The Prime Minister’s Office says the Gaza truce will continue today, after a list was received a short while ago of 10 women and children hostages set for release from Gaza that complies with the agrees ceasefire rules.
Qatar’s foreign ministry confirms the one-day extension of the truce between Israel and Hamas, saying that it will be under the same terms as the previous six days, which saw Hamas release at least 10 hostages in exchange for at least 30 Palestinian prisoners released by Israel.
Addendum: the Arbel daughter sent me this report that UNRWA strontzakken (actually, more useless, since sacks of sh*t are useful as fertilizer) actually held Israeli hostages for HamaSS .
So the 2nd day of truce extension is today. According to the Times of Israel, the names of today’s hostages to be released have been conveyed to Israel, and the head of the Mossad [Israel’s foreign intelligence service] was in Qatar yesterday to discuss a further extension of the cease-fire.
Under the terms of the agreement, the ceasefire could be extended by more days — up to a total of 10 days, including the first four — if Hamas releases at least 10 additional hostages each day, with Israel freeing more security inmates at a ratio of three prisoners for every hostage.
Also, an elderly hostage who was more dead than alive upon arrival (due to not being given life-essential medication for her) is out of immediate danger to her life, states the head of the trauma unit at Soroka Medical Center in Be’er-Shev`a (Beersheba).
(b) Meanwhile, a House vote affirming Israel’s right to exist passed with a lopsided 412-1 vote — the lone vote against was libertarian Republican Mike Massie, who seems to have inherited the “Dr. No” mantle from Ron Paul. Rancida Taliban, er, Rashida Tlaib voted “present”; 21 were absent, including Nancy “Grey Goose” Pelosi who has no record of anti-Israel animus.
Remarkably, the full text explicitly says that “the Jewish people are native to the Land of Israel;” A truism for most of us, but directly opposing the BS “colonization” narrative.
Resolved, That the House of Representatives—
(1) reaffirms the State of Israel’s right to exist;
(2) recognizes that denying Israel’s right to exist is a form of antisemitism;
(3) rejects calls for Israel’s destruction and the elimination of the only Jewish State; and
(4) condemns the Hamas-led terrorist attack on Israel.
There was again a delay with today’s batch of hostages (the 4th) but it reportedly is back on track
(b) Just how far does the hard left-Islamist axis go back? One might be forgiven for thinking this is a recent phenomenon (a result of the intellectual AIDS known as “postmodernism”), but apparently there was Soviet funding going back to the birth of the Muslim Brotherhood:
This was the first time the Muslim Brotherhood was accused of working with communists. Banna dismissed the complaints, and so did the Ministry of Education. It wouldn’t be until November 1948 that the Egyptian government discovered the Muslim Brotherhood had received monies and weaponry from the Soviet Union. According to a United States intelligence memorandum titled “Alleged Financial Support of Ikhwan al-Muslimin by Soviets,” during a police raid on Muslim Brotherhood leader and jihadist sheikh Muhammad Farghali’s house in Isma’iliyya, the police found correspondence between the Soviet legation and the Brotherhood, along with Farghali’s arms cache. 179 While Banna’s mission was predominantly political from its inception, he attempted to publicly tame this aspect only during his stay in Isma’iliyya. This changed when he relocated to Cairo in 1932, and Banna showed that he had acquired more from communists than just their money.
From Cynthia Farahat: “The Secret Apparatus: The Muslim Brotherhood’s Industry of Death”
I am making my way through this fascinating book.
But, predictably, they were not the only bunch of totalitarian collectivists funding al-Ikhwan al-Muslemin:
The Nazi Party’s Egypt office also funded the Muslim Brotherhood. On December 30, 2006, Egypt’s Ahram newspaper published a document from the Nazi Party office in Egypt dating back to August 18, 1939. It read, “The mission sent Hassan al-Banna the same amount of money for a second time and through the same channels; but the Muslim Brotherhood requested more money, although I had already given them two thousand Egyptian Pounds.”233 The Nazi Party and the Soviet Union were not the only ones who funded Egyptian Islamists and Arab nationalists. Italian Fascists also funded them. A declassified CIA document, “Cavalier Ugo Dadone,” discussed the activities of the influential journalist, agitator, and fascist Ugo Dadone. Dadone cooperated with Mussolini in his newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia. According to the CIA document, the newspaper sent Dadone to Egypt as a special correspondent in 1934, where he “propagated sentiments favorable to Italy until his internment in 1941.”
Farahat, Cynthia. The Secret Apparatus: The Muslim Brotherhood’s Industry of Death (pp. 108-109). Bombardier Books. Kindle Edition.
(c) Radical Islamism as Orwell’s “Death Worship”? Judge for yourselves:
These activities are a direct result of Banna’s jihadist ideology that officially manifested in 1938. He merged the essence of crime, totalitarianism, and jihad into a comprehensive project, which he called sina’at al-mawt (the Industry of Death). Banna explained his Industry of Death project in an essay published under the same title in al-Nazir magazine. In 1946, Banna republished the article under the title fan al-mawt (the Art of Death), where he said: Death is an art, sometimes a beautiful art despite its bitterness, it might even be the most beautiful of arts if it is created by the hands of a masterful artist. The Qur’an honorably presented it to its believers and compelled them to cherish and love it more than others love life … Muslims will not be saved from their reality unless they adopt the Qur’an’s philosophy of death and embrace it as an art, a truly beautiful art.
Farahat, Cynthia. The Secret Apparatus: The Muslim Brotherhood’s Industry of Death (p. 120). Bombardier Books. Kindle Edition.
