Hamas & Israel

[Halloween Mike]

I am myself an atheist. I have no religious attachement. Im not a Jew.

I stand with Israel because what i saw on Oct 7 is barbaric and depraved. It have been done before from Islamist Jihad (9/11, Lodon Bombing, Bataclan and so on) but never to this level of atrocity, at least not on such a large scale. I mean more peoples died on 9/11 but the terrorists didn't go to the level of barbarism these guys did. They aimed to kill wich in itself is atrocious, but from my understanding everybody died rather quickly. Seeing the body of Shani Louk all bended in weird ways getting paraded and spit on while not only Hamas members but also "civlians" spit on her... Seeing Namaa Levy getting moved by her hair while her pants were full of blood (likely because she was raped by many peoples)... The testimonies from journalist saying small kids were thrown grenades at ... families burned. That video of this guy getting hit by a shovel while they tried to decapitate him. I could go on and on. All of this is so atrocious ... while these monsters cheered and were happy.

Hamas use civilians to hide, they use hospitals to hide and put their base on. Im sure some civilians do not support Hamas (there was a video of one women in particular wich was shocking, one guy covered her mouth), but the reality is half the population of Gaza is brainwashed in wishing death and harm to Israel, thinking death is some kind of reward, while the other half is either too young to do anything or too afraid (rightfully so).

There is no "good outcome". What Israel is doing now is the only way. Its sad to see children dies of course ! But the reality is Hamas could end this. They could surrender inconditionally and release the hostage. They don't. Just like Japan in 45, sometimes extreme measures is all you can do.... You think these civilians of Nagasaki and Hiroshima deserved it? Of course not !! Tons of innocent civilians died. Its horrible. But somewhat in history books USA is seen as the good guy...

So the IDF does what is must do... as ugly as it is.

What really trouble me is seeing all these "pro palestinians protests". Some just want a ceasefire ok, wich i can understand they THINK its the right thing even if its not. But a LOT are for Hamas, and agree to what they did, and want Israel erradicated. That is so scary. These peoples are not in Gaza or Iran. They are among us... in Montreal, in Toronto.

So personally, i say IDF need to fight til Hamas is erradicated to the last one (or all surrender) and all hostages are freed or their body recovered. Israel tried to let Gaza be ruled by others. Look where it took them. They need to assure security.

Edit : I look a bit at last page and some of you quoted Jackson Hinkle... this guy is a conspiracy theorist, a total nutjob... He spread lies like he breathe. He is basically Alex Jones on steroids. Using him won't get you any points.

 

[poupsy]

Hamas freedom fighters | Free Palestine

From the river to the sea Palestine will be free | support the freedom of Palestine | Hamas Gaza | We need your support to continue Jihad.

www.hamas.com

Then choose

mod: before clicking on the URL, please read the following post - https://merb.cc/xenforo/threads/hamas-israel.225815/page-6#post-1567189

 

[Obvio-0bvio]

Hamas freedom fighters | Free Palestine

From the river to the sea Palestine will be free | support the freedom of Palestine | Hamas Gaza | We need your support to continue Jihad.

www.hamas.com

Then choose

Hello my friend, I respect your choice , but perhaps we should refrain from following the prevalent trend of picking sides and fostering division.

I strongly believe that the media is playing a significant role in instigating this divisive environment, with motives that surpass our comprehension.

Interestingly enough, I recall a recent occurrence where the media also emphasized the distinction between those who received vaccinations and those who did not.

Personally, I find this to be a peculiar coincidence, first with the pandemic and now with the war conflicts. Let us set aside our political affiliations and focus on the purpose of this forum.

We have gathered here to discuss service providers, an area in which we are very passionate and unable to control our enthusiasm.

Therefore, let us remain true to our purpose and refrain from partaking in the world's divisive behavior. We are united for one reason only, and that is to service providers.

 

[minutemenX]

Hello my friend, I respect your choice , but perhaps we should refrain from following the prevalent trend of picking sides and fostering division.
Therefore, let us remain true to our purpose and refrain from partaking in the world's divisive behavior. We are united for one reason only, and that is to service providers.

