Abject evil was visited upon innocent Israeli civilians this weekend, as the savages of Iran-backed Hamas launched a stunning surprise attack against defenseless men, women, and children. As of late Sunday, the death toll in Israel had surpassed 700, marking the single largest slaughter of Jews in decades. Relative to population, this is the equivalent of approximately 25,000 Americans being murdered in a single day. The Israeli government said more than 100 people had been kidnapped by the terrorists and taken as hostages, including an unconfirmed number of US citizens. For the first time since 1973's Yom Kippur War, Israel's government formally declared a state of war, vowing an exceptionally harsh response. Iran-sponsored Hezbollah opened a second front of the war from the north, triggering Israeli reprisals. "The enemy will pay an unprecedented price," Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised in on-camera remarks, later adding, "we will destroy them and we will forcefully avenge this dark day that they have forced on the State of Israel and its citizens.”
The scope of the evil perpetrated by the terrorists is almost too much to contemplate, but the conflict -- and Israel's intensive countermeasures -- cannot be described or discussed accurately without acknowledging this reality. This partial and incomplete series of videos and images that emerged over the weekend is unbearably horrific. Take a breath, then scroll through. Alternatively, here is a searing and gut-wrenching summary that captures the barbarity, part of an important column contextualizing how and why 10/7/23 is Israel's 9/11/01 (content warning):
When Hamas invaded Israel this morning, terrorists streamed across the border in pickup trucks, by motorcycle, on foot, and even on paragliders. Once inside Israel, they abducted and murdered Israelis. They shot people in cars and at bus stops, they rounded up women and children into rooms like Einsatzgruppen—yes, the comparison is appropriate—and machine-gunned them. They went house to house to find and murder civilians hiding in their closets, and they dragged the bloody, dead bodies of Israelis back into Gaza where they are now being paraded, beaten, and mutilated in front of exultant crowds. One young woman was murdered and stripped to her underwear, and her corpse was thrown in the back of a pickup truck so it could be paraded around Gaza while young Hamas men beat and mutilated her body. Hamas terrorists attacked a music festival in the desert. Dozens were killed and injured, and many more are missing. Footage shows young Israelis running for their lives...These images and videos are repulsive. But they must be seen and understood to comprehend what is coming next.
Harrowing and horrifying examples of savagery and depravity keep pouring in. Don't ignore them. Don't euphemize them. Don't look away. There are many observations and truths that must be told -- and must continue to be told as the usual suspects inevitably turn their rhetorical guns against the Israeli response. I don't pretend to be an expert on every detail of this complex and long-running conflict, though I'm relatively well-informed about it. I strongly support Israel, which I view as the only moral and ethical stance to hold. I don't make that assertion flippantly. Most issues and controversies are complicated, with good people and points on both or all sides. On the question of Israel's existence as the world's lone Jewish state, versus the genocidal bloodlust of Hamas, there is good, and there is evil. There is civilization, and there are barbarians. Those who attempt to cloud this clarity, or to invert it altogether, are deeply morally compromised and adrift. Or worse. This observation is hardly original to me, and has almost become a cliche among Israel supporters. It bears repeating, however, as it's both freshly and tragically relevant and enduringly, inarguably accurate:
One side wants peace and coexistence. The other side wants Jews dead and the Israeli state annihilated. One celebrates life, the other celebrates death. This asymmetry underscores the utter bankruptcy of the both-sidesism and victim-blaming that runs rampant among Israel's critics, whose ranks are shot through with outright bigotry. Another striking and crucial asymmetry, which dishonest brokers and anti-Semites routinely deny or ignore: When Palestinian children are wounded or killed, it’s despite Israel’s efforts to avoid civilian casualties while fighting terrorists who intentionally operate among innocents. When Israeli children are wounded or killed, they are explicitly targeted by the terrorists -- and many Palestinians openly celebrate. There is zero moral equivalency here. Anyone who tells you otherwise is ignorant, or lying, or worse. Those immediately calling for a "ceasefire," like multiple members of the Squad, are effectively telling Israel not to defend itself. It's a tell. Even as the Israeli government and military prepared its overwhelming retaliatory campaign, it labored to avoid and minimize civilian casualties. By contrast, inflicting civilian casualties is a core objective of Israel's enemies:
The death cultists are reportedly telling their own people to ignore the warnings, actively seeking more death, understanding that they will need deceased human shields for their coming propaganda offensive:
Bear all of this in mind as Israel takes dramatic and necessarily draconian action over the coming days and weeks. A few more scattered, furious, worried thoughts: First, Saturday's assault represents a catastrophic failure of the Israeli government. Its intelligence services, military and security apparatus exist to discover and foil even minor plots, and to respond swiftly and decisively when an attack is mounted. They failed to anticipate this large-scale invasion, failed to protect their border, failed to defend their people, and failed to neutralize the threat for many hours, in some cases. Israelis are united behind the government as the nation prepares for war. How this war is prosecuted, and what it produces, may well be the defining factor in Prime Minister Netanyahu's legacy. But even as a non-expert on the byzantine machinations of internal Israeli politics, it's clear that there will be righteous rage directed at the government when the dust settles. There will first be hell to pay for Hamas and other terrorist groups. There will then be political hell to pay at home.