ADDENDUM:
Long but good op-ed in the Telegraph by the editor of the Jewish Chronicle: “How the Israeli hostage crisis will change the world forever” https://archive.fo/QIbHb
It therefore came as a surprise when, over tea in the Carlyle Hotel in New York nearly a decade ago, George [Weidenfeld, AR’s publisher and himself a Shoah survivor] said, “There are people who are worse anti-Semites than the Nazis.” He went on to explain why al Qaeda, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad, although of course not as genocidal on the same physical scale as the Nazis, were qualitatively worse than the Nazis in their belief systems, impulses, and instincts.
George died in January 2016 but had he been alive on October 7 this year, he would have had the satisfaction of having his view, once considered controversial, very publicly justified. For whereas the Nazis went to great lengths to hide their crimes from the world, because they knew they were crimes, Hamas has done the exact opposite, because they do not consider them to be so.
In October 1943 Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, delivered a notorious speech to 50 of his senior lieutenants in Posen. “I want to speak frankly to you about an extremely grave matter,” he said. “We can talk about it among ourselves, yet we will never speak of it in public. … I am referring to the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. … It is a page of glory in our history that has never been written and is never to be written.”
By total contrast, the Hamas killers 80 years later attached GoPro cameras to their helmets so they could livestream their atrocities over social media. Although the Nazis burnt Jews alive in barns on their retreat in 1945, they did not film themselves doing it. There are plenty of photographs of Nazis standing around death-pits full of Jewish corpses, but these were taken for private delectation rather than public consumption.
She is completely unsurprised by the atrocities of October 7, by the way, since (a) she’s seen first-hand evidence of what the Muslim Brotherhood fanatics did to Christians in South Sudan, and indeed to her fellow Copts in Egypt; (b) having intensely studied MB writings from Egypt, she says they included explicit and very graphic descriptions of these very tortures, torture-murders, and sexual violence as being permitted on “infidels”. In general, she regards the MB not only as “the greatest criminal organization that ever existed”, but as an existential threat to the entire civilized world. She predicts it will have to get a lot worse before it gets better, but says there are some hopeful signs in her own Egypt , as two years of total misrule when the MB was in power
Her book, she says, was banned on Amazon for a while, at the behest of some US government agencies who felt embarrassed by some of its contents. The ban was ultimately lifted, but she clearly had signed some sort of nondisclosure agreement with Amazon about the terms.
(B) Clifford May of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies has a withering indictment of the United Nebbich, a.k.a. the Useless Nitwits. A taste:
The U.N.’s hostility toward Israel is augmented by its incompetence. One example: After the 2006 war in Lebanon, the U.N. Security Council passed Resolution 1701, establishing a multinational force to disarm Hezbollah in the territory adjacent to Israel’s border. Hezbollah has since installed tens of thousands of missiles in that territory with no serious objections – much less actions – by the U.N. Hundreds of those missiles have been fired at Israel since Oct. 7.
The United Nations came into existence in October 1945, in the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust. It was meant “to maintain international peace and security, give humanitarian assistance to those in need, protect human rights, and uphold international law.”
It consistently fails to accomplish those missions.
Instead, it has become the handmaiden of Islamic supremacists, Chinese Communists, Russian imperialists, and Palestinian terrorists.
No good can come from failing to recognize this disappointing reality.
Read the whole thing. I have long been advocating that the UN Headquarters needs to be relocated, in the name of diversity and equity, from its present “Western-centric” position to a more neutral one, such as Antarctica. Mrs. Arbel objects, saying penguins don’t deserve to have their backyard sullied in this manner. We agreed that the bottom of the Marianas Trench would be a better option.
(C) The Times of Israel just published a report in English (I’ve heard this elsewhere) saying the massacre carried out on October 7 was originally planned for the 1st night of Passover.
Hamas had initially planned its October 7 cross-border onslaught for the eve of Passover, but canceled the attack after Israel raised the alert level, according to a Saturday report.
Military intelligence caught the early signs of an attack on Passover, which this year fell on April 5, and raised the alert, leading Hamas to cancel and the IDF to consider the incident a false alarm, Channel 12 reported, citing unnamed soldiers in the IDF’s 8200 signal intelligence unit.
In the period after that attempt, Hamas, fearing it had Israeli informants in its ranks, raised its internal security and kept most of its members unaware of subsequent plans and of the new timing for the incursion, the report said. […]
aturday’s exposé on the planned Passover attack followed several others in the past month that revealed IDF intelligence on a possible invasion, including reports filed by surveillance soldiers on the Gaza border who detailed unusual Hamas training exercises three months before October 7.
Soldiers in the 8200 unit reportedly warned senior officers before the October 7 atrocities that Hamas was preparing a highly organized and meticulously planned mass invasion of Israel, but were told their concerns were “fantasies.”
A senior and experienced non-commissioned officer as well as a junior officer in 8200 alerted senior IDF officers well in advance that a major operation was being planned by Hamas, but their warnings went unheeded, according to Thursday reports. [..]
Separately, Kan reported that before October 7, the IDF had come into possession of a Hamas terror manual that described ways to capture the Gaza border region in southern Israel.
The manual described taking over IDF positions, capturing kibbutzim and towns in the region, killing and kidnapping residents, and attacking and capturing the three regional cities of Sderot, Ofakim and Netivot. It described how pickup trucks would be used to stage the invasion along with motorbikes and hang gliders, as well as the use of anti-tank missiles under the cover of rocket and mortar fire from Gaza — in much the same way that events unfolded on October 7.
