Hamas

What We Must Remember

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I understand that 10/7 seems like an eternity ago, but as we watch the ceasefire in Gaza unfold there are some things we need to remember.

While there is an “exchange” of people between Hamas and Israel, it is not an equal trade. Israel is releasing from its jails blood-thirsty killers, members of a group that has sworn to destroy it. Hamas is releasing men, women, and small children which it had kidnapped on 10/7.

Those who were kidnapped on 10/7 were the lucky ones that day. Hamas invaded Israel and killed more than 1,200 civilians. These dead were not the collateral damage of war, but deliberately targeted by Hamas as it overran Israeli towns to commit mass torture, rape, and murder.

Those civilians kidnapped by Hamas were as targeted as those which it so cruelly tortured and killed. They were kidnapped to be used as bargaining chips, both to escape destruction by the Israeli military and to inflict psychological torture against the Israeli population at large. Much as Hamas cynically uses its own civilian population as human shields, fortifying its positions with so much living concrete, it uses Israeli civilians to weaken Israel’s will to resist through the implementation of horror and pain.

The recently implemented ceasefire is merely the logical extension of that psychological campaign as Hamas uses those innocents it kidnapped on that awful day as the means to escape (for now) its richly deserved destruction. Every released hostage is for their families, and for Israel itself, a cause for celebration. It is also a cause for all civilized people to refill our hearts with a determined resolve.

Never forget.

Biden, Hamas, and Israel

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In this rather confused video clip (some of it in text form in this article), Biden seems to be saying that (1) he believes the “30,000 Palestinians killed” number which has been circulating, which most observers believe is bogus, (2) that Israel is violating the international rules of war, which he says “we” changed following WWII, and (3) strongly implying that Israel is conducting carpet bombing, which is false.   He also says that Hamas would like a ceasefire because they would “have a better chance to survive and rebuild.”   He is apparently just fine with this outcome.

He also says he told the Israeli war cabinet:   “Do not make the mistake America made,’… we should not have gone into the whole thing in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was not necessary. It was not necessary. It caused more problems than it cured.”

Whatever one thinks about the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, it requires a special kind of cluelessness to not notice the geographical closeness of Gaza-based Hamas to Israel, and the immediate and murderous nature of the threat that Israel faces.

Or, more likely, he does realize this, but does not consider Israeli lives to be very important when measured against Michigan electoral votes.