Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish articles

Tuesday, October 31, 2023

How the Hamas Attack Took Israel by Surprise

By Daniel Greenfield On October 31, 2023 In recent

A week before its attack Hamas agreed to another truce with Israel. The agreement negotiated by Qatar, Egypt and the United Nations traded an end to border attacks for more imports, a bigger fishing zone and more work permits that allowed over 20,000 Gaza Muslims to enter Israel.

The agreement reached between Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, and Sukkot, the conclusion of the High Holy Days season, offered an end to the explosives and rocks being hurled at Israeli soldiers on the border and the incendiary balloons starting fires on Israeli farms. And terrorist attacks on civilians like the murder of Batsheva Nigri: a kindergarten teacher shot and killed while driving in her car with her 12-year-old daughter.

Qatar, a state sponsor of Hamas and an ally of the United States, claimed that it had “succeeded in de-escalating the situation in the Gaza Strip by mediating an understanding.”

Hamas ended the border riots and Israelis went into the Sukkot holiday with an apparent calm. The Israeli army and security forces continued to focus on the West Bank, where much of the violence appeared to be coming from, rather than the Gaza Strip which seemed quiet.

But the border attacks and the negotiated ceasefire had all been part of a feint.

Hamas had been working on a large-scale attack for two years. During this time it had calculatedly tamped down some of the violence and appeared amenable to informal truces in exchange for benefits. The results appeared so impressive that Biden's National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan bragged to Foreign Affairs magazine about “deescalating Gaza and restoring diplomacy”. These claims would be removed from the online version of the article.

More seriously, Israel's intelligence apparatus was so focused on Iran that it had stopped eavesdropping on Hamas as a waste of time. Two years without a major confrontation had convinced too many in Jerusalem and Washington D.C. that the situation was under control.

2023 had been the deadliest year in some time, but the violence was coming out of the West Bank. And that's where the Israeli military and its domestic security forces were focused.

At the Gaza border, a reduced force, sufficient to cope with border riots and small groups of infiltrators, had been left in place. Hamas had spent years closely watching its routines and spotting its weaknesses while developing a plan of attack in plain sight.

When Hamas began conducting exercises on kidnapping Israelis and “storming settlements” in plain sight in September 2023, experts dismissed it as posturing to extract more concessions. In an article five days before the attacks, the default assumption by a Western diplomat and Israeli defense officials was that Hamas was running short of money and an infusion of Qatari cash along with more work permits, which brought $2 million a day into Gaza, would appease it.

An expert quoted in the media described Hamas border violence as a “tactical way of generating attention about their distress. It’s not an escalation but ‘warming up’ to put pressure on relevant parties that can come up with money to give to the Hamas government.”

It was in this state of tactical blindness, the equivalent of America’s obliviousness before 9/11, that the Hamas attacks executed on the conclusions of the High Holy Days took place.

Israel did not entirely drop its guard. Army units were still watching the border and a unit of the Shin Bet, its domestic security agency, had been dispatched in anticipation of an attack. There had been warnings that something was coming, but in line with previous attacks, the most Israeli security personnel anticipated was a 7-10 man incursion by a Hamas strike force.

No one expected over 2,000 terrorists breaking through at multiple points for a full-scale invasion of neighboring Israeli towns and communities. But they should have.

The Hamas campaign has been described as Israel’s 9/11, but it has more of an analogy to another disaster in America’s military history. In January 1968, Communist forces in Vietnam launched the Tet Offensive, taking advantage of a local holiday truce and the conviction of American military leaders that enemy forces were not capable of an attack on that scale.

The ambition of the attack took everyone by surprise. The Viet Cong were able to attack even the U.S. embassy in Saigon and take control of cities like Hue where they murdered and tortured whomever they pleased. While the Tet Offensive failed, it broke the morale of the Vietnamese and helped end Democratic Party support for the Vietnam War.

Like the Tet Offensive, the Hamas attacks violated a cease-fire and depended on diverting Israel’s attention away from the Gaza border and to the West Bank. The border riots and the agreement had lulled Israel into a false sense of security about the scale of Hamas ambitions. Like the Tet Offensive, rocket attacks were followed by a large-scale assault targeting populated areas deeper inside Israel that were not properly hardened. Gazan workers who had been given work permits guided the Hamas terrorists with information about those communities.

Israeli deployments at the Gaza border had been aimed at countering the two usual scenarios over the years: attacks across the border and infiltration by small groups. During border riots, a limited number of IDF soldiers would warn off the rioters, often by firing in the air, and snipers would be on watch for long range attacks. The border fence had been built to block any but the most determined infiltrators and to quickly alert response teams to any incursions. In the event that the border fence was breached, Israeli special units would quickly intercept the terrorists.

In these scenarios, a relatively small number of soldiers could secure the border. No one had planned for a third scenario or brought in sufficient numbers of soldiers to cope with it. Like most militaries, the IDF had focused on winning the wars as they were being fought now.

And that is always a fatal error.

Hamas had carefully studied the Israeli military's routines. It fired rockets while knowing that Israeli soldiers would follow their usual procedures of seeking shelter. With the soldiers pinned down, it attacked the communications infrastructure that provided command and control functions, and also provided some internet and phone access to nearby communities.

The border fence had been designed to alert Israel to individual breaches so that military forces could quickly converge on the area. But now there were far more breaches than forces. While overwhelmed Israeli border forces tried to stop the invaders, more of them were breaching at multiple points and heading toward their real targets: communities inside Israel.

Unlike the Jewish communities that had existed in Gaza before the disastrous ‘disengagement’ that forced them out in the name of peace or the Jewish ‘settlements’ in the West Bank, the ‘kibbutzim’ were not especially hardened. Whereas Jewish ‘settlements’ tend to be more religious and heavily armed, the equivalent of small towns in Texas, the communities near Gaza attacked by Hamas were more approximately Boston suburbs. They were not entirely helpless: but they were dependent on security teams who kept weapons in a central location.

The Hamas terrorists, who had used the Gaza work permits to gain detailed intelligence on their targets, were well aware of this. Security in these communities had been set up to cope with the usual threat of one or two terrorists, but was completely unready for 70 or 90 heavily armed attackers with detailed maps of their targets and a plan to secure their objectives. And that included knowing where the security teams and IDF personnel in those communities lived.

In some communities, members of security teams and ordinary civilians heroically fought back. The story of Inbar Lieberman, a 25-year-old woman who served as the security coordinator for Kibbutz Nir Am, who rallied her neighbors, killed 5 terrorists and saved the kibbutz has been widely told. But other communities were not so lucky. That was where the massacres happened.

The system fell apart and those on the ground improvised. Troops on the ground used WhatsApp to request fire support from choppers. Commando units used WhatsApp groups to locate veterans with military experience and deploy them to targeted areas. “Suburbanites and urbanites, including some retirees, simply holstered their guns, jumped in their cars, and drove maniacally down South – saving their kids, their grandkids, or mere strangers.”

Where the IDF had been overwhelmed and tied down, an informal IDF of veterans stepped into the breach. And without them, Hamas might have achieved its overall objectives.

Hamas had waited two years and deployed over 2,000 terrorists not just to carry out a few large scale massacres, but to seize and secure the targeted communities as forward operating bases, expanding its territory, and seeking to move beyond them in a battle for all of Israel. Its Jihadis wore cameras and recorded their atrocities to use them as a rallying call to summon Arab Muslims in the West Bank and inside Israel’s ‘Green Line’ to join a battle for all of Israel.

The ultimate plan was “to seize the Gaza corridor and open a pathway to Tel Aviv”: a not unthinkable distance of 44 miles away. Hamas moving its atrocities to Tel Aviv would have been the perfect equivalent of the Tet Offensive.

As the Hamas attacks were underway, Al Jazeera reported that mosque “minarets in the West Bank began making calls of ‘Allahu Akbar’ in an expression of support” and “massive processions set out in a number of places in the West Bank… in Jenin, Tubas, Ramallah… in Hebron, and Bethlehem… to celebrate the ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’ battle.”

The images of the hostages, the kidnapped children and abused women were intended to panic Israelis and convince Arab Muslims to join a battle on the verge of being won. The Hamas message was that Israel was weak and ripe for destruction. But no real support arrived. Despite its initial victories and massacres, Hamas was unable to sustain its momentum. Like the Tet Offensive, the High Holy Day atrocities were a political victory and a military defeat.

