Ariel (3) and Kfir (9 months) with their mother Shiri

From the linked article:

After 503 days in captivity, the remains of Oded Lifshitz, Ariel Bibas, and Kfir Bibas were returned, alongside a fourth body that was not that of Shiri Bibas. The fate of Shiri remains unknown, leaving her family and the entire country in a state of anguish and rage. But this was not just another tragedy—this was barbarism.

Forensic reports have now confirmed what we all feared: Hamas did not just abduct these children; they brutally murdered them in captivity in November 2023. Kfir Bibas was just ten months old. Ariel was four. The two children were brutally murdered [by hand strangulation] in captivity by terrorists in November 2023, just a month after their abduction.

The terrorists who carried out these acts are monsters, devoid of any human decency. This was not collateral damage, not an unfortunate consequence of war—this was intentional, cold-blooded murder.

The world must know the truth. Hamas did not just take hostages; they slaughtered infants in the darkness of their tunnels, then callously returned the wrong body [instead of the body of the children’s mother Shiri] in a twisted mockery of basic humanity.

Their cruelty knows no bounds. They paraded our children’s remains like trophies, and then, as if to add another layer of horror, they failed to even return their mother’s body.

Those who have called for ceasefires, who have demanded negotiations with Hamas, must now ask themselves: How do you negotiate with monsters? How do you make peace with those who murder babies and celebrate their deaths? Hamas-supporting parents and their children stood by in Gaza, watching the spectacle of Israeli children’s bodies being paraded around [and cheering, rejoicing]. What kind of society allows such evil to flourish?

Israel must respond with the full force of its power. This is no longer just about retrieving hostages; this is about eradicating a force of pure evil. There is no justification, no rationalization, and no compromise to be made with those who revel in the suffering of innocents.

Every remaining terrorist must know that there will be no safe haven, no escape from justice.

The flame of hope must not be extinguished, but it must now be accompanied by the fire of retribution. The return of our hostages is still our sacred mission, but we must also ensure that those responsible for these atrocities are met with absolute destruction.

                                                                                                                                                                   

Giulio Meotti writes at Israel National News:

That the liberal conscience of the West remains indifferent to the images of Israeli Jews freed from the captivity of Islamic terrorists is aberrant and alarming. It seems that not even the crimes that echo the darkest moments of the 20th century are enough to break the cultural frivolity and moral narcissism of our times.

Hamas placed an hourglass on the stage in Gaza with the photos of the hostage Matan Zangauker and his mother Einav, under the caption: “Time is running out.”

The mothers of hostages are also psychologically tortured. “Time is running out” is the slogan of the hostages’ families forum. Islamic fundamentalists are very skilled readers of the Western psyche.

Romi Gonen only started eating three weeks after she was released by Hamas, her mother, Meirav, said. One of the first things she noticed about her daughter when she returned from 471 days in captivity was “her long, sticking out fingers”.

The hostages were held in extremely unsanitary conditions, full of lice, bedbugs, mold and fungi.

“The Jews are starving us,” Hamas shouted, winning over half of the West, when in reality Hamas was starving the Jews. Gaza is a ghetto, the Western idiots said.

The truth is that under Gaza there is a concentration camp.

For over a year, the entire international community danced to the tune of propaganda about the “famine” in Gaza. Then Hamas showed what they wanted the world to see: evidence of their cruelty, worn on the faces and bodies of those they have tormented since October 7.

The Red Cross has never even pretended to care about the fate of the Israeli hostages held by Hamas. When the mother of one of the hostages begged the Red Cross to try to deliver the medicine her daughter needed every day, Red Cross officials scolded her: “Think about the Palestinian side.”

Meanwhile, three hostages arrived from Gaza with high jutting cheekbones, sunken eyes, prominent collarbones, muscle wasting: where is the scandal?

Or Levy was kept in tunnels almost all the time, was allowed to shower only every few months, was barefoot for 491 days and wore shoes for the first time on the day of his release.

The hostages were subjected to severe torture during their captivity, both physical and psychological. They were strangled, tied up, gagged with cloth until they suffocated, hung upside down and burned with a hot object. One of the hostages revealed that he had been shackled. “I was handcuffed in a dark tunnel, without air or light. I could not walk or stand, only before my release did my captors remove the shackles, forcing me to learn to walk again.”

Sagui Dekel-Chen, who was kidnapped while fighting terrorist invaders with his kibbutz security team on October 7, 2023, was held in a Gaza hospital for the first few weeks of his captivity. He was “tortured during interrogation” by the terrorists and has scars on his body to prove it.

The captors ate in front of the hostages and denied them food, and sometimes forced the hostages to watch them choosing who would eat and who would not.

Hamas showed kidnapped Israeli soldiers videos of their fellow prisoners being tortured.

Daniella Gilboa’s father says: “Some days, they were fed animal feed: inedible scraps of dirty vegetables and a kind of hard flour.”

I don’t think it’s just Hamas that is a threat to Western civilization. It’s the entire Palestinian Arab cause, as it has been for half a century.

Gadi Mozes, who turned eighty in Hamas hands and was released three weeks ago, was held alone for the entire 482 days he was held by the terrorists.

Keith Siegel recalled being dragged 33 times through tunnels and dark buildings. Among Keith’s hiding places was a family home with a Gazan family and children, but where he was locked in a room.

Israeli News 12 testimony from a recently released female hostage: “She was held captive by a married father with multiple wives. He was a senior commander in the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and was extremely abusive, beyond words. He turned her into a house slave.”

Hamas not only beat and caged Yarden Bibas, but also tortured him by beating him and giving him false updates on the fate of his family, his wife and two children.

Adam Berger said his daughter, Agam, witnessed physical abuse while in captivity. “Sometimes they tortured other female hostages in front of her eyes.”

Many were given “cloths soaked in cold water” to wash themselves.

Daniella Gilboa returned with a bullet still in her leg.

Army spokesman Daniel Hagari climbed into the hole where Hersh Goldberg Polin, Eden Yerushalmi, Carmel Gat, Ori Danino, Almog Sarusi, Alex Lobanov were detained and killed in cold blood. From a children’s room decorated with Mickey Mouse, he descended into a hole where it is impossible to stand: bottles of urine and a bucket for toilets, bottles of water for drinking and washing, women’s clothes on the floor, a Koran, the blood of six young people. Hagari said that the prisoners were reduced to a minimal weight, about thirty kilos – like in Auschwitz.

Many children released after two months had had their legs branded with motorcycle exhaust pipes.

A freed Thai worker says that the Israeli hostages he was held prisoner with were savagely beaten with electric cables.

Two teenagers were forced to perform sexual acts on each other. Women were sexually abused and forced to undress in front of everyone, tied to the bed, threatened, pulled by the hair. Whipped. This is contained in the report of the Israeli Ministry of Health released in December.

But our progressives do not seem very shaken by the disturbing similarities with the events that shook pre-war Europe.

They are hereby warned: the new Hitler Islamonazis have promised all the “infidels” the paradise in the shadow of the sword.

Victor Davis Hanson sums up what President Trump and his chosen lieutenants have liberated us from:

There’s been a lot of false information—what the Left calls misinformation, disinformation—about what’s going on in these first 30 days. It hasn’t even been 30 days. It’s reminiscent of FDR’s first hundred days, and they call it the MAGA revolution.

It’s not a revolution. It is a counterrevolution. There’s a big difference. This is a restoration. Let’s use the word “Trump restoration”.

We don’t know really—we don’t really appreciate what we’ve been through with eight years of the Obama revolution and the four-year, more radical third term of Barack Obama, using or employing the wax effigy of Joe Biden. A revolution that we’ve experienced was a cultural, economic, political, social revolution.

It was very similar to the French Revolution under the Robespierre brothers. You should remember what they tried to do. They changed the days of the week. They renamed things. They tore down statues. They went after the churches. Does this sound familiar?

This revolution that we’ve experienced—everything was up for sale. Everything was negotiable. We invented a third gender and rammed it down people’s throats. We tore down statues. We said 1776 was no longer the foundational date. It was 1619.

We changed the very mechanism that we vote. We went from 70% of the electorate voting on Election Day to 70% of the electorate not doing that, either through mail-in or early voting. That was a radical change that had no discussion. It was done by fiat. It was incredible.

We looked at girls sports and we destroyed it. We said that transgendered biological males that were now transgendered females could compete. They won over 600 medals they took away from hardworking female athletes. We had drag shows among young children. It was an effort to change the entire Constitution. We forget that.

They were trying to bring in Puerto Rico as a state and Washington, D.C., to get four instant senators. They were proud, they said, that they were going to pack the Supreme Court. Hadn’t been done—hadn’t been tried since 1937. And it was an object of disgrace ever since but they were proud to try it again.

They talked about making states—the Senate look like the House. They wanted—and a lot of them were advocating, it was not fair that one senator in Wyoming, to take one example, is worth 250,000 votes but a senator in California represented 20 million. They wanted to change the makeup of the Senate.

They wanted to get rid of the Senate filibuster. Remember that.

They wanted to bring back neo-Confederate nullification. Six hundred jurisdictions, in the manner of South Carolina in 1832, or on the edge of the Civil War in 1860, when Confederate, neo-Confederate Southern states said, “The federal government’s law does not apply to us. Tariffs, Yankee tariffs—no, no. We are going to override them.” Andrew Jackson almost invaded the Carolinas over that—South Carolina.

