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

Why is twice-and-forever president, Barack Obama, limitlessly generous, submissive, helpful to the cruel theocracy of Iran?

Why has he helped it become a nuclear power?

Lee Smith writes at Tablet:

[In January, 2024] Kata’ib Hezbollah launched a drone that killed three U.S. soldiers in Jordan. But President Biden didn’t want to retaliate against Iran for fear of collapsing the pro-Iran policy established by his former boss Barack Obama, so U.S. intelligence officials leaked an assessment to the press that Iran doesn’t control the proxy groups it trains, funds, and arms to kill Americans and U.S. allies in the Middle East.

That got Biden off the hook‚ but it’s hard to pose as a global superpower while allowing the servicemen and women you put in harm’s way to be killed with impunity. Biden considered his options, then announced his intentions to hit targets in Iraq and Syria, which gave the Iranians a week to scatter high-value assets and personnel, after which he bombed meaningless targets in those countries. One U.S. official made sure to tell the Iranians through U.S. media that “there are no indications that members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps were killed as part of the operations.” The U.S. president thereby signaled to the Iranians that they are free to continue directing their Arab assets to kill Americans.

Iran’s proxies and cutouts are successful in this sickening game that puts the lives of hostages and servicemen alike at risk only to the extent that officials in the Biden administration are willing to deny and disguise the regime’s active role in targeting Americans. By contrast, when Donald Trump withdrew from the 2015 U.S.-Iran agreement that legalized the terror state’s nuclear weapons program, he signaled that unlike his predecessor he didn’t see Tehran as a regional partner to replace Israel and Saudi Arabia. Accordingly, when Iranian proxies killed an American contractor and laid siege to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad in December 2019, Trump cut off the head of Iran’s paramilitary snake by killing Soleimani. The January 2020 drone strike that got the Iranian terror chief also tagged then-leader of Kata’ib Hezbollah, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, thereby underscoring the fact that Iran is directly responsible for the actions of its proxies.

In comparison, Biden’s Iran policy is a hall of mirrors designed to hide facts likely to disturb the American electorate while allowing the White House to deepen its relationship with Iran.

All that is manifest or at least probable and credible.

But then Smith writes this:

For Americans, the most repugnant feature of what the Biden team sees as a program of regional integration under the Iranian banner is this: U.S. forces are based in Iraq and Syria to protect Iranian interests in those countries. Under the guise of counterterrorism missions, American troops are detailed to target any Sunni Arab population that the Iranians and their allies designate as ISIS, and thereby risk their lives to secure Iran’s position in countries the Islamic Republic has helped destroy.

America is actively helping Iran wage its battles for supremacy in the Islamic world? A shocking fact if true. It is bad enough that the Obama gangsters incomprehensibly fund the Iranian tyranny with American tax dollars, plead with the mullahs for permission to lick their boots, and pant in vain for their gratitude, but to deploy American forces to fight and die for those genocidal sadists would surely be going too far in using  America as Obama’s own property.

If it is true, why is Iran killing American soldiers?

The Iranians persist in targeting American troops to remind the White House who calls the shots.

Yes, the Iranians have directed more than 160 attacks on U.S. forces since October, but the reason for these attacks is hardly Israel’s post-Oct. 7 military response to Hamas: The Iranians have been launching regular attacks on U.S. troops in the region since Biden took office—starting with an attack against a U.S. airbase in Iraq in February 2021.

The Iranians and their proxies are free to attack American forces because the White House has abandoned them to the mercies of Tehran, effectively turning U.S. soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines into a security deposit ensuring that the Biden administration will continue to advance Iranian, rather than American, interests.

“Ensuring that the Biden administration will continue to advance Iranian, rather than American, interests.” 

But why, why, why?  If Obama is a Muslim at heart, does the Democrat Party of America have to put Iran’s interests ahead of its own, and not only ahead of its own but at the cost of its own?