It is not a very comfortable and wise to sit on the fence in the middle of the war field. You will not get any brownie points from both sides, just bullets.

 

[Obvio-0bvio]

It is not a very comfortable and wise to sit on the fence in the middle of the war field. You will not get any brownie points from both sides, just bullets.

I understand your point, my friend, but I am exhausted from following the same path as everyone else.

Instead, I suggest we adopt a neutral stance and hope for a positive outcome in this war. I am unwilling to blindly take sides as the media is pressuring everyone to do.

It is evident that both countries are responsible for their actions. Let's observe how events unfold and witness the world's reaction.

However, I am resolute in my refusal to engage in the divisive behavior that the world is currently promoting.

 

[Fradi]

There is no winner on either side in this.
How do you get over or resolve your family members and loved ones being murdered and slaughtered on either side.
Is there anyway to ever forgive that. Is there anyway to justify that.
It is not the people on either side that want this but the politicians or terrorists to me there is not much difference that create this hatred.
People want the same the world over, they want a peaceful life a decent living, and a better life for their children than they had.

 

[poupsy]

I agree with all of you . War is shit. Why do we have to kill each other instead of just fucking each others?
Having said that and not being jewish myself I just wonder why this conflict is so polarized.
Why the antisemitism rose up to record numbers since this happened? Why this issue on such a small land and relative small number of people is drawing so much division in our society? and please don't give me the occupation BS. Palestinain could have had a state many times. Pakistan and India were partitioned in 1947 (Google: Crudely, this was a division based upon religious affiliation, with the creation of a Muslim majority in West and East Pakistan and a Hindu majority in India. Between 500,000 and 2 million souls perished as a result of the ensuing upheaval and violence.) and it's fine with everyone.
No one is questioning this neither rioting for 300000 syrians killed by Assad couple of years ago or Saudi destructive strikes in Yemen,
My concern is this hate against jewish people in our streets and schools. It is not the society we want. and we certainly don't want charia to shut down agencies and MPs
peace and love

 

[CaptRenault]

I don't agree with the idea that both sides in this conflict are equally guilty and that the conflict could be solved if both sides would just "try to get along."

Hamas is solely responsible for starting this war and there is no way for Israel to compromise with them. Furthermore, many, perhaps most people in Gaza, fully support Hamas and its murderous, intolerant, uncivilized ideology. Though now that Gazans realize that rule by Hamas has led to the destruction of half their land, Gazans may be willing to modify their beliefs (similar to the Germans and Japanese in WWII).

Andrew Roberts is an eminent British historian who has written some great books on WWII, Napoleon, Churchill, etc.

In this opinion piece from this week, he argues convincingly that Hamas is worse (qualitatively though not quantitatively) than the Nazis. I agree with his assessment of Hamas.

What Makes Hamas Worse Than the Nazis

My late publisher Lord George Weidenfeld knew about the Nazis. Escaping from Vienna soon after the Anschluss in 1938, he managed to save his immediate family from the Holocaust, although he lost many other relatives to it. He broadcasted to the Third Reich while working for the BBC during the...

freebeacon.com

...In October 1943 Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, delivered a notorious speech to 50 of his senior lieutenants in Posen. "I want to speak frankly to you about an extremely grave matter," he said. "We can talk about it among ourselves, yet we will never speak of it in public. … I am referring to the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. … It is a page of glory in our history that has never been written and is never to be written."

By total contrast, the Hamas killers 80 years later attached GoPro cameras to their helmets so they could livestream their atrocities over social media. Although the Nazis burnt Jews alive in barns on their retreat in 1945, they did not film themselves doing it. There are plenty of photographs of Nazis standing around death-pits full of Jewish corpses, but these were taken for private delectation rather than public consumption.

When on January 27, 1945, the Red Army reached Auschwitz, they only found 7,000 living skeletons there out of a normal camp population of 140,000, because the Nazis had marched the rest westwards, partly in order kill the death-marchers but also because they did not want evidence of their crimes to be uncovered. Gassing operations there had ended in November 1944, and attempts were made to destroy the gas chambers. "Killing installations had been dismantled," writes Sir Ian Kershaw in his book The End, "and attempts made to rase the traces of the camp’s murderous activities."

