Media outlets will discuss the roughly 600,000 people in Syria who were killed in the civil war and the millions of people who were internally displaced. They will recount how Syrian President Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons on his own civilian population. They may even trot out videos of London-educated Asma al-Assad, Bashar’s wife, on how she stood by her husband.
I would like to share one name: Hamza al-Khateeb, a 13-year old boy taken by Syrian forces in April 2011, whose corpse was returned to his family a month later.
Here is the story as relayed on May 31, 2011 by Al Jazeera:
In the hands of President Bashar al-Assad’s security forces, however, Hamza found no such compassion, his humanity degraded to nothing more than a lump of flesh to beat, burn, torture and defile, until the screaming stopped at last.
Arrested during a protest in Saida, 10km east of Daraa, on April 29, Hamza’s body was returned to his family on Tuesday 24th May, horribly mutilated.
The child had spent nearly a month in the custody of Syrian security, and when they finally returned his corpse it bore the scars of brutal torture: Lacerations, bruises and burns to his feet, elbows, face and knees, consistent with the use of electric shock devices and of being whipped with cable, both techniques of torture documented by Human Rights Watch as being used in Syrian prisons during the bloody three-month crackdown on protestors.
Hamza’s eyes were swollen and black and there were identical bullet wounds where he had apparently been shot through both arms, the bullets tearing a hole in his sides and lodging in his belly.
On Hamza’s chest was a deep, dark burn mark. His neck was broken and his penis cut off.
Hamza al-Khateeb, 13 year old boy in Syria tortured by Syrian forces
The scale and savagery of the attacks in the Middle East are sometimes reduced to numbers such as the million who were killed in the Iran-Iraq war. As Syria falls, it is worth remembering a single soul who was brutally maimed and killed to comprehend the deep moral depravity that permeates – and must be expunged from – the region.
Iran and its associates have long referred to the United States and Israel as “Great Satan” and “Little Satan”, respectively. The jihadi extremists positioned themselves as the “axis of resistance” against western influence in what they perceive to be a purely Islamic Middle East.
The leading edge of the warmongering jihadists are rapidly fading.
Hamas, the Popular Islamic Palestinian Arab Terrorist Group
Hamas has been listed by the United States as a foreign terrorist group (FTO) since the US began the list in 1997. The Palestinian Arab group which ran Gaza and has a majority position in the Palestinian parliament since 2006, has the most antisemitic foundational charter of any country. It is sworn to the destruction of Israel.
Hamas invaded the Jewish State on October 7, 2023 and slaughtered 1,200 people and took over 250 hostages. In Israel’s response to the assault, it has decimated Hamas’s leadership including Yahya Sinwar, Ismail Haniyeh and Mohammed Deif. Hamas’s arsenal and tunnel infrastructure has virtually been eliminated and thousands of its members are either dead or in Israeli jails.
Hezbollah in Lebanon
Hezbollah, like Hamas, is sponsored by Iran. The Lebanese-based US FTO launched an attack on Israel on October 8, and Israel began responding more aggressively over the past few months. During this time, Israel killed much of Hezbollah’s leadership including Hassan Nasrallah, Ali Karaki, Ibrahim Qubaisi, Fuad Shukr, Ahmed Mahmud Wahbi and Ibrahim Aqil.
After Israel incapacitated much of Hezbollah’s fighting force in southern Lebanon, the group accepted a ceasefire agreement. Israel hopes that the government of Lebanon will assume military control of its territory, expunge Hezbollah from parliament and emerge from decades of being a failed state.
Hamas and Hezbollah flags, under foot
Syria
The Iranian-backed government of Bashar al-Assad has overseen a brutal civil war which has left over 600,000 dead and millions displaced since 2011. Since Hezbollah’s ceasefire, Syrian resistance forces have overtaken many of the large cities of western Syria and are closing in on Damascus. It is possible that Assad’s regime may fall as Russia is too weakened by its war with Ukraine, and Iran is too vulnerable to extend resources to its proxy.
Islamic Republic of Iran
The leading state sponsor of terrorism is fully exposed after Israel launched a massive air strike in late October. While Israel has not followed up with additional attacks to remove the Iranian nuclear weapons program at this time, Iran has pulled back on its attacks against Israel, out of fear of being highly vulnerable.
What began as a massive war of Iran and its proxies to eradicate the Jewish State and prevent its integration with Sunni Arab countries including the UAE and Saudi Arabia, is becoming a rout of the jihadi regimes. The “axis of resistance” is vanishing into the “axis of nonexistence.”
