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In an unprecedented scene, a Saudi Arabian reporter grilled the leader of Hamas, Khaled Mashal, on Friday.

Mashal, who lives in the lap of luxury in Qatar while demanding women and children sacrifice themselves for him, was quite obviously caught off guard by the line of questioning. You can see him get visibly angry at times, perhaps due to an expectation that he'd be allowed to spew his normal talking points without any pushback.

The video is obviously in Arabic but is subtitled throughout.

MEMRI @MEMRIReports
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Hamas Leader Abroad Khaled Mashal Rejects Accusations of Transgressions against Civilians on October 7 Attack: We Have Nothing to Apologize For; Hamas Only Fights Soldiers, But Sometimes There Are Civilian Victims in War; Hizbullah, Arab Countries Should Do More to Help Us #Hamas…
7:21 AM · Oct 20, 2023
https://twitter.com/MEMRIReports/status/1715327479684960374

The pressure in the interview starts immediately, with a question about Hamas launching its new war against Israel without any backing from other Palestinian groups or Arab governments and then expecting them to all come rushing in to help. Mashal first answers by praising the brutal massacre of 1,400 people, mostly civilians, as "ingenious" and a part of the "air of resistance."

To her credit, the reporter kept pushing, countering by pointing out that Hamas wasn't resisting but instead butchered civilians and recorded themselves doing it. She goes on to point out that Hamas is now being compared to ISIS.

Naturally, Mashal again deflects, claiming such comparisons are a conspiracy invented by the Jews, and then the mask comes completely off. In an astonishing exchange, he begins to cite the 30 million Russian deaths during World War II as an example of the "sacrifice" needed to win. That's the leader of Hamas coming right out and saying what we all know: He is willing to see an unthinkable number of women and children die for his "cause" while he gives orders from his penthouse in Qatar, never putting himself in danger.

There's no greater picture of cowardice. //

At that point, the questioning returned to the issue of Hamas launching its attack unilaterally, with Mashal making a "demand" that Egypt get involved. It was in the context of Lebanon and Hezbollah, though, that the Saudi reporter delivered her most devastating line.

REPORTER: The last thing they need is another war that will come with another bill to pay. They say: Khaled Mashal is sitting in an air-conditioned room, talking about wars, jihad, and bombings

Mashal's answer is absolutely laughable.

MASHAL: We are in the middle of the battlefield. No one is sitting this one out.

Fact-check: False. He is literally sitting the war out, something he's done for most of his life. This is a man who was exiled by his fellow Arabs in Jordan before going to Syria and then Qatar. He has others die in his name while he lives off the fruit of the aid money he stole from them.

When news broke yesterday that Israel had bombed Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza, killing patients, children, and staff, every “anti-Zionist,” “critic of Israel,” and most big American journalism outfits ran with the horrible story. The tale incited worldwide condemnation and recrimination. But it wasn’t true. Israel did not hit the hospital. The Islamic Jihad did. Hundreds of people did not die. The missile landed in a parking lot. It was Hamas disinformation.

The media’s disastrous failure on the Gaza hospital bombing story is one of the most vivid and instructive examples of the structural and inherent problems plaguing contemporary journalism. It mirrors many other fiascos of the past decade.

It is clear at this point that journalism schools are producing closed-minded, credulous ideologues who will believe anything that comports with their worldview. It’s either that, or we have a bunch of closed-minded ideologues who are willing accomplices in spreading propaganda. Functionally speaking, it doesn’t really matter. //

Of course, any person who’s spent more than ten minutes on the Israeli-Palestinian situation — to say nothing of those who are paid to cover the conflict — knows full well that both Hamas and the PLO are constantly lying about alleged Israeli atrocities and casualties. Anyone who has even a rudimentary understanding of this situation knows that 30-40 percent of rockets that emanate from Gaza land in Gaza. And they know that Hamas not only operates among civilians to use them as human shields — often in hospitals — but that it is keen on seeing Arab civilian deaths to gin up sympathy and sacrifice martyrs.

If you’re gullible enough to believe Hamas’s “Health Ministry,” you need to be reassigned to a job that better aligns with your skill set. Something far away from reporting. Maybe become a journalism professor. //

Many of these same people are the would-be censors who lament the nefarious misinformation that festers and spreads on social media. There have always been conspiratorial people and rumors and disinformation. The real problem today is that we can no longer trust establishment media to debunk rumors and offer facts.

Actually, considering their reach and role, establishment media are often the biggest disseminators of disinformation.

