After October 7, some leftists hopefully changed their view of Muslims

In this Wash. Free Beacon article, they interview a leftist "peace activist" who appears to have changed after her experience with the jihadists from Gaza who also invaded her household on October 7:

Irit Lahav, 57, was a peace activist who believed in the decency of the Palestinian people. Then, on Oct. 7, ordinary Gazans joined in a terrorist attack that left more than one in four of her neighbors in Kibbutz Nir Oz dead or abducted.

For many members of Nir Oz and other Israelis, the atrocities of Oct. 7—and particularly the broad participation of the Gazan public in the day—destroyed their faith in coexistence with the Palestinians.

Lahav, a manager at a travel company, long participated in peace demonstrations. In recent years, she volunteered for an Israeli charity called Road to Recovery, driving Palestinian children from the border of the Gaza Strip, less than two miles from her home, to Israeli hospitals for life-saving medical care.

"We thought that Palestinians are good people. All they want is peace and prosperity," Lahav told the Washington Free Beacon in an interview from a hotel in this Red Sea resort city where she and most of her community were temporarily relocated. "It's just that Hamas is forcing them to be in this aggressive situation."

When terrorists first shook the door of her safe room on Oct. 7, Lahav was sure that she and her 22-year-old daughter were about to be killed. But a makeshift lock she had fashioned out of an oar and a vacuum cleaner thwarted three separate break-in attempts. The women lay in the darkened room for about 10 hours listening to sounds of automatic gunfire and grenade explosions. At one point, they heard a group of teenagers robbing their house.

Later, Lahav learned from other Nir Oz survivors that Gazan women and children as young as 10 years old had followed Hamas terrorists into the kibbutz, looting, helping the armed terrorists, and apparently enjoying themselves.

"Basically it was sort of an invasion of a community," Lahav said. "That's why for me, I cannot say this was a Hamas action. No, for me, this was a Palestinian action. A whole community had come to our kibbutz, took our things, stole stuff, killed people, and kidnapped others."

"Am I thinking about myself being foolish until now?" Lahav added. "Maybe. But more is that I'm disappointed in them, that they're so cruel, have no values, really lost their human values."

During Israel's ongoing war to destroy Hamas, 40 of the hostages taken from Nir Oz have been released, while 30 remain in Gaza. Several other hostages have been declared dead in recent weeks, bringing the total number of people killed from Nir Oz to 46.

While it's good to know she's changed her mind about what people like her still call a "palestinian people", it remains to be seen if any of these presumably no-longer-peace-activists recognize that Islam played a very horrific major role in the bloodbath of October 7. And what would Lahav say if "settlers" of background more religious than hers were the victims? Lahav should publicly renounce all associations with anyone who until now supported Islamic savages. And she'd do well to consider how many women in Europe, in example, have fallen victim to Islamofascism as well. Many on the left now owe a serious apology.

Turkish MP dies after delivering anti-Israeli tirade

Looks like a most antisemitic member of Turkey's pseudo-parliament paid for his vulgar screeds big time:

Turkish lawmaker Hasan Bitmez of the hardline Islamist Saadet Party (SP) died in the hospital on Thursday, two days after he collapsed during a fiery tirade against Israel at the Turkish National Assembly.

Bitmez, 54, collapsed at the climax of a 22-minute speech on Tuesday in which he criticized the government of Islamist President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his AKP Party for not taking a strong enough stance against Israel in the Gaza war.

[...] The parliament was reportedly debating the national budget at the time of his remarks. It is not clear from Turkish media reports if Bitmez’s anti-Israel attack was germane to the budgetary considerations at hand.

For many of these Islamofascists, nothing is ever enough. But here's one scumbag who sure wound up potentially facing the Lord's wrath due to his offensive tirade.

More news coverage of the horror of sexual violence Hamas inflicted on October 7

Here's another report (via Front Page), repulsive as can be, about the sexual violence the Hamas committed along with graphic gore on October 7 this year:

Israeli investigators probing the fallout of the brutal October 7 attacks have found evidence that men as well as women suffered sexual violence and rape at the hands of Hamas and Islamic Jihad attackers, activists have claimed.

Yael Sherer, a spokeswoman for Israel's Survivors of Sexual Violence advocacy group, said there was physical evidence as well as eyewitness accounts of sexual violence perpetrated against both sexes amid the attacks.

'There was sexual violence and rape in these communities in the south of Israel... we have a few living survivors - not a lot - of both genders. It didn't only happen to women, it happened to men as well,' she told BBC Radio 4.

