Just to tie together this week's big story with what we were focused on last week:
The most demented people on social media are those who were offended by Laurence's Fox's comments about a female journalist yet celebrate women getting raped and murdered by a terrorist organisation.
— Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) October 9, 2023
~THE HEROES OF HAMAS: If Jeremy Corbyn and the Canadian Union of Public Employees and the other hot-for-Hamas types of the western left are getting a bit blasé about the gang-raped women, this news report should get their juices going:
i24NEWS Correspondent @Nicole_Zedek reports from Kibbutz Kfar Aza, a quarter-mile from the Gaza border, and recounts the atrocities that were committed in the small community which remains an active scene as soldiers clear booby traps and recover the bodies of dozens of victims pic.twitter.com/J4ZfWZQYHp
— i24NEWS English (@i24NEWS_EN) October 10, 2023
Fox's Trey Yingst is also reporting this story, and i24 is a reputable channel - it's Israeli-owned, but also broadcasts from studios in Morocco and the United Arab Emirates. And indeed it would be statistically improbable, when communities of 400 are reduced to only 160, for there to be no dead kids. [UPDATE! Oh, even the BBC's cottoned to it, albeit sotto voce.]
Ms Zedek's reference to the soldiers being unprepared for "the sheer horror of what they were about to come to" reminds me that I'm old enough to have known Allied soldiers who were the first to stumble on the German death camps. For example, my late chum Denis Norden:
In the spring of 1945 he was preparing one such entertainment with Eric Sykes in northern Germany and needed some lights. He was told there was a German camp down the road lit up like a Christmas tree, and he could surely find what he needed there. So off he set, and walked straight into Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where, among others, Anne Frank had died a month before. 'We hadn't heard a word about it,' said Denis.
The camp had been not so much 'liberated' as abandoned: The German commandants and Hungarian guards had gone, shooting some of their starving prisoners on the way out and making perfunctory efforts to bury the evidence. Norden and Sykes were greeted by a world of wraiths: you couldn't tell which of these slumped emaciated husks was thirty or seventy, and in some cases alive or dead; wizened starving mothers clutched their shriveled babies, unaware that all life had fled. Denis found some lights, took the jeep back to the RAF, and at base rustled up all the provisions he could find and took it back to Belsen - and, even as he handed it out, worried whether the ruined digestive systems of humans starved to all but death would be able even to handle food.
Denis lived with what he'd seen for another three-quarters of a century. I would not like to have the memories these Israeli reservists will have for what remains of ours.
Meanwhile, for all those agonized liberal westerners who still wonder how ordinary, decent Germans could let it happen, here's a Sydney crowd - outside the Opera House - chanting "F**k the Jews". All together now:
Video: A crowd at the steps of the Sydney Opera House chants "gas the Jews" and "f*ck the Jews" on October 9. pic.twitter.com/uPNLuaIgcv
— Gabriel Noronha (@GLNoronha) October 9, 2023
~WAR IS HELL (AT THE BBC): It's only Day Four of the new war, but the western media has already moved on to the iniquities of what's being inflicted on poor little Gaza. On the Beeb's blog, their Gaza City correspondent, Rushdi Abu Alouf, files a story headlined:
The toughest night of my 20 years covering Gaza
I don't doubt it. Hard to get a decent night's sleep when your quiet little neighborhood's decided to paraglide into another country's peace festival and kill all the hippies.
But "twenty years covering Gaza"? Just to take a couple of my many fellow Canadians at the BBC:
*Lyse Doucet (from New Brunswick) was a Beeb correspondent in Islamabad, then moved on over the decades to Kabul, Amman, Jerusalem... She's now Chief International Correspondent, in which capacity she's spent much of the last year reporting from Ukraine.
*Similarly, a generation ago, Barbara Plett Usher (from Manitoba) was the Corporation's Cairo correspondent, then transferred to Baghdad, Jerusalem, Islamabad, before becoming UN Correspondent in New York. She's currently the BBC's State Department Correspondent in Washington.
Those are the fairly typical CVs of BBC "foreign correspondents". But, with Mr Alouf, the Corp seems to have decided it's happy to outsource coverage of Gaza in perpetuity strictly to the Gazans. There's a fairly obvious problem with that. Which is why neither Ms Doucet nor Mrs Usher have ever filed stories headlined...
The toughest night of my twenty years covering New Brunswick
The toughest night of my twenty years covering Manitoba
Just for the record, I don't think Mr Alouf had as "tough" a time as those beheaded babies did. But, if you're wondering why some station you've never heard of broke this news rather than the biggest broadcaster on earth, ask the wanker editors who prefer to focus on his "tough" night.
~CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER: The questions that began on Saturday continue to multiply. Yes, it was the worst "intelligence failure" in Israeli history - granted that Netanyahu denies that Abbas Kamel, the Egyptian intelligence chief, ever did give him a ten-day warning about what was coming. But an equally perplexing question is why, once it became clear what was going on, the Israeli state was so slow to respond. From The Spectator:
In the chaos that ensued, civilians who have spent many hours hiding under fire and having to defend themselves, have criticised the army for being absent when it was needed the most. The question on everyone's lips during the first day of the war was: 'Where is the army?'
Haaretz journalist Amir Tibon, who lives in kibbutz Nahal Oz, close to the border with the Gaza strip, was in hiding with his wife and two young daughters for ten hours. In an indication of the army's lack of readiness, he was eventually rescued by his father, a retired General, who came to the southern town from his home in the centre of Israel.
