The Godfather is a classic in American cinema. The 1972 film won numerous awards including in the Best Picture category. The penultimate scene cemented the script in daring story-telling, as the leading figure, Michael Corleone, set himself as head of the new order.
While Corleone stood in church to be the godfather of a young child being baptised, his hitmen took out the heads of the competing crime families. In doing so, Corleone positioned himself to control the region without challenge.
Perhaps the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia will consider doing something similar to the warlords backed by the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Iran is the leading state sponsor of terrorism, including the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. Each group has caused death and destruction, dismantling any chance for a civilized life for residents and neighbors.
Now, as Iran attempts to stop Saudi Arabia from getting nuclear power from the United States, and establishing an alliance with Israel, it has released its dogs of war to inflict brutality and carnage.
To avert mass destruction and set a better course for the Middle East, the troika of US, Israel and Saudi Arabia could take out the leadership of Hamas in Qatar, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Houthis in Yemen. It would send a clear message to Iran that the US has not left the world to a Russia-China-Iran axis, and avert the deaths of many thousands of civilians throughout the region.
In ‘The Godfather,’ it took a “massacre” to get the families to stop killing each other, and ultimately the heads of the crime syndicates paid the price. As the Middle East prepares for a large scale war, the United States may want to send a clear and unmistakable message to Iran that the period of terrorism in the Middle East is over.
Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY16), representing one of the most Jewish districts in the country, has a running tab of antisemitic and anti-Zionist actions:
Would not sign letter to Department of Education to fight antisemitism at colleges (February 4, 2022)
Original sponsor of resolution calling the founding of Israel a “catastrophe” (May 17, 2022)
Does not recognize discrimination against Jews (March 9, 2023)
Authored letter to President Biden to condition aid to Israel (April 23, 2023)
Voted against the Abraham Accords (April 25, 2023)
Voted against condemning antisemitism, and that Israel isn’t a racist state (July 18, 2023)
Boycotted speech by the Israeli president to a joint session of Congress (July 19, 2023)
Office called Republicans “Nazis” to distract from Bowman pulling fire alarm (October 2, 2023)
Called for a ceasefire between Israel and Gaza without any mention of, or attempt at freeing hostages and bringing Hamas terrorists to justice, nor that Israel has a right to defend itself (October 16, 2023)
Voted against resolution condemning Hamas and supporting Israel (October 25, 2023)
Car in White Plains (NY congressional district 16) on October 25 as vigil for Israeli hostages held a block awayRep. Jamaal Bowman , representing White Plains, voting on October 25 to not stand by Israel
“Present” voters included Pramila Jayapal (WA-07), another member of the far left-wing of the party. Other left-wing extremists who have been critical of Israel like Betty McCollum (D-IL) did vote in favor of the resolution. One Republican, Thomas Massie (R-KY), also voted against the bill, who was not coincidentally the only Republican to not support funding the defensive Iron Dome system for Israel.
The votes of the socialists is not surprising. It is a movement that is trying to dismantle the west and its approach of capitalism, “imperialism” and “colonialism”, wanting to bring back the good old days of the Russian revolution.
In the immediate aftermath of the gruesome Hamas butchery, The World Wide Socialist Website, posted a quote by Leon Trotsky from 1938 on the eve of the Holocaust, “A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains–let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!“
That is the view of socialists. Barbarism is a rightful act by the Palestinians because they fought a war to destroy Jewish “invaders” in 1948 and lost. They support Palestinians taking over Israel, and if it be by blood, rape, fire, beheadings, or other acts of evil, so be it.
The socialist site discussed its disgust at the United States supporting Israel, stating “The World Socialist Web Site condemns the vicious and obscenely hypocritical statements of President Joe Biden and leaders of the European Union denouncing the Palestinian resistance as “terrorism”…. As always, the sympathies of the imperialist powers are with the oppressors. Any manifestation of resistance by the oppressed is greeted with frenzied denunciations. The media ignores the fact that the Israeli government is led by a criminal, whose coalition is dominated by fascistic racists and is engaged in efforts to suppress the constitution.”
It would go on to compare Gazans to Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, and Israelis to Nazis. Blatant antisemitism.
