question everything
question everything's JournalFirst Hamas fighters raped her. Then they shot her in the head - graphic
She had, he says, the face of an angel. Night after night Yoni Saadon, 39, wakes in anguish to the faces of women. First, that of the young woman hiding next to him under the stage of the Supernova festival where he had been dancing to electronic music as the sun rose on October 7 and Hamas militants opened fire. “She fell to the ground, shot in the head, and I pulled her body over me and smeared her blood on me so it would look as if I was dead too,” he said. “I will never forget her face.
Every night I wake to it and apologise to her, saying ‘I’m sorry’.” After an hour, he peeked out. “I saw this beautiful woman with the face of an angel and eight or ten of the fighters beating and raping her. She was screaming, ‘Stop it — already I’m going to die anyway from what you are doing, just kill me!’ When they finished they were laughing and the last one shot her in the head.
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The horror did not end there. Hiding in bushes, he saw two more Hamas fighters. “They had caught a young woman near a car and she was fighting back, not allowing them to strip her. They threw her to the ground and one of the terrorists took a shovel and beheaded her and her head rolled along the ground. I see that head too,” he says.
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Eight weeks after the attack in which 1,200 were killed and 240 taken hostage, there is mounting evidence of widespread rape on October 7. Israeli police have begun their biggest investigation into sexual violence and crimes against women. “It’s clear now that sexual crimes were part of the planning and the purpose was to terrify and humiliate people,” says Shelly Harush, the police commander leading the investigation. The first indications came on the day itself when Hamas livestreamed some of the horrors it was perpetrating. Footage showed several women stripped of their clothing. One video showed a young woman with bloodstains on the crotch of her underwear.
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“Opening the body bags was scary as we didn’t know what we would see. They were all young women. Most in little clothing or shredded clothing and their bodies bloodied particularly round their underwear and some women shot many times in the face as if to mutilate them. “Their faces were in anguish and often their fingers clenched as they died. We saw women whose pelvises were broken. Legs broken. There were women who had been shot in the crotch, in the breasts … there seems no doubt what happened to them.”
More..
https://archive.is/DMI2e#selection-2826.0-2826.1
The Sunday Times of London
From Which River to Which Sea?
When college students who sympathize with Palestinians chant “From the river to the sea,” do they know what they’re talking about? I hired a survey firm to poll 250 students from a variety of backgrounds across the U.S. Most said they supported the chant, some enthusiastically so (32.8%) and others to a lesser extent (53.2%).
But only 47% of the students who embrace the slogan were able to name the river and the sea. Some of the alternative answers were the Nile and the Euphrates, the Caribbean, the Dead Sea (which is a lake) and the Atlantic. Less than a quarter of these students knew who Yasser Arafat was (12 of them, or more than 10%, thought he was the first prime minister of Israel). Asked in what decade Israelis and Palestinians had signed the Oslo Accords, more than a quarter of the chant’s supporters claimed that no such peace agreements had ever been signed. There’s no shame in being ignorant, unless one is screaming for the extermination of millions.
Would learning basic political facts about the conflict moderate students’ opinions? A Latino engineering student from a southern university reported “definitely” supporting “from the river to the sea” because “Palestinians and Israelis should live in two separate countries, side by side.” Shown on a map of the region that a Palestinian state would stretch from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, leaving no room for Israel, he downgraded his enthusiasm for the mantra to “probably not.” Of the 80 students who saw the map, 75% similarly changed their view.
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In all, after learning a handful of basic facts about the Middle East, 67.8% of students went from supporting “from the river to sea” to rejecting the mantra. These students had never seen a map of the Mideast and knew little about the region’s geography, history or demography. Those who hope to encourage extremism depend on the political ignorance of their audiences. It is time for good teachers to join the fray and combat bias with education.
