Three-Fourths of Palestinians Support Hamas and Oct. 7 Terrorist Attack, 98% Have ‘Very Negative’ View of U.S.
Three-fourths of Palestinians support the terrorist organization Hamas and its deadly attack on Israel last month, a “Wartime Poll” gauging the opinions of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip reveal.
The survey was conducted October 31 to November 7 by Arab World for Research and Development (AWRAD), after Israel declared war on Hamas in response to the October 7 terrorist attack, in which Hamas killed more than twelve hundred people, beheaded and incinerated babies, raped women and girls, and took hostages they still hold to this day.
Not only do three-fourths (75%) of Palestinians say they support the October 7 terrorist attack, but more than half (59.3%) say they strongly support the attack. “Strong support for the attacks was notably higher among Palestinians in the West Bank (68%) as compared to Gaza (47%),” AWRAD notes.
Three-fourths (76%) also say they have at least a somewhat positive view of the role of the terrorist organization Hamas, with half (48.2%) voicing a “very positive” view of Hamas.
In contrast, less than one percent (0.4%) have a positive view of the role of the U.S., while 97.6% have a “very negative” view of the U.S.
Palestinians are more than three times as likely to believe the Gaza conflict is primarily between “Israel and Palestinians in general” (63.6%) as they are to think the war is between just “Israel and Hamas” (18.6%).
Ninety percent (89.5%) attribute U.S. support for Israel in the confrontation with Palestine to “Hatred of Muslims and Islam.”
Palestinians are equally cynical regarding the prospects of coexisting with Israel, as nine in ten (89.5%) say their belief in that possibility has decreased. Likewise, two-thirds (68%) say their support for a two-state solution has waned.
“The vast majority of Palestinians hate America and support Hamas' terrorist attack on Israel. Remember that next time you see someone waving a Palestinian flag,” Media Research Center President Brent Bozell said in a social media post Monday, reacting to the survey’s results.
The Myth of Gaza’s Innocent Civilians
Poll shows the vast majority of "Palestinians" supported the Oct. 7 massacres.
[Make sure to read Daniel Greenfield’s contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]
Ever since Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists, along with ordinary Arab Muslims from Gaza, invaded Israel, murdered, raped and kidnapped women and children, the debate has been about how innocent they are. And how easy Israel should be willing to go on them.
In the weeks since, Israel has been lectured about a “disproportionate” response and the urgent need to avoid civilian casualties. That’s a little tricky when fighting an Islamic terrorist group whose only real defensive strategy is hiding behind civilians. Fighting Islamic terrorists without killing civilians is like trying to invade Russia while avoiding cold weather. It’s impossible.
But ever since the Bush administration decided that the real problem in Afghanistan and Iraq was not a cult and a culture of death, but a lack of democracy, our elites have been busy pretending that over a thousand years of terror was due to a lack of free and fair elections.
The Bush administration got its elections in the West Bank and Gaza. And Hamas won. Then Obama got his elections in Egypt and across North Africa, and the Muslim Brotherhood, the parent organization of Hamas and Al Qaeda, won. We’re still dealing with the fallout from that.
‘Democracy’ handed over Iraq and Gaza to Iran. And as a result ISIS emerged.
As Hamas uses ICU patients and babies in NICUs as human shields for its bases, what do the “ordinary Palestinians”, the ones liberals are convinced are innocent parties in all this, think?
A recent poll of Arab Muslim residents of the West Bank and Gaza, known as ‘Palestinians’ circa 1967, conducted by the Arab World for Research and Development (AWRAD) asked them.
74% supported the Hamas atrocities of Oct 7. Of these 59% “extremely” support them and another 15% only “somewhat”. Only 7% were “extremely against” and 5% somewhat against.
That’s 74% in favor of murdering, raping and kidnapping Jews and only 12% against.
Only 7% were ‘extremely’ against murdering and abducting children.
Is this a moral or a tactical objection? Let’s look at the breakdown by region.
83% of those in the West Bank, ruled by the Palestinian Authority, said that they supported the Hamas atrocities. Only 7% were opposed. In Gaza, there was notably less enthusiasm at 63%. But after weeks of bombings and raids, only 20% seem to have decided it was a bad idea.
Why were only 7% of those in the West Bank, but 20% of those in Gaza opposed?
Do those extra 13% of Gazans reflect a people (slightly) more likely to value human life or terrorist supporters who, like their comrades in the West Bank, like it better when someone else is doing the fighting? If the attack had come from the West Bank, would 83% (instead of just 63%) of those in Gaza be enthusiastic about the massacre and beheading of Israelis?
The survey asked a few more questions that got to the heart of it.
A majority believed that the Hamas atrocities were an Islamic response to the “defilement of Al Aqsa” by allowing Jews to set foot on the former site of the Holy Temple.
98% in Gaza and the West Bank said that they felt ‘pride’ as ‘Palestinians’ over the war.
74% expect the fighting to end with the defeat of Israeli forces in Gaza.
Only 17% support a two-state solution while 77.7% want to destroy Israel and replace it with a ‘Palestinian’ state.
Are there innocent civilians in Gaza? Probably a lot fewer than in Berlin or Tokyo in 1944.
The Germans supported Hitler and the Japanese backed the Imperial war machine. Those dissidents and opponents who disagreed not just on tactical grounds, but on moral ones, were a small minority. They’re a far tinier minority among the so-called Palestinians.
The ‘Palestinian’ majority wants a war to destroy Israel fought by Islamic terrorists.
They’re not complaining and crying for a ceasefire because they don’t want a war, but because they’re losing the war that they wanted. They still want the war, they just want to be winning it.
When you spend all of your time dreaming of invading and destroying another country, you may be a civilian, but you’re no more innocent than your average Nazi Party member.
Currently Hamas is a good deal more popular in the West Bank (88% approval rating) than it is in Gaza (59% approval rating), but the Al Aqsa Brigade, the military part of Hamas, scores big in the West Bank (86% approval) and at (69%) in Gaza. Those are numbers Biden would kill for.
And don’t mistake even the nearly 9 out of 10 in the West Bank and 7 out of 10 in Gaza as a lack of enthusiasm for Islamic terrorism.
The Al Qassam Brigades, the direct terrorist arm of Hamas, is at 95% approval in the West Bank and 78% in Gaza.
Islamic Jihad scores 93% in the West Bank and 72% in Gaza.
The Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade is at 88% in the West Bank and at 70% in Gaza.
But let’s go back to democracy. Whom do they want running the place?
75% of those in the West Bank and 68% of those in Gaza want a national unity government of the various Islamic terrorist groups that would naturally include Hamas.
Isn’t democracy a beautiful thing? The ‘Palestinian’ people want to be ruled by terrorists. They want a war. And then they cry to the cameras when the war they demanded actually happens.
That’s what ‘Palestinians’ want and whom they like. Whom don’t they like? Everyone.
98% of the Arab Muslim settlers in the West Bank hate America as do 96.8% of those in Gaza. That’s still better than the UK which is hated by 100% of Arab Muslim colonists in the West Bank and Gaza. They actually hate America and the UK more than Israel which is only at 97.3%.
But don’t feel too bad, Americans, Israelis and Brits, because they hate everyone.
Not a single country, and that includes Iran, gets even a 5% ‘very positive’ rating. 63% don’t like Iran, 27% like it, and only 4% really like it even though it bled itself dry financing their terrorism.
64% don’t like Turkey even though Erdogan, its Islamic dictator, pulled out all the stops for them.
85% don’t like Egypt, 86% don’t like Jordan, 95% don’t like Saudi Arabia, and 95% don’t like the UAE even though these are the fellow Arab Muslim countries that provide aid to them.
Proving that ingratitude is the one consistent ‘Palestinian’ characteristic: 92% don’t like the EU, 88% don’t like the UN, and 69% manage to be against the Red Cross.
Russia, which created the entire ‘Palestinian’ cause and continues to back them, gets some of the best numbers. Only 57% don’t like Russia and 60% don’t like China.
Even more ungratefully, 85% don’t like Western media.
The ‘Palestinians’ have their own dedicated UN agency (UNRWA) and have billions of dollars lavished on them. Their needs are taken care of by the people they hate, America, Israel, Egypt and the UAE, not to mention the UN and the Red Cross, whom they repay by hating them.
If you give them free food, they will really hate you, and if you give them free rockets, they will hate you a little less. The only things they want to do are kill people and then kill some more.
This isn’t a culture or a country: it’s a xenophobic death cult that hates the entire world.
You don’t want them as neighbors or as refugees. Israel is stuck with them. The rest of the world doesn’t have to be. Stop giving them money, stop listening to their propaganda and stop caring.
Our faith in democracy convinced us to waste blood trying to bring democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan. And then we handed Afghanistan to the Taliban on the understanding that they’d run for public office. The State Department is still asking the Taliban to open up elections.
What’s behind this insanity? We refuse to come to terms with the fact that some people are bad. No matter what horrors they commit, we’re certain that it’s only a “tiny minority of extremists” who have “misunderstood Islam” and are surely not representative of the vast majority of peace loving people who want the same things we want and just haven’t been given the opportunity.
The troubling question they don’t like to think about is what if none of that is actually true?
In the Book of Genesis, Abraham pleads with G-d to spare Sodom. The Lord agrees if some righteous people can be found in the infamous city. The patriarch bargains with G-d for increasingly smaller numbers of righteous people until it turns out there is only one. And he has to run for his life before Sodom is destroyed. Modern people are uncomfortable with the story.
We don’t really believe in evil. Even when we come face to face with it we make excuses for it. And evil is then able to manipulate us, to play on our sympathies when it has none for us.
You see there is one piece of good news from that poll.
90% of ‘Palestinians’ would like a ceasefire from the war that 77.7% of them would like to see conclude with the destruction of Israel.
How stupid would anyone have to be to give it to them?
Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
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THE SAUDI MUSLIM INVASION OF AMERICA
Images of 9/11: A Visual Remembrance
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/09/11/images-911-visual-remembrance/
Osama bin Laden’s Evil Legacy
Even though Bin Laden/Zawahiri of Al Qaeda and Abu Bakr al Baghdadi of ISIS are dead, on anniversaries of 9/11 -- and now Hamas’s October 7th event -- a haunting and important question lurks. Why do many young Arabs, Muslims, and even Americans continue to become entranced with Osama bin Laden's Pied Piper music of radical fascist fundamentalist Muslim Jihad? Via TikTok, thousands of American youths recently embraced Osama bin Laden's twisted "Message to the World" over social media.
It is also important to try to understand the uniquely chilling social-psychological fit between the religiously saturated but distorted charismatic leadership of a man like Osama bin Laden/Al Qaeda/ISIS, and the group psychology of communities where he and his colleagues and mentors recruit devoted terrorists. Afghanistan is once again becoming an Al Qaeda and ISIS haven as is Yemen, where Bin Laden’s father was born.
It is a serious mistake to glibly label and dismiss deceased men like Osama bin Laden, Ayman Al Zawahiri, or Abu Bakr al Baghdadi as simply dead mass murderers, psychotics, thugs, psychopaths, or criminals. In painful truth, they are often perceived as Robin Hood-like figures and spiritual Pied Piper spiritual heroes for many people in the unreformed fundamentalist Muslim world. Even American homegrown terrorists who want to attack America and the West often express profound admiration for the martyred Osama bin Laden. For American leaders to imply that Al Qaeda, Hamas, or ISIS are defeated because their leaders are killed is like saying Christianity died when Jesus Christ was crucified.
We can see in Osama bin Laden`s life trajectory evidence of what has been called “Dark Epiphanies” in destructive cult leaders. (Olsson, 2017, Malignant Pied Pipers of Our Time p. 11-12). These later life experiences reify and magnify their earlier molding experiences of disappointment, neglect, shame, and humiliation influenced by parents and other childhood defective role models. In adolescent or young adult life phases, antiheroes are often chosen to rebel against and counteract disappointment or humiliation/shame experiences with parental figures and home communities.
Hamas, ISIS, and Al Qaeda’s appeal has a potential unique “fit” for normal adolescent rebelliousness. Anna Freud said of adolescents, “On the one hand, they throw themselves enthusiastically into the life of the community, and on the other, they have an overpowering longing for solitude. They oscillate between blind submission to some self-chosen leader and defiant rebellion against any and every authority. They are selfish and materially minded and at the same time full of lofty idealism.” [Freud, A. Pp 137-138.) What would be normal adolescent rebellion and protest for some young people, becomes terrorist actions under Hamas, ISIS, and Al Qaeda’s tutelage. The Arab world’s turmoil creates many young adults who are in the phase of what psychoanalysts call “prolonged adolescence.”
In addition to enlisting well-educated youth as future leaders, radical Islamists like Osama also recruit poor and less-educated Muslim “foot soldiers” through religious Madrassah schools and some young-adult mosque programs and activities. Osama’s personal suffering, use of his and his father’s wealth to help fellow Muslims, his supposed bravery and heroism in ousting the Soviets from Afghanistan, made his rebellious jihad appealing to disaffected Arab and Muslim youth. The Madrassah-type “schools” in Pakistan for example, offer economic advantages and spiritual inspiration to families and Muslim communities that have few alternatives. Even via TikTok, many thousands of American youths recently found Osama bin Laden’s treacherous and destructive “Letter to the World” bizarrely inspiring.
Osama bin Laden’s role as a terrorist leader allowed him to act out his unconscious inner narcissistic rage at his father, mother, siblings, rejecting homeland and Saudi Arabia’s oil customer/ally/friend America. In this sense, he became like most destructive cult leaders. Their deepest motives have to do with power, control, revenge, and overcoming a desperate fear of aloneness and meaninglessness. They gain a sense of power and mastery over their own childhood psychological deformities and feelings of insignificance by becoming overwhelmingly significant and powerful in the lives and destinies of their followers.
Apocalyptic Scenarios: Group-Self Death and Rebellious Martyrdom in Terror Cults
Rebellious charisma in a terror leader meshes with the followers’ masochism and narcissistic passive-receptiveness to his charismatic influence. The leader-follower patterns in terror cults like Hamas, Al Qaeda and ISIS are remarkably similar to what is seen in apocalyptic cults like those of Jim Jones and David Koresh.
