The Spiritual War of Oct 7

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

It’s all a lie.

The Oct 7 massacres were not carried out to create a ‘Palestinian’ state, to break out of an ‘open air prison’ in Gaza or any of the lies the media has systemically deluged us with.

They did it to capture Jerusalem.

That’s why Hamas named the operation ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’ after the victory mosque formerly planted by Muslim invaders on the site of the Jewish Temple. That’s why Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh began his Oct 7 invasion speech with complaints about Jewish presence prayers at the Temple site near the Al-Aqsa mosque. That’s why the Hamas emblem features the Al-Aqsa mosque between two crossed swords. Israeli soldiers who served in Gaza reported seeing those same images in homes around Gaza after the Islamic Jihadist group had spent a generation riling up the Muslim population to launch a holy war to conquer Jerusalem.

And it’s not just Hamas.

Arafat had constantly proclaimed his vision of “millions of martyrs marching to Jerusalem.” That line is still broadcast by Palestinian Authority media which declares it to be their great mission.

Muslims in Gaza are not dying to create a state that polls show most of them don’t believe will ever exist. They’re killing and dying in a religious Jihad to take over Jerusalem.

Every effort to create a ‘Palestinian’ state failed because a state was never the real goal, but a means to the real end, the capture of Jerusalem and its holy sites. The idea that the panoply of fake nationalism, flags, ministries, and an anthem, are just a false front for a religious crusade may be incomprehensible to secularized western nations, but Islam is religious, not nationalistic.

There is no ‘Palestinian’ cause, only a Jihadist cause that hides behind it, the way that it hides behind so many other facades, civil rights, social justice, political change, that are just masks.

Why do the Jihadist groups want Jerusalem so badly? For the same reason Islam wanted Constantinople, captured Athens and turned the Parthenon into a mosque and then wrecked it during the Great Turkish War, and why ISIS has repeatedly threatened to conquer Rome.

Muslims have Mecca. Why do they need Jerusalem, Athens and Rome?

Islam is a great thousand year darkness obsessed with eliminating all light. Its followers are convinced that if they eliminate every religion and culture, seize its important sites or, like the WTC on 9/11 or the Buddhas in Afghanistan, destroy them, there will be no alternative to Islam.

Unable to win a religious debate, Islam always turns to religious war as if murder were faith.

The real story of Oct 7 is not the one you have heard about in the media. It’s a spiritual war by an enemy determined to drown out the light of Jerusalem, the light of hope and faith, in murder, hate and moral inversion that transforms victims into perpetrators and terrorists into innocents, that inverts everything, replaces truth with lies, and convinces the world to worship evil.

The Jews have long been the canaries in the coal mines of civilization. Here is how that spiritual war between good and evil played out amidst the soldiers, civilians and hostages in Israel.

Keith Siegel, an American from North Carolina who had been kidnapped from his home along with his wife, spent 484 days as a hostage, and described turning to G-d. He didn’t know many prayers, but he began to say what he remembered including the words of ‘Shema Yisrael.’ “Hear O Israel, the Lord is Our God, the Lord is One” which had been recited by martyrs about to die for their faith.

“There was a moment when I told myself, ‘I’m not going to pray to Allah,'” his wife Aviva recalled. “Even though I was forced to, they would pray in front of us, and it wasn’t clear who they were praying to. I moved my lips, but I wasn’t truly praying. They were so cruel to us, and I couldn’t understand it. How can you pray and be so evil? I just don’t get it.”

Agam Berger, another hostage, had her faith restored when she dreamed of a prayer book, a siddur, and then one came her way. “How do you explain that? That’s not chance. That’s faith,” her mother said.

The media and the woke left and woke right have launched an unprecedented propaganda machine to make Israel seem monstrous and its war senseless. And in the face of that, Israelis have turned to G-d, convinced that there is meaning and purpose even in the face of that evil.

