Everything Has Changed.
It's not just about Israel. It's about civilization and its enemies. And its enemies are among us.
It’s been a week since the last Real Story and I’ve been too overwhelmed by events and assignments to pay proper attention to this newsletter. I confess that the horror and sadness of it all has left me a bit of a wreck. Some of my dearest friends are inconsolable. So please forgive.
I’ll try to get everyone up to speed as succinctly as I can straight away before getting into the guts of today’s newsletter.
A few hours ago I came away from a briefing with Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen and Israeli Defence Forces Major Libby Weiss. The briefing left me about as well-informed as it was possible to be about what had happened and what was to come, but that’s probably not saying much. The situation is, as they say, kinetic.
While sometimes the Real Story’s contents end up in the news pages, the focus of this edition will be to provide some useful resources and background to the headline news that you’re not likely to find elsewhere.
Much of what is being suddenly found so shocking about about the depravity of the so-called “Palestinian solidarity” crowd will be familiar to Real Story subscribers. I’ll include some links below to content from the Real Story archives and other resources that will shed light on all that.
I’ll also include some stern stuff for paying subscribers below a paywall, but for all comers I’ll also include some background sources to my piece published Sunday in the National Post: As Israeli innocents are hunted and murdered, certain Canadian ‘progressives’ choose to celebrate. I touched on the obscenity of certain gleeful celebrations from the United States and Australia and the UK too.
The State of Play
Three days after the Hamas rocket barrage and the incursions of more than 1,000 heavily armed Hamas marauders, the IDF was still engaged in combat inside Israel proper. Quite a few questions couldn’t be answered by Minister Cohen or Major Weiss, owing to the usual “operational security” reasons. God only knows what fresh hell is breaking out now, even as I write this.
I’ve got to get this newsletter out quickly because another Postmedia deadline looms. For brevity’s sake I won’t be getting into the “geopolitics” of things, as in the role of the Khomeinists in Iran, the catastrophe of the Obama-Biden policy, the evolving position of the Palestinian authority and the decrepit Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank, or the likely fate of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu (spoiler: Bibi is finished).
To keep up with that sort of thing, see my friends Claire Berlinski at The Cosmopolitan Globalist and Vivian Bercovici at State of Tel Aviv.
Bearing in mind that the incursions were ongoing, the fighting was ongoing, the wounded were dying and some towns had yet to be assessed and cleared, more than 700 Israeli were confirmed dead yesterday; that count was adjusted to 900 this morning. Men, women, children. Entire families. The injured and wounded number 2,600 as of this moment. The death toll is expected to rise. Hospitals in the south of the country have been overwhelmed.
The number of hostages kidnapped and dragged off to Hamas lairs inside Gaza: roughly one hundred. The difficulty is in discerning the whereabouts of “the missing” because of the Israeli towns that hadn’t been fully cleared of Hamas fighters yet. In one case on Monday, a pair of ten-month-old twins was recovered from a house; their parents were killed on Saturday.
Israel’s initial offensive against Hamas targets in Gaza - this is just the beginning, and the mortalities should be expected to mount dramatically in the coming days and weeks - focused on airstrikes pounding hundreds of Hamas targets in Jabalia, Beit Hanoun and several sites in Gaza City, along with Khan Younis and Rafah. The estimated number of dead: more than 750.
When I filed for the National Post Sunday morning, what wasn’t clear to me was why the official Israeli death count so quickly jumped in a matter of hours, nearly doubling to “about 700.” What Major Weiss made clear in the following day’s briefing was that even the scale of the massacres at the Re’im music festival hadn’t been fully assessed. The corpses of more than 270 people, many of them teenagers, have now been recovered there.
Civilization and Savagery
In covering this story over the years, and during my visits to Israel, it has more than once occurred to me that there was something beneath the shifting terrain of the status quo that would one day have to be taken apart. Ever since 1967, the UN Relief Works Agency has either deliberately or inadvertently encouraged in Palestinians the delusion that their predicament is merely temporary, that one day the Jews would be driven into the sea.
That delusion has to be broken now. Israel has no choice. Breaking it will be horrifically bloody, but the UN member states have left the “Palestinian problem” a matter for Israel to deal with. And it’s exceedingly difficult to see what options are available to Israel except to finally abandon the triangulations, the management of terror, the 3D Chess, the routine assaults on terror strongholds in the West Bank and Gaza - the whole thing - and smash it to bits.