The group death or martyr scenario gives the terror-cult group a special, exciting, and dramatically triumphant defining martyr myth. It becomes a source of “underdog” heroism, and paradoxical group cohesion and identity. For bin Laden, the motivating apocalyptic scenario was his assertion that all Muslims in the world are being threatened by the West, particularly by Americans and Jews. In a book bin Laden wrote in 1998, he called the faithful to a global jihad, a “new vision” that demands the deaths of all Americans and Jews, including children. To attain this cynical and religion-perverting vision, any violence is justified, from terrorist bombings to suicide missions.
Evil is defined initially by the leader bin Laden via fatwa, but gradually becomes co-authored within the group-self as their own group salvation death myth. The codependent leader holds the martyr death myth out to the followers as magical reward. The terror cult leader also holds the death myth over the heads of the followers to magnify the special domain of his “mana” power and self-importance. The leader is needed for the dramatic destructive action that is being planned, for which no one individual takes personal responsibility. The leader experiences the ultimate “celebrity” and fantasized triumph over his lifelong insecurity, hurts, and fear of aloneness.
The future generations of Hamas, Al Qaeda, ISIS, Hezb’allah’s terror cult franchises will not be eliminated by bullets, missiles, or “smart bombs.” The future foreign policies of America need to be informed about the social-self psychology of the terrorist group and its leaders’ spiritual-political power messages. Devastated communities, families, and wounded group-selves in war-torn nations continents away are ignored at our peril. Billions of military aid dollars given to Middle East “friends” may not be worth the enemy-accumulating consequences. “Nation-building” may be impossible, but we cannot just walk away from financially and spiritually devastated societies. Genuine foreign aid helps wounded world communities find ways to rebuild their own dignity and group self-confidence. Hopefully without the “help” and inspiration of malignant Pied Pipers like Osama bin Laden and their heirs. Our own American youth require the charisma and spiritual leadership and inspiration of our diverse founding father heroes who need to be read and studied and not torn down by spiritually empty professors.
Image: TherealMrGreer
Even though Bin Laden/Zawahiri of Al Qaeda and Abu Bakr al Baghdadi of ISIS are dead, on anniversaries of 9/11 -- and now Hamas’s October 7th event -- a haunting and important question lurks. Why do many young Arabs, Muslims, and even Americans continue to become entranced with Osama bin Laden's Pied Piper music of radical fascist fundamentalist Muslim Jihad? Via TikTok, thousands of American youths recently embraced Osama bin Laden's twisted "Message to the World" over social media.
It is also important to try to understand the uniquely chilling social-psychological fit between the religiously saturated but distorted charismatic leadership of a man like Osama bin Laden/Al Qaeda/ISIS, and the group psychology of communities where he and his colleagues and mentors recruit devoted terrorists. Afghanistan is once again becoming an Al Qaeda and ISIS haven as is Yemen, where Bin Laden’s father was born.
It is a serious mistake to glibly label and dismiss deceased men like Osama bin Laden, Ayman Al Zawahiri, or Abu Bakr al Baghdadi as simply dead mass murderers, psychotics, thugs, psychopaths, or criminals. In painful truth, they are often perceived as Robin Hood-like figures and spiritual Pied Piper spiritual heroes for many people in the unreformed fundamentalist Muslim world. Even American homegrown terrorists who want to attack America and the West often express profound admiration for the martyred Osama bin Laden. For American leaders to imply that Al Qaeda, Hamas, or ISIS are defeated because their leaders are killed is like saying Christianity died when Jesus Christ was crucified.
We can see in Osama bin Laden`s life trajectory evidence of what has been called “Dark Epiphanies” in destructive cult leaders. (Olsson, 2017, Malignant Pied Pipers of Our Time p. 11-12). These later life experiences reify and magnify their earlier molding experiences of disappointment, neglect, shame, and humiliation influenced by parents and other childhood defective role models. In adolescent or young adult life phases, antiheroes are often chosen to rebel against and counteract disappointment or humiliation/shame experiences with parental figures and home communities.
Hamas, ISIS, and Al Qaeda’s appeal has a potential unique “fit” for normal adolescent rebelliousness. Anna Freud said of adolescents, “On the one hand, they throw themselves enthusiastically into the life of the community, and on the other, they have an overpowering longing for solitude. They oscillate between blind submission to some self-chosen leader and defiant rebellion against any and every authority. They are selfish and materially minded and at the same time full of lofty idealism.” [Freud, A. Pp 137-138.) What would be normal adolescent rebellion and protest for some young people, becomes terrorist actions under Hamas, ISIS, and Al Qaeda’s tutelage. The Arab world’s turmoil creates many young adults who are in the phase of what psychoanalysts call “prolonged adolescence.”
In addition to enlisting well-educated youth as future leaders, radical Islamists like Osama also recruit poor and less-educated Muslim “foot soldiers” through religious Madrassah schools and some young-adult mosque programs and activities. Osama’s personal suffering, use of his and his father’s wealth to help fellow Muslims, his supposed bravery and heroism in ousting the Soviets from Afghanistan, made his rebellious jihad appealing to disaffected Arab and Muslim youth. The Madrassah-type “schools” in Pakistan for example, offer economic advantages and spiritual inspiration to families and Muslim communities that have few alternatives. Even via TikTok, many thousands of American youths recently found Osama bin Laden’s treacherous and destructive “Letter to the World” bizarrely inspiring.
Osama bin Laden’s role as a terrorist leader allowed him to act out his unconscious inner narcissistic rage at his father, mother, siblings, rejecting homeland and Saudi Arabia’s oil customer/ally/friend America. In this sense, he became like most destructive cult leaders. Their deepest motives have to do with power, control, revenge, and overcoming a desperate fear of aloneness and meaninglessness. They gain a sense of power and mastery over their own childhood psychological deformities and feelings of insignificance by becoming overwhelmingly significant and powerful in the lives and destinies of their followers.
Apocalyptic Scenarios: Group-Self Death and Rebellious Martyrdom in Terror Cults
Rebellious charisma in a terror leader meshes with the followers’ masochism and narcissistic passive-receptiveness to his charismatic influence. The leader-follower patterns in terror cults like Hamas, Al Qaeda and ISIS are remarkably similar to what is seen in apocalyptic cults like those of Jim Jones and David Koresh.
The group death or martyr scenario gives the terror-cult group a special, exciting, and dramatically triumphant defining martyr myth. It becomes a source of “underdog” heroism, and paradoxical group cohesion and identity. For bin Laden, the motivating apocalyptic scenario was his assertion that all Muslims in the world are being threatened by the West, particularly by Americans and Jews. In a book bin Laden wrote in 1998, he called the faithful to a global jihad, a “new vision” that demands the deaths of all Americans and Jews, including children. To attain this cynical and religion-perverting vision, any violence is justified, from terrorist bombings to suicide missions.
Evil is defined initially by the leader bin Laden via fatwa, but gradually becomes co-authored within the group-self as their own group salvation death myth. The codependent leader holds the martyr death myth out to the followers as magical reward. The terror cult leader also holds the death myth over the heads of the followers to magnify the special domain of his “mana” power and self-importance. The leader is needed for the dramatic destructive action that is being planned, for which no one individual takes personal responsibility. The leader experiences the ultimate “celebrity” and fantasized triumph over his lifelong insecurity, hurts, and fear of aloneness.
The future generations of Hamas, Al Qaeda, ISIS, Hezb’allah’s terror cult franchises will not be eliminated by bullets, missiles, or “smart bombs.” The future foreign policies of America need to be informed about the social-self psychology of the terrorist group and its leaders’ spiritual-political power messages. Devastated communities, families, and wounded group-selves in war-torn nations continents away are ignored at our peril. Billions of military aid dollars given to Middle East “friends” may not be worth the enemy-accumulating consequences. “Nation-building” may be impossible, but we cannot just walk away from financially and spiritually devastated societies. Genuine foreign aid helps wounded world communities find ways to rebuild their own dignity and group self-confidence. Hopefully without the “help” and inspiration of malignant Pied Pipers like Osama bin Laden and their heirs. Our own American youth require the charisma and spiritual leadership and inspiration of our diverse founding father heroes who need to be read and studied and not torn down by spiritually empty professors.
Image: TherealMrGreer
Our forgotten first war against Islamic terrorists
Most Americans seem to have forgotten our first war against Muslims. In the late 18th century, our objection to Islamist practice was their piracy and slaving against our ships and sailors in the Mediterranean Sea.
In 1794, provoked by Algerian captures of American ships, our Congress authorized construction of the first six ships of the U.S. Navy, including the U.S.S. Constitution, still in commissioned service and now docked in Boston.
In 1795, our diplomats negotiated treaties with the Muslim states of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli to pay them tribute for the privilege of free passage.
But in 1801, the Pasha of Tripoli, citing late payments of tribute, demanded additional money and declared war on the United States. The United States Marines defeated the Pasha’ forces with a combined naval and land assault. That short foreign conflict is remembered in the Marines’ Hymn in the words “to the shores of Tripoli.”
Earlier, in 1786, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson -- two prominent Founders of our country -- were in London seeking agreements with Muslim states on the North African coast of the Mediterranean Sea. On March 28th they wrote a letter to John Jay, then the American Secretary for Foreign Affairs, reporting on their difficulties:
…We had a conference with the Ambassador of Tripoli, at his House.
The amount of all the information we can obtain from him was that a perpetual peace was in all respects the most advisable, because a temporary treaty would leave room for increasing demands upon every renewal of it, and a stipulation for annual payments would be liable to failures of performance which would renew the war, repeat the negotiations and continually augment the claims of his nation and the difference of expence would by no means be adequate to the inconvenience, since 12,500 Guineas to his Constituents with 10 pr. Cent upon that sum for himself, must be paid if the treaty was made for only one year.
That 30,000 Guineas for his Employers and £3,000 for himself were the lowest terms upon which a perpetual peace could be made and that this must be paid in Cash on the delivery of the treaty signed by his sovereign, that no kind of Merchandizes could be accepted.
That Tunis would treat upon the same terms, but he could not answer for Algiers or Morocco.
Then the Americans asked the Muslim diplomat what justified his country’s seizures of ships and making slaves of their crew or passengers. The answer given by the Ambassador of Tripoli in 1786 was consistent with the 1988 Covenant of Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) on the right of Muslims to wage war on those who professed a different faith:
…The Ambassador answered us that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.
That it was a law that the first who boarded an Enemy’s Vessell should have one slave, more than his share with the rest, which operated as an incentive to the most desperate Valour and Enterprise, that it was the Practice of their Corsairs to bear down upon a ship, for each sailor to take a dagger in each hand and another in his mouth, and leap on board, which so terrified their Enemies that very few ever stood against them, that he verily believed the Devil assisted his Countrymen, for they were almost always successful.
That testament by the Ambassador of Tripoli as to a generic, universal, Muslim right of war against non-believers predated by 215 years the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, which killed 2,996 American civilians, and by 237 years the Oct 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israeli civilians.
Image: Library of Congress
Of course, he did not send them any photos of the worst atrocities he witnessed. Piles of bodies were the most he would allow himself, and Israeli tanks set on fire, but not beheaded babies or eyes gouged out, or naked girls who had been tortured and then raped to death.
Most Americans seem to have forgotten our first war against Muslims. In the late 18th century, our objection to Islamist practice was their piracy and slaving against our ships and sailors in the Mediterranean Sea.
In 1794, provoked by Algerian captures of American ships, our Congress authorized construction of the first six ships of the U.S. Navy, including the U.S.S. Constitution, still in commissioned service and now docked in Boston.
In 1795, our diplomats negotiated treaties with the Muslim states of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli to pay them tribute for the privilege of free passage.
But in 1801, the Pasha of Tripoli, citing late payments of tribute, demanded additional money and declared war on the United States. The United States Marines defeated the Pasha’ forces with a combined naval and land assault. That short foreign conflict is remembered in the Marines’ Hymn in the words “to the shores of Tripoli.”
Earlier, in 1786, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson -- two prominent Founders of our country -- were in London seeking agreements with Muslim states on the North African coast of the Mediterranean Sea. On March 28th they wrote a letter to John Jay, then the American Secretary for Foreign Affairs, reporting on their difficulties:
…We had a conference with the Ambassador of Tripoli, at his House.
The amount of all the information we can obtain from him was that a perpetual peace was in all respects the most advisable, because a temporary treaty would leave room for increasing demands upon every renewal of it, and a stipulation for annual payments would be liable to failures of performance which would renew the war, repeat the negotiations and continually augment the claims of his nation and the difference of expence would by no means be adequate to the inconvenience, since 12,500 Guineas to his Constituents with 10 pr. Cent upon that sum for himself, must be paid if the treaty was made for only one year.
That 30,000 Guineas for his Employers and £3,000 for himself were the lowest terms upon which a perpetual peace could be made and that this must be paid in Cash on the delivery of the treaty signed by his sovereign, that no kind of Merchandizes could be accepted.
That Tunis would treat upon the same terms, but he could not answer for Algiers or Morocco.
Then the Americans asked the Muslim diplomat what justified his country’s seizures of ships and making slaves of their crew or passengers. The answer given by the Ambassador of Tripoli in 1786 was consistent with the 1988 Covenant of Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) on the right of Muslims to wage war on those who professed a different faith:
…The Ambassador answered us that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.
That it was a law that the first who boarded an Enemy’s Vessell should have one slave, more than his share with the rest, which operated as an incentive to the most desperate Valour and Enterprise, that it was the Practice of their Corsairs to bear down upon a ship, for each sailor to take a dagger in each hand and another in his mouth, and leap on board, which so terrified their Enemies that very few ever stood against them, that he verily believed the Devil assisted his Countrymen, for they were almost always successful.
That testament by the Ambassador of Tripoli as to a generic, universal, Muslim right of war against non-believers predated by 215 years the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, which killed 2,996 American civilians, and by 237 years the Oct 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israeli civilians.
Image: Library of Congress
Of course, he did not send them any photos of the worst atrocities he witnessed. Piles of bodies were the most he would allow himself, and Israeli tanks set on fire, but not beheaded babies or eyes gouged out, or naked girls who had been tortured and then raped to death.
Everybody Loves Islam
And they rushed to show their love after October 7.
