From Daniel Pearl to October 7 and beyond
Remember Daniel Pearl? Why do I start this post with him? He was the first terrorist victim – at least the first I can remember – whose death contained that special element of horrific sadism and psychopathic brutality crossed with modern technology, in that his beheading was videoed and purposely broadcast by the perpetrators. This was way before ISIS, but it foreshadowed the behavior of that group. It was something out of a psychological horror movie, and yet it was real.
Pearl was held hostage first, too. And then before the terrorists killed him he was forced to say things such as, “I am a Jew.” That was very very important to the terrorists, although the US seemed to be their main target for the moment.
Here’s an interesting fact that I never knew before, about Daniel Pearl’s mother, which is that she was an Iraqi Jew who fled that country in the 1940s because of persecution and violence:
Pearl was born Eveline Rejwan on November 11, 1935, in Baghdad, Iraq. Her father, Joseph, was a tailor who ran an import business, and her mother, Victoria (Abada) Rejwan, was a homemaker. … When Pearl was 5, she lived through the Farhud, an outbreak of anti-Jewish violence in Iraq following a failed nationalist coup. She and her family hid in their home for days, protected by their Arab neighbors who told rioters that no Jews lived there.
Her family then moved to a suburb of Baghdad but anti-Jewish attacks persisted and she herself witnessed the bodies of Iraqi Jews hanging from gallows in a square. Her father lost vision in one eye after an assault and he had to bribe a police officer to free his two sons after they were arrested on false charges.
In the late 1940s, Pearl worked with an underground Zionist movement that facilitated the emigration of Jews, then illegal, to British-controlled Mandatory Palestine. At this time, Pearl began using the Hebrew name Ruth. Around 1948, her two older brothers were smuggled into Palestine from Iraq. In 1949, Ruth’s oldest brother was killed fighting for the Israeli army, which she did not learn about until years later as her father had withheld the information from his family. In 1951, Pearl arrived with her family in Israel as part of the mass exodus of Iraqi Jews.
So the horror of Arab anti-Semitism was one of her earliest experiences, long before the nightmare returned in a very personal way.
Pearl’s mother met her husband Judah Pearl in Israel, and they moved to the US in 1950 for graduate studies. Both were scientists. Ruth Pearl died in 2021, but her husband is still alive at 87, and he was born in Tel Aviv in 1936 to Polish-Jewish immigrants who had had the prescience and good fortune to be able to emigrate to Israel.
Daniel Pearl was abducted, held hostage, and murdered by various jihadi groups in 2002, when he was 38 years old. That was over 20 years ago, so you may have forgotten some of the details that perhaps didn’t seem so important at the time. But here are a few:
On February 21, 2002, a video was released titled The Slaughter of the Spy-Journalist, the Jew Daniel Pearl. The video shows Pearl’s mutilated body …
The Jew Daniel Pearl. And of course there was the broadcasting, with great pride, of not just the killing but the mutilation. What seemed so unusual back then stopped being unusual a long time ago, because we’ve seen many such videos over the years. And now, with social media, we have refinements such as this: filming the murder of a young man on his cellphone, and sending the video to his mother.
But back to Pearl and the video of his killing. During the video, Pearl was made to say at the outset:
My name is Daniel Pearl. I’m a Jewish-American from Encino, California, USA. I come from, uh, on my father’s side the family is Zionist. My father’s Jewish, my mother’s Jewish, I’m Jewish. My family follows Judaism. We’ve made numerous family visits to Israel.
Jewish, Jewish, Jewish; Israel, Israel, Israel. That was no mere detail to Pearl’s killers. It’s not that they won’t kill non-Jews; they certainly will, and with relish. But it is Jews they wish to eliminate from the earth first. One can argue about what the Koran says about Jews; it says a lot of contradictory things, many of them not good. But you can’t argue about what hadith Hamas chose to put in its charter as inspiration:
The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him
So do not be surprised when Palestinians and Palestinian sympathizers in Western countries stand in public squares and celebrate the killing of Jews and scream that they want to kill more. As courageous Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes:
In short, anti-Semites the world over have been emboldened by this crisis, and Jews are once again being blamed for their own massacre. And I am not remotely surprised. In my childhood, I was steeped in the Islamist movement’s noxious anti-Semitism — which has been on such ugly display this week.