Mr. Hassner is a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley.
https://archive.is/aJvDh
If you cannot open at the link, here is the free link
https://www.wsj.com/articles/from-which-river-to-which-sea-anti-israel-protests-college-student-ignorance-a682463b?st=77xhqyo91zv1ps3&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
The New Antisemitism Is the Oldest Kind
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How innocent the moment seems. That was the postwar “Gentleman’s Agreement” version of American antisemitism—gentiles relaxing up-island, on their fourth glass of Chablis. The word “Jew” wasn’t mentioned. In the Martha’s Vineyard iteration—post-Auschwitz—American antisemitism often had a discreetly covert quality. It emerged from a kind of sly politesse because, after all, everyone at some time or other had seen the films from the Nazi camps—the ones that Gen. Eisenhower had ordered his troops to watch. In Elia Kazan’s 1947 movie based on the Laura Hobson novel “Gentleman’s Agreement,” desk clerks fidget and look away when Gregory Peck, as a journalist pretending to be Jewish, pushes them about renting a room.
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The antisemitism that has poured forth onto the country’s streets and campuses in the autumn of 2023 is a different thing—a reversion to a politics of aggressive, unapologetic hate. The ominous historical regression at work in the latest Jew-hatred takes up the themes of the mid-1930s, the spirit of Hitler’s brown shirts and Kristallnacht. Of course, the new Jew-haters—especially young people on campuses—think of themselves as perfectly virtuous. What is a thousand times worse, they think of their Jew-hatred as righteous. It’s morally fashionable among them.
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Why did Hamas attack on Oct. 7? Israeli oppression? Hamas has ruled Gaza since 2007, two years after the Israelis withdrew. Under decent, intelligent leadership—with a touch of vision, with investment by oil-rich Arab states—Gaza might now be a Mediterranean Singapore. Instead, Hamas has maintained Gaza as an anguished slum, an ongoing dramatization of the Palestinian victimhood that is the source of Hamas’s power and raison d’être.
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Students at Harvard and Columbia don’t protest the region’s routine inhumanities. They do so only when there are Jews around to blame and to hate. It’s the Israelis’ Jewishness that brings the demonstrators out. This isn’t “a new antisemitism.” Antisemitism is never new. It’s an ancient beast that awakens from time to time and exhales such filth as “Gas the Jews” and “Hitler was right.”
https://archive.is/UGLCd
UN Women finally condemns Hamas attacks, sexual violence on October 7
The United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, or UN Women, has condemned the Hamas October 7 massacre in a Friday statement, nearly two months after the terrorist organization’s brutal rampage of rape, murder, and kidnappings.
“We unequivocally condemn the brutal attacks by Hamas on Israel on October 7,” UN Women wrote. “We are alarmed by the numerous accounts of gender-based atrocities and sexual violence during those attacks.”. The women’s rights organization made a similar statement in late November condemning the Hamas attacks, but quickly deleted the post. Earlier, on November 8, UN Women made an X post highlighting Isra al-Modallal, the first female spokesperson for Hamas.
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The initial reaction from UN Women to Hamas’s attack came on October 7 from Bahous, who took to X to write, “The escalation of hostilities in #Israel & the Occupied Palestinian Territory #OPT is gravely concerning. It is imperative that all civilians, including women & girls, are protected.”. Bahaus proceeded to call for “immediate de-escalation,” but did not name, or assign any blame, to Hamas.Not until nearly two weeks later did UN Women first make an X post wherein the organization called for a release of the hostages taken by Hamas.
Infographics videos highlighting the sentiment of neglect and betrayal felt by many Israeli women, such as one posted to the Instagram account “tiroche_art_auctions,” have gone viral in recent weeks on social media. Trends, such as the X hashtag, #metoo_unless_ur_a_jew, have likewise been spread to underscore the perceived apathy on behalf of leading women’s organizations to the sexual assaults endured by Israeli women.
https://www.jpost.com/international/article-776233
Israel is a democracy
It conducts elections on a regular basis where many parties are on the ballot.
