There is no more appropriate song of which I can thing for the journey of Yahya Sinwar to Jahannam, that Queen and Another One Bites the Dust,
The rest of this is below the fold, because Mr Sinwar was as unlovely in death as he was in life. Continue reading
The psychopath Yahya Sinwar. You can see the crazy in his eyes.
To me, the most amazing thing about Hamas’ October 7, 2023 surprise attack on Israel was that they thought that they could get away with it. The New York Times reported, five months ago:
As an architect of the Oct. 7 attacks, (Yahya) Sinwar masterminded a strategy that he knew would provoke a ferocious Israeli response. But in Hamas’s calculus, the deaths of many Palestinian civilians — who do not have access to Hamas’s subterranean tunnels — were the necessary cost of upending the status quo with Israel.
That sounds like utter stupidity to me, but I’m a product of Western civilization, not Islamic barbarism. I’ve said it before: Mr Sinwar’s actions resemble, to me, those of Adolf Hitler, holed up in his Führerbunker, unwilling to surrender to save the Germany he supposedly loved so much from the oncoming destruction and devastation that the inexorable Allied advance and bombing campaign would continue to cause.
Now there’s more insight into his diseased mind:
Secret Documents Show Hamas Tried to Persuade Iran to Join Its Oct. 7 Attack
The Times reviewed the minutes of 10 meetings among Hamas’s top leaders. The records show the militant group avoided several escalations since 2021 to falsely imply it had been deterred — while seeking Iranian support for a major attack.
By Ronen Bergman, Adam Rasgon, and Patrick Kingsley | Reporting from Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Doha, Qatar | Saturday, October 12, 2024 | 9:55 AM EDT
For more than two years, Yahya Sinwar huddled with his top Hamas commanders and plotted what they hoped would be the most devastating and destabilizing attack on Israel in the militant group’s four-decade history.
Minutes of Hamas’s secret meetings, seized by the Israeli military and obtained by The New York Times, provide a detailed record of the planning for the Oct. 7 terrorist attack, as well as Mr. Sinwar’s determination to persuade Hamas’s allies, Iran and Hezbollah, to join the assault or at least commit to a broader fight with Israel if Hamas staged a surprise cross-border raid.
Hezbollah certainly did agree to that “broader fight,” though perhaps the Hezbollah leadership, at least those who are still breathing, might regret it now. I’ve seen speculation that Hassan Nasrallah might not have been killed instantly by Israel’s bombing attack on his location, but might have been trapped in an unventilated pocket and suffocated, perhaps giving him time to realize just how badly he had f(ornicated) up.
Iran? Several Iranian big wigs have been killed in Israeli attacks on Hezbollah sites, and, more embarrassing of all, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed when a safe house in Tehran where he was staying was destroyed by a planted bomb. But, even with that, Iran has limited its direct action to two mass ballistic missile attacks against Israel, both of which were largely intercepted. And now CNN has reported:
Iran’s government is extremely nervous and has been engaging in urgent diplomatic efforts with countries in the Middle East to gauge whether they can reduce the scale of Israel’s response to its missile attack earlier this month and – if that fails – help protect Tehran, sources familiar with the matter told CNN.
Iran’s anxiety stems from uncertainty about whether the US can convince Israel not to strike Iranian nuclear sites and oil facilities, and the fact that its most important proxy militia in the region, Hezbollah, has been significantly weakened by Israeli military operations in recent weeks, the sources said.
Mr Sinwar must be so disappointed! Back to the Times:
The documents, which represent a breakthrough in understanding Hamas, also show extensive efforts to deceive Israel about its intentions as the group laid the groundwork for a bold assault and a regional conflagration that Mr. Sinwar hoped would cause Israel to “collapse.”
The documents consist of minutes from 10 secret planning meetings of a small group of Hamas political and military leaders in the run-up to the attack, on Oct. 7, 2023. The minutes include 30 pages of previously undisclosed details about the way Hamas’s leadership works and the preparations that went into its attack.
This is what makes the article really interesting, and I urge you to follow the link and read it; the Times has done very useful journalism here, but I cannot just plagiarize it and reproduce the whole thing.
Mr Sinwar and his minions clearly wanted, and perhaps even expected, Hezbollah and Iran to follow Hamas into the fight, but, as the above CNN story told us, while Iran might like striking at Israel, even the mad mullahs aren’t particularly interested in what happens if Israel strikes back.
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has publicly denied that Iran had any role in the Oct. 7 attack. And American officials have described intelligence showing key Iranian leaders were caught by surprise, fueling doubts that Iran played a direct role in planning. But Hamas leaders have spoken broadly about the support they have received from regional allies, and there have been scattered and sometimes conflicting reports that Iranian and Hezbollah officials helped plan the attack and train fighters.
So, maybe Iran and Hezbollah helped Hamas, and maybe they simply spewed hot air; we just don’t know. But we do know one thing: whatever training the Hamas fighters were given, it wasn’t very good. They were able to kidnap and rape and burn and murder, but if there was any actual military goal, they didn’t achieve it. Instead, they engaged in an orgy of death and destruction, one which made the denizens of Gaza deliriously happy, right up until the IDF got its response organized and entered Gaza.
