I love the Prokofiev Romeo and Juliet score, and this is one of my favorite passages. In this production, the costumes are also fabulous:
Hamas took the kids on a field trip
The killing fields, that is.
This is so terrible as to be nearly unbelievable. And yet, from what we already know about how children in Gaza are educated, it is indeed believable.
Not all children would be part of this – going along to witness the torture and murder of October 7, and to participate in looting – even if programmed to hate Jews, but some would. That man who was recorded calling his parents on October 7 and bragging about having killed ten Jews with his own two hands wasn’t tremendously old either, probably in his late teens. Gazan children are being abused in a profound way, and I don’t know if it ever would be possible for them to become normal again. I think it depends on the child, the programming, and on the child’s age.
I would guess that the brainwashing only proceeds into outright violence in the percentage of the population which is naturally psychopathic. There are estimates of what that percentage is, but ’tis enough, ’twill serve, if the culture in which those psychopaths live teaches and nurtures hatred and violence.
Not every terrorist had a retinue of children with him. Or women – there were women, too.
Eran Smilansky, a 28-year-old potato farmer, watched Gazan children go from house to house in his kibbutz on Oct. 7. Hamas terrorists followed. The boys laughed as the gunmen shot or dragged away Israeli families.
“They were like young, young kids,” said Smilansky, who defended his home from terrorists for more than six hours that day. “They were going in front of the terrorists, laughing with their friends and looking very calm. I remember thinking, What the fuck?”
Smilansky was one of a dozen survivors of the Nir Oz massacre who told the Washington Free Beacon they witnessed boys or women from the Gaza Strip looting the kibbutz, helping the armed terrorists, and apparently enjoying themselves. The youngest children were around 10 years old, according to several of the survivors, one of whom provided photographs of some of the women and children he saw.
There is strong evidence that this happened, based on photographs as well as multiple eyewitnesses:
Like most of the Nir Oz survivors, Eyal Barad and his family hid in the safe room of their house from about 6:30 a.m. until the Israeli military evacuated them 12 or so hours later. But Barad, an engineer, had a rare view of the outside world thanks to a speed camera he had recently set up to bust his neighbors for driving on the sidewalk.
On the camera’s livestream, Barad watched three types of Gazans pass by his house: uniformed Hamas commandos carrying automatic weapons, RPGs, and grenades; casually dressed gunmen; and ordinary-looking men, women, and children. Barad said the ordinary Gazans vastly outnumbered the armed terrorists. He estimated that he saw at least a dozen children, who were between the ages of 10 and 15, and 30 women from Gaza.
The armed terrorists were in charge, Barad recalled. They gave orders to the ordinary Gazans, like sending the children to loot specific homes. At one point, Barad saw a woman run up to an armed terrorist and point him toward a house.
“I’m guessing she saw people she wanted him to go kill or kidnap or I don’t know what,” Barad said. “But I can say with 100 percent certainty that [the women and kids] were not just innocent bystanders or looters. They were part of the massacre. They were part of the horrors that we endured that day.”
The article contains other chilling stories. The very worst involves a single witness – but no photos – who said that he saw terrorists hand a gun to children as young as six and have them fire it themselves, killing Israelis. I think this event is possible – really, anything is possible – but that’s one isolated instance and perhaps it’s not true.
I hope it’s not true.
But of course it could be true. And of course, we also have all these people in the West thinking the terrorists are the victims. It’s a world gone mad.
Speaker Johnson will be releasing the bulk of the J6 video
Some video is already available to the public as of Friday, with the bulk of it to be released gradually over time, Johnson said.
“When I ran for Speaker, I promised to make accessible to the American people the 44,000 hours of video from Capitol Hill security taken on January 6, 2021. Truth and transparency are critical,” Johnson said in a statement.
“Today, we will begin immediately posting video on a public website and move as quickly as possible to add to the website nearly all of the footage, more than 40,000 hours. In the meantime, a public viewing room will ensure that every citizen can view every minute of the videos uncensored.”
