Townhall Review | Commentaries

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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The terrorist attack on Israel started early Saturday morning, with a massive barrage of rockets and an invasion in the communities adjacent to the Gaza strip in the south of Israel. 

The massacres were barbaric and horrifying … defying the imagination. The death toll rises by the day.

We are at a moment of decision. We must stand with Israel in its right and responsibility to defend itself against murderous aggression intended to destroy the nation and kill Jewish citizens. 

A nation will only survive if it sustains courage and determination greater than the threats it faces. The lives and liberties of Israel’s people are threatened by a genocidal enemy that does not want to see the Jewish state weakened, but destroyed. 

Americans and others who love liberty and prize human dignity must know that Israel’s fight is our fight as well. 

Our deepest civilizational principles are also threatened by the rise and empowerment of terrorist threats.

The Israeli anger is both palpable and justified. 

We pray for the peace of Jerusalem. 

We stand with Israel.

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What Hamas launched from Gaza last weekend should teach us all a lesson.

Palestinian terrorism, as far back as 1968, taught the modern world the use of hijacking civilian airlines and the targeting of schools and civilians. This history runs exceedingly close to home: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.—the presidential candidate—saw his dad killed by a Palestinian, because of his father’s support for Israel. 

It’s time for a moment of truth. 

If a “start-up” nation were trying to model itself and its values based on America, it would look something very much like what Israel did 75 years ago this year.

But there are forces of barbarism that despise exactly that and would rather live in medieval fundamentalism than in a modern world with respect for human rights and human dignity. 

Hamas has demonstrated its willingness to maim and slaughter to attain their goals.

It’s a problem of evil that needs to solved once and for all.

Hamas needs to be defeated and destroyed.

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The bodies had not yet grown cold before American elite media began shifting responsibility for this weekend’s barbarous attack by Hamas to Israel. In fact, Hamas terrorists were still in the process of killing, raping, and kidnapping civilians from Israel and other countries, including the US, when CNN analyst Aaron David Miller declared that the “real problem” would be Israel’s response to this barbaric war. 

Most of the American media followed suit, starting from the first hours of the reports. Most implied or said outright that this barbarity resulted from Israel’s supposed occupation of Gaza, from which Israel withdrew 18 years ago. 

The real problem of American media is that they choose sides—the wrong side—while claiming objectivity. This weekend, they circled the wagons around the Palestinians, Joe Biden, and almost two decades of failed policies that resulted in this war. Their shameful responses will get worse as Israel answers war with war.
Responsible media consumers ought to tune them out and turn them off.

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