#Israel-Hamas war

[wilwheaton]

Lies.

Lies from a liar.

This was deliberate.

This was premeditated.

This is EXACTLY what that murderous war criminal wanted to do.

[tributary]

magen david adom is the israeli emergency medical and blood bank service. years ago they saved my bubbe’s life after a bad fall in jerusalem. they are saving lives now, and they serve everyone that they can get to.

i am going to donate in her memory and i encourage you to do so as well if you’re able.

[girlactionfigure]

Knesset passes preliminary bill designating UNRWA terrorist organization

The same bill, which comes in light of evidence suggesting UNRWA employees' links to Hamas, will abolish the immunities and privileges gifted to UNRWA employees.

MK Yulia Malinovsky's bill to designate UNRWA a terrorist organization passed a preliminary reading with a 42-6 majority in the Knesset on Wednesday. The bill will abolish UNRWA employees' immunities and privileges.

If the bill passes a final reading, it will mean that the Anti-Terrorism Law will also apply to UNRWA. Israel will subsequently cease all ties with the agency, and the organization's assets in Israeli territory will be closed.

The abolition of privilege bill is formally called the "Bill to Abolish the Immunity and Privileges of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA)." UNRWA is a branch of the UN responsible for Palestinian refugees, including 2 million in the Gaza Strip, the organization claims.

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[charlesoberonn]

It's Memorial Day in Israel as of an hour ago.

This Memorial Day is particularly painful with so many people added to the list of the fallen on October 7 and in the subsequent war and unrest.

Many of them are from my hometown. I've been reading the messages people left on their memorial pages and it breaks my heart.

And of course for all the pain and loss on the Israeli side there's more than tenfold the loss in Gaza, in addition to a dire humanitarian crisis with millions more in danger.

I wish with all my heart for this war to end as soon as possible and for both Israelis and Palestinians to begin walking the path of peace, justice, and reconciliation, though I have very few hopes that it'll happen any time soon.

But very few isn't none.

Worse, bloodier, and longer conflicts and enmities have ended peacefully before. France and Germany, Japan and Korea, Israel and Egypt, are a few examples.

I believe this conflict is no different, and one day the list of the fallen will grow no longer.

[eretzyisrael]

This photo was taken in Israel on October 24. The bride and groom had certainly planned for a different wedding location and attire, but both got called up to serve their country in the wake of Hamas’ terror war against Israel...so, they married each other in uniform. There is so much life in this picture: The life that these two are building together, and the lives that they are saving and protecting through their service. Mazal Tov to this beautiful couple, and Am Yisrael Chai

StandWithUs

[thedreideldiaries]

Some People are Still Good

I recently caught up with a friend of mine and offhandedly, sort of casually mentioned that I’d been off instagram since October 7th. He didn’t know what I meant. He'd heard something about a terrorist attack and Israel's military retaliating, but nothing else.

In another universe without tiktok history lessons, I might have been upset. In this one, I was immensely relieved. I didn’t have to argue with him, or hear him rattling off whatever talking points are de rigueur for the Online Left, or get into a heated discussion about the meaning of the word “Zionist,” or get accused of being an apologist for crimes against humanity. I could just…tell him what happened, and how I felt about it.

I told him about the massacre and hostage-taking. I told him how many of the people murdered and kidnapped were peace activists - easier targets, he noted, than anyone in the actual government that Hamas is supposedly resisting. How this was, in proportion to Israel’s population, a bigger terrorist attack than 9/11. That it wasn’t just Israeli Jews who were killed or kidnapped, but Bedouins, laborers from abroad, Americans, and (this is something conveniently left out of a lot of the Discourse), Palestinians. 

I told him about the Israeli government doing exactly what Hamas had counted on them doing in Gaza. I said that people aren’t their governments. I tried to make it clear that I hope Netanyau, may his name be blotted out, lives out the rest of his days in shame and political obscurity (or, to save us all some time, quickly succumbs to some hideously painful disease). That I know there are miles of difference between going to war with Hamas and going to war with the Palestinian people. That if you express any hope that the rest of the hostages will be rescued, you run the risk of getting lumped in with people who think airstrikes on refugee camps are somehow justified, and that unfortunately those people do very much exist.

I told him how Jews are still reeling from what happened, and that it doesn’t help that so many on the left seem to think it’s irrelevant. I told him how my boyfriend (who I’ve seen cry maybe twice over the last decade), spent the entire afternoon of October 7th sobbing at his desk as he watched everything unfold in real time. I told him how that same boyfriend posted about how frustrating it is for Jews to have their suffering repeatedly dismissed, and how one of his leftist friends responded by accusing him of being a genocide apologist. You know, how you talk to a person in mourning. 

I told him how when the first news of the massacre hit, there were leftists who praised it as the start of some glorious revolution. How I don't know how many of them were my acquaintances, because I got off social media before I could find out. How a lot of them were probably ill-informed about what was happening and how and why, but others just think killing Jews is good, actually, and I don't have the mental or emotional fortitude to find out which fall into which category.