“G-d, I speak to you now,” the father of Sergeant Yisrael Natan Rosenfeld, said at his funeral. “People who know me know my doubts, they know my fights. When you have grandparents who went into gas chambers and parents who had great sores and pains after the Second World War. We lost six million people. It is hard to sit down and say, ‘Yes, there is a G-d and I believe and I’m convinced.’ But I’m standing here at the moment where I have to make a decision, and my decision is: G-d, you’re above us, it all has a purpose, a much bigger purpose than we know about.”

“Like in the Book of Esther, where invisible threads are woven by a Master’s hand into a redemptive story – so too we have seen small parts come together into a great picture of miraculous victory: the beepers, the radios, Nasrallah, Assad’s collapse, Trump, Iran. A new biblical chapter is being written in our days. You will never be able to read it, my son, but you will surely be one of its heroes,” Rabbi Tamir Granot wrote to his fallen son Amitay: a platoon leader.

Last summer, Rabbi Granot officiated at the wedding of his son’s fiance who had been introduced to her new husband by the mother of another fallen soldier. It’s not natural, he admitted, “but then ours is a people whose path often travels the supernatural. And when you take that into account, then, yeah, it’s pretty natural for us.”

The war as seen from Israel is very different from the way it is seen in the media and on social media. It’s not the story of endless internet squabbling, but as Rabbi Doron Perez of World Mizrahi, who lost one of his sons and whose other son was wounded on October 7, recently wrote, “a young generation that many had characterized as a self-absorbed TikTok generation emerged as a remarkable generation of self-sacrifice and selfless commitment to our country and cause. A generation no less heroic than the defenders of 1967 and 1973, the founders of the State of Israel, the Maccabees, and perhaps even King David’s army.”

In Israel, the story isn’t about world opinion, it’s the story of volunteers cooking meals, soldiers returning to duty, mothers raising children on their own, and people living with the reality that they may have to run to shelter any moment, and yet believing that there is a purpose to all this.

They know that they are fighting another battle in an ancient war between good and evil.

“We know that the power of life which we so deeply believe in will ultimately triumph over those who celebrate death,” Rabbi Perez said at the funeral of his son Daniel, after being left with nothing to bury other than his bloody shirt. “The blood of our son that we buried, this blood will overpower the spilling of blood. We know with certainty that those who believe we are all created in G-d’s image will defeat those who have lost any semblance of that image.”

Those who know history also know that this is not a new war and it has nothing to do with Gaza, the Six Day War in 1967 or even Israel’s successful fight for independence in 1948.

During the High Holy Days, among the penitential prayers that are read is a 13th century liturgical poem by an otherwise unknown Jewish man writing about the Islamic occupation.

“Those who have made Moloch their king, rule over me,” he bemoans. “Those who serve abominations have befouled my lands.” The prayer goes on to describe how “I have wept and shed tears from the yoke of Ishmael’s children” who “call a prophet a man who never prophesied” while preventing me from “ascending to Jerusalem during festivals”.

“How can the enemies of all that is pure reside in Zion,” the prayer asks. “How came they to dwell in my temples and made themselves a dwelling there?” It prays, “remember us and recall us with your salvation from those who worship things that are not you. Hurl them out and swallow them up from your holy dwelling place. And I through your great kindness will at last enter your house.”

Hamas ascribed the leading cause of its assault on Oct 7 to Jews entering the former site of the Temple Mount which the Muslim invaders claimed as their own. Countless peoples of all religions visit the Vatican. Bethlehem operates under Muslim rule. And people of all religions visit Hindu and Buddhist holy sites. Non-Jews, including President Trump and the Pope, visit the Western Wall. Why is Islam obsessed with driving people away?

“My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.” Isaiah 56:7 envisions the day when everyone will pray there. That is a vision that Hamas, the Muslim world and the UN are obsessed with blocking.

Why was Hamas, a Muslim Brotherhood terror group, so obsessed with Jews entering the site of the Temple Mount that it launched a catastrophic war that claimed thousands of lives?

Under colonial rule, Jews were forbidden to even blow the shofar at the climax of Yom Kippur at the bottom of the Western Wall which had been reduced to a trash heap under Muslim rule.