The manual also described a strategy to lull Israel into complacency by holding negotiations for some form of long-term arrangement, while at the same time staging frequent drills and small security incidents on the border on Saturdays and Jewish holidays to lull the IDF into a false sense of security when Hamas forces turned up en masse at the border fence.
The plan was reportedly drilled with two companies of Hamas’s elite Nukhba force, which was responsible for the October 7 attacks, and included capturing an imitation kibbutz.
Kan reported that the plans detailed in the manual were passed along to senior ranks in the IDF, who dismissed it on the grounds that Hamas did not have the operational capabilities to carry out such an attack.
UPDATE: 13 Israeli hostages now in hands of Red Cross, being transfered via Egypt to Israel; an additional 7 foreign hostages also in Red Cross custody
Since 7am a tense cease-fire is in effect. Channel 11 just reported that a group of 13 hostages was in Red Cross custody and being brought to the Rafiach crossing into Egypt, whence they will be conveyed to the nearby Nitzana crossing into Israel
There is no precedent in modern history in which a movement such as Hamas, with roots in both the racist ideologies of Nazism and in Islamist religious obscurantism, has been so successful in finding supporters or at least excuse-makers among those who regard themselves as secular leftists. For its entire modern history, anti-fascism had been a defining feature of leftist or progressive politics. Beginning in the 1960s, however, leftists in Europe and the United States redefined anti-fascism in a way that severed it from its meaning in the 1940s and, amazingly, turned it against Israel. For the generations who have come of age since the 1960s, the language of anti-racism and anti-colonialism, mistakenly applied to Zionism and Israel, has facilitated the emergence of a kind of magical thinking that transforms Hamas from an inherently racist and antisemitic terrorist force into a member in good standing of the struggle of the wretched of the earth against colonialism and Western domination.
For decades there has been far too little public discussion in the world’s democracies about the echoes of Nazism and persistence of Islamist-based religious hatred that are evident in Hamas’ key documents. The authors of its 2017 charter drew on the secular language of the global left to obscure its reactionary, antisemitic, and fundamentalist essence, but the reality of a religious war against the Jews remained central to what Hamas was and is. All three faces of antisemitism—right, left, and Islamist—are evident in the 2017 charter just as they were in the 1988 one. On October 7, 2023, those religious and secular hatreds exploded with a barbarity that surprised only those who had not looked directly at the truth about Hamas’ war against the Jews, which was sitting in plain sight in these two evil documents.
(A) According to the Times of Israel liveblog, the implementation of the “truce for hostage releases” deal has been postponed by a day, citing “logistical” issues. The decision was coordinated between Israel, Qatar, and Egypt,
Meanwhile, the IDF keeps pounding HamaSS targets, saying this will continue until the truce goes into effect, and restart one minute after the truce.
(B) “VisualEconomik” has a look at the (by now adding up to) tens of billions of dollars in economic aid to the “Palestinians”. The idea of the international community was, at least at first, to foster a burgeoning economy that would make it worth the population’s while to abandon terrorism.
Instead, it created a class that could live high on the hog from the influx of aid money (and the cronyism and extreme corruption that ensued), while the rest of the “Palestinians” continued to suffer in poverty. (Funny how corruption and cronyism are endemic in so many Arab or Muslim countries?)
Into the void stepped a new organization offering charity and education… and using it to indoctrinate its newly gained followers with its Muslim Brotherhood doctrine of Islamic supremacism by any means “necessary”.
ADDENDUM: balancing the very pessimistic views on the “truce-for-hostages deal” by generally clear-headed people I featured yesterday, here is a more optimistic view from my favorite Times of Israel analyst, Chaviv Rettig Gur.
Tens of thousands of Hamas fighters have now been underground for nearly seven weeks. Their stores of food and fuel could be running low; they were prepared for an Israeli incursion, but not an open-ended one. Meanwhile, the IDF has systematically destroyed and sealed hundreds of tunnel entrances — upward of 600 at last count — as it slowly tightens the noose around the underground network in northern Gaza. Hamas’s subterranean strategy has been counteracted by a simple and patient Israeli answer: Burying Hamas forces alive in their own tunnels.
Then, all of a sudden, a deal was announced this week that drops the 1,100-to-one formula to three-to-one: 50 hostages for 150 Palestinian prisoners, all of the latter either women or prisoners who were minors at the time of their terror attacks.
But more interesting than who they are is who they are not. No Hamas fighters will be released, in part because Hamas didn’t really demand it. The prisoner release was treated by Hamas negotiators as a face-saving PR exercise. Their priority, Israeli officials say, was the ceasefire.
Hamas first demanded a month-long ceasefire in exchange for a few dozen hostages. Israel didn’t respond. As Hamas losses mounted, its demands shrank. It has now reached 50 hostages for four days’ respite.
(a) So after I went to bed, the cabinet last night approved, in a 35-3 vote. the “hostages for truce” deal. The truce is supposed to go into force tomorrow at 10am local, and daily releases of batches of hostages to begin at the same time. (The list with names of the first batch has been given to Israel.)
The international community is hailing the agreement (which is worrisome). Alan Dershowitz is worried, and both Bill Otis and Paul Mirengoff at “Ringside at the Reckoning” are ripping it apart. (Both note, incidentally, that the current local head honcho, Obergruppenführer-HamaSS Yahya Sinwar, was one of the prisoners released in exchange for Gilad Shalit.)