Estimates are that Hamas left behind as many as 1,500 dead inside Israel and more along the border. The Jihadiis, fueled by captagon, known as “the drug of jihad”, a popular amphetamine in the Middle East mass produced by the Assad regime in Syria, and widely used by Islamic terror groups from ISIS to Hezbollah, felt invulnerable and gleefully tortured, mutilated and raped their way across communities, heady with the conviction that they could not be stopped.

The captagon high of ‘poor man’s cocaine’ also made them slow to respond as the tide of battle turned. Many fought and died rather than strategically pull back. A surprise attack had turned into a rout. Like Al Qaeda and ISIS, the larger plans of Hamas resembled those of most Islamists whose military strategies were rooted in a mixture of Marxist guerrilla tactics, Mohammed’s conquests and prophecies of final battles when the end times arrive.

Islamic terrorists and guerrillas execute an attack in the expectation that the larger ummah of the Muslim world will rally to their banners. Islamists like Marxists see all battles as primarily ideological. Victory or defeat in any individual battle is less important than raising morale, terrifying enemies and using that to generate recruitment. The Marxist and Islamist guerrilla aims not as much at winning battles as maintaining a higher level of morale and staying power.

Hamas had won and lost before. Each time it emerged with more financing, fame and manpower. To defeat Maoist forces in the field, you have to actually destroy them. Or make them completely irrelevant. The Tet Offensive had failed at achieving its military objectives, but demonstrated how the Communists intended to win. That is what Hamas had also set out to do.

Israel had spent so much time focusing on Hamas tactics that it lost track of the terrorist group’s actual long term objectives. That is a mistake that it cannot afford again with either Hamas, Hezbollah, Fatah or any of the Islamic terrorist groups that it is confronting. Washington’s bad habit of looking at Islamic terrorists through the eyes of realpolitik had rubbed off on Jerusalem. Believing that Islamists want what we all want, that Hamas considerations were driven by $2 million a day or fishing zones rather than a religious mandate to destroy Israel was an error.

Counterterrorism is inherently reactive. Israel excelled at counterterrorism, but that success was also a trap. While the Israelis built better mousetraps, they had come to think of the enemy as a mouse. The more they reacted to what Hamas was doing, the better able they were to stop it in the short term, but the more they lost track of countering its larger plans in the long term.

Islamists engage in terrorism, but it was a catastrophic mistake to think of Hamas as merely a terrorist group and to reduce it to its tactics. The Hamas attacks discarded terrorism and turned to guerrilla warfare, drawing on everything from classic Mohammedan warfare to ISIS attacks to Marxist campaigns in Southeast Asia. Hamas stepped out of the box to launch an operation that overwhelmed Israeli forces still thinking of it in terms of counterterrorism rather than all-out war.

To win a war, you must know the enemy. Israel had lost sight of who its enemy really was. But so has every nation in the free world facing a religious war that is over a thousand years old.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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Monday, October 30, 2023

1 in 10 American Jews Support Hamas

By Daniel Greenfield On October 30, 2023 In recent

On October 18, Hamas supporters stormed the United States Capitol and rallied in the Canon rotunda against the Israeli campaign to stop the Islamic terrorist group. While many of the insurrectionists were Islamist and non-Jewish leftist activists, the event was linked to two veteran anti-Israel organizations: Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow.

There has always been a pro-terrorist fringe among American Jews exemplified by organizations such as these two, along with others such as J Street, the Israel Policy Forum, the New Israel Fund, Jews for Racial & Economic Justice, T’ruah and other anti-Israel groups. And while they have generally boasted more organizations than members, a new poll raises the question of what percentage of American Jews supports Hamas and the killing of Jews.

The answer in one poll is deeply troubling.

Cygnal polled Muslims and Jews in America. It found that 57% of Muslims believed that Hamas atrocities against Jews were justified. But a less widely reported result found that 11.5% of American Jews also agreed that Hamas was justified.

3.6% of American Jews “strongly agreed” that Hamas was justified while another 7.9% “somewhat agreed.”

While the vast majority of American Jews, 88.5% disagreed, there is a distinct minority of people who were born Jewish that supports killing Jews.

And supports Hamas.

Hamas Leader Ismail Haniyeh enjoys a 7.2% favorability rating among American Jews.

When asked if knowing that “Hamas is nothing but a proxy for Iran and is funded and supported by Iran. Would you be more or less likely to vote for a political candidate who supports releasing billions of dollars in frozen assets for Iran to use any way it chooses”, 10.8% of American Jews would be more likely to vote for such a candidate.

1 in 10 American Jews supports the murder of Jews. Not to mention the rape, torture, kidnapping and dismembering of Jews. That is the JVP, IfNotNow, J Street, T’ruah demographic.

Polls are flawed and Cygnal dramatically oversamples Reform who make up 44.7% of the poll, but only 37% of American Jews, and Orthodox and Conservative Jews barely make up a quarter of the respondents, but the poll likely does reflect some percentage of American Jews.

They are the ones who rallied for Hamas in the Capitol and who, like Anna Epstein at Boston University, can be seen tearing down the posters showing the kidnapped women and children.

Anti-Israel groups over the years have claimed that they don’t support terrorism. Even the IfNotNow and JVP rallies operate under the false flag of calling for a ceasefire. Their allies from J Street to JFREJ to T’ruah use similarly misleading language. Some even claim to be advocating for the hostages. This is often enhanced by theatrical performances inappropriately using borrowed Jewish rituals such as a shofar, a tallit and the recitation of Kaddish, the mourning prayer, for Islamic terrorists.

In reality, IfNotNow’s first statement after the Hamas rape, torture, kidnapping and murder of Israelis asserted that, “we cannot and will not say today’s actions by Palestinian militants are unprovoked. Every day under Israel’s apartheid system is a provocation.” It made no mention of Hamas, but only claimed that the “blood is on the hands” of America and Israel.

But what the poll really lays bare is the worldview of Hamas supporters with Jewish last names. It does so without any of the dishonest language, the equivocation, the changes of subject that form the essence of their anti-Israel arguments. Asked if they support Hamas, they do.

It’s that simple and it was always that simple.

There is a percentage of American Jews whose leftist politics are so extreme that they back Hamas and the mass killing of Jews. We don’t know exactly what percent it is, is it really 11.5% or 7% or 3.6%. What we do know is that members of this group routinely lie and mislead about what they believe. They talk about peace when what they’re after is war. When they advocate for a ‘ceasefire’, what they really want is the unrestricted ability by Hamas to kill Jews.

They are not just opposed to the policies of a “right-wing Israeli government” or any Israeli government, they have a favorable view of Ismail Haniyeh: the leader of Hamas, who had bragged that the Islamic terror group would win because it loved death while “the Jews love life more than any other people, and they prefer not to die”.

They aren’t actually advocating for a deal with Iran, they just want an end to all sanctions on Iran even if it supports Hamas and even in the absence of any actual deal to end its nuclear program.

What does the anti-Israel fringe of the Jewish community support?

Israel released a recording of a Hamas terrorist excitedly calling his parents to tell them, “Father, I killed 10 Jews! Check your WhatsApp! I sent you the photos! Father, I killed 10 Jews! I killed 10 Jews with my bare hands. check your WhatsApp. Father, be proud of me!”

How did we get to the point where any percentage of American Jews supports Hamas?

Another poll, from Harvard/Harris, found that 16% of Americans side with Hamas and 24% agreed that “the Hamas killing of 1200 Israeli civilians in Israel can be justified by the grievances of Palestinians.”

This was an opinion held by 31% of Democrats and 36% of self-described liberals. People with college degrees (29%) were more likely to support Hamas atrocities than people with only some college (21%). Urbanites (40%) were far more likely to believe that the murder of Israeli women and children was justified than suburban (17%) or rural (13%) residents. Those making $75,000 or more were more often Hamas supporters (33%) than those making less (19%) and blacks (33%), Hispanics (28%) justified the murder of Jews more than white people did (21%).

The poll didn’t assemble the percentage of Hamas support from urban (40%) liberals (36%) with college (29%) degrees, but it’s a good bet that it’s between a third and a half of them.

That also is a good description of a sizable percentage of American Jews.

A third of American Jews do not support Hamas, but when they are immersed in an environment that does, especially on college campuses, is it any surprise that some do?

When 21% of liberals admit that they side with Hamas, some Jewish leftists will do it too.