Born in Mogadishu, Somalia, I spent my early years escaping political strife after my father was imprisoned for being an anti-government activist. We moved between countries before settling in Kenya.
The worst insult in the Somali community was to be called a ‘Jew’, not that any of us actually knew one. To be called a ‘Jew’ was so abhorrent, some felt justified in killing anyone who so dishonoured them with this ‘slur’.
As a teenager in Nairobi in the 1980s, I joined the Muslim Brotherhood — the strict Sunni Islamist movement, founded in Egypt in 1928, from which Hamas ultimately descends.
I vividly remember sitting with my female fellows in mosques, cursing Israel and praying to Allah to destroy the Jews. We were certainly not interested in a peaceful ‘two-state solution’: we were taught to want to see Israel wiped off the map.
When I was 16, my school’s teacher of religion was Sister Aziza. She read to us the Koran’s lurid descriptions of the everlasting fire that burns flesh and dissolves skin — the place reserved for Jews.
Sister Aziza described Jews as physically monstrous, with horns coming from their heads, out of which flew devils that would corrupt the world. Jews controlled everything, she told us, and it was the duty of Muslims to destroy them.
It was a lot to take in for a teenager who read Western romance novels in secret, but I believed every word. …
[Much later] I abandoned my religion, but I have never lost my clear-sighted understanding, forged in my childhood, of Islamism’s pathological hatred of Jews, as well as Muslims considered as heretics and non-Muslims in general.
The former Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi — a one-time leader of the Muslim Brotherhood — declared that Muslims should ‘nurse our children and our grandchildren on hatred’ of Jews.
One of the most chilling things about the 10/7 terrorist attacks was that for several previous years Hamas pretended to be backing away from violence, and fooled Israel into thinking that actually was true. Now they are bragging about the success of their deception, which caused the Israelis to give them travel permits and also to let down their guard somewhat. According to a Hamas official:
“We made them think Hamas was busy with governing Gaza, and that it wanted to focus on the 2.5 million Palestinians [there] and had abandoned the resistance altogether. All the while, under the table, Hamas was preparing for this big attack.”
And they want this to be a worldwide effort. They’ve been preparing the ground for decades: emigrating to Western nations, using propaganda in the MSM, and enlisting many allies in academia (see this). Perhaps they have overestimated their support and overplayed their hand, causing at least some of their erstwhile allies in the Western Left to recoil in horror. Perhaps. But perhaps not. There is no mistaking their intent anymore, nor the lengths to which they are willing to go to achieve it.
9/11 was a wakeup call for a lot of people. And so is this. The question is whether it will be heeded.
When I was 16, my school’s teacher of religion was Sister Aziza. She read to us the Koran’s lurid descriptions of the everlasting fire that burns flesh and dissolves skin — the place reserved for Jews.
Sister Aziza described Jews as physically monstrous, with horns coming from their heads, out of which flew devils that would corrupt the world. Jews controlled everything, she told us, and it was the duty of Muslims to destroy them.
When you consider that there’s something like 1.8 billion Muslims in the world, a majority of whom likely have very similar viewpoints to Sister Aziza regarding the world’s 16 million Jews and Israel, you start to get a true understanding of the enormity of the issue.
Ruth Pearl’s family escaped death in the first instance because her father’s Arab neighbors did not turn them over to the bloodthirsty mob. Outliers, exceptions.
The bloodthirsty mob wants to rule; on campus, in the Senate chamber today (with red-painted hands), and in the Left worldwide.
in the Senate chamber today (with red-painted hands)
This is the first I’ve heard from those CODEPINK morons in many years, but it figures they’d be on the side of murders and rapists.
But…but…Islam is a Religion of Peace!
Thanks, fool GWB & knave BHO!
Carolyn Glick’s show from yesterday pointed out that the bloodlust of the Hamashites (are all of them Gazamites or are some Westbankians too?). The Hamashites couldn’t pass up on the evil of slaughtering the concert victims, so the jumped the gun (knife) on the Iranian Hezbollah plan. And then the Hamashites tarried in their barbarity. Even Satan’s plans go agley.