And so these jurisdictions said, “Federal law doesn’t apply here. We’re exempt. We have our own laws. You cannot—federal immigration law does not apply here. It applies everywhere else, to you, you, you, but not to us.”

So this was a revolutionary movement. Movies were different. Sports were different. Take a knee.

And Donald Trump came in and it was not sufficient to say we’re going to stop the madness of $37 billion. We’re going to stop the madness of being short 40,000 or 50,000 military recruits because of this DEI coupled with the amelioration and Kabul. We’re going to stop the appeasement of China.

But that wasn’t all. He said, “The government is broke. We’re going to go through all of these agencies. And finally, for the first time in the history of this country, when somebody says they’re going to cut federal spending and drain the swamp or cut the administrative—we’re going to do it. And there’s going to be no changing names, except to go back to traditional names, and we’re not going to topple statues. And if you break the law and you’re on campus and you’re on a student visa, you’re gonna go back home.”

So we’re in the midst of a counterrevolution. It’s not revolutionary. You know what it is? It’s a return to normalcy. It’s a return to common sense. It only looks revolutionary to revolutionaries. But to the rest of the people, it is a counterrevolution to restore normalcy and bring the country from the far-left fringes back home again.

President Trump’s inaugural address, January 20, 2025. LIBERATION DAY.

… while his official presidency is still in the womb of time.

Though not yet inaugurated, Donald Trump is already acting effectively as president of the US and as world leader.

Ward Clark writes at RedState:

[W]hile doddering old Joe Biden is falling asleep in his chair in Africa, Donald Trump is out meeting with world leaders – and they are anxiously awaiting their turn to meet with him.

That’s what presidents do. In the latest example, Acting President Trump attended the re-opening of Notre Dame cathedral in Paris on Saturday, and did so alongside France’s President Emmanuel Macron, where the two exchanged friendly remarks. ..

Meanwhile, Joe Biden is falling asleep at meetings, stumbling, mumbling, growing more and more befuddled and confused by the day. When he’s not napping on the beach in Delaware, he’s napping during summits with other national leaders. It’s downright embarrassing and has been for some time now.

The contrast could scarcely be more stark. …

[D]espite being in his late 70s himself, Donald Trump is energetic, sharp, and focused. He is already taking steps, and already talking to other world leaders; more importantly, other world leaders are coming to the South White House at Mar-a-Lago to speak with him. Trump has, after all, been in this chair before. He knows what he wants to do. He knows that the establishment and the entrenched bureaucracy, who hold real power in Washington, will oppose him every step of the way – and he seems prepared to slug it out. It’s becoming apparent that his second term will be very different than his first.

It’s going to be fun to watch.

It’s going to be wonderful to watch. Encouraging. Exciting.

People … people … everywhere are rightly in awe of the most powerful man in the world, who is also friendly, dependable though totally unpredictable, proud but with no snobbery in him, and with a glorious sense of humor all his own.

After November 5, 2024:

The Master has come home again and from January 20, 2025, will hear your complaints. Will judge. Will reward or condemn.

Americans will be free again. More prosperous. Happier.

The economy will be reset to approach a free market ideal. Taxes will be lowered. Inflation will fall.

The border will be sealed. Illegal criminal aliens will be deported.

Children will be safe from the costly and unnecessary surgeon’s knife.

No babies will be killed in the womb or abandoned to die after birth.

US energy – fossil fuel and nuclear – will be used at home and exported.

No biological males will compete in women’s sports.

Candidates for university entrance, jobs, government appointments will be selected according to merit. Color, race, gender will not be criteria of choice.

Education will be revived, indoctrination stopped.

Technology will serve the people not destroy them.

The military will be servants of the nation again.

Wars will stop. Terrorism will be ended.

Globalism will be laughed at and dumped.

The UN will be destroyed.

Are we sure?

Well, maybe not all of this will be accomplished immediately. But eventually? Oh, of course.

The excellent Bruce Bawer writes at FrontPage:

In the last few days a new chapter has been added to the storied saga of the 41-year-old British activist, author, and citizen journalist Tommy Robinson. On Friday, upon his return to Britain after several weeks abroad, he was taken into police custody – an event he had expected and discussed publicly before flying back home – and charged with several “offenses.” One of the charges, contempt of court, relates to his documentary Silenced, which premiered in July at a screening in Trafalgar Square and has been viewed on X more than 50 million times. In that documentary, Tommy gathered ample witness testimony showing that Jamal Hijazi, a Syrian refugee portrayed in the British media as the victim of bullying at the school he attended in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, in 2018, was not a victim but was, in fact, himself a bully – and a rather horrible one, at that.