Move to a neighborhood full of Nazis, enroll your kids in schools where there are daily chants of “Heil Hitler” during lunchtime and students are taught of the greatness of the Third Reich, and the odds of your kids coming home goosestepping vastly increases. Even if they’re Jewish.

Jews in America have become part of a cultural community that has supported leftist terrorism for at least half a century. Some never abandoned their admiration for Communism, others saw the Marxist terrorists of the counterculture as noble idealists, and some now celebrate Hamas.

American Jews are much less likely to support their own killing, kidnapping and torture than the average liberal (36%), but as many as 1 in 10 may be willing to accept Jewish genocide as the price of social justice. In the early days of the Soviet Union, the Yevsektsia or Jewish Section, made up of people who were born Jewish, was the most ruthless in wiping out Judaism and Zionism. Today, IfNotNow, J Street and Jews for Racial & Economic Justice take up the banner.

The Hamas atrocities and the reaction to it are a reality check. Some Jewish liberals recoil in horror at the implications of the ideology of social justice, others double down and embrace it. They claim that they want peace, but the Cygnal poll shows what they really want is dead Jews.

(Editor's note: as bad as these numbers are, they're the best numbers of any U.S. group.)

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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Sunday, October 29, 2023

CAIR Sues Prison for Asking Funder of Terrorists Who Killed 8-Year-Olds to Take Off Hijab

By Daniel Greenfield On October 29, 2023 In recent

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), an unindicted co-conspirator in an Islamic terrorism funding trial, has gone to bat for a convicted Islamic terrorism funder who was asked to remove her hijab.

Muna Osman Jama, a Somali immigrant, had been sentenced to 12 years in prison for providing material support to al-Shabaab: a Somali Islamic terrorist group allied with Al Qaeda.

Jama had set up a chat room to coordinate funding for Islamic terrorist operations including in Nairobi where the Jihadist group had perpetrated the Westgate Mall Massacre. During the killing spree, al-Shabaab terrorists had singled out non-Muslims by asking them to name Mohammed’s mother or recite the shahada, the Islamic creed, and if they failed, killing them.

Serving a sentence that will only end in 2027, Jama has retained her devotion to her cult. And now CAIR, which has a history of support for Islamic terrorists, is suing the Federal Correctional Institution in Waseca, Minnesota, alleging that the terrorist funder was caused “a great deal of shame and embarrassment” by being asked to remove her hijab.

Jama and CAIR understandably don’t find any “shame and embarrassment” in her support for an Islamic terrorist group that killed people, including elderly women and children, simply because they weren’t Muslims. A Kenyan mother and her two small children played dead for two hours to avoid being murdered for no other reason than that they were Christian.

The victims of the Islamic terrorists whom Jama supported include Jenah Louis Bawa, an 8-year-old girl, murdered alongside her mother, Pramshu Jain, an 8-year-old boy, and an Indian woman who was 6-months pregnant. The killers interspersed the murders with prayers to Allah.

What was Jama’s reaction to the Islamic murder of children? Jama and another Somali immigrant “were recorded as they laughed as the carnage at the Westgate Mall in Nairobi was still taking place” and “laughed at the Boston Marathon Bombing” and the World Trade Center.

This is so unimportant that CAIR never feels the need to even mention it in its press release.

Jama feels no shame for supporting terrorists who murdered 8-year-olds, but CAIR complains on her behalf that her “head, ears, and neck are on full display each time male officers need to identify her during headcounts”. Islam has priorities: dead kids are good, women’s ears are bad.

Under Islam, murdering non-Muslim children is not something to be ashamed of. Unlike removing a hijab, it’s a glorious religious experience. That’s why ISIS jihadists would pray before raping non-Muslim little girls. One of the Muslim terrorists told a 12-year-old girl that raping her brought him “closer to Allah”. There’s no shame in raping non-Muslim children, there is however shame in a Muslim woman having to display her ears to the unclean eyes of infidels.

According to CAIR, Jama “has been forced to carry around an ID photo, which features a picture of her without her hijab” and “each time Jama swipes her ID card, her hijab-less photo appears on the database screen for any males in the vicinity to view. This hijab-less ID has caused Jama a great deal of shame and embarrassment.”

In Somalia, al-Shabaab, the terrorist group Jama helped finance, would gang rape teenage girls. One of the Jihadist group’s victims described being “repeatedly sexually abused by up to six men at a time” leaving her HIV positive. Al-Shabaab took 12-year-old girls as sex slaves, and left them incontinent with damaged genitals. But consider the exposure of Jama’s neck.

Al-Shabaab’s concern for female modesty was so great that it declared that Sharia, or Islamic law, banned women from wearing “un-Islamic bras” and ordered “women at gunpoint to shake their breasts.” Those who did not pass the Islamic underwear test were whipped.

CAIR complains that the federal prison system is violating Jama’s Islamic modesty by exposing her neck, while the terrorists she was aiding did a whole lot worse for Islamic modesty. Jama helped terrorists who wanted to create an Islamic state and force everyone to live by her cult’s rules. Now she complains that the federal prison system is living by its rules, not her rules.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations claims that it’s just acting to protect Jama’s religious freedom. But what is CAIR’s position on al-Shabaab? The perpetrators of the Westgate Mall attack, during which children were murdered, included Somalis Muslims from America.

Family members claimed that CAIR had obstructed FBI efforts to investigate the attack. Muslims who took part in a seminar on al-Shabaab were smeared by CAIR as anti-Muslim.

The uncle of one of the men who may have been recruited to join the terror group testified in Congress that, “CAIR held meetings for some members of the community and told them not to talk to the FBI, which was a slap in the face for the Somali American Muslim mothers who were knocking on doors day and night with pictures of their missing children and asking for the community to talk to law enforcement about what they know of the missing kids.”

This is not the first time that CAIR tried to intervene on behalf of Muslims sentenced for providing support to al-Shabaab. In 2013, CAIR filed a complaint against a federal judge who had sentenced Hawo Hassan, who had raised money door to door for al-Shabaab, and Amina Ali, who had held fundraising teleconferences for the terrorists. A story described them as “respected humanitarian workers” and CAIR condemned the judge for asking the women raising money to impose Sharia law if they supported “jihad, suicide bombings and Sharia law.”

Somalia’s UN representative responded by accusing CAIR of “equating Islam with terrorism” and “misleading the community on a false pretense of defending Muslims”. He pointed out that

“CAIR never urged the community to express collective outrage against Al Shabaab’s menacing act of terror in Somalia.” Is CAIR really concerned about Jama’s ears or al-Shabaab?

“The hijab is a sacred part of Mrs. Jama’s identity and her connection to Allah,” CAIR Legal Fellow Aya Beydoun insists. An equally sacred part of Mrs. Jama’s connection with her god, Allah, is murdering non-Muslims which the federal prison system also blocks her from doing.

CAIR rightly ought to sue the federal prison for blocking Jama’s sacred connection to Allah by interfering with her religious obligation to support Jihad. Instead she’ll have to wait until 2027. But until then, she and CAIR can wage lawfare, a form of Jihad, against the United States.

Al-Shabaab is following the sacred Islamic obligation of conducting Jihad to make Somalia even more of an Islamic state. By supporting them, Jama was engaging in the permanent Islamic religious obligation of supporting Jihad until the entire world is subjugated under Islamic rule.

America has a choice. We can choose Jama’s hijab or the murdered children in Westgate. We can choose CAIR or the young girls being gang raped in Somalia. It is a binary choice.

Somalia is a lost cause. America isn’t. Yet.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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Thursday, October 26, 2023

Pentagon CFO’s Chief of Staff Has Family Ties to Islamic Terrorism

By Daniel Greenfield On October 26, 2023 In recent

In 2019, Yousra Fazili addressed a congressional hearing to complain about the arrest of her cousin by Indian authorities. The woman who now serves as Chief of Staff for the Pentagon Comptroller claimed that her cousin was the innocent victim of oppressive Indian authorities.

According to the daughter of Kashmiri Muslim immigrants, her cousin Mubeen Shah had been arrested under India’s Public Safety Act even though he was “not a politician or a dissident, he isn’t a freedom fighter, or even a kid in the street throwing stones. He’s just a businessman. His life’s work has focused on bringing economic opportunity to Kashmir.”

