The American defeat in Afghanistan and the Taliban’s control of the country revitalizes the hopes of Islamists and jihadists around the world.

“President” Biden has gifted certain Islamic nations and all jihad organizations with a humiliating defeat of America in Afghanistan. 

One of them is Pakistan, which facilitated the Taliban rebellion while pretending to be an ally of the West – taking billions from America for …. what? Keeping a smiling face turned towards it?

Imran Khan, president of Pakistan, declared that now “the shackles of slavery” are broken in Afghanistan.

And the terrorist organization Hamas, offspring of the Muslim Brotherhood, that rules ruthlessly over the Gaza strip, is crowing with delight.

The Investigative Project  on Terrorism (IPT) reports: 

The Palestinian terrorist group Hamas was among the first to congratulate “the Muslim Afghani people for the demise of the American occupation from its soil”.

We congratulate Taliban and its courageous leadership for this victory which culminates to its long Jihad for 20 years … We stress that the freedom from the occupation of America and its allies proves that the resistance of people and on top of the Jihad of our Palestinian people ends with victory and liberation.

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh telephoned Taliban leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar … to personally congratulate him.

The Palestinian Islamic Jihad group also issued a congratulatory statement praising, “the dear Afghan people for liberating Afghan lands from the American and Western occupation. The Afghani Muslim people presented and staged the greatest jihadist glory against all invaders throughout their honorable history.”

IPT reports further on how the defeat of America is a model for all the jihadist movements:

Egyptian born Islamic Group (Al-Jama’a al-Islamiyya) leader Assem Abdul Majeed hailed “The Conquest of Kabul: Praise be to God who honored the Mujahedeen (jihadists), [who] defeated the infidels and Today every believer rejoices And every hypocrite and atheist get angry.”

Separately, he wrote, “Have you seen how was power transferred to the Taliban quietly and without resistance?” He compared the Taliban’s determination to Egypt’s 2013 ouster of President Mohamed Morsi, saying it wouldn’t have happened “if the Brotherhood of Egypt had the courage and strength of the Taliban.”

Radical Muslim Brotherhood cleric Wagdy Ghoneim, who now lives in Turkey, posted a video in which he said, “God made Taliban victorious over America and the infidel western countries that united against it.”

From Yemen, where Islamists have been waging a bloody civil war since 2014, the spokesman for Houthi rebels boasted that “Every occupation has an end, long time or short, and now America is reaping failure after 20 years of occupying Afghanistan, so do the countries of aggression consider this?!”

But it is not just terrorist groups and jihadists celebrating the Taliban victory. Islamist affiliated governments and institutions joined the party.

Iran’s new ultraconservative president, Ebrahim Raisi, described the U.S. “military failure” as a chance for a lasting peace in Afghanistan. “America’s military defeat and its withdrawal must become an opportunity to restore life, security and durable peace in Afghanistan,” Raisi said on Iranian state television.

Tehran hosted Taliban officials last month to prepare for the vacuum expected after the U.S. withdrawal. “We are proud to have stood alongside our noble Afghan brothers and sisters during the jihad against the foreign occupiers,” Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif said at the time.

Meanwhile, Turkey’s Islamist government is offering the security and technical assistance. Last week, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he is mulling meeting with Taliban leader. “The latest developments and the situation of the Afghan public are really, really troubling,” Erdogan told CNN Turk on Wednesday.

Pro-government Turkish media highlighted the Taliban’s willingness to forge strong relations with Turkey. “Turkey is our brother, we have many points in common based on faith,” Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said last month. “We want Turkey to leave the past and return to the present and the future. After that, we can ask for dialogue.”

Erdogan had strong ties with the Afghan mujahideen before becoming Turkey’s prime minister. He was seen in an old video sitting at the feet of Afghani warlord Gulbeddin Hekmatyar, known as the “Butcher of Kabul” in Afghanistan.

Turkey, it must be remembered is – incomprehensibly – a member of NATO!

The head of the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS), Ahmed Raissouni, congratulated the Taliban for “the expulsion of the American and European invading forces. And this is a purely Afghan achievement that came thanks to continuous jihad, patience and sacrifices … We are ready to receive the scholars of Afghanistan and visit them and negotiate with them on issues of Islam and the application of Islamic Sharia as best as possible.”

Ahmed Bin Hama al-Khalili, the Mufti of Oman, congratulated “the brotherly Muslim people of Afghanistan for the clear victory and the valued victory over the aggressor invaders, and we follow this by congratulating ourselves and the entire Islamic nation for the fulfillment of God’s sincere promise.” Khalili’s statement is surprising since he is an official in a country considered a U.S. ally.

The Taliban previously allowed Afghanistan to be a safe haven for terrorists, including Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida. Muslim Brotherhood members already are mulling using Afghanistan as a new refuge, Al Arabiya reported. Their current home, Turkey, started clamping down on Brotherhood activities in an effort to mend strained relations with Egypt.

Brotherhood relations with the Afghan mujahedeen date back at least to the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

The ISIS affiliated terrorist group Boko Haram which has operates extensively in Nigeria, West Africa and African Sahel countries is believed to benefit emotionally from the recent withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan. Boko Haram would like to replicate the Taliban’s success and now has a model to believe in.

The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the Taliban’s takeover, turns Africa into the new frontline of terror, Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari wrote in this Sunday’s Financial Times.

The Taliban victory reverses a decade of setbacks for jihadists and Islamists in countries such as Egypt, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

The American defeat in Afghanistan and the Taliban’s control of the country revitalizes the hopes of Islamists and jihadists around the world.

And, most dangerous of all, China fully understands the lesson of America’s defeat.

The Global Times reports:

Afghanistan situation a lesson for Taiwan authorities

The US troops’ withdrawal from Afghanistan has led to the rapid demise of the Kabul government. The world has witnessed how the US evacuated its diplomats by helicopter while Taliban soldiers crowded into the presidential palace in Kabul. This has dealt a heavy blow to the credibility and reliability of the US.

How Washington abandoned the Kabul regime particularly shocked some in Asia, including the island of Taiwan. Taiwan is the region that relies on the protection of the US the most in Asia.

The situation in Afghanistan suddenly saw a radical change after the country was abandoned by the US.

From what happened in Afghanistan, [Taiwan] should perceive that once a war breaks out in the Straits, the island’s defense will collapse in hours and the US military won’t come to help.

China is much more likely to invade Taiwan now, with the intention of annexing it, after America’s capitulation in Afghanistan.