[Make sure to read Robert Spencer’s contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]
After Hamas’ massacre of 1,200 Israelis on October 7, all the various factions of the world rushed to show how much they loved and admired not the victims of the attacks, and certainly not the state that they lived in, but instead, the belief system and ideology that inspired and motivated the attacks themselves: Islam. Left, right, and center, everybody loves Islam now, and that love is growing more intense by the day.
The left, of course, has loved Islam for many years now. Even before 9/11, Islamic groups such as the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) adopted the left’s tactic of charging that all critics of Islam, including even foes of jihad terror who were simply exposing the motives and goals of the terrorists, with “racism” and “bigotry.” Muslims, CAIR and its allies contended, were an oppressed class, victimized for being “brown,” despite the fact that there are Muslims, and Islamic jihadis, of all races. A new sin, “Islamophobia,” was invented to intimidate people into thinking it was somehow wrong to oppose jihad violence and Sharia oppression of women.
The left embraced this wholeheartedly, leading to a lasting alliance that has given us the winsome and patriotic Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Mogadishu) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Ramallah), and a society-wide fear of the personal and professional ruin that can come from being accused of “Islamophobia.” This alliance is showing some signs of strain lately over the left’s obsession with normalizing insanity, sexual deviance, and perversity, but the Oct. 7 attack showed that the bond between the left and Islam is still strong. Leftists eagerly purvey Hamas’ propaganda about how many civilian casualties have resulted from Israel’s defensive action in Gaza, and Israel is drawing increasing fire from leftist leaders including Canada’s Justin Trudeau and France’s Emmanuel Macron
The strains in the leftist/Islamic alliance, meanwhile, have awakened a new love for Islam on the right. Many social conservatives have noted that Muslims are among the only groups in the U.S. standing up against the delusion that a man can become a woman and vice versa, and that those who wish to do so are of perfectly sound mind. Muslims are also among the few who are resisting the left’s insistence on placing pornography in primary schools. This has led some patriots to imagine that a new alliance can be formed between pious Muslims and social conservatives; this is, in fact, not a new idea on the right, but one that no less a luminary than Dinesh D’Souza advocated as far back as 2007.
The fallacy of this kind of thinking, however, is that even if Muslims are willing to make common cause with non-Muslim social conservatives, this will not lead them to abandon the tenets of their faith that call for them to make war against and subjugate unbelievers. The shared distaste for the left’s perversions and delusions cannot be and will not become the basis for a new accord that will allow Muslims and non-Muslims to live together in peace. The Islamic imperative to “fight them until persecution is no more and religion is all for Allah” (Qur’an 8:39) will remain.
Antisemites on the left and the right, meanwhile, have always loved Islam for its deep-rooted hostility to the Jews. The Qur’an even projects that hostility upon its target: “You will find the Jews and the idolaters the most vehement of mankind in hostility to those who believe.” (Qur’an 5:82) We saw this most recently, and most revoltingly, demonstrated in the TikTok craze for Osama bin Laden’s 2002 letter to America, which excoriates the Jews for supposedly oppressing the Palestinians, and declares: “The first thing we are calling you to is Islam.” Nick Fuentes and others who have hijacked the “America First” slogan to contextualize and justify their Jew-hatred and Israel-hatred love Islam for being so tremendously negative toward the group for which they blame virtually everything. Marxist professors who have always hated Israel for being a standing rebuke to the left’s collectivism and destruction of individual cultures (and of individuality itself) love Islam for lending itself quite well to collectivism and hating Jews just as much as they do.
And so one of the most striking aspects of the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 massacre is that while antisemitism is resurgent all over the U.S. and Europe, individuals and groups on all points of the political spectrum are falling all over themselves to affirm their love for Islam. Jewish and pro-Israel students have been physically menaced on campuses including Cooper Union in New York City, Arizona State University, the University of California San Diego, and Tulane. That’s happening against the backdrop of increasingly harsh criticism of Jews and Israel from people as supposedly ideologically divergent as Max Blumenthal and Candace Owens. The societal trend is clear: everybody loves Islam, and everybody hates the Jews.
[Make sure to read Robert Spencer’s contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]
After Hamas’ massacre of 1,200 Israelis on October 7, all the various factions of the world rushed to show how much they loved and admired not the victims of the attacks, and certainly not the state that they lived in, but instead, the belief system and ideology that inspired and motivated the attacks themselves: Islam. Left, right, and center, everybody loves Islam now, and that love is growing more intense by the day.
The left, of course, has loved Islam for many years now. Even before 9/11, Islamic groups such as the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) adopted the left’s tactic of charging that all critics of Islam, including even foes of jihad terror who were simply exposing the motives and goals of the terrorists, with “racism” and “bigotry.” Muslims, CAIR and its allies contended, were an oppressed class, victimized for being “brown,” despite the fact that there are Muslims, and Islamic jihadis, of all races. A new sin, “Islamophobia,” was invented to intimidate people into thinking it was somehow wrong to oppose jihad violence and Sharia oppression of women.
The left embraced this wholeheartedly, leading to a lasting alliance that has given us the winsome and patriotic Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Mogadishu) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Ramallah), and a society-wide fear of the personal and professional ruin that can come from being accused of “Islamophobia.” This alliance is showing some signs of strain lately over the left’s obsession with normalizing insanity, sexual deviance, and perversity, but the Oct. 7 attack showed that the bond between the left and Islam is still strong. Leftists eagerly purvey Hamas’ propaganda about how many civilian casualties have resulted from Israel’s defensive action in Gaza, and Israel is drawing increasing fire from leftist leaders including Canada’s Justin Trudeau and France’s Emmanuel Macron
The strains in the leftist/Islamic alliance, meanwhile, have awakened a new love for Islam on the right. Many social conservatives have noted that Muslims are among the only groups in the U.S. standing up against the delusion that a man can become a woman and vice versa, and that those who wish to do so are of perfectly sound mind. Muslims are also among the few who are resisting the left’s insistence on placing pornography in primary schools. This has led some patriots to imagine that a new alliance can be formed between pious Muslims and social conservatives; this is, in fact, not a new idea on the right, but one that no less a luminary than Dinesh D’Souza advocated as far back as 2007.
The fallacy of this kind of thinking, however, is that even if Muslims are willing to make common cause with non-Muslim social conservatives, this will not lead them to abandon the tenets of their faith that call for them to make war against and subjugate unbelievers. The shared distaste for the left’s perversions and delusions cannot be and will not become the basis for a new accord that will allow Muslims and non-Muslims to live together in peace. The Islamic imperative to “fight them until persecution is no more and religion is all for Allah” (Qur’an 8:39) will remain.
Antisemites on the left and the right, meanwhile, have always loved Islam for its deep-rooted hostility to the Jews. The Qur’an even projects that hostility upon its target: “You will find the Jews and the idolaters the most vehement of mankind in hostility to those who believe.” (Qur’an 5:82) We saw this most recently, and most revoltingly, demonstrated in the TikTok craze for Osama bin Laden’s 2002 letter to America, which excoriates the Jews for supposedly oppressing the Palestinians, and declares: “The first thing we are calling you to is Islam.” Nick Fuentes and others who have hijacked the “America First” slogan to contextualize and justify their Jew-hatred and Israel-hatred love Islam for being so tremendously negative toward the group for which they blame virtually everything. Marxist professors who have always hated Israel for being a standing rebuke to the left’s collectivism and destruction of individual cultures (and of individuality itself) love Islam for lending itself quite well to collectivism and hating Jews just as much as they do.
And so one of the most striking aspects of the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 massacre is that while antisemitism is resurgent all over the U.S. and Europe, individuals and groups on all points of the political spectrum are falling all over themselves to affirm their love for Islam. Jewish and pro-Israel students have been physically menaced on campuses including Cooper Union in New York City, Arizona State University, the University of California San Diego, and Tulane. That’s happening against the backdrop of increasingly harsh criticism of Jews and Israel from people as supposedly ideologically divergent as Max Blumenthal and Candace Owens. The societal trend is clear: everybody loves Islam, and everybody hates the Jews.
Robert Spencer
Reader Interactions
Horowitz Takes Us into the Mind of the Enemy
What makes the Woke Left tick.
[Order David Horowitz’s new book, The Radical Mind: The Destructive Plans of the Woke Left: HERE.]
“The belief that the world is marching towards justice, and that to be a progressive means one is ‘on the right side of history,’” writes David Horowitz in his important new book, The Radical Mind: The Destructive Plans of the Woke Left, “is a delusion that will justify any and every atrocity, and already has.”
Nobody knows this better than Horowitz. Born into a Communist family, he was at the very center of the action during the Vietnam War and Black Power movement. After his epochal autobiography, Radical Son (1996), which rivetingly recounted his career in, and ultimate departure from, the left, he published a number of books – with titles like Uncivil Wars: The Controversy Over Reparations for Slavery and Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left – that anatomized the left’s ongoing assault on American norms and values. And in the wake of his monumental, eight-volume compilation The Black Book of the American Left, he’s written a series of brief, eminently cogent bestsellers that are the Trump era’s version of Thomas Paine’s indispensable Revolutionary-era pamphlets Common Sense and The American Crisis.
To wit: Dark Agenda (2019) explored the left’s war against America’s Christian roots; Blitz (2020) cataloged Trump’s magnificent presidential record and the left’s brazen attempt to misrepresent it; The Enemy Within provided an overview of “woke” America, with a special focus on cancel culture, the war on whiteness, and the rise of Critical Race Theory; and I Can’t Breathe took on Black Lives Matter – its poisonous ideology, its deep-seated hypocrisy, and, not least, its roster of ersatz martyrs, from Trayvon Martin to George Floyd, whose purported victimization has been used to undergirl a fraudulent narrative of systematic racism and police brutality.
Admittedly, some of us didn’t need to be told that BLM was a crock, that CRT is hogwash, or that Trump had been a terrific president. And happily, more and more Americans are recognizing the left-wing narrative – from the climate-change hoax to the “insurrection” lie, from the Biden crime family cover-up to the trans fantasy – for the Big Lie that it is. But tens of millions still believe the legacy media’s tall tales. ((And while they continue to believe, the left continues to consolidate its hold on the Democratic Party, the legacy media, the elite universities, major corporations, and the higher levels of the military and intelligence agencies. Which is why The Radical Mind – in which Horowitz once again takes on the left with clarity, urgency, and undiminished vigor – matters so much.
In order to make one of his key points, Horowitz takes us back to the Vietnam War. As that conflict dragged on and the protest marches grew in size and number, the ability of the U.S. to prosecute the war was weakened, leading eventually to a messy, mortifying withdrawal. And what happened then? The Communists moved in and slaughtered millions. And what, asks Horowitz, did the leaders of the American peace movement do in response to this monstrous genocide, in which the victims vastly outnumbered U.S. war casualties? Nothing. They’d passionately protested the war, but never commented on the postwar butchery. Why? Because, as Horowitz underscores, they were never really opposed to war or in love with peace – they were opposed to America and in love with Communism.
That’s the crucial insight: they weren’t antiwar; they were pro-Communist. And the insight, as Horowitz adroitly points out, still applies today, mutatis mutandis: establishment Democrats – who’ve left liberalism far behind and embraced Marx – “are not soft on crime. They are pro-crime.” Because crime is social justice in action. Looting is reparation; theft is wealth redistribution.
Understand this and you’ll understand everything. Why illegal aliens were flown for free from the Texas border to cities around the country while U.S. citizens were billed for being airlifted out of Israel after October 7. Why colleges that a year ago were firing faculty for holding mainstream views now defend professors who cheer genocide. Why, as antisemitism has skyrocketed, the Biden administration chose to introduce an initiative against Islamophobia. And why the same Justice Department officials and Soros-funded DAs who gave a pass to Antifa rioters and BLM arsonists are inventing bogus reasons to bring down Donald Trump.
But of course the left has no choice: it has to crush Trump. It’s nothing less than an existential threat to government of the people, by the people, and for the people. And who or what, above all else, represents an existential threat to them? Trump, naturally. Of all the politicians who ran for president in 2016, he was the only one who truly challenged the leftist takeover – and the establishment Republicans who were content to be the controlled opposition.
And so they came up with the Russia-collusion hoax – and more. Even some of his purported allies tried to foil his determination to “make America great again.” And still, as Horowitz reminds us, Trump achieved a great deal for ordinary Americans during his four years in the White House. He took the economy to new heights. He engineered historic peace agreements in the Middle East. These and other achievements strengthened America, served its people – and stymied the pernicious designs of the left, whose media minions dropped these triumphs down the memory hole. Democrats have long posed as champions of the “black community,” but in reality, ever since LBJ’s Great Society, they’ve promoted policies that ensured the persistence of black poverty, crime, and joblessness. And they’ve done this because for progressives – as Horowitz writes, making yet another crucial point – “the issue is never the issue.”
Exactly. The issue is never the issue. Since the Hamas invasion of Israel, we’ve seen left-wing student activists – including many who identify as gay and transgender – marching in support of the terrorists. Observers have asked: don’t these kids realize that if they went to Gaza, they’d be dispatched instantly? Maybe so, maybe not. But what they do know – and it’s the only thing that matters to them – is that Hamas, like them, wants to smash the West. Only the revolution matters. Never mind that the revolution, ever since Robespierre, has always ended up devouring its own: such details never stop a true believer. So it is that Greta Thunberg, formerly obsessed with climate change, has now become a champion of Hamas.
So it goes. When Obama “put kids in cages,” nobody on the left cared – but when the practice continued under Trump, they began screaming about it. Under Trump, the number of unaccompanied children crossing the border was tiny compared to what it’s been under Biden; but the left-wing compassion for those kids disappeared the moment the doddering Democrat from Delaware shuffled into the Oval Office. As Horowitz states, child trafficking at the border is “a humanitarian crisis without precedent” – yet it’s “sparked no revolt or opposition within the Democratic Party,” because those children’s well-being matters far less to the left than the goal of “changing the demographics and voting patterns of the American electorate” by permitting millions of prospective Democratic voters to cross the Rio Grande.
Since the radical mind now touches virtually every corner of American life, this book covers a lot of territory. The Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion departments that, under Obama, were installed at colleges and businesses and in every federal agency? As Horowitz shows, they’re nothing more than Maoist “re-education camps.” He discusses the left’s conquest of even the FBI, CIA, and armed forces, with people like Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin promising, absurdly, to fight “racists” in the military and Attorney General Merrick Garland and Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas claiming that our “greatest domestic threat” is white supremacism.