I have more than once expressed the worry - like my opinion should count for anything - that Israelis may find themselves brutalized by the terrorism the United Nations’ member states have expected them to quietly endure all these years. That Israelis would become inured to Palestinian suffering and pain owing to their own grief and fear.
That is a valid and immediate concern now that Israel has declared a full siege of the Gaza enclave, shutting down all supply chains and barring all electricity and food imports to the two million Gazan Palestinians the terrorist gargoyles in Hamas have been allowed to rule by terror for most of this century.
Even so, it was strangely encouraging to hear the way Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant described Hamas in announcing the seige. “We are fighting savages, and we will act accordingly.”
This is what has to be understood if you want to comprehend even the faintest outlines of the Israelis’ predicament here, and it is not widely understood. Not even close. Sometimes it’s just conveniently overlooked.
In Canada, perhaps especially, the nature of the enemy tends to be covered up, or at least deliberately ignored. The implications of confronting the fact of what Hamas really is are just too awkward, because of the delicate political sensibilities involved in coming to terms it.
We’re talking about “savages” here not just because there are so few words that adequately describe the creatures who set out to inflict those atrocities on innocent Israeli civilians on Saturday. Misunderstand this and you will never get your head around what is happening.
Hamas is not some Third World national liberation movement that just gets a bit carried away now and then. Specifically, Hamas is the Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya, the “Islamic Resistance Movement.” Founded by the Palestinian Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in the late 1980s as the Palestinian political-military wing of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas is not interested in the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
So that’s the first thing, and you can disabuse yourself of any nonsense about the current barbarism being an outrageous but genuinely frustrated response to years of brutal Israeli “occupation.” Israel dismantled all its settlements and unilaterally vacated Gaza in 2005, but that’s beside the point that has to be understood here.
I tried to make the point as succinctly as possible to National Post readers on Sunday. The main thing: Hamas is wholly uninterested in any lasting peace with Israel. Hamas is motivated solely by a theocratic-fascist obsession with ridding the Holy Land of its Jews. It’s exactly the same obsession that was littering the holy ground of Jerusalem with dead Jews long before the State of Israel was established.
The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood to which Hamas turns for its deepest ideological guidance got its biggest boost during the time of the Holocaust, from Nazi Germany. When the Third Reich was rampaging across Europe, the Brotherhood’s Nazi affiliations were open and unambiguous.
Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh is the direct organizational heir and successor of the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, Adolf Hitler’s chief Arab ally during the Second World War. Al-Husseini was already inciting pogroms against the Jews in the 1920s from Hebron in the south to Sefat in the north, two decades before the State of Israel was established.
Hamas did not name its recent multi-faceted terror operation “Al Aqsa Storm” for nothing. Its frisson derives from a conspiracy theory in the form of a recurring hoax about an imminent Jewish desecration or takeover of the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, the Haram al-Sharif, the Dome of the Rock, the holiest place in Islam after Mecca and Medina.
Google “storming Al Aqsa” and you’ll get more than four million hits. Like antisemitism itself, which is a conspiracy theory, the hoax is ineradicable.
Al-Husseini harnessed that hoax for those 1920s-era massacres of Jews, and ever since, the antisemitic incitement has been routinely weaponized to deadly effect by Hamas, by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad organization and by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, especially the PFLP’s Canadian base.
Pandering to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s Canadian iteration, the powerful (and lavishly subsidized) Muslim Association of Canada, several of this country’s Liberal cabinet ministers and MPs have parrotted and megaphoned the same incitement.
Among them, most recently during the horrific violence that broke out during Passover, Ramadan and Easter last year: Melanie Joly, Omar Alghabra, Jennifer O’Connell, Jenna Sudds, Arielle Kayabag, Iqra Khalid, Adam van Koeverden, Sameer Zuberi, and Salma Zahid. You really should read what these usefully idiotic politicians had to say for themselves. It was a potpourri of mumbo jumbo utterly indistinguishable from the tirades broadcast by the Khomeinists on Tehran’s Press TV.
The savageries of Ismael Haniyeh’s Al Aqsa Storm operation were carried out by the Hamas military arm, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades. It should come as no surprise that their atrocities throughout Israel’s southern towns since Saturday resembled nothing so much as the handiwork of Hitler’s Einsatzgruppen murder squads of the 1940s.