The Gazans aren’t so happy now!
And Mr Sinwar isn’t too happy, either. What he expected isn’t what happened. Gaza is heavily damaged, Hamas seriously weakened, Hezbollah has lost almost all of its previous leadership, and has perhaps a thousand of its lower-level people seriously injured by the diabolically brilliant pager attack. Iran has made two expensive but ultimately futile ballistic missile attacks, and is now shuddering in fear over what Israel might do in retaliation. Like the Führer he’s now emulating, he’s waiting in his underground bunker, waiting for a miracle deliverance to keep him from adjourning to Jahannam. He guessed wrong, and he’s going to pay for it. Sadly, tens of thousands of innocent people have also paid the price for his fantasies and delusions.
That our oh-so-noble leftists will lie through their scummy teeth whenever they think it to their advantage is of no surprise to anyone who pays attention. That The New York Times would report on it actually is at least slightly surprising.
Pro-Palestinian Group at Columbia Now Backs ‘Armed Resistance’ by Hamas
Columbia University Apartheid Divest has withdrawn an apology it made last spring for a member who said “Zionists don’t deserve to live.”
by Sharon Otterman | Wednesday, October 9, 2024
The pro-Palestinian group that sparked the student encampment movement at Columbia University in response to the Israel-Hamas war is becoming more hard-line in its rhetoric, openly supporting militant groups fighting Israel and rescinding an apology it made after one of its members said the school was lucky he wasn’t out killing Zionists.
The ‘student’ in question is Khymani James, who, according to NBC News “uses he/she/they pronouns,” thus proving that he’s mentally ill and an idiot, was barred from Columbia’s campus on Friday, April 26th, and is now suing Columbia over his dismissal. Apparently Mr James open support of “militant groups fighting Israel” means fighting Israel in Morningside Heights, and not actually picking up a rifle and heading to Gaza to face the Israel Defense Force in real life.
“We support liberation by any means necessary, including armed resistance,” the group, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, said in its statement revoking the apology.
The group marked the anniversary of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by distributing a newspaper with a headline that used Hamas’s name for it: “One Year Since Al-Aqsa Flood, Revolution Until Victory,” it read, over a picture of Hamas fighters breaching the security fence to Israel. And the group posted an essay calling the attack a “moral, military and political victory” and quoting Ismail Haniyeh, the assassinated former political leader of Hamas.
“The Palestinian resistance is moving their struggle to a new phase of escalation and it is our duty to meet them there,” the group wrote on Oct. 7 on Telegram. “It is our duty to fight for our freedom!”
Also see: William Teach, “Unhinged Jew Hating Group At Columbia U Rescinds Apology For Anti-Semite Comrade
Reporter Sharon Otterman’s article noted the problems the university’s leadership have with statements made under our First Amendment protections, but which can also create a “hostile environment for Jewish students.”
Laughably, Mr James, in his lawsuit against Columbia, as reported by the Columbia Spectator, is claiming that he is the one being victimized by a ‘hostile environment’:
“The environment at Columbia, which has been rendered hostile for James, is sufficiently severe, pervasive, persistent, and offensive such that it deprives James of equal access to the opportunities and benefits that Columbia provides to other students,” the lawsuit reads.
The lawsuit states that after James began sharing “anti-war and anti-genocide political beliefs” on their personal Instagram account, they (sic) became the target of “racist, homophobic, and physically threatening messages,” including ones that called James slurs. These messages distracted James from their (sic) schoolwork and caused them (sic) to feel “uncomfortable, anxious, and unsafe,” according to the lawsuit.
Laughing out loud! At least the Times wasn’t silly enough to use Mr James’ preferred pronouns, but the Spectator, produced by the foremost School of Journalism in the country, was. 🙂
I have to ask, are Mr James and his attorney claiming that he has “anti-war . . . political beliefs” at the same time he and his supporters are calling for war against Israel, and are actively supporting the war Hamas started against Israel? But, I can answer my own question: for the anti-Semitic left, violence in advance of their cause is perfectly acceptable; they are simply “anti-war” when it comes to other people and other people’s defense.
There have been several stories about Americans, primarily combat veterans, who have left the United States and gone to Ukraine, to fight against the Russians, and at least a few of them have been killed in action. Hey, they were vets, knew the dangers, and chose to brave them anyway!
And there have been many stories about Americans and Europeans, primarily Jews, who have gone to Israel to fight with the Israel Defense Force. Some are dual citizens, and the anti-Semitic left have been calling for them not to be allowed to return to their European countries, saying that they are “war criminals.”
But pro-‘Palestinian’ Europeans and Americans? I can’t say that none have gone to Gaza to join the fight, but if any have, there haven’t been enough of them to have merited any story that I have seen in the credentialed media about it.
On Friday, October 6, 2023, Israel was not in open warfare with Hamas or Hezbollah. On Friday, October 6, 2023, Israelis were going about their business. At sundown, on Friday, October 6, 2023, observant Jews were beginning their Sabbath celebrations.
