Israel-Hamas War Keeps Getting Sicker

Victor Davis Hanson

There is something surreal, even sick about the current Israel-Hamas war.

Throughout European and American cities and campuses, tens of thousands of Middle East immigrants and students, and radical leftists chant nonstop, “Free Palestine from the River to the Sea.”

More recently, they are also yelling, “Israel, you can’t hide, we caught you in genocide.”

Consider the hypocrisy of that dual messaging.

Hamas and its supporters are openly and eagerly calling for the genocidal end of Israel by wiping it out from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

Yet at the same time they also claim it is Israel that is committing genocide—the very current, self-described agenda of Hamas and its expatriate community of devotees!

The war has become crazier still.

Hamas and its megaphones abroad also blast Israel daily for retaliating for the Oct. 7 butchery of some 1,400 Israeli infants, children, women, and the elderly.

They further demand Israel must be selective in its airborne targeting of the Hamas killers, who burrow beneath hospitals and mosques while using civilians as shields.

Hamas takes for granted that a supposedly heartless Israel nevertheless will be reluctant to strike the Hamas terrorists when and if they are surrounded by civilians.

Indeed, Gazans are put in more danger by Hamas than they would otherwise be by the Israel Defense Forces.

Yet the world accepts that Israel itself would never employ such a ruse of using civilians to shield its cities from indiscriminately fired Hamas missiles.

The world further knows that if Israel ever employed such a barbaric tactic, Israeli civilian shields would attract—not deter—Hamas rockets.

Hamas’ apologists insist that Israel warn civilians in advance to keep clear of Israeli bombs.

Yet at the same time, Hamas daily launches rockets into Israel. And no one in the international community lectures Hamas first to drop leaflets or text Israeli civilians that Hamas rockets are on their way into their vicinity.

Instead, the only purpose of Hamas rockets is to indiscriminately strike and kill Israeli civilians.

So the real issue is not about the principle of civilian deaths—given Israel is damned when it tries to avoid noncombatants and Hamas is cheered on when it deliberately targets them.

Instead, the asymmetry is explained by the efficacy of the Israeli response and impotence of Hamas rocketry.

In other words, Hamas cannot stop the Israel Defense Forces from hitting its targets, while Israel can knock down far more Hamas rockets.

And so Israel is being blamed for being too effective or “disproportionate” in its bombing, and Hamas is rewarded for being too ineffective in its rocketing.

There are other sick paradoxes in this war.

Hamas started the conflict by sending death squads of 2,000 killers into Israel at a time of peace to surprise and murder more than 1,000 Israeli civilians.

There was no precivilizational, unspeakable atrocity that the butchers did not commit—torture, beheading, rape, mutilation, and necrophilia.

The terrorists were followed into Israel by a multitude of opportunistic Gaza civilians, who in turn joined in the violence and looting.

Back in Gaza, crowds reviled and tried to harm Israeli captives bound as hostages to trade for jailed terrorists in Israel.

In sum, the population that once elected Hamas into power, and cheered on its bloodletting—as long as there was yet no Israeli response—now claims to have no connection at all with Hamas. Yet the world assumes correctly that the people of Israel are inseparable from its military.

The surreal paradoxes of this war still do not end there.

In its mass murdering spree of Oct. 7, Hamas butchered more than 30 American citizens, and perhaps another 13 still are unaccounted for—and are likely hostages inside the tunnels of Hamas in Gaza.

Yet the Biden administration has not forced Hamas to return kidnapped Americans, much less responded to its killing of U.S. citizens.

Why then, despite all the rhetoric of solidarity, is the United States constantly pressuring Israel to be measured in its retaliation against the Hamas terrorists in Gaza, pressure that will only make things easier on Hamas?

Why are we seeking to restrain those who are trying to destroy the killers of Americans, and indirectly aiding those who murdered them?

And why is the global elite community siding with the murderous aggressors and not those seeking justice for the murdered?

Lots of reasons.

There are 500 million Arabs in the world, and nearly 2 billion Muslims—but only 9 million or so Israelis.

Nearly 50% of the world’s oil reserves are found in the Muslim Middle East.

Westerners, like tiny Israel, are considered too rich and powerful, while non-Westerners are romanticized as blameless, victimized underdogs.

But the best way of understanding this sick war is that Israelis are Jews and the ancient plague of antisemitism is again sweeping the globe.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/11/03/one-sick-war

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Boston Children’s Hospital Received $1.4 Million In Taxpayer Dollars For ‘Gender Transition Services’

Boston Children’s Hospital was reimbursed $1.4 million by the state of Massachusetts for its “gender transition services” from January 2015 to May 2023, according to documents obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation through a public records request.