But the real outrage in this whole affair is that there are hospitals that have been bombed – in Israel. On his Substack, journalist Julio Rosas reported:

Barzilai Medical Center is a major hospital in Israel’s southern region, the epicenter of the nearly two-week-old high-intensity conflict between Israel and Hamas. Hundreds of rockets from Gaza have been fired at the seaside city, with many hitting buildings and people who happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Despite being a hospital, Barzilai Medical Center has been attacked at least four times by rockets fired by terrorist groups in the Gaza Strip. //

Barzilai Medical Center serves as the main hospital for wounded soldiers and provides medical services to about half a million people in Israel’s southern region. “We know it from former rounds of battles here that the hospital is being targeted directly. They want to give the impression to the people in Israel that nowhere is safe,” Dr. Givaty told Rosas. //

So, where’s the wall-to-wall coverage for the constant bombing of Barzilai Medical Center? Where is the outrage coming from the elite members of the chattering class? Where are the rallies at the Cannon House Office Building? //

If America’s once-vaunted Fourth Estate were serious about journalism, they would report on instances in which both Israelis and Palestinians are suffering – and they would do their level best to ensure they are giving their audience the truth instead of perpetuating narratives designed to promote a particular agenda.

 Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared war and said that Hamas “will pay a price it has never known before.”

The counter-attack from Israel is now underway, and because of the brutal nature of the Hamas attack, Israel is not going to leave any stone unturned in their response. They've gone too far this time. A lot of killing of Hamas is about to follow.

However, even in that, Israel shows their fundamental humanity and how different their response is. Hamas fires rockets on civilian areas, kidnaps and kills Israeli women and children, then runs and hides in residential buildings, using the cover of their own women and children. The purpose is to terrorize and harm Israeli civilians, then try to avoid any consequences. But Israel — which could just take out the buildings — does something extraordinary on behalf of civilians. They do what's called a "roof knock" strike with a low-level explosive to warn any non-combatants to get out before the full strike comes. Hamas targets civilians deliberately, while Israel does everything it can, even under these circumstances, having undergone a dastardly attack, to minimize civilian casualties.

https://twitter.com/AJEnglish/status/1710690655091990644?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1710690655091990644%7Ctwgr%5E25220b2f675dbe304db89f6a3d5c5e1548304b41%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fredstate.com%2Fnick-arama%2F2023%2F10%2F07%2Fwatch-israel-makes-roof-knock-strike-on-suspected-hamas-occupied-building-then-levels-it-n2164810

https://twitter.com/nexta_tv/status/1710685003254796366?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1710685003254796366%7Ctwgr%5E25220b2f675dbe304db89f6a3d5c5e1548304b41%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fredstate.com%2Fnick-arama%2F2023%2F10%2F07%2Fwatch-israel-makes-roof-knock-strike-on-suspected-hamas-occupied-building-then-levels-it-n2164810

 houdini1984
4 days ago
You can support "palestinian" statehood, of course, but it is impossible to support that without supporting their idea of a state, which is from the river to the sea - meaning all of the land that the Jews inhabit. The dream of "palestinian" statehood is nothing more than a continuation of Hitler's final solution. It is a dream of genocide that would see every Jew killed, driven into the sea, or forced to flee in terror.

There is no such thing as a "palestinian" outside of the context of this genocidal ambition. The very idea of a palestinian cause has nothing to do with restoring some previously existing Arab state called Palestine - since no such Arab state has ever existed. No, the very idea of Arab Palestine is about one thing and one thing only: the destruction of Israel and of the Jews. The idea of a palestinian people is nothing more than the politicization and attempted normalization of genocide.

Period.

 Somewhere along the way, I, of course, encountered the famous Martin Niemöller quote:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

And, of course, I understood its message — it's inescapable. Yet, on some level, I felt exempt from it. Certainly, I would never be the person who didn't speak out. (It's funny — the little lies we tell ourselves, isn't it?) The sad truth is that there have indeed been times in my life when I've held my tongue and remained silent when I shouldn't have — most often simply to avoid conflict rather than in the dire context contemplated by Niemöller, but deserving of frank appraisal, nonetheless.

Particularly in recent years, I've learned that because my views differ from many of my friends and family members, it's best not to voice them in certain settings. Such efforts are too fraught with peril. I don't want to lose or even inadvertently alienate people I care about. I know many don't subscribe to that approach, but for me, preserving relationship is paramount to opining — in most instances. //

Without betraying any confidences, I can say that a recurring sentiment I've seen expressed by Jewish friends and family over the past week is disheartened disappointment in the silence from some quarters — people they consider friends and allies, people who belong to groups or espouse beliefs that they've stood with and defended in the past. In many cases, it's left them feeling abandoned; in some, it's left them wondering if it's a silent expression of ambivalence or — though it's hard to fathom — tacit approval.