What, then, was Tommy’s crime? He’d been ordered by a judge not to contradict the official narrative about Hijazi – specifically, not to describe him as “aggressive and bullying” or as “threatening,” even if he was aggressive and bullying and threatening. A second contempt-of-court charge was leveled at Tommy for several related “offenses,” such as discussing the Hijazi case in an interview with Jordan Peterson, holding that July screening in Trafalgar Square, and posting Silenced on X and YouTube. In addition to the contempt charges, Tommy was charged under the Terrorism Act for refusing to provide the police with access to the contents of his mobile phone, which include material that would compromise his sources.

On Saturday, supporters of Tommy held a “Unite the Kingdom” rally in London, turning out in such significant numbers that, as the Guardian put it, “the demonstration spilled out from its meeting point around Victoria Station.” The Guardian made sure to point out that the protesters, many of whom were treated to an outdoor screening of his new documentary, Lawfare, were “mostly male, white and middle-aged” (all bad things, of course) and that many of them were waving Union Jacks (that most toxic of items). Meanwhile counter-protesters took part in a rally arranged by a leftist group called Stand Up to Racism.

Aside from his documentaries, Tommy has also written (and self-published) a couple of books. Enemy of the State (2015) is an autobiography that focuses on his demonization by the British government, which finds his determination to expose monstrous Islamic crimes inconvenient, distasteful, and threatening to “community cohesion.” His second book, written with Peter McLoughlin, is entitled Muhammed’s Koran (2017). His newest, Manifesto: Free Speech, Real Democracy, Peaceful Disobedience, also written with McLoughlin, came out on October 4, but when I looked for it on Amazon UK it was identified as being “currently unavailable.” After trying to find some other way of acquiring the book online, I was finally able to secure a copy through the good offices of a friend of mine who is also a chum of Tommy’s. (On October 25, Tommy – or somebody – posted at his X account that orders for the book could be placed at a dedicated website and that new copies would be available this week.)

What to say about Manifesto? Put it this way: the authors show that Tommy’s previous topics – the reality of the Islamic threat and the British government’s determination to crush Islam’s critics – are only two details in a much bigger picture. In the U.S., the MAGA movement is a rebellion against America’s unelected but powerful Deep State, a.k.a. The Swamp, which has its equivalents in pretty much every Western country. And as Tommy and McLoughlin note, it’s been around, at least in the U.K., for a long time. Two centuries ago, the English writer William Cobbett (1763-1835) called it “The Thing”; in America, a century or so later, Jack London (1876-1916), of Call of the Wild fame, coined his own name for it – “The Oligarchy” – in the obscure 1908 novel The Iron Heel. Throughout Manifesto, Tommy and McLoughlin use this term to describe the Deep State of our own day, mostly in the U.K.

To be sure, they do devote a degree of attention to “The Oligarchy” in America and other countries – for example the Netherlands, where Pim Fortuyn, a fierce opponent of the immigration policy of the Dutch establishment, was murdered on May 6, 2002, only days before an election after which he probably would have become prime minister. His killer was routinely identified in the Dutch media as an animal-rights activist, but he also despised Fortuyn’s criticism of Islam, hence the assassination. Shockingly, the killer was released from prison after only twelve years and allowed to take a new name under which he could start a new life. As Tommy and McLoughlin point out, theories about possible Deep State involvement in Fortuyn’s murder – theories not unlike those that have been proffered for decades by researchers into the JFK assassination – are now being served up by Dutch commentators.

But Tommy and McLoughlin’s major emphasis is on The Oligarchy in Britain. One fact of which many Americans have become aware since the beginning of the Trump era is that our own Swamp creatures aren’t exclusively Democrats; on the contrary, Deep State operatives – whether they work on Capitol Hill, or for a think tank, or at the FBI or CIA or DoD or IRS, or as lobbyists, or in the legacy media or military-industrial complex – can be found in both major parties. The same is true in Britain, where the Tories held power from 2010 to 2024 without doing anything significant to reform the scandalously mediocre NHS, to reduce the country’s sky-high immigration levels, to address the Muslim “grooming [i.e. child rape] gangs” that can be found in cities all over England, or to protect critics of Islam from arrest, prosecution, and imprisonment.

Things were, as Tommy and McLoughlin observe, scarcely different a century ago. The playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), revered, then as now, by Britain’s cultural elite, was nominally a socialist; the politician Oswald Mosley (1896-1980), reviled, then as now, by the same cultural elite, was nominally a fascist. But there was really little in the way of an ideological gap between them. Both admired Hitler and Mussolini; both looked kindly upon the idea of eugenics-based extermination (in 1938, GBS published a newspaper article entitled “Heil Hitler”); both advocated for a welfare state that limited individual rights. In fact both GBS and Mosley were Fabians – members of the organization, established in 1884, that called for a gradual transformation of the U.K. into a hard-core socialist state and that, not incidentally, founded the London School of Economics (LSE).