He continued, “This decision will provide millions of Americans, criminal defendants, public interest organizations, and the media an ability to see for themselves what happened that day, rather than having to rely upon the interpretation of a small group of government officials.”
Most members of “the American public” will probably find things in the video that confirms the beliefs they already have; I’m not at all sure it will change minds. But I think there will be plenty on there which, if viewed objectively, would challenge the left’s interpretation and the official government message. But perhaps the most important part is that criminal defendents whose lawyers have been blocked from seeing possible exculpatory evidence on the videos will get a chance to look and see for themselves if it’s there.
Good for Johnson. Here’s a link. Some highlights here.
ADDENDUM: See also this (hat tip: commenter “miguel cervantes.”)
Some miscellaneous things I want to highlight
(1) Commenter “IrishOtter49” has a health crisis; see this. Please pray for his recovery if you’re the praying kind, or if not, please send good wishes and hopes for his recovery.
(2) I thought I’d reiterate the following, most of which I’ve discussed previously in my own comments here:
In Israel, for the most part the “safe rooms” were reinforced rooms within the house itself and didn’t have locks. People held them shut, sometimes for 12 hours or so. But even if the terrorists couldn’t get in, they often just set the whole house on fire.
And regarding the failure of the Israeli military and police to get there in time: from what I’ve read, the failure to respond had to do with several factors. The first was that it was a holiday and a lot of people in the military weren’t on duty. The second was that the jihadis disabled some of the communications – I’m not sure of those details and I don’t think the details have been reported, for security reasons. Another is that on a nearby base that had close to 300 soldiers on duty, the terrorists attacked while they were still asleep and murdered them all. I also think that some soldiers and police did come to the area (and many were killed), but not in enough quantity because it took quite a while to realize the huge scope of the invasion – about 3,000, spread out – because an invasion it was, of an unprecedented kind.
Also, 1,000 to 1,500 terrorists were killed that day in Israel. I don’t know what percentage of those terrorists were killed by members of the communities they were attacking, but I think it’s very likely that, as the Israeli military and the police were trying to get to all the areas where Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists were engaged in killing people, a significant number of those terrorists were killed by the Israeli authorities. The area was relatively small – Israel itself is relatively small – but the terrorists were not centralized and they were spread out all over that area. Coordinating the response must have been very challenging. It was obviously poorly done, but I think many factors were involved and we’ll get more information as time goes on.
(3) You might say that this Israeli peace activist who was murdered by Hamas (hat tip: commenter “huxley”), was wrong. But I think she was, if anything, naive. The alternative to believing that peace is possible, and that good deeds will help, is to fall back on a solution that seems terrible. The sad truth appears to be that sometimes it takes violence to combat evil. But still, I can understand the deep desire for it to be otherwise. RIP:
She co-founded the Women Wage Peace group, which lobbied for a diplomatic resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and helped found Ajeec-Nisped – the Arab-Jewish Center for Empowerment, Equality, and Cooperation.
Kher Albaz, an Israeli Bedouin who worked alongside her, tells BBC World Service she “lived in equality” and used to drive injured Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to Israeli hospitals.
“She was a real human being, her view on life was very positive, she was always smiling and looking for ways to make people feel better, always looking for ways to make sure people felt accepted and felt good,” he says.
(4) I got a late start today and need to do some other tasks for the next hour or two. So posting will be delayed till late afternoon or early evening.
Open thread 11/17/23
Shifa hospital and the hostages
The Israelis have explored the tunnels under Shifa hospital and have reported on what they found:
The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have complete control of Gaza City’s massive Shifa Hospital, believed to be home to Hamas’s headquarters.
Unfortunately, the IDF did not find any [living] hostages, but they claim they found evidence Hamas once held them at the hospital.
The IDF discovered “a significant stash of Hamas weaponry.”