Israel is not a large country. At its narrowest point it is narrower than my small New Hampshire township. Sderot, for example, which has been the scene of some of the fiercest fighting, is an hour from Tel Aviv. Yet there appears to have been a certain lethargy in response. [UPDATE! An indispensable part of SteynOnline's global operations is in Tel Aviv, and disagrees with the Speccie's take: See below.]
In Israeli domestic politics, it has been clear for some time that Netanyahu, as much as Trump, is not fully in control of key elements of an executive branch that disdains his authority. But how far would they be prepared to push it in order to be rid of him? Mr Kamel and Mr Netanyahu can both be correct: The Egyptian passed on the "something big" warning ...but to someone other than the PM. Who stuck it in the bottom drawer and went back to obsessing about the Israeli judicial reform or whatever.
Who knows? But, given the still rising four-figure death toll, something is seriously awry in the region's only democracy.
~THE BIG GUY'S TEN PER CENT: Tired of snaps of Hunter with crackpipe and hooker? Headline from The Daily Mail:
Joe Biden's younger brother Frank admits naked selfie on GuysWithiPhones gay dating site is genuine.
One is inclined to Lady Bracknell: To have one family member naked all over the Internet may be regarded as a misfortune; to have two looks like carelessness.
~BONUS BIDEN COMEDY GOLD: The National Security Advisor of the United States just a few days ago:
Biden National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan (last week): "The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades" pic.twitter.com/59MYUXhmHf
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) October 7, 2023
~THOROUGHLY MODERN MILLEY: Not unrelated to the above, there are very few people, as you know, I despise more than the ludicrously beribboned General Milley and the Chiefs of Staff. Yet, upon his retirement, he has been lavished with praise - including from my former magazine The Atlantic:
THE PATRIOT
How General Mark Milley protected the Constitution from Donald Trump
...by telephoning his opposite number in China? And telling him, don't worry, if my nutso commander-in-chief tries to pull anything, I'll give you guys a heads-up?
It was this passage that caught my eye:
In addition to other former Trump administration officials, [former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly] also argued the former president had such contempt for the military that it made it challenging to explain concepts of honor, sacrifice and duty.
One has to be careful to distinguish here. But why wouldn't any rational person have total contempt for the Pentagon? It accounts for forty per cent of the planet's military spending, but for three-quarters of a century has been unable to win anything that matters. If you don't have "contempt" for the brass, you're part of the probem. And that certainly doesn't require you to have contempt for the poor bloody infantry who are on the sharp end of Milley's scam.
Thus, during the fall of Kabul, I drove along I-89 in Vermont, where the bridges were draped in banners mourning the suicide of yet another veteran. Of course, it's "challenging" to explain why men from trailer-parks and suburban subdivisions are expected to die in the Pentagon's racket of endless unwon wars. For chaps like Milley and Lloyd Austin being a general is a necessary step to a lucrative lobbying gig. For those out there in the Hindu Kush and the Sunni Triangle as the beribboned buffoons are wafted upward, it is increasingly difficult "to explain concepts of honor, sacrifice and duty" as they have traditionally been understood.
For over a decade, I've been calling for the complete re-thinking of the American way of war, which self-evidently doesn't work, at all. But it makes stinkers like Milley and Austin very rich, and so nothing will be done.
~Let me thank all the newcomers to our ranks in recent days, from Los Angeles to Lesotho, Regina to Rwanda. We hope to welcome many more of you in the years ahead. For more information on The Mark Steyn Club, see here - and don't forget our special Gift Membership.
[UPDATE! From one of the SteynOnline team in Tel Aviv, begging to differ with the above re the IDF:
There's a lot of incompetence, scandal and future head-rolling about, but it's not accurate to say the military was nowhere. Yes, the area was undermanned and the Defense Ministry bean-counters doomed a lot of people to death by cutting the security budgets and weapons allocations of those small communities.
But the first thing the attackers did when they breached the border, within seconds, was to attack the army outpost at the border and kill or capture all the soldiers. They destroyed a manned tank with a primitive drone strike. That was the main line of defense.
The closest community to the fence is only 500 yards away. In the towns and cities, they attacked the police stations first and killed as many police as they could. And the army is not responsible for security internally; the police is.
The police and soldiers were battling at least 1,500 terrorists with automatic weapons and rocket launchers (i.e. they have counted 1500 dead bodies of attackers in Israel, and then there were the ones that went back to Gaza).
About 200 police and soldiers were killed in these battles, so they were 1) Fighting for their lives and 2) Beyond surviving and killing their attackers, they then had to save people and kill terrorists in the towns they were in before moving on to those small communities that don't have police stations and are protected by their small security squads (the ones starved of weapons and armored vehicles by the Defense Ministry).
So while terrible long-term operational plans and decisions were made by higher-ups, the police and soldiers were on the scene, fighting and dying, and managed to kill 1,500 attackers and likely wound more.
E.g. from the Times of Israel:
According to some accounts, the Israeli Air Force helicoptered into Be'eri two platoons of its special forces Shaldag unit, but apparently they were overwhelmed by the terrorists. In videos of Be'eri circulating in pro-Palestinian social media channels, bodies of men in battle vests are seen lying around the iconic yellow gate of the kibbutz.
...
"Kibbutz Be'eri will be no more," Dani Fux, another resident in his seventies, told Yedioth Ahronoth reporter Nahum Barnea.
Fux said about 90 terrorists entered Be'eri at about 7 a.m. on Saturday. Two hours later, the Shaldag detachment of about 20 troops landed, but "within a short time, the force was eroded," using a military euphemism. "From then on, we only heard Arabic. The terrorists went from door to door, abducted people or killed them. Sometimes they only killed. Sometimes they took the kids and killed the parents, sometimes the other way around.