In reality, as the Hindu Post noted, Shah had “lionized Kashmiri jihadists, agreed with a description of convicted terrorists as ‘inspirations for the youth,’ and promised that ‘we all are ready to spill our blood’” to keep the region Muslim. On Facebook, Shah appeared to have posted a picture describing Mohammad Afzal Guru, an Islamic terrorist tied to the ‘The Army of Muhammad’, which is affiliated with Al Qaeda, as the “Pride of Kashmir”. Guru had been executed for his role in a December 2001 attack on the Indian parliament.

Fortunately for Shah, he had his Fazili family deeply embedded in America’s political establishment. Yousra’s sister, Sameera Fazili had been brought in as a senior policy advisor to Obama’s National Economic Council. And when Biden took office, she became the deputy assistant to the president and the deputy director of the National Economic Council.

When Shah was arrested, Sameera and Yousra Fazili “dialed friends in the State Department” and the State Department demanded information about him from the Indian government. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a radical leftist sympathetic to Islamic terrorists, agitated for his release.

Soon Shah was out and Yousra Fazili was in, joining her sister in a high-level position in the Biden administration. Where Sameera had worked on the economic side of things, Yousra became the Special Assistant to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Defense Programs three years after agitating on behalf of a terrorist supporter.

It was incredible even by the standards of an administration that seemed to have abandoned even the most elementary forms of background checks and security screenings.

But worse was to come.

Yousra Fazili had studied Islamic religious law or sharia at Egypt’s Al-Azhar University before receiving a Master’s degree in Islamic Studies from Harvard. She was recorded showing up at the UN Economic and Social Council representing the International Islamic Federation of Student Organizations known as a Muslim Brotherhood operation. The IIFSO was co-founded by figures tied to the Muslim Brotherhood and Osama bin Laden.

But before long, Yousra Fazili appeared to be providing materials on Islam to federal contractors like Booz Allen Hamilton and then to the Defense Intelligence Agency. She made the leap to the Department of Defense, first serving as the Special Assistant to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Defense Programs and now serves as the Chief of Staff to the Comptroller and Chief Financial Officer of the Pentagon.

But before that she was working for the state sponsor of Hamas.

Rep. Jack Bergman, a retired Marine Corps lieutenant general, wrote a letter to Secretary of Defense Austin, expressing his concern “about the security clearances and responsibilities entrusted to Yousra Fazili, the Chief of Staff for the Comptroller and Chief Financial Officer of the Pentagon” due to her past work as “‘strategic’ advisor to Meshal Al-Thani, the Qatari Ambassador to the U.S., for over three years.”

Qatar is a close ally of Iran, hosts Hamas leaders and has ties to Islamic terrorist groups all over the world. Reports link the Qatari royal family to Al Qaeda. The Islamic terror state harbored 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who escaped when Qatari officials allegedly tipped him off and he left on a “a specially equipped government executive jet, complete with blacked-out windows.”

Furthermore, as Rep. Bergman points out, Qatar was engaged in covert hostilities against the United States. Fazili worked for the “Qatari Ambassador at the time that her client was targeting prominent Americans in an effort to silence Qatar’s critics, including the then-Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Ed Royce, and the former acting head of the Central Intelligence Agency, Michael Morell.”

How does someone go from working for an ally of Iran and Hamas to a prominent position at the Pentagon in a matter of years?

The failure by the Biden administration and the Pentagon to perform even the most elementary vetting of Yousra Fazili is a massive national security failure. Yousra Fazili had testified on behalf of her cousin, while lying about his support for Islamic terrorists, and had publicly supported Islamic terrorists linked to Al Qaeda. The efforts by the Fazili sisters to rally support for him in the State Department should have made that public knowledge in D.C.

Yousra’s sister Sameera, despite her role in the Obama and the Biden administrations, also had a troubling past with extremist groups.

When Biden brought her into the National Economic Council, it was revealed that Sameera was a member of Stand With Kashmir (SWK) “which was founded by her cousin, Hafsa Kanjwal” and which had “praised and defended the actions of a number of violent Islamists” including Asiya Andrabi who had “met with Al Qaeda officials and told them that if ‘you belong to Sheikh Osama’s Al-Qaeda then you are very welcome because he was a legitimate leader of Jihad.’”

Her cousin, Hafsa Kanjwal appeared at a pro-Hamas rally and at foreign conference led by a former Palestinian Islamic Jihad board member, and called for Muslims operating in America to “put a check on American exceptionalism.” Finally she’s an instructor at The People’s Forum: an organization funded by a Chinese Communist based operation whose offices face a “red banner that reads, in Chinese, ‘Always Follow the Party’ and a “plate depicting Xi.”

How exactly does someone a few degrees of separation from Al Qaeda go on to serve as Chief of Staff for the Pentagon Comptroller?

The exposure of Yousra Fazili comes only a few weeks after it was revealed that Ariane Tabatabai, the Chief of Staff to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict, had worked with an operation set up by the Iranian government and coordinated her congressional testimony with them. Despite published emails between Tabatabai and Iran, the Pentagon allowed her to keep her position and her security clearance.

“We have confirmed that Ms. Tabatabai’s employment and clearance processes were carried out in accordance with all appropriate laws and policies,” a Department of Defense official replied to Sen. Joni Ernst.

Two Muslim Pentagon Chiefs of Staff were shown to have worked with enemy nations. And the Defense Department and the Biden administration has chosen to keep them on the job.

When associates and employees of enemy governments that are tied to Islamic terrorism can waltz in and take high-ranking positions in the Department of Defense, national security no longer means anything. The Pentagon has been infiltrated by political hires who would have been disqualified from even being considered twenty years ago on the basis of their associations, their views and their links to enemy governments.

Now Iran and Qatar can plant their employees and catspaws at key positions throughout the Pentagon. And we wonder why our intelligence and our operations are so badly compromised.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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Wednesday, October 25, 2023

Obama, Iran and the Road to Gaza

By Daniel Greenfield On October 25, 2023 In recent

In 2014, Hamas kidnapped and killed three teens, including Naftali Frenkel, an American 16-year-old. “I’ve murdered three Jews,” the killer boasted.

As Israel battled Hamas, Obama called for a ceasefire. “I have no sympathy for Hamas. I have great sympathy for ordinary people who are struggling within Gaza,” he argued, while describing the terrorists as having behaved “extraordinarily irresponsibly”.

“The US goal right now would be to make sure that the ceasefire holds, that Gaza can begin the process of rebuilding,” Obama said and urged that there needs to be “some prospects for an opening of Gaza so that they do not feel walled off.”

After the fighting died down, the Palestinian Authority asked for $4 billion to rebuild Gaza, the international community pledged $5.4 billion with $212 million of it coming from America.

“The people of Gaza do need our help, desperately,” Secretary of State John Kerry claimed.

The ceasefire which allowed Hamas to rearm and rebuild was one in a series that led directly to the horrors in the Israeli communities near Gaza attacked by the murderous Islamic group.

Obama’s pivot on Hamas was part of his pivot on the Muslim Brotherhood. When he delivered his ‘New Beginning’ speech in Cairo in 2009 , he specifically requested that the Muslim Brotherhood attend as he not only called for a ‘Palestinian’ terrorist state inside Israel and negotiations with Iran, but also legitimized Hamas which is an arm of the Brotherhood.

“Hamas does have support among some Palestinians, but they also have to recognize they have responsibilities. To play a role in fulfilling Palestinian aspirations, to unify the Palestinian people, Hamas must put an end to violence, recognize past agreements, recognize Israel’s right to exist,” he told an audience which included members of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Hamas responded warmly to the outreach. Hamas boss Khaled Mashaal praised “Obama’s new language towards Hamas” and described it as “the first step in the right direction.”

Obama had made a point of reaching out to Hamas and to both of its key backers: the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran. On taking office, he had received letters from both Hamas, which “congratulated Mr. Obama on his presidency and reminded him that he should live up to his promise to bring real change to the region”, and from key national security figures, Brent Scowcroft, who provided advice to him, Chuck Hagel, his future defense secretary,

Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security adviser, Paul Volcker, the head of Obama’s economic recovery board, along with other notables, urging him to talk to Hamas.

“I see no reason not to talk to Hamas,” Scowcroft, a longtime advocate of Iran appeasement, had argued. The national security figure was especially influential with Obama gushing, “I love that guy.” And what Obama offered was much better than words..