It is a truism of behavioral economics that any behavior you reward, you get more of. Roy Yozevich recalled Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg, who was imprisoned, yet wrote a legal opinion banning attempt to ransom him, for fear it would encourage kidnapping of scholars.
(c) PragerU has a long interview with an Israeli Muslim Arab woman (now living in the USA) about what life was really like for her. She has no time whatsoever for the BS “Apartheid” accusations.
The 80s NWOBHM (New Wave of British Heavy Metal) band Saxon wrote the song “Dallas 1 pm” about the assassination. Below is a music video with historical footage.
The world was shocked that fateful day A young man’s life was blown away, away In Dallas 1 pm
ADDENDUM: Tzvi Yechezkeli, the Arab affairs commentator of Channel 13 (who speaks fluent Arabic and has extensive experience going undercover in Islamist circles), comments (in Hebrew) on the “quiet emigration” from Gaza. Some 370,000 mostly young people with college degrees (such as they are) have left since 2007: the main reason cited is the lack of any economic opportunity in Gaza unless as part of the HamaSS apparatus. How do they get out? Turkey apparently gives them visas, and Egypt allows holders of such visas transit. Once in Turkey, they join the traffic of refugees from Turkey into Greece, whence they can fan out across the EU.
According to the emerging parameters, there will be a 5-day truce in exchange for the release of 50 to 100 hostages. Israel would also release a few hundred security prisoners, and permit the entry into the Gaza Strip of an additional 300 trucks with supplies.
Earlier, Channel 12 news cited a senior Israeli official as saying “we are very close to a deal.”
Noting that there were still technical issues to be resolved, the official said there was an agreement that at least 50 people will be freed, while dozens more could be released in exchange for extending a planned ceasefire beyond the initial few days.
Those set to be released, in phases over several days, are expected to be some 40 children, their mothers and other women, the report said.
In exchange, Israel would reportedly free some 300 Palestinians, among them women and minors. There would reportedly be a ceasefire in the war as the releases go ahead. According to some reports, Israel would also stop using drones to monitor parts or all of Gaza for several hours a day during the ceasefire.
The support of the broader cabinet is required to approve any hostage release deal that includes freeing Palestinian prisoners, according to the Israel Democracy Institute’s Moran Kandelshtein-Haina.
In line with a 2014 amendment to the Government Law, the cabinet is required to approve the early release of prisoners. Early release is possible only under tight national security or foreign relations conditions, including the release of Israeli citizen or residents held hostage, or as part of a foreign policy agreement.
Developing…
UPDATE: YNet reports (in Hebrew) that the initial group of released hostages will consist of 30 children, 8 mothers, and 12 additional women.
Meanwhile, the full cabinet is meeting on the deal. PM Netanyahu told them that the hostages not for initial release will be allowed visits by the Red Cross and medicine deliveries.
For every released hostage, Israel will release three asirim bitchoniim (security prisoners). The deal may eventually cover up to 100 prisoners, although the realistic number is anywhere between 50 and 80.
Apparently, some foreign groups of hostages, such as the Thai workers, are subject of separate negotiations with the relevant governments and not part of this deal.
One person who is very unhappy with the deal is MEMRI founder Yigal Carmon, who argues it would be much more effective to apply economic, diplomatic, and indeed military pressure on Qatar —- which hosts the HamaSS leadership and otherwise bankrolls their (bowel) movement.
A British doctor who used to work at Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest medical center, under which the IDF says Hamas operates a major command and control base, has confirmed that there were areas of the hospital where he could not go, or else he would be shot.
In a recent interview with the English-language channel of French broadcaster France24, the doctor, who declined to give his name for fear of endangering his colleagues in Gaza, said he had worked at Shifa and other hospitals in Gaza and the West Bank for three months, three years ago.
“When I was first asked to work there [at Shifa], I was told there was a part of the hospital I was not to go near, and if I did, I’d be in danger of being shot,” he was quoted as saying.2/2
“Was it explained to you why that was?” asked journalist Irris Makler in the recorded conversation.
“No, but implicit was that it was being used for non-medical purposes,” replied the doctor.
[…] “Well, I was welcome everywhere else, and as I say, the doctors and nurses there were very welcoming and very kind, and the hushed tones under which this was said were consistent with all the other hushed tones with which Hamas was discussed. You know, people were genuinely fearful,” the doctor replied.
“I cannot emphasize too much the air of collective paranoia that existed there,” he continued.
(b) Meanwhile, MEMRI reports that the HamaSS Einsatzgruppen [I won’t apologize for calling them that] threaten to repeat the October 7 massacres from the “West Bank”.
The IDF’s Military Intelligence Directorate’s Unit 504 — which specializes in HUMINT (human intelligence) — has questioned a total of some 500 Palestinians and has made millions of calls to civilians to evacuate northern Gaza since the beginning of the fighting in the Strip.
Dozens of Arabic-speaking Unit 504 soldiers are on the ground in the Gaza Strip, alongside the combat units, carrying out field interrogations and providing intelligence to forces. Unit 504 has doubled its personnel amid the fighting, and established a new sub-unit specifically for southern Israel.
The IDF in a statement says it has established a detention facility in southern Israel to bring detainees from the Gaza Strip for questioning.
So far, some 300 terror operatives — from Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other groups — and suspects have been brought to the facility for interrogation, the IDF says.
It says that the terror operatives and suspects provided the interrogators with the locations of Hamas tunnel networks and weapons depots, as well as detailing the terror group’s methods of operation, including their use of human shields.
“Each and every investigation leads to the incrimination of new sites, and the human intelligence that emerges… is an inseparable layer of the complete intelligence picture,” says a senior Unit 504 officer.