In other words, both Shaw and Mosley, whether you want to call them fascists or socialists, were at the big-government end of the political spectrum – the spectrum, that is, on which the important distinction lies – and were therefore the ideological forebears of the likes of Tony Blair, who in 2006 unveiled a window at the LSE that openly celebrated the Fabians, including the Hitler–loving GBS. At the other end of that spectrum were people like the brilliant politician and scholar Enoch Powell (1912-1998) – whose brave, prophetic dissent from The Oligarchy’s mass- immigration policy in his 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech led to his immediate expulsion from the political elite and his labeling as a “fascist.” In reality, Powell was no more a fascist than Donald Trump is – on the contrary, he was, like Trump, a patriot and a populist who was deeply concerned about the deleterious impact of Deep State policies on the native inhabitants of his own country.

Also at the small-government end of the spectrum, needless to say, was Margaret Thatcher, who, Tommy and McLoughlin suggest, was expelled from the prime ministership because she’d started to challenge the growing power of the EU. They also speculate that if Thatcher had managed to triumph over the coup that removed her from power, she might well, within the next few years, have acted upon Powell’s warnings and restricted immigration dramatically – an action that would have made today’s Britain a very different country indeed from the one that is, thanks to The Oligarchy, well on its way to having a minority British population.

Granted, the overall message of Manifesto – about the perils of rule by a globalist, authoritarian elite and the drastic need for a democratic, populist shake-up – will hardly be new to readers of this website. And the voice throughout most of the book, if it matters to you, sounds less like that of Tommy, a plainspoken working-class bloke, and more like that of a historical scholar – in this instance, McLoughlin, who has an academic background and has written a book about Oliver Cromwell and another entitled The Pattern of History and Fate of Humanity. No matter who wrote what in Manifesto, however, the value of this book lies not in its main argument but in its many illuminating specifics – from its perceptive account of the enduring significance of Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) to the long, highly detailed chapter pondering the relevance of the gold standard, cryptocurrencies, and other economic phenomena to the mechanisms by which the Deep State exercises its control.

But, alas, some of the branches of The Oligarchy – in this case, the publishing houses that refused to put out Manifesto and the bookstores that refuse to stock it – are doing their best to make it difficult for you to get a copy of it. Meanwhile, other branches – namely the police and judiciary – are intent on barring you from being able to hear Tommy. On Monday morning, a court hearing was held to determine whether Tommy – who has previously served long, hellish terms behind bars after “trials” that were models of injustice, and who was most recently arrested this past June in Canada after giving a speech in Calgary – would yet again be sent to prison.

At the hearing, which took place at Woolrich Crown Court in London, the prosecution maintained that this case wasn’t about Tommy’s politics or “even directly a case about freedom of expression,” but rather “about the disobedience to a court order, and the undermining of the rule of law that goes with that” – never mind that the court order itself was preposterous. When the judge [Sir Jeremy Charles Johnson, 53] issued his ruling, he read it, noted Ezra Levant of Rebel News, who was tweeting from the courtroom, “from his computer,” leading Levant to wonder: “How can he do that, given that there was literally no pause at all after the submissions by the lawyers? Did he pre-write this? How does that work?” Good questions.

And what was the ruling? No surprise: Tommy was sentenced to 18 months in prison, of which he will serve half – probably in solitary confinement, given that British prisons are dominated and controlled by Muslim gangsters, who would tear him to bits otherwise. In short, in a country that is scared to properly punish the Muslim rapists he’s exposed, Tommy is essentially being sentenced once again to the Hotel Graybar for telling a truth of which The Oligarchy disapproves. As Levant put it, “In the U.K., the government is now the arbiter of truth.” Of course George Orwell, whom Tommy and McLoughlin discuss in Manifesto, saw all of this coming in 1984, in which the role of Oceania’s Ministry of Truth is to disseminate lies and suppress facts.

Oh, well. Yet another disgraceful day for British justice – and the beginning of yet another season in hell for Tommy Robinson. What can you do? If you haven’t done it already, start by watching Silenced online – and thank Elon Musk for not having taken it down. And what else can you do? Ponder what my friend Valerie Price of Act for Canada wrote to me about Tommy the other day: “He is my personal hero and yet it must be said that all he has done to become heroic is something that we all can do, should do, and must do: he has spoken the truth.”

The leader of the Hamas savages who invaded Israel and perpetrated the atrocities of October 7, 2023, has been killed by Israeli forces. 

Joel B. Pollak writes at Breitbart:

The IDF suspected that Sinwar may have been inadvertently killed after soldiers directed tank fire at a building in which three terrorists had been spotted. Afterwards, infantry soldiers discovered, to their surprise, a body that resembled Sinwar.

