A Collection of the Best

Some of the best notes from the past few weeks.

No Hassan and Ahmed this week, the Gaza war is still very much in a state of flux and so little new to report. Also, this week’s Ascension Day I’ll instead make up by posting two chapters next week.

In its place today, I’ll be posting a collection of the best notes from the past few weeks.

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A Deplorable Double-Standard

When terrorist attacks have happened in other nations - Charlie Hebdo, 7/7, 9/11, Bataclan, Nice Truck massacre, Ariana Grande concert, Berlin Christmas market…

The natural response worldwide has been one of condemnation. No excuses made for the terrorists, just outright condemnation.

In fact, the terrorists concerned haven’t even been given line space in newspapers or any other media to explain the reasons for their attacks or any excuses made for them.

But in the case of Israel and October 7th, we see a completely different picture…

No end of denials from Hamas and their supporters, claims that they ‘committed no atrocities on Oct 7th’, despite them filming most of it on their own go-pro cameas.

And hundreds of thousands of column inches and texts devoted to these denials and a multitude of excuses both in the media and online… including disgusting claims that Israel ‘killed most of its own’ on Oct 7th.

And now on top of this mass denial, excusing and whitewashing of Hamas’s butchery and mass killing on that day, we now have a London law firm trying to completely sanitize them.

A double-standard that leads me to believe that anti-Semitism in society is far worse than I previouly suspected, has now reached epidemic levels.

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THE HAMAS TACTICS

Launch a 30 year suicide bombing campaign that targets almost exclusively civilians…

Fire countless rockets at civilian areas, and knife, car-ram, shoot and bomb them… and culminate in a vast massacre killing 1,200 mostly civilians…

Yet don’t build any bomb shelters in 20 years, fire rockets from residential areas and build terror tunnels under schools, hospitals, UN centres and refugee camps…

So that when the reprisals come, inevitably civilians are killed…

And when there are not enough civilians killed, wildly inflate the statistics to gain compassion and demonize Israel…

Then sit back and gloat at how many in the West are suckered in by these tactics.

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So, Palestinian supporters, how do you see this working…?

It is well known that Islamic terrorism is a strong, violent factor worldwide from numerous attacks - 9/11, 7/7, Charlie Hebdo, Bataclan, Nice truck massacre, Ariana Grande Concert, massacre of 1,000s of Christians by Boko Haram, ISIS massacring Yazidis…

And conversely Jews worldwide are NOT known to be violent and indulge in terrorist massacres, with ZERO terrorist attacks in the West down to them.

Yet when Jews go to Israel or become Israelis… you expect the rest of the world to swallow that they suddenly become depraved child and women-killing monsters.

And the terrorists there all become plaster saints, or are made enormous excuses for and become 'glorious freedom fighters’.

Has it never struck you how ludicrous that scenario is?

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Common Denominator Problem

Europe and the USA have suffered a staggering 9,200 Islamic Jihadist terrorist attacks over the past 50 years…

Versus ZERO from Jews or Israelis…

Yet Israel finds itself the one constantly criticized and castigated.

In turn, Israel has suffered DOUBLE the number of Jihadist terrorist attacks than the West in that same period…

But it seems that countless liberal numpties in the West are incapable of joining the dots and realizing that Islamic Jihadist terrorism is the common denominator problem…

NOT Israel.

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I was only 14 years old when my Jewish father died.

I had no idea at the time what it meant to be Jewish, as myself and my two sisters had been raised in my mother’s Irish Catholic religion.

Main reason: my eldest sister was born in 1942 and that year in England you could toss a coin on whether Hitler won the war.

My father was a master statistician and not only did vital weather stats for the War Office, but also did the main stats for the Whittle project on jet propulsion. Despite these marvellous contributions to British society, my father was unable to join his local golf or tennis club because he was Jewish.

This knowledge that my father had to partly bury his Jewish roots to save his family and the prejudice he’d suffered weighed heavy on my shoulders in later years.

