiener, tell his story. Sarnowski approached state Sen. Rob Wagner, who agreed to introduce a bill, SB 664. 

The bill passed unanimously in the Oregon House and Governor Brown signed it on June 4, 2019. 

The bill required school districts across Oregon to provide instruction about the Holocaust and genocide in social studies classes, starting in the 2020-21 school year, to “enable students to evaluate the morality of the Holocaust, genocide and similar acts of mass violence and to reflect on the causes of related historical events.”

.As so often happens with legislation, the true believers expanded on Sarnowski’s vision and declared that the instruction must also address: the immorality of mass violence; respect for cultural diversity; the obligation to combat wrongdoing through resistance, including protest, and; the value of restorative justice. Like anti-terrorism laws, it was a classic example of mission creep.

But it was at least a start. And now it’s needed more than ever.

The question, of course, is whether schools are aggressively following the law’s mandates and whether students are absorbing the lessons. The State has also mandated drug prevention education in Oregon’s public schools, for example, but an investigative series from the Lund Report, the University of Oregon’s Journalism Project and Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) has revealed that what students are being taught varies widely and that many school districts don’t use programs backed by evidence that they are effective at delaying or preventing substance abuse. 

And then there’s the question of whether students are acting on what they are learning about the Holocaust.

Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) said recently in a Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Sermon at Central Synagogue NYC that when he was asked why he spoke out so frequently and forcefully about anti-Semitism, his answer was, “The question is not why have I chosen to be outspoken. The question is why have others chosen to be silent amidst the deadliest days for Jews since the Holocaust?”

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Hamas Even Hates Rotary Clubs

Do I have your attention?

Most media coverage of the war in Israel has inexorably shifted from the Oct. 7 barbarism of Hamas[1] to civilian casualties from Israel’s response. Hamas knew this would happen.

“After dealing with reporters through many rounds of violence since coming to power in Gaza in 2007, Hamas understood that most can be co-opted or coerced, and that coverage of Gaza would reliably focus on civilian casualties, obscuring the cause of the war, portraying Israel’s military operations as atrocities, and thus pressuring Israel to stop fighting,” Matti Friedman, a Canadian-Israeli journalist and author, wrote today in The Free Press. This has allowed Israel’s critics to claim the high ground without shame.

It is critical that this shift be challenged by going back to the reality of Hamas’ aims. 

The reality is in the Introduction to Hamas’ original 1988 charter.[2]

“…our struggle against the Jews is extremely wide-ranging and grave, so much so that it will need all the loyal efforts we can wield, to be followed by further steps and reinforced by successive battalions from the multifarious Arab and Islamic world, until the enemies are defeated and Allah’s victory prevails.”

Hamas perceived from the outset that it would have many enemies. 

“The enemies” who must be confronted “…stood behind the French and the Communist Revolutions and behind most of the revolutions we hear about here and there,” said Article 22. “They also used the money to establish clandestine organizations which are spreading around the world, in order to destroy societies and carry out Zionist interests. Such organizations are: the Free Masons, Rotary Clubs, Lions Clubs, B’nai B’rith and the like.”

“All those secret organizations, some which are overt, act for the interests of Zionism and under its directions, strive to demolish societies, to destroy values, to wreck answerableness, to totter virtues and to wipe out Islam,” added Article 28.

The shift in media coverage has allowed the reality of Hamas, as highlighted above, to recede into the background,

As one critical observer, Kevin Diamant, recently wrote in a Letter to the Editor in the Wall Street Journal, “”Hospitals and civilians are entangled in the fighting because the terrorist cowards want them to be — images of civilian casualties are the tool Hamas uses to turn weak minds to its cause.” 

Never forget.

[1] The New York Times reported on Nov. 28, 2023, that it had uncovered new details showing a pattern of rape, mutilation and extreme brutality against women in the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel.

[2] This is from a translation of the original 1988 charter of Hamas. A revised Hamas Document of General Principles and Policies was issued in 2017.