According to The Economist Group's Democracy Index 2022 study, Israel is the only democratic country in the region, qualified as a "flawed democracy" (#29 worldwide) and ranked as "Free" by Freedom House.[1] in the Middle East and North Africa.[2] The level of democracy in nations throughout the world published by various democracy indices, report the Middle Eastern and North African countries with the highest scores are Israel, Tunisia, Turkey, Lebanon, Morocco, Jordan and Kuwait.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_in_the_Middle_East_and_North_Africa
Since not one party gets a majority, as in other countries, the one with the most votes gets to form a coalition. This is a horse race. There may be small parties with unique demands but as long as they agree with the ideas of the major one, they will contribute one or two votes to reach a majority.
This is what happened last January. Netanyahu's Likud party won only 26% of the votes, but it had more than the rest and he got to form a government. The result has been the most right wing government in the history of the country. Some members are racists, homophobic, anti women....
Imagine, elected officials who are racist, homophobic.. Unique to Israel?
(As an aside, Israel has a vibrant LGBT community and Pride is celebrated everywhere).
Commenting on there results were reported in the Israeli media and, all of a sudden, posters here started posting about "a new Israeli government which is anti gay.." These were stories from January! but some here decided to use them now.
I have observed this during all the years (almost 20) that I have been here. Posters find articles criticizing Israel in... Israeli newspapers and post them here.
I can assure you that no other country in the Middle East, in Muslim countries, tolerate articles that criticize its rulers.
Israel is the highest-ranked country in the Middle East and North Africa region in the RSF’s 2023 Press Freedom Index. Its position dropped 11 ranks since last year, placing it at 97 out of 180 countries. Qatar is shortly below Israel at 105. Of the 10 countries that rank lowest on the index, four belong to the region: Saudi Arabia at 170, Bahrain at 171, Syria at 175, and Iran fourth lowest on the list at 177.
https://themedialine.org/people/middle-east-journalists-share-pessimistic-outlook-for-regions-press-freedom/
Back to the recent elections. As soon as the new government was formed and its plans to "reform" the judicial system became known, on every singe Saturday ten of thousands of Israelis went to the streets to protest, and it was reported on "60 Minutes." These protesters included many who voted for Netanyhau and now regretted their votes
On the day that the parliament was going to vote on the "reform," about 100,000 protesters marched to Jerusalem. On their way they met with local residents who built them tents and provided food and drink.
I have recently read that a factor of 36 should be used in comparing Israeli and U.S. populations. Thus, 100,000 Israeli marchers would equal 3.6 million marching on D.C. When has such a crowd marched here?
I have searched for famous marches on D.C and applied a population factor. The 250,000 that listened to MLK in 1963 would equal 460,000 today. The Million Men march with the higher estimation of 837,000 (some estimate 400,000) would equal 1,050,000.
I don't think that this post will stop many here to bash Israel, citing Israeli sources, but I hope that you will appreciate the freedom of the press and free elections that make Israel unique in the region.
Two post scripts:
The protesters that included many reservists and who were referred to as "traitors" have, in the past six weeks were fighting for Israel.
The "Brothers and Sisters in Arm" profiled in the 60 minutes story have now organized help for the ones who had to flee their homes with nothing left. They have been collecting donations, food, clothes trying to ease the trauma and distributing them.
Opinion: Israeli women count, too - Jennifer Rubin
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The atrocious acts of sexual violence against Israeli women on Oct. 7 has gotten shockingly little coverage. On one hand, the deaths and kidnappings have understandably transfixed and enraged the public. But one would think there would be sufficient time and attention devoted to one of the most ghastly episodes of rape and brutalization against dozens upon dozens of women.
To his credit, Jake Tapper at CNN provided one of the few TV news reports. “Israeli police are using forensic evidence, video and witness testimony and interrogations of suspects to document cases of rape amid the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel,” an accompanying report from CNN.com explained. “Women and girls caught in the rampage were brutalized sexually, as well as physically tortured and killed, witnesses to the aftermath say.” The report went on to detail “horrific, almost inhuman, crimes” that first responders found “unimaginable.”