I'm not of the "Silence is violence" camp. But I do agree that silence can speak volumes. Indeed, when I encountered this article on Tuesday, it struck a jarring chord: Why Are All of You Silent? The entire piece is a worthwhile read, but I'll share a brief excerpt:

Some of these people have something to say about every political cause. They insist that “silence is violence” and that, in the oft-quoted words of Desmond Tutu, “If you are neutral in situations of injustice you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” But apparently those maxims don’t apply when Jews are being murdered.

If anything, it speaks to the sheer inhumanity of Hamas’ attack that there are so many people staying quiet—normally when Israel appears in the headlines, every woman who took “Intro to Human Rights” in sophomore year posts at least three infographics about Palestinian borders on her story. It’s a shame it only took babies being beheaded and women being violently assaulted for people to stop treating a tragic conflict in a deeply complicated place they’ve never visited as a convenient opportunity to broadcast their political virtues.

...

War crimes and murdered toddlers are not a “complex political situation” with “arguments on both sides.” You can support Palestinian statehood—in fact, you can have any opinion you want about the regional politics of the Middle East—and still believe that jihadist terrorists abducting 85-year-old Holocaust survivors should be condemned. Conflating those two things only gives credence to the idea that violence against Jews is political; violence against anyone else is unquestionably evil. Insisting on that distinction, in the public arena where narratives are created, is the only way to break the cycle of demonization and intimidation-into-silence.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/why-are-you-silent-israel-hamas-gaza-jews?fbclid=IwAR1IqgotKtltfJ1VR8mhVU9WnEOyNt1dCg2yDJNbiJgPpqGl1nI6eEh593Y

Curtis Houck
@CurtisHouck
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ABC to IDF members: "There are those voices there, across this region and elsewhere who say the price of military action is too great, that too many civilians are now dying. Too many Palestinians dying."

Israeli solider: "We're in a full war here. And the responsibility isn't on us [to pull back]. You should take that question straight back to Hamas. We are here because we have no other choice."

10:21 AM · Oct 16, 2023 //

The goal of war isn't an eye for an eye, it's to make sure that the group that took your eye never has the resources, manpower, or wherewithal to try to take yours, or anyone else's eye again. It is the show of such overwhelming and deadly force that your enemy is crippled to the point of never getting back up again or, if possible, the complete destruction of them.

There's an old saying about how war is hell, and that's especially true in places where terroristic despots have their military trained to use civilians as human shields, including having them hide in hospitals, daycare centers, apartment buildings, and the like so that when and if their opposition strikes back, they'll be accused of war atrocities against innocent people. //

On the other hand, if the Hamas government actually cared about the loss of innocent life then perhaps they wouldn't have green-lit their military to take hostages, murder, rape, and parade naked women in the streets, and behead infants.

But the torture of the Israeli people was the point despite what Hamas knew would be an overwhelming response of force, because this isn't just about Israel for Hamas; it's about the eradication of Jews worldwide, starting in their homeland which of course leaves the IDF no choice but to respond accordingly. //

Douglas Proudfoot
2 days ago
It ain't a war crime to kill human shields. Protesters have ignored that fact. It's only a war crime to hold humans as shields for military targets. The ONLY war criminals are Hamas. Under the rules of war, any military installation is a legal target, regardless of whether there are civilians on or near the target. If there are civilians on or near the target, it is the resposibility of the controling authority, in this case Hamas, to evacuate the civilians as best they can. Hamas tries to stop civilian evacuations, because they want to maximize civilian casualties. Again, that's Hamas' war crime and ONLY Hamas' war crime, no matter how many civilians are killed.

Hamas has over 400 km of tunnels under Gaza, but no bomb shelters for civilians. Hamas has supplies for months of siege, but Gaza civilians are already running out of drinking water, fuel and food. In short, Hamas values civilians in Gaza only as casualties and human shields.

Everything Hamas does is a war crime, genocide, killing babies, taking hostages, killing prisoners of war, using human shields and making no provision for the civilians under their control. Nothing Israel does is a war crime.

Laura Ingraham @IngrahamAngle
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Ron DeSantis points out the irony: 'Arab countries, often vocal supporters of Palestinian Arabs, aren't accepting them as refugees. They're concerned about their own countries. Why can't US elites share the same concern?' #IngrahamAngle 🤔

8:05 PM · Oct 17, 2023 //

Moonmad
18 hours ago
It's simple, Palestinians terrorists in the past used the host country as a base for their actions and often fought and undermined the Jordanian and Egyptian government. Look at Lebanon they started a civil war there and the current government is too weak to get rid of them so they try to manage them. It would be the same as bringing int he Mexican Cartels and have them start agitating in Texas. Oh wait we're in the process of doing that.

