Why We Failed  

By Victor Rosenthal     October 16, 2023

Volumes could, and will be, written about how Israel allowed herself to be raped by Hamas on 7 October 2023. But to focus on the forest rather than the trees, I see two major failures:

The first was the reliance on interconnected automated systems to secure the border, replacing traditional human observers and patrols. In exceptional situations, humans can take initiative and act outside of the system. They can act alone when communication is cut off, and they can recalibrate themselves to entirely new operational environments that were previously unexpected. A military unit can be designed to operate together under centralized control, but individual soldiers can also fight independently if they must.
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October 16, 2023 | 6:22 pm | 2 Comments »

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Students for Justice in Palestine Cheers Hamas Crimes at Colleges Across U.S.  

Daniel Greenfield, 16 Oct 12:25 AM

Students for Justice in Palestine hailed the Hamas rape of girls, murder of babies and kidnapping of children as a “historic win for the Palestinian resistance”.

The national organization which has 200 chapters on campuses across North America put out a ‘toolkit’ which explained that the Jewish victims were “not civilians” and could be freely targeted.

Its poster for a ‘Day of Resistance’ featured an image of the paraglider that Hamas terrorists had used to massacre and rape young Israelis at a music festival.
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October 16, 2023 | 12:11 pm | 4 Comments »

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Twisted, Sadistic, Antisemitic and Orwellian  

By Naomi Kahn, REGAVM– October 15, 2023

In an interview with Mark Austin of Sky News, Dr. Bassem Naim, Director of Political and International Relations for Hamas, insisted today (Wednesday) that no Israeli civilians have been killed in this week’s attack on southern Israel, and claimed that world media had fallen prey to Israeli propaganda. When challenged by Austin, Naim clarified: “We have to redefine what ‘civilian’ means.” Every Jewish Israeli – even the infants that were butchered in their beds – is a combatant, a soldier, and a legitimate target. Every means of eliminating Jewish Israelis is legitimate (including beheading, burning, raping, mutilating) – because every man, woman and child among them is a “settler” (no matter where they live) who “set fire to the Arab village of Huwara,” “a cyber-spy, a soldier not wearing a uniform.”

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October 16, 2023 | 12:07 pm | 1 Comment »

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The United Nations has blood on its hands   

The denial of Israel’s right of self-defense needs to stop now<

By Anne Bayefsky, TOI            Oct 15 2023

The butchery of 1,300 Israelis in a single day and the UN response to the atrocity have made one fact crystal clear. The United Nations has Jewish blood on its hands. Its role as an enabler of Palestinian terrorism must be front and center in the days ahead as its agents seek to deny the Jewish state the existential right of self-defense and fuel a global antisemitic pogrom.

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October 16, 2023 | 6:22 am | Comments »

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Meeting Blinken, Sissi claims Jews never persecuted in Egypt; slams Israeli collective punishment  

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, left, meets with Egypt's President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi at Al-Ittihadiya Palace in Cairo, Sunday Oct. 15, 2023. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, Pool)

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, left, meets with Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi at Al-Ittihadiya Palace in Cairo, Sunday Oct. 15, 2023. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, Pool)<

Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi uses his meeting with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to falsely claim that Egypt never persecuted its now no longer existent Jewish minority.

“You said that you are a Jewish person,” Sissi says to Blinken in remarks in front of reporters. “I am an Egyptian person who grew up next to Jews in Egypt. They have never been subjected to any form of oppression or targeting and it has never happened in our region that Jews were targeted.”

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October 16, 2023 | 3:10 am | 1 Comment »

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Gaza: The tragically belated death of a “conception”  

The political rationale of the Gaza conflict can be expressed in the inexorable logic of an almost mathematical algorithm—studiously ignored by Israel’s policy-making echelons

by Martin Sherman, IDSF October 15, 2023

“The enemy of …conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events”—John Kenneth Galbraith

Saturday 7th of October marked the demise of conventional wisdom and of “respectable” Establishment perceptions regarding the conflict over the Gaza Strip. Decades-old precepts were washed away in a deluge of blood. The idea of Palestinian self-rule (the two-state solution), along with the notion of “managing the conflict” (a.k.a. “mowing the lawn”, or “kicking the can down the road”) were swept away by the gory events of this week.