Earlier in 2009, the Obama administration promised to provide $900 million in aid to help “rebuild” Gaza after fighting that began when Hamas was caught digging a tunnel to kidnap Israelis. The donation was announced in Egypt by Hillary Clinton who promised that the money would not end up in the “wrong hands”, but made no mention of Hamas.

Despite that promise, Obama administration officials told Congress that the money needed to be allocated even if Hamas were to become part of a ‘unity’ government with the PLO. The unity government never happened. Instead, Hamas drew Israel into a series of clashes that ended with ceasefires and reconstructions funded by American aid that left the terrorists stronger.

In March 2014, Rob Malley, who had been dumped by the Obama campaign for his contacts with Hamas, was brought back in and made a senior National Security Council director and then the White House Coordinator for the Middle East. When Obama pressured Israel to stand down and accept a ceasefire after the kidnapping and murder of three Jewish teens, Malley was at the wheel. After Hamas survived, Malley moved on to become Obama’s lead negotiator on the Iran deal. He became Biden’s special envoy to Iran until he was sidelined when the FBI began investigating him for mishandling classified information.

Malley had described Hamas as a misunderstood organization victimized by “misinformation”.

When Obama took office, Iran was torn by internal strife and Hamas was struggling to hang on to Gaza. By the time he left office, Iran had benefited from sanctions relief and used that money to tighten its grip on Syria, Iraq and Yemen (not to mention Lebanon.) Obama’s Arab Spring delivered significant amounts of weapons and rockets to Gaza from Libya, By 2019, Hamas was receiving $30 million a month from Iran. More recently it benefited from the trade in weapons abandoned in Afghanistan. All the negotiations made Iran and Hamas much more powerful.

And this was not an accident.

The Hamas atrocities in the last day of the High Holy Days were a direct result of Obama’s foreign policy which empowered Islamists and undermined American allies. Hamas was the beneficiary of not only regular rebuilding programs after every clash with Israel, but of the newfound wealth and power of Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Obama replaced Bush’s flawed agenda of democratizing enemy nations with something much worse, Islamizing allied nations. The Arab Spring and the Iran Deal had disastrous consequences for every allied country in the region. The effects on Israel were more subtle. It handled the Syrian Civil War on its border without being significantly affected by it and survived Egypt’s brief experiment with Muslim Brotherhood rule. Iran’s rise posed a grave threat, but also spurred some Arab Muslim Sunni enemy nations to form the Abraham Accords alliance.

And yet Obama’s foreign policy had a corrosive effect on Israel that few were aware of. Hamas rocket attacks increased in volume and range. Regular conflicts were settled with ceasefires. Israeli leaders came to rely on a defensive strategy, building up the Iron Dome program, while remaining confident that high tech tools, surveillance cameras, drones and sensors, would enable it to manage any crisis coming out of Gaza. That has proven to be disastrously wrong.

The mindset that made Israel so vulnerable came from the modus vivendi imposed by the Obama administration. Rather than trying to defeat or at least cripple Hamas, Obama had pressured Israel, as he had Egypt and the PLO, to make Hamas a partner. Israeli leaders were encouraged to find ways to incentivize good behavior by Hamas. Such programs led the previous leftist Israeli government to offer 20,000 work permits for Gazans to enter Israel.

Those Gazans scouted Israeli communities and took part in the brutal Hamas attacks.

Obama had corrupted both America and Israel into adopting the worldview that Islamic terrorism could not be defeated, only managed by making deals with even the worst possible terrorists. Hamas was treated as a rational actor which could be co-existed with as long as it had something tangible to gain from avoiding conflict. This same philosophy underlay the massive aid programs to rebuild Gaza after every war which provided Hamas with weapons and money.

It was and still is the philosophy behind the Iran Deal and in every attempt to reach an accommodation with Islamic terrorists. Foreign policy appeasers claimed to be realists and argued at every turn that the jihadists were reasonable and could be dealt with.

“We may disagree with them, but they have their own rationality, that’s the one thing to understand. These are not—none of them are crazies,” Rob Malley spoke of Hamas. “If you want to take Hamas at its word, its long-term objective is the destruction of Israel. But that’s not a practical or realistic goal, even for them,” Brent Scowcroft said dismissively.

The negotiations and agreements with Hamas and Iran, not to mention the Taliban, advocated by the realists fell apart badly. A political and military leadership, and diplomatic corps which had absorbed the nonsensical propositions of the realists was unable to see it coming. Its members refused to evacuate the embassy from Kabul until the very last minute because they were convinced that the Taliban were going to join a unity government. They are still trying to cut an interim nuclear deal with Iran. And they didn’t see a Hamas attack coming.

All the calculations of co-existence were wrong. The ideas that the Obama administration had passed off as reasonable, sensible and credible were actually delusions unmoored from reality.

“Diplomacy is the art of saying ‘Nice doggie’ until you can find a rock,” Will Rogers had quipped.

That is still how our enemies practice diplomacy, but we keep saying ‘nice doggie’ without ever looking for a rock or realizing that we even need one. Saying ‘nice doggie’ has become a magical incantation that continues to be invoked no matter how often it fails.

Defeating Hamas and neutralizing Iran are more than military problems, they require the unlearning of the foolishly dangerous ideas injected into the establishment under Obama.

Barack Obama opened the road to Gaza with his outreach to the Muslim Brotherhood and the Iran Deal. Closing the door on Hamas will require also closing the door on Obama’s legacy.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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Tuesday, October 24, 2023

American Blood on Iranian Hands

By Daniel Greenfield On October 24, 2023 In recent

(On October 23, 1983, Iranian backed terrorists carried out the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut leading to the largest loss of life by Marines in one day since Iwo Jima. This is the 40th anniversary of that Islamic terrorist attack. What follows is a reprint of an article I wrote in 2014)

“The worst part for me is that nobody remembers,” Mark Nevells said on the anniversary of the Hezbollah bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut.

A Marine had thrown his body in front of the truck to try stop the vehicle and afterward for five days, Nevells and other Marines had dug through the rubble for the bodies of the men they had served with.

One of the first Marines on the scene heard voices coming from underneath the rubble. “Get us out. Don’t leave us.”

The Marines lost more people that day than at any time since Iwo Jima and the number of Americans murdered that day by a terrorist group was a record that would stand until September 11.

In Washington, the murder of 220 Marines and the Iranian, Ismail Ascari, who drove the truck full of explosives that tore through their barracks, are inconvenient truths and lost memories. And it has always been that way.

Before the attack, the NSA intercepted a message from Iranian intelligence in Tehran to the Iranian ambassador in Damascus ordering “a spectacular action against the United States Marines.”

Mohsen Rafiqdoost, Khomeini’s bodyguard who helped found Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and served as Minister of Revolutionary Guards during the bombing, boasted, “both the TNT and the ideology, which in one blast sent to hell 400 officers, NCOs, and soldiers at the Marines headquarters, were provided by Iran.”

The Marines who died in the bombing were lucky. Another Marine did not die as quickly.

Colonel William R. Higgins was captured by Hezbollah, the terrorist group acting as Iran’s hand in Lebanon, and tortured for months until his body was dumped near a mosque.

An autopsy report found that he had been starved and had suffered multiple lethal injuries that could have caused his death. The skin on his face had been partially removed along with his tongue and he had also been castrated.

Fred Hof, a diplomat who had been a friend of the murdered man, said, “I am one of a small handful of Americans who knows the exact manner of Rich’s death. If I were to describe it to you now – which I will not – I can guarantee that a significant number of people in this room would become physically ill.”

“The State Department, not the Defense Department, had the lead. That meant diplomacy, not military might. It meant no retribution, no retaliation, no rescue,” Robin L. Higgins, his wife, wrote.

Colonel Higgins’ wife and daughter sued Iran for the murder and won a $355 million judgment from seized Iranian assets. The court found that, “Although an act of cruel savagery, the mutilation of the Colonel’s body was apparently consistent with the Islamic Guard’s fulfillment of Iranian foreign policy.”

Like Higgins, William Francis Buckley, the CIA station chief, was also captured and tortured for months. On video tapes released by his Hezbollah captors, he was incoherent and his mind had been broken by the horrors inflicted on his ravaged body and his soul.

“They had done more than ruin his body,” CIA Director William Casey said. “His eyes made it clear his mind had been played with. It was horrific, medieval and barbarous”

Imad Mughniyah was reportedly one of Buckley’s main interrogators and Iran passed along messages offering to trade Buckley in exchange for weapons sales.