Also, they found Hamas uniforms that seem to have been discarded hastily, probably when the jihadis donned civilian clothing in order to flee.
As far as violence goes:
… [N]one of the soldiers shot their guns. Instead, they entered the hospital calmly and controlled, not engaging any medical personnel or patients.
The IDF claimed it “was ‘not overrunning’ the hospital, asserting troops were conducting a ‘focused’ operation ‘in a defined area’ of the hospital.”
The IDF brought everything Hamas denied the Palestinian people in the hospital: medical supplies, incubators for babies, and humanitarian aid.
It won’t change all the Jew-haters’ minds, nor the MSM coverage. I wonder, however, if a few of the Palestinians have noted the contrast.
This guy apparently noted something else, though, when interviewed by Al Jazeera in another Gaza hospital:
The Qatari-owned broadcaster interviewed an injured Palestinian man at Al-Aqsa hospital in Gaza on Sunday 5 November.
However, the Al Jazeera reporter cut the conversation short as soon as the man criticised the terror group for hiding among civilians.
“As for the resistance, they come and hide among the people. Why are they hiding among the people? They can go to hell and hide there,” the man said, according to a translation by the Middle East Research Institute (MEMRI) from Arabic to English.
The reporter then abruptly turned away from the man even as he continued to speak, addressing the camera and changing the subject.
The Israelis warned the Shifa hospital that they were coming and when it would happen, giving the terrorists plenty of time to leave and live to fight another day. But if the IDF didn’t give warnings, the entire world would condemn them; plus it would offend their own sense of integrity and human decency.
The warnings also give Hamas a chance to move the hostages elsewhere, of course. At some point they may run out of hiding places, but that could take a long long time, if ever. In the meantime, if any hostages die or are even killed by Hamas, the terrorists can claim it was the IDF that killed them.
But so far the hostages are still worth more to the terrorists alive than dead – at least, I think so. Therefore it stands to reason they will try to keep most of them alive in order to get more bang for their hostage buck, as it were. What the hostages are going through, and have been going through, is unconscionable and horrific to imagine on any level, both psychological and physical. The suffering of their families is intense. Even we who are onlookers find the hostage situation enraging and heartbreaking, but multiply that feeling exponentially for the families.
The ultimate fate of one hostage was revealed as a result of the IDF’s Shifa takeover, however:
Yehudit Weiss, 64, was sick with cancer when Hamas death squads murdered her husband in Be’eri and abducted her to Gaza on October 7.
The IDF found her body in a building containing Kalashnikovs and RPGs adjacent to the Shifa Hospital. ? pic.twitter.com/Ik7UuP18Ok
— Eylon Levy (@EylonALevy) November 16, 2023
No further information on her death has been released so far. RIP.
How many other hostages are dead? When did they die, and how? How are the living ones being treated? And where are they? The public has no idea; I hope that Israeli intelligence does.
Why does Fetterman support Israel so strongly?
Senator John Fetterman’s support for Israel is a surprise to many people, because he’s a “progressive” Democrat. These days that seems to go with being anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian, and in some cases even pro-Hamas. But Fetterman has been something of an Israel booster.
I don’t have any special knowledge that answers the question as to why. But I do have a few observations on the subject. The first is that he has a history of strong Israel support, although of course things like that can change when someone enters Congress and is pressured by the Democratic leadership. In this case the Democratic leadership, Schumer, is at least relatively pro-Israel as well. More significantly, Schumer no doubt realizes that the Democratic Party has a lot of Jewish donors (the Jewish voters constitute a rather small number; it’s the donors that really matter), and he might think that having a visibly pro-Israel Fetterman is a nice foil against people like Tlaib in the House.
Fetterman himself, despite being a leftist Democrat, is also somewhat of an individualist. My sense of him is that he’s not afraid to be different; he is different. His clothing, for example, is very different. His illness makes him different, too, but he was an atypical guy even before that.