A toxic mix of rabid antisemitism and socialism have penetrated American universities and congress. It is coming for the Jewish State and soon diaspora Jewry. In the end, it will come for the West.
Wafa, the Palestinian Authority’s official state-run news agency, has once again tried to incite 1.8 billion Muslims to fight Jews and the Jewish State.
The Temple Mount has regular visiting hours and Jews have always used it to visit their holiest site. That angers Jordanian and Palestinian Arabs that Jews claim to have rights to the location which Arabs falsely assert is a purely Islamic holy place.
The Wafa article was horrific from its headline to its last sentence:
“JERUSALEM, Wednesday, October 25, 2023 (WAFA) – Dozens of Israeli settlers Wednesday morning stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied Jerusalem, under protection from Israeli occupation police, according to local sources.
Witnesses said scores of settlers entered the Al-Aqsa Mosque in separate groups, where they conducted provocative tours through the courtyards of the mosque, received explanations about the alleged “Jewish Temple,” and performed Talmudic rituals near the Dome of the Rock.
This latest incident adds to the ongoing tensions surrounding Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third most revered site in Islam. The entry of settlers into the compound, backed by Israeli security forces, is often met with condemnation from Palestinian officials and religious authorities.
The Islamic Waqf, the Jordan-run authority in charge of the holy site, has repeatedly called for international intervention to prevent these incursions, which are seen as a direct challenge to the status quo of the holy site and an affront to the sentiments of Muslims worldwide.
Since 2003, the Israeli occupation authorities have been allowing Israeli Jewish settlers into the compound almost on a daily basis, with the exclusion of Friday, the Muslim day of rest and worship.
Israel captured East Jerusalem, where Al-Aqsa Mosque is located, during the Six-Day War in 1967 in a move never recognized by the international community.
Al-Aqsa Mosque is subjected to almost daily incursions by Israeli settlers, except on Saturday and Sunday, which are done under the heavy guard of the Israeli police in an attempt to divide the mosque spatially and temporally between Muslims and Jews.“
Jews visit their holiest location during regular visiting hours and need protection of police to keep Muslims at the site from attacking them. Jews go because it is the location of two Jewish Temples and the physical center of Judaism. The fact that Muslims get upset does not make it a “provocation” but goes to the antisemitism of those Muslims.
The Palestinian Authority is attempting to get 1.8 billion Muslims riled up against Jews at this most dangerous time. It must be condemned clearly and quickly and forced to stop promoting lies and incitement.
ACTION ITEM
Email White House “Get the Palestinian Authority to stop claiming that Jews are desecrating the Al Aqsa Mosque in an attempt to incite 1.8 billion Muslims around the world to attack Jews.
Hamas, the U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization, is seemingly getting some media support from The New York Times.
Just two weeks after the brutal slaughter of 1,400 people in Israel in an unprovoked attack, The Times is softening language around the evil group.
Despite raping women and dragging them by the hair through the streets, cutting the throats of children, shooting old people at bus stops, burning families alive, and kidnapping over 200 people in one of the largest hostage seizures ever, the paper decided to not call the group “terrorists” or even “militants.”
Cover of New York Times on Saturday October 21, 2023
In two articles on the cover page of the paper, the paper referred to “Hamas, the Palestinian group that controls Gaza” and “Hamas, the group that controls the territory.”
It’s as though the Times thinks Hamas is a co-op board.
In 2014, after the terrorist group Boko Haram kidnapped 200 Nigerian girls, the Times was apoplectic. It wrote that Boko Haram was a “ruthless Islamist group” which committed a “horrifying abduction.” And the group didn’t even beheaded anyone.
Israel is still trying to identify the victims of Hamas’s atrocities, with people so dismembered and incinerated beyond identification, that two weeks on, the number of dead and missing is unknown. But the media has moved on to their victims of preference.
As Israel pursues maximum justice for the savagery of Hamas, New York’s liberal paper is distancing the terrorist group from its evil roots and actions. It’s a form of antisemitism in which justice for Jewish victims is being reframed as an unprovoked attack on 2 million helpless and innocent residents of Gaza.
