October 7, 2024

50 YEARS OF PALESTINIAN TERRORISM: Today marks one year since thousands of Hamas terrorists poured over the border from Gaza into Israel and went on a horrendous spree killing, raping, beheading, maiming, and burning more than 1,200 men, women and children, including infants.

The terrorists also took 230 Israelis and people from other nations, including seven from America as hostages. It is estimated that barely 100 of those hostages remain in the hands of the terrorists, but many of those are undoubtedly dead.

Richard Pollock, for his October 7 remembrance column on Substack this morning, has assembled a heart-breaking chronicle of Palestinian/ Islamic Jihadist terrorism committed in the past half-century. As he writes:

“May we understand that October 7 was not a rare occurrence. Terrorism is the main weapon used in the world of Islamic Jihadi revolution.

“Terrorism against innocent civilians has become the prime strategy for Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Syria, the Muslim Brotherhood, ISIS and Iran.

“The long history of terrorism against innocents is outlined below. But the terrorism of October 7 especially stands out for its depravity, immorality and sheer evil.”

 

Posted at 7:12 am by Mark Tapscott

October 6, 2024

SO SOMEBODY’S HAVING FUN IN THIS ELECTION, AND IT’S NOT KAMALA:

Posted at 10:48 pm by Glenn Reynolds

WELL, YOU KNOW, THEY LITERALLY DID. MORE THAN ONCE.

I remember when Joe Walsh wasn’t a lying moron. Or, at least, he wasn’t making it obvious.

Posted at 10:46 pm by Glenn Reynolds

OPEN THREAD: Ring out the weekend.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

MEGALOPOLIS: Making Sense of Francis Ford Coppola’s Fever Dreams.

My latest, over at Ed Driscoll.com, after taking one for the team, and seeing Coppola’s new movie in an otherwise empty theater. Shorter version: I can’t say it’s a good film, but I’m glad the Maestro, now 85, is still making movies, and movies that are about ideas, rather than sequels, spaceships and superheroes.

Posted at 6:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

KAROL MARKOWICZ: I have spent the last year angry at Jews.

Jews are traditionally liberals, that’s true, but we’re not traditionally stupid. We can see with our eyes who is on our side and the lack of gratitude from Jewish organizations, because they still hope that their political team will someday take them back, is abominable.

There were the galas, for example, thrown by many Jewish organizations. I don’t begrudge anyone pretty dresses and rubber chicken or self-congratulating awards. It was a tough year and the people who helped us get through it, standing up for Jews in general and Israel in particular, should be singled out for praise.

But where were the invites and awards for the conservatives who had unwaveringly stood by us? Where was Megyn Kelly? Where were Clay Travis and Buck Sexton? Dan Bongino? Xaviaer DuRousseau? Erick Erickson? Dana Loesch? Glenn Beck? Guy Benson? Sohrab Ahmari? Stephen “RedSteeze” Miller? Kurt Schlichter? Mary Katharine Ham? Pretty much everyone on Fox News? I only leave off Douglas Murray because he did get one from the country of Israel and one from the Manhattan Institute for his “unwavering defense of Western values,” which is for something even wider than just his defense of Israel and Jews, and Meghan McCain because she got one from the right-leaning magazine Algemeiner Journal. They both deserve even more.

My list of well-known non-Jewish conservatives, with giant platforms, who spent the year standing up for Israel and for Jews in America, could go on and on. These people went above and beyond and got no official thank you from the American Jewish community at all, not a single Jewish organization celebrated them. It’s sickening. These mensches didn’t benefit one iota from standing with Jews and with Israel. They took shots for us, they suffered abuse for us. They’ll say they don’t need the praise. They did it because it was right. But how dare we not say thank you? Throw your Tikkun Olam in the nearest trash can and learn Hakarat Hatov. And then wonder: where is the similar cadre of liberal writers and media personalities to defend you? It does not exist. Face it.

And that’s before we get into the moguls and the politicians. If there was a non-Jewish leftist billionaire who went to Israel, wore the dogtags, he would be headlining every major Jewish event. But it was Elon Musk so that didn’t count? Nearly every Republican politician effusively stood up for Israel and demanded the protection of American Jews. Where is Ted Cruz’s award? Ron DeSantis’s? Tom Cotton’s? Where is Donald Trump’s?

We know why. Most Jewish organizations are dinosaurs, committed to Democrats just as the Democrats make clear they are not at all interested in them. That’s the problem with tying your religion to a political party. The political party can tell you that your enemies, who want to destroy you and murder your children, “have a point” and you’ll just take it.

The late Charles Krauthammer’s Law still has an iron grip over American politics two decades after he wrote, “To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil,” Krauthammer wrote in 2002.

Posted at 5:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

PEAK GRAUNIAD REACHED: How Israel has made trauma a weapon of war.

A slick, high-priced television production. Speeches from top officials. A live audience of thousands. A unified show of collective sorrow and military resolve.

That is how the Israeli government hoped to mark the passing of one year since Hamas’s surprise and bloody attacks last 7 October. But little has gone according to plan.

Many of the families of people killed or taken hostage on that day have come out forcefully against the state-sponsored event, saying pageantry can wait until after the government secures a hostage deal and faces an independent investigation of its own failures before, after and on that day. Some parents have forbidden the government of Benjamin Netanyahu from using their children’s names and images.

Several of the kibbutzim that suffered the greatest losses have said they will boycott. Instead, they will gather in their communities to collectively grieve their loved ones, and remember their hostages, in “intimate, sensitive” rituals. In response, the minister responsible for the ceremony has nixed the live audience while seeming to dismiss the families’ objections as “background noise”. This has led to even fiercer denunciations on social media, with some of Israel’s top celebrities pledging their support to a rival commemoration.

For the government, “everything is a show”, said Danny Rahamim, a member of Kibbutz Nahal Oz.

That may be, but it seems certain that on 7 October, the official show will go on. Indeed it is nearly impossible to imagine a world in which the Netanyahu government – and the legacy Jewish organizations that echo its messaging around the world – would resist the chance to use the potent date as a megaphone to broadcast the same story about the attacks that we have all heard many times before.

It’s a simple fable of good and evil, in which Israel is unblemished in its innocence, deserving unquestioning support, while its enemies are all monsters, deserving of violence unbounded by laws or borders, whether in Gaza, Jenin, Beirut, Damascus or Tehran. It’s a story in which Israel’s very identity as a nation is forever fused with the terror it suffered on 7 October, an event that, in Netanyahu’s telling, will be seamlessly merged both with the Nazi Holocaust and a battle for the soul of western civilization.

In Germany, they speak of a Staatsraison, or reason of state – and in recent decades, its leaders have said that reason is protecting Israel. Israel has a Staatsraison too, related but different. Officially, it is Jewish safety. But integral to the state’s conception of safety is Jewish trauma. Building shrines to it. Erecting walls around it. Waging wars in its name.

As Mark Steyn once wrote, “The old joke — that the Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz — gets truer every week.”

 

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll