Today is the first anniversary of the worst one-day slaughter of Jews since the Second World War, and the start of what John Derbyshire calls the Israel-Iran War, on multiplying fronts.
There will be many observances of October 7th today. You might think that, if one's principal concern is the "disproportionate" nature of the Israeli reprisals, one might schedule the protest marches for the first anniversary of the Zionist Entity's counter-attacks, its first strikes on Gaza. Instead, in almost every major city across the west, the big parades are happening on the anniversary of October 7th - which risks giving the unfortunate impression that what they're really commemorating (indeed, celebrating) is the big pile of Jew corpses, plus the attendant hostage-taking, baby-burning, mutilations, decapitations and industrial-scale gang-rape.
Four weeks from US Election "Day", the Democrat candidate for president is disinclined to be caught on camera expressing any public support for Israel lest it cost her Michigan. She seems pretty confident that American Jews will vote for her anyway, even as the monsters their party has incubated have made their feelings plain on every university campus you've ever heard of. The pitiful rationalisations of wealthy, assimilated Jews in the Germany of ninety years ago are recycled even more pitifully by lifelong Jewish Democrats on the Upper West Side: This will pass.
It won't. For western Jewry, the electoral arithmetic is brutal - in the US, in Canada, Britain, France and beyond. Here are the scenes from my hometown, as described by "journalist" Samira Mohyeddin:
Tens of thousands marching in Toronto to mark one year of Israel's relentless bombardment and genocide in Gaza. I can't see the beginning or end of the procession. pic.twitter.com/9ShbwE6iRF
— Samira Mohyeddin سمیرا (@SMohyeddin) October 5, 2024
Don't you hate it when a neighbouring polity just launches out of the blue an unprovoked "relentless bombardment and genocide"?
In Ottawa, meanwhile, according to our Brit Commonwealth Wanker Copper of the Week, a Canadian citizen needs to support a Palestinian state in order to access Parliament Hill:
AND HERE IS THE 🇨🇦 HAS OFFICIALLY FALLEN VIDEO
OFFICER: "You do not recognize Palestine as a state. You are not a supporter of Palestine. You are not permitted [here]."
So to be on Parliament Hill you must declare your support for a state — that doesn't exist.🤯
📹@DaceyMedia pic.twitter.com/DkdGzlgbMR
— dahlia kurtz ✡︎ דליה קורץ (@DahliaKurtz) October 5, 2024
It is a melancholy fact that His Majesty's Constabulary, from Ottawa to London to Sydney, has been hollowed out by Islamic appeasers. Among the general public, a big chunk of the western left is turned on by the bloodlust of Islam; a significant portion of the western right, on the other hand, increasingly blames Jews for transforming their nations into semi-Islamic dumps.
On the latter point, they're not altogether wrong: the dissembling of what Ezra Levant calls "official Jews" such as Abe Foxman and Bernie Farber (head honcho of the Dominion's "Anti-Hate" Network) has ensured there will be no future for Jews in many western nations. Was Farber marching in that Toronto parade? Could be; he's that stupid. But at least he got his Diamond Jubilee Medal.
In the wider world, it is undisputed that on the right the ad hoc alliance that emerged during the Covid years has badly fractured. As Norman Fenton and others discovered twelve months ago, being right about lockdowns and vaccines counts for naught if you come out against mass gang-rape by Hamas at an Israeli "peace" festival.
The Jewish state's present international isolation will worsen in the years ahead. Then again, their prospects are not as grim as, say, Canada's. Although many questions remain about how October 7th was permitted to happen, the Zionist Entity appears to have recovered its mojo in recent weeks, knocking off Hizb'allah bigwigs on a daily basis and ensuring that the footsoldiers no longer feel safe carrying any pocket gizmos.
Here is what I wrote about the Hamas attack exactly a year ago. Most of it, I think, holds up:
On the fiftieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, Israelis woke up to a sustained attack on multiple southern towns near the border with the Gaza Strip (half of the so-called "Palestinian Authority" territory). This isn't the usual vicious but random spasm of slaughter in which Hamas likes to engage. It appears to have been very well planned and executed, with thousands upon thousands of rockets barraging Israeli residential areas from the southern border to north of Tel Aviv. It is also an invasion: Hamas used bulldozers to demolish Israeli border barriers, enabling an unknown number of its assets to enter the country - followed by reinforcements:
Reinforcements arrive for the Palestinian terror groups that have entered Israel.
They are wearing yellow "friend-or-foe" armbands to help prevent friendly fire.
Israel still doesn't have control of its border pic.twitter.com/3Rjo11Bx27
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) October 7, 2023
That's different - as the locals quickly noticed:
We woke up at 6:30 a.m. to alarms, we thought it was the usual rocket attacks but we started hearing gunshots on the street, sounded like it came from the parking of our building. Then we realized something was unusual. We then started seeing Hamas people in pickup trucks. They knocked on the homes of residents, who thought they were Israeli soldiers. They took them hostage.
The twin prongs of the invasion were in evidence at an all-night "nature party": first the revellers came under rocket attack; then, as they fled, they came under gunfire. Dozens of the partygoers were massacred.
There are reports that the Israelis have lost control of parts of their territory, and that Hamas is now in charge of certain communities: Their men patrol the streets in captured Israeli military vehicles - not something most of the world would have thought possible. The first part of this Telegraph montage gives you an idea of the infiltration:
As I write, over 100 150 200 250 300 Israelis are dead, and well over a thousand 1,500 are injured. Dozens of others have been kidnapped, and taken across the border into Gaza. Among the hostages are seventeen Nepalese citizens. The border community of Netiv HaAsara, a town of nine hundred people, has released the names of fifteen civilians killed by terrorists. Just one hospital in Beersheeba has in its emergency ward sixty 114 civilians critically wounded. In the southern city of Ofakim, a family has been seized in its home by terrorists armed with live grenades. Also in Ofakim, a paramedic was shot dead in his ambulance en route to treat the injured. In Sderot, the fire chief has been killed in a battle with Hamas. This is the biggest and most brutal Palestinian assault on the Jewish state ever, and is looking, proportionately and psychologically, like an Israeli 9/11, or Pearl Harbor. For several Mark Steyn Club members, it's hit pretty close to home:
House next to us took a direct hit. Fortunately they were not at home. Our building has much broken glass.
It would seem to me improbable that Hamas could pull off anything as strategically calculated as this on their own. The unprecedented scenes are also a catastrophic Israeli humiliation of even greater improbability: it represents a total failure of intelligence and perhaps something worse, if critical Israeli agencies have fallen to the same enervation and loss of purpose as their American equivalents. The fiftieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War was surely a date to which one would have expected the Israeli authorities to have been alert.
Even to type that merely underlines its unlikelihood: you don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to regard the intelligence failure as the most striking aspect of the day's events. A central premise of the tiny Jewish state surrounded by merciless enemies is that it is not as other nations - it's sharp enough to know what's coming its way before it arrives. That reputation has just taken a profound hit. If you're one of those mullahs itching to nuke the Jews, today was a very good day.
That said, we know very little at the moment, so one must be cautious about the facts on the ground. My old shingle in the Holy Land, The Jerusalem Post, has a live feed, but one notices it has very little of the cellphone video and Tweets that readers have come to expect in a breaking news story - which suggests not only a fairly major breakdown of communications, but also that a lot of the footage is too graphic and disturbing to publish. Here is one video that has made it out - a Hamas kidnapper cheering "Allahu akbar!" as he arrives back in Gaza with his prize:
Jewish Israeli woman reportedly kidnapped by Hamas and taken to Gaza
The world ignored us when we said how sick Palestinian society is with a bloodlust for antisemitic violence.
Now everyone knows the truth.
Devastating day.
— Emily Schrader - אמילי שריידר امیلی شریدر (@emilykschrader) October 7, 2023
pic.twitter.com/q6nvODt5IH
And another:
Palestinian terrorists captured an Israeli woman and took her hostage. Just hear her screams. pic.twitter.com/L8obwWxpL9
— Hananya Naftali (@HananyaNaftali) October 7, 2023
If you can stomach it, here are streetfuls of Palestinians doing their usual happy dance as their heroes arrive back in town with dead Israeli bodies. The fitter ones climb up on the flatbed and start thwacking the corpse with sticks:
⚠️warning. disturbing content.
Hamas terrorists parade the bodies of murdered Israelis through Gaza.
Thousands of Palestinians are celebrating the slaughter of innocents, the elderly, the young, the infirm. pic.twitter.com/B6ApQayNXE
— Aviva Klompas (@AvivaKlompas) October 7, 2023
So these guys are doing all the things - targeting civilians, especially women and children - that the US and EU argue justifies the toppling of Vladimir Putin. Fortunately for them, the Palestinians enjoy a much better press. The Government of the United States reacted to the unprovoked invasion from a neighboring state by immediately urging Israel "to refrain from violence and retaliatory attacks. Terror and violence solve nothing" - which is in striking contrast to its general approach in Ukraine:
Team Biden made a Day 1 decision to pour millions of dollars into Hamas areas. Internal emails show them saying it would boost Hamas terrorism, but they did it anyway.