The sheer glee with which Hamas, by contrast, killed parents in front of their children and of children in front of their parents, was broadcast to the world. Nazi sadism was routine and widespread, but it wasn’t built into their actual operational plans in the way that Hamas’s sadism has been...

After invading countries, the Nazis often took hostages to ensure the compliance of the local population with their proclamations. The mayor, businessmen, the popular village priest, and other worthies would be taken hostage and threatened with execution if resistance were offered to their rule. It was brutal and in contravention of all the rules of war, but even the Nazis, foul as they were, did not deliberately take nine-month-old babies and young children, women, and octogenarians hostage, as Hamas has done. Nor did the Nazis use babies in incubators and children in hospital ICU units as human shields..

Rape has been seen in every conflict since the dawn of time. The officer corps of civilized countries denounce it, and in the Second World War even the barbaric Nazis had strict rules against their Aryan master-race having sex with people they considered Untermenschen. "One of the differences between the atrocities committed by the Nazis who were carrying out the Final Solution and many other war crimes of the twentieth century," writes Laurence Rees in his book Auschwitz, "is the overt insistence by the Nazis that their troops refrain from sexual violence, not out of humanity but out of ideology. … The Jews and Slavic population of the East represented, to the Nazis, racially dangerous peoples. … Slav and Jewish women (especially the latter) were absolutely out of bounds. Killing Jewish women was a duty, but having sex with them was a crime."

Of course this was regularly ignored in practice. Maris Rowe-McCulloch’s "Sexual Violence Under Occupation During World War II" shows how the Nazis regularly forced women into military brothels; indeed there was a brothel in Auschwitz itself. SS officers who raped Jewish women there tended to be transferred out, but not punished. One officer, Gerhard Palitzsch, was arrested, but only transferred to a sub-camp of Birkenau. German officers were instructed not to punish rape when it occurred, as a 1940 memorandum from Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch in Regina Mühlhäuser’s "Reframing Sexual Violence as a Weapon and Strategy of War" shows. But that is different from the Hamas leadership giving their men orders to rape as many Jewish women as they could find and film themselves doing it, and in all too many cases taking them hostage afterwards or killing them.

In Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Daniel Goldhagen notes how "Hitler opted for genocide at the first moment that the policy became practical. The moment that the opportunity existed for the only Final Solution that was final, Hitler seized the opportunity to bring about his ideal of a world forever freed of Jewry and made the leap to genocide." This came in 1941 when both Poland and the western USSR were under his control. (Over half of all Europe’s Jews lived in the Soviet Union then.) "Demonological racial antisemitism was the motive force of the eliminationist program," Goldhagen adds, "pushing it to its logical genocidal conclusion once German military prowess succeeded in creating appropriate conditions."

Yet Hamas embarked on its genocidal attack when it only had southern Israel under its control for a few hours, and thus when it knew that the Israeli response would be instantaneous and devastating. Unlike the Nazis, who hoped that their murders could be hidden by the fog of war and complete territorial domination, Hamas grasped at their window of opportunity in the full knowledge that they would be punished for it, and soon. Whereas the Nazis assumed they would win the war and thus would never have to face retribution for their crimes, Hamas knew it was only a matter of hours away, yet still they launched their attack, caring nothing for the effect on ordinary Gazans. Their lust for torturing and murdering Jews was therefore even more powerful than the Nazis’, who waited until the front line had pushed forward before sending in the Einsatzkommando to wipe out Polish and Russian Jewish communities.

Toward the end of the war, senior Nazis like Heinrich Himmler and Ernst Kaltenbrunner tried to exchange Jews for cash, exposing how fundamentally cynical and corrupt they were, but also how they were willing to put greed over the killing impulse. Hamas, by contrast, was doing well out of the relative hiatus in military activity before October 7, with thousands of Gazans being issued work permits to earn more in Israel than they ever could in Gaza. Unlike even the heinous anti-Semites Himmler and Kaltenbrunner, therefore, Hamas has not put its greed for cash over its one true love: killing Jews.

