Even after six days, the New York Times refused to admit that they promoted terrorist propaganda as ‘news.’  You’ll remember: They reported—based on Hamas claims—that Israel destroyed the al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza and killed 500 people. They didn’t even wait for sunrise to check those claims before running Hamas’ story.

Video and audio evidence supplied by the IDF added to the obvious conclusion in the first sunrise: an errant missile fired from Gaza landed on the hospital grounds. The Times, however, still won’t report that. Instead, they wrote nearly a week later that Hamas had failed to “make its case,” when in fact they never offered any evidence at all for those claims.

The only correction added to their original report notes only that “the hospital itself was not ruined.” An editor’s note issued a week later – but not included in either article—admitted to relying “too heavily” on claims by Hamas, without apology or corrective action.

The damage has been done.

The paper should change its motto for full accuracy: All the Terrorist Propaganda Fit to Print.

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Israel is about to respond to a ground, sea, and air war targeting the terror group Hamas.  This would not take place had Hamas not barbarically attacked innocent civilians by the hundreds, in actions thought indescribable since Caligula. And it would not have to happen if Hamas would surrender both its perpetrators and the hostages it took. But Hamas remains dedicated to Israel’s destruction.

The war will be awful; non-combatants will die. Civilian institutions like will be hit.  This will not be Israel’s fault, though—by any read of just war theory, fault lies squarely on Hamas for deliberately using civilians as shields to play off Israel’s morality and the world’s sympathy; and for propaganda.

This is how Hamas fights. 

And there is recent satellite evidence of Hamas already placing weapons and missile sites in, under, and next to civilian structures like schools, medical centers, and UN buildings.  These are the real war crimes—and Hamas is committing them. 

We must steel ourselves, so it never happens again.

Hamas must be destroyed.

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This is Carol Platt Liebau for Townhall.com.

In recent years, almost all American universities have shut down right-leaning speakers and cancelled unpopular speech. The justification was that words somehow constituted violence and speech was making college community members feel unsafe.

Please.

In a dark bit of irony, many of those who claimed that discussion of conservative ideas made them feel unsafe are celebrating the massacre of Jews. On campuses like Harvard, masked pro-Hamas protesters have literally intimidated and harassed Jewish students.

Now that’s behavior that could legitimately make someone feel unsafe. Yet Harvard’s leadership does nothing.

They lied when they claimed that conservative speech was banned for “safety” reasons. The left banned speech in our universities because they have a totalitarian impulse and want to shut down the marketplace of ideas.

“Safety” was an excuse. It was all about gaining, holding — and now abusing — power.

I'm Carol Platt Liebau.

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This is Albert Mohler for Townhall.com.

It made history last week when President Biden visited Israel during a time of war, appearing publicly with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

On Thursday night, President Biden made a primetime address to our nation.

What we're looking at here are history-shaping events.

We’re looking at the absolute necessity of Israel defeating Hamas, something that is also in the interest of the United States of America—as well at the other nations in the region.

The world is changing before our eyes. 

We have Iran—the source of the funding of Hamas—threatening both Israel and the United States.

The world is changing in Europe—with Putin’s war in Ukraine.

Scandinavian nations, long determined to be neutral, are joining NATO.

Russian President Putin has been meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

These are all massive issues of worldview significance and the issues that will shape the world’s future are taking shape even as we watch.

So let’s watch closely.

I’m Albert Mohler.

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It was sobering to witness the huge pro-Palestine protests in London and Paris. In Sydney, their rally featured chants of … yes … “gas the Jews.”

It ought to be a wake-up call.

The protesters were immigrants from the Arab world. They’d come to the West—but had failed to adopt the Western values of religious tolerance and pluralism.

Worse yet, none of their new countries had demanded it of them.  Like the U.S., they’ve been under sustained cultural assault by the Marxist left. They’ve lost confidence their way of life is even worth defending.

As the U.S. likewise confronts a massive influx of immigrants from all over the world, we need to decide: Are we willing to secure our border? … and insist that those who do come in—legally, through the front door—accept our values and assimilate? Or are we willing to see those values eroded?   

The moment of decision is at hand.

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This is Carol Platt Liebau for Townhall.com.

Americans received an unwelcome wake-up call watching pro-Hamas rallies on some of our country’s most prestigious college campuses. At UNC, masked protesters rallied with images of the paragliders Hamas used to invade Israel. At University of Wisconsin, student protesters yelled, “Glory to the martyrs, glory to the murders.”

Antisemitism has been repackaged into our social justice and intersectionality moment. Radical professors and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement—BDS—have taught students that Jews are oppressors and Palestinians the oppressed. And so barbaric anti-Jewish violence has been rebranded as “resistance” and every sort of evil justified as throwing off the yoke of oppression.

Many on campus are impervious to the facts. It all highlights just how deep the moral rot has grown at what used to be our institutions of “higher learning.”

I’m Carol Platt Liebau.

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Horrific attacks against Israeli and American civilians have—justifiably—shaken the world.  In the battle over Israel’s right to exist, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln:  One side wanted peace. One side made war. 

Israel accepted war rather than let itself perish. And the war came.

Hamas does not want Israel to exist—at all.  And Hamas owns Gaza—running it for nearly 20 years.  Gaza could have become a start-up nation, a travel destination … a Singapore.  Instead, it chose to become a terror statelet.  October 7th was a culmination, not an aberration.

Israel won’t react proportionally—doing so would mean raping and deliberately, gruesomely slaughtering innocents. Instead, Israel will engage in a long and drawn-out military effort, risking more Israelis along the way.  And a lot of lives Hamas puts at risk.  In the battle for civility over depravity, which is upon us now, we must steel ourselves. 

Don’t expect it to be over quickly.

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Anyone with eyes to see or ears to hear is familiar with episodes of horrific violence over the past few decades. Evil people commit unspeakable crimes against humanity with horrifying regularity.
 
But Hamas’s slaughter in Israel feels different, in its intensity and immediacy.
 
The chilling and methodical depravity that stalked infants and the very old, as well as young people joyfully dancing at a music festival, was profoundly disturbing because it was so purposeful and purposeless: An army of mass murders rampaged in search of victims targeted solely because they were Jews. No military objective, no strategic aim.
 
An army of antisemitic sadists was loosed on the Holy Land, and the consequences have stunned and sickened the civilized world.
 
We have no excuse now to indulge the belief that the Nazi trials at Nuremberg offered a final and binding judgment that all nations would respect. They manifestly did not. Israel will attempt to do so now, and I hope it is with the full support of the United States.

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Two new media polls this week give reason to hope in the common sense of Americans. Mainstream media outlets spent much of the last week trying to minimize Hamas terrorism by focusing on the plight of Gazans and potential Israeli war crimes in the war Hamas unleashed. 

But the American public did not get fooled. Both CNN and Washington Post/ABC polls showed overwhelming support for Israel in the US, and majority support for their war footing against Hamas. Media coverage and the primal pro-terrorist screams from college campuses didn’t put a dent in America’s rejection of genocide and slaughter.

But neither poll showed any hint of renewed confidence in Joe Biden’s leadership, either. It took Biden three days for him to publicly address the attacks that left at least 30 Americans dead and more missing or kidnapped. Only a third of Americans have even a moderate amount of confidence in Biden. 

Americans tend to rally around their leaders in times of crisis. Joe Biden is no leader.

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This is Carol Platt Liebau for Townhall.com.
 
Almost immediately after Hamas launched horrific terrorist attacks murdering Israeli babies, mothers and grandmothers, 31 Harvard student organizations spoke up. To condemn Israel.
 
The great Christian writer C.S. Lewis once noted that “Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.”
 
Here is a prime example. America’s supposed best and brightest are unable to engage in even basic moral reasoning. 
 
It’s the only explanation for their willingness to support the antisemitism and barbarism being broadcast worldwide. Back in the sixties, Americans were pressured to take Judeo-Christian ethics out of their elite institutions. This ethic wasn’t replaced with “nothing” — in its stead came something much darker.
 
It’s long past time for a strong, sustained pushback.
 
I’m Carol Platt Liebau.

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