6 teenagers in France convicted for roles in Islamist murder of Samuel Paty

Six teenagers have been convicted for the role they played in the jihadist murder of the teacher Samuel Paty, all because he wanted to discuss the monster known as Muhammed:

A French juvenile court on Friday convicted six teenagers for their roles in the 2020 beheading of a teacher by an Islamic extremist, an attack that shocked the country and shone a light on the real-world dangers of online hate speech.

Samuel Paty, a history and geography teacher, was killed near his school after showing his class cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad during a debate on free expression. Attacker Abdoullakh Anzorov, a young Chechen who had become radicalized, was killed by police.

The court found five of the defendants, who were 14 and 15 at the time of the attack, guilty of involvement in staking out the teacher and identifying him for the attacker. The sixth defendant, 13 at the time, was found guilty of lying about the classroom debate in comments that aggravated online anger against the teacher.

But here's the bad news:

One was given a six-month prison term but allowed to serve under house arrest with an electronic bracelet. The others were given special suspended sentences of between two and three years requiring them to stay in school or jobs. The sentences included special educative follow-up measures that also involved their families.

Lawyers for Paty’s family decried the sentences as too lenient. [...]

And they're correct. They should be tried as adults, if they weren't, and in any event, this marks another judicial embarrassment where the establishment is trying to dodge serious responsibility.

More than 150 Hamas jihadists surrender to IDF in Khan Yunis

An important accomplishment made by the IDF in capturing a significant number of terrorists in the city of Khan Yunis:

Over 150 Hamas terrorists surrendered to the IDF in Khan Yunis on Thursday. Footage of the incident was published on social media.

The terrorists were checked by the IDF soldiers and transferred for initial questioning by the security forces.

This is a very good achievement. There'll be plenty of jihadists to put on trial soon, and hopefully, they'll be given the death sentence, something that's being debated now in the Knesset.

Amazingly enough, veteran filmmaker Steven Spielberg has commented on the issue:

Acclaimed Hollywood director Steven Spielberg spoke out on the Hamas massacre of October 7 for the first time last week.

In an address published by the USC Shoah Foundation last Friday, Spielberg said that he "never imagined I would see such unspeakable barbarity against Jews in my lifetime."

Spielberg, who is Jewish, founded the Shoah Foundation in 1994 to gather and preserve testimony from survivors and witnesses to the Holocaust. The Foundation has begun gathering testimony from survivors of the October 7 massacre under its Countering Antisemitism Through Testimony Collection program, which documents antisemitism in the post-Holocaust era.

According to Spielberg, this initiative is part of “an effort that will ensure that the voices of survivors will act as a powerful tool to counter the dangerous rise of antisemitism and hate.”

“Both initiatives — recording interviews with survivors of the October 7 attacks and the ongoing collection of Holocaust testimony — seek to fulfill our promise to survivors: that their stories would be recorded and shared in the effort to preserve history and to work toward a world without antisemitism or hate of any kind,” he said.

“We must remain united and steadfast in these efforts,” he said.

But does this means he's willing to produce films and/or documentaries in the forseeable future about this tragedy? Because if he doesn't, then he won't be accomplishing anything. Nor will it avail if he takes the same morally equivalent approach he did with Munich nearly 2 decades ago, which ultimately came at the expense of the Jewish victims of the terrorist attack in 1972 at the Olympics. If memory serves, he even sought approval from CAIR, whom it turns out is celebrating the October 7 horror:

Video emerged Thursday of Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), celebrating the October 7 terror attack by Hamas in which 1200 people were murdered in Israel and more than 240 were abducted as hostages.

Awad’s speech on November 24 to the American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) convention in Chicago was reported at the time, but was largely overlooked; it resurfaced Thursday when shared by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).

[...] The Biden administration also worked with CAIR, despite its radical and antisemitic history, in shaping the so-called “strategy” on antisemitism earlier this year. As Breitbart News reported, CAIR boasted that it helped protect extreme criticism of Israel within the White House’s strategy, which was a reversal of existing policy under previous administrations of both parties.

Will Spielberg be willing to condemn CAIR for their repulsive behavior, and even pan Biden's associations with them? Let's hope he and his institutions realize what a terrible PR error they'd be making if they didn't.

Update: the White House now says it's severing ties with Awad. Something they could've done long ago, and they surely knew CAIR was a repellent lot.