I told him how frustrating it is to be a leftist of Jewish background, sickened by the right and heartbroken by the left. I told him how many petitions I’ve been asked to sign that didn’t so much as mention Hamas or the attack. I said I was worried to bring it up, because if you say “but what about the Jews (and, you know, others) who were tortured and murdered and kidnapped,” you get accused of all sorts of heinous, improbable crimes, and I simply do not have the kind of time or energy for that discussion. 

I told him how I still like my classmates, but I don’t trust most of them. I can’t let my guard down around them. I can’t talk about how I feel about the conflict except in vague terms, which is ironic, because the people who are brave enough to say “peace would be nice” are accused of not taking a stand. How terrified I am that I'll use the wrong word and out myself as whatever they think that makes me. How I’d hoped they’d be my friends, before all of this. How they’re all being really nice to me, and I can’t shake the thought that they’d hate me if they knew I thought the state of Israel should exist and that Israelis have the right to not be murdered. How I wish I felt like I could be in activist spaces without having to loudly and eagerly participate in my own dehumanization and that of so many people I love. 

And he listened. 

I don’t think anyone Jewish is wrong to be cautious. But for all the leftist goyim willing to argue that murdering babies is actually a good thing if the babies belong to colonizers, there are others - many others, I hope - who genuinely want to understand what’s actually going on. Who see a difference between resisting your oppressors and murdering them at a music festival or burning them alive in their homes. Who find “it’s wrong to kill civilians” to be an uncontroversial statement. I hate how many people I can no longer trust, but I’m so grateful to have at least some non-Jewish friends who actually understand nuance and care enough to try.

[bearfoottruck]

OK, so I've been seeing MULTIPLE posts on my dash about Palestine and I'm thinking, "Yeah, but what about Ukraine? Don't any of us still care about them?" Keep in mind that Russia and Iran are allies.

[rhpotter]

“I disagree with Kamala’s position on the war in Gaza. How can I vote fo...

[progressglobenews]

Al Jazeera English

[salixj]

This is what that chant means. Hamas = ISIS = Nazis = Amalek.

And they will be defeated.

[anthonybialy]

Ivy League in League with Hamas

I hope Columbia students are as dedicated to their studies as they are to LARPing.  I doubt it.  They seem to not know much of anything.  Portraying aggressive foes of Israel confirms such.  Refusing to move from ground that was never theirs shows commitment to the cause.

College brats crave pretending they’re something other than political science majors doomed to beg Joe Biden for debt evasion.  A university that wanted to continue to pretend to be taken seriously would deny outdoor squatters the right to Sha Na Na presale access codes.

Instead, expect a flurry of senior theses based on how leaving plants unwatered in an Amsterdam Avenue apartment for three or four days allowed the non-Israel parts of the Middle East to finally prosper.  This is the school where a showy phony lied about being raped so she’d have an excuse to drag a mattress around campus as a regrettable standard of performance art, which makes today’s showy truancy unsurprising.

Acting violent while pretending to not be reflects a wholesale refusal to interact with reality.  True cosplayers act just like their beloved terror cause.  Man, they are focused on playing along.  Their habit of harassing Jews shows solidarity.  Claiming they were the victims all along is what the keffiyeh represents.

Tom Wolfe’s ghost has never been busier.  Earth’s most entitled brats throwing a tantrum while camping on Manhattan’s Ivy League grounds to show fondness for an invading terror squad means he’s still releasing novels a page at a time as news reports.

A Peoples’ University doesn’t sound quite elite.  Those seizing land are presumably honoring prominent Democratic activist Jim Jones’s naming conventions without realizing it.  Like every other contemptible notion that preening quad radicals believe, the inadvertent hilarity stems from their patent ignorance.  While it’d be nice if they were informed, the rest of us can use the laughs.  What are they supposed to do during college: learn?

The sort of students you’re glad you never drank with get to pretend they’re doing something righteous with a lawn campout.  Guilt over unbelievable privilege leads to fretting about the less fortunate.  Enrolling in a moral vacuum prompts sympathy for terror instead of victims.

Columbia students think The Diary of Anne Frank has a happy ending.  Confused reading list participants know what they would’ve done during World War II, namely defend Normandy from invaders.  The claim that 2020’s city torchers were the equivalent of Allied soldiers got sillier just when you thought that was impossible.

These advanced times sure are unenlightened, at least for those at the costliest and therefore best colleges.  Society regresses without learning from primitive times.  Let’s say there’s precedent involving campus radicals defending terror movements.  Collegiate nitwits once again romanticize ghastly assaults against decent people in respectable societies.  A useful degree would feature learning how many of them are not.

Praising the terror side is how the smuggest brats from your high school class battle for the underprivileged.  Hamas engages in rather intense bullying they’d surely condemn if it involved misgendering.  Total non-anti-Semites just happen to be ganging up on the one Jewish state.  Tormenters get every last detail wrong, including which side features people who want to be left alone.

Students fume about a sliver of land that at its narrowest is smaller than the island upon which Columbia lies is long.  It’s not just the lack of real estate that makes Israel an underdog.

