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Israel Fights Back
The war isn’t just with Hamas/Hezbollah/Iran. The fight also must be against the antisemites in the West making excuses for terrorists. They are in academia, the media, student bodies, all around us. The IDF is fighting them as well with a 45-minute screening of unedited videos and pictures of the Hamas terror attack against Israelis for international journalists and media members.
By all accounts, many were incredibly shaken by what they saw. Some left the screening in tears. No cameras were allowed out of respect for the victims and their families but I completely agree with the IDF doing this. It is incredibly important for people to bear witness to what happened.
Obviously, some of the media is trying to turn a blind eye to what happened while simultaneously calling for a ceasefire and allowing these monsters to get away with it. I’m glad Israel and the IDF are combating the enemy on public opinion as well.
Here is a link to a Medialine article about the screening. It is very graphic both in photos and content. Don’t feel like you have to click on it if you don’t want to.
Published in Foreign Policy
I won’t click on it, but I’m glad you’re writing about it.
It’s not gratuitously graphic but that doesn’t mean it isn’t disturbing. I believe the IDF has only released some redacted and blurred videos and images but what the journalists saw was unedited.
I agree with the IDF doing this, and given the very elevated degree of respect that Jews customarily show the dead, this was quite remarkable. What is so damning of our culture is that the IDF needed to do this at all, with the usual anti-semites in the media and in academia questioning eye-witness reports of the savagery.
I haven’t watched yet, waiting for a time when I feel psychologically able, but people – journalists- have to see this. That’s their job.
Otherwise basic human psychology will abstractify and minimize these retail atrocities, then lump them into a category and move onto the next thing.
In the 9/11 attack the 3,000 dead were the result of one heinous act, and we quickly forgot the individual lives destroyed. For a few days, we saw clips of people jumping to certain death to save themselves from the torture of heat and flames… the phone calls of desperation… and then nothing.
This attack was different – very different. These monsters deliberately tortured and humiliated ordinary people up close and personal. It takes a certain kind of evil to do things like that.
Most ordinary people cannot fathom that level of brutality and inhumanity. One has to see it for themselves. I know I had to see it to (really) believe it.
If you ask me, these atrocities show a stark contrast between these two forces beyond any political dispute. The fact these acts have not been denounced in the strongest terms possible makes it a simple choice.
These journalists are not going to be able to see simple equivalencies between the two ‘sides’ after that.
I happen to be intimately familiar with an atrocity that occurred during WWII as my father survived it.
A Japanese submarine torpedoed and sank a merchant ship in the Indian Ocean, picked up the survivors, bound them and selected them one by one to be beaten, stabbed and killed by the crew armed with pipes and bayonets. 77 men were killed and 20 survived. My father was a POW in Japan for 18 months including 40 days handcuffed to a pipe on the sub and beaten almost daily. My father held no grudges against the Japanese people- and he was a tough, tough man. He did work to track down the commander of the sub who had done the same thing with survivors of a Dutch ship after the war and testified at the war crimes trials.
He and many other Americans had no desire to torture, rape or humiliate Japanese civilians or even combatants once they were defeated (or during the war).
So which society was superior? Proud to say I think it’s ours.
I’ve so appreciated your stories about your dad, Franco. What an admirable man.
Oh, I’m sure they’ll manage to do it somehow.
And it had to be only a small fraction of “journalists” who even saw it.
I hear you, but they will be exposed as shills.
Actually, it does work. German schoolchildren were shown pictures and video of the concentration camps for years afterwards. It might even have been overdone. My German-born wife was fairly traumatized and cannot watch any documentary or film on WWII to this day. Most of the Germans I know are super peace-niks, possibly to a fault.
The core reason these people (Hamas supporters ) are fanatical is because of their immersion in lies and hateful propaganda from a young age. As long as that is allowed to remain in place they will act out atrocities.
Maybe since it was widespread among schoolchildren, it was effective. In this case, a relatively small number of “journalists” saw the evidence, and NONE of their readers (who will also be reading stuff from a lot of other “journalists” who didn’t see it).
I also remember that Dennis Prager used to say (and probably still does) that Europe learned a/the wrong lesson from WW II. Instead of learning to fight evil, they learned that fighting IS evil. Could be partly a result of “overdoing it” as you say.
Let’s hope you are right, Franco.
Hamas is vile, so are their apologists. Maybe this will help.
From what various people from the audience said it seemed extremely impactful. They need to force that despicable UN leader to watch it.
Heck, FJB and KJP need to see it.
You probably need to pay a fee to Hunter before the Prez and Dr. Jill will watch it.
It must be similar to what Blinken saw that shook him up so bad. Yrs they all need to be confronted with it. Apparently they had bodycam footage from some of the Hamas terrorists showing them murdering children etc. It’s bad, I’m glad they didn’t release it to the general public
If my loved ones were among the victims, I would demand the IDF release the uncensored videos to the general public.
Not sure i agree. The general public includes those who would morbidly market it as a snuff film and that would be really disrespectful and painful to the victims and their families. Edited clips are plenty powerful in my opinion.
I’m so very impressed by your dedication to the liberal values of the West.
Free speech? Well, except for your fellow citizens who disagree with you about Israel, in which case you advocate waging war against them.
And this already has 27 likes.
It is interesting to observe the lack of self-awareness among apparently intelligent people. Instructive, actually.
It might be worthwhile to try listening to people who disagree with you. You might even understand them. I think that the term for this is empathy.
Could you quote the section in the original post where Concretevol advocates waging war on his fellow citizens who disagree with him about Israel? I have re-read it three times and can’t figure out what you are talking about.
What in the world are you talking about Jerry? Wage war against my fellow citizens? How am I not listening to people that disagree with me here? The post is about Israel demonstrating to the world the atrocities that were committed on them. I’m at a loss to see from the comments what disagreement you are even referencing. The only mild disagreement was that I didn’t think they should release unedited footage to the public but that’s just differing opinions on a topic it seems we generally agree on.
Welcome to Jerry’s world.
And, as usual, Jerry never returns to explain himself.
I just realized something: The world’s condemning Israel for allying with Saudi Arabia sounds just like the world’s condemning Ukraine for allying with NATO. Same stupid rationale. It has to be the same person behind it: Putin.
I don’t know that Israel and Saudi Arabia have talked about being allies. I thought they were simply working on “normalizing” relations.
They’re already de-facto allies (as well as de-facto enemies, its complicated).
I normally wouldn’t have lumped the two together but, dang. The apologists actually seem to imply that the Hamas atrocities were a good thing.
I wondered about the body cams. It seems to me that one reason they wore them was to document their kills and crimes for payment purposes.
Could be for payment purposes, but never forget that murder porn is popular in such cultures–at least when the people being murdered are “infidels”.