On this day last year, Hamas conducted a co-ordinated and bloody attack on Israeli and other nationals much to the indifference of the rest of the globe.
Now, Israel stands alone against its enemies in the region while armchair critics twiddle their thumbs on how they should feel about brutality against even children.
The world will be judged:
Across Israel that day, about 1,200 people - including more than 300 soldiers - were killed and 251 others were taken hostage. Since then, more than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed as a result of Israeli military action in Gaza, the Hamas-run health ministry says.
The Nahal Oz dead were to include Alroy the balloonist and four comrades, who had engaged in a lengthy battle with Hamas, says his father, citing information given to him by the IDF.
They managed to kill close to 10 gunmen, he said, but the five were outnumbered and were all found dead inside a mobile shelter at 14:30.
The war room - which had been designed as a safe space for the base’s units - was destroyed. Photos and videos show it charred, the screens the Tatzpitaniyot had been carefully monitoring, blackened. Bone fragments were found among the ashes there.
The survivors and the families of those killed and kidnapped are left with unanswered questions about how it went so wrong.
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On the first anniversary of the October 7 terrorist attack on Israel, it’s worth looking back at the lessons we learned, or should have learned, over the past year.
First, it’s always appropriate to remember what happened a year ago. In a surprise attack, Hamas terrorists stormed across the Gaza-Israel border, torturing, raping and killing over 1,200 Israeli citizens and foreign nationals. Hamas also took 251 hostages — some have returned, some have been killed and many remain captive.
Taking a broader regional perspective is also helpful. From Israel’s establishment in 1948 to the Yom Kippur War in 1973, each decade saw Israel face down hostile Arab states. Eventually, many of the Arab countries accepted Israel’s existence. With the signing of the Abraham Accords in 2020, many of those same countries agreed to work with Israel, both militarily and economically.
At the same time, Israel made numerous attempts to achieve peace with the Palestinians, who repeatedly rejected such overtures. With the imposition of the radical Islamic regime in Iran in 1979, tensions between Israel and the Palestinians were turned into an opportunity for Iran to work through its proxies — Hamas, Hezbollah and others — to destabilize the Middle East generally, and prevent peace between Israel and the Palestinians specifically.
In short, this is a regional conflict that’s been inflamed by Iran’s exploitative radicalization of local populations, including the Palestinians. This context is helpful when we consider some of the responses to October 7 in Canada. Among the more disturbing reactions that followed the attack were pro-Palestinian protests in major cities coupled with the establishment of encampments on several Canadian university campuses.
Many of the protests took place outside Jewish community centres or near neighbourhoods with large Jewish populations. This was the case with the January protests on an overpass in Toronto, as well as anti-Israel protests in front of a synagogue in Thornhill, Ont., in March.
Pro-Palestinian university encampments engaged in even more aggressive tactics, staking out and commandeering sites on campuses from Halifax to Victoria. Students and non-students alike, often supported by a coterie of academic staff, demanded that their respective institutions divest from all companies with ties to Israel and its defence efforts. ...
Today in Canada, as elsewhere in the West, the return of antisemitism is justified by the ideology popularly called “wokeism,” though it is better labelled as “progressive illiberalism.” This doctrine was born in our universities from a mixture of postmodernism, post-colonialism, critical theory and neofeminism.
Over the last decade, it has made immense gains throughout our society. It now expresses itself explicitly through theories of anti-racism, gender ideology and in the settler-colonial narrative that’s used to attack Israel.
Ultimately, it should not surprise us that this same ideology was at the intellectual heart of the Islamic Revolution that took Iran from a relatively free secular society to an oppressive Islamist dictatorship in 1979. And now, in Canada, in addition to promoting antisemitism, it has contributed to the weakening of our immigration system, which has allowed terrorist operatives to use Canada as a staging ground.
As for Islamist ideology, Canada permits groups like Samidoun, which is banned in Germany, to actively support pro-Hamas rallies across the country. The alliance between progressive illiberalism, settler-colonial ideology and the Islamism promoted by the Iranian regime is undermining Canadian politics and society, while threatening our Jewish and Muslim communities.
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Among the mangled and barely distinguishable ruins were a bullet-riddled window bearing Disney characters that once hung outside a kindergarten; a melted water cooler; a shattered mirror; a scorched mattress; a broken baby bottle; and a singed teddy bear.
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A year after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, a new Leger poll suggests younger and left-wing Canadians are markedly more likely to support Hamas, while older and right-of-centre Canadians favour Israel.
This Hamas:
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Seeking to shore up its shrinking pro-Palestinian vote share, the Trudeau government’s appeasement efforts appear to have only emboldened the anti-Zionist mob as they increasingly target Jewish entities, call for the destruction of Canada and Israel and promote the propaganda of designated terrorist groups.
Israel’s successful attacks against Iran’s “axis of resistance” in recent weeks have provoked further extremism and antisemitism in Canada: over the weekend, flags of the terror group Hezbollah were being waved on Toronto streets, while in Montreal, protesters threw firebombs at police.
**
B@$#@rd:
Israeli media reported on Sunday that the Biden administration has offered Israel a “compensation package” in exchange for refraining from attacks on a list of specific targets in Iran.
And on the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, too:
As the fleet sailed out, Pope Pius V ordered the churches of Rome opened for prayer day and night, encouraging the faithful to petition the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary through the recitation of the Rosary.
The battle itself was bloody.
Some 7,500 Catholic combatants and 20-30,000 Ottoman combatants were killed.
It was a decisive Catholic victory, and the Ottoman fleet was destroyed.
Amid the tragic loss of human life, some good news was that thousands of Christian slaves, chained below decks as rowers for the Ottoman ships were freed.
(Sidebar: hopefully, like these guys.)
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