“Eyewitness accounts told of a white-bearded Chassid in a black caftan running for his life, chased by a mob through an alleyway leading to the Western Wall. The pursuers brandished clubs, sabers, and daggers, and howled: ‘Death to the Jewish dogs!’ and ‘Allahu Akhbar!’”

67 Jews were killed in these Muslim massacres, not over Gaza, but over Jews praying.

This is not just a matter of ancient history. The Biden administration repeatedly warned Israel not to allow Jews to enter the Temple Mount or to pray there.

“Some Jewish groups escorted by Israeli police at the Temple Mount performed religious acts such as prayers,” a more recent State Department report on religious freedom complained, while attacking religious freedom. “In most cases, Israeli police acted to prevent them from praying and removed them, but in other cases, some of which were documented on social media in photos and videos, the police appeared not to notice the acts of prayer.”

“Far-right Israeli minister prays at Jerusalem’s most sensitive holy site,” an outraged CNN headline stormed.

What is it that evil and darkness fears the most? Beneath all the lies, it will always show us.

Hamas killed over 1,000 people and would have killed millions more to seize Jerusalem and stop prayers to G-d. It took hostages and then tried to pressure them into converting to Islam.

This is a spiritual war in which evil uses the tools of moral inversion to make darkness seem like light and turn light into darkness, to make monsters into heroes, to celebrate the worst crimes, and to make the most horrifying atrocities into the moral high ground of mankind. What drives this war? Fear. And what is it that darkness fears above all else? Darkness fears the light.

Hitler’s Mufti, one of the allies of the Muslim Brotherhood before it officially spawned Hamas, justified his Jihad against the Jews by claiming that they were plotting the “rebuilding of the Temple that is called Solomon’s Temple.” In one poll, 52% of Muslims claimed that Israel was planning to rebuild the Temple even though the country had no intention of any such thing.

“Why Israel is closer than ever to building the Third Temple,” Middle East Eye, a Qatari propaganda site that often promotes Hamas, warned. Last year, an Al Qaeda bulletin also warned that Israel was about to “rebuild the third temple.”

In Judaism, the Temple can only be rebuilt by G-d, not by man. If Israel had wanted to build a temple, it had nearly 60 years in which to get it done.

What do Hamas and its Islamic terrorist allies really fear?

Evil fears our bullets less than it fears our faith. It does everything possible to convince us that evil is good and we are evil. Its greatest victory is when we come to believe it. As too many do.

But when we reject evil and turn to G-d, it boils with rage and commits atrocities to terrify us. But underneath the crimes and lies, it is possessed by the terror of the day when “the redeemed of the Lord shall return, and they shall come to Zion with song” (Isaiah 51:11) and “So said the Lord: I will return to Zion, and I will dwell in the midst of Jerusalem; and Jerusalem shall be called the city of truth, and the mount of the Lord of Hosts be the holy mountain” (Zechariah 8:3).

That is the fear and the hate at the heart of the Islamic Jihad. They don’t kill us, torture us and terrorize us because they believe they’re right, but because they fear they are wrong. 

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.

 

 

 

White House Islamophobia Strategy Says Muslims Were the Real Victims of Oct 7th

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

 

On October 7, Islamic terrorists invaded Israel and murdered over 1,000 people. They raped, looted, and burned families alive in their home. Those whom they did not kill, they took hostage.

According to the Biden administration’s newly announced Islamophobia strategy, however, Muslims in America were the real victims of Oct 7 just like they were the real victims of 9/11.

“Threats and acts of violence against Muslim and Arab communities have increased since the October 7 terrorist attacks,” the official White House ‘Islamophobia’ strategy claims. Muslims are also concerned “about the recent spike in incidents of hate and discrimination in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023 Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel, concerns they say mirror their community’s experiences following the 9/11 attacks.”

Forget the hostages, the real issue stemming from the brutal Hamas massacres, according to the administration’s ‘strategy’ is that “members of Muslim and Arab communities have often faced obstacles in renting and using public and private gathering spaces. This issue has become more prevalent following the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023.”