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October 16, 2023 | 2:09 am | 14 Comments »

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Israel is at War: Hamas’ Barbaric Attack Merits Firm Response  

by Eran Lahav, IDSF OCT 15/23

Israel is at war. This is not a slogan, this is the reality. This is a war on our home.

Unfortunately, Israel is accustomed to battles, wars and military operations – but what we saw this Saturday, October 7, 2023 – is completely different from what we have known until today.Israeli citizens were kidnapped, handcuffed as Kalashnikov canes were attached to their heads, to their bodies – elderly, children, women, entire families, soldiers, young people, party goers – who went like cattle to the slaughter and were kidnapped by the Hamas and Islamic Jihad organizations.The murderous Hamas and Jihad terrorists, entered the kibbutzim and towns, occupied them without warning, murdered people in their homes, shot at people in the middle of a party, burned houses, looted property, separated children from their parents – a terrible massacre that reminded of dark days from immemorial times
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October 16, 2023 | 1:52 am | 2 Comments »

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Calls for Israel to restrain itself are ILLEGAL – with Avi Bell  

Is Israel really violating international law in the war against Hamas? The Biden administration, the EU, the UN, Arab nations and others have begun to wage a campaign to restrain Israel’s efforts to destroy Hamas in Gaza. The campaign is based on allegations that there is a contradiction between Israel’s military operations and the laws of war. To understand the nature of these claims, and what the laws of war require from Israel, as well as from the nations waging this campaign against Israel, Caroline spoke with Prof Avi Bell. Bell is a world expert on the laws of war and international humanitarian law.

October 16, 2023 | 12:37 am | 7 Comments »

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Biden Losing the Balance of Power as Key Middle Eastern Ally Shifts Toward Iran: Report  

Also See:  Blinken has ‘very productive meeting’ with Saudi crown price amid Gaza war crisis regional tour

and Saudi officials meet Abbas in Ramallah

Biden Losing the Balance of Power as Key Middle Eastern Ally Shifts Toward Iran: Report

It wasn’t too long ago that, after the success of former President Donald Trump’s Abraham Accords, we were talking about the previously unheard-of thought of normalizing Saudi-Israeli relations — something which would be a coup for both American and, quite frankly, Joe Biden.Leave it to weakness in the Middle East — particularly in regards to Hamas in the wake of last Saturday’s attack and the ongoing war between the terror group and the Jewish state — to put an end to that.
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October 16, 2023 | 12:03 am | 1 Comment »

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The Proper Objectives of the Campaign in Gaza  

October 15, 2023 by Victor Rosenthal

At this moment, the IDF is poised to begin a ground invasion of Gaza. The objectives of the campaign, however, have not been spelled out with sufficient clarity by the political echelon, other than by saying that Hamas will be eliminated as a military threat and sovereign power in Gaza. The following are my ideas of appropriate short and long-term goals for the IDF.

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October 15, 2023 | 3:57 pm | 13 Comments »

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October 7 and the war for the Middle East – opinion  

Islamist militancy and Iranian state capabilities are complicit in Hamas’s murderous attack.

By JONATHAN SPYER  OCTOBER 14, 2023 15:11

The Hamas attack from Gaza on October 7 and the resultant situation of war reflect the return to center stage in the region of two linked phenomena. These are, firstly, the Iranian project for the destruction of Israel through the prosecution of a long war maintained by client and proxy organizations and directed mainly against Israel’s civilian population, and secondly, the popularity at grassroots level across the region of Islamist and anti-Western politics, and the consequent continued vigor and dominance of Islamist militarized political movements in the Arabic-speaking world. The meeting point between these two processes is what made possible the Hamas offensive.So, to understand what is taking place, it’s worth taking a closer look at each of these phenomena, and seeking to understand the nature of the relationship between them.
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October 15, 2023 | 3:56 pm | 1 Comment »

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Should We Help the Palestinians in Gaza?  

by Alain Destexhe, GATESTONE  

The countries of the European Union are divided over whether to continue aid to Gaza. However, the question of whether it is possible to help the civilian population without strengthening Hamas is not part of the current debate.