The IDF publishes three videos showing detainees detailing to Unit 504 interrogators Hamas’s use of hospitals for terror purposes. The men describe how they hid at Shifa and Rantisi hospitals, the Red Crescent building, and other medical centers, while Hamas used the sites to fight against the IDF.
Unit 504 also has sources in the Gaza Strip that have been providing information that is translated into intelligence for the ground forces.
“We received thousands of phone calls from [Palestinians willing to provide information] at a magnitude never before seen in the unit. It is evident that the residents of the Gaza Strip are not satisfied with the barbaric behavior of Hamas, the ordinary citizen understands that Hamas is bringing a disaster on the residents of Gaza that will be difficult for them to recover from,” the senior officer adds.
As part of the IDF’s efforts to evacuate Palestinians from northern Gaza amid the ground offensive, Unit 504 has made more than 30,000 calls, sent more than 10 million text messages, and more than nine million recorded messages to Gazan civilians. The IDF has also dropped some four million leaflets warning Palestinians of the dangers of staying in northern Gaza.
The IDF says the evacuation from northern Gaza allows it to carry out heavier strikes and operate more widely in the area against Hamas infrastructure. Airstrikes still continue in southern Gaza at the same time, with only the small al-Mawasi area along the coast declared by the IDF as a “safe zone.”
(d) The “Palestinian” “Authority”, after first accusing Israel of staging Oct. 7, suddenly changed tone and say “priority now is not to engage in spats“. The bleeding obvious: one cannot believe a single word coming out of these narcissistic sociopath lying liars.
The Palestinian Authority responds to a speech by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last night, in which he slammed the PA for falsely accusing Israel of carrying out the October 7 massacre at an outdoor rave party in southern Israel.
In a declaration by PA presidential spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeineh, Ramallah says that “the priority now […] is not to engage in spats and trivial issues that do not deserve a response,” adding that “Netanyahu’s statements since the beginning of the aggression prove that this government seeks to perpetuate its occupation of all the Palestinian territories.”
“President Abbas’s efforts are currently focused on stopping the barbaric Israeli aggression against the Palestinian people and their holy places in Gaza, the West Bank, and Jerusalem,” Abu Rudeineh adds.
The PA’s Foreign Ministry additionally accuses Israel of fabricating media material to justify its offensive against the Gaza Strip.
Yesterday, the PA Foreign Ministry falsely claimed in a statement that the Israel Defense Forces was responsible for the death of all the partygoers near Kibbutz Re’im during Hamas’s October 7 onslaught. The claim originated in a detail from a Haaretz story published on Saturday that was widely picked up in the Arab press and shared on social media, distorted and taken out of context.
In a video released on Sunday in Hebrew and English, Netanyahu responded harshly to the accusation, calling the statement “utterly preposterous” and a “complete reversal of truth.”
Netanyahu also said that PA President Mahmoud Abbas, “who in the past has denied the existence of the Holocaust, today is denying the existence of the Hamas massacre and that’s unacceptable.”
Following the Israeli backlash, the PA Foreign Ministry deleted its statement from its social media accounts on Sunday night, but Hebrew media said it was sent as a document to diplomats and to the United Nations.
The PA foreign minister did not respond to a request for comment.
ADDENDUM: this is somewhat inside baseball, but I used to attend Masorti (“Traditional” the Israeli version of “Conservative Judaism”) synagogues until things got too woke. I didn’t so much leave the movement as that it left me.
If a member of Ravnet posted that blacks should not be admitted to Ivy League universities, would the mini-tempest pass in a day? If a member of Ravnet wrote that Israeli Arabs should all be forcibly moved out of Israel to guarantee the demographic Jewish majority that Israel needs to remain both Jewish and democratic, would that blow over? If someone said that gays and lesbians should not be able to join Conservative synagogues, would that quickly fade?
But a rabbi can, in so many words, suggest that my son is part of a genocidal army, and all of a sudden, people have a right to say what they want.
So, I did what I should have done years ago. I wrote the heads of the Rabbinical Assembly [=the governing body of Conservative Judaism in the USA] and resigned from the RA, severing all ties to the… Movement.
The Washington Post, quoted in the Jerusalem Post, claims that a detailed deal has been worked out under which Israel and HamaSS will observe a 5-day cease-fire, during which a group of 50 or more women and children will be released in daily batches.
Israel, the United States, and Hamas have reached a tentative agreement to free dozens of women and children held hostage in Gaza in exchange for a five-day pause in fighting, the Washington Post reported on Saturday, citing people familiar with the deal.
As part of the detailed, six-page agreement, all parties would freeze combat operations for at least five days while “an initial 50 or more hostages are released in smaller groups every 24 hours,” the Post reported. Hamas took about 240 hostages during its October 7 rampage inside Israel’s South that killed at least 1,200 people.
The newspaper said that overhead surveillance would monitor ground movement to help police the pause, which also is intended to allow in a significant amount of humanitarian aid.
There was no immediate comment from the White House or the Israeli prime minister’s office on the matter, the Post report.
The hostage release could begin within the next several days, according to people familiar with the agreement.
I’ll believe it when I see it.
UPDATE: meanwhile, the bleating sheep Mahmoud Abbas, a.k.a. Abu Mazen, in the 16th? 17th? 18th? year of his 4-year term as President of the “Palestinian Authority”, claims Israel orchestrated October 7 itself. Is it senility (he’s 87) or is his brain damaged by donkey-borne venereal disease?