What else? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her “squad” get the full Horowitz treatment. So does the grotesquely overrated Sam Harris, who’s supposed to be some kind of philosopher, ethicist, and hero of rationalism but who suffers from one of the world’s severest cases of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Hunter Biden, said Harris on a podcast last year, “literally could have the corpses of children in his basement” and “I would not have cared….It doesn’t even stack up against Trump University, right?” A chilling assertion, but look at it this way: the cynicism with which the southern border has been left open to all comers, including child traffickers, certainly reaffirms – as did the indifference of Mao, Pol Pot, and others to the loss of innocent lives – that in the minds of many a dedicated leftist, Sam Harris apparently included, keeping the “right” people in power and keeping the “wrong” people out is worth the corpses of any number of children.
“Destroy the old, establish the new.” It’s a motto of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and Horowitz uses it as the epilogue to one of his chapters. Destruction; iconoclasm; pulling down statues of Jefferson and putting up statues of George Floyd: that’s the whole game in a nutshell. Recall Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign promise to “fundamentally transform America.” As Horowitz points out, it all goes back to the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), who counseled that the revolution should be advanced not with guns and bullets but rather “by taking over the means of cultural production.” The Sixties radicals whose antiwar marches failed to rock the system heeded this sage advice: after putting away their placards and posters, they went on to influential careers in the cultural field – and (especially) as professors, one of whom, the former Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayers, became a mentor to none other than Obama himself.
And it was Obama who, proving indeed to be transformational, took the radicalization of America to a new level, expertly prodding the country into greater and greater division. It’s Obama, too, who, during this Twilight Zone sequel to the unfairly aborted Trump presidency, still seems to be in charge. As we approach yet another election in which the left will, once again, surely do all it can to foil the will of the deplorables, David Horowitz has given us an illuminating invaluable account of these people’s determination to quash everything that’s good about America – a determination that those of us who are true patriots must, in these times when Marxists hold almost all of the reins of power, resolve to resist with all our might. In so doing we’re fortunate to have as a role model this man who had the strength of character to confess that he’d been wrong, and who has, ever since, with incomparable backbone, devoted his life to standing up for the freedom that he once sought to destroy.
[Order David Horowitz’s new book, The Radical Mind: The Destructive Plans of the Woke Left: HERE.]
“The belief that the world is marching towards justice, and that to be a progressive means one is ‘on the right side of history,’” writes David Horowitz in his important new book, The Radical Mind: The Destructive Plans of the Woke Left, “is a delusion that will justify any and every atrocity, and already has.”
Nobody knows this better than Horowitz. Born into a Communist family, he was at the very center of the action during the Vietnam War and Black Power movement. After his epochal autobiography, Radical Son (1996), which rivetingly recounted his career in, and ultimate departure from, the left, he published a number of books – with titles like Uncivil Wars: The Controversy Over Reparations for Slavery and Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left – that anatomized the left’s ongoing assault on American norms and values. And in the wake of his monumental, eight-volume compilation The Black Book of the American Left, he’s written a series of brief, eminently cogent bestsellers that are the Trump era’s version of Thomas Paine’s indispensable Revolutionary-era pamphlets Common Sense and The American Crisis.
To wit: Dark Agenda (2019) explored the left’s war against America’s Christian roots; Blitz (2020) cataloged Trump’s magnificent presidential record and the left’s brazen attempt to misrepresent it; The Enemy Within provided an overview of “woke” America, with a special focus on cancel culture, the war on whiteness, and the rise of Critical Race Theory; and I Can’t Breathe took on Black Lives Matter – its poisonous ideology, its deep-seated hypocrisy, and, not least, its roster of ersatz martyrs, from Trayvon Martin to George Floyd, whose purported victimization has been used to undergirl a fraudulent narrative of systematic racism and police brutality.
Admittedly, some of us didn’t need to be told that BLM was a crock, that CRT is hogwash, or that Trump had been a terrific president. And happily, more and more Americans are recognizing the left-wing narrative – from the climate-change hoax to the “insurrection” lie, from the Biden crime family cover-up to the trans fantasy – for the Big Lie that it is. But tens of millions still believe the legacy media’s tall tales. ((And while they continue to believe, the left continues to consolidate its hold on the Democratic Party, the legacy media, the elite universities, major corporations, and the higher levels of the military and intelligence agencies. Which is why The Radical Mind – in which Horowitz once again takes on the left with clarity, urgency, and undiminished vigor – matters so much.
In order to make one of his key points, Horowitz takes us back to the Vietnam War. As that conflict dragged on and the protest marches grew in size and number, the ability of the U.S. to prosecute the war was weakened, leading eventually to a messy, mortifying withdrawal. And what happened then? The Communists moved in and slaughtered millions. And what, asks Horowitz, did the leaders of the American peace movement do in response to this monstrous genocide, in which the victims vastly outnumbered U.S. war casualties? Nothing. They’d passionately protested the war, but never commented on the postwar butchery. Why? Because, as Horowitz underscores, they were never really opposed to war or in love with peace – they were opposed to America and in love with Communism.
That’s the crucial insight: they weren’t antiwar; they were pro-Communist. And the insight, as Horowitz adroitly points out, still applies today, mutatis mutandis: establishment Democrats – who’ve left liberalism far behind and embraced Marx – “are not soft on crime. They are pro-crime.” Because crime is social justice in action. Looting is reparation; theft is wealth redistribution.
Understand this and you’ll understand everything. Why illegal aliens were flown for free from the Texas border to cities around the country while U.S. citizens were billed for being airlifted out of Israel after October 7. Why colleges that a year ago were firing faculty for holding mainstream views now defend professors who cheer genocide. Why, as antisemitism has skyrocketed, the Biden administration chose to introduce an initiative against Islamophobia. And why the same Justice Department officials and Soros-funded DAs who gave a pass to Antifa rioters and BLM arsonists are inventing bogus reasons to bring down Donald Trump.
But of course the left has no choice: it has to crush Trump. It’s nothing less than an existential threat to government of the people, by the people, and for the people. And who or what, above all else, represents an existential threat to them? Trump, naturally. Of all the politicians who ran for president in 2016, he was the only one who truly challenged the leftist takeover – and the establishment Republicans who were content to be the controlled opposition.
And so they came up with the Russia-collusion hoax – and more. Even some of his purported allies tried to foil his determination to “make America great again.” And still, as Horowitz reminds us, Trump achieved a great deal for ordinary Americans during his four years in the White House. He took the economy to new heights. He engineered historic peace agreements in the Middle East. These and other achievements strengthened America, served its people – and stymied the pernicious designs of the left, whose media minions dropped these triumphs down the memory hole. Democrats have long posed as champions of the “black community,” but in reality, ever since LBJ’s Great Society, they’ve promoted policies that ensured the persistence of black poverty, crime, and joblessness. And they’ve done this because for progressives – as Horowitz writes, making yet another crucial point – “the issue is never the issue.”
Exactly. The issue is never the issue. Since the Hamas invasion of Israel, we’ve seen left-wing student activists – including many who identify as gay and transgender – marching in support of the terrorists. Observers have asked: don’t these kids realize that if they went to Gaza, they’d be dispatched instantly? Maybe so, maybe not. But what they do know – and it’s the only thing that matters to them – is that Hamas, like them, wants to smash the West. Only the revolution matters. Never mind that the revolution, ever since Robespierre, has always ended up devouring its own: such details never stop a true believer. So it is that Greta Thunberg, formerly obsessed with climate change, has now become a champion of Hamas.
So it goes. When Obama “put kids in cages,” nobody on the left cared – but when the practice continued under Trump, they began screaming about it. Under Trump, the number of unaccompanied children crossing the border was tiny compared to what it’s been under Biden; but the left-wing compassion for those kids disappeared the moment the doddering Democrat from Delaware shuffled into the Oval Office. As Horowitz states, child trafficking at the border is “a humanitarian crisis without precedent” – yet it’s “sparked no revolt or opposition within the Democratic Party,” because those children’s well-being matters far less to the left than the goal of “changing the demographics and voting patterns of the American electorate” by permitting millions of prospective Democratic voters to cross the Rio Grande.
Since the radical mind now touches virtually every corner of American life, this book covers a lot of territory. The Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion departments that, under Obama, were installed at colleges and businesses and in every federal agency? As Horowitz shows, they’re nothing more than Maoist “re-education camps.” He discusses the left’s conquest of even the FBI, CIA, and armed forces, with people like Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin promising, absurdly, to fight “racists” in the military and Attorney General Merrick Garland and Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas claiming that our “greatest domestic threat” is white supremacism.
What else? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her “squad” get the full Horowitz treatment. So does the grotesquely overrated Sam Harris, who’s supposed to be some kind of philosopher, ethicist, and hero of rationalism but who suffers from one of the world’s severest cases of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Hunter Biden, said Harris on a podcast last year, “literally could have the corpses of children in his basement” and “I would not have cared….It doesn’t even stack up against Trump University, right?” A chilling assertion, but look at it this way: the cynicism with which the southern border has been left open to all comers, including child traffickers, certainly reaffirms – as did the indifference of Mao, Pol Pot, and others to the loss of innocent lives – that in the minds of many a dedicated leftist, Sam Harris apparently included, keeping the “right” people in power and keeping the “wrong” people out is worth the corpses of any number of children.
“Destroy the old, establish the new.” It’s a motto of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and Horowitz uses it as the epilogue to one of his chapters. Destruction; iconoclasm; pulling down statues of Jefferson and putting up statues of George Floyd: that’s the whole game in a nutshell. Recall Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign promise to “fundamentally transform America.” As Horowitz points out, it all goes back to the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), who counseled that the revolution should be advanced not with guns and bullets but rather “by taking over the means of cultural production.” The Sixties radicals whose antiwar marches failed to rock the system heeded this sage advice: after putting away their placards and posters, they went on to influential careers in the cultural field – and (especially) as professors, one of whom, the former Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayers, became a mentor to none other than Obama himself.
And it was Obama who, proving indeed to be transformational, took the radicalization of America to a new level, expertly prodding the country into greater and greater division. It’s Obama, too, who, during this Twilight Zone sequel to the unfairly aborted Trump presidency, still seems to be in charge. As we approach yet another election in which the left will, once again, surely do all it can to foil the will of the deplorables, David Horowitz has given us an illuminating invaluable account of these people’s determination to quash everything that’s good about America – a determination that those of us who are true patriots must, in these times when Marxists hold almost all of the reins of power, resolve to resist with all our might. In so doing we’re fortunate to have as a role model this man who had the strength of character to confess that he’d been wrong, and who has, ever since, with incomparable backbone, devoted his life to standing up for the freedom that he once sought to destroy.
Bruce Bawer
Reader Interactions
Pro-Palestinian antisemitism was carefully inculcated in the American psyche
I just received an email from a one-time acquaintance, a hardcore non-Jewish leftist married to an equally hardcore Jewish leftist. She assured me that Israel is engaged in an ongoing genocide against Palestinians and faked a massacre to gain sympathy for the latest iteration of this genocidal plan. This person is not a crazy person on a street corner. She is a biologist with a job—and millions across America share this person’s beliefs. How in the world did this happen? Gary Wexler writes that it was part of a deliberate plan sparked by money flowing from the promised peace of the Oslo Accords.
Before I get into Wexler’s essay, let me just say that it’s a very peculiar genocide (a) that sees the population of Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank increase from 1.1 million in 1967 to 14 million in 2023 and (b) leaves slightly more than seven million Jews surrounded by approximately 250 million Muslims and/or Arabs. Having said that, how in the world did we get to the point at which seemingly rational people claim that there was no attack against Israel and, instead, that what we’ve heard about October 7 is all part of a nefarious scheme to kill all the Muslims in the West Bank and Gaza.
The alleged goal is to colonize land to which Israel has no entitlement whatsoever (never mind the Jews’ 4,000 years of continuous residency versus the fewer than 200 years the Arabs have been there). Even to state the proposition is to reveal its insanity. And yet…
According to Wexler, once the Oslo Accords came into being, big money flowed into the region. He was one of the people the Ford Foundation hired to start handing out money “to help build a vibrant liberal civil society.”
Image: Pro-Hamas at Harvard. YouTube screen grab.
Wexler describes how the Israelis had wonderful visions of peace and cooperation. Not so the Arabs to whom he spoke. They didn’t mention the word “peace,” denied co-existence, and spoke in coded terms of a continued occupation. In other words, they saw the Oslo Accords as a pause, not an end, to their continued war against Israel.
Wexler tried to explain to Israelis that the Arabs didn’t share their goals, and he asked the Arab organizations with which he spoke questions about “terrorism, cooperation and even budget.” When he brought up those issues, “the interviewee would slam on the brakes.” And every time, Wexler would be told the same thing:
“When you are in Haifa meeting with Itijaa, you can ask that question to Ameer Makhoul.” Itijaa was an Arab civil rights organization. Ameer Makhoul was its executive director. It became clear to me that Ameer Makhoul had some type of control over all the Arab NGOs I was speaking to.
When Wexler and his Israeli colleague, Debra London, finally did meet with Makhoul, they discovered that he had detailed information about every meeting Wexler had previously had with the Arab organizations. Additionally, Makhoul had an equally detailed dossier about all facets of Wexler’s life, a clear intimidation tactic. Then, having put Wexler in his place, Makhoul explained the plan the Palestinians would put into effect under cover of the Oslo Accords and with the money soon to be flowing in:
“And now, Gary Wexler,” he sat down, “let me give you more direct answers.” He looked me straight in the eye. “Just like you were a Zionist campus activist, we will create, over the next years, Palestinian campus activists in America and all over the world. Bigger and better than any Zionist activists. Just like you spent your summers on the kibbutz, we will bring college students to spend their summers in refugee camps and work with our people. Just like you have been part of creating global pro-Israel organizations, we will create global pro-Palestinian organizations. Just like you today help create PR campaigns and events for Israel, so will we, but we will get more coverage than you ever have.”