There are several matters fomenting antisemitism at universities. One of them surrounds the topic of “decolonialization” and its impact on Jews on campus.
It is a plain fact that many European countries planted colonies in far away lands. The United Kingdom planted flags in the Americas, South Africa, India and Australia. Portugal took over Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Macau and others. Belgium took the Congo. France had controlled Morocco, Algiers, Tunisia, Senegal, Cameroon and Madagascar. Spain took much of Central and South America while Italy took Libya. It seemed that any European country with a fleet sailed the world from the 15th to 19th century and seized lands and goods.
In the aftermath of the Second World War, European countries left their colonies and those emerging countries had varying degrees of success establishing new functioning governments. Universities established departments devoted to this topic, which analyze how the past 75 years shape events today, such as Brown University connecting the 2011 Arab Spring to “Decolonization, Development and State Building in North Africa.”
Many of the departments and conferences consider how post-colonial state-building left countries vulnerable to autocratic regimes. The issues are typically handled by region, such as Columbia University discussing decolonialization in the Americas in the Latin American Studies department and those in Africa in the Middle East Studies departments. Other schools do much the same.
Things devolve when it comes to Israel.
Many professors in Middle East Studies departments are deeply anti-Israel. They consider the Jewish State to be a colony thrust upon the local Arab population by the United Kingdom and other countries after World War I. They ignore the fact that the UK did not send any Jewish citizens to Palestine nor did the British seize local resources for British use.
Most glaringly, the anti-Israel professors ignore the fact that Jews are indigenous to the land of Israel. The history of Jews and the core of Judaism is in the Jewish holy land.
Those basic truths are not only ignored on university campuses, but a counter-narrative is proffered. For example, Columbia University’s Joseph Massad called the Jews in the Bible “Palestine Hebrews,” ignoring the reality that Arabs did not come to the land en masse until the 7th and 8th centuries.
It’s grossly antisemitic, and ignored by the school administration.
Beyond the cultural appropriation and historical theft, the anti-Israel movement manufactured a lie that Zionism isn’t even Jewish. At a BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) vote at the University of Wisconsin in 2017, a student said “Israel in its inception is not a Jewish idea but a European one,” a principle at the heart of the decolonialization project.
That insane idea is gaining backers. The Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism (ICSZ) is hosting conferences to advance this proposition in universities around the country. According to its “Points of Unity” which people must sign-on to, the number one affirmation is “Zionism is a settler colonial racial project. Like the US, Israel is a settler colonial state. The Institute opposes Zionism and colonialism, and abides by the international, Palestinian-led call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions.”
Its webite goes on that it “aims to support the delinking of the study of Zionism from Jewish Studies, and to reclaim academia and public discourse for the study of Zionism as a political, ideological, and racial and gendered knowledge project, intersecting with Palestine and decolonial studies, critical terrorism studies, settler colonial studies, and related scholarship and activism.”
This group is trying to sever Jews from the Jewish State and Zionism, and place Zionism in the camp of “decolonial studies” and “critical terrorism studies.”
Not surprisingly, this group masks its Jew-hatred under the guise of “academia.” It said that Jews had the October 7 savagery coming to them as part of decolonialization, and was outraged at Jews demanding justice. ICSZ wrote an “open letter to universities and other institutions, demanding they retract their statements endorsing Israeli genocide against Palestinians.” By “genocide”, they meant Israel trying to rescue 200 hostages seized by Hamas, pursue maximum justice for the Satans of Gaza who butchered 1,400 Israelis, and try to return the region to coexistence on either side of the border. Equally upsetting to these evil people at ICSZ, they were “horrified by the ubiquity of messaging from our university administrations that has expressed empathy for Israeli life,” because beheading children and raping women doesn’t deserve “empathy” if the “victims” are Jewish “colonizers.”
This is the state of American academia.
Universities are miseducating students that Jews have no history in the land of Israel and that the Jewish State’s founding was a racist European colonial project. They believe that Israel’s continued existence is an “ongoing Nakba” and Israel must be dismantled “by any means necessary,” which includes the October 7 massacre.
