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French Students Terrorized by Jihadists [Updated]

(John Hinderaker)

In France, at least two teachers have been murdered by Muslim students, one of them beheaded. The French press reports that “death threats and threats of rape have become common among pupils.” Those threats are directed toward both teachers and fellow students.

Now, students at dozens of French schools have been sent “threatening messages and beheading videos” by Islamic radicals. The story is hard to parse out, and more is, perhaps, being concealed than revealed:

At least 30 schools in the Paris region have this week received threatening messages accompanied by “shocking” footage of beheadings, the education ministry said on Thursday.

That effort is being made in support of Islamic terrorism:

The establishments – mainly secondary schools – have received “serious threats” containing “justification of and incitement to terrorism,” a representative of the education ministry told AFP.

The Muslims apparently made use of software that France uses to connect students and teachers. Reportedly, they “‘hacked a student’s email address’ in order to distribute the message and a beheading video.” They also have been making bomb threats:

In the department of Seine-et-Marne, to the east of the French capital, a secondary school received a message saying that explosives had been hidden throughout the establishment “in the name of Allah”, a police source said.

The latest threats follow a flurry of false bomb alerts targeted schools, airport and tourist sites in autumn 2023.

All of this is due to France’s feckless immigration policies. But, to be fair, their policies are a lot better than Joe Biden’s.

UPDATE: Of course, it could be worse. You could be in Russia.

Hamas’s “Operation Ramadan”–and ours

(Scott Johnson)

President Biden apparently thinks the IDF should observe Ramadan as it seeks to eliminate the genocidaires of Hamas. By contrast, the genocidaires of Hamas find Jewish holidays the right time to do their thing. It’s enough to make a sane man vomit.

Wall Street Journal letters editor Elliot Kaufman is not too choked up about Biden’s Ramadan recess. His column on the subject is datelined Tel Aviv and runs with the headline “Hamas’s ‘Operation Ramadan’—and Ours.”

The headline works a witty variation on the title of Norman Podhoretz’s classic Commentary essay “My Negro Problem–and Ours.” By the same token, it could have been headlined “My Biden Problem–and Ours.” However, it would require more than 800 words to lay it out. It would take a book.

Elliot’s column is behind the Journal’s paywall. Here is the heart of it:

There is an idea that it is wrong to fight an Islamic country during the holy month of Ramadan, which this year starts Sunday night. It’s nonsense: Look at Egypt and Syria’s 1973 Ramadan War against Israel or Iran’s 1982 Operation Ramadan against Iraq. Conversations with senior Israeli political, military and legal officials, however, suggest that the taboo is a weapon—and every player in the Gaza war has an Operation Ramadan of its own.

For more than a month, the Biden administration has set the start of Ramadan as the deadline for a deal to release Israeli hostages and stop the war. “There’s got to be a cease-fire because Ramadan,” the president said Tuesday. “If we get into circumstances where this continues to Ramadan, Israel and Jerusalem could be very, very dangerous.” The danger, in his formulation, is all on the Israeli side, so Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had better cut a deal.

Israel’s leaders lamented privately that every day in February and early March seemed to bring a new U.S. shot across Israel’s bow—an unprecedented sanctions regime; new strings attached to weapons transfers; Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s call for a “timebound, irreversible path to a Palestinian state”; a turn against the war effort, which Mr. Biden called “over the top”; loud opposition to an offensive in Rafah, now termed a “red line”; a new policy deeming all settlements illegal; blame pinned on Israel for humanitarian aid problems; calls for an “immediate cease-fire”; and leaks that the U.S. could demand its weapons not be used in Rafah.

Meanwhile, the president no longer speaks about defeating Hamas, let alone destroying it. Victory is off his list of priorities—and Israelis worry that Mr. Biden is the most pro-Israel member of his administration. Where American words gave Israelis succor after Oct. 7, they now confound and demoralize the country. According to a senior Israeli official, Mr. Blinken “says it right in your face: ‘You can’t win.’ ”

This was America’s Operation Ramadan: Spook and threaten Israel into accepting a hostage deal that would end the war much sooner than Mr. Netanyahu wants, because victory is unattainable anyway.

The administration misread Israel. Its pressure tactics have allowed Mr. Netanyahu to rally even his rivals around his positions on Rafah and against unilateral U.S. recognition of a Palestinian state, an idea Israelis find criminally insane right now. The prime minister’s chief opponent, Benny Gantz, has publicly agreed with him on both, and reportedly told U.S. officials that “finishing the war without demilitarizing Rafah is like sending in firefighters to put out 80% of a fire.” As retired Brig. Gen. Amir Avivi, head of the Israel Defense and Security Forum, tells me, “All the Hamas leaders are there. All the hostages are there. The fighters, the munitions—they’re in Rafah.”

It may not exactly fit the IDF’s timetable, but taking Rafah for Ramadan would be the right way to observe the holiday this year.

Longing for Auschwitz

(Scott Johnson)

As a guest of the Jewish Community Relations Council I attended a private showing of the atrocity video compiled by the IDF in the aftermath of the October 7 massacre this past December. Several of the clips compiled in the video had previously been posted to social media. The sadistic glee of the Hamas savages is apparent throughout the 45-minute video. They shriek in ecstasy as they perform their barbaric deeds. They take sensual pleasure in committing acts from which we recoil in disgust and horror.