The U.S. National Strategy to Counter Islamophobia and Anti-Arab Hate operates out of this parallel universe in which Muslim mobs have not been attacking synagogues and assaulting Jews, or blockading Jewish students from college campuses, but have been the victims. The Biden administration has yet to condemn the sustained harassment, boycotts and assaults on Jewish students at UCLA, CUNY and Columbia, instead it claims that “since October 7, 2023”, “Muslim and Arab students, faculty, and staff, have been subject to violence, discrimination, hate, harassment, bullying, and online targeting.”

The Islamophobia strategy provides no citation for its claim of nationwide harassment of Muslims on college campuses. Under its Department of Education Office’s for Civil Rights section its few named incidents include a University of Michigan student who claimed that “someone yelled at her that she had terrorist friends because she participated in a pro-Palestinian protest” and that “CUNY Law School cancelled an event hosted by a Muslim student group without adequate justification for doing so”.

The event in question was by the Muslim Law Students Association falsely accusing Israel of genocide for fighting against Hamas that was reportedly to feature CUNY students who had expressed support for terrorism including Fatima Mohammed who had tweeted, “i pray upon the death of the USA on a public platform “ and had urged, “grant victory to the Mujahideen” or the Jihadis, and Nerdeen Kiswani who had quipped, “I hope that pop-pop is the last noise that some Zionists hear in their lifetime!”

According to the White House Islamophobia strategy, CUNY’s failure to platform murderous hatred for America and Israel was ‘discrimination’ and ‘hate’ against Muslim students.

Meanwhile at CUNY, anti-Israel students had demanded the expulsion of most Jewish students and called to “globalize the intifada”. A CUNY professor described how “a Kingsborough/CUNY student beat a Jewish man in a kippah with a bat while yelling, ‘Kill all Jews, free Palestine.’”

But according to the Biden administration, Muslim students at CUNY are the real victims because a Muslim group’s ugly hate event was canceled “without adequate justification”

Students for Justice in Palestine, the top campus anti-Israel group, had openly celebrated and praised the atrocities of Oct 7, and campus protests featured Hamas and Hezbollah flags, but the Islamophobia strategy falsely claims that “student protestors, despite having condemned Hamas and terrorism and engaging in only peaceful protests, have been accused of supporting terrorism merely due to their advocacy for the human rights of Palestinian civilians”.

The strategy’s citation for the claim that anti-Israel students faced “violent attacks, threats, discrimination” was the UCLA encampment where a federal judge ruled that “Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith.” Prior to what the CNN story linked in the strategy describes as Jewish violence against the terrorist encampment, multiple Jewish students and community members had been assaulted, including on camera, and a Jewish female student had been knocked unconscious.

The Biden administration’s idea of “peaceful protests” was kicking a Jewish girl in the head and it claims that students calling for Hamas to destroy Tel Aviv were “accused of supporting terrorism merely due to their advocacy for the human rights of Palestinian civilians”.

The UCLA encampment had been set up by Students for Justice in Palestine UCLA which had co-signed a statement declaring “our unwavering support of the resistance in Gaza” and taking pride in “Towfan Al-Aqsa” (the Hamas name for the October 7 massacres) “as a revolutionary moment in contemporary Palestinian resistance.”

The White House Islamophobia strategy has as little basis for the “peaceful” nature of the terrorist mobs as it does for the contention that Muslims faced a surge of violence after Oct 7.

The U.S. National Strategy to Counter Islamophobia and Anti-Arab Hate quickly discredits itself by citing hoax after hoax. It repeatedly plays up the Burlington hoax referencing “the shooting of three young men in Vermont” and the contention that “a gunman shot three college students of Palestinian descent in Burlington, Vermont,”

While a mentally ill man did shoot three Muslim men, he was a Hamas supporter.

Rather than being anti-Muslim, the gunman had tweeted, “the notion that Hamas is ‘evil’ for defending their state from occupation is absurd” and “what if someone occupied your country? Wouldn’t you fight them?” The Burlington Islamophobia hoax was so thoroughly discredited that even CAIR had given up on listing it in its litany of ‘Islamophobic’ events, but the Biden administration somehow manages to have even lower standards for the truth than CAIR.