He stood again this time, right over me. “You wonder how we will make this happen, how we will pay for this? Not with the money from your liberal Jewish organizations who are now funding us. But from the European Union, Arab and Moslem governments, wealthy Arab people and their organizations. Eventually, we will not take another dollar from the Jews.”
The meeting ended, Makhoul called the Ford Foundation to accuse Wexler of threatening him, and Makhoul was eventually arrested as a Syrian spy. But none of that’s important.
What’s important is that Makhoul and those allied with him did exactly as promised: They flooded the world—the media and academia—with anti-Israel propaganda, starting with the Muhammed al-Dura hoax. Writes Wexler:
As the years went on, I began to see what Ameer Makhoul had laid out to me taking shape. The PR coverage was first: The Muhammad al-Durrah incident in Gaza, when a 12-year-old boy was shot to death on the second day of the Second Intifada, capturing global headlines. The Mavi Marmara, the Turkish Flotilla to Gaza that the Israelis stormed, killing several Palestinian activists, grabbing global headlines. I knew the Mavi Marmara was manufactured for the exposure it would gain.
Then the campuses: The creation of Apartheid Week worldwide. The growth of BDS. The student volunteers who began by the thousands to work in the Palestinian territories and its refugee camps. The shocking creation of anti-Zionist Jewish student groups.
What we’re seeing today is not an accident. It’s part of a deliberate, well-funded plan to say that terrorists who bake babies ovens, rape women to death, and torture young children before murdering them have the moral high ground when held up against a liberal democracy that, when fighting a hot war, tries to evacuate the enemy’s civilians. And the plan is succeeding, probably far beyond Makhoul’s wildest dreams.
I just received an email from a one-time acquaintance, a hardcore non-Jewish leftist married to an equally hardcore Jewish leftist. She assured me that Israel is engaged in an ongoing genocide against Palestinians and faked a massacre to gain sympathy for the latest iteration of this genocidal plan. This person is not a crazy person on a street corner. She is a biologist with a job—and millions across America share this person’s beliefs. How in the world did this happen? Gary Wexler writes that it was part of a deliberate plan sparked by money flowing from the promised peace of the Oslo Accords.
Before I get into Wexler’s essay, let me just say that it’s a very peculiar genocide (a) that sees the population of Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank increase from 1.1 million in 1967 to 14 million in 2023 and (b) leaves slightly more than seven million Jews surrounded by approximately 250 million Muslims and/or Arabs. Having said that, how in the world did we get to the point at which seemingly rational people claim that there was no attack against Israel and, instead, that what we’ve heard about October 7 is all part of a nefarious scheme to kill all the Muslims in the West Bank and Gaza.
The alleged goal is to colonize land to which Israel has no entitlement whatsoever (never mind the Jews’ 4,000 years of continuous residency versus the fewer than 200 years the Arabs have been there). Even to state the proposition is to reveal its insanity. And yet…
According to Wexler, once the Oslo Accords came into being, big money flowed into the region. He was one of the people the Ford Foundation hired to start handing out money “to help build a vibrant liberal civil society.”
Image: Pro-Hamas at Harvard. YouTube screen grab.
Wexler describes how the Israelis had wonderful visions of peace and cooperation. Not so the Arabs to whom he spoke. They didn’t mention the word “peace,” denied co-existence, and spoke in coded terms of a continued occupation. In other words, they saw the Oslo Accords as a pause, not an end, to their continued war against Israel.
Wexler tried to explain to Israelis that the Arabs didn’t share their goals, and he asked the Arab organizations with which he spoke questions about “terrorism, cooperation and even budget.” When he brought up those issues, “the interviewee would slam on the brakes.” And every time, Wexler would be told the same thing:
“When you are in Haifa meeting with Itijaa, you can ask that question to Ameer Makhoul.” Itijaa was an Arab civil rights organization. Ameer Makhoul was its executive director. It became clear to me that Ameer Makhoul had some type of control over all the Arab NGOs I was speaking to.
When Wexler and his Israeli colleague, Debra London, finally did meet with Makhoul, they discovered that he had detailed information about every meeting Wexler had previously had with the Arab organizations. Additionally, Makhoul had an equally detailed dossier about all facets of Wexler’s life, a clear intimidation tactic. Then, having put Wexler in his place, Makhoul explained the plan the Palestinians would put into effect under cover of the Oslo Accords and with the money soon to be flowing in:
“And now, Gary Wexler,” he sat down, “let me give you more direct answers.” He looked me straight in the eye. “Just like you were a Zionist campus activist, we will create, over the next years, Palestinian campus activists in America and all over the world. Bigger and better than any Zionist activists. Just like you spent your summers on the kibbutz, we will bring college students to spend their summers in refugee camps and work with our people. Just like you have been part of creating global pro-Israel organizations, we will create global pro-Palestinian organizations. Just like you today help create PR campaigns and events for Israel, so will we, but we will get more coverage than you ever have.”
He stood again this time, right over me. “You wonder how we will make this happen, how we will pay for this? Not with the money from your liberal Jewish organizations who are now funding us. But from the European Union, Arab and Moslem governments, wealthy Arab people and their organizations. Eventually, we will not take another dollar from the Jews.”
The meeting ended, Makhoul called the Ford Foundation to accuse Wexler of threatening him, and Makhoul was eventually arrested as a Syrian spy. But none of that’s important.
What’s important is that Makhoul and those allied with him did exactly as promised: They flooded the world—the media and academia—with anti-Israel propaganda, starting with the Muhammed al-Dura hoax. Writes Wexler:
As the years went on, I began to see what Ameer Makhoul had laid out to me taking shape. The PR coverage was first: The Muhammad al-Durrah incident in Gaza, when a 12-year-old boy was shot to death on the second day of the Second Intifada, capturing global headlines. The Mavi Marmara, the Turkish Flotilla to Gaza that the Israelis stormed, killing several Palestinian activists, grabbing global headlines. I knew the Mavi Marmara was manufactured for the exposure it would gain.
Then the campuses: The creation of Apartheid Week worldwide. The growth of BDS. The student volunteers who began by the thousands to work in the Palestinian territories and its refugee camps. The shocking creation of anti-Zionist Jewish student groups.
What we’re seeing today is not an accident. It’s part of a deliberate, well-funded plan to say that terrorists who bake babies ovens, rape women to death, and torture young children before murdering them have the moral high ground when held up against a liberal democracy that, when fighting a hot war, tries to evacuate the enemy’s civilians. And the plan is succeeding, probably far beyond Makhoul’s wildest dreams.
Teachers Unions for Palestine
Peddling Jew-hate to our kids.
On the same day that thousands of rockets rained down on innocent Israeli citizens, photos and videos emerged of people dancing in the street. This time, those images were not broadcast from Middle Eastern cities but instead filmed right here in the United States.
The examples are well-known. A man in Boston holds up a phone showing a beheaded baby and makes an obscene hand gesture to the camera, recording his laughter. A hijab-wearing woman at a Democratic Socialists of America rally says she’s glad for the Hamas attack and does not consider herself an American. Students in Cooper Union lead a pro-Palestinian rally brandishing anti-Zionist posters, shouting anti-Semitic slogans, and terrifying Jewish students barricaded in the library as anti-Israel protestors bang on the doors.
These offensive messages are orchestrated. The people delivering them clearly have been propagandized to hate Jews. Many of their talking points have a not-so-surprising source: radicalized teachers’ unions.
Leftist support for Hamas is grounded in part in years of propaganda, denouncing Western values, from some of the unionized teachers indoctrinating American children. Those activist teachers belong to unions that exploit the profession and muzzle good teachers, while working to turn our kids into leftist activists.
Teachers’ unions support Black Lives Matter and introduced the group’s messages into our schools after George Floyd’s death. It should be no surprise, then, that just as BLM Chicago released an image of a Hamas parachuter with the caption, “I Stand with Palestine,” student activists cheer Hamas’s evil, too.
A BLM spinoff, BLM at School, called the violence a “direct result of decades of Israeli settler colonialism . . . occupation, blockade, apartheid and attempted genocide” of Palestinians. The statement’s language is reminiscent of a National Education Association (NEA) “new business item” from 2019 alleging “apartheid,” “gross human rights abuses,” and “atrocities” against Palestinians. BLM at School, including its BLM Week of Action, routinely receive the backing of the NEA and American Federation of Teachers.
Year after year, unions here and abroad spare no effort to denounce Israel and promote the Palestinians, whose leaders have never renounced their stated objective to annihilate the Jews and Israel. In 2022, for example, the NEA adopted a business item promising to “support and spotlight the efforts of our fellow teacher union colleagues within the Palestinian and Israeli teachers unions affiliated with Education International.” Education International includes 383 teacher groups from around the world; the General Union of Palestinian Teachers (an arm of the Palestine Liberation Organization) and the National Education Union of the United Kingdom are members. According to the Jewish Chronicle, dozens of Jewish teachers resigned from the National Education Union because of its stance on Israel: NEU leaders reportedly visit the radical GUPT and platform GUPT leaders who say that Israel has massacred Palestinians in a way “worse than the Holocaust itself,” and who have “praised murderers as ‘martyrs.’”
Teachers’ unions in America hold similar views. Two years ago, American Federation of Teachers affiliate United Teachers of Los Angeles backed a resolution condemning Israel. Around the same time, United Educators of San Francisco voted to support BDS—boycott, divestment and sanctions—against Israel, as did Seattle’s public schools. Randi Weingarten, head of the AFT, denounced Jewish critics of her stalling to reopen schools after Covid-19 shutdowns, calling Jews in America part of the “ownership class.” As author Marc Stern noted, had such words come from Louis Farrakhan or a Proud Boys member, they’d be correctly condemned as anti-Semitic.
Union officials may stand strongly against Israel and for Palestine, but most teachers disagree with the leadership, like the Jewish teacher in Los Angeles who said that she feared for her safety after the UTLA vote.
Still, the unions, which draw funding for their political activities from teachers’ dues, have no qualms in peddling anti-Israel views.
Teachers’ unions are among the nation’s most influential labor groups. They are famously successful at helping elect legislators who will codify radical union priorities into laws governing classrooms. It’s thus easy to imagine that more young people in America will embrace their ideas about Israel.
On the same day that thousands of rockets rained down on innocent Israeli citizens, photos and videos emerged of people dancing in the street. This time, those images were not broadcast from Middle Eastern cities but instead filmed right here in the United States.
The examples are well-known. A man in Boston holds up a phone showing a beheaded baby and makes an obscene hand gesture to the camera, recording his laughter. A hijab-wearing woman at a Democratic Socialists of America rally says she’s glad for the Hamas attack and does not consider herself an American. Students in Cooper Union lead a pro-Palestinian rally brandishing anti-Zionist posters, shouting anti-Semitic slogans, and terrifying Jewish students barricaded in the library as anti-Israel protestors bang on the doors.
These offensive messages are orchestrated. The people delivering them clearly have been propagandized to hate Jews. Many of their talking points have a not-so-surprising source: radicalized teachers’ unions.
Leftist support for Hamas is grounded in part in years of propaganda, denouncing Western values, from some of the unionized teachers indoctrinating American children. Those activist teachers belong to unions that exploit the profession and muzzle good teachers, while working to turn our kids into leftist activists.
Teachers’ unions support Black Lives Matter and introduced the group’s messages into our schools after George Floyd’s death. It should be no surprise, then, that just as BLM Chicago released an image of a Hamas parachuter with the caption, “I Stand with Palestine,” student activists cheer Hamas’s evil, too.
A BLM spinoff, BLM at School, called the violence a “direct result of decades of Israeli settler colonialism . . . occupation, blockade, apartheid and attempted genocide” of Palestinians. The statement’s language is reminiscent of a National Education Association (NEA) “new business item” from 2019 alleging “apartheid,” “gross human rights abuses,” and “atrocities” against Palestinians. BLM at School, including its BLM Week of Action, routinely receive the backing of the NEA and American Federation of Teachers.
Year after year, unions here and abroad spare no effort to denounce Israel and promote the Palestinians, whose leaders have never renounced their stated objective to annihilate the Jews and Israel. In 2022, for example, the NEA adopted a business item promising to “support and spotlight the efforts of our fellow teacher union colleagues within the Palestinian and Israeli teachers unions affiliated with Education International.” Education International includes 383 teacher groups from around the world; the General Union of Palestinian Teachers (an arm of the Palestine Liberation Organization) and the National Education Union of the United Kingdom are members. According to the Jewish Chronicle, dozens of Jewish teachers resigned from the National Education Union because of its stance on Israel: NEU leaders reportedly visit the radical GUPT and platform GUPT leaders who say that Israel has massacred Palestinians in a way “worse than the Holocaust itself,” and who have “praised murderers as ‘martyrs.’”
Teachers’ unions in America hold similar views. Two years ago, American Federation of Teachers affiliate United Teachers of Los Angeles backed a resolution condemning Israel. Around the same time, United Educators of San Francisco voted to support BDS—boycott, divestment and sanctions—against Israel, as did Seattle’s public schools. Randi Weingarten, head of the AFT, denounced Jewish critics of her stalling to reopen schools after Covid-19 shutdowns, calling Jews in America part of the “ownership class.” As author Marc Stern noted, had such words come from Louis Farrakhan or a Proud Boys member, they’d be correctly condemned as anti-Semitic.
Union officials may stand strongly against Israel and for Palestine, but most teachers disagree with the leadership, like the Jewish teacher in Los Angeles who said that she feared for her safety after the UTLA vote.
Still, the unions, which draw funding for their political activities from teachers’ dues, have no qualms in peddling anti-Israel views.
Teachers’ unions are among the nation’s most influential labor groups. They are famously successful at helping elect legislators who will codify radical union priorities into laws governing classrooms. It’s thus easy to imagine that more young people in America will embrace their ideas about Israel.
Reader Interactions
Taxpayers helped fund Hamas-affiliated organizations
Yesterday, we wrote about the Marxist American millionaires who are residents of China and donated over $20 million to an organization that’s mobilized many of the biggest pro-Hamas marches across America. Today, we’ll take that report a bit further to discuss the Hamas-aligned non-profit organizations that have received hundreds of millions of dollars from corporate foundations, employee giving, and even taxpayers themselves.