Boston Children’s Hospital, which claims to have created the first pediatric and adolescent transgender health program in the country, was hit with heavy backlash in 2022 for performing gender transition surgeries on minors, including vaginoplasty, phalloplasty, chest reconstruction and breast augmentation, according to a since-deleted website. The Executive Office of Health and Human Services (EOHHS) of Massachusetts told the DCNF on July 25 that it paid the hospital over $1.4 million for “Gender transition services (i.e., physician’s services, inpatient and outpatient, hospital services, surgical services, prescribed drugs, therapies, etc.)” from January 1, 2015, to May 1, 2023.

The hospital performed 204 “gender affirmation” surgeries from 2017 to 2020, the same time as the EOHHS funding, according to a study published in the Journal of Clinical Medicine. 177 were chest reconstruction surgeries, and 65 of those surgeries were for patients under 18 years old.

Boston Children’s “Center for Gender Surgery” web page, which has since been removed, contained dozens of videos discussing gender dysphoria, transgender sex, “top” and “bottom” surgery, and even a how-to guide for talking to friends and family about the subject, according to an archived version of the page. The website stated that “surgery is never the first step in a gender transition” and suggested that newer patients start with socially transitioning and “supplemental hormones.”

Patients as young as 15 years old could obtain breast or chest augmentation provided they have their parent’s consent and a letter from a “medical doctor or nurse practitioner stating that you have ‘persistent, well documented, gender dysphoria,'” according to the website.

Boston Children’s also offered vaginoplasty surgeries to 17-year-olds without any parental consent, but said that it would only perform a phalloplasty or a metoidioplasty, which are surgeries to construct a penis, on patients 18 years or older, according to its website.

The hospital did not respond to multiple requests for comment regarding whether or not taxpayer funding was used for transgender surgeries for minors. The public records response did not provide any further explanation regarding the specific “gender transition services” for which the state had reimbursed the hospital.

The hospital’s “Gender Multispeciality Service” website explains that it is “committed to providing the best care for ALL of our patients, regardless of their gender identity” and that children should get the support they need to “live, grow and thrive with love and support.”

“We believe in a gender-affirmative model of care, which supports transgender and gender diverse youth in the gender in which they identify,” the hospital wrote. “This is a standard of care grounded in scientific evidence, demonstrating its benefits to the health and well-being of transgender and gender diverse youth.”

The hospital currently offers a “Transgender Reproductive Health” program where patients can get help with menstrual suppression, including egg freezing and sperm banking, and contraception counseling. The program also does “gender-affirming hysterectomies” but only on patients that are 18 and older, according to the website. If a transgender patient has already had a vaginoplasty, the hospital offers “dilation therapy and care of neovaginas” as well.

On a resources page, the hospital suggests that male teenagers can use things like duct tape for “safe tucking” in order to give the appearance of having a vagina. While the hospital notes that tape is not the recommended method, it lays out steps to use it safely and provides images to demonstrate.

The number of U.S. teenagers getting transgender surgeries has increased over the last several years, according to a study published by the JAMA Network, a medical journal. Surgeries for Americans aged 12 to 40 almost tripled between 2016 and 2019 from 4,552 to 13,011, with minors making up 3,678 of the procedures. The study also noted that just over 25% of patients obtaining gender transition procedures did so using state-funded insurance through Medicaid.

https://dailycaller.com/2023/10/30/childrens-hospital-transgender-services

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Italy Joins Hungary as European Leader in Pro-Life, Pro-Family Policies

Italy is announcing a new initiative to raise the nation’s flagging birthrate. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s government approved a new budget last week, setting aside 1 billion euros (nearly $1.1 billion) in funding to support mothers and families, in an effort to boost the national birthrate.

Some of those measures include increased financial aid to working mothers with two or more children, increased government funding for day care facilities, and extended parental leave. Meloni, herself a working mother, said, “We want to dismantle the narrative that birthrate is a disincentive to work. We want to incentivize those who give birth to children and want to work.”

The prime minister added:

We want to establish that a woman who gives birth to at least two children has already made an important contribution to society, and therefore, the state partly compensates by paying social security contributions.

Italy’s birthrate is currently one of the lowest in Europe. At the end of the 19th century, the Italian birthrate was 5.06 children per woman, but since the 1970s, the birthrate has declined rapidly, dropping from about 2.66 children per woman at the end of the 1960s to 1.24 in 2020, and the population’s average age has increased, with 20% of the population being over the age of 65.