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The willful disregard of sexual violence against Israeli women and girls goes beyond mere ignorance to actual denial. Samantha Pearson, the head of the rape center at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, signed a letter denying the rapes occurred. Thankfully, the university fired her and issued a blistering denunciation of the letter. The attacks were so gruesome and barbaric that the impulse to look away can be overwhelming. And yet when other mass atrocities against women occur, there is no shortage of outrage and condemnation. One is left wondering why Israeli women and girls count for so little in the eyes of so many.
Many Jews, especially Jewish women, feel betrayed by their allies with whom they have protested, lobbied, marched and advocated in support of human rights regardless of the race, ethnicity, religion or nationality of the victims. Sadly, the morally indefensible effort to deflect blame from Hamas has now entered an even more egregious period of moral blindness, cruelty and, yes, antisemitism.
https://wapo.st/3ReC4dd
(free copy)
TRIGGER WARNING: The Hamas sexual pogrom and the deafening silence of the world's feminist movements
Days after the October 7 attack by Hamas against Israel, Representative Derrick Van Orden, a former Navy SEAL and combat medic, turned congressman from Wisconsin, visited Israel after the attack and commented, “I can speak with authority. I’ve done multiple combat tours. People were slaughtered at a level not seen since the Holocaust.” The analogy was not an exaggeration. The terrorists burned babies alive in kitchen ovens.
Hamas commanders had issued specific and sadistic orders to the terror squads to kill and kidnap as many Jews as possible. They also issued orders to rape, sodomize, and sexually mutilate the Israeli women they came across. Underage girls were savaged as were their mothers before the eyes of other family members. Grandmothers, even those in wheelchairs, were molested and sodomized. The terrorists filmed their heinous acts in gory snuff films to be shared on social media and streamed on their GoPro cameras. They took their human trophies back to Gaza to be violated, abused, and held for ransom.
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Rape and sexual assault as a terror tactic in conflict is a war crime. The Geneva Convention specifies that “women shall be especially protected against any attack on their honor, in particular against rape or any form of indecent assault.” The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court states that “rape, sexual slavery, forced pregnancy, or any other form of sexual violence” is a crime against humanity. Many other international treaties and conventions demand that the global community must always safeguard women and girls, including and especially during armed conflict. But the world has been silent about these heinous Hamas crimes against girls and women.
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In the aftermath of wars in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and Ukraine, the crimes against women were central to the international criminal indictments and prosecutions of men responsible for orchestrating the campaign of rapes. It is unlikely that such a special prosecutor will be called to protect Israeli and Jewish women. I have fought the destructive virus of anti-Israel bias of the International Criminal Court for years. The court in The Hague has historically used its jurisprudence as a platform for attacking Israel and not defending it.
More..
https://www.ynetnews.com/article/bjqmutqv6#autoplay
Challenging the misguided Holocaust-Gaza comparisons
A month after the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, there is a moral inversion of history taking place. Israel is being accused of genocide by protesters, human rights activists and some media in response to its military campaign against the Hamas regime in Gaza. Not only is it a debasement of the term genocide, it is a distortion of the Holocaust that fuels the surge in antisemitism worldwide.
It strains credulity that as we have recently commemorated the 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht November 9, 1938, the infamous antisemitic pogrom in Germany marking the onset of the Holocaust, Jews are being accused of mass murder. Over 1500 Israelis, mostly civilians, were murdered by Hamas terrorists, many of them tortured and raped, while 250 innocents were kidnapped and taken hostage in Gaza. Yet these horrific crimes have been diminished, ignored and even celebrated by those who accuse Israel of genocide.
“Genocide” is a legal term that requires intent to destroy an entire people, ethnicity or nation. In no way does it apply to Israel’s actions to defend itself. Yet critics of Israel have manipulated the memory of the Holocaust to turn it against the Jewish state, a familiar demonization throughout history. It is a perversion of fact and international law. It is dangerous. It is antisemitic.