The Islamophobia strategy also lists an incident where “an individual believed to have been involved in prior violent incidents at a Minneapolis mosque struck a man with a minivan in the mosque’s parking lot.” The individual, James Evan Suttles, was a black man who had a long list of prior violent incidents, suffered from paranoid delusions and had been committed four times to mental institutions. No hate crimes charges were brought against him over the attack.

The Biden Islamophobia strategy has to lean on such cases to manufacture the myth of Muslim victimhood because it lacks any actual substance. And it props that up with calls for censorship.

The strategy urges social media platforms to specifically cover Islamophobia and to rig their algorithms “de-rank and stop recommending” content that Muslim groups consider hateful.

Beyond censorship, what does the Biden administration propose we do to fight ‘Islamophobia’? The strategy calls on Congress to formally recognize the UN’s International Day to Combat Islamophobia. The Islamophobia resolution was introduced by former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan. Khan had described Osama bin Laden, whom Pakistan had harbored, as a “martyr”, supported the Taliban and was later charged by his own country under its terrorism act.

Once again, Islamophobia turns out to be how Islamic terrorists silence criticism of their crimes.

The Biden administration’s National Strategy to Counter Islamophobia is an insult to American Jews and Christians. It uses lies and hoaxes to turn the Muslim terrorist supporters who have shut down Christmas tree lightings and attacked synagogues, and who rally for the murder of Americans and Jews as the victims, while portraying Christians and Jews as ‘Islamophobes’.

The Islamophobia strategy is the final insult of many from an administration that has stood with the Islamic terrorists and never with their Jewish and Christian victims.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading. 

 

Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against the Left tells the untold story of the Left's 200-Year War against America And readers love it.

White House Islamophobia Strategy Says Muslims Were the Real Victims of Oct 7th

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

On October 7, Islamic terrorists invaded Israel and murdered over 1,000 people. They raped, looted, and burned families alive in their home. Those whom they did not kill, they took hostage.

According to the Biden administration’s newly announced Islamophobia strategy, however, Muslims in America were the real victims of Oct 7 just like they were the real victims of 9/11.

“Threats and acts of violence against Muslim and Arab communities have increased since the October 7 terrorist attacks,” the official White House ‘Islamophobia’ strategy claims. Muslims are also concerned “about the recent spike in incidents of hate and discrimination in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023 Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel, concerns they say mirror their community’s experiences following the 9/11 attacks.”

Forget the hostages, the real issue stemming from the brutal Hamas massacres, according to the administration’s ‘strategy’ is that “members of Muslim and Arab communities have often faced obstacles in renting and using public and private gathering spaces. This issue has become more prevalent following the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023.”

The U.S. National Strategy to Counter Islamophobia and Anti-Arab Hate operates out of this parallel universe in which Muslim mobs have not been attacking synagogues and assaulting Jews, or blockading Jewish students from college campuses, but have been the victims.

The Biden administration has yet to condemn the sustained harassment, boycotts and assaults on Jewish students at UCLA, CUNY and Columbia, instead it claims that “since October 7, 2023”, “Muslim and Arab students, faculty, and staff, have been subject to violence, discrimination, hate, harassment, bullying, and online targeting.”

The Islamophobia strategy provides no citation for its claim of nationwide harassment of Muslims on college campuses. Under its Department of Education Office’s for Civil Rights section its few named incidents include a University of Michigan student who claimed that “someone yelled at her that she had terrorist friends because she participated in a pro-Palestinian protest” and that “CUNY Law School cancelled an event hosted by a Muslim student group without adequate justification for doing so”.

The event in question was by the Muslim Law Students Association falsely accusing Israel of genocide for fighting against Hamas that was reportedly to feature CUNY students who had expressed support for terrorism including Fatima Mohammed who had tweeted, “i pray upon the death of the USA on a public platform “ and had urged, “grant victory to the Mujahideen” or the Jihadis, and Nerdeen Kiswani who had quipped, “I hope that pop-pop is the last noise that some Zionists hear in their lifetime!”

According to the White House Islamophobia strategy, CUNY’s failure to platform murderous hatred for America and Israel was ‘discrimination’ and ‘hate’ against Muslim students.