"Very many, probably most, Germans were opposed to the Jews during the Third Reich," writes Ian Kershaw in his book Hitler, The Germans and the Final Solution, "welcomed their exclusion from the economy and society, and saw them as natural outsiders to the German ‘National Community,’ a dangerous minority against whom it was legitimate to discriminate. Most would have drawn the line at physical maltreatment. The very secrecy of the Final Solution demonstrates more clearly than anything else the fact that the Nazi leadership felt it could not rely on popular backing for its exterminationist policy."

Here, too, the contrast with Hamas is obvious. The elimination of Jews is openly promised in the Hamas constitution, as it tacitly is in the "From the river to the sea" chant so beloved of today’s demonstrators in the West. Gazans voted for Hamas in 2005 in far greater proportions than Germans voted for the Nazis in 1932, and a good proportion of them celebrated wildly when Hamas paraded its hostages through the streets of Gaza on the afternoon of October 7.

Kershaw writes of how "The Final Solution would not have been possible without the … depersonalization and debasement of the figure of the Jew." In both Gaza and the West Bank, printed educational textbooks present Jews as despicable, worthless, and sinister figures, utterly depersonalized and debased. This is a recipe for further generational conflict. Kershaw argues that in Nazi Germany, ordinary Germans’ "‘mild’ anti-Semitism was clearly quite incapable of containing the progressive radical dynamism of the racial fanatics and the deadly bureaucratization of the doctrine of race-hatred." This is still more true of Gaza today.

 

[minutemenX]

As for Hamas... well, Zionists, Hamas, Isis, Hezbollah, all the same shit to me... same methods different bosses.

But to say "Hamas could end this... they could surrender" lol dude... WTF ...

I spent to much time on this board on this topic but thus we go again...
People do not think logically, this is the problem. Even some seem to be intelligent people on this board. Most are repeating mantras and cliches from the popular media. One of such cliches is that Palestinians are fighting for their freedom and statehood for over 75 years. Anybody with more than 2 brain cells can see that this is not the case. All this years Palestinians were fighting for only one goal: the elimination of Israel. If they really wanted state, they would behave in the very opposite way. Israel is the only country or at very least the key player that can give them their statehood. Israel however repeated thousand times that giving statehood to people who openly declare their goal to eliminate it and kill Jews is suicidal, which is confirmed by the recent events. The state can have an army, import arms, harbor terrorists etc., so the problem Israel faces now will be multiplied by thousand times with Palestinian state. The conditions Israel put forward are that the future Palestinian state should not pose any threat to Israel, especially terrorist, and is committed to a peaceful and secure mutually beneficial co-existence. Israel has also declared multiple times that it is ready for big concessions if these conditions are met and has already made several steps toward it in the past. Palestinians however did not do a single smallest step in this direction and seems to be unwilling in the future. They did not change their charters that declare Israel to be an illegal entity, the curriculum in schools teaches to hate Israel and Jews, they pay pensions to terrorists and glorify them openly at regular state-organized public events etc. Go to the East Jerusalem and you will see official posters glorifying martyrs with suicide vests everywhere. They always ready for the next “glorious” attack on Israeli civilians at the first opportunity as Hamas did. Yes, they often engage in a double-talk saying in English all “right” words on western media but never repeat the same words in Arabic to their population inside. Israel is no fool, it knows them better that they do themselves and is ready only for a real and honest deal. The solution? It is in the hands of Palestinians as it has always been for over 75 years. They should start making real plans for peace and their state.

 

[EagerBeaver]

 

[Obvio-0bvio]

While I am filled with immense relief and joy to witness the safe return of the hostages, a sense of skepticism lingers within me regarding the unusually large number of hostages released by Hamas. This raises suspicions, especially considering the significant value each hostage holds for Hamas. Rumors circulating from China further fuel these doubts, suggesting that Hamas may be setting up deceptive traps or plotting something horrendous against the IDF.

