Mae Wallaby

[Angela Epstein @adepstein1]

Andy Burnham has said he stands with British Jews and that violence against the Jewish community will not be tolerated on the anniversary of the October 7 attack….

So ban today’s march. Scrap your gesture policies towards Israel that have no meaningful impact on that country but fuel antisemitism in the UK. And declare that you will never enter into a coalition with the Greens.
No quite so easy to stand up for Jews after all, is it?

[Hen Mazzig @HenMazzig]

Ed Sheeran did take a risk. He refused to join Free Palestine's false "genocide" campaign. He stood up for the truth and faced the consequences.

He was bullied relentlessly. All his opening acts left mid-tour.

If Ms. Rachel wants to know what a "risk" feels like, she should demand that Hamas disarm, and watch how quickly she gets cancelled for actually calling for peace.

But she won't. She's too busy building her fame on spreading hateful propaganda about Israelis and Jews, while somehow still believing that she is the victim.

[Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib @afalkhatib]

Three years after the catastrophic day Hamas unleashed on Israelis and on the Palestinian people in Gaza, the majority of the “pro-Palestine” industrial complex still refuses to utter a single word of condemnation or assign any responsibility to the Islamist terror group that destroyed the Gaza Strip and triggered the most calamitous chapter in modern Palestinian history.

Today alone, I have seen dozens of posters and announcements for rallies, protests, and a so-called “week of rage.” Endless groups across the Western world, including the United States, whether community-based, campus-based, nonprofit, or cultural, are celebrating and commemorating “three years of resistance and genocide.” In almost comical language, many declare October 7 as the beginning of genocide in Gaza while making no mention of the bloodshed, murder, beheadings, torture, mutilation, burning people alive, executions, sexual assault, and hostage taking that initiated the disaster which befell the Palestinian people.

It is as if Israeli and Jewish lives are invisible. As if civilians were not slaughtered in their homes while they slept. As if partygoers were not massacred. As if the attack was not entirely unprovoked while a ceasefire was in place between Israel and Hamas. It is a complete erasure of cause and effect and a refusal to grasp that choices and actions produce consequences.

I have yet to see a mainstream Arab, Palestinian, or Muslim American organization, let alone prominent “pro-Palestine” academics, journalists, community groups, or notable individuals, issue a statement acknowledging Hamas’s responsibility and culpability for the devastation inflicted on Gaza. Even within the imbalance of power and the overwhelming suffering caused by Israeli decisions, there is still ample space to acknowledge the humanity of Israeli victims and the injustice of what happened to them. More importantly, there is immense space to speak honestly about the horrendous damage caused to Palestinians by the Jihadi fascism of Hamas, which has devastated Gazans over the two decades of its rule.

Three years later, Israelis, Jews, and Zionists are commemorating the anniversary while engaging in introspection, critique, and calls for accountability for leaders, security services, and other political players. In contrast, instead of using the grim third anniversary of October 7 to learn and evolve, significant elements of the “pro-Palestine” industrial complex remain one of the most embarrassing and backward hate-driven movements in contemporary political activism.

This is not a real pro-Palestine movement. It is a virulent anti-Israel bloc built on ignorance, mob mentality, open sympathy for terrorism, and sabotage of the Palestinian people’s legitimate pursuit of freedom and prosperity. Its regressive and poisonous rhetoric will not evolve into anything constructive. It should be treated with contempt, stripped of relevance, and isolated until it collapses and makes room for a serious effort that actually cares about Palestinians rather than the fantasies of wannabe revolutionaries.

[Simon Schama @simon_schama]

https://t.co/Qgmea7rZF5 This essay on the true history of Zionism by Adam Kirsch is absolutely extraordinary - clarifying and powerful and obligatory reading - for Zionists, Jews who aren't sure and - especially - for anti-Zionists.

[Campaign Against Antisemitism @antisemitism]

Scottish Greens co-leader calls the creation of Israel “an act of racism”.

Speaking to @BBCRadioScot, Ross Greer MSP claimed that the creation of the world’s only Jewish state “was an act of ethnic cleansing”.

Zionism is the belief that Jews have the same right to self-determination afforded to all other peoples of the world, under Article 1 of the UN Charter.

The @scottishgreens are a separate entity to their counterparts in England and Wales, who passed the “Zionism is racism” motion.

Meanwhile, the Deputy Leader of the Welsh Greens has called the motion “idiotic”.

So even the various UK Green Parties can’t decide between them whether the Jews are allowed a state or not.

