After the war: “It is unclear how Israel will select Gazans who are truly disconnected from Hamas after the terror group’s 16-year rule, but Gallant is confident that groups can be found or formed”

Posted on January 4, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

JPOST
Israel-Hamas War: IDF plans for post-war Gaza revealed in war cabinet
Yonah Jeremy Bob
January 5, 2024

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on Thursday presented his plan to the War Cabinet and the State Security Cabinet for Israel’s security status once the war in Gaza is over. The plan included the integration of existing Palestinian civilian leadership in Gaza into a more substantial local government. “Hamas will not rule Gaza,” said Gallant in a press briefing before the meeting, “and Israel will not hold a civilian governorship over Gaza.”… In some undefined transitional period, the IDF will retain broad security responsibility, including over the borders and with authority to conduct raids, but some hybrid mix of forces provided by the US, European allies, and Arab allies, such as the Saudis, Egypt, the UAE and others will assist with aspects of internal security and administration. READ MORE

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Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh: Arouri’s killing is “terrorist act,” violation of Lebanon’s sovereignty and an expansion of Israel’s hostility against Palestinians

Posted on January 4, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

REUTERS
Israeli drone kills deputy Hamas chief in Beirut
January 3, 2024

Deputy Hamas chief Saleh al-Arouri was killed on Tuesday night in an Israeli drone strike on Beirut’s southern suburbs of Dahiyeh, a stronghold of the allied Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, signalling the conflict between Hamas and Israel could be expanding to engulf more of the region. In response to questions from Reuters, the Israeli military said it does not respond to reports in the foreign media. Lebanon’s national news agency said the drone struck a Hamas office. Two security sources said the strike had targeted a meeting between Hamas officials and Lebanon’s Sunni Islamist Jama’a Islamiya faction and left a total of four Palestinians and three Lebanese dead. READ MORE

WALL STREET JOURNAL The ‘CEO’ of Hamas Who Found the Money to Attack Israel When Zaher Jabarin ran a Hamas cell in the 1980s, he borrowed cash from his mother to buy weapons. Now, he oversees a financial empire that the U.S. estimates is worth hundreds of millions of dollars and funds Hamas’s operations against Israel. The 55-year-old militant manages Hamas’s financial relationship with its main benefactor Iran and handles how Tehran gets cash to the Gaza Strip, U.S. and Israeli officials say. He looks after a portfolio of companies that deliver income annually for Hamas and runs a network of private donors and businessmen who invest for the Islamist group.

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New York Times uncovers new information, devastating testimony, on systemic targeting of women and girls, use of sexual assault and mutilation during savage Hamas onslaught in Israel

Posted on December 29, 2023 by ArchitectGuy

TIMES OF ISRAEL
In harrowing detail, NYT reports on weaponization of rape, sexual violence on Oct. 7
December 29, 2023

In a comprehensive, horrifying exposé published on Thursday, The New York Times detailed the systematic sexual violence against Israeli women and girls employed by Palestinian terrorists during Hamas’s unprecedented October 7 rampage through southern Israel. The two-month investigation includes interviews with more than 150 witnesses, medical personnel, first responders, soldiers, rape counselors, and government officials, along with the scanning of video footage, photographs and GPS data from cell phones. The piece begins with the description of a harrowing video that circulated widely in the days after Hamas’s monstrous assault on southern Israel that Saturday morning. READ MORE

UNREPORTED TRUTHS Alex Berenson: On the sexual atrocities Hamas committed on Oct.7 We cannot ignore the depravity of these attacks, or what they mean for women. The Times’s descriptions of these crimes nearly beggar belief. They go beyond rape, or gang rape, or even the execution of prisoners. As described by witnesses who survived, and confirmed by video and forensic evidence, Hamas’s attackers turned murder and torture into can-you-top-this sport...