When Joseph Massad of Columbia University wrote about the “start of the Palestinian War of Liberation,” he did not see Arab terrorists hacking children to death and killing the elderly; he saw freedom fighters throwing off the yolk of oppression of Jewish invaders as a moment of “jubilation and awe.”
America’s universities are indoctrinating students in the antisemitic screed of the Hamas Charter, retouched with leftist jingoism to support the slaughter of Jews. And they are pushing the movement to go global. Jews on campuses everywhere have every reason to be terrified.
ACTION ITEM
Demand antisemitic professors and clubs like Students for Justice in Palestine be kicked off campus.
Americans are debating free speech on college campuses, as “resistance” protests have emerged around the country with students supporting the brutal massacre and butchery of 1,400 Jews in Israel. While Jewish students mourned for murdered friends and relatives, they walked passed schoolmates who were celebrating, sitting in class next to classmates who said that their families were thrilled about the slaughter of Jews, and in front a professor who discussed the “start of the Palestinian War of Liberation“, meaning the end of the Jewish State.
University administrators, who want to foster “free speech” allow – and often encourage – the spectacle to go on, knowing that Jews feel threatened. The years of trying to create “safe spaces” for the young people – including calling for disciplinary action for misgendering someone – seemingly had limits.
The AMCHA Initiative has done extensive studies which shows that universities with five or more pro-Israeli boycott professors are more than seven times more likely to have antisemitic incidents on campus than those with fewer. They similarly showed that those with a Students for Justice in Palestine chapter on campus are at least five times more likely to intimidate and harass Jewish students.
The KKK, the most infamous hate group in the United States, despises Jews. And Blacks. And other minorities.
The hate group had been sidelined for years and thought it would be able to make a breakthrough during the Trump administration. To its disappointment, it did not have the money to influence universities the way Qatar, Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries did in pouring billions of dollars onto campuses to build the anti-Zionist and antisemitic infrastructure.
But with a few student signatures and a single university professor with tenure, the KKK can open a chapter on campus. It can spout its false and hate-filled bile. And the university presidents will presumably remain silent, just as they have about SJP.
The war on college campuses is claiming its Jews, led by anti-Zionist groups like SJP. The KKK is right behind and will come for others.
Demand universities fire antisemitic professors like Columbia’s Joseph Massad, and kick Students for Justice in Palestine off of campus
James Zogby, President of the Arab American Institute spoke at the United Nations on June 27, 2023 and bemoaned the “tragic deformity in Palestinian political culture” which has led Palestinians to reject moderate leadership and embrace terrorism. While he blamed the situation on Israelis, he was appalled at how Palestinians are overwhelmingly in favor of violence.
And that was before Palestinian Arabs stormed into Israel and burned people to death on October 7, 2023. They decapitated babies and soldiers. Raped women and slaughtered the elderly. A total of 1,300 people, killed by hand, roughly 13 times the magnitude of 9/11 attacks for small Israel. After the massacre, Zogby said that he was confident that a new Hamas 2.0 would replace the current one after Israel destroys Gaza, with the newest incarnation also ready for violence.
The toxic Palestinian desire to destroy the Jewish State is seemingly a permanent fixture; the only variable is its capabilities to inflict damage.
Which is the focus of Israel’s mission: to save 200 hostages and bring Hamas to justice to limit the group’s capabilities to do more harm. It is not trying to win the hearts of local Arabs; it is simply trying to bring innocent people back to their families and ensure that such terrorist attacks cannot be repeated for the foreseeable future.
Older people in the United States understand this. According to a CNN/SSRS poll, 81% of Americans over 65 years old think Israel is fully justified in its response. The support drops with age, with 56% of 50-to-64-year-olds, 44% of 35-to-49-year-olds and 27% of 18-to-34-year-olds supporting Israel’s actions.
That curve of support is steeper than existed before the gruesome Arab massacre. According to Pew in July 2022, 69% of Americans over 65 had a favorable view of Israel, while the figures dropped to 60%, 49% and 41% for the lower age bands.
Older Americans, who likely remember the heinous attacks of 9/11/01, had GREATER support for Israel after the attacks, fully backing the bombardment of Gaza. The groups between 35 and 64 years old saw a modest decline in support. The youngest cohort, who grew up with the wars against terror but without experiencing the actual trauma of terrorism, had a significant drop in support for Israeli actions.