If you are a Zionist member of the Green Party, we’d like to hear from you.

Please send an e-mail to [email protected] and we will be in touch.

https://t.co/Sr5Xdbg3nS

[Imam of Peace @Imamofpeace]

A Statement of Conscience on October 7

I will not start by saying ‘as a Muslim’ or ‘as an imam’, but as a human being.

On October 7, over 1,200 innocent people were killed in a single day. Families were shot in their homes. Young people out dancing were hunted across open fields. Over 250 people, including children and the elderly, were dragged into Gaza as hostages. I think of a mother hiding in a safe room with her baby’s mouth covered. I think of a father listening as the line went quiet. I think of families who waited month after month for someone to come home, only to receive a coffin. I didn’t need my faith to recognize the evil of what happened. My heart told me first.

But I’m a Muslim and an imam, and I owe the world one honest sentence: what was done that day was a crime against God. God teaches that whoever kills one innocent soul, it is as if he had killed all humanity.

This day has an author: Yahya Sinwar. He planned it, ordered it, and knew what would follow. Every death of that day and war he started rests on him and Hamas leaders who sat in tunnels and foreign hotels and called slaughter a victory. It rests on every Palestinian leader who cheered, excused, handed out sweets, or said nothing. They chose this. They own it.

But Sinwar did not invent himself. He was the fruit of a tree planted almost a century ago by the Muslim Brotherhood. Hamas named itself in its founding charter as the Brotherhood’s branch in Palestine. The Brotherhood’s poison is slow. It arrives through study circles, youth camps, charity boxes, and kind words to lonely young men. Drop by drop, it teaches him that his religion is a political party, his neighbour is his enemy, the Jew is the cause of his sorrow, and God is pleased by rage. By the time the gun arrives, the soul is already taken.

I have seen this poison in mosques where sermons became rallies and young men could recite slogans but not sit still for a verse on mercy. Every people that let the Brotherhood in has paid in blood and ruined generations. It has never built anything it did not first set on fire.

Behind Hamas stands another hand: the IRGC. It was the IRGC’s money, weapons, and training that turned a hateful idea into an army. One calls itself Sunni and the other Shia, and they may curse each other’s creeds, but they are united in what they worship. It is not God. It is power. The same IRGC that armed the killers of October 7 shoots Iranian girls for showing their hair, hangs young men for asking to be free, and has left graves from Tehran to Damascus to Beirut. They speak in God’s name. So did Pharaoh speak in the name of heaven.

So let me say this clearly. Hamas and the IRGC are not merely enemies of Islam. That would be too small a charge, as if their crime were only against us. They are enemies of God. God is the Giver of life, yet they deal in death. God calls Himself the Most Merciful, yet they have made cruelty a sacrament. God honoured the children of Adam, yet they look at a child and see a target or a shield. To murder what God created and sign His name to it is the oldest blasphemy.

And we Muslims have been too quiet. Some of us were afraid. Some told ourselves it was not our business. Some, God forgive them, felt something other than horror that morning and never confessed it. Silence was the soil this poison grew in. I will not add to it.

So on this anniversary, let us say plainly what our scripture already says. The Jews are not our enemies. They are our cousins in Abraham, and their dead were created by the same God who created us. Today belongs to them: the murdered, the hostages, and families who still set a place at the table. To them I say: I am sorry for what was done to you by men who used the words of my prayers. You’re not alone in your grief or remembrance.

The enemies of God are those who murder in His name. We know their names. It is time we said them from our own pulpits, in our own voices, before they speak for us again.

Imam Tawhidi

[Sofia Afonso Ferreira @sofiafonsoferre]

All of this should have alerted us.

When, on October 7, more than 1,200 civilians were massacred in Israel, including children and families, protests broke out the very next day, before any Israeli military response. In various cities, thousands took to the streets not in mourning or solidarity with the victims, but to support the massacre.

The October 7 attack took place during a ceasefire, yet it is always Israel that is demanded to accept a ceasefire which is then violated by Hamas.

When the case of the al-Ahli Arab hospital struck by a rocket made worldwide headlines, the press accepted without question that it had been an Israeli attack, with the number of victims—around 500—tallied in record time. It was proven, through Al Jazeera footage, that it had in fact been a rocket fired by Hamas which, due to a malfunction, had fallen not on the hospital building, as initially claimed, but in the parking lot. The New York Times issued a correction based on verified evidence, but the victims entered the statistics as killed by Israel.

