Hamas

Wednesday

The Spectator

Democrats and the media unite against new GOP speaker

It took a few weeks, but Republicans got their act together and did the impossible: elected a new speaker of the House, Louisiana’s Mike Johnson. Johnson and his team have an incredible amount of work ahead of them — from funding the government to fundraising for House Republicans. What’s particularly noteworthy to me in the hours ahead of Johnson becoming speaker is the all-out effort Democrats and their media mouthpieces are making to define him — mostly by spreading provable misinformation.  Johnson’s Democratic counterparts on the Judiciary Committee immediately lashed out at him for being a member of the Freedom Caucus, which is an outright lie.

Rod Liddle

What Hamas promised to its electorate

From our UK edition

Things you do not hear very often, number one: a pro-Palestinian protestor denouncing Hamas for the barbarity of its incursion into Israel on 7 October, appalled at the savagery of those attacks upon children, grandmothers, etc. It may seem as if, in saying this, I am stating the obvious – because support for that pogrom was, I would suggest, strong among some of those carrying Palestinian flags on marches through London and elsewhere. Six Arab language journalists were suspended by the BBC when it was discovered that they retweeted messages glorifying in that day’s murder. They were not members of Hamas. Ordinary Palestinians interviewed, cowering in the rubble of Gaza, were not quoted condemning the attacks which led directly to their present misery.

Toby Young

Why I don’t trust the BBC’s Trusted News Initiative

From our UK edition

You almost certainly haven’t heard of the Trusted News Initiative (TNI), although you probably should have. It’s a BBC-led consortium of the world’s most powerful news, social media and technology companies that seeks to cleanse the internet of ‘disinformation’. It carries out this mission by doing its best to discredit sites that challenge the prevailing narrative on topics like lockdowns, Covid vaccines, electoral fraud, the Ukraine war and climate change. It was founded in 2019 by Jessica Cecil, a senior BBC executive who, in 2021, was part of the Counter Disinformation Policy Forum, a shadowy group of ‘experts’ convened by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to monitor criticism of the government’s pandemic response.

Peter Jones

Homer’s take on theology

From our UK edition

The Hamas charter does not mince its words: ‘The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said: “The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”’ A return to the ancient pagan gods would surely be an improvement, but the modern world adopts the Hamas line. Consider the current deities of the bigots whose opponents, hiding behind a clearly sacrilegious belief in rational argument, must be condemned to eternal cancellation. The Greek and Roman gods of myth were far more accommodating. Take Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the first works of what we call western literature (c.700 bc).

Thursday

Ben Domenech

A return of the hawks?

Welcome to Thunderdome, where a week and a half after the chilling attacks on Israel, the American people have had time to digest the scenes from across the world — from the Middle East and fiery scenes at embassies, to protests on campuses and now on Capitol Hill, fueled by lies from progressive Democrats — and their concern is enormous. The polls show 85 percent of Americans are concerned the Israel-Gaza conflict will erupt into a wider war in the Middle East. And while supermajorities of Republicans, Democrats and Independents still believe it's important to support Israel, Republicans approve of sending Israel weapons by a roughly twenty points more than other factions. (The Quinnipiac numbers are here.

Charles Lipson

A lie can get halfway around the world

The charge damning Israel with bombing a hospital in Gaza has circled the globe at lightning speed, time and again. But slowly the truth is getting its pants on. The evidence is increasingly clear that Israeli Defense Forces did not bomb a hospital in Gaza, either deliberately or inadvertently. A video, now publicly available, shows the rocket coming from inside Gaza, not from outside or from a plane. CNN has had experts confirm that analysis. The US has confirmed that point with sensitive (and still secret) signals-intelligence. So has Israeli intelligence, independent of the US. There is also at least one captured phone call among jihadists acknowledging that the rocket was fired from inside Gaza. That, too, is publicly available.

Wednesday

Stephen L. Miller

The media accuracy crisis around Israel mirrors how it got BLM wrong

After an explosion in Gaza this week, Hamas asserted that an Israeli airstrike had targeted a hospital, killing up to 500 civilians. Outraged at this evidence-free claim, news outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post and Associated Press all repeated it, without confirmation or investigation. Several members of Congress, including Palestinian sympathizers Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, condemned the “attack,” again, without waiting for confirmation.As evidence began to mount that Israel had not committed this act, the New York Times began to stealth-edit their original story — updating their original headlines several times.