In addition to the measures noted above, Italian Economy Minister Giancarlo Giorgetti implemented a plan earlier this year to adjust tax breaks so taxpayers with children can keep more of their paychecks. He also announced plans to offer income-tax deductions for families: Those with one child may deduct 2,500 euros ($2,641) from their taxes; those with two children may deduct 10,000 euros ($10,567), and those with more than two children may deduct an additional 2,500 euros ($2,641) per child.

When Meloni came to power as prime minister last year with the slogan “Dio, patria, famiglia” (God, fatherland, family), she pledged to make Italian families and the nation’s birthrate priorities for her administration. In order to achieve that goal, Meloni established a Ministry for Family and Birth, telling Italians that it is “time to rediscover the beauty of parenting.”

Meloni has made family—not just birthrates—a chief focus. She opposes abortion, which is currently legal in Italy during the first 90 days of pregnancy, and same-sex marriage, which is not legally recognized in Italy. Under Meloni’s administration, same-sex partners have also been banned from being listed as parents on a child’s birth certificate; the new laws require both biological parents to be named.

Surrogacy, which Meloni called “an abomination that seeks to reduce human life to a bargaining chip,” is also illegal in Italy, and the prime minister has introduced legislation in Parliament to criminalize Italians seeking surrogacies abroad.

According to Meloni, her government is turning to conservative-led Hungary for inspiration in bolstering families. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has been working hard since coming to power in 2010 to support families in his country and increase birthrates, implementing a slew of pro-family policies. Last year, for example, Orbán exempted mothers under 30 from paying income tax.

Previously, the conservative prime minister introduced government subsidies for large families and granted tiered tax breaks for mothers. His party also passed a law requiring women seeking an abortion to listen to their unborn baby’s heartbeat before making a decision, although the party has proven unsuccessful in its attempts to completely outlaw abortion.

Speaking in the Hungarian capital of Budapest last month, Meloni declared, “I think a great battle for somebody who is defending humankind and the rights of people is also to defend families, is also to defend nations, is also to defend identity, is also to defend God and all the things that have built our civilization.”

The policies she and her Hungarian counterpart have enacted are clearly designed to uphold that mantra.

Meloni’s new budget also cuts payroll taxes across the nation, netting an estimated 14 million Italians an extra €100 ($106) per month.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/10/30/italy-devotes-1-1-billion-to-bolstering-families-children

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Tracking men likely to kill: The radical proposal after five women dead in nine days

The proposal below is way over the top. It is a basic principle of natural justice that you cannot punish people for things that they have not done. That someone thinks you MIGHT do something does not alter that.

The big deficit in the article below is that it shows no real understanding of the psychology behind domestic homicide. What women need to be told is that rejection by a woman can be deeply and dangerously distressing to a man, engendering a huge sense of loss. And that can make him very angry with the perceived perpetrator of the loss. And anger very commonly results in violence.

So for a woman to save her life she may need to compromise with the rejected man in some way, difficult though that may be. At a minimum, she could offer a guarantee of continued friendship, even if cohabitation is no longer possible.

In short, to save their lives, women may need to be acutely aware of the huge pain rejection can lead to in some men. It is really important for the man not to feel completely cut off. Sorry if that is not the authoritarian solution the nitwits below were looking for. Human problems require human solutions, not ankle monitors

Men flagged as potential killers would be GPS-tracked and monitored online under a radical proposal family violence experts want governments to consider after five women were killed in nine days.

As despair mounts about the failure to curb the numbers of Australian women seriously injured or allegedly killed by men, experts are calling for more direct intervention with “fixated” men – who stalk, harass, monitor or threaten intimate partners, but may not yet have offended.

They say a program designed in the UK to protect public figures, which is now also being trialled there for potential domestic violence perpetrators, should be introduced and trialled in Australia to de-escalate potential violence against women.

It would involve intelligence gathering by specialist police to find and observe men, possibly including GPS tracking of them and monitoring their online and social media activities, and bringing them in if their behaviour indicated they had moved into a violence-planning stage.

Experts including violence researcher Dr Hayley Boxall, formerly of the Australian Institute of Criminology and now with ANU, say rather than working with offenders to reform their behaviours after violence has commenced, more direct methods such as this could help stop violence before it happens.

National Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Commissioner Micaela Cronin said the proposal, included in Boxall’s homicide research for Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety (ANROWS), is worth considering given the “devastating” deaths of women in Australia this year.

The spate of women’s alleged murders around the country had distressed her deeply, and “it is very clear this year we’ve seen rates [of violence against women] increasing, not rates decreasing”.