'Aside from finding bodies of people who were murdered, a lot of the bodies were mutilated... terrorists made sure to disgrace these people and dishonor them,' she added.

It comes as Israeli police opened up the biggest investigation into sexual violence and crimes against women ever in the nation.

The leader of the investigation, Shelly Harush, said: 'It's clear now that sexual crimes were part of the planning and the purpose was to terrify and humiliate people.'

Police have collected thousands of statements, photographs and video clips that have been called unbearable to watch from a mother's perspective and include 'girls whose pelvises were broken they had been raped so much'.

The irony in this is that those Hamas jihadists who raped men were bound to be homosexual. In which case, there's definitely a contradiction when it comes to homosexuality and Islam. Is that why some of the most antisemitic LGBT ideologues aren't against the Religion of Peace?

Joe Sacco's anti-Israel graphic novel is going back to press

The UK Guardian, a very bad MSM outlet themselves, published a puff piece about Joe Sacco's GN titled "Palestine", which was intended as anti-Israel propaganda, and is now seeing new print, clearly for the sake of obscuring the Hamas' savagery on October 7, and pandering to the crowd of creeps supporting them:

An acclaimed nonfiction graphic novel about Gaza, which pioneered the medium of “comics journalism”, has been rushed back into print after surging demand since the fresh outbreak of the conflict two months ago.

Palestine, by Joe Sacco, was originally released in comic book form by the American publisher Fantagraphics 30 years ago, then published as a single volume by the company, and by Jonathan Cape in the UK in 2003.

It was created by Sacco, a Maltese American journalist and cartoonist from Portland, Oregon, as a record of his own journeys around Gaza in 1991, and has since then won a clutch of awards and been included on university courses as a primer for the whole conflict. Edward Said, the Palestinian American academic and critic, said in his introduction to the book: “With the exception of one or two novelists and poets, no one has ever rendered this terrible state of affairs better than Joe Sacco.”

Gary Groth, the co-founder of Fantagraphics, said that after the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October and the subsequent bombing of Gaza demand for the book had soared.

He said, “We blew out of our inventory of several thousand copies quickly and are reprinting now. Retailers and wholesalers began ordering the book in far greater quantities than in the recent past, which indicates that every element down the chain – consumers and retailers – are expressing demand for it.”

Well, this is certainly telling about Groth to boot, the same disgrace and shame who did a sugarcoated interview with Maurice Sendak years ago. Of course, one must also wonder where any and all comic retailers stand on a subject involving Stan Lee, Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, Jack Kirby, Joe Simon, Will Eisner and Gil Kane's Israeli brethren. If any are seeking to capitalize on the tragedy that struck many Jewish women and children in particular, that's offensive in the extreme, and they have no business associating even remotely with the creations of famous Jewish artists. Sacco, along with the article writer, makes clear he remains sympathetic to followers of Islam, and shows no sign of horror over what followers of the Religion of Peace in Gaza did to innocent and defenseless women and children. That's what really makes this Guardian article repulsive. Unshockingly, they didn't even see fit to mention that Edward Said falsified his history. None of which matters to Sacco, sadly, nor to Groth. I absolutely do not want to buy from Fantagraphics if this is the kind of graphic novels they're going to market.

And Sacco's GN didn't so much pioneer comics journalism as it did propaganda, and exploiting the medium for that specific goal. It's sickening to think how many GNs of this sort came down the pike in the past 2 decades that did more harm than good for the comics medium's image overall regarding political issues.

Anti-Zionism Is Antisemitism

To read the MSM newspapers is to realize just how out of touch mainstream outlets are to the ideological fanaticism that is the base of 9 out of 10 journalists' worldview.

Anti-Zionists are antisemites. Hands down. This is not a new debate. Give Hamas the means and they'll annihilate Israel without second thought, carrying out the wet dreams of leftists worldwide. 

It's sick and disgusting, and I'm tired of it.

FWIW, at NYT, "Is Anti-Zionism Always Antisemitic? A Fraught Question for the Moment":

From the halls of Congress to America’s streets and universities, a once largely academic issue has roiled national discourse, inciting accusations of bigotry and countercharges of bullying.

The brutal shedding of Jewish blood on Oct. 7, followed by Israel’s relentless military assault on Gaza, has brought a fraught question to the fore in a moment of surging bigotry and domestic political gamesmanship: Is anti-Zionism by definition antisemitism?