On Sunday, October 6, 2024, Catholics around the world were listening to parts of Psalm 128:
5 – The Lord bless you from Zion: may you see the prosperity of Jerusalem all the days of your life;
6 – May you see your children’s children. Peace be upon Israel!
On Saturday, October 7, 2023, terrorists from Hamas broke through the gates between Gaza and Israel proper, and went on a rampage of rape, murder, kidnapping, and mayhem. It was still the Sabbath in Israel.
As a terrorist surprise attack, it was wildly successful. 1,195 Israelis were killed, 815 of whom were civilians, and 251 people were seized as hostages. Many Israelis were wounded, and the ‘Palestinians’ used rape and serial rape as instruments of torture and terror.
Yet, for the ‘Palestinians,’ October 7, 2023, was a massive failure. None of the bordering nations came to Hamas’ aid, though Iran, a thousand miles away, kept sending weapons, and Hezbollah, not a nation but a terrorist group of Iranian puppets, tried to join in. Much of Gaza is in ruins, thousands upon thousands of homes destroyed, dozens of thousands of Gazans have been killed, all due to a war Hamas started but couldn’t finish.
Israel is not done. Gaza is still being pounded, and the Israel Defense Force has now focused on Hezbollah in the north. Almost all of Hezbollah’s leaders have been sent to Jahannam, and many of their fighters killed or wounded. Parts of Hamas leadership have also been sent to their eternal rewards, while Yahya Sinwar, who planned the October 7th attack has been stuck in underground shelters in Gaza.
Hamas Leader Is Holding Out for a Bigger War, U.S. Officials Say
Yahya Sinwar is increasingly fatalistic, has blocked a cease-fire deal and, so far, been frustrated that Hezbollah and Iran have not come to his aid, officials said.
By Julian E. Barnes, Adam Goldman, and Edward Wong | October 4, 2024
The psychopath Yahya Sinwar. You can see the crazy in his eyes.
The leader of Hamas, Yahya Sinwar, has become fatalistic after nearly a year of war in Gaza and is determined to see Israel embroiled in a wider regional conflict, U.S. officials said.Mr. Sinwar has long believed he will not survive the war, a view that has hindered negotiations to secure the release of hostages seized by his group in the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel, according to U.S. intelligence assessments.
His attitude has hardened in recent weeks, U.S. officials say, and American negotiators now believe that Hamas has no intention of reaching a deal with Israel.
What “deal” could be reached? Hamas have only one point of strength, and that is the hostages. If they surrender the remaining hostages, many of whom are already dead, they have no leverage at all.
But Israel has learned from past wars: whenever they grant the Muslims a ceasefire before the terrorist groups, or, in some cases, actual Arab armies, have been fully destroyed, they slowly reconstitute themselves, and a next generation of boys grow into men and want to take up the fight. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu knows this, and that’s why he is determined to destroy Hamas once are for all.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has also rejected proposals in the negotiations and added positions that have complicated the talks. U.S. officials assess that he is mainly concerned about his political survival and might not think a cease-fire in Gaza is in his interests.
Well, yes, of course The New York Times and the liberals in the State Department are going to try to put the blame on Mr Netanyahu. But, as the Times previously reported:
As an architect of the Oct. 7 attacks, Mr. Sinwar masterminded a strategy that he knew would provoke a ferocious Israeli response. But in Hamas’s calculus, the deaths of many Palestinian civilians — who do not have access to Hamas’s subterranean tunnels — were the necessary cost of upending the status quo with Israel.
American and Israeli intelligence agencies have spent months assessing Mr. Sinwar’s motivations, according to people briefed on the intelligence. Analysts in both the United States and Israel believe that Mr. Sinwar is primarily motivated by a desire to take revenge on Israel and weaken it. The well-being of the Palestinian people or the establishment of a Palestinian state, the intelligence analysts say, appears to be secondary.
The distinguished Mr Sinwar is very much like Adolf Hitler in his Führerbunker, waiting for the last, and refusing to surrender to save Germany from near total destruction.
On 28 April, Hitler learned that Reichsführet-SS Heinrich Himmler was trying to discuss surrender terms with the Western Allies through Count Folke Bernadotte, and Hitler considered this treason.
How is that any different from what the crazy-eyed head of Hamas is doing? He knows that he’s a dead man, and that his dreams of the ‘frontline’ Arab nations attacking Israel are nothing but fantasy, but if he cared anything, anything at all, about the people for whose liberation he is supposedly fighting, he’d not only surrender himself, and Hamas, but should have done that months ago.
This is being published at 6:30 PM EDT in the United States, which is half-past midnight in Israel. At this time a year ago, innocent Israelis were mostly in bed, living in the peace that they had. When the morning sun arose on October 7th, it would be a red dawn.
Burning the midnight oil
With the 3¼ day power outage, I wound up rereading Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War on my Kindle reader. With its internal light, it was about the only thing I could read in a dark house, unless it was by my single oil lamp.