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Why an historic massacre of Jews, even before the Israeli response got underway, triggered a powerful wave of hostility not toward the attackers—but toward Jews

Posted on December 29, 2023 by ArchitectGuy

THE FREE PRESS
The Wisdom of Hamas
Matti Friedman
December 28, 2023

In the days after Hamas terrorists invaded Israel on October 7, triggering the current war in Gaza, many believed that Hamas had erred. The word “miscalculation” recurred in news analysis and in statements from Israeli leaders. People here in Israel were galvanized into action by the massacre. Western governments responded with shock and revulsion. The civilians of Gaza were staring at a looming catastrophe. Hamas was in for it now! What were they thinking? But as I write nearly three months later, with several acquaintances dead in battle and one still held hostage in Gaza, it’s easier to understand what Hamas leaders were thinking. Indeed, it’s increasingly worth considering the possibility that they weren’t wrong. In many ways, Hamas understood the world better than we Israelis did. The men who came across the border, and those who sent them, may have grasped the current state of the West better than many Westerners. More than anything, they understood the war they’re fighting when many of us didn’t—and still don’t. READ MORE

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When the kids call, I have no sage parental wisdom to impart about their experiences because I have never been there or done any of that.

Posted on December 29, 2023 by ArchitectGuy

JPOST
Israel-Hamas War: What can we tell the kids?
Herb Keinon
December 30, 2023

…It’s not the first time we’ve had a son fighting in Gaza. The Lad, our oldest, was there during his regular service in 2008-2009 during Operation Cast Lead. But that was only one kid for a relatively short period. Now we have three sons and a son-in-law inside Gaza for much longer stints. That brings anxiety and worry up to an atomic level. It also creates a situation where we don’t always know what to say or do for them, their wives, or their kids. It’s a new experience; frankly, I’m getting old and not as good at dealing with new experiences as I once was. READ MORE

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After 2023, surely no one will deny that Western civilisation is under threat from without and within

Posted on December 29, 2023 by ArchitectGuy

SPIKED ONLINE
The unholy alliance between wokeism and barbarism
Brendan O’Neill
December 29, 2023

My favourite story about Spinoza concerns the time he lost his cool. A philosopher, a Jew and history’s finest defender of Enlightenment, Spinoza was normally a picture of quiet reason. But when he heard about the lynching of Johan and Cornelis de Witt he became gripped by an uncommon fury. The de Witt brothers were key political figures in the Dutch Republic, the enlightened new nation in which Spinoza enjoyed such great liberty to think and write. On 20 August 1672, at The Hague, they were set upon by a ferocious mob that held them responsible for the invasion of the republic by a French-English alliance. They were murdered, mutilated and clumps of their flesh were eaten. READ MORE

JNS Jonathan Tobin: There’s no middle ground in the fight against DEI antisemitism Allegations that the battle against campus antisemitism at Harvard was “hijacked” by right-wingers or racists are false. Advocates of woke ideology are the real racists. Critical to understanding this controversy or even the justified concerns about the post-Oct. 7 surge in antisemitism is the way leftist ideologies like intersectionality, critical race theory (CRT) and the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) have played in all of this. The obsession with race above and beyond every other possible consideration pushed morally corrupt figures like [Harvard’s Claudine] Gay to a position of pre-eminence in academia.

POLITICO Harvard agitators turn their ire toward Penny Pritzker The leadership turmoil engulfing Harvard University is putting a major Democratic Party figure on the defensive. Penny Pritzker, a former Obama Cabinet official, current Biden appointee and longtime Democratic megadonor, on Wednesday rejected calls to step down from her role at the top of Harvard’s most powerful governing board. It comes a day after the resignation of university president Claudine Gay…The announcement comes after Bill Ackman, a hedge fund manager and outspoken critic of Harvard’s handling of claims of antisemitism, called on Pritzker, the former U.S. Commerce secretary, to resign over the handling of Gay’s hiring and ultimate exit from the Ivy League school.