This is not the stuff of obscure footnotes to history. It’s about what’s happening now. If you arm yourself with this knowledge you won’t succumb to the usual stupidities about what constitutes a “proportionate” Israeli response to what has happened. And what has happened is the bloodiest catastrophe Israelis have suffered in the half-century since the Yom Kippur war, the most obscene acts of terrorism in Israeli history, and on Saturday, the single bloodiest day for Jews since the Holocaust.
The fundamental incoherence regarding what Israelis are really up against and what Hamas really constitutes is more widespread than you might imagine. Just yesterday, for instance, the Washington Post published what would have been an otherwise routinely rubbish explainer about what has been happening in Israel.
I’ll pass over this giveaway line: “During the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, in April, Israeli forces stormed al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and used force on worshipers, including women and the elderly. . .” That was nonsense, but all you really need to read is what appears right on top of it:
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article incorrectly described Hamas’s aim as the creation of a Palestinian state along the borders that existed before the 1967 war. Hamas does not recognize the existence of Israel and is committed to replacing it through armed struggle with a Palestinian state stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River.
Well. At least we’ve cleared up that little detail. Here we are at this moment, in 2023, and what you read in the The Washington Post yesterday was every bit like reading this about the Second World War, in, say, 1955: “That plucky Mr. Hitler wanted only that little bit of Czechoslovakia called the Sudetenland, but we chose to be beastly with him.”
Closer to home, the CBC has once again covered itself in similarly illiterate glory in this email sent to all CBC journalists, leaked to Honest Reporting Canada. George Achi, the CBC’s Director of Journalistic Standards and Practices and Public Trust, advises that the CBC should nuance the daylights out of the term “occupation,” but also refrain from referring to Hamas terrorists as “terrorists.”
Here’s Achi: “The notion of terrorism remains heavily politicized and is part of the story. Even when quoting/clipping a government or a source referring to fighters as ‘terrorists,’ we should add context to ensure the audience understands this is opinion, not fact. That includes statements from the Canadian government and Canadian politicians.”
I get that you can’t use the word “terrorists” every time you refer to Hamas thugs, marauders, rapists, murderers and so on, but it’s a hell of a thing to claim that to call Hamas fighters “terrorists” is to merely express an opinion.
In Canada, it’s a matter of law. Hamas is a listed terrorist organization.
Resources:
Damir Marusic’s bird’s eye assessment of the current moment, from the Wisdom of Crowds: Complacency and the Coming Storm: Bad times are ahead. And we're not ready.
About “Storming al-Aqsa,” the Nazis’ Palestinian allies during the Shoa, the persistence of conspiracy theories about the Jews and the vice of trafficking in them: Passover, Easter, Ramadan, Riots. . .. . . and a flock of Liberals who sound exactly like a bunch of Khomeinists.
Some background to the key protest organizers across Canada this week, among whom are those Toronto mayor Olivia Chow described as “deplorable” on account of their glorification of Hamas and its “indiscriminate violence, including murder and kidnapping of women and children, by Hamas against Israeli civilians.” Now we notice? What took you so long? Here:
Canada's Samidoun: The Network. The "hacky sac intifada", a mysterious death in Bulgaria & lessons from Hezbollah. My National Post investigation last year: Is Khaled Barakat part of a terrorist group or a victim of Israeli intimidation? Israeli intelligence is not alone in situating Barakat, who resides in Vancouver, in the upper echelons of the PFLP’s chain of command.
Canada’s slovenly approach to antisemites, terror apologists and cranks in high places: Can We Stop Normalizing Antisemitism Now? It may be ineradicable, but can we at least not subsidize it? And if it's not antisemitism we're dealing with, then what are we supposed to call it?
A wider-angle view, also from the Real Story: The Thugs Among Us We Can’t Even See.
About the Muslim Association of Canada, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s Canadian front: Your Canada Day Rulebook: It's okay to promote wife-beating & condone the execution of gay people, but if you fly the old Red Ensign you're a racist and a hater. Some more recent mischief: Antisemitic Egyptian sheikh was to be hosted by Ottawa-funded Muslim group. Nashaat Ahmed was pulled from the speaker list of the Muslim Association of Canada's annual convention after inquiries from the Post.
For book-length dives, you need to read Matthias Küntzel’s Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East: The 1948 Arab War against Israel and the Aftershocks of World War II. Or Jeffrey Herf’s Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World. Jefrey’s got a piece up just now at Quillette: The Ideology of Mass Murder: Hamas and the origins of the October 7th attacks.
And now, a word to this newsletter’s paying subscribers. . .