Update 2: Andrea Widburg at the American Thinker comments on the photographs of the jihadists who've surrendered, ideally stripped to underwear.

Update 3: also vital to note is that, as a doctor's revealed, at least 10 hostages of the Hamas were sexually abused in the tunnels:

At least 10 of the Israeli civilians released by Hamas, both men and women, were sexually assaulted or abused while in captivity, the Associated Press reported Wednesday.

In a report detailing allegations of severe and widespread sexual abuse by Hamas terrorists during their October 7 onslaught and later against hostages, a doctor who treated some of the 110 hostages released from captivity told the AP that at least 10 men and women among those freed were sexually assaulted or abused.

He did not provide further details, and spoke on condition of anonymity to protect the hostages’ identities.

The doctor’s comments corroborated similar accounts shared at a meeting on Tuesday. The meeting, held between the Israeli war cabinet and a group comprising recently freed hostages and family members of those still held in Gaza, featured firsthand testimonies from some of the released captives. These individuals detailed their experiences of sexual abuse during their captivity, participants said.

Read more if you have the stomach for it. This is exactly why the Hamas has to be brought down altogether, and all sane people must strongly condemn their savagery.

University presidents made themselves look horrific on the issue of anti-Israeli violence

3 university presidents were called in to testify about the crisis of antisemitism at their campuses, and all 3 actually made themselves look repulsive, because they wound up acting as apologists for it. Only now, after the initial testimonies, are they actually backtracking:

The presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania on Wednesday sought to contain the damage from congressional testimony a day earlier in which they struggled to say whether calls on their campuses for genocide against Jews would violate school policies.

The stuttering testimony before a US House of Representatives committee by Claudine Gay and Elizabeth Magill, the leaders of Harvard and Penn, respectively, stirred outrage — particularly among Jewish alumni and donors — and added fuel to calls to replace them. By Wednesday evening, an online petition calling for Penn’s board to sack Magill had garnered more than 4,500 signatures from students and donors.

In a video address released on Wednesday, a sober-looking Magill said she had erred by taking an overly legalistic approach when responding to the question posed by Elise Stefanik, the New York Republican representative, who pressed the academics to say plainly whether calling for the genocide of Jews on their campuses violated their codes of conduct of harassment policies.

What took place was worse than harassment. It was support for murder and sexual violence. Such behavior is serious enough to warrant police enforcement to arrest any and all offenders, and even the college presidents themselves should be arrested and imprisoned for failure to report/prevent crimes. Even the part about "legalistic" is DS. Why, if that's how they're going to address anti-Israeli hostility, who knows how they'd respond if 9-11 victims were the subject? Stefanik panned the so-called apology:

Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-NY, blasted the president's video, calling it a "pathetic PR clean up attempt."

"This pathetic PR clean up attempt by Penn shockingly took over 24 hours to try to fix the moral depravity of the answers under oath yesterday," Rep. Stefanik wrote in a post on X. "And there was not even an apology. By the way, the questions were asked over and over and over again."

"No statement will fix what the world saw and heard yesterday."

The Ivy League president said that a call for genocide of the Jewish people would be classified as harassment or intimidation, despite her previous comments saying that it would "depend on the context."

"Depend" is another pathetic wording Magill employed. In the meantime, all concerned should stop donating to these monster factories, should not take classes there, and should also file police reports against the management as much as against the offending alumna themselves. Seriously, there is grounds on which to prosecute university managements, and it's something that should also be done when it comes to cases like the transsexual male creep swimming against female swimmers at these institutions in the past year or so. Yes, Riley Gaines should by all means file a legal case against even the offender himself over that matter. Update: some local sources are speaking out against this academic abomination. For example, the Yad Vashem chairman:

"It's appalling but not surprising," he said. "I visited these institutions, spoke with presidents, provosts, and deans, as well as with the incredible Jewish leaders who are the silver lining there. These Jewish leaders feel ostracized. In a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion class, they put all the Jews in a separate room to 'protect' them. I spoke with the presidents and provosts, and they have no idea what is going on."

"The problem is in the faculty, which is developing, article by article, a policy that calls for the elimination of the Jewish state. Such a protocol is not logical, but it is doubtless driven by other things, such as the Qatari investments some of these institutions are receiving," he explained.