Second, the Biden administration's truly atrocious foreign policy helped enable this attack, and has deliberately strengthened and empowered the Iranian regime, of which Hamas and Hezbollah are clients. Iran is the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism, and the regime's fingerprints are all over this attack. The Iran apologists (and much, much worse) inside the Biden administration and the Democratic foreign policy establishment make endless excuses and serve up feeble spin. An initial statement put out by the administration read like a stand-down order for Israel, before it was deleted. Anonymous Biden officials refused to admit Iran's role in the horror, urging no rush to judgment, even as Hamas was openly thanking Iran for its help, and Iran's tyrannical leader was publicly cheering on the murders. Iran did this, Hamas and Iran boasted. Let's not jump to that conclusion, the Biden administration replied. Their fixation on engaging and appeasing Iran is profoundly wrong-headed and deadly. The Wall Street Journal landed an exclusive on the depth and centrality of Iran's involvement in the attack:
Iranian security officials helped plan Hamas’s Saturday surprise attack on Israel and gave the green light for the assault at a meeting in Beirut last Monday, according to senior members of Hamas and Hezbollah, another Iran-backed militant group. Officers of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had worked with Hamas since August to devise the air, land and sea incursions—the most significant breach of Israel’s borders since the 1973 Yom Kippur War—those people said. Details of the operation were refined during several meetings in Beirut attended by IRGC officers and representatives of four Iran-backed militant groups, including Hamas, which holds power in Gaza, and Hezbollah, a Shiite militant group and political faction in Lebanon, they said...“We don’t have any information at this time to corroborate this account,” said a U.S. official of the meetings.
The administration is also in overdrive trying to root out the "misinformation" that they effectively funded this attack on one of our closest and most important allies by recently granting Iran access to $6 billion in previously-frozen assets. They take us for fools:
Money is fungible. When $6 billion gets pumped into Iran's coffers through one door, a lot of cash is freed up elsewhere to finance terror and death, and shoots out another door. This is an indisputable reality. That Iran operates this way is well established. Even Team Biden will occasionally concede this. The regime knows that they will soon enjoy a multi-billion-dollar windfall, gifted to them by the Biden administration in the form of the most expensive ransom sum ever paid (which also further incentivizes grabbing more American hostages, which they've also done with the Russians). Iran's leaders have explicitly stated that they would do whatever they pleased with this money ("wherever we need it"), and that they view the American "restrictions" as meaningless. After his underlings insulted our collective intelligence throughout Saturday, Secretary of State Blinken gave up the game on Sunday morning:
And yet the current administration funds, cajoles, and empowers these people. It's outrageous. It's backwards. It's lethal. Biden's $6 billion didn't directly fund this heinous massacre, though the fungibility factor argues for the accusation of indirect financing. Biden's policies have undoubtedly directly emboldened and enriched the regime responsible for the heinous massacre. His policies have also emboldened and enriched Hamas. When this administration took over, they made a big show of departing from Trump policies vis-a-vis the Palestinians (as they did on multiple fronts, including, disastrously, at the southern border). Among their ostentatious changes was to immediately resume US taxpayer aid to the pro-terrorism 'leaders' of the Palestinian territories, vastly increasing the outlays just last year. Like they're doing with the Iran cash, they insisted that this money would only be used for good. Privately, they knew better. But they paid it anyway:
State Department officials in 2021 outlined the concerns in private communications, asking the Treasury Department to exempt them from laws that bar the U.S. government from injecting taxpayer aid into territories controlled by Palestinian terror groups. The Biden administration needed this authorization in order to move forward with its plans to unfreeze more than $360 million in U.S. funds for the Palestinian Authority that were cut off during the Trump administration due to the authority's support for terrorists. "We assess there is a high risk Hamas could potentially derive indirect, unintentional benefit from U.S. assistance to Gaza. There is less but still some risk U.S. assistance would benefit other designated groups," the State Department wrote in a draft sanctions exemption request circulated internally in March 2021, shortly after Biden took office.
"Notwithstanding this risk, State believes it is in our national security interest to provide assistance in the West Bank and Gaza to support the foreign policy objectives." The documents—obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the watchdog group Protect the Public’s Trust—show the Biden administration was privately worried its efforts to restart Palestinian aid could benefit Hamas and other terror factions operating in the Gaza Strip. As officials publicly provided assurances to Congress and the press that this aid would be doled out "consistent with U.S. law," the State Department was scrambling to secure a sanctions exemption that would let it skirt anti-terrorism laws.
Third, Congressional action will likely be needed, quickly. The House of Representatives -- for no good reason -- currently lacks a Speaker, and therefore the ability to take meaningful votes until that situation is resolved. It is pathetic for a chamber of Congress to be paralyzed over petty vanity projects. It's outright unacceptable in a time of crisis (with another government funding cliff also fast approaching). Resolve this. Now. Fourth, Iran's malign influence and the Palestinians' fanatical hatred underscore why Tehran must never, ever obtain a nuclear weapon. Fifth, it's probably and depressingly necessary to beef up security at synagogues and other Jewish community centers and schools here at home. Finally, as the war rages, I'll leave you with this:
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