Taking hostages, after all, is how Iran does business. When in its infancy the Islamic Republic seized the U.S. Embassy in 1979 and ransomed 52 Americans, it led the news almost every night, for 444 days. It cost Jimmy Carter the presidency. In the intervening years, the Iranians and their proxies have kidnapped so many people—like Terry Anderson (Hezbollah, 1985-91), Roxanne Saberi (the Iranian regime, 2009), Austin Tice (the Syrian regime, 2012 to the present) and most recently Elizabeth Tsurkov (Kata’ib Hezbollah, 2023 to the present)—that Hamas’s Oct. 7 abductions are just part of the background music of the Middle East. It should shock the world that a nation-state and its proxy forces regularly imprison, torture, and rape innocents until their governments cough up enough money to get them back—or until they are dead. But nearly half a century after the 1979 hostage crisis, the Iranians have acclimated most of the world to the idea that this barbaric practice is just a conventional instrument of their foreign policy.

As president, Obama further normalized Iran’s terms. He helped legitimize hostage-taking as a function of Iranian statecraft by directing his officials to use hostage talks as an entry point that could double as a diplomatic channel …  In 2009, the Iranians kidnapped three Americans who had inadvertently crossed over the Iraq border. Oman mediated U.S.-Iran hostage negotiations, and sure enough the White House used that line of communication for secret talks with Iran to legalize its nuclear weapons program. The nuclear deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was the Obama administration’s top foreign policy priority, with the end goal of turning Iran into a regional hegemon.

Why?

Representing the administration in those secret talks were [the under-devils] William Burns and Jake Sullivan now Biden’s CIA director and national security adviser, respectively.

With the nuclear deal concluded in 2015, Obama went back to the hostage stratagem and gave the Iranians a signing bonus of $1.7 billion, including $400 million in cash, in exchange for four U.S. hostages in January 2016. With that flourish, hostages became an official medium of exchange, which allowed the White House, in the absence of any formal diplomatic agreement or congressional approval or oversight, to ship pallets of cash to Tehran.

Biden loaded his administration with many of the same people who ran Iran policy under Obama, including former Iran envoy Robert Malley, whose security clearances were revoked [in April 2023]  after he was alleged to have mishandled classified information.

Why have we heard nothing more about that? Is (the odious) Robert Malley to be indicted? If not, why not? It’s a puzzle. If he gave classified information to Iran, that would be in line with the Obama agenda. Which may mean that the Biden administration is protecting him from any further punitive action. But if that is so,  who dared to revoke his security clearance? How is he or she to be punished? No doubt very discreetly. Top secretly.

In his role as head of the Washington NGO the International Crisis Group, and then while serving as a U.S. government official, Malley supported and facilitated an Iranian influence operation targeting Western capitals, including Washington itself, and pushed one of its assets, Ariane Tabatabai, into the U.S. government. She, too, appears to be part of the hostage-industry infrastructure. Tabatabai remains chief of staff to the assistant secretary of defense for special operations, a portfolio that includes hostage rescue operations. [Emphasis in original.] Recently her boss posted photos of himself traveling with Tabatabai to visit U.S. troops at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California. For Tehran, the pictures signal that no matter what the headlines may say, the understanding with Washington is unchanged.

Which is surely evidence that Obama still reigns.

The hostage-industry infrastructure gives the White House a way to service the unofficial alliance between the two governments, without having to explain why the U.S. is sending money to Iran, or what the Iranians are doing with it. For instance, in August the Biden administration gave Iran access to $6 billion in previously frozen oil revenues in exchange for five Americans. Was any of that money used to fund Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre? The White House says no. Instead, it claims that according to Qatar, which brokered the deal and parked the $6 billion in its central bank, the Iranians haven’t touched it. The fact that the White House thinks the American public and their elected representatives should take the word of Iran’s bagman is evidence that Qatar’s exertions as an “impartial mediator” have normalized the idea that it’s OK to pay off the Iranians and their proxies for kidnapping and killing Americans and our allies.

