Biden Press Secretary Denies Antisemitism, Talks Islamophobia
"Muslims... have endured a disproportionate number of hate-fueled attacks."
For a week or so after the Hamas atrocities, Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre had to briefly mouth some pieties about opposing the mass murder of Jews.
But it didn’t take long for all of that to fall away.
Q What is his level of concern right now about the potential rise of antisemitism in light of everything that’s going on in Israel?
MS. JEAN-PIERRE: So, a couple of things. Look, we have not seen any credible threats. I know there’s been always questions about credible threats. And so, just want to make sure that that’s out there.
But, look, Muslim and those perceived to be Muslim have endured a disproportionate number of hate-fueled attacks. And certainly President Biden understands that many of our Muslim, Arab — Arab — Arab Americans and Palestinian American loved ones and neighbors are worried about the hate being directed at their communities. And that is something you heard the President speak to in his — in his address just last — last Thursday.
Karine Jean-Pierre denied that there were credible threats against Jews and pivoted to the threat faced by Muslims and ‘Palestinian Americans’.
This is the least surprising thing ever if you remember her history.
New White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre once urged Democrats to skip a meeting of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, claiming it was “severely racist.”
In the piece, she blasted the conference as “severely racist” saying it has “become known for trafficking in anti-Muslim and anti-Arab rhetoric while lifting up Islamophobic voices and attitudes.”
“You cannot call yourself a progressive while continuing to associate yourself with an organization like AIPAC that has often been the antithesis of what it means to be progressive,” she added, while also taking a shot at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The official word is that she misspoke. But where’s the misspeaking? Was she unable to tell apart Jews and Muslims?
No, she delivered a polished answer about the threat faced by Muslims which was clearly prepped from her briefing book, but dismissed antisemitism as a non-issue.
When asked specifically about campus support for murdering Jews, Jean-Pierre pivots to the strange new respect for freedom of speech that has suddenly popped up in university discourse before delivering a fumbling attempt to be against antisemitism.
Q Thank you. I know John Kirby addressed the protests on college campuses, and I appreciate that the President respects First Amendment rights to protest, but does the President view anti-Israel protests and sentiment on college campuses as antisemitism?
MS. JEAN-PIERRE: So, look, I’m not going to get into what’s happening across the country in — at different universities. I’m not going to get into the specifics.
As the Admiral said, the First Amendment right — right? — that’s what something — a peaceful protest is really part of — part of our democracy, being able for folks to — to be able to express their feelings.
I’m not going to get into any, you know, specifics on that. The President has been very clear in wanting to make sure that Jewish Americans, wanting to make sure that Arab Americans, Muslims are protected here. That is what he believes in — that we — they have the right to live their lives and to feel protection and to feel like they’re able to be part of a community. The President has been very, very clear on denouncing any type of violence.
And so, as it relates to peaceful protesting, people have the right to do that. But we’re just not going to get into blow by blows of what’s going on across the country.
Q Well, not —
MS. JEAN-PIERRE: The President has been very clear —
Q Not to get —
MS. JEAN-PIERRE: — very clear —
Q — into blow by blow, but the President himself said “silence is complicity.” So, if there’s antisemitic letters being sent by students or protests, sentiment at protests —
MS. JEAN-PIERRE: Of course — of course, the President doesn’t — is — is against antisemitism. Of course. This is a president that you have heard me say is parti- — wants to protect communities, whether it’s the Jewish community, the Arab American pre- — community, the Palestinian community. This is someone who is going to speak out against antisemitism. Of course.
But you’re asking me — you’re — you were kind of conflating the two. You were asking me about pro- — protests, and you were asking me about this question.
Q I think if you talked to a lot of the protesters, you’ll hear antisemitic —
MS. JEAN-PIERRE: I hear you.
Q — comments. That they accuse —
MS. JEAN-PIERRE: And we’re going to always denounce —
Q — Israel of genocide.
MS. JEAN-PIERRE: We’re always going to denounce antisemitism. But at the same time, people have the right to peacefully protest.
But we, in this administration, are going to always denounce antisemitism, any form of hate — any form of hate. Whether it’s against the Jewish community — right? — antisemitism, against the Muslim community, Arab American community, or the Palestin- — we are going to denounce any form of hate that comes towards those communities.
As it relates to protests — peaceful protests, people have the right to do that. But this is an administration, obviously, obviously, that’s going to be very forceful and very clear about denouncing antisemitism.
Very forceful and clear about denouncing antisemitism… by not denouncing it.
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Biden Warns Against ‘Islamophobia’ in Hamas-Israel War
Priorities, priorities.