Preliminarily, let’s review 501(c) organizations. As taxpayers, we all know that we get write-offs if we donate to a “501(c)(3)” organization. However, there are actually 29 types of 501(c) non-profit organizations. All of them are, in varying ways, exempt from paying some federal and state taxes. This means that they get a lot of bang for the donated buck.
I know that accountants are ripping their hair out over my generalized and probably inaccurate description of what’s going on here, but I just want you, the reader, to get the gist: Organizations under the 501(c) umbrella have tax benefits. This means that 501(c) organizations pay less to the government than they would if they were not 501(c) organizations.
To the extent our federal and state governments spend lots of money, these 501(c) organizations contribute less to these expenditures than non-501(c) regular organizations do. We, the taxpayers, take up the slack, and we’re okay with it for “widows and orphans” charities…but what if the entity is channeling money into terrorism? What then?
Image by Andrea Widburg using a photo from Freepik.
This is a legitimate question because Sam Westrop, writing at Focus on Western Islamism, describes how FWI has tracked over $260 million that has been poured into ostensible 501(c) charities that exist to support Hamas—and that’s not even counting money sent to those organizations directly from taxpayers:
An FWI investigation has uncovered over 260 million dollars sent through the 501(c) system to Hamas-aligned charities in the United States, provided by corporate foundations, employee-giving schemes, partisan community groups and a powerful array of Islamist grant-making foundations that make use of a largely-unregulated nonprofit sector.
FWI’s in-depth investigation has also uncovered new instances of charities seemingly belonging to Hamas’s infrastructure in North America, evidence of terrorism links, and instances of horrendously violently anti-Semitic rhetoric among the officials of leading 501(c) charities across America. Some of these charities and their activities are even funded through the taxpayer, with over $100 million of grants to these charities authorized by the federal government over the past decade.
The U.S. government recognizes Hamas as a terrorist organization, making it a criminal act to send funds directly to it. It has also long designated certain Hamas-affiliated people and entities as terrorist organizations themselves. However, there’s always the problem of apparent charities that donate to other charities that donate to Hamas or affiliated organizations. Writes Westrop,
Indeed, radical movements have long used charitable programs and promises of social welfare to build a base of support and help with recruitment. Crucially, as the U.S. government realizes, charities do not have to fund Hamas’s terrorist operations directly to benefit the terrorist organization financially or ideologically.
At a certain point, the chain is so attenuated that it’s not immediately apparent that monies donated in America are directly funding terrorism—although I’m willing to bet that most of the donors to the charities identified in the article are comfortable with indirectly funding Hamas-based terrorism.
The real problem is that the U.S. government has been incredibly lax when it comes to investigating ostensible charities that intertwine charity and terrorism:
Much of the charitable work is indeed real, but it still serves to benefit terror. In Gaza, for instance, decades ago, Hamas came to the fore by distinguishing itself, through its charitable work, from the incompetence and corruption of the PLO. While Palestinian nationalists embezzled millions, their Islamist rivals set up medical clinics, orphanages and summer camps for Palestinian youth, winning grassroots support. Decades earlier, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt pioneered a similar approach.
In the early 2000s, writes Westrop, the U.S. was aggressive about policing organizations that were effectively terrorists handing out largesse. Now, though, the government isn’t doing squat:
Today, however, the law is still simply not being enforced. The activities of terror-aligned charities are largely ignored by law enforcement and policy-makers. Sometimes, the taxpayer even funds these radical charities through a wide array of obscene government grant programs.
Moreover, the problem is probably worse than FWI has exposed to date. The Schedule F forms that are supposed to disclose 501(c)s’ foreign spending have improperly missing information that makes it impossible to figure out how much money really goes to these faux charities. Still, what information is available reveals staggering sums of money flowing to Hamas-aligned charities, which means flowing to Hamas itself.
If you go to the linked article, you can see the nature of these top “charities” benefitting from these funds. It makes for illuminating reading.
Yesterday, we wrote about the Marxist American millionaires who are residents of China and donated over $20 million to an organization that’s mobilized many of the biggest pro-Hamas marches across America. Today, we’ll take that report a bit further to discuss the Hamas-aligned non-profit organizations that have received hundreds of millions of dollars from corporate foundations, employee giving, and even taxpayers themselves.
Preliminarily, let’s review 501(c) organizations. As taxpayers, we all know that we get write-offs if we donate to a “501(c)(3)” organization. However, there are actually 29 types of 501(c) non-profit organizations. All of them are, in varying ways, exempt from paying some federal and state taxes. This means that they get a lot of bang for the donated buck.
I know that accountants are ripping their hair out over my generalized and probably inaccurate description of what’s going on here, but I just want you, the reader, to get the gist: Organizations under the 501(c) umbrella have tax benefits. This means that 501(c) organizations pay less to the government than they would if they were not 501(c) organizations.
To the extent our federal and state governments spend lots of money, these 501(c) organizations contribute less to these expenditures than non-501(c) regular organizations do. We, the taxpayers, take up the slack, and we’re okay with it for “widows and orphans” charities…but what if the entity is channeling money into terrorism? What then?
Image by Andrea Widburg using a photo from Freepik.
This is a legitimate question because Sam Westrop, writing at Focus on Western Islamism, describes how FWI has tracked over $260 million that has been poured into ostensible 501(c) charities that exist to support Hamas—and that’s not even counting money sent to those organizations directly from taxpayers:
An FWI investigation has uncovered over 260 million dollars sent through the 501(c) system to Hamas-aligned charities in the United States, provided by corporate foundations, employee-giving schemes, partisan community groups and a powerful array of Islamist grant-making foundations that make use of a largely-unregulated nonprofit sector.
FWI’s in-depth investigation has also uncovered new instances of charities seemingly belonging to Hamas’s infrastructure in North America, evidence of terrorism links, and instances of horrendously violently anti-Semitic rhetoric among the officials of leading 501(c) charities across America. Some of these charities and their activities are even funded through the taxpayer, with over $100 million of grants to these charities authorized by the federal government over the past decade.
The U.S. government recognizes Hamas as a terrorist organization, making it a criminal act to send funds directly to it. It has also long designated certain Hamas-affiliated people and entities as terrorist organizations themselves. However, there’s always the problem of apparent charities that donate to other charities that donate to Hamas or affiliated organizations. Writes Westrop,
Indeed, radical movements have long used charitable programs and promises of social welfare to build a base of support and help with recruitment. Crucially, as the U.S. government realizes, charities do not have to fund Hamas’s terrorist operations directly to benefit the terrorist organization financially or ideologically.
At a certain point, the chain is so attenuated that it’s not immediately apparent that monies donated in America are directly funding terrorism—although I’m willing to bet that most of the donors to the charities identified in the article are comfortable with indirectly funding Hamas-based terrorism.
The real problem is that the U.S. government has been incredibly lax when it comes to investigating ostensible charities that intertwine charity and terrorism:
Much of the charitable work is indeed real, but it still serves to benefit terror. In Gaza, for instance, decades ago, Hamas came to the fore by distinguishing itself, through its charitable work, from the incompetence and corruption of the PLO. While Palestinian nationalists embezzled millions, their Islamist rivals set up medical clinics, orphanages and summer camps for Palestinian youth, winning grassroots support. Decades earlier, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt pioneered a similar approach.
In the early 2000s, writes Westrop, the U.S. was aggressive about policing organizations that were effectively terrorists handing out largesse. Now, though, the government isn’t doing squat:
Today, however, the law is still simply not being enforced. The activities of terror-aligned charities are largely ignored by law enforcement and policy-makers. Sometimes, the taxpayer even funds these radical charities through a wide array of obscene government grant programs.
Moreover, the problem is probably worse than FWI has exposed to date. The Schedule F forms that are supposed to disclose 501(c)s’ foreign spending have improperly missing information that makes it impossible to figure out how much money really goes to these faux charities. Still, what information is available reveals staggering sums of money flowing to Hamas-aligned charities, which means flowing to Hamas itself.
If you go to the linked article, you can see the nature of these top “charities” benefitting from these funds. It makes for illuminating reading.
U.S. Pro-Islamist Activist’ We Freed From Egypt Defends Hamas
I warned that helping Aya Hijazi was a big mistake.
I warned in 2017 that the campaign for Aya Hijazi would backfire. Aiding Islamists never produces anything good.
Aya Hijazi was also the photogenic face of a campaign against the post-Brotherhood Egyptian government. Media reports described her as an imprisoned rescue worker who had been released from Egypt after administration intervention.
If you believed the stories, Hijazi had learned French and Spanish while in prison. Photos showed her reading Maya Angelou’s ‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings’ behind bars. Snaps from that calculated photoshoot would be used to illustrate countless media sob stories about her plight in prison.
Mohamed Hassanein, her husband, received far less attention. As did the other arrested members of the Belady Foundation which had been accused of using street children in Muslim Brotherhood riots.
Aya’s cause was quickly taken up by all the usual suspects.
Hillary Clinton had met with President Sisi and called for Hijazi’s release. Rep. Gerry Connolly, the go-to guy for Muslim Brotherhood front groups, had blustered, “The Egyptian government mistakes American resolve.” Avril Haines, the former indie bookstore owner who had been appointed by Obama as Deputy Director of the CIA and Deputy National Security Advisor, despite having no relevant experience, met with Hijazi’s family and issued a statement demanding her release.
Six years later, Aya Hijazi is doing the predictable thing.
“I don’t condemn HAMAS and never will,” Aya Hijazi posted on X on Nov. 7, a month after Hamas massacred more than 1,200 Israelis. “I don’t condemn Palestinians who exhausted every peaceful way on earth to end their occupation and save their lives.”
“I condemn anyone who asks the world to condemn HAMAS,” Hijazi added.
“You are morally abhorrent with reverse standards. One for the Whites and ones for everyone else. And your standards of occupation, land theft, besiegement and mass murder don’t apply to me.”
Trump helped get her out, but you’ll never guess whom Aya Hijazi supports.
Trump and his aides engaged in behind-the-scenes diplomatic efforts to secure Hijazi’s freedom in 2017 after attempts by the previous Obama administration failed. Hijazi, who was 30 years old at the time, was released after spending three years in Egyptian prison on human trafficking charges and was alleged to have ties to the radical Islamist group Muslim Brotherhood.
“I asked the government to let her out,” Trump told The Associated Press at the time. “You know Obama worked on it for three years, got zippo, zero.”
Hijazi endorsed Biden for president in 2020 in a social media post and claimed that Trump only freed her to bolster his “ego.”
Cynthia Farahat, author of “The Secret Apparatus: The Muslim Brotherhood’s Industry of Death,” told Fox News Digital that “no one should be surprised by Aya Hijazi pro Hamas stance.”
“She has and does indeed support the Muslim Brotherhood, and this is why her comments are often featured positively on their official website, something the Brotherhood only does with its overt and covert members and agents,” Farahat said.
Do not help these people. Do not advocate for them. It will bite you in the ass every time. They are the enemy.
I warned in 2017 that the campaign for Aya Hijazi would backfire. Aiding Islamists never produces anything good.
Aya Hijazi was also the photogenic face of a campaign against the post-Brotherhood Egyptian government. Media reports described her as an imprisoned rescue worker who had been released from Egypt after administration intervention.
If you believed the stories, Hijazi had learned French and Spanish while in prison. Photos showed her reading Maya Angelou’s ‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings’ behind bars. Snaps from that calculated photoshoot would be used to illustrate countless media sob stories about her plight in prison.
Mohamed Hassanein, her husband, received far less attention. As did the other arrested members of the Belady Foundation which had been accused of using street children in Muslim Brotherhood riots.
Aya’s cause was quickly taken up by all the usual suspects.
Hillary Clinton had met with President Sisi and called for Hijazi’s release. Rep. Gerry Connolly, the go-to guy for Muslim Brotherhood front groups, had blustered, “The Egyptian government mistakes American resolve.” Avril Haines, the former indie bookstore owner who had been appointed by Obama as Deputy Director of the CIA and Deputy National Security Advisor, despite having no relevant experience, met with Hijazi’s family and issued a statement demanding her release.
Six years later, Aya Hijazi is doing the predictable thing.
“I don’t condemn HAMAS and never will,” Aya Hijazi posted on X on Nov. 7, a month after Hamas massacred more than 1,200 Israelis. “I don’t condemn Palestinians who exhausted every peaceful way on earth to end their occupation and save their lives.”
“I condemn anyone who asks the world to condemn HAMAS,” Hijazi added.
“You are morally abhorrent with reverse standards. One for the Whites and ones for everyone else. And your standards of occupation, land theft, besiegement and mass murder don’t apply to me.”
Trump helped get her out, but you’ll never guess whom Aya Hijazi supports.
Trump and his aides engaged in behind-the-scenes diplomatic efforts to secure Hijazi’s freedom in 2017 after attempts by the previous Obama administration failed. Hijazi, who was 30 years old at the time, was released after spending three years in Egyptian prison on human trafficking charges and was alleged to have ties to the radical Islamist group Muslim Brotherhood.
“I asked the government to let her out,” Trump told The Associated Press at the time. “You know Obama worked on it for three years, got zippo, zero.”
Hijazi endorsed Biden for president in 2020 in a social media post and claimed that Trump only freed her to bolster his “ego.”
Cynthia Farahat, author of “The Secret Apparatus: The Muslim Brotherhood’s Industry of Death,” told Fox News Digital that “no one should be surprised by Aya Hijazi pro Hamas stance.”
“She has and does indeed support the Muslim Brotherhood, and this is why her comments are often featured positively on their official website, something the Brotherhood only does with its overt and covert members and agents,” Farahat said.
Do not help these people. Do not advocate for them. It will bite you in the ass every time. They are the enemy.
Daniel Greenfield
Reader Interactions
Osama bin Laden’s Evil Legacy
Even though Bin Laden/Zawahiri of Al Qaeda and Abu Bakr al Baghdadi of ISIS are dead, on anniversaries of 9/11 -- and now Hamas’s October 7th event -- a haunting and important question lurks. Why do many young Arabs, Muslims, and even Americans continue to become entranced with Osama bin Laden's Pied Piper music of radical fascist fundamentalist Muslim Jihad? Via TikTok, thousands of American youths recently embraced Osama bin Laden's twisted "Message to the World" over social media.