The Winds of War is a historical fiction novel, with Navy Captain Victor “Pug” Henry serving in various roles, at the time of the subsequent page, from Chapter 22, American Naval attaché to Nazi Germany:
“There’s the live nerve,” (Wolf) Stöller said. “And that’s what I’ve found difficult to convey even to the air marshal, who’s usually so hardheaded. Germans who haven’t been across the water are impossibly provincial about America. I’m sorry to say this goes for the Führer himself. I don’t believe he yet truly grasps the vast power of the American Jews. It’s a vital factor in the war picture.”
“Don’t exaggerate that factor,” (Victor) Henry said. “You fellows tend to, and it’s a form of kidding yourselves.”
“My dear Victor, I’ve been in the United States nine times and I lived for a year in San Francisco. Who’s your Minister of the Treasury? The Jew Morgenthau. Who sits on your highest court, wielding the most influence? The Jew Frankfurter.”
He proceeded to reel off a list of Jewish officials in Washington, stale and boring to Pug from endless repetition in Nazi propaganda; and he made the usual assertion that the Jews had American finance, communications, justice, and even the Presidency in their pockets. Stöller delivered all this calmly and pleasantly. He kept repeating “der Jude, der Jude” without a sneer. There was no glare in his eye, such as Pug had now and then observed when Thoda challenged some vocal anti-Semite. The banker presented his statements as though they were the day’s stock market report.
“To begin with,” Pug replied, a bit wearily, “the Treasury post in our country has little power. It’s a minor political reward. Christians hold all the other cabinet posts. Financial power lies with the banks, the insurance companies, the oil, rail, lumber, shipping, steel, and auto industries, and such. They’re wholly in Christian hands. Always have been.
“Lehman is a banker,” said Dr Knopfmann.
“Yes \, he is. The famous exception.” Pug went on eith his stock answers to anti-Semitism: the all but solid Christian ownership of newspapers, magazines, and publishing houses, the Christian composition of Congress, the cabinet, and the executive branch, the eight Christian judges out of nine on the Supreme Court, the paramount White House influence of a Christian, Harry Hopkins, and all the rest. On the faces of his hearers appeared the curious universal smirk of Germans when discussing Jews: condescending, facetious, and cold, with superior awareness of a very private inside joke.
Stöller said in a kindly tone, “That’s always the Jewish line, you know, how unimportant they are.”
That’s a rather long quote, but I think it important. After six years — at the time set in the novel — of Nazi propaganda, overlaid on Europe’s traditional anti-Semitism. Mr Wouk’s characters very believably accepted what they were being told.
And that’s what I’m seeing from today’s anti-Semitic social media postings. Like Alice, they can believe six impossible things before breakfast.
There’s an old trope that somehow, some way, Jews control everything in the world. If you follow that link, you’ll see plenty of sources on that silliness, and, interestingly enough, many of them predate the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel. The Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, who is not Jewish, reported how that myth at least partially motivated an attack on Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas.
My copy of Mein Kampf. I don’t own it because I support it, but because I read it.
To what extent the whole existence of this people is based on a continuous lie is shown incomparably by The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion, so infinitely hated by the Jews. They are based on a forgery, the Frankfurter Zeitung[1]The Frankfurter Zeitung was a Jewish-owned newspaper founded in 1856. It survived until 1943, as Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels found it useful, after the Jewish writers, editors, and … Continue reading moans and screams once every week: the best proof that they are authentic. What many Jews may do unconsciously is here consciously exposed. And that is what matters. It is completely indifferent from what Jewish brains these disclosures originate; the important thing is that with positively terrifying certainty they reveal the nature and activity of the Jewish people and expose their inner contexts as well as their ultimate final aims.[2]Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), 307–308.
While even the Nazis did not believe that the Protocols were anything but a fake, they used them extensively in their propaganda.
But now we’ve come full circle. The apologists for Hamas and Hezbollah, and the supporters of the ‘Palestinians’, have once again been spewing the line that the evil Jews control everything, manipulating President Biden, French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and pretty much all of the world’s leaders who are not attacking Israel.
How much of this is being swallowed by the pro-Hamas, pro-Hezbollah, pro-‘Palestinian’ supporters? I honestly don’t know, but I see this stuff all the time by accused groomer Richard Medhurst, a Syrian-British pro-Palestinian propagandist, and several Twitter — I refuse to call it 𝕏 — accounts, many of which are probably bots — and though some try to differentiate between Zionists and Jews in general, a lot of the protesters just use the word Jew instead.
One final point, paraphrased from The Winds of War, and I cannot remember where in the book I saw it, but it’s in there: while the Nazis and other anti-Semites[3]The Nazis had tremendous help from ordinary Europeans, not just Germans, but the public in all of the lands they conquered, in finding and rounding up the Jews for shipment to the concentration … Continue reading claimed that the Jews secretly ruled the world, when it came to the Holocaust, the Jews didn’t have enough power to even save themselves.