This deliberate misdirection is what Obama intended in 2012, when he asked Qatar to establish a channel with Hamas on behalf of the U.S. Given that Doha is one of Hamas’s benefactors—as of 2023, total aid from Qatar to Gaza is believed to be more than $2.1 billion—the official U.S. line is that the Qataris have leverage over Hamas. They must, or why else would they be brokering negotiations to return the Oct. 7 hostages?

(Gaza survives chiefly on the charity of rich states, non-governmental organizations, and the services of UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for “Palestine Refugees” only). Most of the donated money is retained by Hamas who use it to keep up continual violence and periodic warfare against Israel. Hamas is the government of Gaza, elected by the population. Israel supplied Gaza with fuel, food and special medical services, and employed thousands of Palestinian day-workers from Gaza, some of whom exploited their jobs as an opportunity to collect information useful to Hamas for its invasion of October 7, 2023.)

Accordingly, the Netanyahu government and Oct. 7 hostage families believe that since the U.S. has leverage over Qatar, it can compel the emirate to use its power and influence on Hamas. In this view, Qatar should defund the Palestinian terror group and throw its leaders Ismail Haniyeh and Khaled Meshaal out of their luxury hotel suites in Doha and put them in prison until Hamas releases its captives. But the Biden team isn’t going to pressure Qatar for the same reason it hit irrelevant targets in Syria and Iraq: it wants to preserve its relationship with Iran.

Why?

As the world’s go-to goodwill ambassador, Qatar says it’s impartial. But the only party in the region on whose behalf Qatar “mediates” is the one that takes hostages. Qatar works for Iran. It’s ugly, but it makes sense: If your foreign policy is keyed to the money you spend buying foreign elites and their institutions, and the source of that wealth is a giant natural gas field that you share with Iran, you take sides. And it’s not a hard choice: Is it the side that tortures and rapes hostages and kidnapped 28 Qatari royals, or is it the Americans, who won’t even shut down the local bureaus of Qatar’s flagship propaganda arm Al Jazeera, never mind make good on vague threats to move U.S. Central Command’s forward base out of Al Udeid airfield? It is Qatar that holds leverage over the U.S., which it exercises on its own behalf and Iran’s.

Consider the money that Qatar spreads around Washington, D.C. From the $14.8 million check that Obama administration peace processor Martin Indyk cashed as director of the Brookings Institution’s Foreign Policy Program to the billions Doha has spent on Al Udeid to lobby the Pentagon, as well as its massive investments in key American institutions like major universities, Qatar has leverage over nearly all parts of the U.S. government and American elites.

Qatar’s lavish expenditures are meant to show that the rewards for aligning with Qatar are great, while the punishment meted out by Iran’s fixer can be painful.

In 2017 Qatar hired former CIA agent Kevin Chalker to spy on and smear U.S. legislators like Republican Sens. Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton, and Democratic Congressman Ed Royce, who all supported legislation against Hamas. “An attack on Hamas is an attack on Qatar,” Chalker warned in a lengthy document prepared for his Qatari clients.

The ex-agency man also recommended that Qatar target rival United Arab Emirates by “exposing [the] enemy secrets” of the UAE’s well-connected Washington Ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba. Chalker recommended that Qatar call on its media assets, identifying, among others, Max Blumenthal, anti-Israel activist and son of fading Clinton-world influencer Sidney Blumenthal; The Intercept; and The New York Times. Only months after Chalker produced the report, the Times published stories based on hacked Otaiba emails in a campaign intended, as reporter David Kirkpatrick acknowledged, “to embarrass the U.A.E. and benefit Qatar.” From the Pentagon to the capital’s paper of record, Qatar has Washington covered. It’s Iran’s stalking horse.