The one Middle East country that would tolerate idling undergraduate uselessness can afford to on account of that whole natural rights bit.  Citizens could claim it was awful without consequence.  Go ahead and hold a pride parade in Tel Aviv.  I’d envision a permit tie-up for anyone trying the same in Gaza. Rather confused observers add exercising the right to self-defense to their appalling list of reasons they loathe Jews.

Idle grifters with student IDs get to pretend they’re standing up for a noble cause.  The side against Israel is way less nicer, and underdevelopment must be the fault of oppression.  That sort of logic is common amongst attendees at more prestigious schools.  Ignoring what happened at the music festival to people about the same age helps maintain consistency.

The Morningside Heights campus of Hamas University is a popular study abroad program.  But enrollees can only harvest so much knowledge.  An internship would help.  They can learn from their heroes.  Columbia campers should transfer to Gaza colleges.  There’s a hospital on every corner, which means there must be at least that many schools.  You know it’s bad when the rest of 2024 New York City seems sane by comparison.

Class is boring.  Learn about the real world out on the Columbia quadrangle.  It sure is fun camping out while shrieking insults at civilization.  Real-world experience is supposed to be school’s goal.  Professional terrorists blaming success is the default Columbia student ideology in practice.  Feeling insulated on campus leads to guilty role play.  Flaunt uselessness in the name of awfulness.  This is the best time to dine at Katz’s, as none of the uneducated students will be there.

[divinum-pacis]

Christian activists demonstrate for a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war after an Ash Wednesday Mass near the White House in Washington, Feb. 14, 2024. (RNS photo/Aleja Hertzler-McCain)

[girlactionfigure]

Google is coming in for sharp criticism after video went viral of the Google Nest assistant refusing to answer basic questions about the Holocaust — but having no problem answer questions about the Nakba. 

“Hey Google, how many Jews were killed by the Nazis?” Instagram user Michael Apfel asks a Google Nest virtual assistant. The video was later posted to X by venture capitalist Josh Wolfe on May 8. 

“Sorry, I don’t understand,” 

The same token answer was offered to other related questions including “How many Jews were killed during World War II? Who did Adolf Hitler try to kill? How many Jews were killed in the concentration camps? How many Jews were killed in the Holocaust? What was the Holocaust?

H/T @vizrecon

[stress-test-interfaith-dialogue]

Meet Stress Test Editors John K. Roth and Carol Rittner!

John K. Roth

The Edward J. Sexton Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Claremont McKenna College, where he taught for more than forty years and was the founding director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights (now the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights). He is a Protestant Christian with Presbyterian and Methodist ties. Long friendships with Elie Wiesel and Richard Rubenstein, Eva Fleischner, and Franklin Littell impressed on Roth how deeply the Christian tradition has been implicated in antisemitism and the Holocaust.

In books such as The Failures of Ethics (2015), Sources of Holocaust Insight (2020), and Warnings: The Holocaust, Ukraine, and Endangered American Democracy (2023), Roth looks for ways in which Christians and Jews can work together to resist anti-democratic authoritarianism and to defend human rights. Against long odds, he remains hopeful that a two-state resolution, which he has long supported, can be found for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Hamas-Israel War

Carol Rittner R.S.M.

Dr. Rittner is the author, editor or co-editor of numerous essays and books about the Holocaust and Christian-Jewish relations, including Memory Offended: The Auschwitz Convent Controversy (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1991); What’s the “Good News” After Auschwitz? (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2001), Pius XII and the Holocaust (London and New York: University of Leicester Press/Continuum Publishers, 2002); No Going Back:Letters to Pope Benedict XVI on the Holocaust, Christian-Jewish Relations and the State of Israel (Laxton, UK: Quill Press, 2009); The Holocaust and Nostra Aetate: Toward A Greater Understanding (Greensburg, PA: Seton Hill University Press, 2017); and The Holocaust and the Christian World, 2nd ed. (Mahwah, NJ: A Stimulus Book, Paulist Press, 2019). She is the co-editor, with John K. Roth, of the forthcoming book Stress Test: The Hamas-Israel War and Christian-Jewish Relations (iPub Global, 2025).

Her international engagement further demonstrates Dr. Rittner’s commitment to fostering interfaith understanding and peace. Between 1985 and 2010, she led numerous groups of Christians to Israel, facilitating meetings with Israeli Jews, Muslims, Druse, and Christians. These visits also included interactions with Palestinians in Bethlehem, providing a platform for learning about and discussing the ongoing obstacles and possibilities for peace in the region.

She is the recipient of four Honorary Doctorates from Misericordia University, Dallas, PA (1990), King’s College, Wilkes Barre, PA (1999), Monmouth University, West Long Branch, NJ (2002), and The College of St. Mary, Omaha, NB (2011). In 2022, the National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education at Seton Hill University, Greensburg, PA, honored Dr. Rittner with the Nostra Aetate Award, which “acknowledges distinguished work in the field of Jewish-Catholic relations and, in particular, recognizes scholarship that enhanced interfaith understanding.”

[eretzyisrael]

Senior IDF officials plan to rename Saturday's hostage rescue operation after commander Arnon Zamora, who was fatally wounded during the operation, Israel's Army Radio reported.