References
| ↑1 | The Frankfurter Zeitung was a Jewish-owned newspaper founded in 1856. It survived until 1943, as Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels found it useful, after the Jewish writers, editors, and publisher were forced out. |
|---|---|
| ↑2 | Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), 307–308. |
| ↑3 | The Nazis had tremendous help from ordinary Europeans, not just Germans, but the public in all of the lands they conquered, in finding and rounding up the Jews for shipment to the concentration camps. The Nazis could do it al by themselves. |
Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie is, according to his Wikipedia biography:
an Indian-born British-American novelist. His work often combines magic realism with historical fiction and primarily deals with connections, disruptions, and migrations between Eastern and Western civilizations, typically set on the Indian subcontinent. Rushdie’s second novel, Midnight’s Children (1981), won the Booker Prize in 1981 and was deemed to be “the best novel of all winners” on two occasions, marking the 25th and the 40th anniversary of the prize.
After his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), Rushdie became the subject of several assassination attempts and death threats, including a fatwa calling for his death issued by (Ayatollah) Ruhollah Khomeini, the supreme leader of Iran. In total, 20 countries banned the book. Numerous killings and bombings have been carried out by extremists who cite the book as motivation, sparking a debate about censorship and religiously motivated violence. In 2022, a man stabbed Rushdie after rushing onto the stage where the novelist was scheduled to deliver a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, New York.
Simply put, Mr Rushdie is personally familiar with Islamist governments, and what they do, but, not to worry, a Swedish PhD candidate, @AcademiskC — she does not give us her real name — thinks that she knows more about the Middle East than Mr Rushdie. She tweeted:
I have not one atom of respect for this guy. Not one atom. I am trying very hard to remain polite. There is simply no intelligentsia left. No one big voice. Nobody. Also a complete indictment of academia.
“AkademiskC”, from her Twitter profile.
Here we have a novelist under a death sentence in absentia, one issued by a hard-line Islamist government, telling us that an Islamic government in ‘Palestine,'[1]I always put ‘Palestine’ and ‘Palestinians’ in quotation marks, to note that it is not a real place, and they are not a real people separate from the Arabs. … Continue reading should the world be so unfortunate as to see the ‘Palestinians’ succeed in their goal of conquering Israel and driving the Jews — at least the ones they don’t kill — into the sea would not be ‘progressive’ in any sense of the word as Western liberals see it.
The Taliban are, of course, the most extreme of the Islamist governments. They force women into almost completely obscuring burkas, ban girls from being educated, destroyed non-Islamic art in Afghanistan, and basically imposed their version of shari’a, Islamic law, on the country. Homosexual activity can be, and is, punished, sometimes with death. That Iran publicly and routinely hangs homosexuals has been extensively documented and photographed.
At least Da’ish’s method of executing homosexuals seems to kill them more quickly.
The religious leaders in Iran, which has been funding both Hezbollah and Hamas, are only slightly less restrictive in their laws.
Of course, the Taliban and Iranian religious leaders are not Hamas and Hezbollah. The obvious question is: what have Hamas promised? The Wilson Center stated:
Since its creation in December 1987, Hamas has invoked militant interpretations of Islam to spearhead a Sunni extremist movement committed to destroying Israel. Hamas distanced itself from the longstanding Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)—an umbrella organization for disparate Palestinian factions that ranged from Marxist to secular nationalists—by propagating resistance in the religious context of jihad, or a holy struggle and martyrdom. “Jihad is its path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes,” Hamas said in its first statement in the late 1980s. Predominantly Shiite Iran has armed, trained and funded Hamas since the late 1980s largely due to its opposition to Israel and Islamic ideology.
The United States Department of State noted:
Hamas, a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization with de facto control of Gaza, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and other extremist groups disseminated anti-Semitic materials and advocated violence through traditional and social media channels, as well as during rallies and other events. Hamas also continued to enforce restrictions on Gaza’s population based on its interpretation of Islam and sharia.
When people tell us who they are, perhaps we ought to believe them!
So, what would an Hamas/Hezbollah government over the Holy Land be like?
Israel is officially Jewish, but in my all-too-short visit to Jerusalem, I was able to visit and attend Mass at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, built over the site where Jesus was crucified and buried. The Church has existed since the conversion of Constantine to Christianity, and the subsequently ordered investigations and excavations of Christian sites. Following Muslim soldiers gaining control of Jerusalem, in 1009, the fanatical Fatimid caliph al-Hakim ordered the destruction of the church. However, subsequent Islamic rulers, as the city changed hands between the Muslims, then the Crusaders, to the Muslims again, the Islamic leadership allowed the Church in Jerusalem to continue.
Small mosque on the Via Dolorosa. Photo by D R Pico, and may be freely used, with proper attribution.
Today’s Jewish leadership allow and support the existence of Christian holy sites in Jerusalem. While there have been a few, and I stress the word “few,” protests by Jews in Jerusalem concerning Christian sites, the government have supported the freedom of religion.
It isn’t too far down the Via Dolorosa in which my daughter and I visited a small mosque. The Jewish government allowed that to operate as well.
I visited the Church of the Flagellation, supposedly where Jesus was scourged before his crucifixion, the Garden of Gethsemane, the (supposed) birthplace of Mary, and other sites. I had wanted to visit Bethlehem, but my daughter, an Army Reservist, was under orders not to enter the ‘Palestinian’ areas. While this was eleven months before the October 7th massacres, I understood completely.