It remains to be seen if the vanquished jihadists will repeat the “three Nos” slogan from 1967, or consider accepting the basic human rights and dignity of the Jewish State. Unlike 57 years ago, the incoming US president and Saudi Arabia will be important factors in shaping the contours of the regional relationships into the future.
Yet no one seems to give a lick about 40,000 women and children who are rotting in camps in Syria, because of their familial ties to ISIS.
Children gather at the al-Hol camp, which houses families of ISIS members, in Syria’s Hasakeh province in May 2021. (photo: Baderkhan Ahmad / AP file)
Over 40,000 people live in the al-Hol and Roj detention centers in northeast Syria, of which 62% are children. Almost all of the others are women in what is described as “one big prison.” They hail from 60 different countries (mostly Iraq and Syria) but their governments have been slow to repatriate them because of their ties to ISIS, and of how they might be perceived upon returning home.
While ISIS was defeated in Iraq on December 9, 2017, the group continues its attacks, with over 150 in the first half of 2024. As such, the women and children of ISIS fighters continue to find themselves in limbo FOR THE PAST SEVEN YEARS.
Al Hol Detention camp in northeastern Syria houses roughly 40,000 women and children for several years
The crux of the problem is that many of the women and children share the ideology of their ISIS relatives, as conveyed in the CNN report below. It has made the situation complicated for countries like France to repatriate these women and children for fear that they will foment terrorism back home.
In May 2022, France repatriated 51 women and children. In October 2022 the country brought back another 55 and in April 2023, another 35. It has been an extremely slow process. Upon arrival in France, minors were handed over to child care services while the adults were handed over to the relevant judicial authorities, as joining ISIS is considered a criminal act.
Some countries, like the United Kingdom and Denmark, have revoked the citizenship of people who went to fight with ISIS. Those countries have left people to rot in the detention camps for years.
Beyond the ISIS war, western countries have expelled hundreds of non-citizens for expressing extremist ideology, and stripped citizenship of women and children affiliated with terrorists. All in the name of ensuring the protection and security of their country.
While the UK, France, Denmark and other western countries took such actions, they voted for a UN resolution for Israel to “repatriate” and to “exert efforts toward the implementation of paragraph 11 of General Assembly resolution 194 (III)” which calls for moving millions of Arab descendants of the 1948/9 Arab-Israeli war INTO ISRAEL, even though those Arabs have never lived in nor have citizenship in Israel.
And the western countries did so in the middle of Hamas’s genocidal war to eradicate the Jewish State.
Western countries prioritize national security over the rights of women and children tied to radical jihadists, but simultaneously call for Israel to admit millions of radical jihadists while it is at war against those same people. It is worse than hypocrisy; it is an attempt to sacrifice Jews to the angry jihadi gods to save themselves.
There have been many articles about about the women and children in Gaza who have died in the Iranian proxies- Israel war, which began when Hamas invaded Israel and slaughtered 1,200 people. The BBC quoted the United Nations which said nearly 70% of the Gazan dead were women and children over the period November 2023 to April 2024 (44% children and 26% women). The report concluded that there was “an apparent indifference to the death of civilians and the impact of the means and methods of warfare,” sharply criticizing Israel’s war effort.
What the report does not discuss is the demographic situation in Gaza, where the vast majority of people are women and children.
Children under 14 years old make up 38.8% of the population according to the CIA World Factbook, and there are slightly more men than women. According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 47% of Gaza is under 18 years old, meaning roughly 8% of the population is between 15 and 18, and half of that figure would be fighting age males.
Taken together, it means that between 26% and 30% of the Gaza population are men of fighting age, and therefore, 70 to 74% would be considered non-combatants, if one were to assume that no women participate in the fighting.
Applying the sub-70% figure cited by the UN over the first six months of the war to the demographic data shows that there were slightly FEWER non-combatants killed than random probability would imagine (44% less than 47% children, and 26% women less than 27% in region).
More recent data published by Al Jazeera as of December 3, 2024, claims that 44,532 Gazans have died in the war of which 17,492 (39.3%) are children. As 47% of Gaza’s population is under 18, the much lower 39% figure would suggest that Israel’s war effort is having fewer bystanders killed as the battles continue. As the 39.3% statistics include the first six months of the war when 44% of the dead were children according to the UN, it would imply that since April 2024, 38.2% of those killed in Gaza were under 18, significantly lower than the 47% of the population.
Beyond the raw statistics are other factors.
Gaza’s military is fighting underground and placed its women and children in the front line of fire. One would therefore assume that a much greater percentage of those killed would be women and children. The fact that the figures are lower than the demographic composition showcases Israel’s effort to minimize harm and target combatants.