But Taiwan will not necessarily “collapse in hours”, even without direct American help. It will fight. It has an army, and materiel. And it has cause: freedom.

We agree with the Global Times that Biden-ruled America is very unlikely to engage in war with China.

Biden’s America is a cripple.

DebkaFile reports:

Anti-government protests spread to Tehran today [Monday, July 27, 2021], after a week of raging demonstrations in Khuzestan over water and power shortages.

Hundreds of thousands of protesters across the capital began shouting such slogans as “Death to the dictator!” (supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ) and “Clerics get lost!”

Some took up on the watchword of the 2006 opposition riots that were brutally quelled:

“No for Gaza, No for Lebanon, My life for Iran.”

– allusions to Iranian support for two terrorist organizations: Hamas, ruling Gaza, and Hezbollah, disastrously holding Lebanon hostage.

Placards carried the words

“Today is the day of mourning, workers’ lives hang in the balance”

– as 31,814 new covid cases were recorded, the highest single-day figure ever, and 322 fatalities took the death toll to 89,122. Altogether 3,500 people were hospitalized in the last 24 hours, according to Iran’s health ministry, with a warning that the fifth wave has yet to peak out.

Deputy governor of Tehran Hamidreza Goodarzi admitted that there was “street unrest” which he attributed to long power outages, some spanning several days. He offered no information on how security forces were dispersing the furious protesters.

In the southern oil-rich Khuzestan, eight demonstrators were killed when the Revolutionary Guards were enlisted to break up protests against water shortages and electricity blackouts.

The lives of Iranians are unlikely to improve when Ibrahim Raisi is sworn in as president in August.

Who is Ibrahim Raisi? A monster who has earned the trust of the ayatollahs.

In 2019 Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Kamenei appointed him chairman of the judiciary.

He has the approval of the very powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).

He is particularly remembered for his part in a great  binge of zealous cruelty in 1988, ordered by the founder of the republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Raisi was a member of an infamous “death committee” which condemned thousands of Iranians to be hanged from cranes for religious heresy and/or political dissent. 

According to DebkaFile –

Some activists voiced disappointment over the absence of words of support from the Biden administration or condemnation of the clerical regime’s harsh crackdown of dissent.

But they have no reason to expect anything helpful from the “Biden” administration. The Democrat-loyal state department is pursuing Obama’s policy, desperately trying to revive the rotten “deal” Obama made with the Iranian regime to help it become a nuclear power while seeming to restrain it.

The Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, DFLP (formerly the Popular Democratic Front for etc., PDFLP), was founded by a Jordanian Christian Bedouin named Nayef Hawatmeh. It was a break-off from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the PFLP, led by another Christian – Greek Orthodox – named George Habash.

Both Habash and Hawatmeh were also Communists, Hawatmeh favoring the Trotskyist denomination of that evil religion, and the New Left.

Both are sub-groups of the Palestine Liberation Organization, PLO, formed under the headship of Yasser Arafat.

On May 15, 1974, three members of Hawatmeh’s group broke into an apartment in Ma’alot, in the Galilee, and shot to death a man, his wife, and their son aged four, and gravely injured their five-year-old daughter. The three heroes then went on to a local school where they killed twenty-two children and wounded another fifty-six. All three were eventually killed by Israeli soldiers and are now honored martyrs.

Palestine Media Watch reports and questions:         

While the Biden administration is planning to reopen the PLO offices in Washington DC, one of the PLO member factions – the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) terror organization – is openly glorifying its bloody terror attacks as “acts of heroism”.

[Last month] the DFLP terror organization listed in a statement, with “pride, admiration, and esteem”, its lethal terror attacks over the decades – among them the massacre of 26 Israelis, including 22 children. DFLP vowed to “continue… to provide our people and its political forces with the blood of the heroes”. The terror organization further took pride in the “glorious list of the thousands of Martyrs who sacrificed their lives and their blood under the flag of Palestine”. [Donia Al-Watan, independent Palestinian news agency, June 3, 2021]

In its terror glorifying statement, the DFLP stressed its affiliation with the PLO, stating that the DFLP “always marches and advances in the national ranks under the flag of the PLO, the sole legal representative of our heroic people and its national project“. The organization then listed several of its “heroic operations” – i.e., lethal terror attacks – among them what is known as the Ma’alot Massacre.

Palestine Media Watch asks:

Will Biden reopen PLO offices while a PLO member organization glorifies its bloody terror attacks as “acts of heroism”?

The answer is yes. That is exactly what “Biden” – more accurately the junta now in power – intends to do: reopen the offices of the Palestinian terrorists that President Trump closed. 

From Instapundit:

Hamas spokesman: “The illegitimate Zionist entity must be forced to end its occupation of all of Palestine, from Tel Aviv to Jericho.”

Western Reporter: “So what you’re saying is that you support a peaceful 2-state solution.”

Hamas spokesman: “We will kill the sons of pigs and apes like the great Hitler.”

Western reporter: “So what you’re saying is that you object to right-wing Israeli politicians like Netanyahu.”

Hamas Spokesman: “We want an Islamic state governed by sharia.”

Western reporter: “Democracy, one-person, one-vote, religious freedom for all. Got it.”

Hamas Spokesman: “We thank our great friends in Iran for their money, missiles, and bombs.”

Western Reporter: “Hamas insists on being a grassroots Palestinian movement not dependent on foreign support.”

… and in doing so co-author terrorism, war, oppression and mass murder.

Almost all news reporting is false. Almost all of it is propaganda. Most of the press, all over the world, is the tool of terrorists, Communists, Islamic religious fanatics, and their useful idiots.

Matti Friedman, a rare truth-telling reporter of Middle Eastern affairs, writes (in part) at The Atlantic (which is woke, so well done Matti Friedman for getting it in there!):

To make sense of most international journalism from Israel, it is important first to understand that the news tells us far less about Israel than about the people writing the news. Journalistic decisions are made by people who exist in a particular social milieu, one which, like most social groups, involves a certain uniformity of attitude, behavior, and even dress (the fashion these days, for those interested, is less vests with unnecessary pockets than shirts with unnecessary buttons). These people know each other, meet regularly, exchange information, and closely watch one another’s work. This helps explain why a reader looking at articles written by the half-dozen biggest news providers in the region on a particular day will find that though the pieces are composed and edited by completely different people and organizations, they tend to tell the same story.