“That’s what keeps me up at night; what is it we can do that will shift the dial?” said Cronin from the Northern Territory, where she will attend a landmark coronial inquest on Monday into the violent deaths of four Aboriginal women, allegedly by domestic partners.

Women including Perth family lawyer Alice McShera, 34; Bendigo mother-of-four Analyn “Logee” Osias, 46; and Lilie James, a 21-year-old water polo coach at a Sydney private school, all died violently between October 25 and 29.

Men have been charged in the cases of Osias and McShera and are on or awaiting trial, but the suspected killer of James was found dead by police.

In 2023, 43 women have allegedly been killed in domestic and family violence incidents, along with 11 children.

The number of women who have died in intimate partner homicide per year in Australia has hovered about 68 since 1989-90, Australian Institute of Health and Welfare data shows, and intimate partner homicide is the country’s most common form of homicide.

This week the Australian Institute of Family Studies found one in three Australian teenagers had experienced intimate partner violence, and the New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics released data showing rates of domestic and family violence had not decreased in the last 12 years.

‘What we need to do in this country more is to really understand, and focus on, the men who kill women and use violence against women.’

“What we know from Australian Institute of Criminology research [the Pathways to Intimate Partner Homicide] is that there are pathways into perpetration … and what we need to do in this country more is to really understand, and focus on, the men who kill women and use violence against women,” she said.

“We’ve moved women around, removed women from their homes to safe houses, we tell women not to go walking at night; all the attention is on what women can do to keep themselves safe rather than holding men who use violence accountable.”

Boxall’s proposal to introduce a system of monitoring and intervening with men who had not yet committed violence, but whose actions suggested they were likely to, “could be worth exploring”.

One-third of perpetrators of intimate partner homicides in Australia fit the “fixated threat” category of men who have not previously come to the attention of the justice system, Boxall found.

“Despite being jealous, controlling and abusive in their relationships, (fixated threat) offenders were relatively functional in other domains of their life,” she wrote.

“In many cases they were typically middle-class men who were well respected in their communities and had low levels of contact with the criminal justice system.“

She found their behaviours escalated as the victim was perceived to withdraw from the relationship.

Boxall said a dedicated family violence Fixated Threat Assessment program, staffed by specialist intelligence-gathering police, would help to “keep eyes” on such men and allow police to gauge if and when they may pose a lethal threat.

Many men who go on to commit murder, but had not yet used violence, did show signs that could have helped prevent deaths, Boxall said. Dedicated threat assessment structures could give bystanders a way to get interventions started.

“In 25 per cent of cases, the perpetrator [of intimate partner homicide] has told friends and family members he was going to murder his partner,” Boxall said.

“In a number of cases there was evidence this was followed up with a police report: in one case, he [the eventual perpetrator] told his golf buddies, ‘I’m going to kill her by smashing her head in with a golf club’, and he did it a few months later – but nobody had done anything.”

“We think we know that guys who will murder their partner look a certain way; but these are guys living among us.”

The death of Lilie James highlighted that progress is needed to understand who is capable of violence against their partner, and a more sophisticated threat assessment would be a tangible way to help find out.

Professor Michael Flood, a researcher sociologist at Queensland University of Technology who has written about engaging men and boys in violence prevention, agreed with Cronin and Boxhall that earlier intervention with men at risk of murdering their partners or ex-partners is “entirely warranted”.

He agreed that the focus had been primarily on victims and how they could avoid victimisation, and far more effort needed to be placed on changing young men’s attitudes towards women.

National Community Attitudes Towards Violence Against Women Survey data had revealed this year that, “a substantial proportion, particularly of young men, think it’s legitimate for men to dominate women in relationships,” he said.

“There is still a level of social tolerance of dominance and abuse in relationships that we have to address.” This would mean more education on healthy masculinity, and “the way harmful forms of masculinity feed into perpetration … we still need to scale the work with men and boys up much more”.

On the ground, police forces in New South Wales and Victoria have made strong, one-off family-violence blitzes this year, in which hundreds of people, many with outstanding warrants, were charged with various offences including weapons, firearm and drug offences.

But existing fixated threat assessment is focused on lone-actor, “grievance-fuelled violence” perpetrators such as terror offenders, not family violence prevention.

“Police will of course act if we identify a threat to any individual including a current or former partner,” a Victoria Police spokesman said. There are no plans to create a similar centre specifically for family violence.

“Any decisions around fitting trackers to family violence offenders is a matter for government,” the spokesman said. “Police see the devastating impact of family violence every day.”

https://www.smh.com.au/national/tracking-men-likely-to-kill-the-radical-proposal-after-five-women-dead-in-nine-days-20231103-p5ehdd.html

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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