[Make sure to read Robert Spencer’s contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]
There is one thing Old Joe Biden is good at: seizing every opportunity to get things wrong. His speech to the nation on Thursday night was just the latest in a long list of public remarks in which this senescent corruptocrat takes a bad situation and makes it exponentially worse.
After Hamas’ bloody massacre of Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, the alleged president made his way to Israel and announced that he was sending $100 million to Gaza, which will almost certainly be seized by Hamas and go for more jihad attacks upon Israel. While there, he warned Israelis not to give in to an “an all-consuming rage.” He took the opportunity to criticize his own country and to issue an implicit warning to Israel not to be too tough on the murderous jihadis: “While you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it. After 9/11, we were enraged in the United States. And while we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes.”
Biden also claimed in that same address that “the vast majority of Palestinians are not Hamas. Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people.” This is, however, just wishful thinking, if it isn’t outright deceit. The Washington Institute reported on Oct. 10 that “overall, 57% of Gazans express at least a somewhat positive opinion of Hamas.” Those who would be quick to assume that the remainder are “moderates,” however, would do well to ponder the fact that “it is organizations like Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and Lion’s Den that receive the most widespread popular support in Gaza. About three-quarters of Gazans express support for both groups.” These are both jihad groups that are even more bloodthirsty than Hamas.
Then on Thursday, Old Joe took the opportunity not only to cheerlead for yet more taxpayer money to go for the war in Ukraine, but also to wag his finger at Americans and warn them against “Islamophobia,” or “Islamicphobia,” as he called it. “You know,” said homespun ol’ Lunchbucket Joe, “and here at home, we have to be honest with ourselves. In recent years, too much hate has been given too much oxygen, fueling racism, a rise in antisemitism and Islamicphobia [sic] right here in America.”
Now, anti-Semitism is a genuine phenomenon, and it is indeed rising in America today, particularly among Old Joe’s leftist allies and the people who protect themselves from criticism by charging their critics with “Islamophobia.” The hatred of Jews simply for being Jewish is an ancient phenomenon that is experiencing yet another ugly recrudescence in our own age. Biden, however, equates it with “Islamophobia,” which is an entirely different matter.
“Islamophobia,” in contrast to anti-Semitism, is relatively new as a concept, and is much more often used than it is defined. It is so seldom defined because it is actually a trick, a sleight of hand, consisting of an illegitimate conflation of two distinct phenomena: vigilante attacks against innocent Muslims, which are never justified, and honest analysis of the motivating ideology of jihad terror, which is always necessary.
The goal of this conflation is to silence that analysis by falsely claiming that it leads to or causes those attacks. No one, or vanishingly few people, hates Muslims for being Muslims; what is all too often termed “Islamophobia” is a suspicion of Islam based on its teachings regarding the necessity for warfare against unbelievers, the subjugation of women, and the hatred of Jews.
Old Joe was playing this game in a big way on Thursday evening, declaring: “You know, I know many of you in the Muslim American community or the Arab American community, the Palestinian American community, and so many others are outraged and hurting, saying to yourselves, ‘Here we go again,’ with Islamophobia and distrust we saw after 9/11.” So apparently the real victims of the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel were Muslims, just as we saw the establishment media claim so often after 9/11 that Muslims were the real victims of those attacks as well.
No innocent people should be attacked under any circumstances, anywhere. Old Joe, however, in equating anti-Semitism, which is all too real, with “Islamophobia,” which is all too often little more than a tool for censorship, once again shifts the focus away from where it should be. Israelis, not Muslims, were brutally attacked on Oct. 7. This is not the time to play politics or hand out victimhood prizes among favored leftist victim groups. Old Joe Biden doesn’t even have the decency to stand unequivocally with a staunch American ally in its greatest moment of crisis.
[Make sure to read Robert Spencer’s contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]
There is one thing Old Joe Biden is good at: seizing every opportunity to get things wrong. His speech to the nation on Thursday night was just the latest in a long list of public remarks in which this senescent corruptocrat takes a bad situation and makes it exponentially worse.
After Hamas’ bloody massacre of Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, the alleged president made his way to Israel and announced that he was sending $100 million to Gaza, which will almost certainly be seized by Hamas and go for more jihad attacks upon Israel. While there, he warned Israelis not to give in to an “an all-consuming rage.” He took the opportunity to criticize his own country and to issue an implicit warning to Israel not to be too tough on the murderous jihadis: “While you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it. After 9/11, we were enraged in the United States. And while we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes.”