Foreign activists are a notable feature of the landscape, and international NGOs and numerous arms of the United Nations are among the most powerful players, wielding billions of dollars and employing many thousands of foreign and local employees. Their SUVs dominate sections of East Jerusalem and their expense accounts keep Ramallah afloat. They provide reporters with social circles, romantic partners, and alternative employment—a fact that is more important to reporters now than it has ever been, given the disintegration of many newspapers and the shoestring nature of their Internet successors.

In my time in the press corps, I learned that our relationship with these groups was not journalistic. My colleagues and I did not, that is, seek to analyze or criticize them. For many foreign journalists, these were not targets but sources and friends—fellow members, in a sense, of an informal alliance. This alliance consists of activists and international staffers from the UN and the NGOs; the Western diplomatic corps, particularly in East Jerusalem; and foreign reporters. There is also a local component, consisting of a small number of Israeli human-rights activists who are themselves largely funded by European governments, and Palestinian staffers from the Palestinian Authority, the NGOs, and the UN. Mingling occurs at places like the lovely Oriental courtyard of the American Colony hotel in East Jerusalem, or at parties held at the British Consulate’s rooftop pool. The dominant characteristic of nearly all of these people is their transience. They arrive from somewhere, spend a while living in a peculiar subculture of expatriates, and then move on.

In these circles, in my experience, a distaste for Israel has come to be something between an acceptable prejudice and a prerequisite for entry. I don’t mean a critical approach to Israeli policies but a belief that the Jews of Israel are a symbol of the world’s ills, particularly those connected to nationalism, militarism, colonialism, and racism—an idea quickly becoming one of the central elements of the “progressive” Western zeitgeist, spreading from the European left to American college campuses and intellectuals, including journalists. In this social group, this sentiment is translated into editorial decisions made by individual reporters and editors covering Israel, and this, in turn, gives such thinking the means of mass self-replication.

Many freshly arrived reporters in Israel, similarly adrift in a new country, undergo a rapid socialization in the circles I mentioned. This provides them not only with sources and friendships but with a ready-made framework for their reporting—the tools to distill and warp complex events into a simple narrative in which there is a bad guy who doesn’t want peace and a good guy who does. This is the “Israel story,” and it has the advantage of being an easy story to report. Everyone here answers their cell phone, a d everyone knows what to say. You can put your kids in good schools and dine at good restaurants. It’s fine if you’re gay. Your chances of being beheaded on YouTube are slim. Nearly all of the information you need—that is, in most cases, information critical of Israel—is not only easily accessible but has already been reported for you by Israeli journalists or compiled by NGOs. You can claim to be speaking truth to power, having selected the only “power” in the area that poses no threat to your safety.

Many foreign journalists have come to see themselves as part of this world of international organizations, and specifically as the media arm of this world. They have decided not just to describe and explain, which is hard enough, and important enough, but to “help.” And that’s where reporters get into trouble, because “helping” is always a murky, subjective, and political enterprise, made more difficult if you are unfamiliar with the relevant languages and history.

Confusion over the role of the press explains one of the strangest aspects of coverage here—namely, that while international organizations are among the most powerful actors in the Israel story, they are almost never reported on. Are they bloated, ineffective, or corrupt? Are they helping, or hurting? We don’t know, because these groups are to be quoted, not covered. Journalists cross from places like the BBC to organizations like Oxfam and back. The current spokesman at the UN agency for Palestinian refugees in Gaza, for example, is a former BBC man. A Palestinian woman who participated in protests against Israel and tweeted furiously about Israel a few years ago served at the same time as a spokesperson for a UN office, and was close friends with a few reporters I know. And so forth.

International organizations in the Palestinian territories have largely assumed a role of advocacy on behalf of the Palestinians and against Israel, and much of the press has allowed this political role to supplant its journalistic function. This dynamic explains the thinking behind editorial choices that are otherwise difficult to grasp, like the decision to ignore a report about an Israeli peace offer to the Palestinians in 2008, or the idea that Hamas’s development of extensive armament works in Gaza in recent years was not worth serious coverage despite objectively being one of the most important storylines demanding reporters’ attention.

When the UN released its controversial Goldstone report on the Gaza fighting, we at the bureau trumpeted its findings in dozens of articles, though there was discussion even at the time of the report’s failure to prove its central charge: that Israel had killed civilians on purpose. The director of Israel’s premier human-rights group, B’Tselem, who was critical of the Israeli operation, told me at the time that this claim was “a reach given the facts”, an evaluation that was eventually seconded by the report’s author. “If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document,” Richard Goldstone wrote in The Washington Post in April 2011. We understood that our job was not to look critically at the UN report, or any such document, but to publicize it.

Decisions like these are hard to fathom if you believe the foreign press corps’ role is to explain a complicated story to people far away. But they make sense if you understand that journalists covering Israel and the Palestinian territories often don’t see their role that way. The radio and print journalist Mark Lavie, who has reported from the region since 1972, was a colleague of mine at the AP, where he was an editor in the Jerusalem bureau and then in Cairo until his retirement last year. (It was Lavie who first learned of the Israeli peace offer of late 2008, and was ordered by his superiors to ignore the story.) An Indiana-born Israeli of moderate politics, he had a long run in journalism that included several wars and the first Palestinian intifada, and found little reason to complain about the functioning of the media.

But things changed in earnest in 2000, with the collapse of peace efforts and the outbreak of the Second Intifada. Israel accepted President Bill Clinton’s peace framework that fall and the Palestinians rejected it. Nevertheless, Lavie recently told me, the bureau’s editorial line was still that the conflict was Israel’s fault, and the Palestinians and the Arab world were blameless. By the end of Lavie’s career, he was editing Israel copy on the AP’s Middle East regional desk in Cairo, trying to restore balance and context to stories he thought had little connection to reality. He wrote a book, Broken Spring, about his front-row view of the Middle East’s descent into chaos, and retired disillusioned and angry.

I have tended to see the specific failings that we both encountered at the AP as symptoms of a general thought pattern in the press, but Lavie takes a more forceful position, viewing the influential American news organization as one of the primary authors of this thought pattern. This is not just because many thousands of media outlets use AP material directly, but also because when journalists arrive in their offices in the morning, the first thing many of them do is check the AP wire (or, these days, scroll through it in their Twitter feed).

Journalistic hallucinations occur when reporters are not granted the freedom to write what they see but are rather expected to maintain a “story” that follows predictable lines. For the international press, the uglier characteristics of Palestinian politics and society are mostly untouchable because they would disrupt the Israel story, which is a story of “Jewish moral failure”.