Meanwhile at CUNY, anti-Israel students had demanded the expulsion of most Jewish students and called to “globalize the intifada”. A CUNY professor described how “a Kingsborough/CUNY student beat a Jewish man in a kippah with a bat while yelling, ‘Kill all Jews, free Palestine.’”

But according to the Biden administration, Muslim students at CUNY are the real victims because a Muslim group’s ugly hate event was canceled “without adequate justification”

Students for Justice in Palestine, the top campus anti-Israel group, had openly celebrated and praised the atrocities of Oct 7, and campus protests featured Hamas and Hezbollah flags, but the Islamophobia strategy falsely claims that “student protestors, despite having condemned Hamas and terrorism and engaging in only peaceful protests, have been accused of supporting terrorism merely due to their advocacy for the human rights of Palestinian civilians”.

The strategy’s citation for the claim that anti-Israel students faced “violent attacks, threats, discrimination” was the UCLA encampment where a federal judge ruled that “Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith.” Prior to what the CNN story linked in the strategy describes as Jewish violence against the terrorist encampment, multiple Jewish students and community members had been assaulted, including on camera, and a Jewish female student had been knocked unconscious.

The Biden administration’s idea of “peaceful protests” was kicking a Jewish girl in the head and it claims that students calling for Hamas to destroy Tel Aviv were “accused of supporting terrorism merely due to their advocacy for the human rights of Palestinian civilians”.

The UCLA encampment had been set up by Students for Justice in Palestine UCLA which had co-signed a statement declaring “our unwavering support of the resistance in Gaza” and taking pride in “Towfan Al-Aqsa” (the Hamas name for the October 7 massacres) “as a revolutionary moment in contemporary Palestinian resistance.”

The White House Islamophobia strategy has as little basis for the “peaceful” nature of the terrorist mobs as it does for the contention that Muslims faced a surge of violence after Oct 7.

The U.S. National Strategy to Counter Islamophobia and Anti-Arab Hate quickly discredits itself by citing hoax after hoax. It repeatedly plays up the Burlington hoax referencing “the shooting of three young men in Vermont” and the contention that “a gunman shot three college students of Palestinian descent in Burlington, Vermont,”

While a mentally ill man did shoot three Muslim men, he was a Hamas supporter.

Rather than being anti-Muslim, the gunman had tweeted, “the notion that Hamas is ‘evil’ for defending their state from occupation is absurd” and “what if someone occupied your country? Wouldn’t you fight them?” The Burlington Islamophobia hoax was so thoroughly discredited that even CAIR had given up on listing it in its litany of ‘Islamophobic’ events, but the Biden administration somehow manages to have even lower standards for the truth than CAIR.

The Islamophobia strategy also lists an incident where “an individual believed to have been involved in prior violent incidents at a Minneapolis mosque struck a man with a minivan in the mosque’s parking lot.” The individual, James Evan Suttles, was a black man who had a long list of prior violent incidents, suffered from paranoid delusions and had been committed four times to mental institutions. No hate crimes charges were brought against him over the attack.

The Biden Islamophobia strategy has to lean on such cases to manufacture the myth of Muslim victimhood because it lacks any actual substance. And it props that up with calls for censorship.

The strategy urges social media platforms to specifically cover Islamophobia and to rig their algorithms “de-rank and stop recommending” content that Muslim groups consider hateful.

Beyond censorship, what does the Biden administration propose we do to fight ‘Islamophobia’?

The strategy calls on Congress to formally recognize the UN’s International Day to Combat Islamophobia. The Islamophobia resolution was introduced by former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan. Khan had described Osama bin Laden, whom Pakistan had harbored, as a “martyr”, supported the Taliban and was later charged by his own country under its terrorism act.

Once again, Islamophobia turns out to be how Islamic terrorists silence criticism of their crimes.

The Biden administration’s National Strategy to Counter Islamophobia is an insult to American Jews and Christians. It uses lies and hoaxes to turn the Muslim terrorist supporters who have shut down Christmas tree lightings and attacked synagogues, and who rally for the murder of Americans and Jews as the victims, while portraying Christians and Jews as ‘Islamophobes’.