But when I first visited Israel in the mid 1970s and later was there again reporting on the last years of the Lebanese Civil War, Israel and the neighbouring WB and Gaza was an open territory with no barriers or restrictions. And Israel and Jews in general were seen in a positive light, with many students taking summer breaks on a kibbutz. I didn’t feel I had to defend my father’s Jewish heritage, because I didn’t see it being attacked.

Roll forward to 2015 and Jeremy Corbyn’s bid to become PM, and the situation was very different. Israel was being attacked vocally and online at every turn and Jews in the UK also felt themselves under attack. Anti-Semitism had resurged, this time hidden under a rather feeble and spurious anti-Zionism banner.

So at that point, I felt myself defending my father’s heritage and the terrible prejudice he’d suffered because I saw it happening all over again. So, three years ago I wrote a holocaust-related novel, The Vienna Writers Circle, partly dedicated to my father and written in his original Jewish name, Maetis.

And now I find myself happily writing regular articles on Substack on the subject of Israel-Palestine, because I see it as the same righteous cause I did back in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Little has changed, except the enemies of Israel, and in turn Jews in general, are massing once again, so that defence is probably needed now more than ever.

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Jihadist Terrorism is the problem…

NOT Israel.

If it wasn’t for repeated terrorist attacks, there would be no walls, fences and security divides…

No need for such stringent security at checkpoints…

No need for barriers and strong protection for the Israelis living in WB-Judea-Samaria..

There would be no armed reprisals…

There would be free passage and movement between the two people as they lived and worked together.

A peace deal between Israel and Palestine could have been made decades ago.

A Palestinian State could have been formed by now, and their people benefited from it.

I repeat: Jihadist Terrorism is the problem…

NOT Israel.

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WW2

In that war, between 2-3 million German civilians lost their lives.

But if it was replayed today - using Israel-Gaza as the yardstick - halfway through people on social media and in the Press would start protesting about the number of German women and children killed.

Hitler and Goebbels would have built on that and increased the death stats of women and children killed to raise even more public sympathy. ‘Churchill and Roosevelt are killing our children,’ every other newscast would have proclaimed.

In the end, public sympathy and outrage would have reached such a level that the war had to be stopped.

Hitler and the Nazis would have gone on to survive and continue their drastic purges.

First of all, they’d have killed all the remaining Jews. Then they’d have killed all the gypsies, Poles and Slavs. Then anyone black or ‘of colour’. Then all the gays and transvestites.

Now hopefully you see why Hamas must be removed or destroyed at all costs.

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ME TOO…!!

Unless you’re Jewish or Israeli…

With feminist groups and some prominent Hollywood stars having banged the drum heavily the past decade that when women claim rape, they should be believed rather than doubted…

Suddenly when it comes to the Gaza war, it seems OK for them to doubt the women claiming rape and call them liars.

And whose word do they favour over these women? That of a bunch of murdering, barbaric terrorists, who have already slaughtered 1200 people in cold blood, dismembering bodies, including infants and babies.

I know that anti-Semitism has become more rife the past decade, but when it gets to the stage that feminist groups and Hollywood stars will believe a bunch of bloodthirsty terrorists over a group of women, purely because those women are Jewish or Israeli… then it has hit a new and dismal low.

If you’re as outraged as I am by this brazen double-standard, please restack.

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John Matthews - Notes from the Edge. If you like my articles and wish to receive them regularly - 2-3 a week on Israel, Middle East and World Affairs, plus now a comedy spoof and two thrillers in serial form - then I look forward to getting your subscription.

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John Matthews is an experienced writer and journalist. The author of 24 books, including two centred around WW2 and the holocaust in the name of J.C. Maetis (his father’s original Jewish name) his first experience of writing about the Middle East came as a war correspondent covering the last years of the Lebanese Civil War, which led to his second book, ‘The Crescents of the Moon’. He has since written on the subject for a number of journals, including The Times, Sunday Times, Newsweek, The Independent and The Spectator. He was also in the run-up to the millennium editor of European Brief, the main magazine for the European Parliament, editing the likes of Tony Blair, Al Gore and Henry Kissinger on subjects ranging from the fall of the Berlin Wall and European unity, climate change and nuclear fusion to, once again, the Middle East. He lives in London with his wife and family.

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