What happens in Gaza, then, will have consequences throughout the world—for Iran’s hostage infrastructure is built with something grander in mind than just trading human flesh for cash. After Oct. 7, Iran has made it clear that the purpose of its nuclear weapons program was never just to threaten Israel and Saudi Arabia, but also to hold the whip hand in world trade and energy markets. With Biden all but standing down the U.S. Navy, the Houthis, Iran’s proxy in Yemen, have closed Red Sea shipping lanes and forced major container shipping lines to take alternate routes, raising the prices of goods around the world. With a nuclear bomb in its arsenal, Iran’s next hostage is the global economy.

“Its nuclear weapons program was never just to threaten Israel …”  No, indeed not. It is first of all to destroy Israel.  And the only plausible explanation for Obama’s policy, still being pursued by his frontman Biden, of helping Iran become nuclear armed is because he wants Israel to be destroyed. 

Not all the Democrats in positions of authority are anti-Israel. There are even some who are strongly pro-Israel. So a Democrat-led American government could not openly destroy the small embattled country; but it can and does, with unwavering dedication and at enormous price, make it possible for Iran to attempt that truly genocidal operation.

We published this article on November 11, 2011 under the title FYI. We need to change only one word – an “all” to a “most” – for it to be as accurate and pertinent now as it was then. The need to change that one word is, however, a sign of welcome improvement in Israeli-Arab relations: 

We all have opinions on issues about which we are ignorant. They arise from our characters, our prejudices, and our emotions. Fortunately, in our private lives, our opinions seldom matter enough to cause much harm. But when persons in power form policies based on uninformed opinions arising from their deep-seated prejudices, they affect the lives of millions, necessarily for the worse.

And in the arena of politics, the prejudices and uninformed opinions of many individuals can all too easily influence the actions of the powerful.

One of the dangers of democracy is that the vote of the know-nothing counts for exactly the same as the vote of the well-informed, and the know-nothings can swing an election.

It’s the business of the mass media to inform the public. When journalists let their own opinions keep them from telling the truth about an issue or a candidate for office, they empower the ignorant. The media failed in their duty to inform the electorate that Barack Obama was a poorly-educated, inexperienced, far-left ideologue with close ties to terrorists and jihadists. The votes of the uninformed gave him the presidency. The result is a wrecked economy, and the weakening of the United States as a power in the world and so of Western civilization as a whole.

If there is one issue in world politics on which opinions are held most strongly while being least informed it is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Vast numbers of people, almost certainly a majority, believe these falsehoods:

1. The Palestinians had their country taken away from them by the Jews.
2. The Israelis expelled the Palestinians.
3. The Israelis illegally occupy territories that belong to the Palestinians.
4. The Israelis refuse to negotiate for peace with Palestinian leaders.
5. Israeli intransigence impeded a peace process that Palestinian leaders pursued in good faith.

We summarily dismiss points 1 and 2: –

1. There never was, in all history, a State of Palestine.
2. There is no evidence that any Arabs were expelled from the State of Israel. There is evidence that in at least one city – Haifa – they were implored to stay. There is also evidence that the Mufti of Jerusalem and Arab leaders urged them to leave before five Arab armies invaded the newly-declared State of Israel, promising them a victory after which the refugees would return to their homes. And there is absolute certainty that hundreds of thousands of Jews were forcibly expelled – stripped of all they possessed – from the Arab states. 

As for points 3, 4, and 5, we quote from an excellent recent column by Melanie Phillips at the Mail Online. She writes:

One of the most egregious signs of western irrationality and bigotry over the issue of Israel is the way in which its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is routinely scapegoated for causing the breakdown of the so-called peace process between Israel and the Palestinians.

This charge is based on the widespread fallacy that the ‘peace process’ has stalled because Israel keeps building more Jewish ‘settlements’ on ‘Palestinian land’. This reasoning is not only totally wrong but utterly perverse on the following grounds:

1) The actual reason for the collapse of the ‘peace process’ is that Mahmoud Abbas repeatedly maintains that he will never accept that Israel is entitled to be a Jewish state, hails Palestinian terrorists as heroes for murdering Israelis and does nothing to end the incitement to murder Jews disseminated in schools, mosques and media under his control. In other words, Abbas is not a legitimate interlocutor in any civilised ‘peace process’ since he remains committed to the eradication of Israel [as are all  most Arab and Muslim leaders – JB]. Yet Netanyahu is blamed for the impasse.

