By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor
October 7, 2023 was the Saturday of a holiday weekend.
Americans were celebrating the three-day weekend of Columbus Day; Jews worldwide were completing Sukkot, the Feast of Booths. Historians remembered the Battle of Lepanto and the Yom Kippur War, both of which happened to be very important defeats for the islamic world.
And islamofascist terrorists, as we know, like to stage attacks on historic days.
So it was that the largely self-governing portion of the Palestinian Authority known as the Gaza Strip chose that Saturday to launch an unexpected series of vicious coordinated attacks on its neighbor Israel, by any measure the worst in fifty years.
Worse than the “intifadas,” worse than any uprising of any kind since the Yom Kippur War.
Hamas terrorists charged across the border into Israel and mowed down a crowd of young people at a “peace” festival.
Hamas terrorists launched a barrage of rockets into Israeli residential neighborhoods.
Hamas terrorists charged into houses and attacked innocent families, stabbing, shooting and raping anyone in their path.
As the dust has settled, we have learned that Hamas terrorists stormed nurseries and murdered dozens of babies in their cribs, decapitating the infants.
Videos have been released showing Hamas terrorists taking hundreds of hostages, violently raping the young women and beating or killing the men, sometimes parading their captives, alive or dead, through the roads as if it was a Roman triumph of two millenia ago.
At this writing, Hamas terrorists have killed at least 1200 Israelis so far, with 2700 more wounded.
The overwhelming majority of these victims have been civilians, because Hamas always targets civilians. Unlike a proper war, following the rules of war such as the globally accepted Geneva Convention, terrorists focus on defenseless civilians: children at play and sleeping babies, partiers at music festivals, tourists on city streets, families at home.
Israel has responded to these strikes from Gaza as Israel must, with military counterstrikes wherever the terrorists are located.
But Hamas launches rockets from apartment buildings; they store weapons in schools and food dispensaries.
Hamas stations their terrorists in houses and mosques and madrassahs; they locate the entries to their hidden tunnels under medical clinics or restaurants.
Why? Because when Israel shoots back – as Israel must – it will then appear that Israel is shooting at a mosque or a private residence or a clinic or a school.
Hamas plans – as all modern terrorists do – for two audiences – both their fellow bloodthirsty anti-semites and the western republics.
For their fellow extremists, the jihadists and jihadist sympathizers of the Arab world, they display the corpses and show off the girls they’ve raped and the children they’ve kidnapped.
And for the squeamish, peaceful West, they situate their positions in clearly non-military locations, so that when Israel fires back, the visuals can be made to make Israel look bad.
It is baffling, frankly, that Hamas can get away with this, but they do; they always do.
The effectiveness of Israel’s response is blunted by Israel’s knowledge that when they destroy a Hamas weapons depot, the non-military appearance of the targeted terror pad will turn off the westerners who should be Israel’s natural supporters.
One hopes that this time, the tactic won’t work.
Hamas has gone so far this time, been so absolutely demonic in their slaughter and abuse of innocents, that perhaps the West for once will admit to ourselves that, after all, “Israel has got to do what it’s got to do.”
The Biden-Harris regime has poured US tax dollars into Hamas (in direct violation of US law), and has released billions of dollars to the mullahs in Tehran, claiming that this money would not be used for terrorism – when everyone on earth knows that terrorism is literally all they do.
Hamas has ruled Gaza without opposition since 2007. In all this time, they have not attempted to build their own economy, to help their constituents to prosper, as any responsible government would do.
Hamas has kept their single-minded focus on attacking Israel, and on raising their own children to grow up and become terrorists – or to become terrorists before they grow up.
Hamas has been funded directly by the Hezbollah in Lebanon and therefore indirectly by their masters in Iran. Hamas has constantly feigned poverty to get Israel and the West to provide them with food and water and utilities, so that Hamas could spend every penny of money on rockets to launch at Israel.
Hamas has never ended the vile practice of paying families to enroll their children as terrorists. This “martyrs’ fund” – financed by their sympathizers in Iran and elsewhere – rewards parents for raising their children to strap bombs to their backs or lead attacks, and rewards fathers or mothers for abandoning their families to man the rocket launchers or fire the machine guns, as they all attack innocent Israeli civilians again and again, year after year.
It’s what they do; and the martyrs’ fund rewards them for mainstreaming such a homicidal mania.
As we watch all this unfold from half a world away, wisdom from various sources of the past comes to mind:
–Prime Minister Golda Meir’s insight that “there can be no peace in the middle east until they (the Arabs) begin to love their children more than they hate ours.”
–The repeated warnings of conservative pundits and Republican politicians for decades now, that for Democrats to support Iran is the same thing as directly financing these Hamas and Hezbollah attacks, because these terrorists are proud clients and acolytes of Iran.
–The late Rabbi Meir Kahane’s argument that it’s not bigotry to call for the removal of terrorists and terrorist sympathizers from one’s country; in fact it’s suicide to leave such demons in your midst.
–The constant reminders of the dangers of allowing known criminals to roam free in society. Just as “catch and release” of murderers and muggers in America’s big cities leads to an increase in robbery and murder, so too does the tolerance of known terrorists on Israel’s doorstep ensure that there will be more terror attacks against Israel.
–Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s summation that “If the arabs laid down their weapons tomorrow, there would be no more war; if Israel laid down our weapons tomorrow, there would be no more Israel.”
As horrifying as Hamas’ attacks have been, as heart-rending as the news of casualties is to our sensibilities, nothing about this attack should truly be surprising.
Many in the West – from the misguided youths of college BDS clubs to the warped policies of the Obama and Biden regimes – have built up Hamas over the years, empowering the terrorists and weakening Israel.
Just as it is time for Israel to crack down and rid the area of these homicidal Islamofascists once and for all, it is also time for America to hold our own pro-Hamas organizations to account.
Our colleges need to purge the Hamas front groups from their campuses.
Federal law enforcement needs to enforce the export controls, the anti-boycott legal code, and all our many other laws against support of islamic terrorism that the woke crowd and the Wall Street managers have been flouting in recent years.
There are thousands of political issues in the world – tax policy, spending policy, regulatory policy – on which both sides can be fairly debated, and the issues are not black-and-white. The situation in Israel is not among these.
If there’s anything this war has proven beyond a doubt, it is the absolute evil of Hamas. This is that rare case in which one side is indeed entirely in the right, and the other is entirely in the wrong.
Israel has been nothing but generous to the Gaza Strip for decades, and this is how that generosity is repaid? It is time to wipe out Hamas’ ability to pose a threat ever again, once and for all.
Copyright 2023 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based trade compliance trainer and transportation manager, writer, and actor. A one-time county chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party, he has been writing regularly for Illinois Review since 2009. Follow John F. Di Leo on Facebook, Twitter, Gettr or TruthSocial.
A collection of John’s Illinois Review articles about vote fraud, The Tales of Little Pavel, and his 2021 political satires about current events, Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes One and Two, are available, in either paperback or eBook, only on Amazon.
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