Freddy Gray

Joe Biden’s Middle East diplomacy is a wreck

From our UK edition

Joe Biden prides himself on his decades of foreign-policy experience, his ability to talk tough yet be kind, and his talent for bringing opposing sides together. Touching down in Israel today, he gave Bibi Netanyahu a big hug – quite the gesture – and promptly told him he believed that ‘the other team’ – i.e. Hamas, not Israel – was responsible for the bomb that struck a hospital in Gaza last night, killing many of non-combatant Palestinians and inspiring another wave of anti-Israel protests. Biden will now set about trying to help release the hostages held by Hamas and persuading local powers to allow a secure flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza.   Israel will be grateful for Biden’s show of support.

hamas palestine cancel culture
Ben Domenech

Being denied a job for supporting Hamas isn’t ‘cancel culture’

Karol Markowicz has a piece today about cancel culture and the college students who signed on to reprehensible anti-Israel or even pro-Hamas statements, driving donors to pull funding for major higher ed institutions and even leading some professors to say flat-out: don’t hire the people who signed these. I’ve written repeatedly about the difficulty and sloppy definition of the term “cancel culture,” and why I think most people struggle to define it and just fall back on their priors: if someone I like is getting yelled at, it’s cancel culture; if someone I don’t like is getting yelled at, it isn’t.

Tracy-Ann Oberman

Why do I need security guards so I can play Shylock?

From our UK edition

These are very odd times. The project of my life – The Merchant of Venice 1936, which sets Shakespeare’s play in East End London during the rise of Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts – was postponed because of Covid, but is now alive and kicking. It’s kicking hard. We’re on a ten-week tour and I’ve been moved beyond words at the reactions of audiences and critics. Yet for the last week, the production has had to have security men around keeping an eye on things. It’s like a dystopian nightmare. A Jewish actress putting on a play about anti-Semitism which needs to be made secure because of Jew-hating extremists. As one reviewer said: ‘Written in 1600, set in 1936, as relevant today in 2023.’ Ain’t that the truth.

Lionel Shriver

Keep your politics à la carte

From our UK edition

It’s a truism that the Anglosphere has developed a ‘tribalism’ that rivals the divisions between the Kikuyu and Luhya in Kenya. One pernicious aspect of mutually hostile groupsterism is prix fixe politics. Your side shares a rigid, prescribed collection of beliefs, and joining the club entails embracing every single one, while despising a compulsory roster of enemies and backing the folks on your team – whatever friend or foe may say, whatever friend or foe may do. As in French restaurants, there are no substitutions. Letting go of indefensible positions your gang is ‘supposed’ to maintain is a relief Rarely has set-menu morality been put on more vivid display than last week.

Monday

Stephen L. Miller

Ron DeSantis models presidential behavior

In the week-long fallout from the Hamas massacre in Israel and Israel’s military counteroffensive, the sitting president and the GOP front-runner were more publicly focused on their own pet projects than the concern that Americans were perhaps trapped in Israel. As of today, the death count of Americans murdered by the Hamas excursion stands at thirty, and it may rise. That number is also not accounting for the dozen or so hostages that the State Department cannot or won’t confirm. To the public, Americans in Israel seem to be little more than an afterthought to this administration, much the same way the Biden administration would not be forthcoming about Americans trapped in Afghanistan.

The Spectator

Jim Jordan herds cats

“We must move forward,” Representative Jim Jordan wrote in a letter to his Republican colleagues as he works to lock up the votes he needs to become speaker, lay out an agenda of empowering rank-and-file lawmakers and expand the fragile House majority. Following a surprise call for a weekend-long recess, Jordan has been herding the cats in his conference. After facing what seemed like long odds to secure the gavel on Friday, Jordan made several key strides, securing backing from former foes like Representatives Vern Buchanan, Ken Calvert, Mike Rogers and Ann Wagner, the latter a fierce ally of his rival last week, Steve Scalise. Right now, Jordan is the only announced candidate for speaker — and pulling former critics on board is a sign of some much needed Jordanmentum.

palestinians
Roger Kimball

Who or what are ‘the Palestinians?’