  • Most international aid to Gaza is channeled through UNRWA, a UN agency dedicated exclusively to Palestinian refugees and their descendants… Unfortunately, UNRWA’s very existence and modus operandi directly reinforce Hamas. For this international organization, though there are only a handful of surviving refugees from 1948, supposed “refugee status” is passed down from father to son, so there are now around five times as many “refugees” in Gaza as there were originally.
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October 15, 2023 | 3:23 pm | 2 Comments »

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For Israel, Failures Never Learned and Lessons for Today  

October 14, 2023

By Alexander G. Markovsky

As prominent Zionist Max Nordau once observed, “Logic is a Greek art, and Jews can’t tolerate it. The Jew learns not by way of reason but from catastrophes.” Although the circumstances have changed greatly since those words were written, Max Nordau’s wisdom as applied to Israel has not changed.

In 1947, Arab countries rejected a UN plan to partition the British mandate in Palestine into two states. Armed with British weaponry and guided by British officers, Arabs were convinced they could claim the entire territory by military triumph. If not for comrade Stalin, who supplied the Jews with weapons via Czechoslovakia and dispatched hundreds of seasoned Soviet officers and generals of Jewish heritage to Palestine, all of whom played a pivotal role in the formation, organization, and leadership of the Israeli army, including the air force, Israel would not exist.

 

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October 15, 2023 | 3:05 pm | 1 Comment »

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Hamas’s deception—and our self-deception  

Hamas’s deception—and our self-deception

The U.S. and Israel continue to base their policies on the fiction that the Palestinian Authority is willing to coexist with the Jewish state. Opinion.

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(JNS) Last Sunday, senior Hamas terrorist Ali Baraka told the tale of how Hamas duped Israel and the U.S. into complacency.

In an interview with RT (formerly Russia Today), Baraka said, “In the past couple of years, Hamas has adopted a ‘rational’ approach. It did not go into any war and did not join Islamic Jihad in its recent battle, [i.e., its missile assault on Israel in August 2022].

“We made them think Hamas was busy with governing Gaza, and that it wanted to focus on the 2.5 million Palestinians [there] and had abandoned the resistance altogether. All the while, under the table, Hamas was preparing for this big attack.”

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October 15, 2023 | 10:33 am | Comments »

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Blinken Meets with Israeli Crypto Fascists in Effort to Americanize the War, Force 2-State Outcome  

By David Israel , JEWISH PRESS – 28 Tishri 5784 – October 13, 2023

Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday met with ‘Brothers in Arms,’ the crypto-fascist group whose goal has been to topple the Netanyahu government through months of lawless demonstrations and harm to the Israeli public.

The group boasted: “Today we hosted with great pride Anthony Blinken, the US Secretary of State, in our civilian war room at the Exhibition Gardens Expo. We thanked him excitedly for the amazing support of the United States and had the privilege of receiving warm words from him about our contribution to Israel’s civil resilience. In the terrible days we are going through, we were happy to see that our eternal ally, the United States of America, is standing by our side.”

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October 14, 2023 | 6:44 pm | 2 Comments »

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Hoenlein to Newsmax: Unreal Antisemitism So Loud in US  

By Solange Reyner, NEWSMAX    Friday, 13 October 2023 11:03 PM EDT

Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, told Newsmax on Thursday that the levels of antisemitism he’s seeing is “almost unbelievable.”

Unbelievable that “we would face the antisemitism from the left, from the right, from minorities, from Muslim groups, some state-sponsored, but most particularly the frontline on our campuses where we see the most horrendous ideologies being imparted to our youth,” he said during an appearance on “The Record With Greta Van Susteren.”

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October 14, 2023 | 2:59 pm | 2 Comments »

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How the Biden Administration Helped Iran’s Mullahs Try to Fulfill Their Dream of Annihilating Israel  

by Majid Rafizadeh, GATESTONE INSTITUTE  •  October 14, 2023 at 5:00 am

Iran provides roughly $100 million a year to Palestinian terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and $700 million a year to Hezbollah. Pictured: Iran’s “Supreme Leader” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei meets with Hamas leaders Khaled Mashaal (center) and Musa Abu Marzouk (left) in Tehran on February 1, 2009. (Photo by AFP via Getty Images)

  • “Look, it’s not even just this $6 billion, which clearly is going to further enrich Iran. It’s closer to $60 billion. If you look at what the Biden administration has done to help this Islamic terrorist regime in Iran by [stopping enforcement of] sanctions, by lifting restrictions, by allowing Iranian oil to increase by 650% over the last year from 400,000 barrels of oil a day to 3 million barrels of oil a day – all of this has strengthened” the Iranian regime. — Former US Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, Fox News, October 9, 2023.

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October 14, 2023 | 2:50 pm | 1 Comment »

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