Most consumers of the Israel story don’t understand how the story is manufactured. But Hamas does. Since assuming power in Gaza in 2007, the Islamic Resistance Movement has come to understand that many reporters are committed to a narrative wherein Israelis are oppressors and Palestinians passive victims with reasonable goals, and are uninterested in contradictory information.

Hamas is aided in its manipulation of the media by the old reportorial belief, a kind of reflex, according to which reporters shouldn’t mention the existence of reporters. In a conflict like ours, this ends up requiring considerable exertions: So many photographers cover protests in Israel and the Palestinian territories, for example, that one of the challenges for anyone taking pictures is keeping colleagues out of the frame. That the other photographers are as important to the story as Palestinian protesters or Israeli soldiers—this does not seem to be considered.

In Gaza, this goes from being a curious detail of press psychology to a major deficiency. Hamas’s strategy is to provoke a response from Israel by attacking from behind the cover of Palestinian civilians, thus drawing Israeli strikes that kill those civilians, and then to have the casualties filmed by one of the world’s largest press contingents, with the understanding that the resulting outrage abroad will blunt Israel’s response. This is a ruthless strategy, and an effective one. It is predicated on the cooperation of journalists. One of the reasons it works is because of the reflex I mentioned. If you report that Hamas has a strategy based on co-opting the media, this raises several difficult questions, like, What exactly is the relationship between the media and Hamas? And has this relationship corrupted the media? It is easier just to leave the other photographers out of the frame and let the picture tell the story: Here are dead people, and Israel killed them.

In previous rounds of Gaza fighting, Hamas learned that international coverage from the territory could be molded to its needs, a lesson it would implement in this summer’s war. Most of the press work in Gaza is done by local fixers, translators, and reporters, people who would understandably not dare cross Hamas, making it only rarely necessary for the group to threaten a Westerner. The organization’s armed forces could be made to disappear. The press could be trusted to play its role in the Hamas script, instead of reporting that there was such a script. Hamas strategy did not exist, according to Hamas—or, as reporters would say, was “not the story”.  There was no Hamas charter blaming Jews for centuries of perfidy, or calling for their murder. [There is.] This was not the story. The rockets falling on Israeli cities were quite harmless; they were not the story either. [It is.]

Hamas understood that journalists would not only accept as fact the Hamas-reported civilian death toll—relayed through the UN or through something called the “Gaza Health Ministry,” an office controlled by Hamas—but would make those numbers the center of coverage. Hamas understood that reporters could be intimidated when necessary and that they would not report the intimidation; Western news organizations tend to see no ethical imperative to inform readers of the restrictions shaping their coverage in repressive states or other dangerous areas. In the war’s aftermath, the NGO- UN-media alliance could be depended upon to unleash the organs of the international community on Israel, and to leave the jihadist group alone.

When Hamas’s leaders surveyed their assets before this summer’s round of fighting, they knew that among those assets was the international press. The AP staff in Gaza City would witness a rocket launch right beside their office, endangering reporters and other civilians nearby—and the AP wouldn’t report it, not even in AP articles about Israeli claims that Hamas was launching rockets from residential areas. (This happened.) Hamas fighters would burst into the AP’s Gaza bureau and threaten the staff—and the AP wouldn’t report it. (This also happened.) Cameramen waiting outside Shifa Hospital in Gaza City would film the arrival of civilian casualties and then, at a signal from an official, turn off their cameras when wounded and dead fighters came in, helping Hamas maintain the illusion that only civilians were dying. (This too happened; the information comes from multiple sources with firsthand knowledge of these incidents.)

Colford, the AP spokesman, confirmed that armed militants entered the AP’s Gaza office in the early days of the war to complain about a photo showing the location of a rocket launch, though he said that Hamas claimed that the men “did not represent the group”.  The AP “does not report many interactions with militias, armies, thugs or governments,” he wrote. “These incidents are part of the challenge of getting out the news—and not themselves news.”

This summer, the Western press corps showed up en masse to cover the conflict. It was deliberately fought from behind Palestinian civilians, many of whom died as a result. Dulled by years of the “Israel story” and inured to its routine omissions, confused about the role they are meant to play, and co-opted by Hamas, reporters described this war as an Israeli onslaught against innocent people. By doing so, this group of intelligent and generally well-meaning professionals ceased to be reliable observers and became instead an amplifier for the propaganda of one of the most intolerant and aggressive forces on earth. And that, as they say, is the story.

President Trump achieved a remarkable development in the Middle East with the “Abraham Accords”, bringing peace, trade, and –  even more amazing – good will between Israel and several Arab states. A new era had dawned, in which a settlement of the Palestinian problem was for the first time in a hundred years genuinely possible.

Then along came the crooked “Biden administration” and undid all the good President Trump and his envoy Secretary of State Pompeo had done. “Biden” gave billions to the terrorist group Hamas, and released billions to the mullahs of Iran, who fund not only Hamas but terrorist attacks everywhere in the region.

It was not just encouragement to Hamas to make war on Israel, it was a signal to do so. The Democrats’ anti-Israel White House did everything it could to undo the Trump achievements and return to the disastrous policies of Obama, with greater intensity.

And it is Israel who is blamed for the war! As usual.

Richard Kemp writes at Gatestone:

During an operation in Gaza last week, the Israel Defence Forces attacked a Hamas tunnel complex with 12 squadrons of 160 combat planes striking over 150 targets with hundreds of bunker-busting JDAMs [Joint Direct Attack Munitions] in less than an hour. Although the battle damage assessment is still underway, the raid destroyed perhaps the most critical element of Hamas infrastructure, wiping out vast stocks of munitions and likely killing dozens if not hundreds of fighters. This was a hammer blow to Hamas and may prove to be a turning point in the conflict. It also sent a powerful message to Iran and Hizballah, foretelling the consequences of an assault on Israel with their arsenal of tens of thousands of missiles in southern Lebanon.

The IDF operation was a carefully coordinated combination of intelligence, surveillance, knowledge of enemy tactics, deception, surprise and precisely targeted, overwhelming force. Of all these, deception and surprise were key. Surprise is a principle of war in the American, British and many other forces, defined in the US Army Field Manual as “striking the enemy at a time or place or in a manner for which he is unprepared’. The manual goes on to say: “Deception can aid the probability of achieving surprise”. Throughout the history of warfare, surprise achieved through deception has led to many stunning military victories — often against the odds.