The body was taken to Israel for further examination, including dental, DNA, and fingerprint verification. It is unclear how many of these checks were completed before Israeli officials concluded that the dead body was indeed Sinwar’s.

According to Israel’s Army Radio, Sinwar was found with passports on his body, as well as a quantity of cash. He was apparently trying to flee Gaza to Egypt, leaving Hamas and the Palestinian people behind as he attempted to escape.

Sinwar was once thought to have surrounded himself with hostages to prevent Israel from killing him in an airstrike. On Thursday it was revealed that those hostages were the ones executed in a tunnel in late August, including U.S. citizen Hersh Goldberg-Polin, as Israeli soldiers closed in. Sinwar had evidently been on the run ever since.

His body was found next to those of senior Hamas commanders known to be close to him.

The Biden-Harris administration had, just days earlier, threatened Israel with an arms embargo unless it did more to “surge” aid into Gaza and trimmed its military operations there. Harris had also pushed for a ceasefire earlier in the war, even before the release of hostages had been achieved. Other nations, such as France, had called for an arms embargo to stop the war.

Sinwar was killed near the Philadelphi corridor in southern Gaza, on the Gaza-Egypt border, an area from which the Biden-Harris administration had been urging Israel to withdraw for a ceasefire deal.

Israelis are now hoping Sinwar’s death can bring about the release of the remaining 101 hostages, more than half of whom may still be alive. There are also hopes for an end to the war in Gaza.

Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant declared: “Israel today closed an account of many years’ standing with Yahya Sinwar. The IDF will pursue everyone who harms our people and our forces, and will settle accounts with him.”

One year and ten days after his hellish invasion, the fiend of (secular) SIN and WAR has been killed by Israelis.

A day to celebrate. Annually. 

*

Noah Pollak writes at X:

If you are celebrating the elimination of Sinwar, you should also be celebrating the premiership of Bibi Netanyahu. No other Israeli leader would have stayed in the fight this long and achieved this victory. Since weeks after 10/7, the pressure on Israel from the Democratic Party, Europe, the UN, the media, the western foreign policy and political establishment, etc, to cut a deal, to agree to a “ceasefire,” to surrender, has been unrelenting and enormous. And for a full year, the leader of a tiny and vulnerable country has resisted and outmaneuvered the pressure to stop fighting. It’s a remarkable achievement, and it’s the real reason Sinwar is dead.

Gerard Baker writes at the Wall Street Journal, of which he is an Editor-at-Large:

How will we ever repay the debt we owe Israel?

What the Jewish state has done in the past year—for its own defense, but in the process and not coincidentally for the security of all of us—will rank among the most important contributions to the defense of Western civilization in the past three-quarters of a century.

Having been hit with a devastating attack on its people, beyond the fetid imagining of some of the vilest antisemites, Israel has in 12 months done nothing less than redraw the balance of global security, not just in the region, but in the wider world.

It has eliminated thousands of the terrorists whose commitment to a savage theocratic ideology has claimed so many lives across the region and the world for decades. It has, with extraordinary tactical accuracy, dispatched some of the masterminds of the worst evil on the planet, including most recently Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader in Lebanon. It has repelled and then reversed the previously inexorably advancing power of one of the world’s most terrifying autocracies, the Islamic Republic of Iran. It has demonstrated to all the West’s foes, including Iran’s allies in Moscow and Beijing, that our system of free markets and free people, and the voluntary alliance network we have constructed to defend it, generates resources and capabilities of vast technical superiority. Above all, it has provided an unexpected but crucial reminder to our enemies that there are at least some willing and able to pursue and defeat them whatever the risk to our own lives and resources.

The only appropriate responses to Israel’s gallantry, fortitude and skill from us—its nominal allies, especially in the U.S.—are “thank you” and “how can we help?”

Instead, time and again Israel’s supposed friends, including the administration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, have, while expressing sympathy over the outrage of Oct. 7 and uttering the usual support for “Israel’s right to defend itself”, repeatedly tried to restrain it from doing just that. Their early, valuable support has been steadily diminished by the way they have too often connived with the anti-Israel extremists in their own party.

Before Israel had even buried its dead last October and as Hamas was busy murdering its hostages, there were calls for Israel to cease fire. For a year we have heard our leaders’ “balanced” condemnations of Hamas and its terror masters on the one hand and the Jewish state on the other, a false equivalence that says more about the moral disorder in our own politics than about Israel’s motives and actions.

In Europe, they have gone even further, as usual, rewarding Hamas and Hezbollah by nominally recognizing a nonexistent Palestinian state and prosecuting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on bogus war-crimes charges.