When the first hostages were rescued, horrific stories began to surface. Their testimonies revealed that they had been tortured, beaten, raped, starved, and denied water in captivity. Some hostages spent months in cages. Many were held by families, journalists, teachers, and employees of humanitarian organizations. We saw a hostage reduced to skin and bones digging his own grave in a tunnel. Others returned as corpses, including a baby strangled with bare hands.

UNRWA, which should be a neutral agency meant to provide humanitarian aid, was exposed with evidence. UNRWA employees took part in the October 7 attacks. UNRWA schools served as weapons depots. Hamas operatives hold management positions in UNRWA.

Palestinians were murdered by Hamas for disagreeing. Images and videos showed Hamas executing alleged Israeli collaborators without trial, torturing, silencing, and killing political opponents, violently repressing protests, throwing gay people off rooftops, and beating women in public squares over imposed religious norms.

All of this should have made clear what kind of regime controls Gaza.

All of this should have alerted us that it was an epidemic that would spread to the West.

________

Image – Rockets fired from southern Gaza toward Israel, October 10, 2023. (Atia Mohammed/Flash90)

[HonestReporting @HonestReporting]

Palestinian Islamic Jihad just announced its youngest dead operative: 13 years old.

A 14-year-old was named the same day.

Hamas’s own footage shows child soldiers in training. The IDF published a video showing an adolescent being used to move weapons, and the Hamas operative trailing behind him.

The terrorists are saying it themselves. Why isn't the media?
https://t.co/R4DebXjoSc

[Aja ♀️🇬🇧 @AjaTheEmpress]

Anyone else find it weird that “Zionism is racism” was a National Front talking point in the 80s and is now official Green Party policy?

[John Aziz @aziz0nomics]

This is some rather telling graffiti from the French riots: explicit support for Hamas and October 7.

But go on—keep telling me that these are "school protests" about "teacher shortages".

Nobody believes you. The rioters certainly don't.

https://t.co/h319MeZkef

[Mor Edge Insight @MorEdge_Insight]

Everyone is sharing the satellite pictures of Rafah and calling the rubble the whole story. Nobody is showing you what was under it.

This is Rafah. The red lines are the tunnel network Hamas built under the neighborhoods, and the video marks where it runs under stadiums, under mosques, under schools, under UNRWA compounds, under hospitals, under civilian homes.

The overhead is an illustration. The shafts and the corridors are not. The IDF filmed inside them. Concrete arches, bunks, stored gear, a city under the city, dug so the people above it could be used as the roof.

That’s why the blocks came down. You can’t leave a fortified tunnel grid under a border town and call the houses above it civilian. Hamas put the war under the kitchens and the classrooms on purpose, then sent the pictures of the kitchens and the classrooms around the world.

The satellite image is the surface. The reason is underneath it.

Gaza wasn’t destroyed because Israel felt like it. It was destroyed because the Islamic army that started the war built its base under the people it claims to defend, and then refused to come out.

[Hen Mazzig @HenMazzig]

Lubna Speitan, the Green Party member who proposed the "Zionism is racism" motion, talks about how she joined the party in the first place.

Was it to make the UK a better place to live? To fight for the disenfranchised citizens? Nope.

In her own words, she says she joined to help members that wanted to reject both the IHRA's and the JDA's definitions of antisemitism.

She joined the Green Party to deny antisemitism. You can't make this up.

[Aizenberg @Aizenberg55]

🧵On @piersmorgan show @mehdirhasan lied, obscured & misrepresented in a desperate attempt to discredit IDF's list of 170 fake Gaza journalists who were combatants. In one key lie, Hasan claimed Abdullah Darwish was never a CPJ listed journalist, but he was! Links below. 1/

[Rachel Moiselle @RachelMoiselle]

As per the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign’s website, there will be at least 16 anti-Israel events held across the island of Ireland on the anniversary of the October 7th massacre.

I am particularly saddened to see one such event in my hometown of Dún Laoghaire, which is also the hometown of the father of Emily Hand, the 8-year-old child abducted by Hamas.

You can protest against Israel all you like. But it goes against all semblance of human decency to attend a protest (or any anti-Israel event) on October 7th. The very date three years ago that approximately 1,200 people in Israel were slaughtered, 251 people were taken hostage, and women and girls were raped by Hamas butchers.

Going out of your way to attend an anti-Israel event on an anniversary dedicated to honouring murdered Israeli victims just serves to expose you for who you really are. Someone filled with sadistic malice who hides behind the language of social justice to inflict your self-righteous cruelty.

