We are not afraid.
We, the citizens of the West, are not afraid.
And we should not be afraid.
The massive pro-Hamas rallies we have seen in nearly every major Western city and across college campuses are designed to intimidate.
But here is the optimistic reality: Far more people in the West oppose Hamas than support them. Far more people are in favor of Israel wiping Hamas off the map than are in favor of Hamas retaining any level of power.
The silent majority may be silent.
But it is a majority.
That much was clear yesterday at the National Mall in Washington D.C., where pro-Israel ralliers, mostly Jewish, came by the hundreds of thousands — 300,000 in all, the largest single gathering of Jews in modern history. They came from Florida and California and New York and New Jersey. They came from Cleveland and Chicago and Houston.
They came for one reason: to show that those who support Israel are more numerous than those who support Israel’s enemies.
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The ralliers showed far more than that, actually. They showed that those who support Israel love the West — and by extension, they demonstrated that those who hate Israel hate the West. The contrast could not have been clearer. The pro-Israel rally was replete with American flags, with pride for our country. The pro-Israel rally featured no hate chants, no calls for genocide, no blood-curdling baying on behalf of the targeting of innocents. Instead, it featured prayer, solidarity, and love.
As one police officer reportedly put it, “I received a career’s worth of thank yous in one day.”
Overheard today at the Rally: A local police officer said he received a career’s worth of thank yous in one day!
— David M Friedman (@DavidM_Friedman) November 15, 2023
Meanwhile, at a pro-Hamas rally on Tuesday in Staten Island, people yelled, “We don’t want no two-state, we want ’48” and “From New York to Gaza, globalize the Intifada!” They also fought with police officers. Yes, the contrast is obvious.
It is obvious to me, to you, and yes, to most Americans.
The support for Israel was bipartisan at the rally. Both GOP Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer spoke.
The rally had its haters.
Hamas supporters vandalized a medical tent the night before the rally, and apparently, bus drivers refused to take Jews arriving from out of town from Dulles International Airport to the rally itself, in a clear case of religious discrimination.
All of the hating is depressing, of course. It’s even more depressing to see such sentiments in the halls of power, emanating almost entirely from the far Left. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spent yesterday ripping Israel, an unsurprising development from the morally blind dolt.
Representative Jamaal Bowman of New York, for example, took a break from pulling fire alarms to claim his opposition to Israel was actually an attempt to uphold Judaism — a truly breathtakingly audacious statement.
Meanwhile, Bowman’s fellow Hamas Squad colleagues took a different tack: Rep. Ilhan Omar claimed that all people of faith should oppose Israel.
And then there was the inimitably idiotic AOC, who suggested that Israel should somehow find a way to negotiate with … wait for it … Hamas.
But in truth, these are fringe sentiments. According to a new poll from HarrisX, 67% of Americans believe Israel should continue fighting Hamas until Hamas is defeated and Israel’s hostages are released; more than eight in ten Americans agreed Israel has a responsibility to protect its citizens.
Most (67%) Americans believe Israel should continue its military efforts in Gaza until Hamas is defeated and the hostages are released, according to a new poll.
By @ZvikaKlein | #Hamas | #Gaza_War | #Israel https://t.co/HeaumIzyUP
— The Jerusalem Post (@Jerusalem_Post) November 14, 2023
This is the true America — not the pictures on TV or the minority portrayed as a majority by our pathetic media infrastructure.
Speaking of the media, they spent most of yesterday ignoring the massive rally in favor of astroturfing resistance to Israel’s mission. For example, the front page of the New York Times’ website, as of last night, made no mention of the largest Jewish rally in centuries — but they did have a front-page article about 500 anonymous members of the executive branch writing a letter to Joe Biden protesting his Israel policy.
Clearly the pro-Hamas groundswell is building, says the Times!
The media continue to do their damndest to undermine Israel’s ability to defend itself. So despite the fact every major media outlet of the last 20 years has reported that Hamas has placed its military headquarters beneath Al-Shifa Hospital in the Gaza Strip, the press continue to treat Israel as a political leper for pursuing that military target.
No matter that the Pentagon spokesperson confirmed yesterday that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad use hospitals as fronts for military sites.
No matter that this behavior, under international law, transforms those sites into military sites. On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal pointed out that in 2016, U.S. forces attacked a hospital in Mosul. Actually, U.S. forces hit the hospital with an airstrike. Centcom reported in 2016, “ISIL was using the hospital as a base of operations and command and control headquarters. … In support of the Iraqi Security Forces, Coalition aircraft conducted a precision strike on the location to target enemy fighters firing on Iraqi forces.”
No heartburn from the media. After all, Barack Obama was president at the time.
Yet Israel is attempting to take out Hamas room by room, all the while trying to protect Gazan civilians. And the media are treating that as some sort of war crime. Many members of the media keep asking if a hospital suddenly becomes a legitimate target just because Hamas is using it as a military site.
The answer, under international law, is yes. Article 19 of the Geneva Conventions states, “The protection to which civilian hospitals are entitled shall not cease unless they are used to commit, outside their humanitarian duties, acts harmful to the enemy. Protection may, however, cease only after due warning has been given, naming, in all appropriate cases, a reasonable time limit, and after such warning has remained unheeded.”
Israel has warned Hamas and medical officials for weeks. Israel has facilitated exit from the hospital for the sick and innocent.
But the BBC lied about what Israel is doing in the hospital, saying Israel Defense Forces were “targeting people, including medical teams as well as Arab speakers.”
This, of course, was a lie. And they repeat it twice. The truth is Israel was including medical teams as well as Arab speakers.
It was an unsurprising lie, given that the BBC is effectively a Hamas propaganda arm.
In fact, Israel is exposing its own soldiers to fire from terrorists in Al-Shifa, and according to the IDF, those forces “include medical teams and Arabic speakers, who have undergone specified training to prepare for this complex and sensitive environment, with the intent that no harm is caused to the civilians being used by Hamas as human shields.”
This is something no army in history has done.
Ever.
The BBC was forced to apologize for that lie.
Yet Elizabeth Spiers, who writes frequently for the New York Times, stated it was a racist lie to claim Hamas uses children as human shields.
Yes, it’s now racist to point out that Hamas uses human shields. She should talk to Hamas about their racism, since they brag openly about doing it.
But here’s the thing: Nobody with a brain believes the media’s moral equivalence game.
And that’s encouraging.
All Hamas and its allies have is fear. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
Well, we are not afraid.
The West need not be afraid.
We have both right and might on our side.