I have to wonder: if the Islamists conquered the Holy Land, would they continue to allow the existence of Christian sites, or would they go all-out Taliban, and destroy them? When Jews attempted to visit Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus, some Muslims attacked them.
On two occasions, Israeli security forces prevented attempts to detonate explosive devices when Jewish worshipers visited the Tomb. In June and October (2019), unknown persons also threw explosive devices at Rachel’s Tomb from the West Bank.
One of the extreme idiocies we have seen in the anti-Semitic, pro-Hamas demonstrations in the United States following the October 7th massacres has been a few demonstrators holding “Queers for Palestine” posters. What would life be like for homosexuals and the ‘transgendered’ in a ‘Palestine’ completely controlled by the Islamists?
I don’t know AkademiskC, and the odds I will ever meet her are vanishingly small. I’ve never been to Sweden, and if we ever do visit Europe again, that country isn’t high on our list of places to go. Sweden produced global warming climate change and pro-Hamas activist Greta Thunberg, so great wisdom seems to be in short supply there.
Still, as a PhD candidate, I have to assume that AkademiskC knows a little bit more than Miss Thunberg. Surely she’s noticed the increased crime in her country due to immigration from Third World countries. Yet she is utterly appalled that someone would dare to suggest that an independent ‘Palestine’ would somehow not be an enlightened and ‘progressive’ place.
Our Swedish doctoral candidate complained, “There is simply no intelligentsia left.” Mirriam-Webster defines “intelligentsia” as “intellectuals who form an artistic, social, or political vanguard or elite,” but I find it difficult to accept the idea that “intellectuals” or “intelligentsia” can accurately define people like AkademiskC, and so many on the left, who cannot see just what and who Hamas and Hezbollah really are. It is as though the “intelligentsia” are completely absorbed by the silliness of “intersectionality“:
Intersectionality is an analytical framework for understanding how individuals’ various social and political identities result in unique combinations of discrimination and privilege. Intersectionality identifies multiple factors of advantage and disadvantage.[1] Examples of these factors include gender, caste, sex, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, religion, disability, weight, species[2] and physical appearance.[3] These intersecting and overlapping social identities may be both empowering and oppressing.[4][5] However, little good-quality quantitative research has been done to support or undermine the theory of intersectionality.[6]
Intersectionality broadens the scope of the first and second waves of feminism, which largely focused on the experiences of women who were white, middle-class and cisgender,[7] to include the different experiences of women of color, poor women, immigrant women, and other groups. Intersectional feminism aims to separate itself from white feminism by acknowledging women’s differing experiences and identities.
This is intellectual vacuity, empty and lacking content or serious ideas. It doesn’t take a doctoral candidate to see that the interests of different groups, even if the left find them to be oppressed in some fashion, are not all the same. The desires of the ‘Palestinians’ and Islamists are not at all like those of homosexuals or ‘progressives’ or feminists, and the Muslims have been perfectly willing to tell everyone this. The ‘progressives’ have simply been unwilling to believe the evidence of their own eyes and ears.
If they were under the kind of government that Hamas and Hezbollah would set up if they could, ‘progressives’ would be utterly astonished to find that they’d be the first ones lined up against the wall to be shot.
References
| ↑1 | I always put ‘Palestine’ and ‘Palestinians’ in quotation marks, to note that it is not a real place, and they are not a real people separate from the Arabs. ‘Palestinians’ are simply Arabs who live in the areas conquered by Israel in 1967. |
|---|
In February of 1896, long before the Nazis, just a couple of months before Adolf Hitler’s 7th birthday, Theoror Herzl’s Der Judenstaat, The Jewish State, was published in Leipzig and Vienna by M. Breitenstein’s Verlags-Buchhandlung. Mr Herzl saw the persecution Jews were facing in Europe, where they had lived ever since their expulsion from the Holy Land by the Romans beginning in 70 AD. Jews, he believed, needed to live apart from the mostly Christian populations of Europe.
But even living apart, while in Europe, didn’t prove particularly safe. While the Jüdischer Wohnbezirk in Warschau, the Warsaw ghetto, was not formally established until November of 1940 by the Nazi occupation authorities, it contained those heavily Jewish neighborhoods which existed before the outbreak of World War II in Europe.
Now there’s this, from The Wall Street Journal:
Maybe It’s Time for Jewish Self-Segregation
The self-protective impulse is a healthy response to a wave of antisemitism.
By Joseph Epstein | Thursday, September 19, 2024 | 5:33 PM EDT
The recent and rampant rise in antisemitism is, to put it gently, disheartening. One finds it everywhere, much of it passing under the flag of anti-Zionism, criticism of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and presumably sympathy for the Palestinians. Saddest of all is that antisemitism has cropped up so exuberantly among students in our elite universities. Apart from decrying it, calling it out for what it is, what are Jews to do to protect themselves from this recurring nightmare? Perhaps a jaunt down memory lane will help.
For those who don’t have my too-expensive subscription to the Journal, the OpEd can be accessed for free here.
