Tough read

A few articles to peruse if you feel like diving in to the middle east cesspool:

How Hamas came to power.

Harari - leftist indifference to Hamas atrocities

Hamas hideout under Gaza hospital

Omer and Omar: How two 4-year-olds were killed and social media denied it

Dear Jewish Academics: Hamas exulted in killing Jews, not zionist colonialists

An Israeli Academic Spent a Decade Trying to Understand Palestinians. He Now Believes Hope for Peace Is Bleak

Friedman - Please, Israel, Don’t Get Lost in Hamas’s Tunnels

Imagine you are Israel. You are suddenly attacked and your people are slaughtered in their cribs, wheelchairs, kibbutzim and at a rock concert, unarmed. Hamas operatives make videos of the killings and broadcast them in real time on social media, send taunting notes to the parents afterwards.

The military on Tuesday published a recording of a Hamas terrorist who took part in the October 7 onslaught in southern Israel bragging to his parents of slaughtering Jews, as Israel continues to put out further details from the murderous assault earlier this month.

In the call, the man can be heard excitedly telling his parents that he is in Mefalsim, a kibbutz near the Gaza border, and that he alone killed 10 Jews.

“Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews!” he says, according to an English translation.“Mom, your son is a hero,” he later adds.

His parents are heard praising him during the call. Identified by his father as Mahmoud, the terrorist says he is calling his family from the phone of a Jewish woman he’s just murdered, and implores them to check his WhatsApp messages for further documentation.

How proud they must be! Notice, he was killing Jews, not Israelis. You listening, Wallace Shawn?

These "armed resistors" then make statements that they only kill soldiers, never civilians. This is after their attack plans to the contrary are found and disseminated which shows the opposite. In any case, the soldiers and guerrilla force slink back into the shadows of Gaza and hide in a population that both elected them and knows fully well where they operate.

Israel retaliates, naturally, and the cry goes up that Israel is applying collective punishment (which they are) and that Hamas and the Gazans, who perpetrated the atrocity, are the true victims here. They are joined by their friends on the political left and at the U.N., who love to lecture Israel and the Jewish people on matters of morality, and demand immediate statehood for the Palestinians as payment for their recent acts of terror and perfidy.

What they have failed to achieve by bloodshed and atrocity shall be rewarded by an immediate ceasefire and a land deal. Israel can certainly not punish the murderers who killed over a thousand people and then hide amongst the civilian population. Let it go. Hamas gets a pass.

I have been clear that Israel's hands are not altogether clean here, that they have been duplicitous with their settler policy and have missed many genuine opportunities to give the Palestinians a contiguous state. I blame Netanyahu and the right wing for a lot of the rightful anger in Gaza and the west Bank.

But let's blame Hamas too, a group not only dedicated to the destruction of Israel, from the river to the sea, but to killing Jewish people wherever convenient, in and out of Israel. This is a barbarous muslim group committed to terror, make no bones about it. How can you make peace with a people committed to your destruction?

Unfortunately, in the world we live in and in certain circles of the left, Jewish blood is apparently very cheap. 

On college campuses today, throughout America and Europe, anti semitism is rampant and young people champion the rights of terrorists to kill Jewish babies in their cribs in their righteous acts of resistance.

This is where they lose me. I recognize the awful tragedy of innocent people dying in Gaza but never forget who cast the first stone in this recent conflict. The people of Gaza have their share of blame too, electing leaders who perpetrate genocidal actions and then pretending that their hands are clean.

What is happening in Israel and the occupied territories is horrific, for all involved. The current violence will end one day and no one, on either side, will have learned anything.