It’s so cute when politicians like AOC and Rashida Tlaib, to say nothing of hysteric undergraduates and ill-informed lefties across the country, complain that Israel is an “apartheid state” that is illegitimately “occupying” the land West of the Jordan River from the Golan Heights down to the border of the Sinai Peninsula.  Responding to the murderous attacks on Israeli civilians by Hamas on October 7, AOC decried “the occupation of Palestine” while Tlaib urged “ending the occupation, and dismantling the apartheid system” that can “lead to resistance.” Hermeneuts of the world, unite! What does Tlaib mean by “resistance” here? Slaughtering innocent partygoers? Incinerating and beheading babies?

Saturday

Jonathan Spyer

An Israeli ground assault would be devastating for Gaza

From our UK edition

On a patch of scrubland outside the Zikim kibbutz earlier this week, I came across a platoon of Merkava 4 tanks positioned among the trees. One of the tank commanders recognised my colleague and we exchanged a few words. ‘This is our Yom Kippur,’ he told us. ‘We haven’t even begun to grasp the implications of this.’ Yom Kippur, in this context, isn’t a reference to the annual Jewish day of atonement. Rather, it recalls October 1973, when Israel was surprised by an attack on two fronts from the forces of Egypt and Syria. The Hamas assault on Israeli Jewish communities around the Gaza Strip came exactly 50 years and a day after what Israelis call the Yom Kippur War.

Paul Wood

Paul Wood, James Heale and Robin Ashenden

From our UK edition

23 min listen

This week Paul Wood delves into the complex background of the Middle East and asks if Iran might have been behind the Hamas attacks on Israel, and what might come next (01:11), James Heale ponders the great Tory tax debate by asking what is the point of the Tories if they don’t lower taxes (13:04) and Robin Ashenden on how he plans to introduce his half Russian daughter to the delights of red buses, Beefeaters and a proper full English (18:36).

Friday

The Spectator

‘Day of rage’ fear paralyzes the West

This Friday October 13, governments around the world received a warning from Israel: look out for yourselves, look out for your Jewish citizens, as terrorism may reach your soil.The Israel National Security Council and Ministry of Foreign Affairs recommended that all Israelis abroad remain cautious, “keep away from the demonstrations and protests and — if necessary — check with local security forces regarding possible protests and disturbances in the area.”“Against the background of Operation Swords of Iron,” the agencies said in a joint statement, “Hamas leadership has called on all of its supporters around the world to hold a ‘Day or Rage’” against Jews around the globe.

day of rage
gaza proportionate hamas
Roger Kimball

What does a ‘proportionate’ response to Hamas look like?

As the world stumbles through the fog of war following the savage attacks on Israel by Hamas last week, I thought it might be worth pondering two things.  First, since the news is full of headlines warning against Israel’s conducting a “disproportionate” response, I wonder what a “proportionate” response to the wholesale murder and mayhem perpetrated by Hamas would look like?  Second, I know that I am not alone in sensing that the attack, though brutal, was but the opening gambit of a plan whose origin and course is, as of this writing, still unknown to the public. As to the first, this was the strophe: on October 7, hundreds of Hamas terrorists suddenly and without warning swarmed across the border separating the Gaza Strip and Israel.

harvard
William A. Jacobson

It can happen at Harvard

How did we get to the point that on numerous American campuses devoted to “social justice,” many student groups openly celebrated a brutal Hamas attack that killed more than 1,000 Israeli civilians and saw many hundreds tortured, beheaded, executed in front of family members and set on fire?  How did we get to the point on campuses where any unwanted sexual contact, even if intended only as a non-violent romantic approach, is denounced as a crime against women and can lead to expulsion, yet student protesters celebrate the mass rape of Israeli women, including rape victims still bleeding from the violation or killed and stripped naked, being paraded through the streets of Gaza as howling mobs defiled and abused their bodies?

Wednesday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Starmer’s stall, high treason and the horrors of Hamas

From our UK edition

Home At the Labour party conference, cheerful in the hall but overshadowed by the war in Israel, Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, said that in government he would build 1.5 million homes and a host of ‘Labour new towns’. He wanted to spend £1.1 billion a year on higher overtime payments within NHS England to reduce waiting lists. A protestor poured glitter over him. Angela Rayner, the deputy leader, and Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, also said Labour would ‘rebuild Britain’. ‘Rachel Reeves is a serious economist,’ said Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of England. Labour took Rutherglen and Hamilton West in a by-election that the Scottish Labour leader, Anas Sarwar, called a ‘seismic night in Scotland’.