Do they not get that in the end we have to make a choice: our ally, on the front lines of defense against barbarism or our enemies, those who literally want to see us all buried?

Fortunately for all of us, it seems Israel is prevailing despite the chorus of hecklers.

Perhaps all this sounds too blithe for skeptical readers; or at least premature given the rising expectation of a much wider conflict to come. And it is true that there has been awful loss of innocent lives in Gaza, Lebanon and elsewhere that undoubtedly fuels the ire of the enemy across the world [for which Israel is NOT to blame – ed.]

What if Mr. Netanyahu and his government’s aggressive prosecution proves a Pyrrhic victory?

But that wider conflict was perhaps always inevitable, given Iran’s stated objectives and its consistent efforts to achieve them. We can say two things tentatively about that long-feared wider confrontation. First, the strategic tactical, intelligence and technological genius Israel has demonstrated over the past year might have done so much damage to Iran’s proxy armies and their military and political leaders that they will be ill-prepared and equipped for the bigger struggle to come, and Israel—and, let’s hope, reliable allies—better placed to defeat its enemies. Second, having observed this Israeli superiority over that time and eagerness not to bring the destruction on itself a wide war would surely bring, perhaps Iran will be deterred.

Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few, Winston Churchill said of the men of the Royal Air Force after they had repelled Hitler’s Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain. 

We should echo those words today as we watch in awe what a country smaller in area than New Jersey, with a population less than North Carolina’s and an economy smaller than that of Washington state, has done for all of us.

As Israelis solemnly mark a year since Oct. 7, we should not only redouble our expressions of sympathy and solidarity. We should show them our gratitude, and if we are willing to be really honest, acknowledge a little of our own shame.

Since the purloined election of 2020, there has been NO ONE in charge of the country.

How then does the executive carry on? Easily. The agencies keep running on a fuel that is free and in inexhaustible supply – habit.

The White House is Liberty Hall. Clowning is what goes on in it. Adolescent pranks. Giggling. Everybody on the staff knows that the putative head, “Joe” Biden, is senile and unaware of what’s happening – and that he wouldn’t care anyway. He does what clowning he can himself, when he musters enough energy. Blood-red lighting, soldiers on guard, as a background to a rant of his, was his own idea.

The Cabinet and their highest offices are “manned” by freaks. Preferably women and weirdos and perverts. Preferably not white. A Health Secretary, “Admiral” Richard Levine, the biological father of two children, calls himself Rachel and wears long blond hair, frocks and jewellery. A couple of ministerial transvestites with mustaches, and make-up caked on their faces, wear showy dresses. (One of them steals women’s luggage at airports).

Those “trannies” who disported themselves in the spring on the White House lawn with an “LGBTQ” rainbow flag draped across the front of the grand building (intended originally to be a visible sign of its exalted purpose – to house the headship of the United States’ executive branch of government, the Head of State, representative of the nation), were enjoying a puerile iconoclasm, men showing off bare breasts artificially created to help them pretend they are women.

More freaks in huge wigs, clownish make-up, glittering dresses and high heels – blatantly mocking women – read to small children, in schools and libraries, graphic descriptions of perverse sexual acts. And children are encouraged to demand that their bodies be abused and mutilated with chemicals and surgical operations so that they too can pretend to be the sex they are not. The fact of biological sex is denied. Human beings, the “Democrats” say, are “assigned” a sex at birth and they can change it if they want to.  It is another lie. They traffic in lies.  The Transport Secretary, “Pete” Buttigieg, son of a devout Communist, had himself photographed sitting up in bed with a gadget strapped onto his chest which is filled with milk or baby formula so his adopted child can suck at a “nipple” and “Pete” can feel like a real mother.* To the same ridiculous end he probably has tampons prominently displayed in his bathroom. He is “married” to another man.

Young visitors to the Oval Office turn up in crumpled jeans and sweaty T-shirts. No “bourgeois formality” for them! And as the mood of the White House – turned into a carnival palace at the same time as a sty – spreads wherever “Democrats” are performing, the Senate too has become a playground. Why not – thought one young man – use the Senate building for sexual adventures? He stripped naked, knelt on all fours in a chamber used for solemn meetings and enjoyed a sodomy session which his partner filmed so that it could be – and was – shown to the nation, to the world. (Still the young pervert insists that he would “never disrespect” his workplace. Democrats not only work by habit, they lie by habit too.) Such fun! No stuffy old inhibitions allowed to restrain their liberty. To them liberty is license. Let license ring!

A packet of cocaine was found in the White House. “Joe” Biden’s son Hunter, the depraved  addict, was living there at the time. But dosing himself with illegal substances is the least of his criminal activity. The criminal corruption of the Biden family is public knowledge. Hunter did the hunting; his father the President and other relations shared the catch.