 Now the administration has removed the picture and made a public apology for the security lapse. The damage is already done, however, as Hamas terrorists presumably are able to screen capture just like anyone else. Plenty of people have already taken advantage of the screenshot button, and the untouched photo is still all over the place on the social media platform X. //

Monica Crowley @MonicaCrowley
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The Biden WH just doxxed the Delta Force operators in Israel to rescue American hostages

and the Biden State Dept issued a Worldwide Caution for U.S. citizens.

Your life - and the life of every American - is in exponentially more danger under this corrupt psychopath.
1:56 PM · Oct 19, 2023

Media outlets around the globe were quick to run Hamas’ headlines—without fact checking.

We now know that an Islamic Jihad rocket aimed at Israel misfired and hit the hospital in Gaza. pic.twitter.com/DzJgsbxS4i

— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) October 17, 2023 //

Israel Defense Forces Spokesman Jonathan Conricus was interviewed by the BBC, and he used it as an opportunity to let them have it for their reporting and to eviscerate the media in general for their failure to confirm the facts before running with the story.

There’s a big conflation with African American rights and Palestinian rights as if they’re anything like the same.

JAMES KIRCHICK, TABLET MAGAZINE: That is so insulting to Black people because Black people in this country suffered immense injustice far worse, I would say, than anything that he Palestinians have suffered at the hands of the Israelis. And how did Black people respond to that? They didn’t go around beheading babies, and raping women in mass numbers, and slaughtering people. They launched the non-violent civil rights movement that was the most successful in human history. One more thing. If there was a Palestinian Martin Luther King, this conflict would have been over decades ago. //

Colonizers. Okay, this is, again, this has become like in the media we just call the Israelis colonizers. It’s not a colonizing, okay. Colonizing is when one country had nothing to do with another country, like the British or the Dutch in South Africa, marched in with an army and took over a place they had no connection to. Israel has quite a connection to Israel…

If you did a land acknowledgment like we do in this country. I’m standing on the ground that 3,000 years ago was King David’s capital of Jerusalem… And if that land acknowledgment means like we honor who originally had the land, why does this work for Indians but not Jews?

Last week, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman told Fox News that the kingdom “is getting closer” day after day to normalising ties with Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Friday that Israel is on the cusp of signing a normalisation deal with Saudi Arabia that will change the whole Middle East.

As a result of the fighting and Israel’s siege of the Gaza Strip, Saudi Arabia appears to have suspended negotiations to normalize diplomatic relations with the Jewish state. It seems it was all part of the plan.

 
Jordan Schachtel @ dossier.today @JordanSchachtel
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The leader of Hamas lives at the Four Seasons in Doha. Today he told everyone in Gaza to stay put and act as human shields instead of evacuating to safety.

Joe Truzman @JoeTruzman
Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian met with Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Doha, Qatar today.
Embedded video
4:47 PM · Oct 14, 2023 //

Ariel Oseran @ariel_oseran
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IDF says Hamas placed roadblocks in the Gaza Strip to prevent Palestinians from evacuating south. Earlier, the IDF warned it would strike in the north of the enclave. Hamas leader Haniyeh: "Our people will not leave or migrate. We call on them not to fall for the enemy's lies."

1:45 PM · Oct 14, 2023

This is the biggest massacre of the Jewish people since the Holocaust. But unlike the Holocaust, in which the Germans tried to hide their war crimes — it took the Allies, remember, years to uncover all that the Nazis did — here, we have people streaming it, on real-time, on TikTok, on live stream, and on Instagram. //

The woman whose story I began with, Shaked Haran, 10 percent of that kibbutz where her family members were taken from — 10 percent, it is the literal meaning of the word "decimated" — were slaughtered. More than 100 bodies have been recovered from that kibbutz.

I want to emphasize what Jonathan was saying before: This is not a situation with two sides, with militants versus an army. This — the two sides in what just happened over the past 72 hours — is the side of rapist, barbaric people, who we are now learning beheaded babies — beheaded babies — versus innocent people. That is what is going on here. And anyone who is found cheering, celebrating in the streets of London or Paris or Berlin or New York or Sydney, where they are screaming: "Gas the Jews!" They are not cheering for the liberation of the Palestinian people in Gaza, who languish under the jackboot of Hamas. They are cheering for barbarism and bloodshed. And we should be absolutely clear about what is going on here. //

Retlag
5 hours ago edited
The ADL has been woke for some time now and all of a sudden they proclaim "I am shocked, shocked I tell you, to learn that there is anti-semitism going on in MSNBC and the Democratic party." This is WHO YOU ARE! Wake up, Greenbatt, and smell the coffee. You're like the kapos in Auschwitz. You've allied yourself with people who despise you and will throw you under the bus as soon as you cease to be useful.