It is curious. America’s youth is more liberal than older people, but still don’t support the much more liberal Jewish State over the radical Islamist Gaza Strip. Perhaps because youth read liberal papers like The New York Times which states over-and-again that Israel is led by “an extreme right-wing government” and never states that Gaza is ruled by a radical jihadi antisemitic terrorist group. Perhaps the youth read opinion pieces by Nicholas Kristof who lies that Gazans want a more moderate leadership, when even James Zogby acknowledges that Palestinians have become disgustingly blood-thirsty.
In other words, is the youth miseducated by a biased media?
America’s youth staged protests in main squares in major cities supporting Hamas in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas slaughter. They continue to chant on college campuses to end the Jewish State, and published letters that they proudly stand with the Palestinians who committed terrorist attacks. They are deliberately making young Jews on campus fear for their safety, as administrations are loathe to fight the horde.
They didn’t do any of this related to Russia/Ukraine, USA/Afghanistan, Armenia/Azerbaijan or any other conflict.
Those are not the actions of young adults poorly educated but indoctrinated.
James Zogby, a leader in Arab American community was saddened to admit that Hamas carried out “horrific murders” as part of the “tragic deformity of Palestinian culture,” but understood the Arabs’ goal of taking over the Jewish State. The situation of America’s 18 to 34 year-olds aligning with the killers of Jews – without a personal stake in the fight – is even more horrific.
The West is raising a dangerous generation which cannot differentiate between good and evil through their class-prism which parses everyone into the binary of minority/oppressed/victim/colonized and majority/oppressor/attacker/imperialist. That they lump the most persecuted, smallest minority group – Jews – into the camp of the oppressor, adds the stench of antisemitism to what may become known as America’s Worst Generation.
The United Nations Security Council tried to get a resolution passed last night to bring about a ceasefire in Gaza. The Russian resolution was supported by China, United Arab Emirates, Mozambique and Gabon for a total of five, while four opposed (the United States, Britain, France and Japan) and six abstained (Albania, Brazil, Ecuador, Ghana, Malta and Switzerland). Nine votes are needed to pass a UNSC resolution so the matter failed.
Linda Thomas Greenfield, the US Ambassador to the UN was appalled that the resolution did not even mention Hamas by name, let alone condemn it. In summarizing her remarks the UN wrote that the October 7 “acts brought to mind the heinous atrocities by Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), also known as Da’esh, and it is these acts by Hamas that led to the dire humanitarian crisis in Gaza, she said, stressing: “Civilians should not suffer for these atrocities, and it is the Council’s responsibility to address the crisis, unequivocally condemn Hamas and support Israel’s right to self-defence under the Charter of the United Nations.” However, the proposed resolution does not meet these conditions, by failing to mention Hamas, she said, calling this “outrageous and indefensible”. The United States could not vote for a resolution that dishonours victims. It is Hamas that set the crisis in motion, she said, stressing that members cannot allow the Council to shift the blame to Israel.“
US Ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield
Albania, which abstained, said that “Albania abstained from the draft resolution presented by Russia because the text failed to adequately address all critical issues, including the condemnation of terrorist attacks by Hamas.”
It is obvious and essential to call out and name and condemn Hamas. Observers may question whether the omission was done to protect Hamas or give countries an easy reason to reject the resolution so Israel can bring Hamas to justice.
But this is familiar territory. In December 2018, the UN General Assembly tried to pass “Activities of Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza” (document A/73/L.42). While the text gained plurality support in a recorded vote of 87 in favour to 57 against, with 33 abstentions, it failed to meet the two-thirds adoption requirement. As summarized by the UN “The text would have had the Assembly demand that Hamas and other militant actors, including Palestinian Islamic Jihad, cease all provocative actions and violent activity. It would have also encouraged tangible steps towards intra‑Palestinian reconciliation, including in support of the Egypt’s mediation effort.”
The United Nations has never in its history condemned Hamas.