Last Thursday, the IDF massed tanks, artillery and infantry combat vehicles on the Gaza border. The build-up was observed by Hamas and widely reported in international media as an imminent ground invasion. Hundreds of Hamas fighters rushed to take shelter inside the “metro” tunnel network. Built by Hamas after the 2014 conflict to house command facilities, store weapons and facilitate protected movement, these tunnels covered dozens of kilometres beneath the Gaza Strip. There the fighters were trapped as JDAM after JDAM thundered in from above. Emerging to fight the invasion that never came, the surviving anti-tank teams and mortar squads were then also hit from the air.

This masterpiece of tactical synchronisation, with all its complex elements, symbolises the IDF’s precision attacks during this campaign, Operation Guardian of the Walls, which have already inflicted damage from which Hamas will not recover for years. The IDF learnt many lessons from previous engagements in Gaza and since 2014 have vigorously collected intelligence and worked to develop battle plans and technological solutions to deal with Hamas and their Palestinian Islamic Jihad bedfellows.

Hamas is no match for the IDF and could be quickly and much more cheaply defeated by blunt and crushing military force were it not for one thing — the Israeli need to minimise loss of civilian life. Hamas know that. They know they cannot prevail over the IDF and have no intention of trying. Their entire strategy is to attack Israeli population centres using rockets, kamikaze drones and tunnels, aimed at luring IDF counter attacks that will kill their own civilians in order to vilify and isolate Israel around the world and gain international support for their cause. With human shields as the fundamental element of every operation, Hamas are the first “army” in history to use the lives of their own civilian population as weapons of war.

Their strategy has been woefully successful. Over many years of conflict in Gaza, the majority of the world’s media have enthusiastically reported the deaths of Palestinian civilians as though they were the deliberate object of Israel’s callous and uncaring way of war. This blatantly false propaganda has been taken up by Hamas supporters and “useful idiots” in the West. In the US, Britain and Europe, last week we have seen hundreds of anti-Israel demonstrators brandishing Palestinian banners, burning Israeli flags, spitting out their hate for the Jewish state and screaming about IDF baby-killers. Hamas’s calumny is a prime motivator among Israel-loathing academics in Western universities and high schools who have mined their false allegations as rich seams of material to indoctrinate generations of students.

Human rights groups around the world have been doing the same. There have been dozens of anti-Israel resolutions at the UN, often drawing on Hamas’s narrative, twisting every aspect of the conflicts in Gaza. The prize has been the International Criminal Court’s decision this year to launch a full investigation with the hope of dragging Israeli soldiers, officials and politicians into the dock at The Hague.

I have taken part in every UN Human Rights Council evidence session and emergency debate on Gaza conflicts in the last 15 years. The wilful ignorance combined with malice has always been breathtaking. Every commission of inquiry determined Israel’s guilt before it even met for the first time. Every debate and vote has overwhelmingly and of course falsely affirmed Israel’s supposed war crimes and crimes against humanity. Meanwhile Hamas’s actual multiple war crimes have been brushed aside.

The reality is very different from the lies emanating from these modern-day Towers of Babel. The IDF attack on the “metro” tunnels this week depended on lightning action and the coordination of 160 planes attacking a small area in a very short space of time. Alongside these awesome complexities, the IDF did all they could to ensure minimum loss of civilian life by selecting targets where the lowest levels of innocents would be harmed, such as empty roadways under which tunnels ran, and maintaining close surveillance to confirm a bus load of civilians didn’t suddenly appear. The IDF have so far destroyed several high-rise buildings containing critical Hamas military infrastructure as well as civilian offices and apartments. Remarkably all of these have been smashed down without any reported civilian casualties.

As in previous conflicts in Gaza the IDF has made radio broadcasts in Arabic, sent SMS messages and even phoned civilians inside the Strip to warn them of impending strikes, where to go for their own safety and which routes to take.

When civilians do not leave an intended target building, the IDF sometimes drop specially designed low-power munitions (“knock on the roof”) to encourage them to get out. With careful surveillance of target areas, the Israeli air force frequently aborts planned sorties if there is a risk of civilian casualties.

In a conflict designed by Hamas to maximize civilian deaths, some are inevitable. It is too early to accurately assess casualty figures or ratios of civilians to fighters killed, but current assessments suggest the IDF have been even more successful in minimizing civilian casualties during this campaign than in previous engagements in Gaza. Many in the media, human rights groups and international bodies have rushed to characterize all civilian casualties (other than those inflicted by Hamas, of course) as war crimes. But the Geneva Conventions disagree. Inflicting civilian casualties is not illegal provided a military operation is necessary for the prosecution of a war, they are not disproportionate to the planned military gain and that combatant commanders do not intentionally target civilians while doing all they can to avoid hitting them.

The media takes reports from the Gaza health ministry as authoritative and objective. That is disingenuous and they know it. The health ministry is controlled by Hamas and follows their every order. For example, of around 2,000 rockets fired so far by Hamas during this conflict, approximately 400 have fallen short, landing inside Gaza. Some of these have killed civilians and the health ministry has attributed all of them to IDF action.

Counterintuitively, the most effective means of saving Gazan civilian lives has been Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile system. Despite Hamas efforts to overwhelm it, Iron Dome has had a 90% success rate in preventing missiles from Gaza hitting their targets. Not only has this saved the lives of countless Israeli civilians but it has also meant the IDF campaign can be more deliberate, discriminating and precise. If hundreds of Israelis were dying under Hamas rockets, the IDF would have no choice other than to strike Gaza with much greater ferocity and ground forces would already have entered the Gaza Strip, unavoidably inflicting vastly more civilian casualties than we have seen so far.

Despite all of this, as the media unceasingly show us, the real victims in this campaign have indeed been Gaza civilians. But they usually get the cause wrong. Every one is due to Hamas’s unprovoked aggression against Israel. None would have occurred without it. Once this round of fighting is over, Hamas will work to build back better for next time — that is, to regenerate their military capability rather than civilian infrastructure. If Western governments, international bodies and human rights groups are genuinely interested in avoiding suffering in Gaza, they should start now, striving to end Hamas’s reign of terror rather than support it by parroting their baleful narrative.

The United Nations MUST be abolished. 

It is evil and it does evil. Nothing but evil.

This organization is the most blatant hypocrite of all the hypocritical institutions in the world. More so even than the churches. And though hypocrisy is, as La Rochefoucauld said, the “tribute vice pays to virtue”, this hypocrite’s continued existence is an insult to the entire human race.

Hypocrisy House in Turtle Bay, N.Y.

Judith Bergman writes at Gatestone:

As accusations of “institutional racism” in organizations, professions, universities and cultural institutions continue to make the headlines, no one is calling out the institutional racism of the United Nations (UN).