Though I sincerely hope that Hamas is engaging in this hostage exchange out of genuine compassion and a desire for political diplomacy, my knowledge of their history and tactics leads me to harbor strong doubts about their true intentions.

 

[Halloween Mike]

While I am filled with immense relief and joy to witness the safe return of the hostages, a sense of skepticism lingers within me regarding the unusually large number of hostages released by Hamas. This raises suspicions, especially considering the significant value each hostage holds for Hamas. Rumors circulating from China further fuel these doubts, suggesting that Hamas may be setting up deceptive traps or plotting something horrendous against the IDF.

There is no doubt that they are using this ceasefire (or pause, call it as you want) to regroup and prepare traps, plans etc to fight back. Israel itself admited it when they agreed to it. For Israel this was a chance to at least get SOME hostages back, especially with pressure from the famillies. But they knew right away that sadly this would make the fight harder after and likely result in the death of more soldiers. But its a price they were willing to pay.

 

[Sic92]

Lire ce thread est vraiment amusant, que dire si je suis pas mal déçu de la capacité d'analyse et de l'objectivité de pas mal de gens que j'estimais pourtant être en retrait de toutes formes de propagande médiatique. Hélas, il semblerait qu'il ne soit pas donner à tous de ne pas être biaisé dans ce qu'on affirme. Personne, je dis bien personne n'arrivera à me faire croire que l'entité sioniste est victime de quoique ce soit. Si demain la Terre court un risque de connaître une 3ième guerre mondiale, soyez certain que l'état raciste, criminel et d'apartheid israélien ne sera pas du tout étranger à un tel désastre.

 

[CaptRenault]

This video provides an excellent summary of the Israeli perspective on the war against Hamas. Obviously, I agree with it, because I embrace the same civilized values of freedom, democracy, tolerance, progress, and peace that the Palestinians have continually rejected since the formation of Israel in 1948. As the narrator says: "The people of Gaza are not choosing terror because they are poor; they are poor because they choose terror."

BTW, I see that YouTube is trying to censor this video by making it "age restricted." This is leftist censorship bullshit. There is nothing at all objectionable about the content-no nudity, war or terrorist video. It's just an Israeli guy talking about the war. Click on the link and you can watch it on YouTube.

 

[Sic92]

This video provides an excellent summary of the Israeli perspective on the war against Hamas. Obviously, I agree with it, because I embrace the same civilized values of freedom, democracy, tolerance, progress, and peace that the Palestinians have continually rejected since the formation of Israel in 1948. As the narrator says: "The people of Gaza are not choosing terror because they are poor; they are poor because they choose terror."

BTW, I see that YouTube is trying to censor this video by making it "age restricted." This is leftist censorship bullshit. There is nothing at all objectionable about the content-no nudity, war or terrorist video. It's just an Israeli guy talking about the war. Click on the link and you can watch it on YouTube.

I swear to god that you are trolling at this point dude

 

[CaptRenault]

I swear to god that you are trolling at this point dude

Hmm, typical ad hominen response when you have no good arguments to make.

I assure that I am not trolling. I sincerely, unequivocally, unambiguously believe everything that I have posted in this thread. I fully support Israel's war against Hamas and I hope that it comes to a successful conclusion as soon as possible.

How about you? Do you sincerely believe that Israel is a "racist, criminal, apartheid state" ["...soyez certain que l'état raciste, criminel et d'apartheid israélien..."] or are you just trolling? I don't think so-I believe you are sincere. Do you also embrace the Hamas Covenant of 1988 and support the Hamas terrorist attack that killed 1200 people and took 250 hostage on October 7?

 

[EagerBeaver]

I swear to god that you are trolling at this point dude

There was nothing even remotely trolling about CR's post. He posted a video from an Israeli who gave the Israeli point of view which, from what I know, is very likely the point of view of a majority or perhaps vast majority of Israelis. Indeed I have relatives there and they feel exactly the same way and have made similar statements to me.

 

[Sic92]

Hmm, typical ad hominen response when you have no good arguments to make.

I assure that I am not trolling. I sincerely, unequivocally, unambiguously believe everything that I have posted in this thread. I fully support Israel's war against Hamas and I hope that it comes to a successful conclusion as soon as possible.