Biden also claimed in that same address that “the vast majority of Palestinians are not Hamas. Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people.” This is, however, just wishful thinking, if it isn’t outright deceit. The Washington Institute reported on Oct. 10 that “overall, 57% of Gazans express at least a somewhat positive opinion of Hamas.” Those who would be quick to assume that the remainder are “moderates,” however, would do well to ponder the fact that “it is organizations like Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and Lion’s Den that receive the most widespread popular support in Gaza. About three-quarters of Gazans express support for both groups.” These are both jihad groups that are even more bloodthirsty than Hamas.
Then on Thursday, Old Joe took the opportunity not only to cheerlead for yet more taxpayer money to go for the war in Ukraine, but also to wag his finger at Americans and warn them against “Islamophobia,” or “Islamicphobia,” as he called it. “You know,” said homespun ol’ Lunchbucket Joe, “and here at home, we have to be honest with ourselves. In recent years, too much hate has been given too much oxygen, fueling racism, a rise in antisemitism and Islamicphobia [sic] right here in America.”
Now, anti-Semitism is a genuine phenomenon, and it is indeed rising in America today, particularly among Old Joe’s leftist allies and the people who protect themselves from criticism by charging their critics with “Islamophobia.” The hatred of Jews simply for being Jewish is an ancient phenomenon that is experiencing yet another ugly recrudescence in our own age. Biden, however, equates it with “Islamophobia,” which is an entirely different matter.
“Islamophobia,” in contrast to anti-Semitism, is relatively new as a concept, and is much more often used than it is defined. It is so seldom defined because it is actually a trick, a sleight of hand, consisting of an illegitimate conflation of two distinct phenomena: vigilante attacks against innocent Muslims, which are never justified, and honest analysis of the motivating ideology of jihad terror, which is always necessary.
The goal of this conflation is to silence that analysis by falsely claiming that it leads to or causes those attacks. No one, or vanishingly few people, hates Muslims for being Muslims; what is all too often termed “Islamophobia” is a suspicion of Islam based on its teachings regarding the necessity for warfare against unbelievers, the subjugation of women, and the hatred of Jews.
Old Joe was playing this game in a big way on Thursday evening, declaring: “You know, I know many of you in the Muslim American community or the Arab American community, the Palestinian American community, and so many others are outraged and hurting, saying to yourselves, ‘Here we go again,’ with Islamophobia and distrust we saw after 9/11.” So apparently the real victims of the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel were Muslims, just as we saw the establishment media claim so often after 9/11 that Muslims were the real victims of those attacks as well.
No innocent people should be attacked under any circumstances, anywhere. Old Joe, however, in equating anti-Semitism, which is all too real, with “Islamophobia,” which is all too often little more than a tool for censorship, once again shifts the focus away from where it should be. Israelis, not Muslims, were brutally attacked on Oct. 7. This is not the time to play politics or hand out victimhood prizes among favored leftist victim groups. Old Joe Biden doesn’t even have the decency to stand unequivocally with a staunch American ally in its greatest moment of crisis.
Robert Spencer
Reader Interactions
Legendary Playwright David Mamet Rips Democrats for Betraying the Jews: ‘The Writing Is on the Wall. In Blood’
Renowned Glengarry Glen Ross playwright David Mamet is accusing Democrats and the left in general of betraying the Jewish people in the wake of Hamas’ murderous attacks in Israel. “The writing is on the wall. In blood,” he writes in a new essay for UnHerd.
David Mamet specifically calls out liberal American Jews, who have voted Democrat for generations and are still pledging fealty to a party that clearly is siding against them.
In his UnHerd essay, titled “How the Democrats betrayed the Jews,” Mamet calls out the blatant anti-semitism that has overtaken the Democrat party.
Renowned Glengarry Glen Ross playwright David Mamet is accusing Democrats and the left in general of betraying the Jewish people in the wake of Hamas’ murderous attacks in Israel. “The writing is on the wall. In blood,” he writes in a new essay for UnHerd.
David Mamet specifically calls out liberal American Jews, who have voted Democrat for generations and are still pledging fealty to a party that clearly is siding against them.
In his UnHerd essay, titled “How the Democrats betrayed the Jews,” Mamet calls out the blatant anti-semitism that has overtaken the Democrat party.
He also draws a historical line from the Gaza hospital hoax to centuries of Jewish libel, dating back to ancient times.
“There is no more cosy mystery in the antisemitism of the Democratic Party,” Mamet writes. “Representatives are affiliated with the Democratic Socialists and pro-Palestinians, calling for the end of the state of Israel — that is, for the death of the Jews.”
He adds: “And Democrat Representatives repeat and refuse to retract the libel that Israel bombed a hospital, in spite of absolute proof to the contrary, and will not call out the unutterable atrocities of Hamas. The writing is on the wall. In blood.”
Mamet also blasts those on the left calling for “ceasefire.”
