No Country For Anyone

In case one had forgotten what Hamas really is:

Survivors’ accounts, video evidence, and the interrogation recordings of apprehended Palestinians paint a damning picture of the complicity of Gazan civilians both in the Oct. 7 attack, in which more than 1,200 people were murdered and 240 people were abducted to Gaza, and its aftermath. It is one that has sparked a debate in Israel that challenges the inclination to draw distinctions between ordinary Palestinian civilians of Gaza—often referred to in Israel as bilti me’uravim (uninvolved)—and their terror leaders. For many, Oct. 7 reeked of something that Jews have been familiar with for centuries; a phenomenon where not just a vanguard, but a society at large participates in the ritual slaughter of Jews.

Around 700 Palestinians stormed Barad’s kibbutz of Nir Oz—less than a five-minute drive from Gaza—that day, CCTV footage shows. The overwhelming majority of those, estimated by Eran Smilansky, a member of the kibbutz’s security squad, to be around 550, were civilians. They were largely unarmed and not in uniform. Some of those civilians carried out wholesale acts of terror themselves, including rape and abduction—and in some cases, the eventual sale of hostages to Hamas—while others abetted the terrorists. Others still simply took advantage of the porous border to loot Israeli homes and farms, including stealing hundreds of thousands of shekels in agricultural equipment.

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About 70 people had gathered inside a small meeting hall in Atlanta on Jan. 23 to watch a movie none of them was looking forward to seeing.

Israel put together an official video of the atrocities committed by Hamas in its Oct. 7 terrorist attack. More than 900 Israeli civilians and 300 soldiers were killed that day, and 240 more were taken to the Gaza Strip as hostages.

The attack triggered the Israel-Hamas war in that 141 square miles of territory, now in its fourth month.

Seeing the video is an invitation-only affair directed at journalists, community leaders, and other opinion-makers.

No recording is permitted, only handwritten notes. Viewers sign a statement promising not to record. They were asked not to use any names of victims present in the video.

Families of the victims portrayed—people who were dead, injured, raped, kidnapped, mutilated, or abused, often more than one of those—signed releases allowing the government to use the video footage, according to Anat Sutan-Dadon, Israel’s Consul General for the Southeastern United States who led the showing.

Ms. Sutan-Dadon told The Epoch Times those releases specified closed showings only.

She suggested, though, that the feelings in Israel immediately after the attack have now changed, especially as thousands of pro-Hamas demonstrators marching and rioting around the world suggest falsely that the atrocities didn’t happen, that the footage was faked, and focusing attention on the war in Gaza, instead of what started it.

More families want the footage to be seen, she said. Filmmakers are now at work in Israel making documentaries about Oct. 7.

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Oh, how embarrassing:

According to The New York Times, "The daily death toll in Gaza has more than halved in the past month," and has fallen almost two-thirds since late October. Moreover, the percentage of civilian to combatant causalities has gone down considerably as well.

In a massive understatement, The New York Times also reported that these considerable reductions in civilian deaths have been "somewhat overlooked" by the media and critics. "Somewhat"! They have been totally buried and ignored. The New York Times also opined that Israel's "harshest critics are wrong to accuse it of wanting to maximize civilian deaths."

It is no accident that this reduced civilian death toll has been "somewhat overlooked" by the media and by Israel's critics, including previously by The New York Times itself. Israel is subject to a discernible double standard when it comes to covering its military actions.

Even before the recent dramatic reduction in civilian deaths, Israel's military actions produced far fewer deaths and a far lower ratio of civilian-to-combatant deaths than in any comparable urban warfare. This is especially significant considering the reality that Hamas deliberately increases civilian deaths by using women and children as human shields and by hiding its military personnel and equipment among civilians. The current ratio of civilian-to-combatant is well below two-to-one, which compares extremely favorably with ratios achieved by other Western democracies in urban warfare.

Critics of Israel almost never cite comparable data from other military encounters. This omission creates the false impression that the civilian death tolls in Gaza are among the highest in history, when they are in fact among the lowest.

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Laugh it up, idiot:

An adjunct NYU professor denied reports that the terrorist group Hamas beheaded babies and raped women in Israel on October 7, telling a group of students last month: “We know it’s not true.”

“We live in a Zionist city,” Amin Husain added at the December 5 “teach-in” organized by Students for Justice in Palestine at The New School, according to a video obtained by The Free Press. “No, let’s be real about this, let’s be fucking real.”

He went on to joke about his reputation for being antisemitic, citing a petition launched by an NYU alumnus on October 17, 2023, calling for his dismissal: “I have a petition going around, right, because I’m antisemitic. I won the honors of antisemitic multiple times.”