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Civilian Deaths in Gaza Lie at Hamas’s Door

“Far too many Palestinians have been killed, far too many have suffered these past weeks,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Friday in New Delhi.

Do you think Hamas cares?

When Hamas terrorists launched an unprecedented and sadistic surprise attack on Israel  with cold indifference on Oct. 7, brutally butchering and massacring more than 1,200 people, injuring at least 6,900, taking more than 240 people hostage (There is still been no formal master list of hostages held, because Hamas hasn’t provided one), and launching thousands of missiles at Israel from the Gaza Strip, did they expect to overrun the country and eliminate Israelis from the river to the sea? 

Not in the least.

Their aim was to cause chaos and invite massive retaliation, hoping the retaliation could be twisted to undermine Israel’s right to exist and justify Hamas’s cause. 

Israel initially gained wide support in the face of Hamas’s savagery. 

President Biden condemned the atrocities committed by Hamas fighters, including the “slaughter” of men, women and entire families, as well as “stomach-churning reports of babies being killed.”

“The United States unequivocally condemns this appalling assault against Israel by Hamas terrorists from Gaza,” Biden said in a statement. “Israel has a right to defend itself and its people.” 

U.N. human rights chief Volker Turk said he was “shocked and appalled” by the attack. Ursula von der Leyen, head of the European Union’s executive commission, called the attack “terrorism in its most despicable form.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, “Israel’s right to self-defense cannot be questioned.”

But as Israel has retaliated militarily in Gaza in an effort to punish Hamas, and more civilians have been caught in the crossfire, some because Hamas has demanded they stay in place, the public debate has shifted. The portrayal of Israel as the aggressor has emerged, just as Hamas surely hoped it would. 

Now the media is laser focused on the civilian casualties occurring with Israel’s response, all but eclipsing the Oct. 7 barbarities of Hamas. In achieving that shift, Hamas is turning itself into the victim.

Nowhere is that victim status more embraced now that at many American institutions of so-called higher learning. At Harvard, The Palestine Solidarity Committee issued a joint statement with more than 30 other student groups that held Israel “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” ” The apartheid regime is the only one to blame,” it continued.

” When antisemitism moves from the shameful fringe into the public square, it is not about Jews, It is never about Jews,” observed Bari Weiss, editor of The Free Press, in a recent speech to the Federalist Society. “It is about everyone else. It is about the surrounding society or the culture or the country. It is an early warning system—a sign that the society itself is breaking down. That it is dying.  It is a symptom of a much deeper crisis—one that explains how, in the span of a little over 20 years since Sept 11, educated people now respond to an act of savagery not with a defense of civilization, but with a defense of barbarism.”

Sarah Katz, an author with a background in Middle East Studies and counterterrorism, argues that statements such as the one from Harvard’s Palestine Solidarity Committee reflect the conflict of ideologies that has arisen between alleged racist perpetrators and racialized victims.

“When applied to Israel and Palestine, Israel as the “powerful Western oppressor” and Palestine as the “brave non-white victim” have captured the hearts and minds of many esteemed institutions,” Katz wrote recently in the Jewish Journal.  “This oppressor/victim binary tends to dismiss any reference to the culpability of any Palestinian entity in events preceding Israeli retaliation.”

As Ben Kawaller put it in a Free Press post, “What’s really righteous is to promulgate a fundamental loathing of anyone belonging to the “oppressor” class.”

It is essential to know all this when confronting the tragedy that is now Gaza. This is not to ignore or downplay the civilian deaths in Gaza, but Hamas does not get to position itself as the honorable resistance movement in Gaza because of them.

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Things fall apart

I was enjoying a coffee and pastry at a Starbucks this morning when a man sitting next to me checking his smartphone and reading the paper turned and said, “It looks like the rebels or the Russians might have shot down a Malaysian Airlines plane carrying 300 people. Do you get the feeling everything is just unraveling?”

Yes.

A plan to transport three busloads of Central American families through San Diego for processing at the Murrieta Border Patrol station took an unexpected turn when scores of protesters blocked the buses from entering.