The Islamophobia strategy is the final insult of many from an administration that has stood with the Islamic terrorists and never with their Jewish and Christian victims.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. 

Thank you for reading.

 

 

Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against the Left tells the untold story of the Left's 200-Year War against America, and readers love it.

Inside The October 7th War

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

On Oct 7, 2023, thousands of Hamas terrorists invaded Israel. Their mission was to wipe out the Jewish population in the nearby towns, secure them and use them as forward operating bases for the next phase of the war. While the atrocities they committed in that initial assault, entire families burned alive in their homes, women raped and kidnapped, and babies killed, made it look like a terrorist attack on a large scale, Oct 7 had not been meant as a hit and run operation.

Hamas had risked too much and put too many men in the field for it to be anything other than an invasion. Its plans to continue advancing into Israel appear unrealistic only out of context.

The thousands of terrorists from Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah had been meant as the tip of a larger spear. Thousands of Hezbollah and allied terrorists had been in position on Oct 7. Had Hamas been able to hang on to Israeli territory, they would have invaded the Galilee, but after the initial shock and long delays throughout that first day, the Israeli military regrouped.

The Hezbollah invasion was postponed until it was briefly revived by the Islamic terror group around the time of the pager attacks and then shut down by targeted Israeli strikes.

Oct 7 had been Hezbollah’s plan before it was executed by Hamas. Hezbollah had even spent years boasting about using its network of tunnels to invade and conquer the Galilee, but the funding and plans had come out of Tehran. Yet when push came to shove, Hezbollah hesitated.

Iran had planned for an Oct 7 that would have dealt a catastrophic blow to Israel. The original plot would have seen coordinated Hamas and Hezbollah invasions backed by heavy rocket campaigns not only by Hezbollah, but by the Houthis in Yemen and Iran’s militias in Iraq targeting Israeli bases, military assets and infrastructure. Terror groups in the West Bank would have launched their own assaults creating a multi-front guerrilla war deep inside Israel. Even if Israel had beaten back the attacks, many of the Jewish communities would have been in ashes.

And seeing Israel’s weakness, hostile Muslim major military forces from Egypt and Turkey might well have joined in leading to a conflict more on the scale of another Yom Kippur War.

The death toll would not have been over 1,000, but in the tens of thousands at the very least, and perhaps, unimaginably, even more than that on the scale of another Holocaust.

Iran had planned to break Israel on the final day of the Jewish High Holy Days. And to also break the United States with it by taking out a key American coalition partner in the region.

The Biden-Harris administration had overseen the two treacherous deals with Hamas and Hezbollah. The Israeli–Lebanese maritime deal had turned over parts of Israel’s gas field to Hezbollah’s puppet regime in Beirut and an ‘understanding’ had moved Qatari money to Hamas.

Both deals had been meant to assure quiet with Israel. And for a little bit they seemed to work.

The Biden-Harris administration’s diplomacy however had been subverted by Iranian and other enemy agents. The deals did not assure an end to the fighting, but a planned campaign against Israel timed ahead of Iran’s nuclear breakout and the upcoming presidential election.

The Iranian campaign however fell apart early due to bloodlust, scheming and cowardice.

The Iranian plan to take out Israel’s defenses and communications worked. The Israeli army and air force wasted precious hours figuring out what was going on and how to respond. But Hamas had drugged its terrorists with Hezbollah’s ‘captagon’ amphetamines. Whether it was the drug or their religion, the terrorists spent too much time glorying in their brutality, including the attack on the Nova festival, to execute the next part of their mission and secure a foothold.

After some initial battles against outnumbered Israeli forces, the tide turned once the Israelis finally understood the scale of the attack they were dealing with. And Hamas was demolished.

The original plan to link up with elements in the West Bank was sidelined for the Hamas goal of displacing the Palestinian Authority and so it did not risk coordinating with anyone there. By the time anyone in the West Bank had a sense of what was going on, Hamas had already lost.