Indeed, the barbaric actions of the Hamas terrorists and its charter, which calls for the elimination of the state of Israel, fit the legal description of genocide. And anti-Israel protesters’ slogan, “from the river to the sea” is, as many in Congress have acknowledged, “a genocidal call to violence to destroy the state of Israel and its people to replace it with a Palestinian state extending from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.”
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https://www.ynetnews.com/article/bksymnfva
Deborah Lauter is the Executive Director of The Olga Lengyel Institute for Holocaust Studies and Human Rights
Iran Might Have Miscalculated in Gaza - Walter Russell Mead
Most news and commentary describes the war in Gaza as the latest brutal episode in the conflict between Israelis and Arabs. That is one dimension, but from the perspective of world-power politics, it isn’t the most important. What really matters in the Middle East is the battle between Iran, increasingly backed by Russia and China, and the loose and uneasy group of anti-Iranian powers that includes Israel and the American-backed Arab states... But so far, from a global perspective, the most important fact is that Iran isn’t getting what it wanted from the war. Iran’s objective in arming, training and encouraging Hamas wasn’t solely to cause Israel pain. The real goal was to disrupt the gradual deepening of the strategic ties between Israel and its most important Arab neighbors.
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Sunni Arabs have long viewed Iran as a religious rival and a security threat. More recently, as Iran’s march to hegemony left a trail of ruined countries and bloody corpses, suspicion solidified into terror and loathing. Tehran’s support for Bashar al-Assad in Syria is responsible for many times more deaths and refugees than all the Israeli-Palestinian wars combined. Iran’s support for Hezbollah converted once-prosperous Lebanon into a poverty-stricken Iranian satellite. Tehran’s allies keep Iraq in a state of miserable unrest while Iranian support for Houthi forces in Yemen drove one of the greatest humanitarian disasters of our time.
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Tehran hoped to disrupt the emerging anti-Iran bloc in the Middle East. The idea was that Hamas’s dramatic attacks would electrify public opinion in the region against Israel, the U.S. and the Arab rulers willing to work with them. This, Tehran hoped, would drive a wedge between the Arabs and Israelis as Arab rulers sought to placate their angry publics by abandoning any plans to work closely with Israel. So far, this plan has failed. Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Egypt have all signaled that they intend, once the storm has passed, to go on working with Jerusalem for a safer, more stable Middle East. Worse from Iran’s point of view, the Arabs are committing to a revived form of Palestinian governance that can exclude Iran’s proxies from both the West Bank and Gaza.
(snip)
Instead of dividing Israel from the Arab states, the Hamas attacks reminded sensible people across the Middle East how important it is to hold Iran in check. The Gulf states need stability, and Iran and its murderous proxies are mortal threats to the economic future that Arab rulers want and their people need.
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https://archive.li/4VPTh
IDF releases damning evidence of Hamas using ambulances to move around Gaza
Days after rare Israeli strike on ambulance in Gaza, army releases intercepted call in which Hamas terrorist admits ‘I can leave with any ambulance I want’
“I can leave with any ambulance I want,” the terrorist is heard saying to a Gaza resident he was talking to. The recording comes after Israel took responsibility for a strike on an ambulance in Gaza over the weekend it claimed was transporting Hamas terrorists.
In addition, a collection of quotes from Shin Bet interrogations of terrorists from Hamas’s elite Nukhba force who took part in the massacre in Israeli border towns on October 7 also reveals the use of ambulances and hospitals by Hamas terrorists for military activities in the Palestinian enclave.
(snip)
Another terrorist argued that “the Jews don’t hit ambulances” while a third terrorist said that “During combat, the ambulances are used, among other things, to evacuate fighters – commanders and operatives. They also transport food, cargo and weapons in them because that is the safest way to transport them.”
Another told in his interrogation that most senior Hamas political and military officials, including Hamas leader in Gaza Yahya Sinwar, are “hiding in the hospitals, especially the Shifa Hospital. They take advantage of the hospitals so that they will not be bombed.”
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https://www.ynetnews.com/article/r1pwadtqt#autoplay
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