Robert Stethem, a Navy diver, was brutally murdered when Hezbollah terrorists took over TWA flight 847. The Iranian-backed terrorists, one of whom was Imad Mughniyah, beat and kicked him to death.

“They were jumping in the air and landing full force on his body. He must have had all his ribs broken,” Uli Derickson, the stewardess, described. “I was sitting only 15 feet away. I couldn’t listen to it. I put my fingers in my ears. I will never forget. I could still hear. They put the mike up to his face so his screams could be heard by the outside world.”

Stethem’s screams, like those of the other American victims of Iran, have yet to be heard in Washington.

After the bombing of the American embassy in Beirut, the terrorist group that took credit for the attack warned, “This is part of the Iranian revolution’s campaign against imperialist targets throughout the world.”

It may be tempting to dismiss all this as ancient history, but the terror never stopped. In 1996, 19 Air Force airmen were killed in the bombing of the Khobar Towers with another truck bomb. “The Khobar Towers bombing was planned, funded, and sponsored by senior leadership in the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” the judgment in yet another case by victims of terrorism against Iran found.

President Clinton responded to the Iranian act of terror with a conciliatory message to Mohammad Khatami, another newly elected phony reformer playing the part of the President of Iran

“The United States has no hostile intentions towards the Islamic Republic of Iran and seeks good relationships with your government,” Clinton wrote. “In order to lay a sound basis for better relations between our countries, we need a clear commitment from you that you will ensure an end to Iranian involvement in terrorist activity.”

The Iranians rejected the call for peace and Clinton, who had earlier told advisors, “I don’t want any pissant half-measures”, backed down, as he usually did when confronted with Islamic terror.

The 9/11 Commission found evidence that the majority of the “muscle” operatives who would terrorize the crews and passengers had “traveled into or out of Iran between October 2000 and February 2001.“ After September 11, top Al Qaeda officials fled to Iran as part of its policy of covertly allowing Al Qaeda terrorists to travel across its border without passport stamps. The key figure in the cooperation between Iran and Al Qaeda was once again Imad Mughniyah who met with and influenced Osama bin Laden.

The 1998 indictment of Al Qaeda stated that the terrorist group had “forged alliances with the National Islamic Front in the Sudan and with representatives of the government of Iran, and its associated terrorist group Hezbollah, for the purpose of working together against their perceived common enemies in the West, particularly the United States.”

After the Israelis finally took out Mughniyah with a bomb in his headrest, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei declared, “The pure blood of martyrs like Imad Mugniyah will grow hundreds like him.”

All these horrific acts of terror took place as a result of Jimmy Carter’s appeasement of Iran. What blood price will be exacted for Obama’s appeasement of Iran?

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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Sunday, October 22, 2023

It’s Islam, Stupid

By Daniel Greenfield On October 22, 2023

Beslan. Mumbai. Paris. Manchester. New York City. Nairobi. Luxor. Sulu. Kibbutz Be’eri.

186 children murdered in a school in Beslan. Dozens of children taken hostage from a Catholic school in the Philippines. Two teachers were beheaded, but not the girls. “We do not kill women. We will just enslave them,” the Jihadists promised. 8-year-olds gunned down in the Westgate Mall in Nairobi. The terrorists asked their victims to name Mohammed’s mother to tell apart the non-Muslims from the Muslims. In Luxor, Egypt, the terrorists danced, sang and killed and mutilated the foreign tourists. They “took all the young women, the girls, and disappeared with them. I don’t know where they went with the women, but they hurt them. We could hear screams of pain.” Among the dead was Shaunnah Turner, a 5-year-old British girl.

Pregnant women and children murdered in Israel baffle the world. They seem implausible because each time they happen, we forget. A few days of horror pass and we move on.

When a Muslim terrorist set off a bomb in Manchester at a concert full of children and teens, there was shock and outrage. Nails were pulled out of children’s faces.

“This attack stands out for its appalling, sickening cowardice, deliberately targeting innocent, defenceless children and young people,” then Prime Minister Theresa May fumed.

That was 6 years ago. It might have been an eternity.

Our governments, talking heads and thought leaders find excuses for the killers. The Manchester Arena bomber was angry about the Syrian Civil War so he killed some British kids. Abu Sayyaf, ‘Bearers of the Sword’, keeps attacking Christian schools in the Philippines because it isn’t allowed to form its own state. The Jihadis who murdered children in Beslan were furious about Chechnya, in Nairobi, they were upset about Somalia, and in Luxor about the ban on the Muslim Brotherhood. In Israel, Hamas murdered children because the border wall makes their terror entity into an “open air prison” which prevents them from killing Israeli children.

We’re told not to look at the pattern. It’s Islamophobic. Instead we must take each attack not as a manifestation of Islam, but of local issues or a response to oppression. When Muslims gang raped and sawed in half a Hindu schoolteacher in Kashmir, it was about India’s treatment of Muslims. And when they rampaged through the Bataclan theater in Paris, killing everyone within reach, they were protesting France’s treatment of ISIS. And when they rape a woman at a concert in Israel by the bodies of her murdered friends, they’re protesting for Gaza.

But in 1929, Muslim mobs in the Jewish city of Safed burst into an orphanage and “smashed the children’s heads and cut off their hands.” During the Hebron Massacre that same year, a British policeman described how, “on hearing screams in a room I went up a sort of tunnel passage and saw an Arab in the act of cutting off a child’s head with a sword. He had already hit him and was having another cut, but on seeing me he tried to aim the stroke at me, but missed; he was practically on the muzzle of my rifle. I shot him low in the groin.”

Israel had not even come into existence yet. What were Muslims protesting then: Jews?

During the first siege of Vienna in 1529, when the invading Muslim horde decided that “children were cut out of their mothers’ wombs and stuck on pikes”, was that a protest against colonialism or capitalism? When a Muslim chronicle boasted that during the genocide against the Sikhs in the 18th century, “the shrieks of the women captives who were being raped, deafened the ears of the people”, was this a response to globalism or Zionism? Or was this just Islam.

Everything Hamas did during the bloody High Holy Days massacres has been done by Muslims throughout history and is still being practiced today. There is nothing new here whatsoever. Medieval barbarism never went away because Islam kept those grisly practices alive. It endures side by side with the modern world of smartphones, electric cars and AI because its worst crimes are an object of religious law and faith.

A Yazidi girl abducted by the Islamic State when she was only 12 described how the Jihadist who raped her explained to her that because she “practiced a religion other than Islam, the Quran not only gave him the right to rape her — it condoned and encouraged it”. He “bound her hands and gagged her. Then he knelt beside the bed and prostrated himself in prayer before getting on top of her. When it was over, he knelt to pray again”. The girl begged him to stop, but he “said that by raping me, he is drawing closer to Allah.”

This is Islam.

It’s not about Israel, India, Russia, America, England, France, the Philippines or any of the numerous other countries that have been marked by Islamic terrorism. It’s not about “oppression”, “colonialism”, “settlers”, “cartoons” or a lack of “integration”. None of the excuses ever hold up or explain the pattern that consistently and indelibly marks Islamic violence.

Hamas called its assault, ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’, a reference to the colonial mosque planted by Islamic conquerors in Jerusalem on top of the holiest place in Judaism, site of the former Temple. This wasn’t about “resistance”, Gaza being an “open air concentration camp” (with luxurious hotels, restaurants and mansions) or any of the excuses that the media has thrown at us.

It was a religious war. That’s why Hamas scheduled its attack on the Sabbath and on Simchat Torah, the final day of the High Holy Days and the most joyous day in Judaism. Just as the Yom Kippur War had been scheduled for the holiest day in Judaism. And the worst previous Hamas terrorist attack had been the bombing of a Passover seder in Netanya which killed 30 and wounded 140.

In Nigeria, Boko Haram has set off bombs in churches on Christmas. In 2015, a Muslim couple opened fire at a workplace Christmas party in San Bernardino, California, while a year later a Muslim terrorist drove through a Christmas market in Berlin and a 12-year-old Muslim boy tried to detonate a nail bomb at another Christmas market in Germany.

In India, Muslim terrorists set off bombs on the Hindu festival of Diwali. Massacring Christians, Jews and Hindus on their religious holidays is not a political statement: it’s a religious one.