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Flight crew complained that passengers who switched seats made them uncomfortable

Posted on December 29, 2023 by ArchitectGuy

FORWARD
Passengers accuse JetBlue of antisemitism after Orthodox Jews ordered off plane
Beth Harpaz
January 2, 2024

Three Orthodox passengers were ordered off a New Year’s Eve red-eye flight from California to New York after they changed seats. “My inflight crew tells me they do not want to have you on their plane,” the JetBlue pilot can be heard telling the passengers in an audio recording of the incident supplied to The Lakewood Scoop. “I have to support them.”…The kerfuffle began when a visibly Jewish elderly man took what he apparently thought was a vacant seat on a red-eye from Palm Springs to John F. Kennedy Airport. A flight attendant asked if that was his assigned seat, and when he said no, she told him he couldn’t sit there…One of two Orthodox women seated elsewhere on the plane who were traveling with him then intervened, explaining that he couldn’t occupy his assigned seat because of “religious purposes,” presumably because it was next to a woman. READ MORE

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“This past Christmas Eve, the New York Times went to a place I’d never imagine: It published an essay by Gaza City’s mayor, an appointee of Hamas. You know, the world-renowned terrorist group”

Posted on December 29, 2023 by ArchitectGuy

FUTURE OF JEWISH
The Day the New York Times Died
Joshua Hoffman
December 28, 2023

…Publishing the views of a democratically elected politician [Senator Tom Cotton, 2020, provoking an apology from NYT management] went too far for the Times and its readers, but platforming Gaza City’s mayor, who was appointed by an atrocious terror organization, is perfectly fine…“Times readers are being served a very restricted range of views, some of them presented as straight news by a publication that still holds itself out as independent of any politics,” according to James Bennet, a former editor at the Times. “The paper leads its readers further into the trap of thinking that what they are reading is independent and impartial — and this misleads them about their country’s center of political and cultural gravity. Throughout the Israel-Hamas war, the New York Times has continued to give Hamas a dangerous platform, which the newspaper defends as important to shed more light, not less, on the most extreme corners of the world. But less light is what readers get. READ MORE

CAMERA BLOG CAMERA’s Alex Safian appears on Mark Levin’s Life, Liberty and Levin CAMERA’s Alex Safian joined Mark Levin on his top-rated FoxNews program Life, Liberty and Levin to discuss the abysmal media coverage of Israel’s war against Hamas, which was triggered by the terrorist organization’s horrific massacre of Israeli civilians on Oct. 7. Distorted, biased and inaccurate reporting by the New York Times, CNN and MSNBC was the major focus of the segment (11/12/23) – watch it here:

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Sergeant First Class (res.) Joseph Gitarts wrote in a letter his parents received after his death: ‘I lived a good and interesting life, I wasn’t afraid of death; I made this choice myself and followed it through to the end; I fell with honor for the sake of my people, I have no regrets’

Posted on December 29, 2023 by ArchitectGuy

YNET
‘I gave it all, I have no regrets’: The letter a fallen IDF soldier left for his parents
Adam Kutub
December 26, 2023

“I could have chosen not to come here and hide. But that goes against everything I believe in and value – and the person I consider myself to be. Therefore, I had no choice, and I would do the same thing if I could choose again.” This is what Sergeant First Class (res.) Joseph Gitarts, 25, from Tel Aviv, who was killed in Gaza on Monday, wrote to his parents. The sealed letter that Gitarts wrote before he was called to the reserves to fight in Gaza, anticipating the tragic scenario that has now unfolded, began with an attempt to console his parents. “Dear Mom and Dad, I love you very much. Everything is as it should be. I chose this path myself. I’ve lived a good and interesting life. Nevertheless, I have never been afraid of death. I made this choice myself and followed it through to the end. I fell with honor for the sake of my people. I have no regrets.” READ MORE

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Support Israel Economy: Buy From Israeli Shops

Posted on December 29, 2023 by ArchitectGuy

Amid the economic challenges brought on by the ongoing war in Israel since October 7th, 2023, small businesses are facing unprecedented struggles. In response, we’ve launched a pro-bono initiative to support these local shops. Within just two weeks, over 500 Israeli shops have already joined our list, and every day more are joining – and it’s 100% free to do so! We offer supporters of Israel worldwide the opportunity to connect directly with these businesses, providing quality merchandise and a chance for people globally to contribute to Israel’s economic resilience during these challenging times. Let’s make a positive impact together – your shopping helps Israelis rebuild their economy. Am Yisrael Chai! Shop goopss !

Posted in Israel & Middle East | Leave a comment