2) It is only Israel that has made concessions in this ‘peace process’ [giving up vast areas of land conquered in defensive wars in exchange for peace that was never granted]. The Palestinians not only failed to deliver what was expected of them under the Road Map [or under any of the signed agreements] but now, with their UN gambit, have unilaterally reneged on their previous treaty obligations. Yet Abbas is given a free pass while Netanyahu is blamed instead for the impasse.

3) The claim that the ‘settlements’ are the key to resolving the dispute is ridiculous. First, they take up no more than one or two per cent of West Bank territory. Second, even when Netanyahu froze such new building for ten months as a sign of good will, Abbas still refused to negotiate. Yet this is all ignored, and Netanyahu is blamed instead for the impasse.

4) The claim that the establishment of a Palestine state would end the dispute is also ridiculous. Such a state was on offer in 1948; Israel offered to give up more than 90 per cent of the West Bank for such a state in 2000; and an even more generous offer was subsequently made by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. The Palestinian response was in every case war and terror. Yet all this is ignored, and Netanyahu is blamed instead for the impasse.

5) Whatever land Israel may choose to give up in its own interests, under international law Jews are entitled to settle anywhere in the West Bank. There is no such thing as Palestinian land and never was.The West Bank and Gaza never belonged to any sovereign ruler after the British withdrew from Mandatory Palestine; before that it was part of the Ottoman empire. Israel’s ‘borders’ are in fact merely the cease-fire lines from its victory in 1948 against the Arab armies that tried unsuccessfully to exterminate it at birth. It is therefore more correct to call the West Bank and Gaza disputed territory. Yet this history and law are denied and Netanyahu is blamed instead for the impasse.

6) The Jews alone have the legal – as well as the moral and historical – right to settle within the West Bank and Gaza, a right given to them by the Great Powers after the First World War on account of the unique historical claim by the Jews to the land then called Palestine. This Jewish right to settle anywhere in that land was entrusted to Britain to deliver under the terms of the Mandate for Palestine – an obligation which it proceeded to break. [Even giving away the greater part of the territory to the Arabs to create the Emirate of Transjordon – now the Kingdom of Jordan – which is therefore an Arab state of Palestine.] Yet this history and law are denied, and Netanyahu is blamed instead for the impasse.

This information is the bare minimum a commenter needs before he is justified in expressing an opinion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. An opinion formed with any less knowledge is worthless and potentially dangerous.

Victor Davis Hanson writes:

There is something surreal, even sick about the current Gazan war.

Throughout European and American cities and campuses, tens of thousands of Middle East immigrants and students, and radical leftists chant nonstop “Free Palestinian from the River to the Sea.”

More recently, they are also yelling, “Israel, you can’t hide, we caught you in genocide.”

Consider the hypocrisy of that dual messaging.

Hamas and its supporters are openly and eagerly calling for the genocidal end of Israel by wiping it out from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

Yet at the same time they also claim it is Israel that is committing genocide—the very current self-described agenda of Hamas and its expatriate community of devotees!

The war has become crazier still.

Hamas and its megaphones abroad also blast Israel daily for retaliating for the October butchery of some 1,300 Israeli infants, children, women, and the elderly.

They further demand Israel must be selective in its airborne targeting of the Hamas killers, who burrow beneath hospitals, mosques, and hospitals and use civilians as shields.

Hamas takes for granted that a supposedly heartless Israel nevertheless will be reluctant to strike the Hamas terrorists when and if they are surrounded by civilians.

Indeed, Gazans are put in more danger by Hamas than they would otherwise be by the Israel Defense Forces.

Yet the world accepts that Israel itself would never employ such a ruse of using civilians to shield its cities from indiscriminately fired Hamas missiles.