Further, the figures do not distinguish between women and children bystanders from family members of terrorists. It is likely that a great number of the women and children were killed alongside terrorist family members.
The statistics of Gaza’s dead as provided by the terrorist group Hamas may show a significant number of women and children but it also shows that Israel is using efforts to minimize casualties among civilians.
The United Nations General Assembly passed one of the most anti-Israel resolutions in its history on December 3, 2024. Titled “Peaceful settlement of the Question of Palestine,” drafted on November 25, it demands that Israel surrender to every Palestinian Arab demand, including giving up every inch of land that Israel recaptured in its defensive June 1967 war, removing all Jews from those lands to recreate the ethnically-cleansed situation advanced by the Jordanian army in the 1948/9 war, and to settle millions of Palestinian Arabs who never lived in Israel, into Israel.
The resolution passed with 157 states in favor, eight against (Argentina, Hungary, Israel, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea and the U.S.) and seven abstentions (Cameroon, Czech Republic, Ecuador, Georgia, Paraguay, Ukraine and Uruguay).
Where was Australia, Canada, France, Germany and the United Kingdom in rejecting this horribly biased resolution? Even though votes at the General Assembly hold no legal weight, the antisemitic vote amidst the global wave of antisemitism is both revolting and frightening.
And the resolution IS ANTI-JEWISH.
Section 7 demands that Israel “evacuate all settlers from the Occupied Palestinian territory” and stop “modifying the demographic composition of any parts of the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem.” That’s a direct call to remove Jews – and only Jews – from all lands east of the 1949 Armistice Lines (E49AL) including Judaism’s holiest location of the Old City of Jerusalem.
“Settlers” means Jews – and only Jews – at the UN.
“Demographic composition” means the presence of Jews – and only Jews – at the UN.
The paltry number of Jews in the world are concentrated in a handful of countries today. Israel and the United States account for roughly 85% of global Jewry, but significant numbers live in France (453,000), Canada (391,000), UK (290,000), Germany (116,000) and Australia (113,000). These countries are seeing a toxic tsunami of Jew hatred run through the streets over the past year, and the governments are now blessing the idea that Jews should be banned from certain lands and stripped of basic human rights, even in their holy land.
The UN has moved passed the “Zionism is racism” resolution of the 1970s and sanctioned Jew hatred. If Jews can be confined to certain locations and banned from others in the Jewish holy land, it stands to reason that they can easily be placed into ghettoes and denied rights everywhere else.
Israel may be winning the regional war militarily, but global Jewry is losing basic human rights in the process.
The United Nations marks November 29 of each year as the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, a strange choice of dates since it was on that day in 1947 that the UN General Assembly voted to divide the region of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, which the regional Muslims adamantly rejected and launched a war to ethnically cleanse the land of Jews in the shadow of the Holocaust.
The Muslim Arabs lost the 1948/9 war but still sought to destroy the new Jewish State. The various armies assembled again in 1967 in a genocidal effort to drive the Jews into the Mediterranean Sea. Once again the jihadists failed in their quest and lost even more land to the Jews.
On October 7, 2023, local genocidal jihadists in Gaza came for the Jews again and killed 1,200 people and took over 250 hostages. Other regional actors immediately followed, including from the West Bank, Lebanon, Iran and Yemen. As of this writing, they too have failed, and the Israeli Defense Forces has leveled much of Gaza in seeking justice for the estimated 6,000 Gazans who took part in the October 7 massacre, and to rescue the Israeli hostages.
As member states gathered at the United Nations to mark the November 29 anniversary amidst the bloody backdrop in 2024, the Palestinian Authority made clear that it continues to reject a Jewish State in the region, calling all of Israel an “illegal occupation” and cemented this moment to the major wars of 1948/9 and 1967.
Riyad Mansour, Permanent Observer for the State of Palestine read a statement from PA President Mahmoud Abbas at the UN (39:35) where he said that “more than 150,000 casualties – the majority of them being children, women and the elderly – killed and maimed by the Israeli Occupying Forces who are deliberately and systematically targeting civilians in a repetition of what happened in the ‘Nakba’ of 1948 and the tragedy of 1967, aimed at displacing our people and seizing their lands and resources.”
Mansour made clear that Palestinians view all of Israel to be occupied for “76 years”, back to the founding of the modern State of Israel, and that their quest to seize the land will never stop.
This gross inversion of history attempts to make the genocidal jihadists victims rather than perpetrators of crimes against humanity. That noxious libel is being spouted by the more “moderate” Palestinian leadership in public at the United Nations.