I was 5 when I was first aware not only that I was Jewish but that being Jewish had consequences. My father asked me what I had learned in school one day, and I told him the poem “Eenie, Meenie, Miney, Moe,” which I began to recite. When I came to the n-word—before “tiger” had been substituted as a more appropriate alternative—my father angrily stopped me and told me I was never to use the word again, especially since our people, like the Negroes (as they were called then), had been long persecuted and called all sorts of terrible names.
A few years later, returning with my father from a Bing Crosby movie, “Going My Way,” I asked if we might have a Christmas tree. “No,” he said. Why not? “Because you are Jewish.” Case closed. Not long after that, my mother pointed out various Chicago neighborhoods and suburbs—Sauganash, Kenilworth—that were “restricted,” which meant no Jews allowed. Not only did being Jewish carry responsibilities; it also apparently meant being despised, at least in certain quarters.
After several more paragraphs, in which Joseph Epstein, the author, describes his life growing up, and in college, in mostly Jewish enclaves, we get to the meat of the column:
No one saw the current wave of antisemitism coming. Who thought Hamas would find supporters at Harvard, Columbia, the University of California, Los Angeles, and elsewhere? The country had known of this virus before, but it came not from crowds of thousands but from prominent people. Henry Ford was openly antisemitic. No Jew in those days drove his cars. Father Charles Coughlin, on his radio show in the 1930s, attacked what he termed “international bankers.” But those were largely isolated, the present strain more widespread.
Is self-chosen segregation among Jews a good thing? In one sense, it feels like taking a step backward toward a less open society. Yet when the politics of a country swing too far in either direction, antisemitism is almost certain to come in its train. The swing today is unmistakably and strongly leftist, and self-segregation strikes me as the first step in combating the attacks on Jews that attend it.
I am not Jewish, and I live in an area with very few, if any Jews, so perhaps I just don’t understand, but this seems to me to be an advocacy of surrender, and not even an effective one. If American Jews self-segregate, into small, mostly Jewish communities, are they not simply gathering in a smaller and more confined target area for any violently antiSemitic ‘mostly peaceful protests’? We have already seen ‘protests’ at synagogues and Hillel Centers on campuses. Self-segregation, self-isolation doesn’t work when those who hate you still know where you congregate and live.
Israel is, of course, Mr Herzl’s dream, even if he never saw it; he died in 1904, at a very young 44 years of age, though he is now buried in Mt Herzl, on the west side of Jerusalem. But look at the situation today. Israel is the self-segregation of millions of Jews in the modern world, yet we see not just the Arabs — who can always be counted on for hate — but millions of people reared in Western civilization nations who don’t want the Jews to have even that small nation.
Self-segregation counts on the tolerance of others to allow your segregated communities, and we aren’t seeing much of that tolerance by the supporters of Hamas and the ‘Palestinians.’
In the end, hiding from your enemies just doesn’t work.
Israel launched one of the greatest covert action attacks ever yesterday, with some kind of operation that targeted the pagers that Hezbollah were using in Lebanon. Israel had the pager numbers of the Hezbollah operatives, including an Iranian representative to the group in Beirut, and sent a group page than caused the pagers to explode. As nearly as I can see, the only problem with the operation is that the explosions weren’t lethal enough!
Hezbollah had turned to pagers for communications because the Israel Defense Force, IDF, had been successful in tracking Hezbollah’s cell phones, and targeting drones to zero in and whack the terrorists. At least in theory, the pagers couldn’t be tracked.
This was a brilliant operation, because it targeted Hezbollah members specifically, as opposed to having to bomb particular buildings or streets to strike at the terrorists, thus including possibly significant ‘collateral’ casualties. There were a few, few! collateral injuries in this operation; that was unavoidable. Nevertheless, FrumTikTok — who is not Libs of TikTok! — found and tweeted out the frantic response of a pretty but nevertheless silly redhead — and redheads always get a break from me! — to the operation.
Click on the image and you can listen to her entire rant.
She was horrified, horrified, that Israel was able to strike Hezbollah so precisely. Would she have preferred that the IDF would have blown up entire blocks?
Also see: William Teach, “Funny: Hezbollah Pagers Explode“
The odious Edward Snowden, who has had nothing to say about the Islamists attacking Israel, said that this precision attack was “terrorism.”
I will admit to being amused that some of these pagers detonated in ways that could have emasculated some of the terrorists. 🙂 They fully deserve it.
I saw the hints of this story on Twitter, but it seemed so insane that I was determined to find a credentialed media, a liberal credentialed media source before I would comment on or believe it. Well, the Grey Lady certainly fits the definition of a liberal credentialed media source, and the idea is simply appalling. From The New York Times:
Meeting With Biden, British Leader Hints at Ukraine Weapon Decision Soon
As the president deliberated with Prime Minister Keir Starmer, the question of whether to let Ukraine use long-range weapons in Russia was a rare point of contention between allied nations.
By Michael D. Shear and David E. Sanger
President Biden’s deliberations with Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain about whether to allow Ukraine to attack Russia with long-range Western weapons were fresh evidence that the president remains deeply fearful of setting off a dangerous, wider conflict.