[spiked @spikedonline]

Gaza is the most lied about war in history. There was no genocide, no famine, no intentional targeting of children. These are modern-day blood libels. We need to expose all the Islamo-left lowlifes who spread these lethal falsehoods, says Brendan O’Neill
https://t.co/HX7wOLaa8K

[WikiBias @WikiBias]

Sanitizing a massacre begins with how it is presented: the language, the images, and whose suffering remains out of view.

Look at Shai Hermesh amid the ruins of his home in Kfar Aza. A former regional council head and Knesset member, he spent 20 hours hiding in his safe room during the Hamas massacre. His home became a command center for the terrorists and was destroyed. His son, Omer, was murdered.

Days later, he returned to search for anything that had survived. He found his tefillin and Hanukkah menorah intact.

Now look at English Wikipedia’s presentation of October 7: a satellite image, “armed incursions,” “Palestinian militant groups.” The opening paragraph mentions Israel’s military response before the massacre of civilians.

These choices place geography, military terminology, and geopolitical context before the people whose lives were destroyed.

The result is distance from the victims and from the brutality they endured.

This is how a massacre is sanitized.

Remembering October 7 means preserving the truth and the humanity of its victims, even when biased editors on English Wikipedia obscure that reality.🕯️

[David Bernstein @ProfDBernstein]

The IDF painstakingly researched and provided a military ID number, rank and unit for every one of the 170 supposed journalists who were actually Hamas or Islamic Jihad terrorists. Much of this information was gleaned from the terrorist groups' own "martyr notices."

That's what Albanese means by "not a shred of evidence." It's like 2026 Goebels with her.

[European Jewish Congress @eurojewcong]

We are appalled by reports that MEP Rima Hassan knocked down the Israeli and European flags displayed at the European Parliament as part of an exhibition honouring the victims and hostages of the October 7 massacre.

If confirmed, this goes far beyond political disagreement or provocation. These flags formed part of a memorial to the victims of the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust and to those abducted by Hamas. To deliberately interfere with such a memorial, on the eve of the anniversary of the attacks, would show a profound contempt for their memory and for the suffering of their families.

That such an incident is alleged to have taken place inside the European Parliament makes it all the more serious. We call on the Parliament to establish exactly what happened, make the relevant evidence public and, if the allegations are confirmed, take appropriate disciplinary action.

The victims of October 7 and the hostages deserve dignity and respect. Their memory must never become a target for political provocation.

[Campaign Against Antisemitism @antisemitism]

A global hate movement is mobilising to mark the third anniversary of the 7th October attacks.

According to figures released by Israel’s Ministry for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, 262 anti-Israel events have reportedly been organised across 37 countries between 1st and 14th October.

Staggeringly, it appears that 29% of all upcoming events are due to take place on 7th October itself, and around one-third have been identified as high-risk.

The UK reportedly is holding the fourth-highest number of events in the world, behind only the US, Spain and Australia, and London has been named among the high-risk hotspots.

Ahead of the planned student-led anti-Israel march taking place in London tomorrow, these statistics are a sobering reminder that this hatred knows no borders.

This is not one protest in one city. Across the world, the anniversary of the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust is being treated not as a day to mourn, but as an occasion to rally against the Jewish state.

https://t.co/aFVGYJGIQc

[Rob Rinder @RobbieRinder]

Zionism is both historic and spiritual; the ancient connection of the Jewish people to the land of Israel and their right to self-determination in their historic homeland.

I am British by birth, belonging and love; Jewish by inheritance, memory and faith. Britain is my country. Israel is not a competing loyalty, it is the homeland of the Jewish people to which I am bound by ancestry, memory and identity.

For millions of Jews, that is the heart of Zionism. Not supremacy, dispossession or the killing of Palestinians and not a colonial claim to a foreign land but the self-determination of a people with an ancient and continuous connection to it. In practice, it must mean two peoples entitled to self-determination both living in security and freedom with neither people’s future purchased with the lives, rights or humanity of the other.

That is why declaring “Zionism is racism” is not merely wrong, it tells most Jews that their understanding of their own history, identity and collective freedom is itself morally suspect. The Greens should ask themselves whom they are trying to please by adopting a slogan that turns Jewish self-determination into a moral stain. If your politics of inclusion requires millions of Jews to renounce a central part of their history and identity before they qualify for your solidarity, it isn’t inclusion. You are telling Jews: you may belong here but only if you disown Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people. That is not anti-racism. It is imposing a political test on Jews that no genuinely progressive movement would dream of imposing on any other minority.