Now Professor Alvin Rosenfeld seeks to capture the Hamas spirit in the Tablet column “Longing for Auschwitz.” What’s it all about? Professor Rosenfeld seems to me to get at the mania that is otherwise beyond our verbal grasp if not our human understanding. This is just the opening slice of his column:

Hamas’s assault on Israelis on October 7th was not an act of war as we normally think of it but something far worse. We don’t have an adequate term for what occurred on that day, so people use words like “terrorism,” “barbarism,” “atrocity,” “depravity,” “massacre,” and so on. All are correct, and yet all fall short of capturing the annihilationist fury set loose at the Nova music festival and in the kibbutzim and small towns of southern Israel. The people attacked in those places were not only to die, but to die in torment. In addition to the merciless torture, killings, slashings, burnings, beheadings, mutilations, dismemberments, and kidnappings, there were gang-rapes and other forms of sadistic sexual assault, including, according to some reports, the cutting off of women’s breasts, nails driven into women’s thighs and groins, bullets fired into their vaginas, and even intercourse with female corpses. Unimaginable? For most normal people, yes. But before going into Israel, the Hamas assassins were instructed to “dirty them” and “whore them.” And that’s precisely what many of them faithfully did.

If it were possible to encapsulate all the evil of that day in a single image, it would be that of the violent seizure of a young Israeli woman, Naama Levy, 19, barefoot, beaten, and bloodied, her hands tied behind her back, the crotch of her sweatpants heavily soiled, possibly from being raped, dragged by her hair at gunpoint into a Hamas car, and driven off to Gaza to suffer an unspeakable fate among her captors there.Her assailants filmed every second of her ordeal; and as one watches the clips of her being taken away, one sees crowds nearby loudly shouting “Allah-hu Akbar” – “Allah is the greatest”—a victory cry that offers religious sanction to the malign treatment of Naama Levy and countless others seized, slaughtered, and abducted on that horrific day.

All wars cause human suffering, but the cruelties visited upon Israelis on October 7th far surpasses what normally happens when armies go to war. Hamas’s actions had a different aim: not conquest but the purposeful humiliation of Jews by people who detest them and were sworn to degrade and dehumanize them before murdering them. For those familiar with Jewish history, the mass violence enacted against Jews in Kishinev in 1903 came instantly to mind, as did the Farhoud in Iraq in 1941 and Chmielnicki’s savage decimation of Ukrainian Jewish communities in the mid-17th century. With memories of those earlier massacres newly revived, October 7th instantly evoked the word “pogrom.” With cause. But how could such a catastrophe occur in today’s Israel? The country’s military has been hailed as one of the strongest in the world and was regarded as invincible. And yet on October 7th, it failed to protect its southern border and prevent the ruthless assault on Jews in the Gaza envelope. Responding to Hamas’s bloody deeds, one Israeli woman summed up the reactions of virtually every Jew in the country and millions of others abroad when she said, simply and incontrovertibly, “Every Israeli’s worst nightmares have come true.”

October 7th, 2023 was the most destructive day of mass violence against Jews since the end of the Holocaust. The carnage carried out on that day, far from being a by-product of war, was a religiously sanctioned, orgiastic display of unrestrained Jew-hatred. One cannot begin to understand it if one ignores the Hamas Charter and other Islamist teachings that make Hamas the organization it is and inspires it to do what it does.

Hamas originates as a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. It is and always has been a jihadist organization, which sees the existence of the State of Israel as an intolerable intrusion into the Domain of Islam (“dar al-islam”) and is committed to removing Israel by whatever means necessary. The preamble to the Hamas Charter declares that “Israel exists and will continue to exist until Islam obliterates it, just as it obliterated others before it.” The “Palestinian problem,” it affirms, “is a religious problem” and is not amenable to a negotiated political settlement. The only way to “raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine” is through “jihad,” a holy war that is a “duty for every Muslim wherever he may be.”

After watching the atrocity video, I wondered: Has Dementia Joe or blind Tony Blinken seen this? (Kelly Jane Torrance reported in her New York Post column on it that Biden has seen it.) If so, what are they doing hectoring Israel, yammering about a two-state solution, and disparaging a country acting in self-defense while in the throes of a crisis that goes to its reason for being? If that’s the best they can do, why won’t they shut up?

The “solution” is part of the problem. A people must have civilized norms and civil institutions on which to predicate a state. It can’t be created ex nihilo or ex worse than nothing.

Israel exists as a homeland and refuge for the Jewish people. The events of October 7 belie its reason for being. In other words, it won’t remain a refuge if Israelis aren’t safe from such atrocities in their homeland. Thus the war on Hamas in which it is currently engaged. Israel, by the way, also has to contend with Iranian proxies including Hezbollah and the Houthis as well as Iran itself. The day of reckoning is coming.

No government freely elected by the people of Israel can tolerate what Israel withstood on October 7. There can be no return to the status quo ante or its functional equivalent under the supervision of the Palestinian Authority, whose president for life himself supports terrorism with funds generously provided by his supporters among the Biden administration and elsewhere.

Sweden Seeing the Reality of “Diversity”

(Steven Hayward)

This morning I stumbled across a Tweet linking to an Australian “60 Minutes” segment about the unassimilable migrants that are causing the crime rate and other social dysfunctions to soar in Sweden. Turns out the episode is seven years old, but since we don’t see Australia’s “60 Minutes” here (and our CBS “60 Minutes” won’t touch this subject with a ten meter pole), I doubt little has changed in the last seven years, so here’s the complete seven minute segment—watch to the very end:

I still contend that sooner or later, European nations are going to institute mass deportations of migrants. (If it wants to survive, anyway. It may not have the will to do so any more.) Germany has already said it is going to step up deportation proceedings against recent migrants whose asylum claims are unfounded, but look for other countries to ratchet up from there.

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