“Those who consider themselves mere ‘liberals’ moderate their cowardice by calling for a ‘ceasefire’ — which is to say, a pause while Hamas re-arms,” he writes.
David Mamet has spoken exclusively with Breitbart News in recent years, including a 2020 interview in which he said Donald Trump was a “great president,” while liberal reaction to his presidency has been “psychotic.”
Follow David Ng on Twitter @HeyItsDavidNg. Have a tip? Contact me at dng@breitbart.com
Amit Halevy: The World Forgot Hamas Is About Islamic Fundamentalism
JERUSALEM, Israel — Amit Halevy, a senior member of Israel’s governing Likud Party, told Breitbart News on Saturday night that one of the reasons Israel was unprepared for the Hamas terror attack Oct. 7 was because the conventional wisdom was that Hamas had become a normal governing party.
In reality, he said, the group — whose name is an Arabic acronym for “Islamic Resistance Movement” — had never changed its commitment to Islamic fundamentalism.
“For many years, we didn’t take seriously the religious dimension of our enemy … We hear [about] material considerations, maybe internal considerations of a fight between some groups inside Gaza or inside Lebanon — nonsense.
If you study the Hamas charter, Halevy said, the group’s goals are clear: it wants to eliminate Jews, not just in Israel but worldwide. And it wants Islam to dominate the world.
“They say exactly what they mean, and they mean exactly what they say. So it’s about time that the Western world — because the West is next — that we will take very seriously those intensions.”
Halevy added: “Not only the West is next, but also MBS [Mohamed bin Salman, the Saudi Crown Prince] is next.”
He said that the timing of the attack was motivated by MBS’s interview with Fox News last month, in which he said that peace with Israel was within sight, and hinted that a Palestinian state would not be a necessary condition.
Halevy argued that the distinction between Hamas and Palestinian civilians in Gaza was not always clear. There were, he said, civilians who had participated in the massacres of Israelis, crossing into Israel behind the Hamas terrorists. “In [Kibbutz] Be’eri there were [Palestinian] kids that burned our kids — six-year-old kids.”
He said that Israel should consider bombing the underground facilities that Hamas maintained in Gaza, even though it often placed them under hospitals, schools, and mosques. International law, he said, made “dual use” civilian facilities legitimate targets.
Halevy, who leads the foreign affairs and national security committees in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, acknowledged that there would be major political changes in Israel as a result of the shock from the Oct. 7 attack. But it was too early for politics, he said.
For now, the country was focused on winning the war. The only debate was about how to do it. He praised the ordinary citizens who raced to the scene of the attack and prevented many thousands more people from being killed in the attack.
Tune in to SiriusXM Patriot 125 on Sunday, Oct. 22, from 7-10 p.m. ET, for an interview with Halevy on Breitbart News Sunday.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
JERUSALEM, Israel — Amit Halevy, a senior member of Israel’s governing Likud Party, told Breitbart News on Saturday night that one of the reasons Israel was unprepared for the Hamas terror attack Oct. 7 was because the conventional wisdom was that Hamas had become a normal governing party.
In reality, he said, the group — whose name is an Arabic acronym for “Islamic Resistance Movement” — had never changed its commitment to Islamic fundamentalism.
“For many years, we didn’t take seriously the religious dimension of our enemy … We hear [about] material considerations, maybe internal considerations of a fight between some groups inside Gaza or inside Lebanon — nonsense.
If you study the Hamas charter, Halevy said, the group’s goals are clear: it wants to eliminate Jews, not just in Israel but worldwide. And it wants Islam to dominate the world.
“They say exactly what they mean, and they mean exactly what they say. So it’s about time that the Western world — because the West is next — that we will take very seriously those intensions.”
Halevy added: “Not only the West is next, but also MBS [Mohamed bin Salman, the Saudi Crown Prince] is next.”
He said that the timing of the attack was motivated by MBS’s interview with Fox News last month, in which he said that peace with Israel was within sight, and hinted that a Palestinian state would not be a necessary condition.
Halevy argued that the distinction between Hamas and Palestinian civilians in Gaza was not always clear. There were, he said, civilians who had participated in the massacres of Israelis, crossing into Israel behind the Hamas terrorists. “In [Kibbutz] Be’eri there were [Palestinian] kids that burned our kids — six-year-old kids.”
He said that Israel should consider bombing the underground facilities that Hamas maintained in Gaza, even though it often placed them under hospitals, schools, and mosques. International law, he said, made “dual use” civilian facilities legitimate targets.
Halevy, who leads the foreign affairs and national security committees in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, acknowledged that there would be major political changes in Israel as a result of the shock from the Oct. 7 attack. But it was too early for politics, he said.