At the conclusion of Mansour’s comments, the chair of the committee expressed (52:10) “the committee’s full support to your quest to recover your legitimate rights.”
The United Nations has been consistent in seeking an Arab state since 1947. Local jihadists have been consistent that they oppose a Jewish State on what they consider purely “Arab land.” And the UN has been consistent in not condemning the jihadists in their quest.
And now even blessing it.
Whether Israel will take additional territory in this defensive war just as they did in 1948 and 1967 remains to be seen. What is abundantly clear is that the local Arabs are ready, willing and able to launch more ‘Nakbas’ in a gross public display of sadism and masochism.
UNRWA, the United Nations agency that uniquely is for Palestinian refugees (all of the world’s other refugees are handles by UNHCR) and that is uniquely only staffed by members of that group (99% of UNRWA employees are local Palestinians while UNHCR is staffed by UN employees hailing from many countries), decided to suspend its aid delivery activities in Gaza. It blamed the suspension on “criminal activity” and the inability to protect the “humanitarians” who deliver aid.
UNRWA’s European masks for the Gazan group do not call out that the “criminal activity” is from local Palestinian Arab gangs, just as they do not mention that UNRWA Gaza principally consists of Hamas and Islamic Jihad members, allies and family members. Instead, the “humanitarian” group blames Israel for the suspension of activity.
For over a year, Israel has been stating that much of the flow of goods by UNRWA has gone to Hamas fighters, and now that the terrorist group has lost control of the region, by various armed gangs. Rather than acknowledge that the UN agency was corrupt at the outset and ineffective now, the UN is asking Israel to prop up the corrupt regime. Instead of closing UNRWA in Gaza and handing full control to Israel, the UN is asking Israel to protect the quasi-terrorist agency in its mission of fomenting perpetual Arab hatred of Jews.
The head of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, insists on the farce. He calls UNRWA “irreplaceable” even though the institution is fundamentally flawed. Now that it is exposed as not only corrupt but incapacitated, the global agency once again dutifully follows its blinders and focuses blame on Israel.
UNRWA teaches its students to hate and kill Jews. Its mission is to destroy the Jewish State and relocate millions of Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) into Israel. It funnels billions of dollars of global charity to terrorists and their enablers. And now that a severely weakened Hamas cannot coordinate with its joint venture partners inside UNRWA, the UN has lashed out at its nemesis, Israel.
As the antisemitic genocidal jihadist group of Hamas disintegrates, unsurprisingly, so does Gazan UNRWA. Amidst the war which Hamas started, its joint venture partner of the United Nations has the vulgar chutzpah to now ask Israel to protect and assist the group.
It is time for the civilized world to demand UNRWA be shut down.
The New York Times, mouthpiece for progressive dreams rather than facts, once again made up news that the Islamic Republic of Iran is taking a “conciliatory tone” in the Middle East and “that it wants less confrontation,” even after the Islamic Republic’s leaders blast Israel.
Throughout the article, the Times claimed that Iran had a “shift in tone” and sought to “defuse tensions” in “recent diplomacy.” It concluded that “Without a doubt, among senior officials and ordinary people, there is a real desire to end the tensions with the West and get along…. Cooperation with the West is not viewed as a defeat.”
These comments stand in sharp contrast to those published by Hezbollah’s Al Manar which led its article with “Resistance Unbreakable: Imam Khamenei Declares Israel’s Doom, Al Aqsa Storm Unstoppable.”
The article quoted from the “Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Imam Sayyed Ali Khamenei” who said that “regional resistance movements cannot be quelled” and that the “Zionist regime is destined for departure.” The article said that “Hezbolah hailed the operation’s [war against Israel] success” as did Hamas.
Al Manar concluded with a quote from the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei who said that “the result of the warmongering and crimes committed by the Zionist regime, fully supported by the United States… is the martyrdom of 60,000 innocent people,” inflaming the jihadi readers to seek retribution against the West.
The editors of the Times do not want the United States or Israel to go to war remove the threat of Iranian nuclear weapons, so openly lie to its readership that Iran is a peaceful actor in the region and not the leading state sponsor of terrorism. It is publishing boldface and dangerous lies.
It begs the questions of whether The New York Times is a tool of Iran.
On November 5, 2024, New York’s 15th Congressional District once again elected Ritchie Torres to serve in Congress. With broad support from the Latin, Black and Jewish communities in the area, the consensus candidate was a shoe-in.