The world further knows that if Israel ever employed such a barbaric tactic, Israeli civilian shields would attract—not deter—Hamas rockets.

Hamas’s apologists insist that Israel warn in advance civilians to keep clear of Israel bombs.

Yet at the same time, daily Hamas launches rockets into Israel. And no one in the international community lectures Hamas first to drop leaflets or text Israeli civilians that Hamas rockets are on their way into their vicinity.

Instead, the only purpose of Hamas rockets is to indiscriminately strike and kill Israeli civilians.

So the real issue is not about the principle of civilian deaths—given Israel is damned when it tries to avoid noncombatants and Hamas is cheered on when it deliberately targets them.

Instead, the asymmetry is explained by the efficacy of the Israeli response and impotence of the Hamas rocketry.

In other words, Hamas cannot stop the IDF from hitting its targets, while Israel can knock down far more Hamas rockets than blow up Israeli citizens.

And so Israel is being blamed for being too effective—or “disproportionate”— in its bombing, Hamas rewarded for being too ineffective in its rocketing.

There are other sick paradoxes in this war.

Hamas started the conflict by sending death squads of 2,000 killers into Israel at a time of peace to surprise murder more than 1,000 Israeli civilians.

There was no precivilizational, unspeakable atrocity that the butcherers did not commit—torture, beheading, rape, mutilation, and necrophilia.

The terrorists were followed into Israel by a multitude of opportunistic Gaza civilians, who in turn joined in the violence and looting.

Back in Gaza crowds reviled and tried to harm Israeli captives bound as hostages to trade for jailed terrorists in Israel.

In sum, the population that once elected Hamas into power, and cheered on its bloodletting—as long as there was yet no Israeli response—now claims to have no connection at all with Hamas. Yet the world assumes correctly that the people of Israel are inseparable from its military.

The surreal paradoxes of this war still do not end there.

In its mass murdering spree of October 7, Hamas butchered more than 30 American citizens, and perhaps another 13 still are unaccounted for—and are likely hostages inside the tunnels of Hamas in Gaza.

Yet the Biden administration has not forced Hamas to return kidnapped Americans, much less responded to its killing of U.S. citizens.

Why then despite all the rhetoric of solidarity, is the United States constantly pressuring Israel to be measured in its retaliation against the Hamas terrorists in Gaza, pressure that will only make things easier on Hamas?

Why are we seeking to restrain those who are trying to destroy the killers of Americans, and indirectly aiding those who murdered them?

And why is the global elite community siding with the murderous aggressors and not those seeking justice for the murdered?

Lots of reasons.

There are 500 million Arabs in the world, and nearly 2 billion Muslims—but only 9 or so million Israelis.

Nearly fifty percent of the world’s oil reserves are found in the Muslim Middle East.

Westerners, like tiny Israel, are considered too rich and powerful, while non-Westerners are romanticized as blameless, victimized underdogs.

But the best way of understanding this sick war is that Israelis are Jews and the ancient plague of anti-Semitism is again sweeping the globe.

World war coming up because Obama and Biden have helped Iran to start it.

Jonathan Spyer writes and we quote (almost in full):

Israeli forces are completing the final stages of preparation before the start of a ground offensive into Gaza. The goal of this offensive, according to statements by senior Israeli officials, will be to put an end to 16 years of Hamas rule over this area.

But even as the world’s attention remains focused on the narrow and dusty strip to Israel’s southwest, a far larger and potentially more consequential mobilisation is taking place across the Middle East.

From Lebanon to Yemen, via Syria and Iraq, the Iran-led regional axis of which Hamas is only a minor element is moving into position. Some of its component militias have entered the fray already, carrying out limited attacks against Israeli and US forces. Others have arrived at their jump-off points, awaiting the order to intervene.

It’s important to understand the nature of the alliance in question. It is the fruit of the methodology and the investments of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps during the past four decades in the Middle East. In that time, patiently, and with tactics adjusted to fit local conditions, Tehran has built an army of a type never before seen in the Middle East and that is now preparing for action.