How about you? Do you sincerely believe that Israel is a "racist, criminal, apartheid state" ["...soyez certain que l'état raciste, criminel et d'apartheid israélien..."] or are you just trolling? I don't think so-I believe you are sincere. Do you also embrace the Hamas Covenant of 1988 and support the Hamas terrorist attack that killed 1200 people and took 250 hostage on October 7?

You support a genocidal and a criminal entity and it might be motivated by a certain racism or hatred, period.

 

[CaptRenault]

In recent days, we have been learning the extent to which Hamas used rape as a weapon to terrorize Israeli women and their loved ones. A columnist for the Wall Street Journal describes the extent of the horror and why the story has taken time to emerge:

Opinion | The Rape of the Israeli Women

Hamas’s crimes on Oct. 7 were deliberate and systematic. Why has the left been disbelieving, silent or equivocal?

www.wsj.com

At first I didn’t understand. Among Hamas’s crimes of 10/7: little children and babies murdered, some burned to death; children forced to watch parents chased, beaten and shot. Old couples murdered in their homes; families who’d taken refuge in safe rooms burned out and killed. Hamas attempted to behead a kibbutz worker, and killed old women standing at a bus stop. Women were abused—raped, it seemed certain. But I didn’t understand why, from day one, the last received such emphasis. Defenders of Hamas kept demanding proof and claiming there was no evidence. It was as if they were saying: Sure we behead people and kill infants but raping someone, that’s crossing a line!

But now I understand what was done. It was grim and dreadful, but it was also systematic and deliberate. And since there’s going to be a lot of 10/7 trutherism—there already is—we have to be clear about what happened.

In the days after the attack, chaos reigned in the attack areas. At least 1,200 people had been murdered, their bodies scattered through kibbutzim and on the site of the Nova music festival. The crime scene was huge; the priority was identifying the dead and informing their families. Documentation of crimes was incomplete, forensic evidence not always recorded, evidence perishable. The testimony of witnesses, body collectors and morgue workers came in unevenly. It has built and is becoming comprehensive.
A stunning report appeared last weekend in London’s Sunday Times, by reporter Christina Lamb. Bar Yuval-Shani, a 58-year-old psychotherapist treating the families of victims, told Ms. Lamb she has been told by several witnesses of rape at the music festival. A police commander told Ms. Lamb, “It’s clear now that sexual crimes were part of the planning, and the purpose was to terrify and humiliate people.” Ms. Lamb quotes Yoni Saadon, 39, a father of four and shift manager in a foundry who was at the music festival. He said he hid as a young woman was raped, and saw Hamas fighters capture another young woman near a car. “She was fighting back, not allowing them to strip her. They threw her to the ground and one of the terrorists took a shovel and beheaded her.”
“We didn’t understand at first,” Ms. Lamb quoted Cochav Elkayam-Levy, a Hebrew University expert on international law, who heads a commission into the Hamas crimes. She said survivors arriving at hospitals weren’t asked about sexual abuse or given rape kits, but those who volunteered to collect bodies started reporting that many of the women were naked and bleeding from the genitals. The commander of a unit of a volunteer religious organization that collected the remains of the dead told Ms. Lamb they collected 1,000 bodies in 10 days from the festival site and the kibbutzim. “No one saw more than us. . . . It seemed their mission was to rape as many as possible.”

Israel Defense Forces sources told the paper that Hamas fighters caught in Gaza reported in police interrogations that they had been instructed by superiors to “dirty” and “whore” the women.
A few days after the Sunday Times report came one on the mounting evidence of violent sexual abuse from BBC correspondent Lucy Williamson. Several of those involved in collecting and identifying the bodies of the dead told the BBC that they had seen “multiple signs of sexual assault, including broken pelvises, bruises, cuts and tears, and that the victims ranged from children and teenagers to pensioners.” Video testimony of an eyewitness to the music festival, shown to journalists by Israeli police, “detailed the gang rape, mutilation and execution of one victim.” The BBC saw “videos of naked and bloodied women filmed by Hamas on the day of the attack.”
The gallant gents of Hamas were filming their own war crimes.