For now, the country was focused on winning the war. The only debate was about how to do it. He praised the ordinary citizens who raced to the scene of the attack and prevented many thousands more people from being killed in the attack.
Tune in to SiriusXM Patriot 125 on Sunday, Oct. 22, from 7-10 p.m. ET, for an interview with Halevy on Breitbart News Sunday.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
*** WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT *** Horror: IDF Screens Raw Footage of Hamas Terror Attack for Media
GLILOT BASE, Israel — I wanted it to stop at 17 minutes in. But I had to watch. We had to bear witness.
This is what we saw.
A father and two sons, in their underwear, having just woken up, are trying to flee from their home.
The father picks up one boy and all three run to a shelter in the back yard.
A terrorist peers over the fence and lobs a grenade into the shelter. It bounces off the back wall and explodes.
The father’s body falls forward. A boy appears, covered in his father’s blood, looking at his father.
For a moment, you think the terrorists will shoot him.
Instead, the armed terrorists bring the boys inside, into the home.
One boy sits on a chair, the other on a couch, both still in their underwear, both covered in trickles of blood, theirs and their father’s. They wail: “Daddy! Daddy!” The boy on the couch says, “Itay, I think they are going to kill us.”
A terrorist — with a Palestinian flag patch on his flak jacket — opens the fridge and asks if they want water — “mayim,” in Hebrew. The one on the couch replies, in English, that he wants his mother — not “mayim,” but “mommy.” He repeats: “Mommy. Mommy.”
Then comes the worst moment of all.
We see the boy on the couch, now doubled over on the rug. “Why am I alive?” he wails.
He then looks at the brother in the chair. There is a red, black space where his eye used to be. He asks if his brother can see out of that eye. He says that he cannot. The other brother asks again. Are you joking? He repeats that he cannot see.
Somehow, the boys escape together, out the back door.
Later, the footage shows the mother coming to the home with local security guards. She sees her husband’s body and her legs give way. She screams, and the security guards place a hand on her mouth and try to drag her away. The attack is still going on, and they are still at risk of being killed.
That was the worst, for me — the footage of that event compiled from multiple surveillance cameras in a town that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) asked us not to reveal, since the relatives of the dead have not yet seen the footage.
On Monday, the IDF invited journalists onto a military base to view 43 minutes of raw footage of the attack by the Palestinian Hamas terrorist group on October 17 — an attack that claimed over 1,400 lives and saw over 4,000 people wounded, and more than 200 taken prisoner.
The footage was compiled from both victims and perpetrators, from GoPro cameras, dashboard cameras, social media, surveillance cameras, and even audio recording apps on mobile phones. It is just a small part of what the IDF still possesses.
We were not allowed to bring cell phones, cameras, or laptops into the room, because the IDF does not want the public to see the footage before the families of the victims have seen it — if it is ever seen again at all. We were only allowed notepads and pens.
Throughout the screening, there were gasps, and cries in the audience. I heard some journalists whisper: “Make it stop.”
Some of the footage had already appeared in snippets of news coverage, or on social media, during the attack on October 7, and in the hours that followed. But most had never been screened publicly before, or in full context.
We saw — we still see, in our memories — civilian drivers being murdered in their cars. We saw terrorists setting fires to homes. We saw the aftermath — burned bodies; corpses of people who had been bound and gagged; bodies of murdered children and babies; a decapitated soldier.
We see and hear the terrified screams of female IDF soldiers who had taken shelter against the attack. Some are murdered underneath a table as they scream — the incoherent, terrified scream of a living human being facing violent death, helplessly.
Again and again, we see Hamas terrorists pumping bullets into people who are already dead — just to make sure.
Some of the terrorists are visibly and audibly nervous in the footage. But they are not in a combat situation: they are coming for civilians.
They are hunting Jews, trying to find them in their hiding places, reveling in the piles of bodies, mutilating corpses, looting the victims.
The film also containes an audio sequence, recorded on the phone of one of the victims, used by a terrorist to call his parents back home in Gaza to boast that he had killed 10 Jews. His father replies: “Allahu akbar!” (God is great!).
But then the realization sets in that his son is probably not coming back — that he intends to become a martyr, and to die fighting, so that he can kill as many Jews as possible. The mother comes to the phone and pleads with him to come back.
She is not, after all that murder, proud of him.
We see scenes of the carnage at the music festival — terrorists shooting into the closed doors of portable toilets, murdering those within. We see victims hiding in a dumpster; we see hostages, bloodied, in agony, being loaded onto trucks as their captors laugh.
There is no moment of redemption in the footage. We do not see the end, when the good guys arrive and save the victims. The only comfort is the knowledge that the GoPro footage, at least, was retrieved from the terrorists after they were killed or captured.