No, there is a more prosaic explanation: Westerners do not always realize we are dealing here with a culture for which brazen lies in the service of “the cause” are not merely permitted but considered praiseworthy. THat in a sense, they invented postmodernism before that intellectual AIDS virus rotted the brains of the West. No wonder so many pomo-leftists are “ghey for HamaSS”.
A colleague of mine a decade ago told me flat out he preferred HamaSS over the PLO crowd, saying they both want to do the same to us but at least HamaSS openly admits it.
Meanwhile, here are embedded (inside a Hebrew page) surveillance cam videos that clearly show hostages being dragged into Shifa Hospital. Also IDF say it has evidence that hostage Cpl. Noa Marciano was not killed in an Israeli aristrike as claimed, but suffered survivable wounds, was borught to the hospital, and then finished off by the terrorists.
We were just discussing with friends the state of agriculture in the Netherlands, and specifically the surplus of pig manure. I would suggest exporting it to Gaza: immersion in liquid pig excrement until death would seem to be a suitable punishment for the HamaSS “Dirlewanger Brigade” that carried out this G-dforsaken “operation”.
And speaking of brazen lies, I invite all of you to find the boundaries of “Palestine” on map from the late Ottoman era.
As you can see, neither a vilayet [province] nor a sanjak [district, county] with the name FILASTIN.
Also:
What happened to the Jewish population of the Middle East and North Africa?
Why are there so few left?
Maybe we can ask the students marching in universities campuses every week, shouting gibberish about genocide? pic.twitter.com/ZkIooloiYu
And ya khamar Alexandra Occasional Cortex started braying about attaching conditions to US aid to Israel. The reactions did not turn out as she wished or expected. (Although at times the theory that she’s a conservative mole trying to make the Grade Z Generation leftist demographic look more ridonkulous than it already is.)
Those who keep harping on the “Palestinian” refugees of the 1948 Independence War generally don’t want you to know about the other side of the post-1948 population transfers: the 800,000-odd Jews expelled from the Muslim word, or harassed until they left for want of an alternative. This included such hoary communities as the Jews of Iraq, who’d been living there since the Babylonian Exile (Babel, or Mesopotamia, is the central part of Iraq).
Oren from travelingisrael.com just uploaded this important brief summary of what happened.
If you want a longer and more detailed view, coupled with a history of the Jews in those lands beginning in pre-Islamic times, I warmly recommend the book by Martin Gilbert, “In Ishmael’s House: A History Of Jews in Muslim Countries”. This was one of the last books the late lamented historian (and authorized biographer of Winston Churchill) wrote, and it is very much worth your while.
It’s come to this: the Grade Z Generation (dor sug zayin) is now approvingly reading the “Letter To America” of Osama Bin Laden —- the mastermind of the worst terrorist attack thus far on American soil.
As Ben Shapiro explains, this is indeed the logical endpoint of teaching an entire generation that being successful = oppressor, and being a loser = oppressed, and that oppressed cannot be judged for anything you do.
And why this garbage on TikTok? Three guesses who runs Turtlef*** TikTok: the CCP.
Shapiro rips also into the “decolonization” argument pro HamaSS, since “there is literally no more colonialist religion than Islam” (ask the Spanish about that ;))
He also claims in passing that Congress-critter Rancida Taliban, er, Rashida Tlaib, is a member of a Facebook group that questions whether the Shoah really happened (aside from approvingly posting images from the October 7 massacres).
Iowahawk comments:
If you kids think Bin Laden made some good points, wait'll I tell you about a vegetarian former art student with an ironic mustache whose impassioned manifesto about the Zionist oppression of his people sparked a worldwide movement
The Barbara K. Olsen memorial lecture of the Federalist Society commemorates the wife of former Solicitor General Ted Olsen: she was killed as one of the passengers aboard Flight 77 on 9/11.
This year’s speaker is an unusual choice for them: not a conservative, not a legal scholar, but a center-left journalist who even lives in a “same-sex marriage”. Yet her speech could not be more timely, as it is about 10/7 — which on Israel’s population scale was the equivalent of thirty 9/11s.
But this is just the jumpoff point for a frank discussion about a pathology that threatens all of civilization. Antisemitism/judeophobia? Paraphrasing her: it is just one particularly blatant symptom of a much deeper and broader illness.
It is the ideology of nihilism. It knows nothing of how to build. It knows only how to tear down and to destroy.
And it has already torn down so very, very much. The civilization that feels as natural to us as oxygen? That takes thousands of years, thousands of nudges of progress, thousands of risks, thousands of forgotten sacrifices to build up. But vandals can make quick work of all that.
Reagan used to say that freedom is never more than one generation from extinction. The same can be said of civilization.
If there can be anything good that has come out of this nightmare that began on October 7 it is this: we have been shaken awake. We know the gravity of the stakes. And they are not theoretical. They are real.
(a) Hat to to the Arbel daughter: this is supposedly satire by “Eretz Nehederet” (“Wonderful Country”, the Israeli counterpart of SNL). But can we be really sure it’s satirical?
(b) According to the Times of Israel, the IDF is now carrying out a pinpoint operation on the grounds of al-Shifa Hospital: see their liveblog for updates.
(c) Now Poutine Castreau, a.k.a. Justin Trudeau, is wagging his finger at Israel. Vas-te faire foutre par ton pédé Xi Jinping, espèce de connasse. OK, for Canadian French I’d have to throw in a few chalices and tabernacles with the rudery, but I know I have Catholic readers, so I will spare you.