A plan to transport three busloads of Central American families through San Diego for processing at the Murrieta Border Patrol station took an unexpected turn when scores of protesters blocked the buses from entering.

Tens of thousands of children of all ages, most unaccompanied by adults, are flowing across the U.S. Southwest border. Frustration and anger is bubbling up all over the country. Some people are arguing that President Obama has encouraged the stream of immigrants and that strong steps need to be taken to control the U.S. border and send the immigrants home. Others argue the immigrants need to be treated with compassion and welcomed to America with open arms in the spirit of “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”

Whichever side you are on, and just about everybody seems to have taken sides, just 28% of the public approves of the way President Obama is handling the surge of children from Central America, according to a new poll by the Pew Research Center or the People & the Press.

Meanwhile, violence is spreading in Gaza and Israel after the kidnapping and killing of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank set off a new cycle of violence in the region.

While Hamas militants and Israel exchange rocket fire, stories multiply of civilian deaths, including a story today reporting that four boys, ages 9 to 11, were killed on a beach west of Gaza City.

A boy on a Gaza beach killed in an Israeli attack is carried away.

A boy on a Gaza beach killed in an Israeli attack is carried away.

Of course, the only reason similar horrifying stories of civilian killings by the Hamas militants haven’t surfaced in Israel is because of its effective anti-rocket defenses.

In Ukraine, tension continues as Russia threatens the country, pro-Russian militants fight the government’s forces and, as noted earlier, rumors swirl that a Malaysian Airlines plane with 295 on board, including some Americans, that crashed in Ukraine near the Russian border was deliberately shot down. The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry in Kiev asserted that the “the airplane was shot down by the Russian Buk missile system.”

wreckage of Malaysia Airlines plane crash in Ukraine

wreckage of Malaysia Airlines plane crash in Ukraine

In Egypt, after a popular uprising resulted in the first democratically-elected Islamic president in Egypt’s history, forces led by Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi overthrew the fledgling president and instigated an unforgiving campaign of retaliation against the Muslim Brotherhood and regime critics that continues to this day.

In Syria, after Obama insisted that use of chemical weapons by the the Assad regime would be “a red line for us,” Obama dithered and the civil war escalated, creating a country scarred with destruction and pushing out hundreds of thousands of refugees into neighboring counries.

obama-redlinespeech821

In Afghanistan, scene of what Obama called “the good war” that needed to be fought, chaos has ensued since the U.S. precipitously withdrew its troops.

In Iraq, after thousands of American soldiers gave their lives in an effort to create a sustainable peace, the U.S.-backed Shia-led government under Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki initiated a cleansing of the Sunni minority. Now we have a violent struggle going on in Iraq with mostly Sunni militants from the radical Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.

A file image uploaded on June 14, 2014 on the jihadist website Welayat Salahuddin allegedly shows militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) executing dozens of captured Iraqi security forces members at an unknown location in the Salaheddin province (AFP Photo / HO)

A file image uploaded on June 14, 2014 on the jihadist website Welayat Salahuddin allegedly shows militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) executing dozens of captured Iraqi security forces members at an unknown location in the Salaheddin province (AFP Photo / HO)

Meanwhile, despite a roaring stock market, economic insecurity reigns. Just 19% of those surveyed by Pew say economic conditions in the U.S. are excellent or good while 81% rate conditions as only fair or poor. About six-in-ten (62%) still say jobs are difficult to find locally.

Detroit Area Economy Worsens As Big Three Automakers Face Dire Crisis

Obama’s rating for handling the economy also has stayed negative, with 56% disapproving of the way Obama is handling the economy, according to the Pew survey. In fact, Obama’s job rating on the economy has been around 40% for most of the past five years.

Meanwhile, Obama, “a restless president weary of the obligations of the White House,” as the New York Times puts it, jets around the world for fundraisers and dinners with celebrities and wealthy supporters, taking as many breaks as he can for golf.

Barack Obama

Unravelling? You bet.