Evil to condemn (Boko Haram, al Shabab, Hezbollah)
Evil to tolerate (governments of Syria and Saudi Arabia)
Evil to ignore (Hamas)
He went to war with the first category, tried to help other forces get rid of the second, considered it realpolitik in needing to deal with the third group and thought the fourth was other people’s problem.
That is essentially a recap of the world regarding placing Hamas in the right category. Whether the group is evil and a terrorist group is not really relevant for many. Hamas speaks for local Palestinians who want to destroy the Jewish State and move into that thriving land where grandparents used to live.
Western countries are demanding that the world call out and condemn Hamas (category 2 at a minimum) and ideally support Israel, which has a category 1 score for the group. But that will not happen because those countries are not looking for a two state solution but a single Palestine solution, and Hamas is the tip of the spear (it’s a category 3 or 4 at best, and may be a force for good).
Or maybe for them it’s just theater, as Israel is so unique that there is unlikely to be spillover into their countries.
In an intense scene from Game of Thrones (The Mountain versus The Red Viper S4E8), a man came back to avenge the rape of his sister and murder of her children. He returned to a place he despised to demand a confession from the killer and bring quick justice for the heinous crimes. “Say her name!” he demanded as they fought to a common death, as spectators looked on. So it is with Israel’s return to Gaza which it left in 2005, to reclaim hostages and bring Hamas to maximum justice.
There is no debate about the atrocities committed by Hamas, they are plain facts. When people and governments refuse to call it out, they are not simply siding with those who want to see the end of the Jewish State; they are awaiting the theater of Jews and Arabs slaughtering each other over the narrow strip of land far from their shores.
If and when the United Nations can call out the evil of Hamas, thousands of lives in the region will be saved, and the terrorist group will be on a path for elimination. I am not optimistic.
The New York Times publishes a large “Opinion” section each Sunday which typically features a dozen opinions which tilt to its far-left readership. On occasion, it publishes center and right perspectives to provide readers a wider view of a situation.
In the aftermath of the worst atrocities committed against Jews since the Holocaust, the Times opted to serve up exclusively left-wing opinions which essentially offered that Palestinians really aren’t at fault for the October 7 atrocities, and even if they were somewhat to blame for the massacre, you cannot take it out on them.
The New York Times opinion section on October 15, 2023
Using Peter Beinart, an anti-Zionist as the main feature on the cover to discuss “How did we get here and how do we get out of here?” was setting the stage for a pile of bile. Another contributor listed on top of the front page was “Nicholas Kristof on how bombing civilians promotes extremism” was certainly going to be a blame-the-victim spectacle.
All this, while Israelis were still trying to identify the dead who were burned to death and hacked to pieces.
There were seven articles in all. All gave the same message of “why can’t we all just get along?” and blamed religious radicals in Israel and Palestinian territories for all the death and hatred. But especially the Israelis. As the stronger party, calling them out serves the progressive idols.
These are opinion pages, so people can repeat each other in their echo chamber to make them feel as if their opinions have miraculously transformed into facts all they want.
Alas, it is not so.
As a stark example, take one paragraph from Kristoff’s piece “What Does Destroying Gaza Solve?” He decided to veer from enlightened-snobbery opinion to give statistics from a Palestinian poll. He lied outright when he wrote:
“Gazans voted in Hamas in 2006 but have a mixed view of it, with 70 percent saying in a July poll that they would like Hamas to hand over administration of the territory to the much more moderate Palestinian Authority. Some 62 percent of people in Gaza said this summer they wanted to continue the ceasefire with Israel.”
Sounds like Gazans have moderated, right? It’s a total fabrication.
79% of Gazans are in favor of forming new “armed groups such as the ‘Lions’ Den’ and the ‘Jenin Battalion,’ which do not take orders from the PA and are not part of the PA security services”
55% of Gazans believe that they will “recover Palestine”, meaning take over all of Israel
78% of Hamas-supporters believe Israel won’t exist in 25 years
If presidential elections were held today, Hamas’s Ismail Haniyeh would win with 65% of the vote in Gaza
“Level of satisfaction with the performance of president Abbas stands at 17% and dissatisfaction at 80%…. Moreover, a vast majority of 80% of the public wants president Abbas to resign while only 16% want him to remain in office.”