No government shutdown for now
Congress approved another stopgap measure to avoid a shutdown:
The United States Senate passed a continuing resolution late Wednesday night that will, at least for now, avoid a government shutdown. The bill passed by a margin of 87–11, with 10 Republicans and one Democrat voting no. Republican Senators John Cornyn (TX) and Tim Scott (SC) were absent for the vote. …
…[T]he House of Representatives [had already] approved the measure 336 to 95, with 209 Democrats and 127 Republicans voting in favor of it, giving new House Speaker Mike Johnson (LA) his first big win.
So you might ask: what’s the difference between this and Kevin McCarthy? The difference may be this:
Newly elected House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., proposed a plan on Saturday creating two separate deadlines for funding different parts of the government to set up more targeted goals to work toward in an effort to prevent Congress from lumping all 12 spending bills into a massive “omnibus” package.
Bills concerning military construction and Veterans Affairs; Agriculture; Energy and Water; Transportation and Housing and Urban Development must be worked out by Jan. 19 while the remaining eight appropriations bills must be decided upon by Feb. 2.
The reality is that the Democrats control the Senate, and although the GOP controls the House it’s by a very slim margin and split between the more conservative and the more GOPe wings of the party. Although we might wish for a magic wand, there’s no getting around those facts. The only way around the situation is to elect more conservatives to Congress, although maybe that would require a magic wand, too.
A truly amazing survival story
What a strong constitution this guy must have. And what a loving father he is:
Open thread 11/16/23
Another day, another piano prodigy:
The UN is the educational propaganda arm of Hamas and other jihadis, training Palestinian children in Jew-hatred for generations
And the US has given them the money to do it by its huge monetary support of the UN.
I became alerted to this long ago. I wish I could recall exactly where and when I first read about it, but I came across an article describing this – perhaps in the New Yorker, perhaps in the early 1990s. The piece was about what was taught to Palestinian children in places such as Gaza, and it made my blood run cold. The UN has funded most of these schools, and the curriculum was and still is Jew-hatred of Nazi-level genocidal virulence.
I remember becoming quite frightened even back then, because it was obvious that this was going to bear fruit and, as bad as things already were in that area of the world, they would be getting worse.
I have thought of that article many times in the intervening years. I’ve searched for it, but I’m handicapped by the fact that I have no idea where it was published or exactly when, who wrote it or whether that was the main topic or whether it was tangential to the theme of the piece. It’s the only part I remember.
October 7 made me think of it again. I have little doubt that the terrorists who raped and tortured and murdered and mutilated with such zest and ferocity, and the people who cheered them in the streets of Gaza, had been steeped in the sort of education described above.
Note the cute little girl towards the end of this video:
This is an excellent discussion of the UNRWA Palestinian education problem. The good news, I suppose, is that if someone takes over and changes the education of these kids, the entire situation might at least improve. Towards the end of the video, the speaker describes efforts that have changed Saudi and UAE education for the better. The guy talking about UNRWA has been doing work on this enormously important issue for a long time, and I salute him:
Biden gives aid and comfort to Iran
The Biden administration has extended a sanctions waiver that will grant Iran access to roughly $10 billion from Iraq in exchange for electricity purchases.
The 120-day waiver, signed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday, is identical to one issued in July, but comes amid increased attacks against US forces by Iranian proxies and just over a month after Iran-backed terror group Hamas slaughtered 1,200 people in Israel on Oct. 7.
I wrote “Biden” in the post’s title, but of course he’s got his pro-Iran advisors.
If you read the fine print, it’s all supposedly limited to being used for “humanitarian” purposes to benefit the Iraqi and Iranian people. If I believed it were possible to successfully limit the regime in that way, I wouldn’t be so incensed. But I don’t believe it’s possible. Here’s one of those cases where I hope I’m wrong, because that money can buy a lot of armaments.