(d) Suella Braverman, sacked as Home Secretary by “Conservative” PM Rishi Sunak for saying the blatantly obvious — that the British police are treating pro-HamaSS supporters with kid gloves — minces no words in her resignation letter (paywalled; cached copy).
[…] As you know, I accepted your offer to serve as Home Secretary in October 2022 on certain conditions. Despite you having been rejected by a majority of Party members during the summer leadership contest and thus having no personal mandate to be Prime Minister, I agreed to support you because of the firm assurances you gave me on key policy priorities. Those were, among other things:
1. Reduce overall legal migration as set out in the 2019 manifesto through, inter alia, reforming the international students route and increasing salary thresholds on work visas;
2. Include specific ‘notwithstanding clauses’ into new legislation to stop the boats, i.e. exclude the operation of the European Convention on Human Rights, Human Rights Act and other international law that had thus far obstructed progress on this issue;
3. Deliver the Northern Ireland Protocol and Retained EU Law Bills in their then existing form and timetable;
4. Issue unequivocal statutory guidance to schools that protects biological sex, safeguards single sex spaces, and empowers parents to know what is being taught to their children.
This was a document with clear terms to which you agreed in October 2022 during your second leadership campaign. I trusted you. It is generally agreed that my support was a pivotal factor in winning the leadership contest and thus enabling you to become Prime Minister.
For a year, as Home Secretary I have sent numerous letters to you on the key subjects contained in our agreement, made requests to discuss them with you and your team, and put forward proposals on how we might deliver these goals. I worked up the legal advice, policy detail and action to take on these issues. This was often met with equivocation, disregard and a lack of interest.
You have manifestly and repeatedly failed to deliver on every single one of these key policies. Either your distinctive style of government means you are incapable of doing so. Or, as I must surely conclude now, you never had any intention of keeping your promises.
These are not just pet interests of mine. They are what we promised the British people in our 2019 manifesto which led to a landslide victory. They are what people voted for in the 2016 Brexit Referendum.
[…] Another cause for disappointment – and the context for my recent article in The Times – has been your failure to rise to the challenge posed by the increasingly vicious antisemitism and extremism displayed on our streets since Hamas’s terrorist atrocities of 7th October.
I have become hoarse urging you to consider legislation to ban the hate marches and help stem the rising tide of racism, intimidation and terrorist glorification threatening community cohesion. Britain is at a turning point in our history and faces a threat of radicalisation and extremism in a way not seen for 20 years. I regret to say that your response has been uncertain, weak, and lacking in the qualities of leadership that this country needs. Rather than fully acknowledge the severity of this threat, your team disagreed with me for weeks that the law needed changing.
As on so many other issues, you sought to put off tough decisions in order to minimise political risk to yourself. In doing so, you have increased the very real risk these marches present to everyone else.
In October of last year you were given an opportunity to lead our country. It is a privilege to serve and one we should not take for granted. Service requires bravery and thinking of the common good. It is not about occupying the office as an end in itself.
Sunak is one of those billionaire fauxservatives who want to conserve conservatism by denuding it of anything conservative. “The Minnesota Magid used to confuse the Evil Impulse by giving in without a struggle.” Rishi Sunak must have read this quote from The Big Book of Jewish Humor and mistaken the book for a howto-manual of governance.
As much as it pains me to say it, the only chance I see for the Tories to stave off a Labour landslide at the ballot box would be to bring back Boris Johnson from the wilderness. For all his many flaws, being a populist rather than a “wet Tory” a la Sunak or Cameron, nor a “dry Tory” like Thatcher of Liz Truss — but a populist).
(e) “Masgramondou”, guestblogging at Sarah Hoyt’s place, lays bare in an extensive piece just how far the lamestream media is ghey for in the tank for HamaSS, and how full of shiite they are.
(f) there was a massive pro-Israel demonstration in DC yesterday, as a counterweight to the sickening pro-terrorist march we saw earlier. The new GOP Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, spoke at the event, but — as a sop to its biggest donor base, or as a rebuff to the “squad” wing — so were Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Majority Leader Shuck Choomer Chuck Schumer and special envoy on antisemitism Deborah Lipstadt (best known perhaps for her libel trial against Shoah denier David Irving).
ADDENDUM: IDF unveils HamaSS high command bunker at depth of 30m under surface headquarters . There is evidence both Gaza Reichsführer-HamaSS Yahya Sinwar and military commander Obergruppenführer-HamaSS Muhammad Deif operated from there.
ADDENDUM 2: Belgian parliament refuses to screen movie of Oct. 7 atrocities – remember : much of it drawn from HamaSS’s own GoPro cams – claiming it is “propaganda”. And of course: “Green Party” watermelons. https://www.ynetnews.com/article/sj11ebbg4astrontzakken!
And hear this testimony from an Israeli Arab Muslim volunteer with ZAK”A [Zihuy Korbanot Ason, זיהוי קרבנות אסון, lit. ’Identification of Victims of Disaster’] about what he saw at the scene of the Oct. 7 massacres.
Fascinating interview with historian Niall Ferguson (formerly Harvard, now at Stanford’s Hoover Institution), discussing the broader context of the Israel-HamaSS war. The host is former deputy PM of Australia, John Anderson AO.
As he sees it, we’re talking about a new Cold War between the free West and a loose alliance of unfree societies, with China at the center. Obviously Xi Jinping doesn’t love fundamentalist Islam (he does all he can to suppress it in his own backyard — to zero protest from the Islamic world, BTW, as he has them economically by the beitzim) but anything that weakens the West is geopolitically convenient to him.