As of Monday morning, two days after Hamas committed horrible atrocities across Israel, the worst single attack in the country’s history, former President Barack Obama had yet to issue any statement about the attacks. There could be any number of benign reasons for that, but it’s also true that Obama’s relationship with Israel would lead one to speculate about some not-so-benign motivations.

Certainly, there are many legitimate questions to ask about the government of Israel’s behavior, the limits of America’s national interest in the region, and whether Protestant America’s fetishization of the “Holy Land” keeps us from seeing issues in the region with moral clarity. However, any fair-minded critique of Israel is a far cry from Obama’s well-established and radical views on the Middle East that stem, by his own admission, from his affinity for radicals such as Frantz Fanon, whose brain-dead swagger produced such sentiments as “decolonization reeks of red-hot cannonballs and bloody knives.”

And it’s probably time to admit that, while attempting to bury their aims under layers of academic sophistication, Obama and his acolytes used his presidency to destabilize the Middle East in the service of a left-wing ideology that excuses antisemitism and justifies terrorist violence. //

as Tablet’s David Samuels put it, “Obama’s hostility to American exceptionalism also seemed linked to his hostility to Israel, or more specifically to America’s identification with Israel.” As Samuels went on to note, the inexplicable fixation Obama had with making Iran — the world’s leading state sponsor of terror attacks, and the same country behind Hamas’ atrocities in Israel over the weekend — a regional hegemon in spite of Israeli (and Saudi) objections is ample proof of that. //

Obama is hardly the only tenured radical in our political establishment that shares these radical left-wing foreign policy views, a toxic combination of self-righteousness and self-loathing, that views our national interests and America’s relationship with Israel as inherently suspicious. //

after the weekend, even Democratic partisans are scrambling to distance themselves from the Biden and Obama administrations’ ill-advised cozying up to Iran. Now we need to follow through and make sure the Obama-Biden foreign policy legacy, and the dangerous ideology that motivated it, is rejected and held up for the failure that it is.

A mainline Israeli news station is reporting that the bodies of 40 babies have been found in the town of Kfar Aza following the invasion by Hamas militants on Saturday.

According to i24 news, the babies were being carried out on gurneys, with some of them having been beheaded. //

I'm talking to some of the soldiers, and they say what they've witnessed as they've been walking through these different houses, these different communities. Babies, their heads cut off, that's what they said. Gunned down, families completely gunned down in their beds. You can see some of these soldiers right now comforting each other.

The reporter goes on to describe the house-to-house fighting that is still ongoing, with the bodies of those murdered being found every hour. Booby traps are also set in the area, worsening the recovery efforts for those that were massacred.

The kibbutz in question is positioned near the Southern border with the Gaza Strip and was one of the places hit by Hamas.

These segments produced no shortage of drama and gripping visuals, but they also delivered some harsh reality, namely that these incidents each took place inside of Israel. Trey Yingst was indicating how the Hamas rockets were of such volume as to hopefully overwhelm the famed Iron Dome anti-rocket system Israel has developed for its protection. All the reporters were experiencing attacks from Hamas, something a few of their own networks were striving to gloss over.

What we saw, as gripping as it was to experience from the vantage of a reporter, is a reality many residents inside Israel have had to contend with for years. These evasive actions are commonplace for many as these types of attacks from Palestinians are persistent. And, despite the agitprop delivered by “Tulkarm Rose” on CNN, those targets are frequently — almost exclusively — civilian in nature.

It is rather galling to see these news outlets try to paint Israel as the unreasonable aggressor in these conflicts (as they attempt to bypass the significance of phrases such as “military response” and “retaliatory strikes”) while their own reporters are detailing the very aggression leading to Isreal’s reactions. It is one thing to attempt to gaslight the globe about the threats to the nation, but it turns pathetic when your own people are displaying the harsh reality faced by the Israelis.

700 dead in a country of 9.3 million people (where everyone knows someone’s cousin) is the equivalent of a terror attack on America in which over 25,000 people were brutally murdered. And not in a single catastrophe: Imagine 25,000 Americans killed in various murder sprees across the country.