What is institutional racism? The first entry on Google tells you, “Institutional racism is a form of racism that is embedded as normal practice within society or an organization”.

If you google “racism”, a Google dictionary defines it as:

Prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalized.

The UN counts all the states in the world as its members, and all are ostensibly equal under international law, to which the UN claims to adhere. According to its own rationale, therefore, all the member states in the UN should be treated equally by the organization’s various bodies and be judged according to the same standards. If the UN would systematically single out a minority of only one member state to be condemned for alleged human rights abuses for example, while completely ignoring the documented human rights abuses of an entire host of member states, this double-standard would amount to systematic discrimination, or “racism”, against that state according to the definition of “institutional racism” mentioned above.

This form of systematic discrimination, or “racism”, is in fact what the UN has been engaging in for decades against one country, Israel, a tiny state of roughly 8.7 million citizens – with a landmass roughly the size of New Jersey — out of a total world population of 7.8 billion people:

The UN General Assembly, the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) and the UN Commission on Human Rights have passed a large number of resolutions and decisions against Israel. According to the human rights non-governmental organization (NGO), UN Watch:

Every year, the General Assembly adopts some 20 resolutions against Israel and only 5 or 6 against the rest of the world combined, with one each on Iran, Syria and North Korea. The General Assembly adopts zero resolutions on systematic abusers like Cuba, China, and Saudi Arabia.

The discrimination is too obvious to ignore. There are 193 member states in the UN. For 20 resolutions a year to be lobbed at the only democratic country in the Middle East, which actually observes human rights and equality under the law — but only 5 or 6 at the remaining 192 states, which include major violators of international law such as China, Russia, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Nigeria and Iran — speaks of an extremely ingrained form of state-sponsored discrimination or “racism”.

China, a state of 1.4 billion people, continues to be the number one executioner in the world …  The Chinese Communist regime ruthlessly persecutes ethnic and religious minorities, and withholds from its own citizens the most basic human rights, such as freedom of expression, freedom of religion and freedom of assembly, as previously reported by Gatestone Institute. Every one of those rights is enshrined in the UN’s own conventions and declarations. …  Even though China is a leading violator of international law and one of the most outrageous abusers of human rights, neither the General Assembly nor the UNHRC has condemned its actions.

There are countless other examples of UN member states who do not live up to even a fraction of the UN’s treaties and declarations of human rights, yet those countries are never called out. The UNHRC has not passed a single resolution against Saudi Arabia, for instance, a country of more than 33 million people that largely continues to operate according to medieval human rights standards, despite the efforts of Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman to effect some reforms. Last year, the kingdom surpassed its own record for executions …  when it beheaded 184 people. Saudi Arabia only decided to end flogging a few months ago. The desert country, which takes up most of the Arabian Peninsula, also still operates a male guardianship system, which treats women as legal minors, so that they usually can only travel and perform the most mundane tasks, such as applying for a passport, under the supervision of a male guardian. …

There are countless other examples of countries with atrocious human rights records that are not only not called out by the UN and its human rights bodies, but actually serve on those bodies; countries such as Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Pakistan and Somalia, which all currently serve on the UN Human Rights Council. …

Even the UN’s World Health Organization (WHO), at its annual assembly, assigns Israel its own separate agenda item, number 14. In it, every year, Israel is condemned as a violator of “Palestinian health rights” in the “Occupied Palestinian Territories, including east Jerusalem, and in the occupied Syrian Golan”.

In fact, Israel provides free medical care to thousands of Arabs hurt in the ongoing war in Syria, and medical treatment and aid of all sorts to Palestinians.

The UN’s Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) “dedicated to the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of women”, also routinely singles out Israel for condemnation for “violating women’s rights” [which it does not, of course – ed], while countries such as Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia and Iran, some of the world’s most dangerous countries for women, are not even mentioned. Not only is there no condemnation of Saudi Arabia — where women are still treated as legal minors, and where campaigners for basic women’s rights face long prison sentences — but Saudi Arabia was even elected to the CSW a few years ago to assist in the task of “promoting women’s rights”.

Regrettably, almost all UN member states, apart from the United States, appear to find this discriminatory treatment of just one country in the world to be completely normal and as matters should be. There is simply a whopping international double-standard here on what passes as institutional racism and what does not — and it needs to be acknowledged.

Ironically, the institutional racism against Israel at the UN takes the focus away from countries that are in acute need of scrutiny — which is possibly the reason for its success. Countries where women have few to no rights, where political opponents are tortured and stashed away in prisons or killed, and where people cannot speak their minds freely, get a pass. At the very least, people might question whether an organization that has made discrimination against one country in the world one of its operating principles — as institutionalized in permanent agenda items and almost ritual condemnations — is worth the exorbitant cost. The United States, for instance, as the organization’s single largest donor, in 2018 funded the UN to the tune of $10 billion.

At a minimum, instead of paying a mandatory “slightly less than one-fifth of the body’s collective budget” every year, the US — and the UN — would fare far better if the US paid for what it wanted and got what it paid for. At present, the UN has long ceased being a force for good [it never was – ed] and is being used, first, to prop up its majority of un-transparent, unaccountable anti-democratic despots, and second, to perpetuate conflicts — largely at the US taxpayers’ expense.

UNITED NATIONS DELENDA EST!

Under his hand the map of the Middle East is changing.

Will he succeed? He usually does.

The Democratic Party is promoting abortion as the defining right of women. The enfranchised woman must have a right not to be forced into a woman’s “gender role” – which is to say, not to be a mother. 

The Left considers it a health right to have free contraception provided under insurance policies. Though male and female must be equal in sexual behavior, women can change their minds after intercourse and ruin the reputation of men through meetooism, an auxiliary right to special women’s justice which does away with due process. 

Democrats will probably not go as far as the mandatory, forced abortions of China. The one child policy there resulted in mass female infanticide. It is more important to abort boys in the “patriarchal” West. There is no need to feel compassion for the babies. Compassion should be kept for black murderers of white cops. 

Tucker Carlson said on his Fox News show (Monday May 14, 2019): “We have a political party that believes having children is a punishment.” It’s true. When Barack Obama was president, he said he didn’t want his daughters to be “punished with a baby”. Many “progressive” intellectuals, including spokesmen for the medical profession, argue for abortion at any stage of a pregnancy and even advocate infanticide. A movie actress asks women to adopt absolute chastity as a form of protest because some states are not allowing abortion at any stage of pregnancy on demand.