“31% say Hamas is most deserving of representing and leading the Palestinian people while 21% think Fatah under president Abbas is the most deserving”
“63% say the PA is a burden on the Palestinian people”
“Only 28% support the two-state solution”
“53% support a return to an armed intifada”
“52% believe that armed action is the best way to end occupation”
Does that sound like a region that wants to hand administration over to the Palestinian Authority or supports a ceasefire? That has moved away from armed conflict and wants to pursue coexistence with Israel?
Even an opinion piece needs fact-checking when completely false data is presented to bolster the opinion, and the Times is either incompetent or complicit in lying about Gazans actual evil intentions.
The Beinart piece was a work of inversion of cause-and-effect. He blamed the frustration of Gazans being under blockade for causing their violence, rather than Gazans feeling that all of Israel is rightfully theirs and want to kick out the “colonial invader” Jews.
The blockade of Gaza started in 2007 when Hamas killed members of Fatah and seized the area. The formation of Hamas, with its antisemitic genocidal charter was written in 1988, roughly twenty years earlier. There’s a clear cause-and-effect and getting the sweet cover picture promotion by the Times doesn’t change facts.
To answer the question posed on the cover “how do we get out of here?” requires being honest about the situation to produce possible solutions. The New York Times believes that openly lying to its readership about a peaceful Gazan population under the domination of a handful of radical Islamists will produce a solution. It will not. The media lies will only produce more anger against Israel, especially as civilians in Gaza die in Israel’s attempt to save hostages, bring the Hamas perpetrators to justice, and end the threat posed from Gazan terrorist enclave.
ACTION ITEM
Write to The New York Times letters@nytimes.com: “The Kristof statistics about Gazans favoring the Palestinian Authority and a ceasefire are complete lies as shown in the June PCPSR poll.”
October 7, 2023 will be marked in Israeli and Jewish history as one of the most horrible days in modern times. Not since the Holocaust had such Jews experienced such savagery.
It would be hard to understand that from looking at pictures in The New York Times coverage of the Hamas massacre.
The attack was featured on the front page as well as in two other pages with many color pictures.
Front page of NY Times on October 8, 2023
Four pictures were featured under the headline “Palestinian Militants Stage Attack On Israel.” The four pictures included two of Palestinians attacking Israel, one with rockets and another with a bulldozer ripping down a fence. The other had an Israeli soldier walking past “bodies of Israelis killed by militants in the city of Sderot,” which gave no clarity as to whether the Israelis were soldiers, like the one standing in the picture, or civilians. The last picture had people in Gaza carrying “the body of a slain militant.”
From the pictures on the cover, one would imagine a battle between armed opponents, Palestinian militants and the Israeli army.
Page 12 would build on this theme.
Page 12 of The New York Times on October 8, 2023
Three small pictures on the top of the page show missile strikes and debris. One shows an Israeli town being hit and two pictures show Gaza being struck. The large picture in the center of the page has an Israeli woman, shown from the back, running for cover from a “rocket siren”, and the bottom picture has young Palestinian Arabs looking up at the sky from the “sound of airstrikes.”
The picture coverage started to move to civilians, with the war being a battle from the skies.
Page 13 of NY Times on October 8, 2023
The final page of coverage continued with the theme of rocket fire, with a large picture on top showing a strike in Gaza, then a small picture of a house in Israel with damage. Below the fold was an Israeli family running from “a site that was hit by a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip.”
This pictorial narrative is utterly and completely disgraceful.
Well over 1,000 Palestinian terrorists stormed into Israel and slaughtered over 1,000 people. They set fire to homes and burned people alive. They shot up people in the streets and in their beds. The raped women and dragged them through the streets. The Arabs chopped the heads off babies and soldiers.
It was a vicious slaughter committed by people in close proximity, mostly of armed Hamas terrorists against civilians.
All unprovoked, in an attack on the Jewish Sabbath and holiday of Simchat Torah.
The New York Times attempt at showing a similar number of pictures of damage from rockets in both Israel and Gaza right after the massacre distorts the entire narrative of the grotesque slaughter of Jewish families and young people, to warrant being called antisemitic and libelous.
First One Through 