Israeli police have privately shown journalists filmed testimony of a woman at the music festival. She describes Hamas fighters gang-raping a woman and then mutilating her. The last of her attackers shot her in the head. She said the men cut off parts of the woman’s body during the rape. In other videos, Ms. Williamson writes, women carried away by the terrorists “appear to be naked or semi-clothed.”

Reuters on Dec. 5 quoted an Israeli reservist who worked at a makeshift morgue. “Often women came in in just their underwear,” she said. “I saw very bloody genitals on women.” Reuters spoke to seven people, first responders and those dealing with the dead, who attested to the sexual violence. Reuters quotes written testimony from one volunteer, who said he saw dozens of dead women in shelters: “Their clothing was torn on the upper part, but their bottoms were completely naked.”

This Monday a meeting at the United Nations laid out proof of the violent abuse. In the New York Times, reporters Katherine Rosman and Lisa Lerer quoted the testimony of Simcha Greinman, a volunteer collector of remains at the kibbutzim. He said the body of one woman had “nails and different objects in her female organs.” A person’s genitals were so mutilated “we couldn’t identify if it was a man or a woman.” Other women had mutilated faces. The head of the International Crime Investigations Unit of the Israeli police was asked how many women were abused. He said, “I am talking about dozens.”

If half of this testimony is true, then what was done to the women at the music festival and in the kibbutzim wasn’t a series of isolated crimes. It happened at scale, as part of a pattern, and with a deliberateness that strongly suggests it was systematic. The rape, torture and mutilation of women looks as if it was part of the battle plan. Hamas used sexual violence as a weapon.

Why has the progressive left in the West, for two months now, been disbelieving, silent or equivocal about what Hamas did to women? One answer is that the progressive left hates Israel and feels whatever is done to Israelis is justified. Another is that the sick brutality of Hamas’s actions undercuts its position in the world, undercutting too the cause they falsely claim to represent, that of the Palestinian people. Why have women’s groups of the progressive left been silent? Because at bottom they aren’t for women; they are for the team.

All of this makes more remarkable the exchange between Dana Bash of CNN and Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Seattle. Ms. Bash pressed Ms. Jayapal on why she wasn’t condemning what had been done to women on 10/7. Ms. Jayapal was evasive, tried to redirect, said rape is “horrific” but “happens in war situations.”

“However,” she said, “I think we have to be balanced about bringing in the outrages against Palestinians.”

Balanced? How do you balance a story like the horrors of Oct. 7? You don’t, you just find and tell the truth. Some stories don’t have two sides. This is one of them.

Why is it important? Because it happened. Because it reveals something about the essential nature of Hamas and reflects its ultimate political goals. Progressives admiringly quote Maya Angelou’s advice that when people show you who they are, believe them. Oct. 7 was Hamas showing you who they are. Believe them.

 

[minutemenX]

Balanced? How do you balance a story like the horrors of Oct. 7? You don’t, you just find and tell the truth. Some stories don’t have two sides. This is one of them.

What person can be instructed to gang rape a woman, then cut her breasts off before beheading with a shovel? Not one or two, hundreds of women were gang-raped, mutilated and killed. I almost vomited when I just read about it. This kind of behaviour has been installed, conditioned, and cultivated from the childhood by the school and family in everyday life interactions. Hamas are not Martians or some special tribe from Afghanistan that is brought to Gaza. They are large part of the Gaza’s population where even now 70% support it. They are not even soldiers that lives in special barracks where they can be brainwashed. It is a militia that lives with family and interacting with family members every day. After October 7, they were praised and celebrated telling their stories and showing their videos to family members: their brothers, sisters, wives and even kids. They were expected approval from their parents, and they got it. This is just showing the enormous level of hatred towards Jews in the general population where the most horrible crimes against Jews as people and a Jew as individual are not only approved but celebrated. How do you make peace and negotiate with these people after the war? Hamas as an organization will be destroyed and its leaders will be killed in a month or two. What to do with Hamas in the heads of 2 million?