Mick Hartley

The Hamas attack on Israel is the most deadly killing of Jews since the Holocaust. It's already being called Israel's 9/11. This, at Tablet, is worth a read – Hamas’ War on Israel: Everything You Need to Know.

An excerpt:

This was an Iranian attack carried out by Hamas terrorists. Iran is the main arms supplier and political backer of Hamas (which is also supported by Turkey). As The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday, the organization and planning for the attack came directly from the Iranian regime, and was finalized at a meeting last Monday in Beirut.

Beirut? That’s actually important. Iran backs Hamas as part of its “Axis of Resistance,” which is an umbrella alliance of the region’s worst villains—including the butcher Bashar Assad in Syria, who killed more than half a million of his own people; Hezbollah, the terrorist group that now runs Lebanon; militias in Iraq; and the Houthi tribal army that has torn apart Yemen.

Over the past two decades, Iran started positioning the Axis of Resistance as a way to dominate the region. It found a receptive ear in Barack Obama, who was looking to pave the road for a quick American exit from Iraq—and from other regional entanglements that might lead America into another deadly and pointless Middle Eastern war. Obama believed the Iranians to be the only power strong enough to run the region without American help. We see now how well that turned out.

What about the Palestinians in Gaza? Yes, they'll suffer, as they've suffered since Hamas gained control. For Iran, as indeed for the Arab states, they're expendable pawns in the battle against Israel.

Ordinary Palestinians are suffering every day under Hamas’ brutal rule. But murdering grandmothers and uploading their dead bodies onto their own Facebook pages for their family to see and massacring people at a music festival are not actions taken by people looking to build, or fight for, a thriving society. And anyone insisting on asking this question on a weekend when more than 700 noncombatants were murdered, women raped, and babies kidnapped has a marked inability to acknowledge the suffering of others. Or maybe just of Jews.