Hamas

Professor Alan Dershowitz is one of Israel’s most prominent defenders outside the Jewish state. He has just written — in record time — a book about the events of October 7: War Against the Jews — How to End Hamas Barbarism. It will be published next month and will argue, among other things, that the Hamas attack “has required Israel to consider its nuclear option as a last resort to assure its survival.” I spoke to Professor Dershowitz and asked him first, about another of the book’s arguments, that there should be no absolute distinction between civilians and combatants in Gaza, but instead “a continuum of civilianality.” "It existed in Nazi Germany," he said.

Responsibility for the catastrophe now unfolding in the Middle East belongs to Hamas and its sponsor, Iran. The atrocities we are now discovering — the deliberate killing of innocents, the capture of hostages — were an integral part of Hamas’s military strategy and grew directly out of its vicious hatred of all Jews — and of Western civilization. These are acts of true evil and, in committing them, Hamas has the full backing of Iran. President Biden spoke for America when he said, bluntly, “The brutality of Hamas’s blood thirstiness brings to mind the worst rampages of ISIS. This is terrorism.” It is important to begin with these basic points before discussing mistakes made by Israeli and American leaders.

As the bodies of hundreds of Israelis lay freshly butchered by Hamas terrorists, the group’s supporters from around the world celebrated — including by mourning the dead terrorists and cohosting a rally with a designated terrorist group — and urged them to “globalize the intifada.” The rallies sprouted up almost immediately after Hamas stunned Israel by launching a surprise attack, likely with Iranian assistance, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. The images of Israeli grandparents and infants being held hostage, and of Israeli villages being wiped out shocked the world. It wasn’t just Israelis who were murdered, however; nine Americans have already been confirmed among the dead, along with German, French and Cambodian citizens.

Following the US setback during the Tet Offensive in Vietnam in 1968, Walter Cronkite, the mythical CBS News television broadcaster, was sent to Southeast Asia to report on the military intervention there. After Cronkite proclaimed in his broadcast that the US lost the war in Vietnam and that it was time to bring the boys back home, then President Lyndon B. Johnson told his advisors, 'If I lost Cronkite, I lost Middle America.' Urban legend or not, it reflected the way I imagined the role of the American media to be when I had served as a press officer at the Israeli Consulate in New York about a decade or so after Cronkite aired that broadcast from Vietnam.

A regular column by an anonymous whistle-blower operating deep within the heart of the Social Justice Movement. To protect their identity, they will go under the code-name ‘They/Them’. Wokeyleaks is a confidential news leak organization for anyone who wishes to divulge classified information (and hilarious anecdotes) about woke culture without fear of getting canceled. To any would-be Edward Snowflakes out there: leak your woke-culture war crimes to wokeyleaks@protonmail.com. We promise to protect our sources. Having spent a lot of time in Brooklyn, I find it easier to understand Israel’s occupation of Palestine not as a ‘religious conflict’, but as a kind of militarized gentrification.

Once, long ago, in a land far away, the best journalists tried to stand aloof from the stories they reported. The idea was simple and powerful. If journalists tried to be neutral and kept their reporting separate from their opinions, analysis, and speculation, then the public would believe them. Those days are long gone — and the media’s credibility is gone with them. Journalists and media organizations are now smack in the middle of many stories they cover, in part because they want to be. They want to spin them, to set ‘the Narrative’. Imbued with this new mission, many journalists have become partisan protagonists.