The Patriot Post® · Hospitals Are for Sick People, and We Don't Mean Jihadists
Four events yesterday all related to the war Israel is now waging against Hamas after jihadists slaughtered 1,400 innocent people on October 7. Those events tell us a lot about where things stand, including a significant military campaign on the ground in Gaza.
We’ll start with some good news. An estimated 300,000 people attended a pro-Israel rally in Washington, DC. Among them were scores of family members of Israelis who are still being held hostage by Hamas terrorists.
“We are all standing here in unity with you,” Republican Senator John Barrasso told them. “For the family members, you have seen the face of terror, the horrors, the brutality. We are heartbroken by that. We stand with the people of Israel and that is very heartfelt.”
The rally was bipartisan, too, showing that some Democrats actually get it. “When Hamas says ‘from the river to the sea,’ they mean all of present-day Israel should be a Jewish-free land,” explained Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer in a pointed rebuke of a few of his Democrat colleagues. “In fact, Hamas has said that what they did — the horror that they did on October 7 to the Jewish communities near the Gaza border — they should do to all Israelis. Just look at Hamas’s founding document. It says, ‘Is that a Jew behind the tree? Cut down the tree so you can shoot him.’ That is the evil of Hamas. Never, never, never will we forget the evil of Hamas.”
Unsurprisingly, the pro-Israel attendees felt no need to yell or display racist or genocidal slogans, or to tear down statues, or to get in fights. There were American and Israeli flags, not terrorist ones.
That doesn’t mean the event was free of such ugliness. “Heil Hitler!” yelled one anti-Israel protester among other vulgarity. A genocidal fascist dictator of the German Left is precisely the model for today’s Islamofascist killers.
Neither are U.S. government employees unanimous in supporting our ally Israel. The second event was that more than 400 staffers across 40 government agencies sent a letter to Joe Biden yesterday calling on him to “urgently demand a cease-fire,” seek “de-escalation of the current conflict by securing the immediate release of the Israeli hostages and arbitrarily detained Palestinians,” and to help restore basic utilities in Gaza.
The moral equivalence is appalling. Israel is retaliating to make sure Hamas cannot continue carrying out the very mission Schumer pointed out. Before commencing military operations, Israel told Palestinian civilians to flee Gaza and gave them many days to do so. Hamas and Egypt wouldn’t let them. As for utilities, maybe if Hamas used all that foreign humanitarian aid to serve the population instead of making missiles and allowing its billionaire leaders to live it up in Qatar, water and electricity wouldn’t be a problem.
As House Speaker Mike Johnson said to loud cheers at yesterday’s rally, “The calls for a cease-fire are outrageous.”
Speaking of Johnson and the House, event number three yesterday was the Senate blocking the House bill providing $14.3 billion in aid to Israel. Typical of Washington, many in Congress and the White House want to tie that aid to Israel with about four times as much for Ukraine. That $100 billion combo platter includes money for other national security priorities too.
There’s a lot to be said here and too little room to say it, but we’ll make two key points. First, Republican support for Biden’s seeming blank check to Ukraine has dwindled, so it’s predictable that the GOP-controlled House would want to separate the two. Second, however, combining them actually does make some sense given that Russia and Iran are increasingly collaborating with weapons, money, and resources against U.S. interests around the globe.
Finally, on the ground in Gaza, Israeli forces entered the Al Shifa hospital in a battle that illustrates a lot about the two sides in this conflict.
It’s unlike the lie about a hospital that the American Leftmedia helped Hamas tell last month. As our Douglas Andrews deftly put it: “It wasn’t an airstrike, it didn’t hit a hospital, it didn’t kill hundreds, and Israel didn’t do it. But other than that, the reporting was accurate.”
This time, Israeli troops actually did enter the hospital to fight Hamas, though the Leftmedia is still propagating fake news. “Israel says Hamas militants are using hospitals as shields for fighters but hasn’t provided evidence of that,” harrumphs the Associated Press, which oh by the way had photographers embedded with Hamas during the October 7 attack.
If anybody could provide evidence of Hamas’s use of human shields and hospital bases, you’d think it would be, oh, maybe AP photographers.
Perhaps the AP could consult with other outlets. PBS, The Washington Post, and Human Rights Watch each documented Hamas terrorists operating in that same hospital going as far back as 2006. Hamas attacked Palestinian rival Fatah from the hospital in 2007, hid there during war in 2008 and 2009, and used it as a headquarters in the war in 2014.
CNN reported just Monday that “Hamas has a command node under the Al-Shifa hospital, uses fuel intended for it and its fighters regularly cluster in and around Gaza’s largest hospital.”
Or maybe the AP could ask Team Biden. According to National Security Council spokesman John Kirby, “We have information that Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad used some hospitals in the Gaza Strip, including Al Shifa, and tunnels underneath them, to conceal and support their military operations and to hold hostages.”
Yes, Hamas literally built a base below the hospital — which probably cost some of that aforementioned humanitarian aid money — specifically for the purpose of creating media headlines around the world about an “Israeli assault on a hospital.” It’s a sick game played by deranged Islamofascists with a religiously motivated death wish. And today’s media often falls for it because journalists are increasingly invested not in the story but in The Narrative™.
In any case, the war in Gaza is far from over. That’s also true of the war for hearts and minds in the West, though a rally of 300,000 people certainly provides some hope.