Around 9 minutes, he also delves into the generation gap in the West on Israel, with boomers overwhelmingly supporting Israel and “Generation Z” and the academic intelligentsia so obsessed with radical identity politics that you see bizarre alliances like “Qu**rs for Palestine” (when the actual mafia-SS rulers of Gaza torture or kill homosexuals on their own turf).
A ton to unpack here: perhaps I’ll add a summary later.
(A) Interviewed by the Times [of London] YouTube Channel, former Haaretz (and now Times) military correspondent Anshel Pfeffer gives a pretty good summary of where things stand now.
He also intimates that, while the Gaza incursion has essentially wall-to-wall support in Israel, the same is not true for the government, and especially not for PM Netanyahu.
Pfeffer too expresses a sense that Israel’s “window of opportunity” to crush HamaSS is limited, and that this is spurring on commanders to greater efforts.
(B) Meanwhile, Powerline reports on a story at MIT that, as a former US academic, has my blood boiling. Apparently, when local Arab/Islamist pro-HamaSS students tried to block Jewish and Israeli ones, taking sanctions was nixed by MIT’s “leadership” because of visa consequences for any students punished of what are likely felonies.
As John Hinderaker of Powerline points out, these “international students” are pretty much the only ones paying the full sticker price tuition, and if their visas would be revoked… bye-bye $50K per year per head + housing.
I’ve spent enough time in US academia (I relocated to Israel’s a decade ago) that this theory sounds completely credible to me. If true, I have only one word for it: academic prostitution, bent over and grabbing their ankles while yelling “harder, HamaSS! Deeper!”.
Of course, if academia would drop all the fluff and focus only on its core mission, it would not need to charge such outrageous tuition in the first place. But then there would be no money to hire thousands of administrative flunkies with “studies” degrees who are at best useless to the university’s mission and at worst completely inimical to it.
UPDATE: more on this last story at the New York Sun (paywalled; cached copy here). Ugh.
UPDATE 2: the university has “acknowledged that this might be the case”. Good grief.
So MIT was going to suspend these students for clearly and deliberately violating the rules after repeated warnings, but decided not to because it could lead to their visas being revoked.
It seems that’s something the students should have considered beforehand… https://t.co/M7FtosBSAB
Very disappointingly, Wishy-Washy Rishi has now sacked Home Secretary Suella Braverman for saying the blatantly obvious — that the UK police treats pro-HamaSS thugs with kid gloves — and replaced her with current Foreign Secretary James Cleverly, who in turn will be replaced by… ex-PM David Cameron.
More reshuffling is currently in progress. The Environment Secretary stepped down, citing her long run under five different PMs (Cameron, Johnson, May, Truss, and Sunak).
“Wet Tories” (in UK English, “wet”=’effete, ineffectual, inept’) like Michael Heseltine are rubbing their hands with glee, while the grand dame of all “Dry Tories”, Margaret Thatcher, is generating renewable energy by spinning in her grave. For shame.
A long and far-ranging, but very rewarding, interview with Douglas Murray on where we are in Israel and in the West post-October 7.
Because make no mistake: this isn’t just about Israel. After the HamaSS and their Quislings are done with us, they will come for the entire West. And the same Western nihilists who are [in Murray’s words] “carefully sawing off the branch they are sitting on” in the hope that they will finally get the narcissistic supply due to them after the “Revolution” will find themselves in the same position as revolutionaries everywhere after they have outlived their usefulness to the leadership.
President Isaac Herzog reveals that an annotated copy of Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” was found in a children’s room that was used as a base by terrorists in the northern Gaza Strip.
Herzog holds up a copy of the Arabic translation of the Nazi leader’s book during an interview with the BBC.
“This is Adolf Hitler’s book, ‘Mein Kampf,’ translated into Arabic,” Herzog tells the BBC, according to a statement from the President’s Residence. “This is the book that led to the Holocaust and the book that led to World War II.”
The President’s Residence says the book was found in a residential building, among the personal belongings of a terrorist, and had been annotated.
“The terrorist wrote notes, marked the sections, and studied again and again, Adolf Hitler’s ideology to hate the Jews, to kill the Jews, to burn and slaughter Jews wherever they are. This is the real war we are facing,” Herzog says.
“After the massacre and atrocities committed by Hamas terrorists on October 7 — the day on which the largest number of Jews were murdered since the Holocaust — this is another revelation that testifies to the sources of inspiration of the terrorist organization Hamas, and proves once again that all its actions have the same goal as the Nazis — the destruction of Jews,” the President’s Residence says in a statement.
An annotated copy of an Arabic translation of ‘Mein Kampf’ that President Isaac Herzog says was found by Israeli troops in a children’s room used as a terror base in the Gaza Strip, photo released on November 12, 2023 (President’s Residence)
Congratulations, leftist polezni duraki [Russian: “useful idiots” or “useful innocents”]. Three years ago, you called yourself “antifascists” who had the moral duty to “punch Nazis” (by which you meant anyone to the right of Lenin). Now you’re allying yourselves with the true, hardcore, genocidal kind — the SS of today.
ADDENDUM: the book cover. Yes, “My Struggle” in Arabic is “Jihadi”, no more, no less.
The Media Line sarcastically tags UNRWA on X and asks if this book is perhaps part of the UNRWA-sanctioned curriculum?
In an interview with the @BBC: President Herzog reveals Arabic copy of Hitler's “Mein Kampf” found in a children's bedroom used as terror base in northern #Gaza
Spin, strangeness, and charm 