But the decision now facing Mr. Biden after Friday’s closed-door meeting at the White House — whether to sign off on the use of long-range missiles made by Britain and France — could be far more consequential than previous concessions by the president that delivered largely defensive weapons to Ukraine during the past two and a half years.
In remarks at the start of his meeting with Mr. Starmer, the president underscored his support for helping Ukraine defend itself but did not say whether he was willing to do more to allow for long-range strikes deep into Russia.
“We’re going to discuss that now,” the president told reporters.
For his part, the prime minister noted that “the next few weeks and months could be crucial — very, very important that we support Ukraine in this vital war of freedom.”
Let’s be clear here: the Prime Minister is very concerned that Joe Biden will not be President after January 20th, and that, if former President Donald Trump is elected, that’ll be it: no more aid to Ukraine. And while Vice President Kamala Harris Emhoff has supported Mr Biden’s policies on Ukraine, she pretty much had to do so, because he is boss, and she isn’t. If she wins the election, she becomes boss, and perhaps, just perhaps, she won’t be as eager to set off World War III keep sending money and equipment to Ukraine.
Russia isn’t advancing, at least not in Ukraine. In 2½ years of war, the Russian advance has been mostly stymied. But it’s also true that, in 2½ years of war, the Ukrainians have been unable to reconquer anything, haven’t been able to defeat and expel the Russians. The United States and European NATO nations have sent billions of dollars in money, economic aid and military equipment to Ukraine, and it hasn’t been enough to defeat Russia. Prime Minister Starmer’s purported advocacy of deeper strikes into Russia is simply more evidence that what the West have provided Ukraine is not enough to defeat Russia. I have said it before: it doesn’t matter how much money and military aid we send to Ukraine, they cannot defeat Russia absent the US and NATO sending actual ground troops to fight Russia, and fighter aircraft and pilots to gain air superiority. That would mean the US and NATO in direct combat with Russia, a nation with a strategic nuclear arsenal. We have had our ‘proxy wars’ with the Soviet Union, in Korea, in Vietnam, and in Afghanistan, but those things were very different from direct combat against the USSR in the USSR.
The article noted that Mr Starmer is talking about “the use of long-range missiles made by Britain and France,” which would mean that the President of the United States does not have direct authority to authorize their use, but the US is the largest, most powerful, and wealthiest member of NATO, and it isn’t even close. If His Majesty’s Government approved the use of those long-range British missiles without American consent, it would create a major split in NATO, something Mr Starmer definitely does not want with Mr Trump possibly taking office again in four months, because the former President is not all that thrilled with an alliance which would require the United States to declare war on Russia if Vladimir Putin ordered an invasion on one of the small Baltic states, which are NATO members.
Ukraine is not a member of NATO.
European officials said earlier in the week that Mr. Biden appeared ready to approve the use of British and French long-range missiles, a move that Mr. Starmer and officials in France have said they want to provide a united front in the conflict with Russia. But Mr. Biden has hesitated to allow Ukraine to use arms provided by the United States in the same way over fears that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia would see it as a major escalation.
On Thursday, Mr. Putin responded to reports that America and its allies were considering such a move by declaring that it would “mean that NATO countries — the United States and European countries — are at war with Russia,” according to a report by the Kremlin.
There was a fine gentleman named Jake Broe, whose Twitter profile tells us that he is a “Fmr. Nuclear & Missile Operations Officer US Air Force”. Mr Broe tweeted:
If Russia uses a nuclear weapon against a NATO country, then this is what will happen to Russia in response.
About 45 million Russians will be vaporized in the first hour. Not much of a life remaining for the other 100 million.
Maybe the people of Russia should stop supporting Putin and deescalate the conflict?
He included a nasty World War III scenario video showing hundreds of nuclear warheads devastating Russia, but think about exactly what he said: “If Russia uses a nuclear weapon against a NATO country, then this is what will happen to Russia in response.” Ukraine is not a NATO nation!
Vladimir Putin might be a bit crazy, but he’s not stupid. He could respond to any NATO escalation of allowing longer-range weapons to be used to attack Russian military sites in Russia — and I’m old enough to remember President Richard Nixon’s expansion of the Vietnam war into Cambodia to attack Viet Cong bases there, and just how well that worked — with the use of ‘tactical’ or ‘battlefield’ nuclear weapons against Ukrainian military sites of troop concentrations inside Ukraine, and it would not be a nuclear attack against a NATO country. That would leave President Biden and Prime Minister Starmer and President Emmanuel Macron of France absolutely defecating in their drawers — and yes, I contemplated writing that in more vulgar terms — over how to respond. Ukraine has no nuclear weapons, and no one has been stupid enough to give them any, so any nuclear response, even if it is ‘just’ a small, tactical weapon, would have to be a direct attack by the US, UK, or France, the only NATO members which have nuclear weapons, and that would be a declaration of war against Russia.
That we have a President who’s clearly sinking into dementia taking this decision is appalling.
Let me be clear about this: I do not want President Putin and Russia to win this war, and so far, they haven’t. But I also do not want the United States involved in this war; the potential consequences are too dire. How many Americans am I willing to sacrifice to preserve Ukraine’s independence? The answer to that is: zero!