A  female Democrat in the House of Representatives, said: “There is a scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult, and it does lead, I think, young people to have a legitimate question. Is it OK to still have children?” That same Democrat, referring to the same “scientific census” (which does not exist) believes that the world is coming to an end in 12 years from now. It would be so unfair to give birth to a child who will have less that a dozen years to live.

Such a laudably unselfish view, that. But not common on the Left. The view that abortion is the defining right of women is the politically correct orthodox Democratic position. Children are invaders who would enter the world through the womb, occupying a woman’s body without her permission. Even though she knows how the invader gets in there, and almost always opens the door herself, she is being exploited. The invader must be evicted.

Those children who are so impudent and far-right, so bigoted, xenophobic, undiverse, uninclusive and Trumpian as to get born despite all efforts to abort them – or if their mother in collusion with a Democratic doctor does not kill them when they actually arrive in the world – then they must be made unhappy.

If they are white, they must be made to feel bad about it. Democratic Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi – an exemplary anti-human – has said that she is proud of her grandson for saying that he wished he was brown like his friend.

If they are male, it is worse.  If they are male and white they are the guiltiest of the guilty and must be accused, abased, cut up, punished.

Boys should be changed into girls. Or at least a parody of girls. And why should not all girls be changed into boys? Or at least a parody of boys. Start the process when they’re 4 years old. (A British judge just overruled a school’s objection to a 4 year old being treated as a transgender.) They hold that “gender” is only a “social construct”.

So feed them on hormones. Mangle their sexual organs. Make them sterile. Make them wretched.

And since the curse of children is upon the nation, make use of them. Have them vote – for the Democrats. The party that knows it can rely on the votes of felons, illegal aliens, and lunatics, believes just as reasonably that it will get the votes of children.

There are many other uses for children too. The Left recommends that they be taught how to make their parents worried about “climate change”. (And to report the parents to the Totalitarian Authorities if they are obstinate?)

On the Mexican border, migrant men rent children and pretend to be part of families that are not theirs in order to enter the US.

Hamas, the terrorist organization passionately supported by two Congresswomen, uses children as living shields against Israel’s retaliatory bombs and guns. The Palestinians train children to be suicide bombers.

Of course (we hope) the Left will not go as far as Joseph Kony, leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, who made children kill and eat their own parents and then be footsoldiers and sex slaves.

Children can even take the initiative in leading campaigns that advance the agenda of the Left. A Swedish teenager named Greta Thunberg, 16, is leading a children’s crusade against the mythical curse of “man-made global warming”. She has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

So we can be optimistic and surmise that the Democrats will probably not make it illegal to have children.

Oh the protestants hate the catholics
and the catholics hate the protestants
and the hindus hate the muslims
and everybody hates the jews

So sang Tom Lehrer in his 20th century satire, National Brotherhood Week.

There’s been a resurgence of anti-Semitism – or to give it its common or garden name Jew-hatred – all over the formerly Christian world where it never disappears entirely. The boost results now from the addition of Islamic cultural color and its fun new cooking recipes to the social mix.

Even in the US, the Democrat majority have just proved themselves open-minded on the issue since a couple of newly-elected Muslim members of Congress, the representative for Hamas, Rashida Tlaib, and the representative for Somalia, Ilhan Omar, have given them a new perspective on it. (Warning: The Tlaib link goes to an article showing examples of extreme political obscenity.)

Don’t expect Western anti-Semites to be consistent with their hatred. They can condemn anti-Semitism when it suits them. For instance, when they use it as an accusation against their opponents.

That’s what President Emmanuel Macron did. Here’s the story, told by Guy Millière at Gatestone:

After sixteen Saturday demonstrations by the “yellow vests,” who began in November by protesting French President Emmanuel Macron’s increase in fuel prices, the controversy seems to have taken a darker turn.

That seems to have come to light on February 13, when a small group of demonstrators started hurling insults at a French Jewish philosopher, Alain Finkielkraut — who was born in and lives in Paris — after they spotted him on a sidewalk. One man, shouted, “Shut up, dirty Zionist sh*t,” “Go home to Tel Aviv,” “France is ours,” “God will punish you.” A cameraman filmed the incident, then shared the video on social networks. A scandal ensued. The “yellow vests” movement as a whole was immediately accused by the French government of anti-Semitism and “fascism”.

Finkielkraut claimed that he had not been attacked as a Jew, but as a supporter of the State of Israel. He then added that the man who had insulted him did not speak like a “yellow vest” and that the words “God will punish you” is an expression from “Islamic rhetoric”. Police who watched the video identified the man as a radicalized Muslim, and the next day arrested him.

In the days leading up to that incident, several anti-Semitic acts had taken place in and near Paris. The German word “Juden” [Jews] was painted on the front of a Jewish bakery; swastikas were drawn with a black marker on portraits of former Jewish minister Simone Veil; trees that had been planted in memory of Ilan Halimi, a young Jew who had been kidnapped, tortured and murdered [by Muslims] in 2006, were destroyed. Investigations have begun but nothing so far has shown any relationship between the “yellow vests” movement and any of these anti-Semitic acts. The French government nevertheless continues accusing the “yellow vests” of being at least partly to blame.

When the French government, for instance, published statistics about anti-Semitic acts committed in 2018, and noted a 74% increase from the year before, the government spokesman linked this increase to the “disorders” that have been taking place in France, implicitly meaning the “yellow vests”.

Meanwhile, in a demonstration against anti-Semitism organized for February 19 by the Socialist Party and The Republic on the Move (the party created by Macron), fourteen parties agreed to participate. Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, however, was excluded. The organizers said that as the National Rally belongs to the “extreme right”, it cannot participate in a protest against the “fascist peril”. Slogans included: “It’s enough”, “No to hate” and “Anti-Semitism is not France”. Former Presidents Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande took part. Prime Minister Edouard Philippe spoke of a “united France”. A Muslim singer, Abd al Malik, was invited to sing the French anthem.

President Macron, during the event, was at the Holocaust Memorial in Paris. The next day, he attended the annual dinner of the CRIF (Representative Council of Jewish Institutions) and gave a speech against “racist hatred”. To make sure that his audience understood that he was talking about the “yellow vests”, he used an expression he had used on December 31: “hate crowds”.

The “yellow vests” movement continues to be described by members of the government as guilty of being anti-Semitic and “fascist” despite the minor detail that nothing proves any culpability in recent anti-Semitic acts. The “yellow vests” movement began only in November and therefore cannot be held responsible for the increase in the number of anti-Semitic acts for the whole of 2018. Small groups of anti-Semites who did try to infiltrate the demonstrations of “yellow vests” were quickly expelled. The “yellow vests” movement is fundamentally a movement against taxes that many French people consider arbitrary; it has nothing to do with either anti-Semitism or “fascism”.