The Nazis are said to have put murdering Jews and others above military priorities, not to imply that the German military wasn’t all in with the butchery. Nope, it wasn’t just the SS and the “special groups.”
Not your kids’ Count Chocula:
https://pjmedia.com/raymond-ibrahim/2023/10/31/count-dracula-undead-bloodsucker-or-anti-jihad-hero-n4923475
Powerline has a link and an excerpt of a report that suggests there may be some US fingerprints on the Gaza attack.
POSTED ON OCTOBER 31, 2023 BY SCOTT JOHNSON IN BIDEN FOREIGN POLICY, HAMAS, HEZBOLLAH, IRAN, ISRAEL, LEBANON, TERRORISM
EYELESS IN GAZA
Tony Badran is a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where he focuses on Lebanon, Hezbollah, Syria, and the geopolitics of the Levant. Tablet originally published his illuminating column “Eyeless in Gaza” on October 18. FDD has cross-posted it here with Badran’s many links. The column provides an illuminating account of “how the U.S. blinded Israeli intelligence gathering efforts on Hamas and other Palestinian groups inside Lebanon.” Our friends at FDD have given us permission to publish it on Power Line. Prefacing his column with the famous lines from Milton, Badran writes:
“… Promise was that I
Should Israel from Philistian yoke deliver;
Ask for this great deliverer now, and find him
Eyeless in Gaza…”
—John Milton, Samson Agonistes
It will be a while before we’re able to piece together a more complete picture of how Israel, despite its vaunted intelligence-gathering capabilities, was blindsided by the massive Hamas terrorist onslaught on Oct. 7, which led to the biggest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. After the current Israeli operation in Gaza concludes, there will be inquiries, official and unofficial, in Israel and beyond, about what contributed to this intelligence failure. Where was Israel blinded, and how?
A key focal point for these inquiries will be Lebanon. Immediately following the Oct. 7 massacre, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing Hamas and Hezbollah sources, that the terrorist attack was planned by the Iranians and Hezbollah in Lebanon, where the Iranians had set up a joint operations room, the existence of which Hezbollah media had previously disclosed in 2021. The New York Times corroborated the Journal’s story a few days later, adding that training for the attack, including on paragliders which were used to slaughter Israelis and tourists at a music festival, also took place in Lebanon.
So how did Israel find itself blind and deaf in Lebanon? Why was it that, with all this activity taking place in Lebanon over several months, Israel was not able to pick up meaningful intelligence on a lethal adversary? To answer these questions, we must turn to the current security environment in Lebanon, which in turn shaped and constrained Israel’s intelligence gathering capabilities.
Since Israel’s last major war in Lebanon in 2006, the tiny county has come under American sponsorship, even as it remained under Iranian suzerainty via its local regent, Hezbollah. This U.S.-Iranian condominium, solidified during Barack Obama’s two terms in office, is being topped off by the construction of a brand-new, $1 billion U.S. Embassy in Beirut—a symbol of the U.S.’s commitment to underwriting the country’s existing Hezbollah-led order.
America’s most significant commitments to Iranian-dominated Lebanon involve underwriting the Lebanese security sector, especially its two largest organs: the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) and the Internal Security Forces (ISF). The U.S. provides arms, training and equipment to these forces. Over the past year, American taxpayer dollars have also underwritten their salaries.
Right from the outset, the Lebanese security forces used American training and equipment to uncover Israeli spy cells gathering intelligence on Hezbollah. In 2009, the ISF detected an Israeli breach of Hezbollah’s ranks. The then-head of the ISF called the group’s intelligence chief and told him: “You’ve been infiltrated.” After Hezbollah and the ISF exchanged information, Hezbollah reportedly then took over the surveillance, apprehension, and interrogation of the spies. Following the assassination of Hezbollah senior commander Imad Mughniyeh in Damascus the previous year, the LAF gave Hezbollah a counterintelligence assist by snatching Israeli spies in eastern Lebanon.
Obama’s fingerprints might be more accurate.