“Joe”, bribed by China, allowed its spy balloon to float all over the USA, sending pictures of military facilities, roads, railways, fields and farms, back to Beijing. Dear old Joe!  He sent billions of dollars to the tyrants of Iran while they screamed “Death to America!” He invited teeming masses from anywhere in the world to walk into the USA from Mexico, and they do. He and his Secretary of Homeland Security continue to assure the nation that the southern border is “secure” while  enemies, petty criminals, slavers, drug dealers, human traffickers, lunatics, blood-thirsty gangs, mass murderers, kidnappers, rapists, from every inhabited continent, pour unhindered into the southern states and thence into every state. Not one of them “vetted”. Millions of them must have infectious diseases, but pour in they may – and did even when US citizens were forced to distance from each other, wear masks, stop going to clinics, churches, school, rallies, sports , restaurants, theaters, shops, hairdressers, clubs … for fear of catching a “new” flu launched across the world  by Communist China.

The United States is again a country of slavery. Hundreds of thousands of kidnapped alien children, brought over the “secure” southern border by slave traffickers, are exploited as forced laborers and sex slaves.**

“Joe” said it was okay for Russia to make a small invasion of Ukraine, so Russia invaded Ukraine. “Joe” sends Ukraine enormous sums of taxpayers’ money so it can keep the war going. At the same time, while he assures Israel that his backing of its security is “iron-clad”, he goes on directly and indirectly paying Muslim terrorists to capture, torture, and kill as many Israelis as they can.

To save the world from burning up (but knowing that it will not) as a result of human beings “polluting the air” by simply carrying on with their lives, “Joe” gave notice of coming bans on gas-powered vehicles, gas stoves, oil-fired heating and cooling systems …

Everyone with any common sense knows that these decisions and actions are not really President Biden’s; they come out of the utopian dreams of his ever more demonic Democratic Party. Its aim is to reduce the population of the world from some 8 billion to 1 billion, by means of abortion, infanticide, “transgendering” treatments including mutilating surgery, homosexual marriage, euthanasia, murderous riot, extortionist taxation, surging national debt.

The outlook is dire, but roughly half the electorate votes for it. Shrinking police forces; permitting theft from stores; releasing prisoners convicted of – or deliberately not charged with – murder, rape, assault, shop-lifting, abduction, torture; tolerating encampments of lunatics and addicts on city streets – even supplying the addicts with free drugs – this is the “Democratic” program to make life for normal citizens intolerable.

The same gleeful destroyers, envious and cruel, run campaigns of anti-Semitism. They label conservatives as terrorists, peaceful protest as insurrection. Real insurrection by their own hordes of arsonists, rapists, murderers, torturers, kidnappers, thieves, they call “peaceful protest”.

Everything they touch, they ruin: education, the media, the arts, the family, childhood, health care, even the military …  At least Secretary of Defense Austin did not join in the danse macabre of ruination. When in this summer of 2024 a gang of lawyers promised the Muslim organizers of mass-murder (some 3,000 killed by Muslim plane hijackers flying into New York buildings and the Pentagon and crashing in a field in Pennsylvania on 9/11/2001) that in return for confessions of guilt they would be spared the death penalty, Austin asserted his authority and cancelled the deal. Appointed all too probably because he is black, he had been ignored and discounted by the (no doubt passionately “anti-racist”) lawyers who did not even consult him about the deal; but he refused to be overlooked. (Will he abide by that decision? Can he redeem the military from “woke” impotence? Does he want to?)

The “Democrats” don’t give a fig for democracy. They suddenly threw away millions of primary votes cast for Biden to be their nominee in the coming election and arbitrarily appointed a black woman, his Vice-President, instead of him. She’s a person of low intelligence, loose morals, alarming ignorance, and a hideous wide-open-mouthed cackle that even they formerly deplored but now – since she’s become their candidate – praise as an expression of  “joy”.  While they insist that they don’t  know what a “woman” is (except as the correct term for “transgered “ men)  they like to appoint women – preferably black – as figureheads: cabinet members, directors of agencies, prosecutors, police chiefs, ambassadors, military top brass, presidents of universities, principals of schools … so why not now one of them – the more ill-informed and incompetent the better since she mustn’t actually make decisions or do anything – as Head of State, Commander-in-Chief, Keeper of the Nuclear Codes?

Will the People let that happen? As former President Trump often says, “We must wait and see.”

And we must vote for him to be our 47th. president.

Notes:

*I’ve been told that this photograph was a fake. Okay, but I maintain it told the truth about Buttigieg the way fiction can tell the truth about reality.

**From the New York Post, August 21, 2024:  “The Biden-Harris administration has lost track of more than 320,000 migrant children who crossed the border without parents, according to a shocking new report.”

Jillian Becker   August 26, 2024