Then Hamas launched an invasion of Israel.
Team Biden's immediate response was to tell Israel to roll with it. pic.twitter.com/PopoiBo3oM
— Omri Ceren (@omriceren) October 7, 2023
When whoever does the weekend shift at the White House woke up, he/she/zhe evidently felt that was going a bit far even for the Biden Administration and ordered the advice deleted.
For his part, Netanyahu has said simply: "We are at war." And, when you're at war, listening to Joe Biden is a luxury you can't afford. The alleged President supposedly telephoned the Israeli Prime Minister. That's not a call I would have bothered to take. One assumes that Joe has been given a notecard instructing him to remind the PM of the need for "restraint". In our comments section, Chris Hall writes:
I'm afraid that the gloves will have to come off this time. Israel never gets any credit for being nice, so they might as well end this endless war, permanently.
Indeed. How "restrained" is Israel? So restrained that it supplies the invaders' electricity. From the BBC:
Israel's energy and infrastructure minister Israel Katz said that Israel will cut off its electricity supply to Gaza Strip.
"I have signed an order instructing Israel's electric company to stop the electricity supply to Gaza," Katz said in a statement.
So Israel provides the electricity for the Hamas war-room - and now that they've turned it off, the self-same BBC's commentators will be denouncing its lack of "restraint". Have they had Layla Moran on yet? Or Toronto mayor Olivia Chow? Or the Irish foreign minister Micheal Martin? Or the Archbishop of York, who has already issued a "Statement on the Violence in Israel and Gaza"? There'll be enough moral equivalence to choke on in another hour or two.
Meanwhile, the Taliban have apparently asked Iran, Iraq and Jordan for safe passage through their territory so they can join the fight and "conquer Jerusalem":
BREAKING:
The Taliban have announced that they have asked Iran, Iraq and Jordan to grant them passage to Israel.
They have stated that their intent is to "conquer Jerusalem" pic.twitter.com/X5eLnPTboS
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) October 7, 2023
If they bring even a tenth of the weaponry Thoroughly Modern Milley and the US military gifted them, that could be a significant escalation.
Given all that, underneath the kidnappings and murder of civilians, what's going on? As I said, it's not credible that Hamas could have pulled off anything this coherent unaided. For what it's worth, Obama and Biden's indulgence of Iran's nuclear ambitions destabilised the balance of power in the Middle East. That helped spur the Abraham Accords, under which Israel and the Sunni Arabs became new best friends. The Jerusalem-Riyadh axis is regarded as a threat by Tehran to its own hegemony. Did they decide to act on that threat and try to prise the besties apart? At least one western government thinks so:
The British government believes that Iran is linked to the Hamas attack on Israel and that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is likely to have played a role in training and the supply of weapons (Dipesh Gadher writes).
A Whitehall source said: "The Revolutionary Guards have their fingerprints all over this multifaceted attack. Hamas is just another tool in Iran's campaign against the West."
Those thousands of rockets don't come cheap, but, thanks to Obama and Biden's pallets of cash, that's no problem - they got another six bil from Biden just last month.
UPDATE! From Hamas and Iran:
A Hamas spokesperson earlier told the BBC that the militant group had backing from its ally, Iran, for its surprise attacks on Israel, saying it was a source of pride.
Ghazi Hamad told the World Service's Newshour programme that other countries had also helped Hamas, but he did not name them.
Earlier, a senior adviser to Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, confirmed the Islamic Republic supported the attacks, but did not go into any details.
Hmm...
So what happens next? When the Israelis are retaliating against Gaza, how many of those Gulf regimes will stick with the Abraham deal? And, aside from those newfound chums in Saudi, Israel has far fewer friends around the world than it did fifty years ago. Just contrast the coverage of this unprovoked invasion with that of Ukraine - same time-zone, different rules.
It will be interesting to see whose fingerprints are on this as the facts emerge.
~from SteynOnline, October 7th 2023
We had a very busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with Mark's column on one of the dopiest clichés of the age. Steyn's Saturday music show offered an eclectic cavalcade of songs from France and Nigeria to tailbacks and dictaphones. For his weekend movie date Rick McGinnis picked Kate Winslet as Lee Miller, while Steyn's Song of the Week opted for one of the greatest songs ever written. Our marquee presentation was a brand new Tale for Our Time, Jack London's account of the rise and fall of China: You can find Part One here, and the conclusion here.
If you were too busy spending the weekend getting arrested by FEMA for trying to deliver aid to North Carolina, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