Anti-Semitism in France has been gaining momentum. In the last 15 years, eleven Jews were murdered in France by anti-Semitic killers, often in horrific ways. In a growing number of neighborhoods, everyday life for French Jews has become unlivable. Many who have the means have left France. Many who have not left have moved to more secure areas of the country. In the last two decades, 20% of French Jews (100,000 people) have emigrated, and tens of thousands have abandoned unsafe places, such as Seine-Saint-Denis, and have relocated inside France.

Some journalists observed that a decision to mobilize people against a “fascist peril” — and to unite almost all political parties while excluding the National Rally — seemed like a political trick, unfair and biased. They emphasized that most of the anti-Semitic attacks and all the murders of Jews in France came not from members of the National Rally or “fascists”, but from extremist Muslims.

Also on February 19, tens of thousands of people across France demonstrated against anti-Semitism. Those protests would certainly seem praiseworthy — if they had no hidden agenda. Many commentators, however, seem to think that this was what was taking place.

Some community leaders stressed that the demonstration against anti-Semitism was a political operation aimed at demonizing the “yellow vests” to arouse fear of a non-existent peril in order to help Macron’s Republic on the Move party win the European elections in May.

Other people noted that holding a demonstration which excluded the right-wing National Rally party was a move aimed at diverting attention from the real anti-Semitic danger. They also suggested that political parties which support the murderers of Jews were precisely those which deny that radical Islam is a danger.

Television commentators pointed out that the government had largely ignored the “anti-Zionist” dimension of the insults addressed to Finkielkraut. They also noted that the presence among the demonstrators of parties, such as the French Communist Party, and Europe Ecology — which support terrorists who murder Jews — was a shock.

Gilles William Goldnadel, Honorary President of the France-Israel Association, published an article in Le Figaro stating:

“Making the yellow vests take the blame is an act of cowardice [to avoid mentioning] Islamism…. Asking people to march against anti-Semitism while cynically rejecting political parties in the name of a fantasy anti-fascism, but accepting to be at the side of parties that support killers [of Jews] is outrageous… It is Islamism that kills Jews in France. We must not forget it. Since 1945, every drop of Jewish blood that has flowed in France was shed by Islamism“.

MP Meyer Habib said that, “hypocrisy reaches new heights when parties that praise terrorist killers claim to fight against anti-Semitism.” He enumerated in Parliament the list of Jews murdered in France and gave the names of their murderers, to show that all of them were radicalized Muslims. He added that the mobilization should be a mobilization against “radical Islam”, not against “fascists”.

In a television interview, the author Éric Zemmour defined the behavior of Macron and the government as a “masquerade of pyromaniac firefighters“:

“They claim to fight against anti-Semitism by attacking imaginary fascists, and they do it in alliance with leftists who support anti-Semitic murderers, but they do nothing against the Islamization of France, which is the main source today of anti-Semitism in France…

“Macron and the government are accelerating the rise of Islamism by each year hosting in France hundreds of thousands of Muslim immigrants who come from countries where anti-Semitism is omnipresent, and continuing to repeat blindly that Islam is a religion of peace. They actively contribute to the rise of anti-Semitism by barely denouncing Muslim anti-Semitism.” …

The journalist Ivan Rioufol, also using the word “masquerade,” spoke of a fight led by the government against “almost non-existent fascists”, and of the “use of the fight against anti-Semitism” to crush “an almost non-existent anti-Semitism” while sparing “the anti-Semitism that attacks and kills“. …

A documentary film, Under a False Identity, by the journalist Zvi Yehezkeli, showed in detail how some Islamist organizations are preparing to be the “vanguard of the revolt” and using all the opportunities available to take control of France. One of the people he interviewed, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in France, said that the Muslim Brotherhood is gaining ground, and can count on the help of the French government, which subsidizes its activities. …

Back to Macron’s speech at the CRIF dinner: He spoke briefly of “an anti-Semitism based on radical Islamism”, but immediately — and incorrectly: as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said, “Islam is Islam.” — defined “radical Islamism” as a “deformed religion” and not true Islam. He said just as briefly that “anti-Zionism is a form of anti-Semitism”, but that he would not call for a vote on a law to condemn anti-Zionism.

He immediately added that he intends to fight against “other hatreds: hatred against Muslims, racism in all its forms, anti-LGBT racism”. He said that he will ban associations that “feed hatred”. He then named three associations he intends to ban as soon as possible: a very small neo-fascist group, Social Bastion, and two extremely tiny Nazi groups, Blood & Honor Hexagon and Combat 18. He did not name any leftist, anti-fascist or Islamic group, even though they are evidently responsible for much of the violence committed at the end of the demonstrations of “yellow vests” and are easily identifiable: many have websites or street addresses.

Macron stated that “the foreign policy of France is known”, but he failed to elaborate. He could not very well remind a Jewish audience that France is one of the main supporters of the Palestinian Authority, or that he had “regretted” Israel’s decision to freeze the funds used by the Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas to reward murderers of Jews and their families, or that he had worked for months with Germany and the United Kingdom to create a trade mechanism intended to help Iran’s of the mullahs, who often repeat that they intend to wipe Israel off the map.

On February 20, the fifteenth demonstration of the “yellow vests” took place in Paris without major incident. The police used a few explosive grenades but no one was hurt. There were no anti-Semitic attacks. A fully veiled woman, wearing a yellow vest on which anti-Jewish slogans were written, was asked by demonstrators to leave. She was in the company of some bearded men also wearing yellow vests. They all quietly left.

The next day, in the center of Paris, another demonstration was held. Pro-Palestinian advocates assembled to demand the release of “Palestinian political prisoners”. They waved pictures of people who had been convicted of murdering Jews and were now in Israeli prisons, and signs on which were written, “Israel murders Palestinian children”, “Destroy Israeli apartheid” and “Death to Israel”. Macron and the French government do not seem to find the organizers of that demonstration problematic.

So that’s the picture. The civilized world, the post-Enlightenment West, the forgiving, loving, Christian world as it used to be, condemns race-hatred. It will even go so far as to forbid it by law.

It commands:

Thou shalt not hate. Especially thou shalt not hate supremacist, totalitarian, misogynist, homophobic, savagely cruel, murderous Islam.

But thou mayest hate the Jews.