Islamic terrorism is not an American problem, a British problem, a French problem, a Russian problem, a Chinese problem or an Israeli problem. It’s an Islamic problem. The only way we will ever triumph against it is to stop treating it as someone else’s problem. If only India gave up Kashmir, Israel gave up more of the West Bank, if America stopped being involved in the Middle East, if France hadn’t banned the hijab and the Netherlands hadn’t allowed cartoons of Mohammed, there would be no Islamic terrorism are the kinds of lies that are killing us.

We are not responsible for Islamic terrorism. None of us. Only Islam is responsible.

Islamic violence is over 1,000 years old. It predates most modern countries and it is not caused by anything we do. The only thing we are guilty of is our failure to smash the Jihad.

Nothing that we or anyone else does will appease the terrorists. Islam is not Northern Ireland: peace negotiations have never accomplished and will never accomplish anything. It cannot be reasoned or co-existed with. Its violence is a religious duty written into its scripture and its laws, its atrocities, murder, torture, mutilation and rape, are acts of sacred religious devotion. The Islamic kingdom of heaven can only be achieved when the entire world submits to Islam.

The horrors we have seen in the Jewish communities near Gaza are the same ones that Islam has perpetrated across Africa, Asia, Europe and America. In Nigeria, Boko Haram has kidnapped over 1,000 children from Christian schools. In the Philippines, Muslims burst into a school and took children hostage. In Algeria, they beheaded Trappist monks while in Thailand, they beheaded Buddhist monks. In Boston, they blew the legs off marathon runners while in France they drove a truck through a crowd on Bastille Day until the wheel well filled up with body parts.

This is grotesque, hideous, horrific and unimaginable. This is Islam.

We look away because we can’t bear it. When the attacks happen somewhere else, we pretend that it has nothing to do with us. And when it happens to us, then we let ourselves be persuaded that if we just avoided doing anything to upset the Muslims, like allying with the peoples and countries they’re trying to exterminate, drawing cartoons or mishandling korans, we’ll be fine.

It’s not a problem of “those people fighting over there and bringing their problems here.”

Islam is not just at war with us or with them, but with the entire world. If you are not a Muslim or the right kind of Muslim, then you are in a war whether you like it or not. You can be a peace activist and march with a ‘Queers for Palestine’ banner. You can welcome in migrants or blame the whole thing on conspiracy theories, but it still won’t matter. They will kill you if they can.

This is not about politics: it’s a thousand plus year crusade to subjugate all of mankind.

To win, we have to stop blaming ourselves, stop treating Islamic terrorism as someone else’s problem and stop pretending that it goes away when it’s not in the headlines. To win, we have to stand together and stop letting the enemies of mankind and their useful idiots divide us up. To win we have to recognize that we either fight or die. If we’re not faced with that choice right now, we will be, and if not us, then our children and grandchildren will one day come up against it.

We must reject terms like “senseless violence” because there is nothing senseless about it. Our enemies know who they are and what they want. We refuse to understand who they are. The only thing truly standing between us and victory are the lies that we tell ourselves. In moments of truth, the lies temporarily fall away and we see the enemy revealed for what it is.

Through a rain of paper and ash on a September in New York City, nails driven into the faces of children in Manchester and the mutilated legs of runners in Boston, the bloodied half-naked children of Beslan and the kidnapped children of kibbutzim in Israel, we glimpse the truth.

Hold on to that truth. We are not weak, we have been weakened by lies. And the greatest of those lies is that this endless catalog of crimes to which a new one is added every few weeks is about anything but Islam. It is about Islam. It has been about Islam for over 1,000 years.

Instead of “regional dispute”, say Islam. Instead of “cycle of violence”, say Islam. Instead of militants, say Islam. Instead of terrorists, say Islam. Instead of war, say Islam.

One little word explains all of this. One little world has led to an endless world of horror.

Our only hope for victory begins with ending the lies and telling the truth.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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Saturday, October 21, 2023

The Myth That Israel/Netanyahu Created/Funded Hamas

By Daniel Greenfield On October 21, 2023 In recent

Since these false claims that Israel created Hamas or that Netanyahu supported Hamas are circulating across social media, let’s address them.

Hamas is an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization founded in Egypt in the 1920s, before the rebirth of the State of Israel, but which now has a presence in Israel and in much of the world. In its early days it coordinated with the Nazis and received support from Nazi Germany.

The Gaza Strip used to be ruled by Egypt which helps explain the strength of Hamas in the area.

The Muslim Brotherhood operates in the United States and Europe under different names and front groups, such as CAIR. It also has terrorist organizations including arguably Al Qaeda, whose leaders have mostly been MB members, and which after Bin Laden was run by members of an Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood splinter group.

The Muslim Brotherhood operates under various identities inside Israel. There are two branches of the Islamic Movement, one of which has seats in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. Hamas initially resembled them, focusing on religion, social work and non-violent politics, before it gained strength and revealed its real true agenda.

This is how the Muslim Brotherhood tends to operate. It pretends to be political and non-violent until it can seize power.

The Israelis, like the Americans and Europeans, were initially fooled by Hamas and viewed it as western governments tend to see Muslim Brotherhood organizations in their own countries as religious and political, but not terrorist.

That obviously changed.

When the Bush administration pushed elections in the Palestinian Authority as part of its democracy agenda, Hamas easily won them. The Palestinian Authority then ended any future elections to avoid losing them to Hamas.

Hamas fought the Palestinian Authority (Fatah/PLO/PA are all basically the same thing) and won in Gaza.

While Israel closed its border with Gaza, Hamas had plenty of support from Muslim Brotherhood organizations around the world (and during the Obama Arab Spring, the Muslim Brotherhood temporarily took over Egypt) and from terror state sponsors like Iran and Qatar.

Under Obama, Hamas attacks and Israeli responses tended to end in ‘truces’ negotiated by Egypt. In these truces, Israel would trade some benefits for an end to the violence.

Social media has passed around a claim taken from an article in the ultra-left Haaretz about Netanyahu funding Hamas. Here’s the actual context, also from Haaretz, about that funding.

"In recent months, Israel has quietly provided some relief as part of an unofficial, Egyptian-brokered truce with Hamas, in exchange for reduced rocket fire from the territory and the scaling back of weekly protests along the border. It has allowed Qatar to deliver millions of dollars in cash to allow Hamas to pay its civil servants and has allowed the United Nations to step up aid efforts."

Netanyahu allowed Qatar to bring cash to Hamas in exchange for an end to the violence.

A quote circulating on social media about Netanyahu and Hamas comes from a Haaretz hit piece on Netanyahu.

“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” he told a meeting of his Likud party’s Knesset members in March 2019. “This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.”

The actual source is supposedly the biography of Haim Ramon who had not served in the government since 2009, and certainly not in the Likud.

Ramon, a leftist politician, had been convicted of sexual harassment, partially ending his political career. He certainly had not been a Likud member and was not attending any such meetings, raising serious credibility issues about the quote.

But the Qatar deal was certainly unpopular in the conservative Likud party, and it’s not impossible that Netanyahu might have tried to rationalize it to right-wing members in those terms.

That’s not however why the deal was made. It was made to stop Hamas attacks on some of the same communities now under attack.

Haaretz’s elite defense editor, Amos Harel, wrote a defense of the deal when it was made in an article titled, “Images of Qatari Cash Flowing Into Gaza May Embarrass Netanyahu – but Alternative Is War”

He argued that “continued pressure on the Strip will lead to an explosion, which in turn will lead to an Israeli ground operation in Gaza, heavy casualties followed by desperate negotiations over who will assume responsibility for Gaza’s population – or in other words, a return to square one. And if Israel has nothing to gain by invading Gaza, it ought to try any other possible solution before going to war…

Thursday’s cash transfer produced a relatively quiet weekend, the second in a row. Friday morning, Hamas was busy distributing the cash to 27,000 civil servants and some 50,000 families defined as needy. In the afternoon, its security forces generally prevented large numbers of people from nearing the border fence during the weekly demonstrations…

Over the summer, when incendiary balloon launchings were at their height – a threat played up by the media and on social media – Netanyahu was nearly dragged into a war he didn’t want and which the military forcefully advised against. The steps that will soon be approved to ease Gaza’s distress could have been taken much earlier, thereby reducing the damage on all sides.”

The Haaretz hit piece on Netanyahu is hypocritical because the paper supported the policy.

The policy was terrible. I argued against it. So did anyone seriously concerned about fighting Islamic terrorism The problem with it was not that Netanyahu was hawkish, but that he was too liberal and prone to giving in to pressure.