After the video was done, we were allowed to go outside to retrieve our equipment. I needed to start writing as soon as I did so.
But first, I had to sit down. I leaned against a wall and cried. I kept thinking about those little boys and the nightmare they endured.
IDF Spokesman Admiral Daniel Hagari said that the military had hesitated before sharing the footage. But he said the IDF ultimately decided to do so because “we want to understand, ourselves, what we are fighting for.” He spoke about the duty to create a “collective memory,” noting that Israel was doing so even while it was still fighting the enemy that had attacked it.
Hagari also said that the attacks had nothing to do with Islam. But it was impossible to ignore the shouts of “Allahu Akbar!” that accompanied so much of the killing, and that greeted the dead bodies and the bloodied captives when they arrived in Gaza.
Whatever this attack had to do with Islam is something that Islam has to deal with. For now, Israel has a war to fight and win.
And this is why: a terrible crime, a crime against humanity, demands justice.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
GLILOT BASE, Israel — I wanted it to stop at 17 minutes in. But I had to watch. We had to bear witness.
This is what we saw.
A father and two sons, in their underwear, having just woken up, are trying to flee from their home.
The father picks up one boy and all three run to a shelter in the back yard.
A terrorist peers over the fence and lobs a grenade into the shelter. It bounces off the back wall and explodes.
The father’s body falls forward. A boy appears, covered in his father’s blood, looking at his father.
For a moment, you think the terrorists will shoot him.
Instead, the armed terrorists bring the boys inside, into the home.
One boy sits on a chair, the other on a couch, both still in their underwear, both covered in trickles of blood, theirs and their father’s. They wail: “Daddy! Daddy!” The boy on the couch says, “Itay, I think they are going to kill us.”
A terrorist — with a Palestinian flag patch on his flak jacket — opens the fridge and asks if they want water — “mayim,” in Hebrew. The one on the couch replies, in English, that he wants his mother — not “mayim,” but “mommy.” He repeats: “Mommy. Mommy.”
Then comes the worst moment of all.
We see the boy on the couch, now doubled over on the rug. “Why am I alive?” he wails.
He then looks at the brother in the chair. There is a red, black space where his eye used to be. He asks if his brother can see out of that eye. He says that he cannot. The other brother asks again. Are you joking? He repeats that he cannot see.
Somehow, the boys escape together, out the back door.
Later, the footage shows the mother coming to the home with local security guards. She sees her husband’s body and her legs give way. She screams, and the security guards place a hand on her mouth and try to drag her away. The attack is still going on, and they are still at risk of being killed.
That was the worst, for me — the footage of that event compiled from multiple surveillance cameras in a town that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) asked us not to reveal, since the relatives of the dead have not yet seen the footage.
On Monday, the IDF invited journalists onto a military base to view 43 minutes of raw footage of the attack by the Palestinian Hamas terrorist group on October 17 — an attack that claimed over 1,400 lives and saw over 4,000 people wounded, and more than 200 taken prisoner.
The footage was compiled from both victims and perpetrators, from GoPro cameras, dashboard cameras, social media, surveillance cameras, and even audio recording apps on mobile phones. It is just a small part of what the IDF still possesses.
We were not allowed to bring cell phones, cameras, or laptops into the room, because the IDF does not want the public to see the footage before the families of the victims have seen it — if it is ever seen again at all. We were only allowed notepads and pens.
Throughout the screening, there were gasps, and cries in the audience. I heard some journalists whisper: “Make it stop.”
Some of the footage had already appeared in snippets of news coverage, or on social media, during the attack on October 7, and in the hours that followed. But most had never been screened publicly before, or in full context.
We saw — we still see, in our memories — civilian drivers being murdered in their cars. We saw terrorists setting fires to homes. We saw the aftermath — burned bodies; corpses of people who had been bound and gagged; bodies of murdered children and babies; a decapitated soldier.
We see and hear the terrified screams of female IDF soldiers who had taken shelter against the attack. Some are murdered underneath a table as they scream — the incoherent, terrified scream of a living human being facing violent death, helplessly.
Again and again, we see Hamas terrorists pumping bullets into people who are already dead — just to make sure.
Some of the terrorists are visibly and audibly nervous in the footage. But they are not in a combat situation: they are coming for civilians.
They are hunting Jews, trying to find them in their hiding places, reveling in the piles of bodies, mutilating corpses, looting the victims.
The film also containes an audio sequence, recorded on the phone of one of the victims, used by a terrorist to call his parents back home in Gaza to boast that he had killed 10 Jews. His father replies: “Allahu akbar!” (God is great!).