This army consists of a host of nominally independent militias, that in reality are controlled by a central guiding hand. It is a unique melding of regular and irregular capacities, and of the political with the military. Most crucially, the IRGC method weds the Islamist fervour from below that remains the dominant force across the Arab world at street level, with the capacities, armaments and organisation that can be supplied only by a powerful state.

This is what the mobilisation of this army looks like: On Israel’s border with Lebanon, the Hezbollah organisation that is Lebanon’s de facto ruler is launching Kornet antitank missiles, drones and rockets at both military targets and civilian communities every day. Efforts to infiltrate terror squads across the border also are ongoing. Fifteen to 20 attacks a day of this kind are taking place, according to figures released by the Institute for the Study of War. Israel has evacuated 28 civilian communities close to the border.

I reported from the border area at the end of last week, from the moshav settlement of Shtula and the town of Kiryat Shmona, both pummelled in recent days by Hezbollah-IRGC ordnance. In the villages on the border fence, the civilians have gone. Only mobilised infantry units and local emergency response teams remain. Activity is ongoing and frenetic, the atmosphere tense and charged.

In Syria, the Iran-supported militias that defeated the rebellion of 2012-19 are once more on the move. From their positions in the deserts of Deir al-Zor province in the country’s east, they are heading west, toward Deraa and Quneitra provinces, adjoining the Golan Heights. In recent years Iran has carved out an area of its exclusive control that stretches from the al-Qaim-Albukamal border crossing between Iraq and Syria to Syria’s border with Israel.

Exclusive means the IRGC doesn’t need the permission of the nominal ruler of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, to move its pieces across the board. It is along this area of control that the militias, with Iraqi, Syrian and Lebanese fighters chief among them, are making their way, from the border crossing to the town of Mayadeen, exclusively controlled by the IRGC, and then onwards west.

The militias are attacking US targets in Syria, too. On October 19 they launched three drones at the US-controlled al-Tanf base in the desert on the Syria-Jordan border. The Conoco Mission Support Site, located inside Kurdish-controlled eastern Syria, also was targeted.

Across the border in Iraq last week, Kata’ib Hezbollah, the most powerful of the Iran-led militias in that country, and its allied organisations launched drone and rocket attacks at three sites where US troops are present: the Ain al-Asad air base, Baghdad International Airport and the al-Harir base in Iraqi Kurdistan. The Badr Organisation, largest of the militias in Iraq, issued a statement threatening further attacks.

The political element here is once again no less crucial than the military one. These militias are not independent forces operating out in the wilderness. Rather, in their other form as political parties, they form the central core of the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani. Indeed, Iraqi National Security Adviser Qassem al-Araji is a veteran member of Badr.

Even as far afield as Yemen, Iran’s Houthi allies appear to have tried to launch missiles at Israel last Thursday. The Houthis, again, control the Yemeni capital of Sanaa and a large swath of the country.

So Iran’s long investment, arming and organisation of Islamist forces across the region appear to be heading for a denouement now. It is impossible, of course, to predict the precise course of events in the next days. But the mobilisation is plain to see.

Israel is holding back its planned and desperately needed ground attack on Gaza because Biden told Netanyahu that’s what he wants. Which is to say, that’s what Obama wants – and half the population of the United States.

What next, America?

A must-watch video:

(Only doubt: that what Hamas is doing is “against Islamic law”.)

Israel has been invaded from Gaza by Hamas, the terrorist organization that governs the strip.

The Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu has announced: “We are at war.”

Up-to-date news can be found here:

https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/defense-news/2023-10-07/live-updates-762053

Is the money for the invasion coming from the Iranian regime? “President” Biden recently made billions available to the mullahs who are notoriously funders of terrorism.   

Is it possible that the planning and preparation for this massive attack was not known to Israel’s legendary intelligence service, the “best in the world” Mossad? Seems so!

Israel strikes back. Gaza City in flames.