Iran had made sure that Hezbollah was ready and waiting on the border, but the Islamic terror group had already spent years taking a beating for Tehran in the Syrian Civil War. Nasrallah and the Hezbollah leadership had secured control over Lebanon and did not want to risk it in an operation that would decimate the terror group if Hamas could not deliver on Oct 7.

When Hamas failed to hold up its end, Hezbollah did not invade, but began a running war with Israel as prep for a potential invasion. Israel targeted Hezbollah positions while the Islamic terror group depopulated parts of northern Israel. Hezbollah was giving its Iranian bosses some of what they wanted without actually committing to a full scale war with the Jewish State.

The Biden-Harris administration’s ceasefire agenda and rallies inside Israel for a hostage deal at any cost kept the Hezbollah campaign alive by transforming an invasion prep campaign into a pressure campaign to spare Hamas. Hezbollah would have likely stepped down once it was clear that Hamas had lost, if talk of a deal had not provided a lifeline to the terror group.

Hezbollah miscalculated that Israel was too weakened by Oct 7 and its engagement in Gaza to respond. It gloated over worried headlines in the Israeli media about its massive stockpile of rockets. Nasrallah and the Hezbollah leadership became convinced Israel was terrified of it.

But as Israel’s large-scale confrontations with Hamas wound down and Hezbollah’s attacks escalated, the war shifted over to Lebanon. In the year of fighting, Hamas had become too small to present a useful target for large scale military operations. The Israeli campaign in Gaza had fractured the Hamas terrorist operations back down to the cell structure where terrorist groups first begin. Hezbollah however was just the right size to take on. And it was thoroughly bugged.

Israel’s campaign struck shattering blows to the morale of Iran’s Islamic terror coalition.

Iran’s ballistic missile attacks on Israel were not a sign of strength, but of weakness. Hamas and Hezbollah, Iran’s local proxies, had become too weakened to do the job. The Houthis and Iraqi militias can contribute something to the attacks on Israel, but not nearly enough. What initially looked like a solid projection of force by an Iranian Shiite coalition is falling apart into chaos.

But the collapse really began on Oct 7 when Hamas faltered and Hezbollah did not invade. Hamas proved unable to control its urge to kill Jews long enough to secure military objectives. Hezbollah was unwilling to put everything on the line for Hamas. Iran was happy to see Hamas and Hezbollah bleed, but unwilling to take any major risks until they had delivered real results. Iran had exploited Hamas and Hezbollah, and Hezbollah had sold out Hamas on Oct 7.

And the result was that what was meant to be another Holocaust failed.

Many Israelis suffered unimaginably on Oct 7. Mothers were killed in front of children. Pregnant women were butchered. Families were burned alive in their homes. But Israel is still here.

And it’s winning.

It’s winning despite European arms embargoes and threats from the Biden-Harris administration. It’s winning because Israel knows there is no alternative to victory.

Oct 7 shattered the complacency some Israelis had developed about their situation. The months since have made it clear that no amount of deals are a substitute for security. Threats as a deterrent cease to provide any leverage when the enemy stops fearing they will be carried out.

A year later, Israel is battered, but Israelis can envision a future in which they will not have to live in bomb shelters or appease terrorists in the hopes of being allowed to go on with their lives.

Last year, Israelis thought that life would mostly go on the way it had. Now they know it cannot.

December 7, 1941. 9/11. Oct 7. These are not just dates: they are wake up calls. A year later after a long day of terror and death on what was to be a joyous holiday, Israel is awake.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.

Another Day That Will Live in Infamy

   

 

One Year Ago Today – Gaza Terrorists and Citizens Storm Israel and Slaughter 1,200 Innocents in Worst Attack on Jews Since World War II - One year ago today, on October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists stormed across the border from Gaza into southern Israel. The terrorist organization and hundreds of Gaza residents and families stormed into Israel and raped, robbed, and slaughtered hundreds of Jews in their path. An estimated 1,180 were killed that day including 797 civilians, and 36 children. 379 members of the military were also killed. Hamas kidnapped 251 Israelis and took them back into Gaza. The terror group is still holding 101 Israeli hostages a year later. Many of the hostages were abused and murdered by the terror regime..............

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