But then the realization sets in that his son is probably not coming back — that he intends to become a martyr, and to die fighting, so that he can kill as many Jews as possible. The mother comes to the phone and pleads with him to come back.
She is not, after all that murder, proud of him.
We see scenes of the carnage at the music festival — terrorists shooting into the closed doors of portable toilets, murdering those within. We see victims hiding in a dumpster; we see hostages, bloodied, in agony, being loaded onto trucks as their captors laugh.
There is no moment of redemption in the footage. We do not see the end, when the good guys arrive and save the victims. The only comfort is the knowledge that the GoPro footage, at least, was retrieved from the terrorists after they were killed or captured.
After the video was done, we were allowed to go outside to retrieve our equipment. I needed to start writing as soon as I did so.
But first, I had to sit down. I leaned against a wall and cried. I kept thinking about those little boys and the nightmare they endured.
IDF Spokesman Admiral Daniel Hagari said that the military had hesitated before sharing the footage. But he said the IDF ultimately decided to do so because “we want to understand, ourselves, what we are fighting for.” He spoke about the duty to create a “collective memory,” noting that Israel was doing so even while it was still fighting the enemy that had attacked it.
Hagari also said that the attacks had nothing to do with Islam. But it was impossible to ignore the shouts of “Allahu Akbar!” that accompanied so much of the killing, and that greeted the dead bodies and the bloodied captives when they arrived in Gaza.
Whatever this attack had to do with Islam is something that Islam has to deal with. For now, Israel has a war to fight and win.
And this is why: a terrible crime, a crime against humanity, demands justice.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
Meet the Major US Philanthropy Financing an Israeli-Designated Terror Group
The Rockefeller Brothers Fund has given more than $3.4 million to Hamas-friendly groups since 2018
October 23, 2023The Rockefeller Brothers Fund touts its commitment to advancing "social change that contributes to a more just, sustainable, and peaceful world." It also bankrolls an Israeli-designated Palestinian terror group and has given millions more to groups that fund Hamas or have justified the terrorist group’s attacks against Israel.
Established by the heirs of John D. Rockefeller Jr., the Rockefeller Brothers Fund has since 2018 funneled more than $3.4 million to Hamas-friendly groups including Defense for Children International-Palestine, which serves as a critical cog in the terror group’s propaganda machinery.
In fact, the Israeli government declared Defense for Children International-Palestine a terror organization in October 2021, arguing that it effectively operates as an extension of the terror group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and employs senior PFLP members.
Defense for Children International-Palestine has received $165,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund since 2018 and propagates shoddy research that is weaponized by Israel’s detractors to delegitimize the Jewish state. Since Israel began retaliatory strikes against Hamas, it has amplified the false claim that an Israeli airstrike killed 500 Palestinians at the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza on Tuesday. Democratic lawmakers have relied on the group’s flawed statistics to push anti-Israel legislation in the House. In May, nearly 30 Democrats led by Rep. Betty McCollum (Minn.) introduced a bill accusing Israel of wrongfully detaining Palestinian children, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
Defense for Children International-Palestine’s ties to terror were public knowledge long before Israel designated the group a terrorist organization in 2021. The Jerusalem Post reported in 2018 that many of the group's top officials and board members were linked to the PFLP, a U.S.-designated terrorist group. At the time, Stephen Heintz, the fund’s president, defended the group’s support for Defense of Children International-Palestine, telling the Jerusalem Post in a letter to the editor that he was "convinced" that none of the group’s resources funded terrorist activity.
The fund, which former vice president Nelson Rockefeller and his four brothers launched in 1940, has been responsive to pressure from left-wing groups to amend its portfolio. The group pledged in 2014 to divest from fossil fuels, a move that vice chair Valerie Rockefeller Wayne described as a "moral obligation." Heintz agreed, saying it "felt like we were compromising ourselves" by holding stakes in oil companies.
Heintz has made no such argument when it comes to Palestinian terrorism as his fund pledges to work toward a "peaceful world."
The Rockefeller Brothers Fund has also doled out $580,000 to the Education for Just Peace in the Middle East, a group that has been accused of abusing its charity status to bankroll Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups. Other recipients of the fund’s largess include Jewish Voice for Peace, which organized a Wednesday raid on a congressional office building, resulting in the arrests of over 300 pro-Palestinian protesters.
Jewish Voice for Peace, which has received $490,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund since 2019, argued in the hours after Hamas launched its attacks that "Israeli apartheid and occupation" was the sole source of the violence. "Inevitably, oppressed people everywhere will seek—and gain—their freedom. We all deserve liberation, safety, and equality," the group said in a statement.