Buying calm from Hamas did the opposite. But the truces pushed by Obama had made that the default plan.

Israel however was not financing Hamas. It was letting Qatar move money in. As outrageous as that was, it was part of the same system that had Israel providing water and power to Gaza. And the entire agreement in which Israel regularly transfers money and provides services to the Palestinian Authority which is no better than Hamas.

The Oslo Accords were essentially a deal in which Israel provided terrorists with territory and money in exchange for peace. That agreement, like all subsequent ones, failed.

As they always will.

This was the policy of the Clinton administration which pushed the Oslo Accords. Nearly every administration since has pushed Israel to make concessions in exchange for peace. Biden’s visit to Israel climaxed with more of the same, with Israel being forced to once again provide services to the Hamas territory.

That’s the context.

Hamas is not a monster that Israel created, but that came out of Islam, was financed by Muslim countries for the same reasons as Al Qaeda and other Islamic terrorist groups.

Israel is stuck with an Islamic terrorist problem. Like most countries, it unfortunately alternates between fighting them and trying to appease them.

But the appeasement never works. War always follows. The only way to deal with terrorists is to destroy them. Anything else is appeasement which leads to compromises like these that attempt to avoid war, but bring on war anyway.

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Thursday, October 19, 2023

Israel’s Work Permits for Gaza Enabled the Hamas Attack

By Daniel Greenfield On October 19, 2023 In recent

Among the litter of guns, korans, and maps discarded by the Hamas terrorists whose bodies lie alongside bullet-riddled vehicles and dusty roads are green Gaza IDs with work permits. Normally residents of the Hamas territory can’t enter Israel, but work permits allowed over 20,000 Gazans to enter Israel. When some returned, it was as Hamas rapists and killers.

The Hamas invasion succeeded so well because the terrorists had an intimate knowledge of the communities they were targeting because they had worked there or had intelligence from those who had worked there. The attackers had detailed maps and building layouts. One woman whose husband and son were murdered said that the Hamas terrorists knew the names of the people, how many children they had and even which of them owned dogs.

Last year, Secretary of State Blinken addressed a J Street even and told the anti-Israel lobby that the Biden administration had pushed Israel to “improve the lives of Palestinians” by, among other things, “issuing thousands of work permits for Palestinians in Gaza”.

The number of exits from Gaza into Israel rose sharply under the Biden administration and the left-wing Bennett-Lapid government which handed out an unprecedented number of work permits.

In 2021, there had been a total of only 7,500 exits a month from Gaza, but by July 2022, there had been 35,370 exits.

The massive increase was due to the work permits that the Biden administration had sought and that Bennett, Lapid and Gantz had willingly provided. Prime Minister Naftali Bennett made the decision to increase the number of work permits from 5,000 to 15,000. Defense Minister Benny Gantz assessed the security situation and approved the move which embedded Hamas terrorists into Israel. By late 2022, the number had expanded to17,000.

“We need to make the civilian population in Gaza realize that they can live a different life. To pressure Hamas to stop shooting at Israel. To that end, we have increased the number of permits for working in Israel that are issued to the residents of Gaza,” Prime Minister Lapid said.

The leftist government viewed the work permits as leverage over Hamas to maintain quiet.

“And we are telling our Palestinian neighbors, ‘When it is quiet you will enjoy the economic flourishing.’ That’s the case in Gaza. They have 12,500 people coming to work in Israel. If it stays quiet, I will increase it,” Defense Minister Gantz promised.

When the conservative Netanyahu government took office, it failed to shut down the program because the establishment believed that it was working. Experts and diplomats claimed that Hamas had avoided joining in Islamic Jihad rocket attacks to avoid disrupting the status quo.

In July 2023, a record 67,769 exits had occurred on 22,000 work permits. In August, the Netanyahu government finally stopped handing out new work permits (without revoking the existing ones) after Hamas was caught smuggling in explosives.

In September 2023, Hamas touched off riots at the Gaza border. Explosives and incendiary balloons were launched into Israel. Snipers fired on Israeli soldiers and IEDs were planted on the border wall. Israeli soldiers returned fire and shelled Hamas positions.

Hamas began conducting exercises on kidnapping Israelis and “storming settlements”. The Islamic terrorist group has done this before and it was dismissed as posturing to extract economic concessions. Meanwhile its spokesman told members of the media what they wanted to hear. “Hamas is trying to avoid an escalation. A lot of our sons and daughters would be killed,” Basem Naim, the head of Hamas’s Political Department, toldThe Washington Post.

Rather than escalate further, Israel negotiated with Hamas through Egypt, and its allies in Turkey and Qatar, and came to an agreement to end the fighting.

In late September, mere weeks before Hamas launched an invasion of Israel and massacred over a thousand people, Israel opened the main border crossing with Hamas and allowed Arab Muslims from Gaza to once again enter the country. This was part of a deal with Hamas that increased the number of work permits and allowed more imports and exports, in exchange for peace. The violence stopped and everyone breathed a sigh of relief.

Trading work permits for an end to the rockets and riots seemed like it was working.

In reality, Hamas was approaching the end of its two-year plan for invading Israel. The work permits were not forms of leverage that had ended the violence and ushered in stability, they were a vulnerability allowing Hamas to gain detailed intelligence on Israeli positions and targets.

By 2022, in response to Biden administration pressure, there had been more exits from Gaza than at any time since 2005. After the Hamas takeover of Gaza, those numbers fell to the low thousands and mostly involved visits to Israeli hospitals. And that’s how it should have stayed.

But in 2019, work permits shot up from under 10,000 to 16,000 as part of a truce negotiated with Hamas that began after two Israeli soldiers were shot. The agreement negotiated through Egypt, allowed Qatar to deliver millions in cash to Hamas (this has been misrepresented on social media as Netanyahu funding Hamas) and to expand the number of work permits.

The work permits and the money were a trade for an end to the rockets and the riots, but they allowed Hamas to work on its two-year plan of invading Israel while profiting from the truce.

Israel had a secure border, but it was persuaded to open it up in order to appease Hamas. Experts on Islamic terrorism, like myself, had repeatedly warned that a truce in Islam is only a means of maneuvering for advantage. While American and Israeli politicians and generals came to believe that they had gotten a handle on Hamas, bribing it to stop the violence, the Islamic terrorist group was exploiting a political breach in the border in preparation for a full invasion.

After the war there will be a political reckoning. And that reckoning needs to include not only the immediate failure to maintain border security and force strengths in sufficient numbers to respond to a massive attack, but everything that led up to it including the false notion that Hamas could be negotiated with and that a modus vivendi could be achieved with the terrorists.

The work permits that allowed Hamas terrorists to infiltrate and scout targets in Israel with precision and depth was part of a larger strategy toward the Islamic terrorist group. After Hamas took over Gaza, the Bush and Obama administrations tried to maneuver it into a unity government, and when that failed, they relied on backchannel negotiations to reach an understanding without a formal peace deal: all of which led up to one horrifying day.

Israeli communities foolishly allowed workers from Gaza into their homes, grew fond of them and believed all their talk about peace. Then they watched their children be murdered by them.

The myth that Hamas violence was a reflection of conditions in Gaza, and that ameliorating them would reduce the violence filtered down from the U.S. and the EU to some Israelis and led to the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust. There’s a lesson here.

Borders only work if you keep them closed. Walls don’t work if you open doors inside them.

The Biden administration wanted Israel to provide work permits to the West Bank and Gaza where 70% of the population supports terrorism. Even though the Oslo Accords had failed to seduce Arafat and the PLO away from terrorism, the same experts believed that they could seduce Hamas away from terrorism with economic benefits. The same strategy that failed with Iran, with North Korea and with the Taliban was used to lull Israel into a false sense of security.

There’s no win-win scenario with Islamic terrorists: there is only a win-lose scenario. Anyone who thinks that they’re in a win-win scenario with those who want to kill them has already lost.

The work permits that cost over a thousand lives were an attempt at a win-win scenario. After the slaughter, it is clearer than ever that either Israel kills the terrorists or the terrorists kill it.

No matter what the White House and the rest of the international community says, it is not Israel’s responsibility to make life better for those in Gaza, but to protect its own citizens. And these competing obligations are incompatible. Trying to negotiate with Hamas and make life better for Gazans cost Israel over 1,300 lives. May these be the last lives lost to appeasement.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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