In the weeks following the sweep of Republicans to the Executive Office, Senate and House, Torres attacked the far-left of the Democratic Party for foolishly advocating for non-common sense positions. He has taken particular aim at New York’s Governor Kathy Hochul, a fellow Democrat whom he seems intent on challenging in the Democratic primary of 2026.
On November 21, Torres said there was a “poverty of governance in New York” as well as a “leadership crisis.” The next day he called Hochul “the new Joe Biden” who is so clueless about “her vulnerabilities as a Democratic nominee,” that allowing the Democratic machine to prop her up will “give us a Republican Governor in 2026.”
Torres has not officially declared he will run for state Governor but his attacks on a fellow Democrat are not subtle. The following week he called Hochul a liar and hypocrite.
While Torres represents the poorest district in the United States, he has built strong relationships with many wealthier sponsors including Jews and pro-Israel advocates who appreciate his strong fight against antisemitism and supporters of Hamas. Torres should be able to stage a strong fight against Hochul, if he can build support around New York State.
The next question becomes who is best positioned to take his seat in Washington, D.C. should Torres move on to Albany. The likely contenders are former Congressmen Jamaal Bowman and Mondaire Jones.
Bowman has strong roots in the Bronx. He defeated Eliot Engel in the Democratic primary in 2020 and then rapidly lost hold of the district when new lines were drawn which replaced much of the Bronx with lower Westchester County. While Bowman lost in his 2024 Democratic primary, he faired well in Co-op City in the Bronx.
Jones has bounced around a few districts after his seat in Rockland and Westchester counties were redrawn. After a single term in 2020, he failed in his attempted run for office in lower Manhattan in 2022, and then again running in 2024 for the lower Hudson Valley in NY’s 17th district. He would need to build a new strong ground team to take on Bowman in his comfortable turf.
Or a newcomer could enter the race, perhaps someone Hispanic as the district is 53% Hispanic and 31% Black.
Will the Democratic Party rally to the disgraced Bowman who was censured for pulling a fire alarm, putting many lives at risk? For chanting to a crowd that there were no rapes of Jewish women by Palestinian Arabs on October 7, 2023, in a #DontBelieveJewish Women moment?
The Jewish community that invested so much in Torres and wants to see him succeed in his political aspirations will be outraged and appalled if Bowman comes back to Congress to represent them. It must therefore work with the Democratic power brokers, Mondaire Jones or another rising candidate from the Bronx immediately, to prevent the return of the toxic squad.
Over the last few days, anti-Israel Canadians smashed storefronts and burned cars on the streets of Montreal. An owner of a coffee shop in a Jewish hospital shouted that “the Final Solution is coming your way” and flashed a Nazi salute.
This is the same Canada that arrested Muhammad Shahzeb Khan in September, a Pakistani man living in Canada, who planned to commit a mass slaughter of Jews at the Chabad headquarters in Brooklyn, NY in support of ISIS on the anniversary of the October 7 massacre.
Ahmed Fouad Mostafa Eldidi and his son, during court proceedings in Ontario
This is the same Canada where Charlotte Kates, a leader of the group Samidoun took to the streets of Vancouver to scream “long live October 7th!” On October 15, 2024, Canada and the United States both labeled Samidoun as “a sham charity that serves as an international fundraiser for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorist organization.”
WESPAC, a US-based “charity” based in White Plains, NY came out to defend Samidoun and Kates on November 22 stating “The Vancouver Police Department raided her [Charlotte’s] home using such unnecessary militarized force with the aim of humiliating and instilling fear not just against Charlotte but her community and anyone who chooses to advocate for the human rights of Palestinians.”
Canada’s Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) issued a statement on November 25 that “The government must act now to stop the scourge of antisemitism.” It cited a poll of Canadian Jews that 82% believe that Canada is less safe for Jews than it was before Oct. 7th massacre and 36% have been targeted (themselves or a member of their family) by antisemitic remarks since October 7, 2023.
Significantly, Canada’s Jews feel unprotected, with 85% and 75% feeling that the government and police, respectively, should be doing more to combat antisemitism in Canada.
It is no surprise.
Their government grants citizenship to a man featured on ISIS propaganda videos beheading people. Their government relied on France to alert them about an impending attack. Their government only identified a sham charity fronting for terrorist groups a year after Germany.
In September 2023, before Palestinian Muslims slaughtered over one thousand civilians in Israel, India’s foreign minister said he was alarmed about “Canada and its growing reputation as a place, as a safe haven for terrorists, for extremists, and for organized crime.”
Free range terrorists are roaming the Great White North and are coming for Jews across North America. Others too, but mostly Jews.