The Rockefeller Brothers Fund has given an additional $2.2 million since 2018 to other groups that have issued statements either justifying Hamas or blaming Israel for the terrorist attacks.
Rockefeller Brothers Fund trustee Peter Beinart gave his full-throated endorsement of Jewish Voice for Peace’s move to storm the congressional office building. In a series of tweets, he praised the courage of the demonstrators and claimed they care deeply about the 1,400 Israelis murdered by Hamas.
Beinart isn’t the only Rockefeller Brothers Fund Trustee with anti-Israel tendencies. Three other trustees of the fund—David Rockefeller Jr., Miranda Kaiser, and Marnie Pillsbury—are members of the Council on Foreign Relations, an influential Washington D.C., think tank that came under fire in September for hosting a private, invitation-only event with Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi, who has threatened Israel’s destruction and praised the Hamas terrorist attacks as a "glorious operation."
The Rockefeller Brothers Fund did not return a request for comment.
The Rockefeller Brothers Fund touts its commitment to advancing "social change that contributes to a more just, sustainable, and peaceful world." It also bankrolls an Israeli-designated Palestinian terror group and has given millions more to groups that fund Hamas or have justified the terrorist group’s attacks against Israel.
Established by the heirs of John D. Rockefeller Jr., the Rockefeller Brothers Fund has since 2018 funneled more than $3.4 million to Hamas-friendly groups including Defense for Children International-Palestine, which serves as a critical cog in the terror group’s propaganda machinery.
In fact, the Israeli government declared Defense for Children International-Palestine a terror organization in October 2021, arguing that it effectively operates as an extension of the terror group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and employs senior PFLP members.
Defense for Children International-Palestine has received $165,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund since 2018 and propagates shoddy research that is weaponized by Israel’s detractors to delegitimize the Jewish state. Since Israel began retaliatory strikes against Hamas, it has amplified the false claim that an Israeli airstrike killed 500 Palestinians at the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza on Tuesday. Democratic lawmakers have relied on the group’s flawed statistics to push anti-Israel legislation in the House. In May, nearly 30 Democrats led by Rep. Betty McCollum (Minn.) introduced a bill accusing Israel of wrongfully detaining Palestinian children, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
Defense for Children International-Palestine’s ties to terror were public knowledge long before Israel designated the group a terrorist organization in 2021. The Jerusalem Post reported in 2018 that many of the group's top officials and board members were linked to the PFLP, a U.S.-designated terrorist group. At the time, Stephen Heintz, the fund’s president, defended the group’s support for Defense of Children International-Palestine, telling the Jerusalem Post in a letter to the editor that he was "convinced" that none of the group’s resources funded terrorist activity.
The fund, which former vice president Nelson Rockefeller and his four brothers launched in 1940, has been responsive to pressure from left-wing groups to amend its portfolio. The group pledged in 2014 to divest from fossil fuels, a move that vice chair Valerie Rockefeller Wayne described as a "moral obligation." Heintz agreed, saying it "felt like we were compromising ourselves" by holding stakes in oil companies.
Heintz has made no such argument when it comes to Palestinian terrorism as his fund pledges to work toward a "peaceful world."
The Rockefeller Brothers Fund has also doled out $580,000 to the Education for Just Peace in the Middle East, a group that has been accused of abusing its charity status to bankroll Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups. Other recipients of the fund’s largess include Jewish Voice for Peace, which organized a Wednesday raid on a congressional office building, resulting in the arrests of over 300 pro-Palestinian protesters.
Jewish Voice for Peace, which has received $490,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund since 2019, argued in the hours after Hamas launched its attacks that "Israeli apartheid and occupation" was the sole source of the violence. "Inevitably, oppressed people everywhere will seek—and gain—their freedom. We all deserve liberation, safety, and equality," the group said in a statement.
The Rockefeller Brothers Fund has given an additional $2.2 million since 2018 to other groups that have issued statements either justifying Hamas or blaming Israel for the terrorist attacks.
Rockefeller Brothers Fund trustee Peter Beinart gave his full-throated endorsement of Jewish Voice for Peace’s move to storm the congressional office building. In a series of tweets, he praised the courage of the demonstrators and claimed they care deeply about the 1,400 Israelis murdered by Hamas.
Beinart isn’t the only Rockefeller Brothers Fund Trustee with anti-Israel tendencies. Three other trustees of the fund—David Rockefeller Jr., Miranda Kaiser, and Marnie Pillsbury—are members of the Council on Foreign Relations, an influential Washington D.C., think tank that came under fire in September for hosting a private, invitation-only event with Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi, who has threatened Israel’s destruction and praised the Hamas terrorist attacks as a "glorious operation."
The Rockefeller Brothers Fund did not return a request for comment.
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