But, but, but… I thought all we really had to worry about were those evil CHRISTOFASCISTS and MAGA RETHUGLICANS that we keep hearing about from Biden, Harris, Jeffries, AOC, Tlaib et al. as well as all the truth-tellers on TV like Maddow, Reid and all the rest at MSNBC and CNN! Can this possibly not be true? I’m shocked! Shocked, I tell you.
the thing about Pearl is that while his family had been committed Jews, he wasn’t. His wife and child were gentile and yet his captors didnt care if he were a Chasid or Edith Stein.
the people at the Peace Concert on Shabbat were the types who would have made a deal with Hamas and yet they were the victims. Hamas doesn’t distinguish
Related:
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/379478
“Muslims warn Europe: Stop supporting Israel or….”—
The silver lining…?
” ‘Three miracles occured on October 7th’ ;
“IDF reservist Yair Ansbacher notes three miracles that had they not occurred, the attack would have ended in a much more difficult way.”—
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/379443
+ Bonus:
“Senior Hamas official: ‘Tunnels were meant to protect us and not the residents of Gaza’;
‘Mousa Abu Marzook: “The tunnels were meant to protect us. The UN is supposed to provide protection to the residents of Gaza”.’—https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/379469
“Ambassador Hotovely: UK stands with Israel, there is Jihad in the streets of London”—
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/379481
(But as they say, it ain’t over till it’s over….)
Avi:
True. In fact, on 10/7 they even murdered Israeli Arabs and visiting Thai workers. Hamas likes to kill. But they prefer to kill Jews. And even a non-religious Jew is as much a Jew to them as the same person would have been to the Nazis.
Now the young in our country, my Country, have been polluted with the hatred.
They call all none sufficiently devout muslims mushrikun (polytheists(
I tried, some years ago, to convince my non-observant Jewish neighbor that his lack of ritual observance would not save him if the monsters came. No, he preferred his Democratic and more or less pacifist voting habits. I don’t see him since he moved away; I wonder if he’s changed his mind.
Turns out some of the US Colleges and Universities are hotbeds of anti-semitism. In addition, they are also hotbeds of Marxism, Intersectionality, and DEI.
What happened on Oct. 7th in Israel is coming to America and to Western Europe. Tens of thousands of illegal young men from the Middle East and China have and are crossing the border into the US. They’re not coming for jobs. Their targets are likely to be schools, hospitals, and anywhere large crowds gather because instilling terror is the goal of terrorism. It’s not a matter of if but of when.
How I hated the Daniel Pearl execution-spectacle and those behind it.
I’m risking nothing to say so here, but — I stand with Israel; I stand with the Jews.
“9/11 was a wakeup call for a lot of people. And so is this. The question is whether it will be heeded.”
Joe Biden is totally asleep and we all pay the price.
Had lunch today with a lawyer friend who was the national president of the Association of Christians and Jews. That sure seems a long time ago.
I’m totally shocked at all the pro-HamaNazis who are openly displaying their hate of Jews. And, of course, they are all Dems.
All I can say is I hope Israel wipes out Hamas and it is so complete that they know they are beaten and all this insanity stops.
People need to be reminded of this simple truth:
When someone says they want to kill you, you have only three options:
1) You can let them kill you. This option will not be chosen by anyone who is sane.
2) You can try to talk them out of wanting to kill you. This usually never works, as demonstrated by Hamas and others.
3) That leaves only the 3rd option, where you have to kill them before they kill you. Israel has been forced to choose this third option now, as many of us will also soon have to choose this option.
PS there are no other options.
A bit of good news:
Geoffrey Britain
The illegal immigrants will bring their wars to our cities.
james sisco says, “Turns out some of the US Colleges and Universities are hotbeds of anti-semitism.”
Prof. Jacobson at Legal Insurrection put up a new post about an hour ago about a junior at Cornell who has been arrested and charged with posting online threats against Jewish students at the university:
“Patrick Dai, of Pittsford, posted threats to shoot up a multicultural dining room on campus to an online discussion site, prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of New York said in a news release. 104West, the dining room, serves food that meets Kosher, Halal and other religious guidelines. It is next to the university’s Center for Jewish Living, where several dozen Jewish students live on campus.