The question deeply divided congressional Democrats last week when Republican leaders, seeking to drive a wedge between American Jews and the political party that three-quarters of them call their own, put it to a vote in the House. It has shaken the country’s campuses and reverberated in its city streets, where pro-Palestinian protesters bellow chants calling for Palestine to be free from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

It surfaced in Wednesday’s Republican presidential debate, when Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor, said, “If you don’t think Israel has a right to exist, that is antisemitic.” The following night, lighting the national menorah behind the White House, Vice President Kamala Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, who is Jewish, warned, “When Jews are targeted because of their beliefs or identity, and when Israel is singled out because of anti-Jewish hatred, that is antisemitism.”

Zionism as a concept was once clearly understood: the belief that Jews, who have endured persecution for millenniums, needed refuge and self-determination in the land of their ancestors. The word still evokes joyful pride among many Jews in the state of Israel, which was established 75 years ago and repeatedly defended itself against attacks from Arab neighbors that aimed to annihilate it.

If anti-Zionism a century ago meant opposing the international effort to set up a Jewish state in what was then a British-controlled territory called Palestine, it now suggests the elimination of Israel as the sovereign homeland of the Jews. That, many Jews in Israel and the diaspora say, is indistinguishable from hatred of Jews generally, or antisemitism.

Yet some critics of Israel say they equate Zionism with a continuing project of expanding the Jewish state. That effort animates an Israeli government bent on settling ever more parts of the West Bank that some Israelis, as well as the United States and other Western powers, had proposed as a separate state for the Palestinian people. Expanding those settlements, to Israel’s critics, conjures images of “settler colonialists” and apartheid-style oppressors.

So for some Jews, the answer to the question is obvious. Of course anti-Zionism is antisemitism, they say: Around half the world’s Jews live in Israel, and destroying it, or ending its status as a refuge where they are assured of governing themselves, would imperil a people who have faced annihilation time and again.

“There is no debate,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, which has been defining and monitoring antisemitism since 1913. “Anti-Zionism is predicated on one concept, the denial of rights to one people.”

Many Palestinians and their allies recoil just as fiercely: The equating of opposition to a Jewish state on once-Arab land — or opposition to its expansion — with bigotry is to silence their national aspirations, muffle political dissent and denigrate 75 years of their suffering.

Laila el-Haddad, a Palestinian activist and author, called it “a chilling attempt to punish and silence voices critical of Israeli policies.”

But perhaps nowhere is the question more fraught than among Jews themselves. Younger, left-leaning Jews, steeped in the cause of antiracism and terms like “settler colonialism,” are increasingly searching for a Jewish identity centered more on religious values like the pursuit of justice and repairing the world than on collective nationalism tied to the land of Israel.

Many older liberal Jews have also struggled with the Israeli government’s lurch to the far right, but they see Israel as the centerpiece and guarantor of continued Jewish existence in an ever more secular world.

“We’re living in an increasingly post-religious age, and any Jewish community that walks away from the Jewish people, and its most articulate expression of our times — the Jewish state, the state of Israel — is walking away from their own future,” said Ammiel Hirsch, the senior rabbi of Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in Manhattan and the founder of Amplify Israel, which seeks to emphasize the Jewish state in Jewish worship.

For Republicans, the issue is simple and convenient. The raising of anti-Zionism in the debate over antisemitism amid the Israel-Hamas war pushes aside the presence of white-nationalist bigots on the fringes of the Republican coalition — like Nick Fuentes, the avowed neo-Nazi who dined with Kanye West and former President Donald J. Trump last year — and instead forces Democrats to defend the pro-Hamas demonstrators on their own coalition’s fringes.

So on Tuesday, when G.O.P. leaders led by Representative David Kustoff of Tennessee, one of the House’s two Jewish Republicans, put to a vote a resolution condemning all forms of antisemitism and flatly stated “that anti-Zionism is antisemitism,” the 216 Republicans who voted yes included two who have been accused of antisemitism and white-nationalist flirtations, Representatives Paul Gosar of Arizona and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia. (The one Republican who voted no, Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, has now been labeled antisemitic by the White House.)

For the broader Democratic community, by contrast, the debate has been wrenching, pitting allies against one another, splintering more conservative Jewish Democrats who absolutely believe anti-Zionism is antisemitic from progressive Democrats, especially Democrats of color, who argue just as strongly for the latitude to criticize Israel, and leaving a huge middle unwilling to draw bright lines.

Thirteen Democrats voted no, including Israel’s fiercest critics in Congress, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. Ninety-five voted yes, but 92 Democrats voted “present,” among them prominent Jews like Jerrold Nadler of New York, Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Jan Schakowsky of Illinois.