"The presidents of these universities respond by citing the First Amendment about freedom of speech. I say to them - if such a doctrine were to be developed calling for the ostracization of the LGBTQ+ community or targeting people of color, that too would be protected by the First Amendment, but that professor would be fired the following day. The same professor calling for the elimination of the state of Israel has a good chance of being promoted."

He added: "This is a cancerous process. I saw it starting five to ten years ago when there were reasonably easy steps that could have been taken against the BDS referendums. We are now in stage two cancer, and more aggressive treatments are needed - treatments I am not optimistic to see from the current administration. At stage three and four, it will be terminal - but for the universities, not for the Jews."

Dayan says that he believes that claims of history repeating itself are more than hyperbole. "For the first time, I see the similarities between what happened then and what is happening now. The people who burned books in Berlin in the 1930s were not the ignorant masses but the professors and students of the most prestigious universities in Germany. Virtually, the Zionist books in the university libraries are already being burned."

He sees distinct similarities between Hamas and the Nazis: "The cruelty displayed by Hamas is the same cruelty displayed by the Nazis, and the intentions are the same genocidal intentions. Whether to call them Nazis can be debated, but there can be no doubt about their intentions."

[...] Dayan believes that the denial of the massacre mandates action by his institution. "Denial of the Holocaust started in the 40s. Denial of Oct. 7th started on Oct. 8th. Denial of antisemitism and the state of Israel is growing as well and costing Jewish lives. Yad Vashem traditionally doesn't deal with modern antisemitism because six million Jews murdered in the Shoah are entitled to an institution that is exclusively for them. The situation now, though, calls for exceptional actions, and so now we will be active in combating modern antisemitism too."

Here's some more on the Algemeiner:

Antisemitism on American college campuses is comparable to Stage 2 cancer, and if allowed to progress to Stage 4, academia will be “doomed,” the chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel’s national memorial to the Holocaust, told The Algemeiner a day after presidents of elite US universities refused to issue a condemnation of genocidal calls against Jews and Israel.

According to Dani Dayan, institutions of higher education are becoming increasingly filled with “pseudo-academic theories advocating for genocide of the Jewish people,” and the leadership of those colleges are supporting them, “either by action or inaction.”

Dayan said he explained to University of Pennsylvania president Elizabeth Magill — who drew outrage in September for refusing to cancel an anti-Zionist festival featuring speakers accused of promoting antisemitic conspiracies and violence against Israel — that antisemitism was a “cancerous process” that wasn’t stopped at Stage 1 by universities when it would have been “relatively easy” to do so.

“Now we are in Stage 2, which is much more difficult, and necessarily takes harsher steps,” he said.

“But if we don’t take those steps now, we will reach Stage 3 and Stage 4, which is terminal,” he added, clarifying the problem would be lethal “not for the Jews, but terminal for the university. They will be doomed if they continue this way.”

Well this is why any university that allows such repulsive ideologies to take hold cannot be bankrolled anymore by sane people's money, period. Nor can Jewish students continue to learn there. They'd do well to save their hard-earned money.

Update 2: since the the subject of the Holocaust during WW2 came up here, see also this article about Miss Puerto Rico Michelle Colón revealing she had relatives who were murdered during the Holocaust.

Update 3: rabbi David Wolpe resigned from the Harvard antisemitism investigation committee after Gay's catastrophous failure of responsibility.

Update 4: Magill has resigned on the 9th of December as president of UPenn. What she did was truly repulsive, and she should be ostracized by sensible people for excusing the seriousness of the topic.

Child hostage freed from captivity returns to school

One of the child hostages who was fortunate to be freed from Hamas captivity has returned to school:

Emilia Aloni, one of the youngest hostages taken by Hamas during the October 7 massacre, has returned to kindergarten Tuesday. This was the first day she attended since September 28, when classes were dismissed for the Jewish holidays.

In a heartwarming video recorded by Emilia's mother, Danielle, and released on social networks by the family and the Israeli Ministry of Education, the teacher is seen opening the gate for Emilia, saying: "Welcome, welcome, welcome – I feel like breaking into song! Wow, I love her!" After she hugs the 5-year-old girl, the other girls start hugging her too. One of them is heard telling Emilia: "I missed you for such a long, long time," and "I missed you. I saw you on TV."

One girl who's very lucky to be alive and well after those horrors.