It is also important to try to understand the uniquely chilling social-psychological fit between the religiously saturated but distorted charismatic leadership of a man like Osama bin Laden/Al Qaeda/ISIS, and the group psychology of communities where he and his colleagues and mentors recruit devoted terrorists. Afghanistan is once again becoming an Al Qaeda and ISIS haven as is Yemen, where Bin Laden’s father was born.
It is a serious mistake to glibly label and dismiss deceased men like Osama bin Laden, Ayman Al Zawahiri, or Abu Bakr al Baghdadi as simply dead mass murderers, psychotics, thugs, psychopaths, or criminals. In painful truth, they are often perceived as Robin Hood-like figures and spiritual Pied Piper spiritual heroes for many people in the unreformed fundamentalist Muslim world. Even American homegrown terrorists who want to attack America and the West often express profound admiration for the martyred Osama bin Laden. For American leaders to imply that Al Qaeda, Hamas, or ISIS are defeated because their leaders are killed is like saying Christianity died when Jesus Christ was crucified.
We can see in Osama bin Laden`s life trajectory evidence of what has been called “Dark Epiphanies” in destructive cult leaders. (Olsson, 2017, Malignant Pied Pipers of Our Time p. 11-12). These later life experiences reify and magnify their earlier molding experiences of disappointment, neglect, shame, and humiliation influenced by parents and other childhood defective role models. In adolescent or young adult life phases, antiheroes are often chosen to rebel against and counteract disappointment or humiliation/shame experiences with parental figures and home communities.
Hamas, ISIS, and Al Qaeda’s appeal has a potential unique “fit” for normal adolescent rebelliousness. Anna Freud said of adolescents, “On the one hand, they throw themselves enthusiastically into the life of the community, and on the other, they have an overpowering longing for solitude. They oscillate between blind submission to some self-chosen leader and defiant rebellion against any and every authority. They are selfish and materially minded and at the same time full of lofty idealism.” [Freud, A. Pp 137-138.) What would be normal adolescent rebellion and protest for some young people, becomes terrorist actions under Hamas, ISIS, and Al Qaeda’s tutelage. The Arab world’s turmoil creates many young adults who are in the phase of what psychoanalysts call “prolonged adolescence.”
In addition to enlisting well-educated youth as future leaders, radical Islamists like Osama also recruit poor and less-educated Muslim “foot soldiers” through religious Madrassah schools and some young-adult mosque programs and activities. Osama’s personal suffering, use of his and his father’s wealth to help fellow Muslims, his supposed bravery and heroism in ousting the Soviets from Afghanistan, made his rebellious jihad appealing to disaffected Arab and Muslim youth. The Madrassah-type “schools” in Pakistan for example, offer economic advantages and spiritual inspiration to families and Muslim communities that have few alternatives. Even via TikTok, many thousands of American youths recently found Osama bin Laden’s treacherous and destructive “Letter to the World” bizarrely inspiring.
Osama bin Laden’s role as a terrorist leader allowed him to act out his unconscious inner narcissistic rage at his father, mother, siblings, rejecting homeland and Saudi Arabia’s oil customer/ally/friend America. In this sense, he became like most destructive cult leaders. Their deepest motives have to do with power, control, revenge, and overcoming a desperate fear of aloneness and meaninglessness. They gain a sense of power and mastery over their own childhood psychological deformities and feelings of insignificance by becoming overwhelmingly significant and powerful in the lives and destinies of their followers.
Apocalyptic Scenarios: Group-Self Death and Rebellious Martyrdom in Terror Cults
Rebellious charisma in a terror leader meshes with the followers’ masochism and narcissistic passive-receptiveness to his charismatic influence. The leader-follower patterns in terror cults like Hamas, Al Qaeda and ISIS are remarkably similar to what is seen in apocalyptic cults like those of Jim Jones and David Koresh.
The group death or martyr scenario gives the terror-cult group a special, exciting, and dramatically triumphant defining martyr myth. It becomes a source of “underdog” heroism, and paradoxical group cohesion and identity. For bin Laden, the motivating apocalyptic scenario was his assertion that all Muslims in the world are being threatened by the West, particularly by Americans and Jews. In a book bin Laden wrote in 1998, he called the faithful to a global jihad, a “new vision” that demands the deaths of all Americans and Jews, including children. To attain this cynical and religion-perverting vision, any violence is justified, from terrorist bombings to suicide missions.
Evil is defined initially by the leader bin Laden via fatwa, but gradually becomes co-authored within the group-self as their own group salvation death myth. The codependent leader holds the martyr death myth out to the followers as magical reward. The terror cult leader also holds the death myth over the heads of the followers to magnify the special domain of his “mana” power and self-importance. The leader is needed for the dramatic destructive action that is being planned, for which no one individual takes personal responsibility. The leader experiences the ultimate “celebrity” and fantasized triumph over his lifelong insecurity, hurts, and fear of aloneness.
The future generations of Hamas, Al Qaeda, ISIS, Hezb’allah’s terror cult franchises will not be eliminated by bullets, missiles, or “smart bombs.” The future foreign policies of America need to be informed about the social-self psychology of the terrorist group and its leaders’ spiritual-political power messages. Devastated communities, families, and wounded group-selves in war-torn nations continents away are ignored at our peril. Billions of military aid dollars given to Middle East “friends” may not be worth the enemy-accumulating consequences. “Nation-building” may be impossible, but we cannot just walk away from financially and spiritually devastated societies. Genuine foreign aid helps wounded world communities find ways to rebuild their own dignity and group self-confidence. Hopefully without the “help” and inspiration of malignant Pied Pipers like Osama bin Laden and their heirs. Our own American youth require the charisma and spiritual leadership and inspiration of our diverse founding father heroes who need to be read and studied and not torn down by spiritually empty professors.
Image: TherealMrGreer
Even though Bin Laden/Zawahiri of Al Qaeda and Abu Bakr al Baghdadi of ISIS are dead, on anniversaries of 9/11 -- and now Hamas’s October 7th event -- a haunting and important question lurks. Why do many young Arabs, Muslims, and even Americans continue to become entranced with Osama bin Laden's Pied Piper music of radical fascist fundamentalist Muslim Jihad? Via TikTok, thousands of American youths recently embraced Osama bin Laden's twisted "Message to the World" over social media.
It is also important to try to understand the uniquely chilling social-psychological fit between the religiously saturated but distorted charismatic leadership of a man like Osama bin Laden/Al Qaeda/ISIS, and the group psychology of communities where he and his colleagues and mentors recruit devoted terrorists. Afghanistan is once again becoming an Al Qaeda and ISIS haven as is Yemen, where Bin Laden’s father was born.
It is a serious mistake to glibly label and dismiss deceased men like Osama bin Laden, Ayman Al Zawahiri, or Abu Bakr al Baghdadi as simply dead mass murderers, psychotics, thugs, psychopaths, or criminals. In painful truth, they are often perceived as Robin Hood-like figures and spiritual Pied Piper spiritual heroes for many people in the unreformed fundamentalist Muslim world. Even American homegrown terrorists who want to attack America and the West often express profound admiration for the martyred Osama bin Laden. For American leaders to imply that Al Qaeda, Hamas, or ISIS are defeated because their leaders are killed is like saying Christianity died when Jesus Christ was crucified.
We can see in Osama bin Laden`s life trajectory evidence of what has been called “Dark Epiphanies” in destructive cult leaders. (Olsson, 2017, Malignant Pied Pipers of Our Time p. 11-12). These later life experiences reify and magnify their earlier molding experiences of disappointment, neglect, shame, and humiliation influenced by parents and other childhood defective role models. In adolescent or young adult life phases, antiheroes are often chosen to rebel against and counteract disappointment or humiliation/shame experiences with parental figures and home communities.
Hamas, ISIS, and Al Qaeda’s appeal has a potential unique “fit” for normal adolescent rebelliousness. Anna Freud said of adolescents, “On the one hand, they throw themselves enthusiastically into the life of the community, and on the other, they have an overpowering longing for solitude. They oscillate between blind submission to some self-chosen leader and defiant rebellion against any and every authority. They are selfish and materially minded and at the same time full of lofty idealism.” [Freud, A. Pp 137-138.) What would be normal adolescent rebellion and protest for some young people, becomes terrorist actions under Hamas, ISIS, and Al Qaeda’s tutelage. The Arab world’s turmoil creates many young adults who are in the phase of what psychoanalysts call “prolonged adolescence.”
In addition to enlisting well-educated youth as future leaders, radical Islamists like Osama also recruit poor and less-educated Muslim “foot soldiers” through religious Madrassah schools and some young-adult mosque programs and activities. Osama’s personal suffering, use of his and his father’s wealth to help fellow Muslims, his supposed bravery and heroism in ousting the Soviets from Afghanistan, made his rebellious jihad appealing to disaffected Arab and Muslim youth. The Madrassah-type “schools” in Pakistan for example, offer economic advantages and spiritual inspiration to families and Muslim communities that have few alternatives. Even via TikTok, many thousands of American youths recently found Osama bin Laden’s treacherous and destructive “Letter to the World” bizarrely inspiring.
Osama bin Laden’s role as a terrorist leader allowed him to act out his unconscious inner narcissistic rage at his father, mother, siblings, rejecting homeland and Saudi Arabia’s oil customer/ally/friend America. In this sense, he became like most destructive cult leaders. Their deepest motives have to do with power, control, revenge, and overcoming a desperate fear of aloneness and meaninglessness. They gain a sense of power and mastery over their own childhood psychological deformities and feelings of insignificance by becoming overwhelmingly significant and powerful in the lives and destinies of their followers.
Apocalyptic Scenarios: Group-Self Death and Rebellious Martyrdom in Terror Cults
Rebellious charisma in a terror leader meshes with the followers’ masochism and narcissistic passive-receptiveness to his charismatic influence. The leader-follower patterns in terror cults like Hamas, Al Qaeda and ISIS are remarkably similar to what is seen in apocalyptic cults like those of Jim Jones and David Koresh.
The group death or martyr scenario gives the terror-cult group a special, exciting, and dramatically triumphant defining martyr myth. It becomes a source of “underdog” heroism, and paradoxical group cohesion and identity. For bin Laden, the motivating apocalyptic scenario was his assertion that all Muslims in the world are being threatened by the West, particularly by Americans and Jews. In a book bin Laden wrote in 1998, he called the faithful to a global jihad, a “new vision” that demands the deaths of all Americans and Jews, including children. To attain this cynical and religion-perverting vision, any violence is justified, from terrorist bombings to suicide missions.
Evil is defined initially by the leader bin Laden via fatwa, but gradually becomes co-authored within the group-self as their own group salvation death myth. The codependent leader holds the martyr death myth out to the followers as magical reward. The terror cult leader also holds the death myth over the heads of the followers to magnify the special domain of his “mana” power and self-importance. The leader is needed for the dramatic destructive action that is being planned, for which no one individual takes personal responsibility. The leader experiences the ultimate “celebrity” and fantasized triumph over his lifelong insecurity, hurts, and fear of aloneness.
The future generations of Hamas, Al Qaeda, ISIS, Hezb’allah’s terror cult franchises will not be eliminated by bullets, missiles, or “smart bombs.” The future foreign policies of America need to be informed about the social-self psychology of the terrorist group and its leaders’ spiritual-political power messages. Devastated communities, families, and wounded group-selves in war-torn nations continents away are ignored at our peril. Billions of military aid dollars given to Middle East “friends” may not be worth the enemy-accumulating consequences. “Nation-building” may be impossible, but we cannot just walk away from financially and spiritually devastated societies. Genuine foreign aid helps wounded world communities find ways to rebuild their own dignity and group self-confidence. Hopefully without the “help” and inspiration of malignant Pied Pipers like Osama bin Laden and their heirs. Our own American youth require the charisma and spiritual leadership and inspiration of our diverse founding father heroes who need to be read and studied and not torn down by spiritually empty professors.
Image: TherealMrGreer
Meet the Photojournalist for CNN and AP Who Went in With Hamas Nazis on October 7
What did they know? And when did they know it?
There are many journalists, past and present, known for their anti-Israel animus. There was NBC’s Peter Jennings, who could always be counted on to suavely vilify the Jewish state. Few knew that his girlfriend for many years was the PLO propagandist Hanan Ashrawi. There is the long list of BBC journalists who report on Israel and the Palestinians, regarding the former with contumely and the latter with deep sympathy. These include John Simpson, Jeremy Bowen, Lyse Doucet, Orla Guerin, and Yolande Knell. There is Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, who deeply resents the fact that the Israelis so rarely follow his advice, despite his clearly being the World’s Greatest Authority.
But now there is the case of Hassan Eslaiah, a photojournalist who is not only a Palestinian, but, It has now been revealed, is a supporter and admirer of Hamas Nazis who accompanied the murderers when they charged into Israel on October 7, and rampaged through the kibbutzim. He recorded with evident pleasure the atrocities the terror group’s operatives were committing. He watched as they butchered babies, burned children alive, tortured and raped young girls, slaughtered parents in front of their children, and children in front of their parents; he saw how Hamas members mutilated helpless Jews, gouging out their eyes, slicing off their breasts, cutting off their genitalia, both before and after death. He saw it all, and approved. And this was the man that two of the most important news sources in the world relied on as a photojournalist, to supply images they could use. Of course, he did not send them any photos of the worst atrocities he witnessed. Piles of bodies were the most he would allow himself, and Israeli tanks set on fire, but not beheaded babies or eyes gouged out, or naked girls who had been tortured and then raped to death.
More on Hassan Eslaiah can be found here: “Crossing the lines of integrity with a Hamas-praising photojournalist – analysis,” by Maayan Jaffe-Hoffman, Jerusalem Post, November 11, 2023:
CNN hired a photojournalist who just three days before posted videos and photos of himself inside Israel during the Hamas massacre, including with an Israeli tank and a room of bloody, dead bodies.
Gaza photojournalist Hassan Eslaiah crossed into Israel on October 7 to document the Hamas massacre of more than 1,200 Israelis. His photos from the scene appeared on several international news outlets, including The Associated Press, the Jerusalem-based watchdog HonestReporting has said.