Dai, a junior, also called for the deaths of Jewish people and threatened to bring an assault rifle to campus, prosecutors said. He was charged with posting threats to kill or injure another using interstate communications. Dai faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison if convicted.”
https://legalinsurrection.com/2023/10/cornell-junior-arrested-and-charged-in-threats-against-jewish-students/
Brendan O’Neill, once again, in a brilliant (if rather obvious!) analysis/take-down/shake-down of the current zeitgeist racket on campus….
“The normalisation of savagery;
“Societies that give up on freedom will soon find it replaced by violence.”—
https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/10/31/the-normalisation-of-savagery/
H/T Powerline blog.
@ om > “The Hamashites couldn’t pass up on the evil of slaughtering the concert victims, so the jumped the gun (knife) on the Iranian Hezbollah plan. And then the Hamashites tarried in their barbarity. Even Satan’s plans go agley.”
I suspected from reading between the lines over the last few weeks that something like that had happened. There was clearly a plan to open a multi-front war on Israel but Hamas ruined it. A fitting ally for Biden Inc, if you recall Obama’s view of his VP’s competence.
Now Hamas is complaining that its erstwhile allies aren’t going ahead with the botched plan, which depended on all of the attacks happening before Israel was put on guard.
https://www.jns.org/hamas-leaders-feel-betrayed-by-iran-and-hezbollah/
“Razi Hamed, another top Hamas official, said a few days ago in a television interview that Hamas had expected more from its allies, but he did not name Iran or Hezbollah. “Our vision was to open all fronts at the same time,” Hamed said.”
He should have stuck with the program.
On the other hand, I’m not sure that Israel is learning the right lessons either.
https://www.jns.org/israel-green-lights-entry-of-thousands-of-palestinian-workers/
From the “So What?! It’s Just Another Blood Libel” File…
“Anatomy of a Blood Libel”—
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/anatomy-of-a-blood-libel
+ “Bonus”:
“I Said Hamas Raped and Beheaded. The Yale Daily News Issued a Correction.”—
https://freebeacon.com/campus/i-said-hamas-raped-women-and-beheaded-men-the-yale-daily-news-issued-a-correction/
H/T Powerline blog (for both links).
And it looks like the Yale Daily News issued a Correction (or Retraction) of their Correction…
https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2023/10/31/on-recent-editors-notes/
H/T Powerline blog.
Do you think the Yale paper will change its practices, or are they just cleaning up after getting busted this one time?
She was? a die moron
@ Barry > ““IDF reservist Yair Ansbacher notes three miracles that had they not occurred, the attack would have ended in a much more difficult way.”—”
Your INN link doesn’t work for me, have tried all day.
Here is an alternate post with the same story.
https://www.newsrael.com/posts/wz3lvw5t4qi
He is correct about dispensing with the mall guards only if Israel ends their very restrictive laws on gun possession.
Robert Dean Stethem. Killed because he had a be U S. Armed forces ID. I disagree Pearl was the first. In fact, I’ve lost track. It used to be part of my job.
Who is counting coup? Pearl wasn’t the first by my count. So what? I largely don’t care if you’re the first o re ten thousandth. I want you dead
Steve 57:
The reason I chose Pearl is that, to the best of my knowledge, he was the first to be beheaded, the first whose killers made a snuff film of his murder for propaganda purposes and disseminated it, and the first to be explicitly targeted because he was a Jew. That is the connection.
.
Islam and Democrats. Somehow, you can always trust them to be pushing the Overton Window off a cliff.
.
Neo, I have the utmost respect for your grace and your wisdom. I believe it was TWA flight 847 the Arabs highjacked. When they dumped Stethem’s body in the tarmac they made an enemy of me for life.
I actually don’t know if it was then or the NORKs and the Pueblo who taught me to hate
Steve57:
Munich in ’72 was a turning point as far as I was concerned. And it made Arafat a hero and sympathetic in the eyes of much of the world. That paradoxical and horrible effect was part of the awfulness.
I don’t hate. It clouds the mind. In times of stress you need to think.
For me it was the Yankees….
Thinking is your way out of your situation
Damn Yankees!