The watchdog’s story sparked a series of questions and international outcry, ultimately leading to his being let go from the two institutions. [CNN and AP]
However, CNN said in a statement last week that their working relationship with the freelancer began after the October 7 terrorist attacks on Israel, on October 10. It also noted that despite its decision to stop working with Eslaiah, it did not have “any reason to doubt the journalistic accuracy of the work he has done for us,” as reported by Ynet and confirmed by The Jerusalem Post.
But “journalistic accuracy” from a photojournalist should mean not just whether a particular photo shows what the photographer claims it shows, but whether the entire event is being properly covered by the photos and videos that he chooses to share. Eslaiah was willing to send both AP, as of October 7, and CNN, as of October 10, photos of dead Israelis, including soldiers killed in Gaza, but not any photos that showed torture, mutilations, beheadings of Israelis on October 7. He was willing to supply AP with a photo of a burning tank, but not a baby found baked in an oven.
And from the afternoon of October 7 and for several weeks after he returned to Gaza, he of course was eager to supply photos of dead Palestinian children, the more blood-spattered and gruesome their appearance, the better. Limbs lost were even better. He took shots of tiny corpses, swaddled in white, cradled by mothers uncontrollably weeping. He also took pictures of schools, mosques, and apartment blocks after they had crumbled under Israeli attacks, but offered nothing to indicate that under those buildings there lay a vast network of terror tunnels. Photos, too, of disconsolate Palestinian young males, looking at the ruins of their neighborhoods have been part of his stock in trade. Hassan Eslaiah wanted to arouse sympathy for the Palestinians, and knew exactly how, using his camera as a weapon, to do it.
The Post confirmed that Eslaiah was not fired for his work on the 7th but for a separate but related concern.
It was unclear if CNN knew about Eslaiah’s posts on Telegram before offering him work….
If CNN and the AP had performed due diligence, they would have discovered Eslaiah’s enthusiasm for the “glorious morning” of October 7, when Hamas dealt the Zionists a great blow. One hopes that they simply failed to investigate Eslaiah before hiring him. The alternative — that these news agencies knew about his sympathy for Hamas, and even about his having accompanied the group’s operatives on their rampage through the kibbutzim, and didn’t care — is too painful to contemplate.
Eslaiah took a picture of himself smiling as he hugged Yahya Sinwar, as Sinwar kisses his cheek in a sign of humorful affection.
However, by scrolling through Eslaiah’s personal Telegram channel, the Post has found that Eslaiah posted much more than a tank on the 7th, including items that indicate that not only did he likely know about the planned massacre before it began at around 6:30 a.m., but that he supported the deaths of the innocent Israelis he watched being murdered.
Eslaiah’s first post on October 7 was at 5:59 a.m.: “We wake up to the great gifts of God,” he posted, according to a translation by ChatGPT. “The spirit has returned, and our blessings have increased.”
Within half an hour, he is posting about the rockets being launched at Israel and the sounds of the Iron Dome intercepting them over Khan Yunis. Then, between 6:55 a.m. and 8:30 a.m., he posts multiple variations: “To follow the latest news moment by moment, follow me on my media platforms.”…
At 9:25 a.m., the most gruesome of posts is revealed: a video with his watermark: “Filmed by Hassan Eslaiah” in the center, depicting a room full of dead, bloody bodies.
This particular video does not appear to have been published anywhere else. In the background, you hear a calm voice that sounds like his from other videos, and is spoken in his Arabic dialect, stating the following: “[Animal] carcasses, carcasses. God is great. This is the path to Jerusalem.”…
This was Hassan Eslalah, describing the Israeli corpses as “animal carcasses.” Then he allahu-akbars — “God Is Great” — and mentions the “path to Jerusalem” that apparently Hamas has now opened up. Al-Quds can now be taken back from the perfidious Jews, thanks to Hamas’ great deeds on this day.
Now that CNN and AP, both major news outlets, have revealed themselves to have failed at performing due diligence on Hassan Eslaiah, it is time for them, and for other news outlets, to thoroughly examine the social media presence both of those they are planning to hire, and those already working for them, in order to find out about their possible support for terrorists. Does this mean that employers, such as CNN and AP, should at regular intervals make a sweep of the social media posts both of their reporters and photojournalists, to determine how likely they are to be biased in their reporting?
Yes, I’m afraid it does.
HOW MANY BILLIONS OF AMERICAN DOLLARS HAVE BEEN TURNED OVER TO THIS TERRORIST STATE?
There are many journalists, past and present, known for their anti-Israel animus. There was NBC’s Peter Jennings, who could always be counted on to suavely vilify the Jewish state. Few knew that his girlfriend for many years was the PLO propagandist Hanan Ashrawi. There is the long list of BBC journalists who report on Israel and the Palestinians, regarding the former with contumely and the latter with deep sympathy. These include John Simpson, Jeremy Bowen, Lyse Doucet, Orla Guerin, and Yolande Knell. There is Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, who deeply resents the fact that the Israelis so rarely follow his advice, despite his clearly being the World’s Greatest Authority.
But now there is the case of Hassan Eslaiah, a photojournalist who is not only a Palestinian, but, It has now been revealed, is a supporter and admirer of Hamas Nazis who accompanied the murderers when they charged into Israel on October 7, and rampaged through the kibbutzim. He recorded with evident pleasure the atrocities the terror group’s operatives were committing. He watched as they butchered babies, burned children alive, tortured and raped young girls, slaughtered parents in front of their children, and children in front of their parents; he saw how Hamas members mutilated helpless Jews, gouging out their eyes, slicing off their breasts, cutting off their genitalia, both before and after death. He saw it all, and approved. And this was the man that two of the most important news sources in the world relied on as a photojournalist, to supply images they could use. Of course, he did not send them any photos of the worst atrocities he witnessed. Piles of bodies were the most he would allow himself, and Israeli tanks set on fire, but not beheaded babies or eyes gouged out, or naked girls who had been tortured and then raped to death.
More on Hassan Eslaiah can be found here: “Crossing the lines of integrity with a Hamas-praising photojournalist – analysis,” by Maayan Jaffe-Hoffman, Jerusalem Post, November 11, 2023:
CNN hired a photojournalist who just three days before posted videos and photos of himself inside Israel during the Hamas massacre, including with an Israeli tank and a room of bloody, dead bodies.
Gaza photojournalist Hassan Eslaiah crossed into Israel on October 7 to document the Hamas massacre of more than 1,200 Israelis. His photos from the scene appeared on several international news outlets, including The Associated Press, the Jerusalem-based watchdog HonestReporting has said.
The watchdog’s story sparked a series of questions and international outcry, ultimately leading to his being let go from the two institutions. [CNN and AP]
However, CNN said in a statement last week that their working relationship with the freelancer began after the October 7 terrorist attacks on Israel, on October 10. It also noted that despite its decision to stop working with Eslaiah, it did not have “any reason to doubt the journalistic accuracy of the work he has done for us,” as reported by Ynet and confirmed by The Jerusalem Post.
But “journalistic accuracy” from a photojournalist should mean not just whether a particular photo shows what the photographer claims it shows, but whether the entire event is being properly covered by the photos and videos that he chooses to share. Eslaiah was willing to send both AP, as of October 7, and CNN, as of October 10, photos of dead Israelis, including soldiers killed in Gaza, but not any photos that showed torture, mutilations, beheadings of Israelis on October 7. He was willing to supply AP with a photo of a burning tank, but not a baby found baked in an oven.
And from the afternoon of October 7 and for several weeks after he returned to Gaza, he of course was eager to supply photos of dead Palestinian children, the more blood-spattered and gruesome their appearance, the better. Limbs lost were even better. He took shots of tiny corpses, swaddled in white, cradled by mothers uncontrollably weeping. He also took pictures of schools, mosques, and apartment blocks after they had crumbled under Israeli attacks, but offered nothing to indicate that under those buildings there lay a vast network of terror tunnels. Photos, too, of disconsolate Palestinian young males, looking at the ruins of their neighborhoods have been part of his stock in trade. Hassan Eslaiah wanted to arouse sympathy for the Palestinians, and knew exactly how, using his camera as a weapon, to do it.
The Post confirmed that Eslaiah was not fired for his work on the 7th but for a separate but related concern.
It was unclear if CNN knew about Eslaiah’s posts on Telegram before offering him work….
If CNN and the AP had performed due diligence, they would have discovered Eslaiah’s enthusiasm for the “glorious morning” of October 7, when Hamas dealt the Zionists a great blow. One hopes that they simply failed to investigate Eslaiah before hiring him. The alternative — that these news agencies knew about his sympathy for Hamas, and even about his having accompanied the group’s operatives on their rampage through the kibbutzim, and didn’t care — is too painful to contemplate.
Eslaiah took a picture of himself smiling as he hugged Yahya Sinwar, as Sinwar kisses his cheek in a sign of humorful affection.
However, by scrolling through Eslaiah’s personal Telegram channel, the Post has found that Eslaiah posted much more than a tank on the 7th, including items that indicate that not only did he likely know about the planned massacre before it began at around 6:30 a.m., but that he supported the deaths of the innocent Israelis he watched being murdered.
Eslaiah’s first post on October 7 was at 5:59 a.m.: “We wake up to the great gifts of God,” he posted, according to a translation by ChatGPT. “The spirit has returned, and our blessings have increased.”
Within half an hour, he is posting about the rockets being launched at Israel and the sounds of the Iron Dome intercepting them over Khan Yunis. Then, between 6:55 a.m. and 8:30 a.m., he posts multiple variations: “To follow the latest news moment by moment, follow me on my media platforms.”…
At 9:25 a.m., the most gruesome of posts is revealed: a video with his watermark: “Filmed by Hassan Eslaiah” in the center, depicting a room full of dead, bloody bodies.
This particular video does not appear to have been published anywhere else. In the background, you hear a calm voice that sounds like his from other videos, and is spoken in his Arabic dialect, stating the following: “[Animal] carcasses, carcasses. God is great. This is the path to Jerusalem.”…
This was Hassan Eslalah, describing the Israeli corpses as “animal carcasses.” Then he allahu-akbars — “God Is Great” — and mentions the “path to Jerusalem” that apparently Hamas has now opened up. Al-Quds can now be taken back from the perfidious Jews, thanks to Hamas’ great deeds on this day.
Now that CNN and AP, both major news outlets, have revealed themselves to have failed at performing due diligence on Hassan Eslaiah, it is time for them, and for other news outlets, to thoroughly examine the social media presence both of those they are planning to hire, and those already working for them, in order to find out about their possible support for terrorists. Does this mean that employers, such as CNN and AP, should at regular intervals make a sweep of the social media posts both of their reporters and photojournalists, to determine how likely they are to be biased in their reporting?
Yes, I’m afraid it does.
HOW MANY BILLIONS OF AMERICAN DOLLARS HAVE BEEN TURNED OVER TO THIS TERRORIST STATE?
Three-Fourths of Palestinians Support Hamas and Oct. 7 Terrorist Attack, 98% Have ‘Very Negative’ View of U.S.
Three-fourths of Palestinians support the terrorist organization Hamas and its deadly attack on Israel last month, a “Wartime Poll” gauging the opinions of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip reveal.
The survey was conducted October 31 to November 7 by Arab World for Research and Development (AWRAD), after Israel declared war on Hamas in response to the October 7 terrorist attack, in which Hamas killed more than twelve hundred people, beheaded and incinerated babies, raped women and girls, and took hostages they still hold to this day.
Not only do three-fourths (75%) of Palestinians say they support the October 7 terrorist attack, but more than half (59.3%) say they strongly support the attack. “Strong support for the attacks was notably higher among Palestinians in the West Bank (68%) as compared to Gaza (47%),” AWRAD notes.
Three-fourths (76%) also say they have at least a somewhat positive view of the role of the terrorist organization Hamas, with half (48.2%) voicing a “very positive” view of Hamas.
In contrast, less than one percent (0.4%) have a positive view of the role of the U.S., while 97.6% have a “very negative” view of the U.S.
Palestinians are more than three times as likely to believe the Gaza conflict is primarily between “Israel and Palestinians in general” (63.6%) as they are to think the war is between just “Israel and Hamas” (18.6%).
Ninety percent (89.5%) attribute U.S. support for Israel in the confrontation with Palestine to “Hatred of Muslims and Islam.”
Palestinians are equally cynical regarding the prospects of coexisting with Israel, as nine in ten (89.5%) say their belief in that possibility has decreased. Likewise, two-thirds (68%) say their support for a two-state solution has waned.
“The vast majority of Palestinians hate America and support Hamas' terrorist attack on Israel. Remember that next time you see someone waving a Palestinian flag,” Media Research Center President Brent Bozell said in a social media post Monday, reacting to the survey’s results.
Three-fourths of Palestinians support the terrorist organization Hamas and its deadly attack on Israel last month, a “Wartime Poll” gauging the opinions of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip reveal.
The survey was conducted October 31 to November 7 by Arab World for Research and Development (AWRAD), after Israel declared war on Hamas in response to the October 7 terrorist attack, in which Hamas killed more than twelve hundred people, beheaded and incinerated babies, raped women and girls, and took hostages they still hold to this day.
Not only do three-fourths (75%) of Palestinians say they support the October 7 terrorist attack, but more than half (59.3%) say they strongly support the attack. “Strong support for the attacks was notably higher among Palestinians in the West Bank (68%) as compared to Gaza (47%),” AWRAD notes.
Three-fourths (76%) also say they have at least a somewhat positive view of the role of the terrorist organization Hamas, with half (48.2%) voicing a “very positive” view of Hamas.
In contrast, less than one percent (0.4%) have a positive view of the role of the U.S., while 97.6% have a “very negative” view of the U.S.
Palestinians are more than three times as likely to believe the Gaza conflict is primarily between “Israel and Palestinians in general” (63.6%) as they are to think the war is between just “Israel and Hamas” (18.6%).
Ninety percent (89.5%) attribute U.S. support for Israel in the confrontation with Palestine to “Hatred of Muslims and Islam.”
Palestinians are equally cynical regarding the prospects of coexisting with Israel, as nine in ten (89.5%) say their belief in that possibility has decreased. Likewise, two-thirds (68%) say their support for a two-state solution has waned.
“The vast majority of Palestinians hate America and support Hamas' terrorist attack on Israel. Remember that next time you see someone waving a Palestinian flag,” Media Research Center President Brent Bozell said in a social media post Monday, reacting to the survey’s results.
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